The Art of Offering a Personal Brand as Help to Yourself and Others. Part 1 of 2

As the founder of Belly Guru LLC I have been a catalyst in promoting holistic women's health for almost fifteen years . Although I opened up as a brick and mortar yoga themed wellness studio, my intension was always to be the creator of a learning space where any mother could learn how to maintain the title of CEO of her life.

My focus was always on empowerment of body , mind and mentality. I fused ancient mental, behavioral and body centric practices with modern integrative tools and rehabilitation to create my brand as "The Belly Guru". I began my health business as a mom of young kids in my thirties and now, as a mom of aging teens in my mid forties,I am very happy Belly Guru LLC was adaptable for the changing seasons of my life, the financial ups and downs of my market and the recent drastic change in health education and delivery systems. Although I have shifted a majority of my impact to coaching and consulting, because I strategically grew a personal brand (instead of my modalities) I can and have moved back in and out of clinical care as a fluid income base in a matter of months. I find that growing my family mindful to the ebb and flow of my season of life required me to have other revenue streams to change gears.

So How Have You Gone With The Flow?

I never thought I would be palpating pelvic floors when I began my athletic trainer move into physical therapist but then again, up until I had a child, I never realized that healthcare had very little care for the athletic woman who had a completely different set of biochemical rules. Likewise, I never wanted a complex business but I wanted to feel satisfied in my career and in my role as mom at home. 

I believe there has been a huge wave of disappointment for many of my professional colleagues who are obsessed with adding more and more credentials in the hope of it translating into better revenue streams and a happier position as an employee. In my early years, as a licensed physical therapist, continuing education was almost an obsession but it was not taken for a salary upgrade. It was taken by personal interest and a desire to improve my hands on healing expertise but as I aged into my desires and strengths, I quickly realized that physical therapy was much better suited to expand into the doors opening up in medical circles for mind- body and lifestyle approaches to healing than any other western medicine professional.

Unlike many tied to the norm, I never hesitated or looked for permission. I took the bull by the horns back in 2005 to fuse the holistic mentality of eastern mindset with the western body centric care because it made the most sense to me. Out of shear desire to offer all I can and absolutely no rules beyond professional boundaries stopping me, I created a private practice within a yoga centric wellness center focused on a fusion of life school and personal development rather than therapeutic exercise sheets, Thera Band(TM) pain care and fixing someone's something. Now, as I mentor many emerging women's health and female health entrepreneurs into a life they love with a career they own, I have recently seen a drastic shift in entrepreneurship as the better use of their dollars and use of their mental skills and precious vitality.

The Better Path to Happy Clients

Instead of ways to manipulate joints, I see much more value in you using those dollars to manipulate the environments we treat in. It is proactive to expand one's communication and coaching skills and old school to treat without them. It is going to be a lot more profitable with improvement in expected outcomes if I am working with the right people I filter strategically into my services by marketing a personal brand. I am most likely to motivate a sedentary person through my online presence as well as getting in front of them and focusing on conversations instead of like clicks. As one of the early one's on the bandwagons of telemedicine and online education, I have walked the talk for over a decade and can confirm that solid seeds planted to grow in the right conversations will sprout up money. In my mentoring I demonstrate how being an online health entrepreneur is the ultimate way for a mompreneur to navigate the steady income, influence and independence she intended. It is one of the few ways to escape falling victim in an otherwise patriarchal positive model that relies a lot more on hierarchy for client management than on what the research has dictated is the primary expertise.

I myself morphed into a more feminine styled tangent. The online exposure has allowed me to get in front of various age groups and dive into coaching many of these young men and women, who like me in the early 2000's, just wanted to feel fulfilled in their career while being a contributing presence in the lives of their growing families. My ticket to my own online academy was Kajabi but there are plenty of educational and promotional platforms health providers can utilize to stop chasing the hour trades for dollars or expand their educator dreams. For me, becoming a PhD or EdD, just to become a college professor or working as a traveling continuing educator was not going to work for my life, my bank accounts or my interests yet I know I have collected wisdom for something more. Can you relate?

The Answer is To Keep It Simple and Sane

I often speak of the "curvyhustle" to explain the contrast between the yin and yang of building a business line from one's presence in a bigger conversation. I think it is hard, especially in the more active communities of healing such as orthopedics or sports medicine to grasp the importance of the pause but for the 400 physicians committing suicide each year, the curvy hustle could not be more welcome.

It is time for licensed professionals to practice what they preach and lead by example. They need to figure out the best ways to K.I.S.S. their life by overcoming their fear of liability within the arena of online global conversations people with much less education are holding space for. We, as very invested in the quality of information, most critical of the research need to master how to dance and interact with real life more. Our clinical presentations should not be barriers. We should be meeting the public where THEY have gone instead of demanding they conform to where we remain. I personally focus on exposing our own ignorance in not being more proactive in meeting the public where they were in the past and love to take advantage of the many tech savvy ways we each can expose the public, and our peers outside our specialty. Seeing the brand wheels of change begin to churn during my initial clarity calls with colleagues is evidence to me that I am onto something beyond the evidence based conversations, opinions and journal discussions academic circles are used to.

So How Do I Care Now?

I have found that I really enjoy helping others in the healing professions figure a simple way to join me so I created the Mind Body Brand Academy, an 8 week incubator for many women healers who find their voice is lost in the bigger conversations. Just like my clinical clients, I get them to understand their strengths instead of focusing on weakness and how to ask the right people to pay them for sharing their skills. Two and a half years in and it finally feels like this Goddess Wisdom Mastermind global network of feminine health leaders is beginning to create a viable connection that can us a collective force to shift direct to consumer facing healthcare and promote a conscious culture of wellbeing.

In my practice I hold space for women to heal themselves and hold more presence in their healthcare provider conversations. I also hold space for each client who desires to become the medicine woman of her home and community, way to reclaim that title again. In a very similar way, I hold my professional facing circles online, in person and on retreats for the professional medicine woman who are currently the guide of wellbeing in her work but who do not really have much presence in her community. In each part of my work I help each person understand her personal resistance points holding her back from a life she loves and then can educate herself with the most simple and sane ideas and tools to grow a solid social presence. It takes a certain teacher to plant some abundant seeds that can grow in any direction desired or season of life as a flexible entrepreneur. By providing both groups with empowered coaching and enlightened education, I am adding a path to wellbeing on several levels of public health.

Want to Join Vibes?

I know yoga and energy medicine are usually reserved for the yoga studios but trust me, there is something in the power of respecting someone as a force of nature instead of a piece of meat with a replaceable bag of bones inside. By caring for my clients from the belief that every one of us has a potential medicine woman inside, we activate our very nature as the softer, comforting, more receptive human beings we are and this is the gold. If given a chance to reclaim the wisdom of our innate alchemy, we literally co create miracles simply by moving ourselves back into alignment with universal laws of health. By moving my healing hands onto a computer for course creation and business consulting with other lady leaders, I am opening the door of expansion for so many women's health and family care providers. The joy you can feel when the veil of the industry is lifted and the freedom past coaching clients feel as they begin to open their minds to the possibility they are in the right profession is so fulfilling. I dream of so many burnt out colleagues growing into leading their own tribes of thousands without compromising their own health or wealth goals so that we can finally leave the blind leading the blind. Finally, by highlighting partnered care, we are turning the healing role back over to the public. That can be scary but I am asking you to feel the impact you can have as a midwife birthing a society where accountability and personal ownership of one's wellbeing could again become the norm.

Now it is Your Turn to Shift The Conversations.

What do you think of my take on a healthcare career? How are you expanding the reach of your wisdom?