While the wellness industry is booming, it’s easy for us wellness practitioners to get lost in the shuffle. I know firsthand that many yoga teachers, wellness practitioners, fitness coaches, nutritionists, holistic coaches, and even holistic docs are having a super challenging time trying to figure out how to reach the income/lifestyle experience they want.

I know many of you are just getting by, loving your work, and making sacrifices to do it well. Chances are, you love your clients, your patients, your students. Their wellness evolution is why you do what you do.

But, you have desires to be more prosperous and more effective. You know there are tools out there you should be taking advantage of. It’s all a big overwhelming as social media keeps getting busier. Not to mention the marketplace is more crowded than ever. What is a wellness pro to do?

Instead of it taking you 10 years to learn what I’ve learned, I’ve distilled the gems into 7 audio lessons for you to put on your smartphone and listen to again and again, until you’ve nailed it.  I have put in 10 years of hardcore learning and $50,000 into training in learning how to thrive uplevel my game as a holistic practitioner. My career-development investments int $, time, and focus have paid off. I’ve made a great living. I’ve made it ridiculously affordable so that no matter how hard you’re working for your dollars, you could still get it.

Here is an overview of what I’ve learned in 7 lessons, that are the basis of the Uplevel mp3.

Lesson 1: Who do you need to be next?

What ever you are earning and who ever you are being is not the same as who you will be at the next level. Think back to when you first hit the yoga mat. When yoga was new to you, you were not the same you. We grow by growing. Think about it. If you want exponential growth:

1. You need an exponential shift in mindset.
2. You will need skills you do not currently possess.
3. You will need skills you forgot you had.

Take a moment and dream. Who do you need to become? Get specific. Use the human power of visualization – or bringing the future forward into the now. Mark this occasion. This is where the old you dies.Now, let’s make that happen.

p.s. If you’re typical you need time management, project management, and assistant management skills right off the bat. We’ll talk about those in the following lessons.

Lesson 2: Organize your success.

If you did a good enough job visualizing and getting the vision of you and your upleveled career, we have enough to start lesson 2. If you didn’t do that you’ll just organize around the old you. In yoga that is called a samskara. Stop repeating the past.

To organize for success you need a project management tool. I use Basecamp. Many of my students in Yoga Health Coaching Certification use Asana. Career success is a multiple project problem. There is no way to streamline your time with a paper calendar and a to-do list. Your system is keeping you stuck. Once you sign up for your project management system do this:

• Set up 3 projects
• Set your projects page to your web browser homepage
• Read  The 12 Week Year. Or listen to it on Audible. You can get it free on Audible.

Before deeply studying the 12 Week Year I had no idea how to effectively organize projects and timelines. My old self thought I knew how, and I did enough to stay at the prior stage of success. But, if you want to up your game, you need to up your systems. Use The 12 Week Year. Read or listen to it at least 5 times until you have it implemented. This works for reverse engineering personal and career goals.

Lesson 3: How to hire a virtual assistant.

If you already have an affordable assistant who loves to free up your time, skip to lesson 4. If you already have a virtual assistant who sucks your time for very little output you don’t get to check off this lesson. Almost everyone I know could use an assistant. Learning how to hire and train is another story. Here are some tips:

• Hire a go-getter. To do this you need to screen your applicants before an interview. Create a series of hoops for them to jump through that will demonstrate the skills to do the job. For example, we just put the word out that we’re hiring a Podcast Show Manager. The person needs to design some social media posts, find an old episode in the articles and make 2 suggestions for how to improve the show.  After that, my team will be in touch. Not before.
• Master that which you want to handoff. If you don’t know how you want done what you want done, your assistant will waste time figuring out how to do it. Chances are it won’t be done the way you want. Hand off tasks you’ve mastered, with clear instructions. Allow the person to become competent in specific tasks. Quickly you will find yourself mastering the art of getting stuff off your plate.
• Don’t let money get in the way. We are hiring me a new assistant this week that will work for $4 an hour. She won’t be a white middle-class American; she will, most likely, be a mom and will love computer technology and social media. This job with me will elevate her life on multiple levels. She will love her work and her new team. She’ll feel like luckiest gal on the block. How do I know? Because of the three before her, two were promoted and one was fired. The one that was fired we shouldn’t have hired, and now know how to hire and train a perfect fit for our team. My microbusiness now supports 6 families. Buyah.

Lesson 4: Ask better questions ( To find your perfect client )

Shift your gears inward. When we ask a question in earnest we are much more likely to be able to hear an answer we have never considered. Stop thinking you know how to get to where you are not. You don’t know. And, you can’t know.

Lucky for us humans, that doesn’t matter one bit. As long as we’re asking questions in earnest that illuminate exactly what we don’t know how to do we will likely be available to receive the answer. I pay excellent coaches to answer my questions. Other coaches pay me to answer their questions. I read books that have the answers to my questions in the title. This week those books were:

• The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

I never would have read those books if I hadn’t asked specific questions, which I found the answers to in those books. And if you’d rather listen- try Audible. I listen while I workout and garden.

Take a moment now and practice this habit. Think of 1 current challenge. Mine is that I’m writing this blog post and procrastinating from editing 4 podcast episodes. Now, I’ll take that challenge and turn it into a question. A good question is: Who should edit my podcast? If I ask that without pretending that I already know the answer, I’ll get a noteworthy insight. Then, I can try it. What is your spur of the moment challenge? What is your question? 

Lesson 5: Build a Tribe to build your career.

I slowly grown and nurtured a huge community (impact) and lots of students/members (income). I love my work, and I love my peeps. I’m very curious about who you are, dear, reader, and what you want from me. When I have a clue about that, I try to serve you where we have cross-over.

Last week I sent out a survey. I’ve had an email list for 15 years. As of writing there are 40,000 subscribers.  I’m continually curious about who I’m sending emails to. Yesterday I got the tallied results. Guess which demographic holds the majority of hyper-responders around here?

I was blown away.

The over-60 population. The boomers. My mom’s generation.

Now that I know that, you’re going more interviews on dynamic aging, creative dying, nurturing grandchildren, intergenerational education, evolution of ethics, legacy design, and deep wisdom traditions. Is any of this new to me and my work? No. Did I know these were the pressing issues of the hyper-responders in my tribe? No. Now I do.

And when I focus on this more balanced inter-generational approach to my work you better believe the tribe that supports my bi-locational surf lifestyle will grow. I imagine you’ll hear my parents on the podcast soon.

Lesson 6: Lead Generation Never Goes Away

This lesson is simple: if you want your career to thrive –  you want to be in hot demand. The more hot demand you create for yourself, the easier it is to pick and choose what you do with whom. Early in my career I hustled hard for the work I earned. With tribe-building I started to have more work than I could do. I started groups because I liked working that way more than 1-1. I leveraged my earning power. I learned how to consistently attract the best people for my group work – aka courses.

Despite all this, I never stop nurturing the tribe and inviting new peeps to join our little corner of the world. When the right people find our conversation – they are psyched. And I am too. I consistently and systematically put myself out there to be found. Then, I reverse engineer the easiest way for that person to find what they want to satisfy or stimulate their curiosity. At that point, the games have begun.

The right people end up in the right courses to carry their internal conversation and external evolution to the next level. It’s a beautiful thing.

And, I look at how it all went down and create a better system for the next person. Lead generation next goes away if you want to grow.

Lesson 7: How to Create Dynamic Transformation in Groups

Like I mentioned, I quickly outgrew seeing people 1-1. I found that groups transform faster than individuals. I learned this from working with the wealthy and the skids. The skids are people who skid through town. They live out of their cars or rent a room. In Driggs, the skids work to ski. These people in my yoga classes were largely NOLS instructors. They came to class to learn.

I quickly learned that peer support accelerates evolution. 

The wealthy clients I worked with 1-1 were slow to grow. I found I started enabling their stagnancy just by creating the 1-1 container. They didn’t want deep transformation. I grew bored… and decided to create dynamic group-based programs.

I found that I could be like an orchestral conductor and create an amazing group transformational experience. I began to study methods on how to improve. The basics of what I learned are:

• Know the A to B in the transformational journey you’re aiming for
• Build a container for that to occur
• Create rules for group behavior to strength the container
• Reward positive group behaviors

Each of these lessons is expounded upon in the 7 Lesson mp3, which you can get here for a steal of a deal.
Also, I know that when I’m learning something new I always want to talk to someone about it. When I talk about what I’m learning I learn faster. For this reason, I’ve included 2 sessions with Alex Biondo, the head career strategist at Yogahealer.com, for you to talk things through. All this is only $12. Yup.
Ridiculously accessible.
This offer won’t last – so get it while you can.

Alex helped me pinpoint the ways I was putting my energy into unproductive day-to-day busyness and helped me with a strategy for working more effectively without burning out!”    – Julie, Michigan