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In Practice: How to Create a Successful Holistic Practice from Start to Success!
Rapport and Pearls
of Wisdoms
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by Shaun Brown |
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In this May issue I’ll talk about connecting and wisdom. If we were to look at how we affect people energetically the basic principle would be that we talk without speaking. However, when approaching new and continuing clients, it is important to dress it up with a kind voice, an open heart and an invitation to heal themselves. I will also toss some pearls of wisdom for you in the second half.
RAPPORT:
Relationship, especially one of mutual trust or emotional affinity. Dictionary.com
Rapport is learning to get along, bond and create a sacred space for your clients to heal themselves.
Mentally logging and observing clients is the only way to really start getting a handle on how to best serve them. It takes a lot of these experiences to develop your craft. Being able to “sense” what people are about is a craft.
This ability must be earned. One can’t win discernment in a lottery. It takes client after client to learn how to size them up in the first two minutes of connection with them. Developing this intuition helps in your ability to give them the best care needed for the time they are there with you in session.
As a professional, part of your job is to “know” the best route to take for that particular session and it is also a good idea to always ask the client what you can do for them too. After about 500 clients, only then, you will start getting in tune with such things as body language, voice intonation, their energetic coloring, attitude and where they want to go in that session. This class is called: Rapport 101, it is earned through time.
TRUST: Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing. Dictionary.com.
The first contact with a new client is especially critical when it comes to establishing trust. They are fragile at first. Baby steps are required at first. Take your time with their intake medical evaluation. This interview will give you plenty of time to “sense” what they need and how to act toward them when in session.
There is a difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is jumping into the disease with the client experiencing all of their drama and pain; empathy is feeling compassion at a distance. You must detach with Love and observe the client, or you will be of no value to them because you will have joined them in the tempest. You are no good to the client if you are caught up in their experience. Someone has to steer the boat to the other side, and that captain is supposed to be you. Most clients come to you with a “disease,” they are trusting your ability to help them towards a holistic result. The only caveat I will suggest here is: Everybody has a bad day-but if it is a lifestyle, as I taught you about vampires in October, that is a big difference. Get rid of and learn from vampires, remember they are in your face to teach you to have strong boundaries and more self-esteem.
Compassion for your client’s ailment is appropriate. Compassion is a heart emotion. Compassion is accepting that person just as they are and if they choose to move forward in your practice, toward a healthier life, they belong there. Your job, as a therapist, is to show them where center is and for them to learn to trust you and themselves. It is not letting them distract you and getting caught up in useless eternal dramas.
Attention!
During an interview does a new client require constant eye contact? That usually means they are sizing you up to see if you are a safe person. Do they not want to have much eye contact? This usually means they want you to be extra careful about their boundaries. Talking soft or firm and clear, a bouncy personality or subdued, these characteristics are developed to help bond with them. This client has chosen to have a healthy relationship with you, and, has chosen to trust you with a capital “T”. Sometimes developing this bond can require a long time and you should commit to be in the trenches for at least as long as it takes provided they are moving forward. However, if you have worked on your stuff and you are approachable, the trust between you and your client will happen quickly without fail.
For me-learning to meet the client halfway has been very successful in creating long and loving relationships. Being a holistic professional is one of the most trusted jobs on the planet. After all, you are asking them to shed their skin. No pun intended. This type of practice deals with the vulnerability of the heart and they must develop a trust in you. People come to you because they want to be whole. They learn to come from the heart and open up. They are awaking to what changes need to take place in their lives to make them healthy, happy, viable people.
Your “presence” is crucial to their development. That is why you are in this holistic practice, the business of the heart. Your job is to love them, with compassion and detachment, until they can love themselves.
Considerations To Procure
See how many yes answers you can check:
When a new client calls on the phone, can you return a call within an hour or two?
Do you have, recorded on your voice mail, specific times you can be reached and that you check your messages frequently?
Are you helpful and not vague about scheduling their appointments and your prices? When you value their time you are giving value to a prospective client as well as yourself.
Do you make sure that the client is scheduled in your planner? If ever I forget a clients’ scheduled session they are automatically compensated with a complimentary session. That’s just all there is.
Are you dressed in appropriate attire? The clothing automatically speaks of the nature of your intent and sets the tone for how people will treat you.
Smiling, with eye contact, at first sight is important. When greeting someone at the door in this manner, do you say, “I’m glad your are here, you have value to me.”
Do you schedule so that you do not appear harried? No one wants to feel rushed or that you have jammed them between other sessions.
Is there an inviting waiting room? Remember all reading materials, magazines, fountains; music, etc. are a tax right off.
Does the office and surrounding spaces look organized or chaotic? Is the surrounding area yard and session space neat and smelling clean when the client arrives?
More Rules
If for some reason you are running more that five or ten minutes late, the waiting room needs to have materials to read and a feel of safety and comfort. Maybe some music can be playing while they wait. The sight and sound of a water fountain is great.
If a client has to wait after fifteen minutes, this is unacceptable. If this occurs, explain to the client that the scheduling was unexpected and that you can either reschedule them for a later date, as a complimentary session, or they can have a 50% discount for this session if they don’t mind waiting. Remember, your goal is for them to reschedule.
Smells and airflow are VERY important. Does the space smell clean and not confining? I remember getting a massage from a therapist that I went to ONCE. I entered her home, she had kids running all over the house, the living room smelled like mold and as she pointed to the bathroom and I stepped into use it the place smelled like urine. Well then, I haven’t even had my massage, so much for air flow; she had lost me at the front door.
I greet the client and take them into the workspace, giving them time to feel comfortable as they fill out their medical form. I also give them the option of using the bathroom facilities too. I have traded for housekeeping, which helps; I constantly vacuum, because I have animals and I burn great smelling candles, incense (nag champa is classic, user friendly-I have been burning it since the 60’s) and have fresh flowers. My clients are always commenting on how great the whole sanctuary feels and smells. Burn nothing synthetic. If you can’t afford real flowers at first, buy really real looking fake ones. Intent remember?
All of these considerations are essential and lead up to the integrity quota you have intentionally worked for. All of these communication skills represent who you are. The difference between ordinary and extraordinary touches will pay off. The client will spread the word about how your practice has far exceeded their expectations. You get one shot to represent and communicate who and what you are about, remember first impressions.
The care and intent you have put forth to create and communicate a healthy, professional, safe space is invaluable and makes them feel special, because they are. That type of advertisement is priceless. My clientele is almost strictly word of mouth. They automatically feel they can trust me and likewise I can trust them because we are connected to someone’s wife, secretary, brother, etc.
So be creative, experiment with how you want your space to appear. Play beautiful music, light candles (that are in glass containers for safety), and dance in what you have created. You’ve earned it! You are in your Dharma!
Pearls Of Wisdom
The proverb, “Choose not to throw pearls before swine,” was not said lightly. Your Life Force is at stake. In other words-choose who you want in your practice. Swine are not “bad” people, but they are like children and as adults they have not worked on their issues. They do not vibrate with the level of trust in themselves that is necessary to be your healthy, moving forward chosen clients.
Lazy dysfunctional people will butter you up and want you to fix them. Your job is to take care of yourself, not buy into the eternal drama like you really think you can heal someone else in the first place. True healers only touch those willing to be healed. Choose only the ones that are moving forward. Again, when choosing to remove a dysfunctional you can send them a letter or tell them in person, gently, that you are just not their therapist-end game. Once you have healthier boundaries the unhealthys won’t even see you. Sidebar-don’t send them to another therapist unless that therapist is trained in dealing with dysfunctionals as a living.
When we choose people to be in our lives they usually mirror where we are at that time. Want to know what’s going on inside of you? Just look at the people and clientele you surround yourself with. Kinda cool huh? I scan people now, just like the computer, usually starting with the scheduling of a session by phone. If they are healthy I know there is the possibility to form a solid bond of intimacy. It feels good to have left behind the old push-pull drama found in the passive-aggressive dance of the dysfunctions that I had experienced years ago.
Each person is in our life for a reason on some level. We do not connect to all people in our lives on all the same levels. The server at a restaurant, for instance, is a shallow, tentative level. As your friendships develop by building trust with a person that can value your Life Force, your level of trust becomes greater with that person. Each step with this relationship is earned, each step checked by indicating your motives. Why is this person in your life? Do they enrich and enhance who you are, not to say they stroke your ego, but is there a genuine sharing of equal productive energy?
Do you have people in your life that seek every opportunity to engage in psychic warfare, or undermine your ideas or do you undermine theirs? If this is the case, you are involved in a passive-aggressive dance and you will keep dancing until you are sick and tired of being sick and tired. You can change your shoes, change your clothes, but in order to change our life, you must change dance partners.
But as I have learned the more I have worked on me the better the new clients are about self-care and loving themselves…hmmm. The most important partner in your life needs to be you first. Self-care, inner work, telling your truth and not being afraid of things falling by the wayside, which they will, will start creating an energy so clear that those unclear will not be attracted. It keeps it real simple: you do the inner/outer work on yourself and that vibration attracts whom you need in your life for further growth. The growth can come from a loving trusting direction or it can come from a passive aggressive/betrayal direction. You choose.
Every person in my life brings meaning to it. By meaning, I am saying that they are searching for their inner life to manifest outwardly too. Intentionally working on themselves. Walk the talk. People who “talk” about working on themselves are not as valued to me, as far as sharing my life force with them, as the ones who walk their Truth. Life Force can only be perpetuated or expanded when you are sharing it with people of like Life Force. If it is shared with those who choose not to truly do the inner connection work, entropy takes place and you will find yourself drained. It’s a good indication, when you feel drained after being around someone, that you are drained. It’s not that they are bad, again, for there is no such thing as good or bad, merely degrees of courage to shed the veils of illusion that tell us what we must “get” from someone else that we can’t get from within in order to be happy.
Unravel
If you can’t keep your word, which manifests into being late, missing appointments, being scattered with your clients, you will sabotage your holistic business. This is a good indication that there is some non-continuity in the value of the vibration of your being that needs to be changed if you are to be healthy.
I suggest that you get into therapy soon. Go back and unravel the parts and the old survival belief systems that keep you in fear of making healthy choices with your voice. Discover these areas that got stuffed along the way. Scan the issues that keep you in a mode of self-abuse, and release them. They no longer serve you or anyone else. If you continue with a lack of wholeness in your voice, your throat chakra, which is the chakra that evokes the soundness of your spoken Truth, it is highly possible that a physical ailment will manifest. Disease not released will manifest from the 4th dimension into the physical, usually a “disease” in your body.
When I feel the need to continue to look at my character defenses that keep me from a clear connection to Spirit, I seek out hypnotherapy. I like hypnotherapy because I am not wasting my time sitting in front of a bored counselor spewing out one crisis after another and getting a bill. This becomes months of little change as well. Staying stuck, because you are in a victim mode. I haven’t seen a lot of personal breakthroughs with all of the many years of counseling I have done. Hypnotherapy allows me to perceive my “drama” from an unattached view. Get into it and get over it.
This life, after all, is all about your perception anyway. Hypnotherapy gets up close and personal and doesn’t waste time and money. I can look at an issue that is holding me back which is always fear-based, unwrap and process, and let go of the problem in weeks, instead of a long drawn out rigadoon. A hypnotherapist is trained and capable of being present when the deep personal work that is needed is being done. Just like anything else, choose a professional you resonate with, trust your gut.
The more your word is held true to consistency and accountability, the more people will see you as a true and accountable. In regard to your word and how you choose to view the world, I will suggest again that in your future, as a holistic professional, you learn about the energy system and those vibrations emitted. PLEASE purchase the Caroline Myss tapes or CDs of Energy Anatomy. She gives a vivid and complete education on the energy information of each chakra that is an absolute must for your education.
Ok my Dears it is time to close. I hope I help you as much as I help myself everytime I reread what I have written. They say the teacher teaches what they need to learn. You can now purchase my books: “How To Create A Successful Holistic Practice” or “Intentional Success” on line at Amazon.com. Feel free to email me and let me know how you are doing- shaunBeWell@Comcast.net
BeWell, shaun
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Shaun Brown,
Holistic Therapist,
Author and Consultant
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Shaun Brown has been self employed most of her adult life. She has an AA degree in General Business and a Bachelor of Arts Degree from University of California, Sacramento, in Communications. Her main focus of education is in advertising, promotion and production. Ms. Brown attended the Health Awareness Academy, in Fair Oaks, California, has practiced bodywork therapy since 1993 and has taught holistic related classes since 1994.
Ms. Brown works, with a team of professionals, including physicians and other health care providers, as well as volunteering her time to work at Mercy Hospice. Her focus is the care of people working in high stress environments, and those suffering from injuries due to a variety of causes.
She is the best selling author of “How To Create A Successful Holistic Practice,” and her newest current release is titled, “Intentional Success-A Workbook For The Holistic Therapist.” Ms. Brown currently has a successful holistic practice in Orangevale, California, is an author, speaker, columnist and consultant. To read a chapter/purchase her books/schedule a workshop visit
Email:
BeWell!
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