How embodiment professionals can earn more with less effort

Have you hit a frustrating earning ceiling in your wellness-based business? Most embodiment professionals are lucky to earn an average yearly income of $58,000 – $63,000 in major US cities like New York or San Francisco. That’s not much, considering the cost of living in those cities, and it’s lower outside big urban areas. If you are at or below this income level as I was for many years, core values is probably the last thing you are worried about.

Furthermore, that number is probably lower for those of us who work with alternative modalities like Body Mind Centering or The Alexander Technique, which are educational at their core and not curative. Wellness is a side-benefit of what we do, but it’s just a tiny bit of the value we have to offer.

My mission is to help embodiment professionals build more profitable, innovative, and meaningful businesses because I truly believe in the transformative power of our work. 

I highly recommend three fundamental steps to break through that income ceiling.

Step one: Understand why you do what you do. (I covered this topic here.)

Step two: Discover the core values underneath that “why.”

Step three: Lead with those core values when communicating with potential customers and allies.

Today’s newsletter will give you prompts to help you uncover your core values and put them in a form that makes communication easy.

I’ll also give you a few real life examples of how being clear on core values increases your income, saves time and effort, and helps you build alliances for future growth.

Here are writing prompts for discovering your core values:

• Describe a time in your life when everything felt right, in the flow, joyful. You felt honored to be working with the people surrounding you and you knew you belonged. What values were being expressed?

• Remember a time in your personal or professional life when you made a decision that required sacrifice. Perhaps it was simply inconvenient, scary, or uncomfortable for you – but you did it anyway. What was the value propelling you towards that decision?

• Reverse engineer your values using pet peeves, or profound disagreements with the way things are done in your profession or your community.

You may discover many, but you should hone it down to a short list of 3 – 5. Here is a great example.

This three-step format for your core values is easy to use in any context:

• One jargon free word, phrase, or sentence that states the value.

• One paragraph that deepens understanding of that value.

• A story that illustrates how that value has been expressed in your work with your clients.

Here is one of mine to show you what I mean:

Value: Joy

Sentence: Embodied learning is joyful.

Paragraph: Humans need to feel safe, curious, and open to explore before they can learn something new. Joyful movement jumpstarts and amplifies learning simply because it feels good.

Story: I have a young student whose tendons and ligaments are very loose. He can get injured easily. People have counseled him to be very careful (lots of worry and anxiety) and have told him not to lift more than five pounds.

I enjoy creating safe but fun experiments during his lessons that extended his movement range without injury. An example would be learning the anatomy of his arm joints, playing with all the different movements they can do, and seeing how those joints work when crawling.  Eventually, he was bearing weight on his arms and hands with no pain or fear for a few minutes at a time.

When I pointed out that his body weighs more than 5 pounds, so he must be stronger than he thinks, he laughed. He continues to expand his movement range and build strength in small, safe increments. We have such a blast and he really enjoys the experiments. I know he will want to keep learning in the future.

Knowing your core values has many benefits, including:

Easier sales process and increased profit:

“I was working with a new client online, and I had my in-progress list of core values sitting on my desk beside me. As we worked through her anxiety around drawing poorly, it came naturally to share a few with her. Every time I shared one, she said “yes – that’s it! I feel the same way!” She bought a package of 4 more lessons without me even asking.”

Sara Schneckloth

More effective website copy:

“Hi Clare!  I loved our meeting yesterday.  It was so cool to be met with such understanding of the practitioner I’m trying to be.  I immediately updated my website.  It’s totally different btw, with the new understanding about how people learn to ask for what they want in a session!  “Let’s get clear about communicating and uphold a deep sensitivity to your needs.”  Homepage and navigation are different now too.”

Sarah Erickson

Easier marketing content creation and time management:

I used to spend hours planning each video I make, but the Joy Series is happening with much less effort and time. This series will help me retain current clients who want guided practice outside of lessons, but also reaches new potential clients who want to integrate embodiment practice into their daily lives.

This is just one example of the Embodied Business Plan process that I teach in my Mastermind Groups. A new group is opening this September, and I’m looking for just the right folks (6 total) to be a part of it.

Could you be one of them? The way to find out is book a FREE 45 MINUTE BIZ STRATEGY SESSION. I promise there will be no sales pressure. You’ll leave the meeting with three action steps to get you moving forward in your business, and I’ll get information about what your real life struggles are that helps me serve my clients better. It’s a win-win.