“I can’t do the normal fifty minute sessions other providers do.”
I’ve heard a version of this many times over the last twenty years, and it’s surprisingly normal. But, when your business doesn’t yet have gobs of clients crowding your schedule, it’s hard to go against what “everyone does.”
Here’s the short story version of this article: Go do it. Create your business the way you want to. Make your sessions how you want to.
Now, it is absolutely understandable when you’re newer to lean into industry norms, into what you see more experienced colleagues or practitioners doing. Of course you try it out that way.
The key here is to listen to yourself, to notice when you’ve got enough of a grasp of what you’re doing that you know that you just don’t fit into those kinds of structures.
Here’s some examples:
- A coach/healer just wasn’t feeling effective with offering weekly, 50 minute sessions to clients. The work she did was deep and needed the spaciousness. She ditched the fifty minute sessions and offered two hour sessions instead.
- Another healer realized that the work she did with clients was way more effective if she could work intensely with a client, and then drop to a maintenance schedule. She created an offer where she worked once a day with a client for a week, then shifted to weekly for a month, then to twice a month, then to once per month. She had to get creative with how she priced and charged for it, but it worked out very well.
- A yoga teacher was really struggling with the inconsistent, undependable flow from holding drop-in yoga classes. But all yoga teachers he knew did that. It was an internal struggle for him, but he let go of all the drop-in classes, and began to only offer 4 month series, and individual one-on-one 4 month series. It worked! His students were committed and progressing in beautiful ways, and his income went up and became consistent.
In each case our client noticed that the standard way things were done just didn’t work for them. They also noticed, critically, that what was normal wasn’t really the best for their clients, either.
To arrive here, they each had to embrace three things:
- The way they worked best with their modality/service. With a little experience, they came to know how their being flowed with the work, and how they operated best. “I stopped feeling like an adult foot stuffed into a child’s shoe,” explained one of our clients. She finally felt open and free with a beautiful mix of training and intuition.
- When they worked in a way that matched who they were, it was also when they got the best outcomes for their clients. The first time someone stretched and offered a two hour session instead of fifty minutes, it was amazing. Their client had a huge breakthrough, and finally, finally our client felt really happy, ecstatic, satisfied with how the session went.
- The truth that the business was really their own. That they were free to create any offer they wanted, any structure they wanted, led only by their own knowledge, experience and creativity. One of our clients told me, “It was an incredible feeling to get that the business was really *mine* and I could offer whatever I wanted, without asking anyone else for permission.”
While this kind of change isn’t the only ingredient in a successful business, it is certainly a key one. You want to be operating at your best, in ways that your clients can benefit the most from. That’s when you can feel clear and strong and confident that you can help people, and inviting them into your offers becomes MUCH easier, because you know you’re giving them your best.
If this resonates with you at all, if you take a moment with each of the three points above, what do you notice? How do you do your best work, and get the best outcomes for clients? And does that match how you are currently offering your work? Give this a couple of minutes, really lean into it. Maybe you already have the perfect structure for you. And maybe it could shift, at least a little.
If the structure of your offer does want to shift, take a moment to let it sink in that your business is really YOUR business. That you can make any change you want or need to, as long as it’s ethical and legal. How does that feel?
I’m so curious, what did you get? Even if you don’t have a totally clear picture of what the new offer will be, what do you see needs to change, if anything?
And how does it feel to really own your business?
With love,
Mark Silver, M. Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.
The Heart of Your Business: Healing your relationship with business
When you don’t understand how business really works, the core principles involved, then it can feel very risky to play with any part of it. If you shift this way of doing things, will it all come crashing down?
However, when you understand the core principles, then you aren’t stuck just copying how everyone else does it. You can begin to feel free in your heart and in your business to make changes without breaking the fundamentals of a healthy business.
The Heart of Your Business does that and more. You’ll learn core principles, the big picture, and you’ll also receive a deep healing around the spiritual nature of business, and the begin to witness the presence of love in everything. This course is such a nourishing, foundation-building experience.
And it’s pay-from-the-heart. Take a look and see if it resonates with you:
