Better than boundaries
Sustainable practice in 2021
Hi, how are you?
I hope that you and your loved ones are well and your year is going well so far.
This is the first Radiant Business newsletter of 2021.
If you are new here, hi!
This is a newsletter for homeopaths interested in ideas around practice-building and meaningful marketing.
Inside you’ll find:
Practice reflections - ideas to try
Brain food - links to inspire you
Monthly planners - beautiful and free
Free e-course ‘Easy Marketing’
New webinar ‘Homeopathy and counselling skills for grief’
How is your January going so far?
Maybe, like me, you are needing to manage home-schooling or perhaps you have had to reframe your work-life in other ways?
My son is home from secondary school, but at least having lessons on Google Classrooms which is so much better than simply having online work to complete like during the summer lockdown.
My daughter is home from uni, but she also has online tutorials and coursework to complete. She’s happy to be home where she can be with all of us, plus take our dog for walks and see her boyfriend who lives nearby.
It’s hard to believe that we are coming up to a year of living through a pandemic.
So much has changed in our daily lives and I’m finding it harder to remember how things used to be.
I miss so many things!
But, every day, I’m thankful for my home, my family, my work, my neighbourhood.
I’m truly grateful for and aware of all my privileges.
Practice reflections
If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while, you might remember that in November 2020 I made the decision to leave my clinic and move to my own office-space instead.
Until the pandemic changed everything, my practice was largely face-to-face, and I worked from a local clinic in Bethnal Green, east London, and a co-working space in the City.
At the start of Lockdown, I moved my practice to my laptop set up on the kitchen table.
A couple of months later, my clinic re-opened and I was very grateful.
By the end of October, it dawned on me that I needed my own space. A room where I could take client calls and prepare remedies.
Not a shared space.
My own space.
One day I decided to do a Google search for private offices and amazingly I quickly found somewhere I wanted to visit.
It’s a co-working community with desks and offices just a mile down the road from where I live.
My new room is completely private, and I have access 24/7, should I need it.
If and when I’m seeing people face-to-face again, I can do that there too.
It costs a little more than I was paying for room rental previously, but it’s worth it.
It’s been a big transition though.
We don’t have a car, so it took two Uber trips to move my client notes, books, remedies and other supplies.
I’ve had to purchase a desk and other items to get it set up the way I want it to be.
I haven’t had a work-space like this before, and I feel very lucky to have one.
Word for the Year
My ‘Word for the Year’ in 2020 was ‘Boundaries’.
Moving to the office was unexpected, but once I was there I realised it was a much-needed step towards my goal of better life-work boundaries.
In December, as I reflected back on my year, I felt that while my boundaries were better I had also been working much longer hours than I wanted to.
This led me to see that my ‘Word of the Year’ for 2021 needed to extend my life-work boundaries in a way that would enable me to work in a more sustainable way.
Choosing a word for 2021
Choosing a word of the year is hard so I tried out a few words in my journal.
I came up with ‘Ease’ and ‘Clarity’ (both of which I love!)
But, in the end, I settled on a different word entirely.
It doesn’t sound very exciting or even that inspiring, but it’s the right word for me.
My word for this year is ‘Sustainable’.
By sustainable, I mean sustainable for my personal well-being, and also as a long-term way of working in my homeopathy practice.
Sustainable practice
Perhaps like me, you have found many aspects of our current situation quite hard to navigate.
Even though I have an office, I still need to balance my work with taking care of my family.
Luckily, my husband can work from home, and my daughter is old enough to help 'keep an eye on’ my 12-year-old and be around if I am out at work.
I also find there are ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ to practising online.
The main ‘con’ for me is that I find it quite draining.
Plus, the time it takes to prepare remedies and get them into the post really needs to be properly factored in.
So…
I’ve realised that I need to try and organise my schedule so that I have a bit more breathing space.
I want to have regular weeks where I don’t see any clients, so I can be around my family more and hopefully get ahead with planning, writing etc. not to mention staying up-to-date with book-keeping.
Forward planning
In order to do this, I have done a lot of forward-planning in my schedule.
Blocked out several weeks of ‘No Clients’ right through to the end of the year in both my personal calendar and my booking system.
I’ve made sure these weeks are outside school holidays, as I want to have time to get ahead with planning, writing etc. and to stay up-to-date with book-keeping.
To help me do this I looked back through my calendar to discover booking trends. I discovered the last week of the month generally has fewer bookings, and the weeks either side of ‘Black Friday’ were also quiet.
January, September and December are the months which get booked out quickly. With this in mind, I’ve decided to only offer Radiant Business School once during 2021 – in April/May.
A new thing I’m doing is a ‘Content Calendar’. This is a more focused plan for both Your Radiant Business and Homeopathy with Tracy. I want to be more organised so I can see exactly what I need to do and when.
To protect my mental and emotional energy, I am also making sure I regularly look ahead at my schedule to count how many bookings I have each week. I know how long it takes for case-work and remedy preparation, and there is only so much I can do per week, especially with home-schooling at the moment.
If you’re an experienced and busy practitioner, you might be having similar kinds of thoughts to me. I have spoken to several homeopath friends who’ve needed to put in place measures like these to avoid burnout in the last year.
If you are less experienced and less busy, you might be thinking:
”Is this relevant to me?”
My answer –
Yes.
It really is.
Here’s something to think about.
If you are not super-busy with clients (yet), it is still worth scheduling blocks to focus on your marketing work.
Setting aside proper time to immerse yourself in research, writing and creating whatever content you are planning is a good habit and a very worthwhile thing to do.
Everything is easier when you batch it.
That’s what I plan to do during the weeks when I’m not seeing clients this year.
I’ll let you know how it goes. :-)
What changes are you planning to your practice this year?
I’d love to hear them.
Homeopathy and Counselling Skills for Grief
Thursday 4th February, 10am - 1pm
(I’m planning to teach three homeopathy webinars this year and this is the first, on a topic I’ve been planning for more than a year.)
Grief and loss affect all of us, in a variety of ways, for a wide range of reasons throughout our lives.
As homeopaths, we know that distressing life events such as bereavement, divorce or redundancy can be underlying causes of physical as well as mental and emotional symptoms.
Working with clients who are processing grief can be challenging as well as rewarding, even for the experienced practitioner.
We need to be able to offer empathy and emotional intelligence during the consultation.
We also need self-reflection and self-care practices to maintain our own well-being and resilience.
Webinar content includes counselling skills, boundaries and homeopathic remedies for working with the different stages of grief and loss.
Join live or watch later.
There’s no expiry date for the webinar.
A clear set of notes is provided.
£30Early bird
£40 from January 26th
Best Brain Food Links of 2020
If you regularly share curated content via newsletter or on social media, do you make a habit of keeping track of your numbers?
It is always good to know what your audience is most drawn to, as this guides you in your curation.
I reviewed the statistics for this newsletter to see which links I shared were most popular in 2020.
These are the ones that stood out.
Here they are again, in case you didn’t catch them the first time around.
2021 Monthly planners!
I also want to share a link for the Radiant Business monthly planners!
Here they are for the whole of 2021!
All on one document!
(Massive thanks to my wonderful assistant Eloise, who created them for us back in December.)
Easy Marketing – a free course for the new year!
One week e-course starts Monday 18th January
Simple, practical, heart-centred marketing that you will enjoy!
My goal for this course is to offer you some motivation and inspiration, wherever you are on your practice journey!
One email per day, delivered directly to your inbox, five days in a row.
Live webinar on Thursday 21st January, 9.30 - 10.30 am
Places are genuinely limited for practical reasons.
There are five spaces left!
Thank you, as always, for reading.
I’ll be back in your inbox on Monday 25th January.
Here’s to a brighter year ahead for us all.
Tracy
P.S. What do you do when patients don’t come back?
Did you know you can join the Radiant Business Newsletter community with a monthly private group webinar?
I’m always surprised at how much there is to talk about!
On the January webinar, I responded to some great questions, including, ‘What do you do when patients don’t come back after one or two sessions?’
I turned the question around and talked about the steps I take to avoid that happening in the first place.
If you’re interested in practice-building questions such as these, why not join as a paid subscriber?
For just £7 per month, you receive an invitation to the group webinar on the first Thursday of every month, 9 am.
I have done a similar thing - for the first time! I have marked out a day off a week and marked clear weekends. Have only done a couple of months so far, so I’ll take inspiration from you and mark up more months!