7 Simply Powerful Habits You Must Adopt to Grow Your Wellness Coach Business
Through the course of 20 years, coaching thousands of clients, I find myself continually repeating and highlighting 7 simple yet powerful habits that help wellness coaches grow successful businesses. Habits that will make the puzzle of growing a business much more manageable.
Yes, times have changed dramatically these last 20 years. Yes, there are new avenues for marketing our businesses, yes there are social media avenues we now use, and yes there are also other brilliant options for leveraging technology. But these 7 simple habits for building a highly successful business remain the same.
These habits are not born of rocket science. Quite the opposite. And at first glance, you may discard them as too simple. But simple never meant easy and doing things the hard way never guarantees success.
The 7 simple habits are also the keys to putting together jigsaw puzzles of all things. Yup, jigsaw puzzles. Shuffling through a box of 1000 such pieces one rainy afternoon, it hit me — everything I know about the best way to grow a successful wellness coaching business, every habit that must be adopted, was mirrored in the lessons I’ve learned from this simple hobby. No wonder building both puzzles and businesses just fascinates me.
The Seven Simply Powerful Habits:
1. Keep your eye on the big picture you are creating, the entire time. In business, this means knowing your “why”, and your mission statement. Not sure of that lately? Take time to rewrite and reconnect!
2. Avoid overwhelm…get into inspired action. In the jigsaw puzzle realm, when you start, and you look at all those loose pieces, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. The same is true in your business. So just remember during those times of overwhelm that, as my favorite teachers, Esther Hicks and Abraham of Abraham-Hicks are fond of saying, “you are in the perfect position to get ‘there’ from ‘here'”…trust the process, refocus on the “why”, pick up the single next piece and take inspired action.
3. Focus on one small task or area at a time…be that the border, sorting colors, or putting just the trees together in a puzzle or making a video, writing a post, or attending a networking meeting to grow your business. You can’t do it all at once, and the true gifts come as you…
4. Enjoy the process of putting this puzzle or business together – all of it…even the part where you can’t find a piece. Yet! As soon as you shift your attention to what you want and why and away from what you don’t have or can’t find, and then let go, the desired piece will be there. In fact, it’s best if you commit to enjoyment the whole time – from the sound of the pieces in the box as you shuffle them around to picking out “just the edge pieces” or finding “just the sky pieces” to placing each and every piece into the puzzle in its own time. Commit to enjoyment in your business in the same way — from choosing your new logo to hiring your first assistant, to dealing with a computer crash — sounds Pollyanna-ish, but it’s really important to remind ourselves that we are truly blessed to be in business for ourselves and we do this not just for the end result, but for the fun of the game.
5. When it starts being anything but enjoyable, take a break — at the puzzle board or in your place of business. Get up and move around, do something else, shift your attention to another section of the puzzle or business, or just stop for a while. Have some tea, go for a walk, shift from the details of bookkeeping to the interactive world of calling a colleague or jumping on a mastermind call. Always keep it fresh. And speaking of breaks…
6. Take a time out every so often to reconnect with where you are heading. In the puzzle realm, it means looking at the picture on the box…in business, it means re-visiting your “why” as I mention in habit #1 – but also connect regularly with your goals as well as you “why” – I suggest doing so at least weekly – pull your mission statement out, pin it up on the wall, post it on your computer desktop. Close your eyes and imagine yourself at the business level you are aiming for right now. Do so until emotion wells up. If you use the EFT “tapping” technique that I teach, start tapping while reading that mission statement aloud!
7. “Manage your expectations and don’t quit.” This little gem of wisdom is courtesy of my business mentor & coach, Dr. Ben Lo. It’s great advice for business and for puzzles — if you think there won’t be glitches along the way, whether in puzzles or business, think again. You’ve got to just keep on keeping on. You’ll see as you go that the picture will begin to come into focus — the jigsaw puzzle picture and the picture of what you are shaping in your business.
Bonus tip: Know that when you are “complete”, it won’t be long before you want to do a new puzzle…know that it is the process (of building a puzzle OR a business) that delights you. When you get to a desired level in your business, soon a new desire will be born — a new product to create, a new tagline that emerges, or a new book to write. There are always more puzzles to do and you never get them all done.
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Now I know, some of you are possibly saying, “Yes, it’s a cute analogy, Erica, but this enjoyment thing, and trusting the process are only applicable to jigsaw puzzles — because there you know all the pieces are in the puzzle box — the manufacturer put them there. I don’t know that all the pieces are there when it comes to my business. In fact some of them are glaringly missing…I don’t know how to make a Youtube video for instance.”
Well, as I mentioned earlier, I am a joyful student of the teachings of Abraham-Hicks and their Law of Attraction material…so it won’t surprise you when I say, “Yes, and YOU contain all the pieces of your picture of a successful and prosperous business that you could ever possibly imagine…your “manufacturer” put them there right from the get go…it is your job to FEEL this and ALLOW it. Even if you don’t know exactly how to make a Youtube video or design a subscription site, you are creative, resourceful and very much whole. And you do have what it takes to find someone who does know how to do that thing you don’t know how to do, or to learn to do it yourself, or to get the need met in another creative way. Yes, you do have all the pieces you need.”
Let me know what other habits have helped you in your business!
To Your Brilliance and Wellth,
Erica Ross-Krieger, M.A., BCC
Board Certified Business Coach, Author
WellnessCoach.com
