Hey there, wellness entrepreneur. Welcome back!
As we wind up 2024, we’re going to talk about something that’s not often talked about in business because, truthfully, it’s pretty uncomfortable and no one really likes to talk about hard times when they’re in the hard time or what is often known as the messy middle of business.
What is the Messy Middle
Now, the messy middle can be the middle of you trying to hit a certain revenue goal, the middle of you trying to launch an online program or getting fully booked in your one-to-one practice, the middle can be any part of your business that you’re specifically shooting for but haven’t quite hit it.
This can be also known as or looked upon from the perspective of failure, which is often why we avoid this part, try to resist it when it happens, or like right now, when we come upon the end of the year, which is the perfect time to review the whole entire year and see what worked, what really went well so we can repeat more of that in 2025, understand what didn’t go well and then problem solve for what we’ll do differently to make 2025 a new year.
Why We Often Avoid The Year End Review
We often avoid that review and that evaluation because sometimes we haven’t hit the goals that we want to hit or we haven’t hit them in the time frame that we want to hit or the way that we thought we would hit the goals.
Often what we imagine or how we imagine we will feel when we hit our goals or the process of hitting our goals, what it’ll look like, it’s that what happens on Instagram versus reality type situations. What we imagine isn’t often reality. Sometimes it is. I don’t want to say every time because sometimes it is. We really imagine something and then it really works out the way we thought we would or even better.
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Why This Blog Is For You
Today I’m speaking to those of you that are caught in the messy middle where maybe things aren’t working out the way you really imagined or in the time frame that you imagined and this blog is designed to help you go forward because when you’re ending the year and if you haven’t hit certain goals, it doesn’t mean that you won’t.
In fact, it doesn’t even mean that you’ve failed. It just means you’re in, and when you view it from this perspective, you can get so much more information and stay motivated not from a hustly way, not from an overworking way, but just a committed way to keep going and push through this middle portion.
And I want to be transparent. This blog idea, this topic was inspired by one of my coaches. Right now, I’m in three different programs. One is a general business coaching program that covers many aspects of business just like I do for the 100K Awaken Business Coaching Program. I’m also in an Instagram mastermind that’s specific to growing an Instagram audience and a revenue challenge as well.
And when I was in the revenue challenge for the month of November, actually parts of it continue through the month December, one of the last live calls with this coach, she was giving us a very inspiring talk speaking to this messy middle how if we didn’t hit that revenue challenge goal that we were shooting for that it doesn’t mean that the challenge is actually over, that it’s completely ended, that we’ve failed for good. And she really inspired me to keep going no matter what. And again, not from a hustly way, not from a way of beating myself up, not from overworking or trying to work more hours, but in some very specific ways.
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So, I am taking the philosophy of that message that she said to us, and I’m actually distilling it and breaking it down and making it specific to you as the wellness entrepreneur that wants to hit six-figure plus goals in 2025, whether that is for a brick and mortar practice, a one-to-one practice where you’re using your hands, your body, or an online wellness practice or a hybrid of them both.
So if you’re a health coach staring at unfulfilled program spots, or a yoga teacher wondering why your online classes aren’t growing, or a physical therapist struggling to transition into a hybrid practice, this blog is for you. So you are motivated and certain and looking forward to your business in 2025 and knowing that your goals are possible for you 100%. I know that to be true.
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What’s Happening In The Global Wellness Business Marketplace
So let’s talk about what’s happening right now in the global wellness business marketplace, what’s happening for a lot of wellness practitioners across the globe.
So a lot of wellness practitioners have set ambitious goals for 2024. They’ve created amazing online wellness programs. They’ve filled a lot of yoga retreats. Yoga retreats are back in business, blossoming, popping up everywhere. Yoga studios are getting back into rhythm. Classes are filling. I see workshops really exploded again this year back in-person and online. People are continuing to have hybrid models of doing workshops in-person and online, one-to-one sessions in-person and online. I love it. It creates so much flexibility and freedom, not only for the practitioner, but clients too.
I have many clients that live in where they really get impacted by snowstorms, where people can’t make it in or they have children and nannies call out sick and the ability to offer a virtual session if they can’t make it to the clinic has been life-saving for both the clients to still be able to keep their appointment and work with them and not get a last-minute cancel fee. Businesses have less cancels in the books.
Did you know right now after doing an AI research on this that 70% of consumers prefer digital-first healthcare interactions? I’ll say that again. 70% of consumers prefer digital-first healthcare interactions. That just creates so much potential for you if you’re considering developing any kind of online wellness program for 2025. Also in 2024, telehealth usage stabilized at 38 times higher than pre-pandemic levels.
This just goes to show you people, yes, they still do want in-person things like retreats, manual, I’ve gotten back into my bodywork sessions, manual work. Yes, people do want in-person interaction and they’re still readily consuming and buying online wellness products as well.
This is because many corporations brought back their employees in 2024, corporate wellness programs are growing at 15% annually. There’s still opportunities in the corporate wellness if you are a yoga teacher or a health coach or a health practitioner looking to serve those in corporate wellness and partner up with HR. Again, HR can be used for both in-person and online services for their employees.
Let’s do a breakdown of nutrition and health coaching. 42% of consumers are seeking personalized nutrition advice. Right now, the health coaching annually for fitness and movement digital fitness market is anticipated to reach 79.8 billion by 2025. Hybrid fitness models are growing at 35% annually. 60% of consumers plan to maintain both digital and in-person wellness services.
Okay, let’s look at 2025 and what’s anticipated. 73% are prioritizing preventative health care, health and wellness people. 65% are seeking holistic wellness solutions. Right now, they’re probably on Instagram looking and consuming content. 58% are preferring practitioners who offer both virtual and in-person options. 58%. That’s more than half of people seeking out someone that has a hybrid option. 82% of people are valuing personalized wellness plans so that means one-to-one models are still in demand and that does not mean that you have to sacrifice your schedule for one-to-one. I still do one-to-one. I have about 15 to 20 clients a week and I love it. There are so many ways to structure your one-to-one plans where your schedule isn’t hijacked.
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55% of consumers are using digital wellness platforms. 68% are willing to pay premium prices for personalized programs. Again, another plug for the high-ticket one-to-one wellness offers. The average client lifetime value is increased by 40% with hybrid offers.
What does that mean? That means if you want to increase your revenue, especially reoccurring revenue and having your existing clients work with you again and again, that can be increased by creating hybrid and wellness offers.
Social media. 78% of consumers research health practitioners on social media AKA Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn. Instagram remains primary platform for wellness content with 62% engagement and video content shows a four times higher engagement than static posts right now anyways.
The global wellness market is projected to reach 7.7 trillion by end of 2025 and that’s research from the Global Wellness Institute.
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What Happens When We’re In The Messy Middle and Importance of Perspective
The reason why I wanted to go over all these facts is to light a fire under you and start to motivate you as well as truthfully this is a strategy. When our brain starts to get stuck in the messy middle, it’ll start to tell you lies. That’s the only way to go about it.
I mean even now sometimes my business is very successful. I love it. 2024 has been my best year yet and I woke up right after Thanksgiving and I was like, “Yeah, I think I’m failing. Things aren’t going as planned. My business is really slow,” and old anxiety started to come back and just before I even started my day, I paused and I reflected into that and I said to myself, “What is going on here?” And I realized it was just an old pattern.
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That is my comfort pattern of going into scarcity mindset to motivate myself and when I reviewed the facts of my business, actually my business is not slow at all. I’m working with people paying in full one or two months sometimes even three months ahead of when they want to start. I’m fully booked right now as I speak. My client roster is filled with wonderful clients. I’m really loving to work with in all kinds of capacities online, in-person, hybrid models, teams, no teams, solopreneurs, LLCs, you name it. I’m working with health coaches, spiritual coaches, physical therapists, massage therapists, all kinds of practitioners and I just love them. They’re wonderful. Right now, my client roster is stellar.
When I woke up in the morning and my brain still told me a lie to kind of fuel all anxiety, I think to get me motivated and I can break that down some more. It’s actually my list of self-journaling, self-coaching to do today. But the point of the matter is sometimes whether we’re succeeding or we’re behind in what we want to achieve, our brain will tell us things to cause anxious thoughts in terms in an attempt to help us to survive. It’s just a nervous system triggered.
So if we can come back to the facts when our brain tells us none of my clients are on Instagram, there’s no good quality leads on Instagram, no one wants to buy digital products, no one wants to buy high ticket wellness offers, all of those are untrue! They’re lies and this is all by research for consumer trends for 2025. So you can just remind your brain, “Hey brain I hear you. I understand that you are interested but that is a lie and instead let’s focus on all the people that are on Instagram researching content. Let’s focus on those finding those consumers that do want to work with people online, etc.”
So if your programs aren’t full, if your Instagram isn’t growing as fast as you like, if your income isn’t matching the impact that you feel that you’re making, if you dream of a thriving online wellness practice but it feels further away than ever, I get it. We all go through this at different points of the year. You can be feeling like you’re winning and actually failing at the same times.
It’s all very confusing especially now if you feel that everyone, your friends are celebrating their best year yet because it’s December and everyone’s wrapping up their posting best year ever and you’re kind of wondering if you did something wrong. If you have what it takes to succeed and I’m here to tell you that you do. You just have to keep going. You’re only in the messy middle and it’s only the middle because you underestimated the time frame that you thought you could complete a goal in.
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So for example, in the year 2024 that you could hit 100k in your wellness business but you’ve only hit 60k. It doesn’t mean that you’re a failure. It doesn’t mean that you can’t ever hit 100k in one year. It doesn’t even mean that you have to wait to December 2025 to claim that. It just means that you’re about 60k in the middle of hitting that 100k goal. You’re right smack in the middle and you just need to keep going. So maybe in February 2025, if you look at your rolling 12 months that could add up to 100k if you had a big year in February 2024 and the couple months before, it’s totally possible, but if you consider 2024 to be a failure and that goal wasn’t hit and you give up and you stop then you end it and you’re not in the middle anymore.
So we need to change this perspective. You’re in the middle. We got to keep going. The messy middle is that space between starting and succeeding. It’s where most wellness entrepreneurs quit right before their breakthrough. I have been there myself so many times and fortunately my brain even though it likes to offer all the lies and the scarcity, what it feels are truth. Somehow, I have it in me and I’m so grateful for her to just get up, listen to a podcast, listen to one of my coaches, read one of my feedback from my coaches. This is why of course, I’m biased here but this is what I feel coaching is so helpful and why I invest in many programs year after year after year is because it just keeps me going and I pick myself up and I take another step forward and it leads to not always the best month ever, not always the best year ever, but over time it ends up to better years.
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The Messy Middle in Your Client’s Perspective
All right! Let’s look at the messy middle also from another perspective. Not your perspective, but your clients’ perspectives. Think about their health and healing journeys. You know they’re coming to you a lot of when they’re in their own messy middles. They feel like their bodies aren’t performing the way that it should or they have an injury and they’re wondering if they’re ever going to heal again and you can look at them and you can know exactly what’s wrong and you can get down to the root cause.
You’ll use your assessment, your objective tests, you’ll gather all the information and as the expert and skilled practitioner you are, you will know what is root cause of what’s going on for them and even though they feel that they’re in the messy middle or potentially never going to get better or don’t have a clear path because they tried so many other practitioners that they doubt that they can ever heal or achieve their wellness goals, you know that they’re only in the messy middle and your job is to educate them on what do to achieve those goals, you help them through their messy middles, you help them through their discomfort when they feel like giving up, when they feel like quitting, you’re the person that they turn to for advice when they have questions for the next step for the wellness blueprints, you’re the person they go through and the only way you can help them go through their messy middles in their health and wellness journeys is if you know how to go through your messy middle.
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What It Means Getting Through the Messy Middle
So getting through the messy middle in your business in whatever capacity that might be it, might be in your Instagram audience growth, it might be an engagement that you want, it might be in your revenue, it might be the number of clients that you want to work with, or that wellness online program that you want to create, or the staff that you hire, whatever it is that you want to achieve, when you feel stuck, it’s not only important to get through it for your business growth for you as a business owner but it’s also for you as the practitioner to know that you can face and feel uncomfortable emotions and evaluate and know how to move forward and go through the messy middle without giving up so then you’ll be able to educate your wellness clients on how to do that too.
Wellness and business is not all that different when you break it down to just having a goal and learning the process of knowing how to achieve it and working through uncomfortable emotions because when you know how to work through those uncomfortable emotions, you’ll be able to guide your clients through those uncomfortable emotions, layered in with the specific wellness strategies that you teach them so you might be thinking, “Well I don’t have time to be in the messy middle. I can’t afford to be in the messy middle.”
But here’s the truth: you can’t afford to quit just before your breakthrough and truthfully all that you have control over is what you have control over such as getting better at everything that you’re trying to improve in your business, one thing at a time.
So you don’t have control over whether your clients refer you new people, you don’t have control over when that next person is going to decide to pick up the phone or to email or call you, but what you do have control over is that next Instagram post or writing that next email in a compelling way that encourages them to take that next step, to feel vulnerable, to show up and do a Facebook live to your group, so getting through the messy middle is actually the combination of the mindset and feeling and learning how to work with and developing the self-concept of being the entrepreneur that can handle uncomfortable emotions like imposter syndrome, fear, scarcity mindset, feeling vulnerable, risking, failure, and can still show up and to do that, what helps again is remembering some of those stats which are the truth and reframing some of the mindset.
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Strategies To Help With The Mindset And Perspective
Like telling yourself, if a program didn’t fill at first that you were doing market research. Okay, for this program let’s break that down what does that even mean? If you were promoting a new online group for example, and it didn’t fill and you sent 10 e-mails and made 15 posts, well the market research would be like one, maybe that’s not enough e-mails and posts because everyone’s getting indented by a ton of e-mails and posts right now from everyone which is fine, that’s just how it goes. Maybe you need to write those e-mails and do Instagram posts and show up and also do an in-person workshop or an online workshop. That could be a theory!
Another theory could be, “Okay, well I sent those emails and I did those posts but I didn’t do any stories.” Maybe another theory would be to try stories. Another theory could be, well you did those e-mails and those but maybe the message didn’t resonate, maybe the messaging could have been more specific, speaking to more specific problems or highlighting the frameworks that you use in the program to help them through those struggles.
So, when you view it as less of a failure and realizing that every person goes through that and it’s just learning your market and researching it and hypotheses which then you can try for the next time you launch and that gets you through the messy middle.
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Another strategy to help with the mindset and the perspective is to change the metrics that you’re measuring. Instead of focusing on the number of clients that you have, the monthly revenue that you’re creating or the social media followers you have, instead start measuring the skills that you’re developing. For example, a skill is social media marketing skill. Instead of only showing up once a week to Instagram, now you’re going to start to show up four to five times a week and it’s going to take you less than 30 minutes to create one post and you’re not going to feel so exhausted afterwards. If you learn that skill, it’s a skill that you can repeat again and again and again in not just 2025 but 2026 and so forth.
So what skills do you want to develop in 2025? What systems do you want to build? Maybe it takes you 90 minutes to write one e-mail and you don’t really know what to say, you don’t know who you’re talking to, it just feels very generic and general, so can you develop an e-mail marketing system to reduce the time that it takes to write e-mails and make them more effective in converting so you get more clicks or more replies, can you develop that e-mail system or what other systems? A client renewal system in your business? What other systems can you implement in 2025 to help you achieve those goals and that you can measure.
And then you want to document your progress. You want to create a “wins” folder with your client testimonials. I tell all my clients this, to keep a client testimonial right there on your phone with screenshots of clients texting you success stories or e-mailing you, so you can both look at to keep you going and inspired and know that you’re helping people. As well as to create easy stories on Instagram to share the testimonials. You also want to document the self-concept skills that you are developing knowledge, gained small problem, solved small, victories achieved, you want to track all of that.
And then start to implement success rituals for small and large victories. You can do a morning mindset review, weekly wins review at the end of the week, monthly progress check-ins, like I send my clients every month a progress feedback report, takes less than 10 minutes to complete and it’s for them to review their month and for me so I can track their progress.
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Conclusion
So the benefits of embracing this process of the messy middle is that it will help to create more mental freedom instead of comparing yourself to others. You’ll do less comparison and more evaluating and reviewing and not taking things personally to against yourself. You’ll have reduced anxiety and feel more certain and confident in your business plans. You’ll make better decisions because they’re more informed decisions based upon data instead of emotional reasoning. You’ll also have more business strategic growth. You’ll be able to focus on foundations, building sustainable systems, creating scalable solutions, and you’ll develop a resilience both strategic resilience and emotional resilience. You’ll create more authentic connection to yourself and deeper client relationships. You’ll do more genuine and authentic marketing. You’ll build a stronger community both in person and online and you’ll make real industry connections.
I’ll tell you for both my business and my in-person brick-and-mortar, the teams I’ve built right and these are AKA teams I can consider them to be my community team. So for example, when I had my brick and mortar, I would refer out a lot to a naturopath, to a nutritionist, to other body workers when maybe my clients couldn’t get in as quickly to see me, I would have practitioners that were skilled in other acupuncturists that I was not skilled in so we could work together as a team informally because we each had our own business but informally to better serve the client. And then we were able to refer back and forth here in my coaching business, I refer to my CPA, I refer to lawyers and legal entities, Google and Facebook coaches because I don’t specialize in those areas and I can never be the expert in everything so I have teams, real industry connections where I can refer and they can refer to me.
So just remember you’re not alone here! There’s been many times in my business, many times, even in this one year that I’ve encountered the messy middle, I gave you one example going through my own revenue challenge in November but now it’s shaping up to be my best December. So sometimes you just need to keep going.
My client Justine, when she came to me, she was even thinking about closing the doors to her physical therapy practice because she was so exhausted not bringing in the revenue that she wanted and that is different. Her gross revenue was actually really good on paper. She was a multiple six-figure earner, but she wasn’t taking home as much profit as she wanted for the amount of hours that she was working and for the time she felt she was sacrificing for her family.
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What she didn’t realize was she was in the messy middle but she thought she wasn’t. She thought the answer, the solution was to stop, to close the doors to her business but fortunately she reached out to me, we had conversation and I educated her on some areas where she could find and improve, we tested a lot of hypothesis to get well, we made a lot of hypotheses together and then we got to work implementing them and testing them and refining them and where she is now today, she’s more profitable than ever!
She’s actually making more money now. She’s got a three-month wait list in her clinic with her dream team to help serve those clients. She’s launched her online program and more than two times has exceeded her launch goals with her online fitness classes. She just expanded her in-person brick-and-mortar practice and has taken on a new lease with additional overhead and more room and hired more practitioners and during the holidays, she took a trip globally with her family with less stress because she knew she had the team to support her.
Just think, she would not only be missing all that had she closed the doors, but all the moms to be and all the new moms and all the women that she helps in her practice wouldn’t be getting the help that they need in her town had she closed the doors so realizing where you are in the messy middle is not just about you, but it’s the clients that you want to serve as well.
So remember, come back to the facts, do an evaluation of where you are in in terms of the goal that you want to hit for 2025, for the yearend review, and if you didn’t hit your goals, what are the refinements you want to make, what’s the troubleshooting that you think was the reason why you didn’t hit those goals, what are your hypotheses and then what are the solutions for those hypotheses and that is what you’ll implement for 2025 to keep you going forward.
It’s really that simple. And remember, it’s not about you! You are totally capable! Don’t take it personally. You’ve got this we all hit the messy middle. Let’s make 2025 your best year yet and if you have a friend going through the messy middle right now and you think they could use a little help and a little pick me up, make sure to send this to them. They will thank you for it.
Okay that’s what I’ve got for you today! Have a wonderful week, and I’ll see you next week! Bye for now.
Important Links to Visit:
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