Hey there, wellness entrepreneur. Welcome back!
Today, we’re talking about a topic near and dear to my heart because I just see so many wellness entrepreneurs generously on fumes. They’re saying yes to everything, undercharging in some ways, or there’s mismatch between their audience size and their offer price point and what they’re offering in terms of their wellness program.
And all this is leading to exhaustion, sometimes overworking and hustle, running on fumes and seeing very little to show of it. And it breaks my heart because I’ve been there too.
My Experience With Burnout
It’s a whole reason why I have such a passion for business coaching in the wellness field because it doesn’t have to be this way. And I’m hoping to help rewrite this story, especially if you’re in a mill practice, if you’re working for an employer, maybe you’re in a massage mill clinic or a physical therapy mill clinic, or you’re teaching back to back yoga classes around town at many studios, I’ve actually done all of these.
And sometimes, depending on the position or if you’ve been in a clinic long enough, you can make okay money, I’ve made okay money as a massage therapist, I’ve made okay money as a salaried physical therapist, teaching a lot of yoga classes, I didn’t so much make okay money, but I spent a lot of time doing that.
However, the point being is I never made enough, especially with my student loans, especially for the thousands of dollars I was spending in my certifications, and living in Southern California. Now you could be living anywhere. But for the amount of energy and effort and time and passion I was putting into what I was doing, and my love for helping people, I wasn’t getting that same return in my revenue. But worse off, I actually wasn’t getting very far ahead in my student loans, I had over six figures of debt, and I was exhausted all the time. I didn’t really feel like I was enjoying my life.
Now, this could be part of some of my genetic mutation. I don’t think science has really caught up to that. I require a lot of rest and a lot of sleep. But here’s the thing. We are not robots as healers, as practitioners. We are human beings. And sometimes we have health diagnoses going on in the background, or we have multiple family members that we’re caring for. Maybe they’re littles, maybe they’re your parents. We have a lot of responsibilities. And most of the wellness practitioners that I work with are also empaths or introverts, or something of that nature on the spectrum in that way, where it does require a lot of rest and replenishment time to clear yourself of other people’s energies, to get back and reset your nervous system.
I work with a lot of practitioners, myself included, whose nervous systems are easily triggered, yet you love helping and working with people. And so whether you’re a wellness entrepreneur, or you’re working for someone else, you need a business that works for you, not burns you out or runs you down.
And it’s the white elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about in the wellness industry, the burnout, the exhaustion, the fatigue, the running around with little to show for it, not really able to enjoy life.
How I felt was I’d come home from the clinic, and I had to face plank into the couch. And I didn’t even have my daughter at the time. I was just so exhausted from treating five patients at a time, or when I was doing massage, six, seven, nine bodywork sessions in one day. I was just so exhausted. I couldn’t do anything else except be on the couch.
And I remember on the weekends it took, well, actually, I used to work most weekends. But when I had the occasional Sunday off, it took everything that I could. It was a beautiful sunny San Diego day. And my boyfriend at the time, who’s now my husband, wanted to go for a bike ride or do something fun. And I’d have to like really talk myself up off the couch and be like, “’It’s only a couple hours, you can do it. It’s the sun, it’ll replenish you.” And I always loved it. I loved hanging out with him. And I loved our adventures. But I was so exhausted, it was really hard sometimes to get myself to go to them. And then when I was there in the moment to really be in present and enjoy them.
And then when my daughter came along, it was that much harder because there were more responsibilities, often less sleep, especially when she was a baby. Now she sleeps through the night, because she’s nine years old. But those first few years, a lot of sleepless nights combined with all of this.
And now I brought that burnout mentality, that back to back patient cycle, back to back fill your schedule, book out your lunch, teach classes all ends of the day. I brought all of that into my business because I thought that’s how you run a business. I never worked for another practice that wasn’t that way.
But here’s the truth. As wellness practitioners, we cannot help others if we are physically exhausted ourselves. Okay, that’s a lie. We can help others. If we’re exhausted, because again, we’re not robots, we’ll have days where we do feel tired and off, that happens. And we can still help others. I’m going to rephrase this, we cannot help others as best as we possibly could, to the fullest potential of what’s really available if we’re not fully energized ourselves.
And again, that doesn’t mean energized every single day 100% perfectionism. What it means is most days, you are showing up replenished and energized and ready to go and clear headed and productive and focused. I know because I know what it’s like to drag myself to yoga classes and try to teach them on a busy, busy week schedule. I know what it’s like to have eight clients or eight patients in one day and talk myself into those last few sessions of the day to get through them.
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And I know what it’s like now the last several years to have a schedule that really lights me up, that I really love going to and never trying to talk myself through the end of the day. Like each session, I feel clear headed, I feel focused, I feel present on the session. When my day ends, I still have energy in the tank to go for a bike ride with my daughter or like today, as soon as I finish recording the podcast, we’re going to take one of our dogs Kona for a walk down the street. She gets a special walk by herself because she’s getting older now. On the weekends because I actually have my weekends free now, I’m able to go on bike rides. We go on hikes. We do day trip adventures to SeaWorld or Legoland or the zoo, places that I would be so taxing for my nervous system that I couldn’t even imagine doing before because my adrenals were already tapped out.
Now I have energy stores to go to them, to shield myself, and I still have time when I come home to recover. And so then the next day I can get up and meet my friend for a kick butt strengthening class at Elevate. I have the energy to do it all. And I’m making more money than I’ve ever made in my life and I’m working way less hours.
It’s re shifting the paradigm of what’s possible and the wellness industry.
It really needs this so so badly. So I’m so glad you’re here. Please share this with a friend that needs to read about it.
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What Really Is Burnout For Wellness Professionals
Burnout for the wellness professionals is really a unique beast. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or working in a clinical center, you entered this field because you’re so passionate about helping others heal. But somewhere along the way you found yourself trapped in back to back sessions with barely enough time to use the bathroom, let alone eat a full lunch. Nervous system, down regulated, peaceful, focusing on your food, just like you teach your people. Or maybe you’re stuck with documentation that follows you home every night or consumes hours of your weekend. Or in a clinic, performance metrics, they just hang over your head where it really prioritizes quantity over quality of care.
Oh, my gosh, I can’t tell you. I hated treating five people at the same time. I just wanted to take one person back to the closed room and do manual work or energetics or just talk with them. And that just was not, I wouldn’t say it wasn’t allowed, it was frowned upon in a couple of the clinics I worked with. You feel guilty when you take time for yourself. You watch your own wellness practices get pushed to the back burner because you feel like you have so much to do. And you often feel like you’re operating in survival mode rather than growth mode. And you know that you could help so many more people.
You just can’t feel like you can get out of this stuck cycle that you’re in. Especially if you work for an employee that uses insurance or you yourself bill in your own business and you have to even work with the insurance company to get this done. So I think there are a lot of demands on top of all of this. You know what’s ironic is because I’ve been through many trainings, massage school on the West Coast, the East Coast, yoga teacher trainings on the West Coast, the East Coast, actually, some international as well. I’ve been in a physical therapy school and what I’ve learned is that some of the certifications do teach wellness and self-care and prioritizing.
That physical therapy school did not at all, which was super ironic to me the whole time. I remember I brought it to a professor at one time I was like, “Why are we in health care, but you already grind into your students like go to school from nine to five and then study some more and the weekend study some more never once did I hear go to a yoga class or go out for a walk or enjoy time with your friends?” I didn’t hear that one time in my whole three years of physical therapy and practitioners, they get out and they just repeat that whole habitual process in clinics or in their business. It’s horrible.
And now no shade, no judgment here because I’ve done it myself early on when I opened my own practice, I thought I would escape that corporate hamster wheel of treating too many patients all at one time but I just I created a new one. I was running a successful physical therapy and wellness clinic. It took me a while to get prime yoga classes and then fill them, fill my workshops at prime time, lead yoga trainings and fill them from the outside. It was very successful. I was really happy and proud of all of that. But also I was really really exhausted.
And it was a really hard wake up call that I experienced in the form of my Lynch syndrome genetic mutation diagnosis and stage one rectal cancer but it’s a wake-up call that I really needed. I had to learn how to burn down everything that I knew. I mean, both my parents were entrepreneurs and they overworked and they hustled as well. This has been passed down through my learning and family generations of overworking and I really had to re-shift everything and thank you to my husband who really grew up in a different mindset and understood the value of rest and really preach this to me over and over again, and believed in me that I could learn it and do it another day another way.
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The Solution for Burnout
The solution isn’t quitting the field that you love. I know so many practitioners leave this field because they are so so burnout or they close their businesses because they’re so burnout.
And with your expertise, with your knowledge, you pay thousands of dollars and all these certifications and trainings and you have a passion for what you do. And only you with your life experience of what you went through with your own health diagnoses and journeys and in that unique combination with the certifications that you have and the knowledge that you have, only you can teach that the way that you do and if you stop doing that, then people that need that unique combination to heal their own health and wellness won’t be able to get it because you will have stopped and that is heartbreaking.
If you really want to shift out of health and wellness completely for other reasons and you feel very passionate about it, you don’t feel forced to leave because of exhaustion or not knowing how to do it another way, that’s an entirely different story. So if you do feel compelled to leave and do something else for different reasons, I support you 100%.
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I’m talking to those of you who feel forced to leave because their business hasn’t worked out and they feel like they’ve tried everything or they’re completely exhausted and they feel like that there’s no other option in this health, wellness and healthcare industry. But there is, there is.
Okay, let’s talk about some of these options.
So we’ll start with an employed practitioner. So you can start to look at other options available to you while you’re still in your job. So I know this is preached all the time, boundary setting in your job, protecting your energy, even in demanding environments.
But let’s break this down specifically. I see so many healthcare workers, wellness practitioners bringing their work home. And if you have a patient that you care for and you really need to research, that’s one thing, right? Sometimes for me, going to a training and researching, I’m a healthcare worker, I’ll always be learning. That fuels me. It resets my nervous system. It gets me pumped for the following week. I feel more confident. I’m like renewed. That is one thing. I think that’s different.
And still, we still need full days of not thinking about our patient and client care. What I’m talking about is when you’re bringing your documentation home, when you’re bringing your worries home, when you’re in the clinic hours longer than you really need to be. That is what I’m talking about here. If you added all those hours up, it probably equates to almost another full work week, maybe more. So that’s one place to start to look.
And then what do you do with that free time? Rest, rest, replenish, enjoy life. Because from there, your next step, whether it’s staying at the job and just getting more confident, and strategically positioning yourself for roles that better fit you or demanding a higher salary or better hours. I mean, you can structure your hours. You don’t have to do the 40-hour work thing if you really like your job, but you just feel tired. Don’t do 40 hours then. And with that additional time, again, you can rest or there’s so many things that you can do with secondary income streams where you only need a phone and email.
And then once you figure that out, you can create an exit strategy and maybe move into your own what was a side hustle and make it a full hustle. And when I say hustle, I mean hustle within a sustainable schedule. There is a little bit of hustle. You have to be a little bit hungry, right? But I’m not saying overworking. There’s a difference.
For entrepreneurs, it’s creating a hybrid business model that combines in-person and online scalable wellness offerings. There’s so many ways to structure these where you’re not stuck in the back-to-back, one-to-one all day long, week after week after week. Developing systems that generate revenue while you sleep, implementing strategic marketing that attracts your ideal clients without draining you so it feels in alignment, pricing your services that’s also in alignment with their true value impact, and making sure that your services you offer are also structured in a way that matches your audience size and your marketing skills.
And it’s building a community of support to overcome the isolation of entrepreneurship. Now, if you’re introvert, this might not matter so much, but I’m an introvert. I require a lot of loan time and I still love my community. So I think that community part is true even if you’re an introvert. And then whether you’re employed or self-employed, everyone needs clear boundaries between work and personal life. When are you going to shut the laptop and not open it again? Non-negotiable self-care practices that you do consistently. That doesn’t mean perfectly, right? It doesn’t always have to mean an hour long yoga class or a five-mile run.
Remember, some of the overworking out actually depletes your adrenals. So how can you imperfectly replenish yourself in self-care practices and finding a blend of self-care practices? Yes, that get your sweat on, that build your strength, but also replenish and reset and down-regulate your nervous system, like a restorative practice, even if it’s 20 minutes legs up the wall at home on your bed as well.
And you need a vision of success that includes your well-being, not just your output, not just your productivity. And when you build a career that prioritizes sustainability alongside growth, that’s when everything changes. You’ll wake up excited to serve your clients, not dreading your schedule. You have energy left at the end of the day for yourself and your family. Your income will grow while the amount of hours that you’re actually working with your clients stay manageable or even decrease. You help more people through leveraged offerings and more effective clinical work. You become the embodiment of the wellness that you teach, enhancing your credibility and your impact. You create a career path that can adapt to life’s unexpected challenges, whether it’s a health issue, family needs, or simply the desire to travel and enjoy life.
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Strategies to Implement
Okay, let’s just talk about a few strategies today to implement this.
The first one is an energy audit scheduling system. Start by tracking your energy levels throughout the day and throughout the week. When are you naturally most energized? When do you typically crash? If you’re employed, you can use this information to request schedule adjustment that align with your energy pattern as well as possible. I remember I tried different things when I was a salary employee doing half, five days a week. Some of them were long days. Some of them were half days. That didn’t work so much for me because I needed less time away from people. I did four 10-hour days with a one day in the middle of the week to replenish and recover. I kind of like that schedule. You can also structure your day to handle complex cases during peak energy times. Use breaks even though they’re just five minutes to strategically recharge. How will you do this when your energy dips?
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Plan documentation and workflow around your natural energy cycles and make sure that it’s getting done during the day and try to take none of it home, none of it. For entrepreneurs, you can use that energy data to schedule your most demanding client work during your peak energy times. Reserve lower energy periods for admin tasks or rest.
For me, I like to get my admin tasks done in the beginning of the week and then Tuesday, Wednesday on or heavier with client loads and I can focus on them completely. I’m very present with them because I’ve gotten what I need to be done in my business.
I also structure my client calls based upon how my energy works. It’s two or three client calls and then a large break and then maybe two or three more, although I cannot do six calls back to back every day, back to back week by week. So I do know my limits and I structure my schedule based upon that. And then I work backwards. I make sure that my revenue goals will match the number of clients that I can see in a day and in a week.
And I work on growing my scalable online offers as well. I also have a free download. You can check them out here <LINK>. It’s a scheduling audit system, so you can also be aware of where you might be losing time and energy leaks, such as for me, transferring tasks when I’m going from tab to tab and my computer, sometimes I get distracted and I lost and what should be a two or three minute rescheduling or just editing fix sometimes can take me a half hour or more because I get lost in my emails or in other tabs or just distracted and I forget where I even started or what my purpose was. It’s kind of like entering a room and being like, “How did I get here? What do I need?” Sometimes that happens when I go from tab to tab.
So I have my transitions clearly laid out and I try to avoid jumping from tab to tab when I’m working within my work. So it’s knowing for you where you lose time or focus or energy. It’s also keeping things simplified in your business, which is why I recommend having your signature wellness program because if you’re marketing one, maybe two things, and then you’re using workshops and other lower ticket items or free items as your marketing strategies, then your funnel is very clear and you always know how to prioritize your time or what to focus on.
But when you have many different offers or many different price points or contracts and one-to-one clients and group programs and classes, it can be very draining and it’s like spinning several different plates on sticks and trying to keep them all in the air. And I know this is really common for wellness entrepreneurs because you are creative, because you have so many passions and hobbies.
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How Can You Really Simplify This?
When I worked with my client Katie, she was working 12-14 hour days with only maybe $1,000 to $2,000 revenue months. She more than doubled her revenue and we reduced her hours to normal 8-hour working days by simplifying a lot of this.
Now, if you have made your own practice kind of a mill grind or you are in a mill grind yourself, you just need an exit plan strategy. So that could be exit plan from the mill grind that you created in your own business. It could be an exit plan for getting out of the job, but you can work this in phases.
So for me, when I found myself in the mill grind of my own business of teaching a lot of classes and teaching workshops and trainings on the weekends crammed with one-to-one patients, I couldn’t just drop all my classes. I couldn’t just drop all yoga teacher trainings all at once because that would really cut down on my revenue and all my leads came from my classes and my training. So I had to phase out of this. I had to phase my grueling one-to-one schedule and slowly make my price point of my prices match the current number of clients that I wanted to see per week slowly in a very de-risky way in a way that felt safe for my nervous system.
Same with letting go of classes. I had to analyze every single class that I was teaching and making sure that, “Oh, okay, did I love it? Do I love this class? Do I love this community? Okay, that’s great.” Is it also bringing me patients and clients where I really make my money with my one-to-one sessions or at the time even in my clinic I had an online membership. Is it generating clients for this?
Now, when I went from being a salaried physical therapist to owning my own business, I didn’t have a phased exit plan which I don’t recommend. I was actually fired. I was let go of my job and I had just come back from maternity leave with my daughter so I had very little savings and which is really what fueled a lot of my hustles. So if you can build up more savings than I did, I barely had any so probably you’re already better than where I was to start. It really does help to keep the nervous system calm and reduce less hustle. I also waited maybe a year, year and a half before I hired my first business coach. If I had hired one sooner, I probably would have made more money and worked less hours that first year because there was a lot of mindset stuff going on and I was charging maybe $60 for an hour with my doctorate in physical therapy and all these certifications.
There are a lot of skills I could have built in marketing and selling. Maybe if I had thought or had the courage to know that I was going on the entrepreneur path that I could have learned along the way while I still had my job. So there’s a lot that you can do when you still have a job. Even start so I have a client that she is working part-time as a pathologist in the school systems and she makes seven to nine K revenue months with her part-time job.
So there’s a lot that you can do with a job that will set you up for greater success when you go all in full-time into your job if that’s what you want to do.
Another strategy that I mentioned earlier is the pricing and offer strategy making sure that it is appropriate for your audience size and your marketing skill set. You really want to be able to focus from transitioning from selling single sessions to comprehensive packages or programs. It really helps a lot.
Another area that really helps to save time is the sustainable content system. If you’re employed you can begin to build a professional presence separate from your employer. You can share expertise through case studies, educational content, thought leadership. You can develop relationships with referral sources and networking outside your clinic. You can create content that positions you as an expert increasing your value and options. If you’re an entrepreneur and if you’re building your social media presence while you have your job there are a ton of episodes here on this podcast all about marketing and content strategy and Instagram specific strategy. So just reference some of those.
And then the last strategy for today is the Wellness First career planning method. That is instead of fitting self-care around your work you want to build your professional life around your non-negotiable wellness practices.
So for me when I was employed I always made sure okay when am I going to walk when I’m going to go to the gym. That’s what I would schedule first. When do I have my doctor’s appointments? Put them in and I would treat them just like they were a client or a patient session. I wouldn’t reschedule them on myself. I do the same as an entrepreneur. I schedule my workouts, my doctor’s appointments, eating, picking up my daughter, myself, and then my family’s needs first. And then I create my work schedule around that. And the scheduling audit system, the free download, the free guide goes over some of these strategies as well and deeper.
So you can check it out here <LINK> and download that. You want to be sure that you create hard stops in your workday and that you honor that stop regardless of what’s unfinished. Just keep track of what’s unfinished and remind yourself that tomorrow is a new day.
I remember my client Christina as soon as we did that, we figured out a thought that was in alignment with her that to remind herself because she would work after she put her daughter to bed sometimes 10 11 o’clock or later and then the next day would be exhausted. And then she just had to do was just do a little bit and then remind herself that tomorrow was a new day and she would get to the climbing gym more. The sub-paddling, she would take vacations more, full days, full days of rest and that changed everything for her. And she still hit big revenue months, blew past her revenue goals, and got fully booked with a waitlist. And you want to make sure you plan regular business-free days into your monthly calendar. Maybe you like to work weekends because you trade child care shifts with your partner. Or maybe you do like to work evenings because that’s when your peak energy is. Find out what works for you and then make sure you are blocking off full days of rest whenever they are for you.
Now if you’re employed and you think I can’t just change my schedule, my supervisor will never allow it, bring your request with that that’s data driven. So I remember when I shift from five weird, it was a weird schedule. I had like three long days and two half days. And I told him why I would be more productive doing four 10-hour days, how it would better serve the community there because I would be available into the evenings and after work hours, and how I’d be more energized to better serve my people. And then we just phased it in over time.
If you’re an entrepreneur and you feel like you can’t afford to reduce your client load because you need the income, you need to again phase that in. So maybe you start to bring in a scalable online wellness program depending again on your audience size. I teach many of my clients how to do this and how to grow an audience online so they have an audience to sell that program to. Or maybe you just need to restructure your one-to-one offer in a different way or your price point.
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Conclusion
There are many ways where you can slowly reduce the number of one-to-one that you do in a day and in a week and give yourself more time to replenish and reset. And actually when you, a lot of the times when I work with my practitioners, when they have more energy they feel more clear-headed and focused and they actually make more money.
And if you’re like, well I don’t have time to create the content to grow that online audience or create the content for that wellness program, remember you can start small. Again, you don’t need more than an hour or two or a week to create content. If it’s taking you longer than that then something’s gone wrong in your content system. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time to create content for a program. In fact, there are many ways to do it while you’re actually delivering a program.
And if you just start somewhere and block that in now, several months down the road you will have an asset, a library, a body of work of content that you’re posting online and or a library of content that you can then sell. You can do this. We can change the wellness industry together. Every day that you continue to push through burnout is a day you’re not building the sustainable career that could be supporting both your financial goals, your freedom, your passion of really what you desire and your well-being. And building that sustainable wellness career, it’s not just good for you. It’s essential for the people that you serve and the people that you care about, your family.
Because you know they want you to be happy. My husband wants me to be energized and happy. My daughter wants me to have energy so I can go ride bikes with her. They need you at your best and not just for today or tomorrow but for years to come.
If you’re ready to break free from the burnout cycle and create a career that supports your well-being as much as your bank account, I invite you to take that first step. You can just reach out to me. I will help you or you can set up a consult call or just send me a DM on Instagram. You deserve a career that gives you energy rather than depletes it, especially in the wellness industry and that is totally possible.
Alright, I’ll see you next week. Bye for now!
Important Links To Visit:
How to Attract and Convert Your Invisible Audience as a Wellness Entrepreneur
How to Set Confident, Sustainable Pricing for Your Wellness Business
How to Set Confident, Sustainable Pricing for Your Wellness Business
How to Confidently Transition Your In-Person Wellness Skills to an Online Format
