ep023: Why You Need Leadership Energy

In this episode, I’m going to talk about what I call leadership energy. This is the energy that you need to cultivate, to grow, to embody in order to not simply be a great practitioner, which you may already be, but to be the leader of your business, driving it forward with clarity about what to do in your business, when, where it’s going, and the strategies you’re pursuing to get there so that you can have the business and life you want. Welcome to the Business Revolution podcast, where practitioners and coaches that provide services in health, wellness and education come to learn the business side of things like marketing, pricing, hiring, finances, all the things you need to streamline and organize your business, create steady and predictable income, serve your clients even more deeply, and reach your full potential as a business owner.

If you’re a skilled, experienced practitioner of your craft that has or wants to have a profitable and sustainable business doing the work you love, you’re in the right place. And I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s get into this episode.

Okay, it’s been quite a while since I put out a new episode, but most people tell me they binge this podcast. So if you happen to be new here, I do recommend that you have a listen to episodes one to ten at least, and any others that you want to. And if you’re a regular and have already binged on all or most of my other podcast episodes, then welcome back.

There’s been a lot going on over here for me, both personally and professionally. If you’re on my email list, you already know this. I am in the process of moving to Mexico from California, and I’m also launching a brand new program, the profitable practitioner academy, which I’ll tell you more about later.

So my house is in disarray as I sort and pack all of my belongings. And meanwhile, I’m getting together all these many pieces for this new program. And I’m dealing with a lot of things right now, and I wouldn’t be able to do all of this and stay sane if I didn’t know how to cultivate and embody and be in leadership energy.

So what do I mean by leadership energy? Leadership energy is when you’re focused on the long range view. You know what your destination is and you have a map to get there. You know where you’re going.

So your perspective is big. It’s panned out. You see the whole picture.

And what this does is stretch out time and space for you. So to illustrate what I’m talking about, let’s look at the opposite, because I think we can all relate to the opposite of this, which is when you’re in crisis mode. If you’re experiencing a crisis of some sort, you’re only focused on the moment right now in front of you.

And we can all relate to moments like that, right? It’s a shrinking of time and space, and that may serve us well in an actual life or death crisis, but that doesn’t serve us well in business. Business is not a life or death crisis. And yet, many times we can receive, like, an email from a client or something that sends us into that crisis mode, that shrinking of time and space.

And when it comes to running your business, that’s a precarious state to be in. And yet many of us live in it every day in our businesses. So let’s call that wobbly.

I’m going to call that wobbly. When you’re wobbly and in that mode of just what’s here right now, putting out fires, anything can knock you down. Wobbly is a little push or pull and you fall over.

A little crisis and you’re knocked down and off course. Now, I know I’m speaking really abstractly here, so let me try to get a little bit more concrete. What this wobbliness looks like in your business is say it’s Monday morning.

You’re headed into your workday. You look at what’s on the schedule for today, what clients are you seeing? What are the other business tasks you need to take care of? What are you going to be able to get done? How are you going to get it all in? Maybe. Maybe you look at the whole week and kind of see what does the week look like? And I’m guessing that client sessions that are booked are what provide some structure for your week.

They’re what provides some clarity. But everything else you might want or need to do in your business somehow needs to fit in the gaps between sessions. Does that sound familiar? So this is a concrete example of that shrinking of time and space.

When you’re just focused on what client sessions you have today or this week, you’re not seeing the big picture. When you’re in leadership energy, you are actually focused on the big picture of where your business is going and how you’re getting there. A day is just a dot in the week, a week is just a dot in the month.

A month is just a dot in the year. And a year is just a dot in a three year or five year or ten year vision of your business. When you’re running your business with the limited contracted perspective of just seeing what’s right in front of you.

Today or this weekend. You’re wobbly and you can get knocked down by the simplest things. When you’re wobbly.

You spend most of your time in the day reacting to whatever happens to show up, whether it’s an email or text or phone call from a client that needs something or it’s a new lead reaching out, or maybe it’s a staff member. If you have a team, you spend your time and energy reacting to other people’s needs. You may find yourself bending over backwards to please clients, letting clients decide when to be seen, and adjusting your schedule for them.

Instead of you having clearly defined client facing hours and automated systems for their scheduling, you may be letting your clients dictate the terms of your work with them, like the time they want to be seen, sure, but maybe even the cost of your services and what you do with them. You may find yourself offering discounts just because you perceive a little hesitation from a client or lead. When a discount hurts your business and your income and it’s unfair to your other clients, you may be taking any and all prospective clients that come your way, trying to help everyone and anyone, even when they’re not a great fit, even when they show you problematic behaviors.

In the realm of something like marketing, you might try a new marketing tactic and then shut it down and give up because you got no response when you tried once. Wobbly practitioners make decisions based on other people’s behaviors, reactions, and what’s going on just in this moment right now. Practitioners that have leadership energy make decisions based on their big vision and strategy.

They’re always focused on that big vision, the big picture. So what’s your big vision for your business and life? Where are you going? Where do you want to be in three years? In five years? In ten years? And how are you going to get there? When you’re focused on that big vision, any daily blip that comes up, you’re not reacting, you’re leading. You’re simply doing what you need to do to stay on course because you already know where you’re going.

In the last place that I lived, I had a next door neighbor that was a pilot. He was a flight instructor, actually. And he said that on every flight, a pilot spends most of their time just adjusting to the weather.

You know, the air currents, flight control tower instructions that most of the time flying, the pilot is simply making minor adjustments here and there to get to their destination in the smoothest way possible. So if you’re running your practice, just focus on the day to day or even the week to week. It’s like using these metaphors here.

A pilot who takes off, who’s reacting to the weather or the currents and just ends up wherever they might happen to end up, right? They’re not. It wouldn’t be knowing where you’re going. And that’s not how we want to run our businesses.

We want to know where we’re going. We want to be leading our business there, and we need to embody leadership energy for that. So you are the leader of your business, and it’s time to step into leadership energy.

When you have leadership energy, you know that you can make your business into whatever you want it to be. You’ve got that confidence. You’ve got that big leadership energy.

Even when there’s ups and downs, even when there’s an unexpected hit to your business, something totally out of your control, like a natural disaster or a global pandemic, something that’s beyond you, you still stay even keeled emotionally. You make smart, proactive decisions based on your vision and goals, and you don’t get knocked down by stuff like that because of your leadership. You attract aligned clients that are committed and get great results.

And the reason that happens is because committed clients want somebody to lead them. They feel your leadership energy. Your clients get amazing results, not just one or two of your best clients, but all of your clients, because you’ve designed programs based on what they need, not based on pleasing them.

And they follow your leadership energy doing what they need to do to get those results. You love consultations. You love talking with prospective clients about what they need and how you can help.

You have no struggles offering and selling your services. It’s a delight. Because of leadership energy, you can easily enroll clients in your long term programs, and you’re charging the right prices.

That may mean raising your prices to be profitable. You feel solid with your pricing no matter what it is because this is an even, clean exchange of giving and receiving, which you don’t just know cognitively. You feel it in your body as the leader of your business.

You don’t have cancellations, and you don’t need to enforce things like cancellation or late payment policies because your clients just don’t pull that b’s because of your leadership energy. Your boundaries are clear and they follow them, and you get high quality referrals, not just from your clients, but from other practitioners as well. You become known as a leader in your field because of your leadership energy.

Okay, so I want to share with you five ways to cultivate leadership energy. All right, number one, get coaching and training to teach you how to step into leadership of your business. This needs to be from someone that helps you see what’s possible and believes in your potential.

If you don’t know how to properly price your services for profitability, if you don’t know how to predictably convert your leads into committed, long term clients, if you don’t know how to manage your cash flow and are stressing about low income months because you have no money, these are all things you can learn how to do. And learning how to do them creates leadership energy. You can absolutely build it by learning.

Number two, have a big picture vision for where you want your business to be in three years, in five years, in ten years if you’re a little bit older. That includes your exit plan. How do you want to leave your business? Do you want to sell it? Do you want to hand it off? Do you want to dissolve it? What’s your exit plan if you’re older? Okay, setting your big picture vision.

This is one of the very first things that all practitioners that work with me do is create that vivid vision for the business you want to have. Having that vision is really the only way to determine the best strategies for your business because the vision is what tells us where we’re going. And then the route to get there is the strategy you pursue.

And no one can tell you what you should do in your business. You can’t do it yourself and you can’t get help unless you know what your vision is for how you want it to be. Number three, community.

This is the third way to cultivate leadership. Energy is with community and the energy of connection to others. Okay.

There’s a famous quote from somebody or other about how you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You know, the idea there is that the people you choose to be around impact your thoughts, your beliefs, your behaviors. So it’s really important that as the leader of your business, you get yourself into a community of other innovative, driven practitioners that have or are building profitable, sustainable wellness businesses.

These are people that are further ahead than you, people that are next to you, along with you, and people that are just behind you. That is how you’ll find inspiration and see what’s possible that builds your confidence and creates leadership energy. And I just want to note that you may have experienced this yourself.

I know I have. We oftentimes kind of lean on our own friends and family for that kind of support, and it doesn’t work because our friends and family. Unless they happen to be another wellness owner, business owner, friends and family project their fears onto you.

Now I’m not saying you don’t tell your friends and family what you’re doing in your business, but relying on them for the kind of business support that you need can be a big mistake because they will express their fears and they’re just not in it and don’t know what it is. You want to definitely find a community of people that are aligned and on the same path as you. Number four, fourth way is I call it Soul support.

What we call Soul support in my programs is the time, space, container and the tools for expanding your capacity for growth. Expanding your capacity to receive, expanding your comfort zone. Because you can expect to feel fear or resistance when you step into something new.

There’s always some perceived risk when you create a new goal or step into a new stage or level of life or business. Your unconscious and conscious beliefs, your relationships, your identity, those all get shaken up a bit. And that new and unknownness can be dysregulating.

So look, feeling dysregulated is a part of growth. There’s nothing wrong with you if and when this happens. But you do need to have the space and the tools to address those fears and resistance so that you can reach your goals, so that you can actually have what your heart desires.

And in the profitable practitioner academy, we provide this space and coaching and nervous system regulation tools for expanding your comfort zone and expanding your capacity to receive so that you can grow and scale your business and reach your financial goals and all of your goals. Okay, fifth one. Systems.

Systems. Systems. Systems help you cultivate leadership, energy and lead your business.

What I mean by systems is repeatable, time efficient and effective step by step processes in your business for all the aspects of business, like how leads are responded to, how leads are qualified and converted into clients, how you work with clients gets them the results, how clients are scheduled, how they’re billed, how you collect the data in your business, the financial data, the client results data, the marketing data, how you review and use your data for decision making, how you get client reviews and testimonials, how you market your services, how you acquire new leads. All of these things need systems, and you might have some systems in place for some of this. But are they effective? As in are they getting you the results you want and expect? Are they time efficient? Taking as little of your time as possible, building efficient and effective systems to run your business gives you leadership.

Energy systems help you create and keep your boundaries. Putting systems in place is leading your business. So listen, you get all of these things in the profitable practitioner academy.

You get coaching, training, community, soul support, and the system system systems to streamline and organize your back end. Inside the profitable practitioner academy, you’ll step into leadership energy. You’ll work exclusively with committed clients you love and help them get better results by enrolling them in programs or treatment plans.

Because you are leading them, you’ll use the profitable pricing calculator to charge the right prices. Because you’re the leader of your business, you’ll eliminate your resistance to selling with the predictable sales system, which really teaches you how to embody leadership. You’ll have $5,000 days instead of $500 days.

You’ll no longer have cancer or no shows. Your business will be streamlined and organized so that it’s finally running smoothly and sustainably with less effort and time. In other words, you’ll finally have a business that actually provides for you and make that big vision you have for your business and life a reality.

For more information about the profitable practitioner academy, you can go to joannasappir.com/PPA and I’ll put that link in the show notes as well. All right, bye now.