Andrea Nordling 0:00
Welcome to the profitable nutritionist podcast my friend, I am going to start today's episode with a shout out to a resource that I have not mentioned lately. So if you are new to the podcast, you may not know about this amazing free resource, which is the profitable philosophies free course, if you have not done the free course at Build a Profitable practice.com/free You need to go and do the free course. In fact, everything that we're talking about on today's episode is a really good kind of intro for the way that I teach and the way that I think you can really simply fix I'm err, quoting the word fix, as I say that fix the problems in your health and wellness business, instead of scrapping it and starting over, which is a really good segue into what we're talking about today. But if you have not already start the profitable philosophies free course, again, it's at Build a Profitable practice.com/free. It's all delivered via email. So as soon as you sign up on that page, you will get an email from me with the day one exercise. So anyway, like I said, we're teeing up kind of how I teach and how I approach problem solving. And is it even a problem, which I think if you're listening to this episode, and especially along the topic of draining clients, when you have a bunch of clients, or even just a few, and you feel like they're drowning you like this is so overwhelming, oh, my gosh, I can't take more clients, I cannot keep doing this. It's too much. You ever felt that way? Okay, it is very common, especially in what I call stage three of your business, which is when you've made about $10,000, between 10 and $20,000, usually is when this creeps up. So in particular, I was coaching a client in the profitable nutritionist program recently on this. And I reflected back that actually, this is a topic I've coached on quite a bit in the last few months, specifically, both in my mastermind with higher level clients that are dealing with this at where they're teaching clients in a program or a group or a more of a scalable offer, but also shows up with one on one clients as well in the profitable nutritionist program. So yeah, this is something that I coach on a lot. And I have some strategies to help overcome that feeling that you're totally overwhelmed. Oh, my gosh, cannot keep going have to change something, ah, panic, all of that. Okay, don't worry, we're going to go into some really specific ways that you can tackle it starting with batching. Outsourcing, and what I call setting strategic agreements. These are the three things I'm going to tell you about today. Batching, outsourcing, and setting some strategic agreements. Now all three of these strategies are going to require you to define and to enforce some new time and energy boundaries with your clients as well, which I'm going to talk about in each one of the strategies. So let me set the stage here a little bit on what is actually going wrong. When your clients are draining you. Nothing. Nothing has gone wrong whatsoever. When this is happening. In fact, you're just in the process, there's a three stage process that I teach, which is decide, take action, and evaluate my students know it as the D process, okay. And when your clients are draining you you're just in the process, meaning you've made decisions about what to offer your people. That's the decide phase, you've already made your decisions, you've made the offer, and you've sold it to them, congratulations, amazing. Which means that now you are delivering your offer, whether that's one on one packages, or a group or a live workshop series, whatever it is that you sell to the people, you're delivering it now. And it's overwhelming you this is the imperfect action stage. Remember, decide, take imperfect action, and then evaluate. So you're just in the imperfect action stage. At this point, you're imperfectly taking action doing the thing you plan to do and delivering it to your clients. And then it's time to evaluate. And if you feel overwhelmed, like your clients are draining you and drowning you at the same time. And you cannot continue to do this with more people. Like you're totally fried and can't even imagine going and getting more clients right now, your brain is going to be very tempted to revisit the original decision and to change your offer. Do not do it. Your offer is fine. It just needs some tweaks. This is totally normal. And that's why you evaluate and then you go take more imperfect action based on the tweaks that you uncover on your evaluation, and you don't go revisit the decision. Notice the term imperfect action that I'm using here. It is not going to feel like you have this all figured out. It is not perfect action. It is imperfect action. It is not going to feel like it's a well oiled machine. It's not going to feel like everything that you thought was going to happen is happening. Ever. Ever. Welcome to being a business owner, my friend, it is never going to feel like you have it figured out. It's never going to feel like oh, I got this. I know exactly what I'm doing next. It's all working perfectly just like that. So never gonna happen. You're imperfectly tests. During your process, you're imperfectly delivering your offer to your people you're imperfectly dealing with your clients needs, and new situations that pop up that you probably didn't anticipate were going to pop up your and very imperfectly figuring out are things going faster than you thought? Or are they dragging out longer than you thought? Are you covering a lot more ground or less ground, you're imperfectly figuring out, if you're spending a lot more time than you thought you would on a certain aspect of your process that you bring your clients through, or all of the above at the same time, which is the most likely scenario. It's imperfect, and it feels imperfect. You're feeling it, it feels messy, it feels imperfect, it's just the way to say it. Again, nothing has gone wrong for my clients that I coach on this overwhelm. And this total draining feeling, it tends to happen, like I said, after they've made around 10 to $20,000 in their business, which just is the sweet spot where you've had enough momentum to get to the point where you are asking the question, Can I keep doing it like this? And then your brain is screaming at you? No, no, we cannot we could I keep doing this. And you naturally want to go back to the drawing board and start over with a different offer. No, don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Because here's what's gonna happen, you'll then swing the pendulum so far the other way, trying to be as hands off as possible that you're going to create a different problematic scenario for yourself and for your human brain, where you're going to struggle to sell the new offer, at least initially, most people do. And then even if you do sell the offer, you're going to be panicking behind the scenes that your people aren't getting results without you being super plugged in, because that's what you're used to doing. And that's where you're comfy places. And so your brain is still going to be freaking out either way that either that they're draining you or that you have no idea what's going on, and you just are going to assume they're not getting results that way as well, which is equally overwhelming. So don't do it. Follow the process, look at your brain, examine your thoughts about your clients and your offer, which is what we're going to do together on this episode, instead of changing the offer. And if this hasn't come up for you in your business yet. Congratulations, you're listening to this episode. And it's not going to be a problem for you because you're going to be prepared. And you're going to know that this temptation might be coming to totally abandon everything that's working and start over because you're overwhelmed. And you don't have to be overwhelmed. Okay, that's what we're going to explore with these three strategies today.

Andrea Nordling 7:16
So number one is batching. The first thing that I would recommend tweaking if you're feeling drained by your clients, is the amount of access that they have to you. And or the expectations for how and when you're going to be in touch with your clients. For example, these are questions I would ask, can they text you anytime they want? And do you like the answer to that? Can they private message you anytime they want to do like the answer to that? Do they expect you to respond to their emails or any correspondence immediately? Do you like the answer to that? Are you meeting with them at predetermined times like a weekly or bi weekly schedule that you're feeling is unnecessary or cumbersome in some way? What I mean by that is, did you initially think we're going to meet every single week and then every single week when you're meeting? You don't feel like it's really necessary? Or you don't have enough to discuss or you're feeling like you're kind of occupying dead airtime? What's coming up for you around that? Are you spending huge amounts of time researching things that your clients could be resourceful and do on their own? And are you getting resentful about that? Sir, and any other questions that come up for you. But these are some I would definitely start with. Now for some of my clients. They love having text communication with their clients, they love it. It's their favorite thing. Like, yeah, I love that they text me and ask all the questions. And this is what I want to do. And that's why I charge a premium rate and it doesn't overwhelm me at all. And it's fantastic. Perfect. It's there's no right or wrong here. Now for other people, they think I would never give my phone number to my clients. I don't want them to ever text me No, absolutely not. Again, do you love your reasons for it? So that's why I asked through all of these questions. There is no right or wrong, there is no better or worse. It's just Do you like it? Do you like the experience that you're having here? Let's start with all of these. And then I want you to isolate what's causing your overwhelm when it comes to these methods of communication that you've set up so far. So you can get really clear on what you want to change. That's what these questions are fleshing out here, what is causing the overwhelm? Is it that I feel like they have too much access to me, is it that I feel like I have to stick to a certain schedule that's stressing me out? Is it that I feel like that I have to respond super quickly, is it that they're asking me questions that they should really just be figuring out on their own and I'm enabling them to do that could be all of the above. I'm going to tell you a little story about how this has shown up in my business. So I used to allow meetings to get scheduled on my calendar five days a week. So Monday through Friday, if something came up, I would make it work. So I was coaching some days I was meeting with clients some days. I was having meetings with internally within my business and with other people I was doing. Like being a guest on somebody's podcast, for example would be something that would come up on my calendar and they were Lots of different calendar commitments, which I was getting very overwhelmed with is it as it grew and grew and grew, I just felt like oh my gosh, every single day, I look at my Google calendar. And it just looks like me having to be I'm going out myself as maybe not being super put together every day. I was like, Oh, I have to do my hair every day. I have to be so ready all the time. And it was stressing me out. So. And really, it didn't have to my thoughts about it were what was stressful, let's be very clear. It wasn't my calendar, it was my thoughts about it, that it was overwhelming. And that is what was stressing me out. But anyway, I decided to clean up my thoughts around time and overwhelm and the commitments on my calendar. First and foremost, I coached myself a lot on that. And then my response to it was I wanted to test batching my video and meeting days to two days a week. So I decided that Mondays and Wednesdays would be the days since those are the days that I coach in TPN. And in the mastermind, like those are my camera ready days. So let's put meetings, let's put podcast recordings, if I'm a guest on someone's podcast, or I'm having guests on my podcast, or we have internal meetings, let's put those all on Mondays and Wednesdays. And then I have open space to create things to record my own podcast episodes to write emails to do the internal stuff behind the scenes. I can do that on the other days of the week. So for me, that works really well, I now feel like even though I have the exact same amount of meetings, nothing has changed there. I feel like since I'm batching, my time and my attention, it's just really helpful for me, it also cuts down on having to get ready every single morning, it's just less times you know, all of that. This is just an example. And I have coached several of my clients on this as well, is it possible to batch your client days on certain days of the week, and then have more open space, other days of the week? Sometimes it's just these really simple, just tweaks, little calendar changes, just strategies around that that can be a huge game changer in terms of how you are feeling day to day in your business. So I offer that batching might be the answer as far as your calendar goes. But you can also batch your communication with your clients. So what could that look like? I'm gonna give a few ideas. You can respond to emails or texts or direct messages, or however it is that people are responding to you with an auto responder that gives them your office hours, you guys know exactly what this looks like. It's an automatic response to something that says, hey, I will get back to you within X amount of time. These are the hours that typically work. Something like that is usually really helpful for an initial step in setting some time boundaries, especially with if you haven't been great at that before. And if you are overwhelmed by your clients, and you feel like they're draining you, I have a strong sneaking suspicion that you have some boundaries, it's time to enforce. So this can be a good baby step to that, to kind of show your existing clients, we're going to be changing things around here a little bit, I'm not going to be immediately available to answer every single question you send my way. So that can be a great, super simple way to start easing into a new way of doing business, you can also do something this is I give some coaching to one of my students around this, which we thought would be a great scenario for her business. So I'll bring it here too, you could test out using an end of the week form or could be a beginning of the week form whatever you decide you want to do, but a weekly form where your clients would report the progress that they've made. And they could establish their priorities for the next week and tell you what those are going to be. And then you could batch respond, either with a video or with an email or an audio however, you want to do that to this form. But you could batch that for all of your clients at one time. So you could sit down for an hour hour and a half or whatever it is review those forms, batch the content send to them, instead of being available for constant client appointments or constant emails as they come in onesie twosie. And feeling like you have to be responding to those all the time, you could set the parameters of this, this is the workflow of the communication you send in the form, I review the form, I send it back to you and you kind of batch that internally in your calendar to really start to pare down the probably unnecessary back and forth of all this just some processes to put in place. Okay, maybe that's not going to work for you. But maybe it is so start thinking about is would that be possible? Could that take a few things off of my plate and still get great results for my client, they're still going to feel very taken care of. And you're going to be teaching them some skills on being resourceful and hopefully setting some of their own priorities answering some of their own questions, which we will talk about in a minute. That brings us to the third thing that you could be batching which is some of your researching time. Now I know a ton of my clients report that they spent a lot of time behind the scenes researching new protocols and certain conditions and symptoms for their clients. So if that is you, I would wonder if it's possible to batch some of that research time instead of getting an email or getting a message for someone or getting off of a client. I Call with one of your clients when something comes up where you think I need to look into this deeper and immediately doing it. And then an hour goes by two hours go by and who even, like pop up from your stupor and realize, oh, my gosh, my day has gone. Could you be batching that research time and doing it all at once, you know, giving yourself 15 or 20 minutes, setting a timer, and doing it at one time, instead of responding and being really reactive to every single request as soon as it comes up. Again, this brings us to boundaries. Time does that. So because if you had, how do I want to say this, I want you to think of your responsibility is to teach your clients how to be resourceful, and figure out a lot of the answers on their own. And I know it is hard. And I know that they don't have all of these answers yet. And that's why they hired you, of course. So this is going to require you to think ahead, and over time to create some resources for your clients that you can direct them to that you can teach them how to use in the beginning. And you won't have all of this right away. But it's something to work towards. And to figure out, okay, these are things that I would like to create resources for in the future. So when you're feeling the overwhelm, and you're feeling like your clients are draining, you want you to be making a plan for what you could be creating for them that would encourage them to be resourceful and to figure things out on their own and to make some of their own plans. And to take agency of that with some resources you could create for them, start figuring out what those things would be. It's also going to require you as you're setting these boundaries to have a few, probably slightly uncomfortable responses to questions. This is not a big deal. But your brain is going to tell you that this is a huge deal. It's so big, it's really not a this is going to be as simple as responding to one of your clients questions. Maybe when they're asking you in the moment about a health condition that's coming up or a symptom that they're having is this normal is this this, this would be an opportunity for you to say something such as that would be great for us to talk about on our next call, make sure that you mentioned it, that's it

Andrea Nordling 16:58
could be a little uncomfortable, depending on what your communication has been so far. If it's a one on one client, that's how I would handle it, some version of that. Or if you run a group program, and you find that people are reaching out to you, and you're fielding one off questions privately because and this happens a lot, especially in the mastermind, we talked about this when you are running a group, but people really just want you one on one. And so they're reaching out to you one on one, and they want you to help them instead of asking questions in the group. This happens to me, or hap, I would say happened quite a bit. But I just had a canned response that was that such a great question. Can you bring that to the group? So I can answer it. And everybody can benefit from the response to that? I think that's so good. Some version of that. It's just just training people, this is how we answer that question, bring it to the group. That's great. So anyway, some strategies there, if you are struggling with actually setting the boundaries, and then how to enforce them, your brain is going to tell you that this is a really big deal, because you haven't been operating this way. And people have expectations. All of the things you might feel like your clients have paid you a lot of money. So you owe it to them to be very available and to be completely accessible whenever they need something. Check yourself if you're having those types of thoughts. Maybe you feel responsible for the choices that your clients make in the moment, if you aren't hyper responsive to their questions. I a coach on this sometimes do or my clients are like, I just feel like I have to make sure I answer their questions right away. Otherwise, they're gonna go do something dumb and totally a setback, their progress? Do you have thoughts like that? Totally normal? If you do, but I want you to be aware of them. Okay? Are you feeling responsible for the choices that your clients make? Are you resisting setting boundaries, because you feel like your clients have paid you a lot of money and you owe them something in response? You owe them a big, immediate access to you and probably your firstborn child along the way? Are you having those thoughts be totally normal if you are, but we're going to challenge them. And I'm going to actually challenge you really hard on it. Because if you don't clean up this mindset, now, it's just going to come with you to every level of your business, from here on out, no matter what you're offering, could change your offer as many times as you want to, no matter how you try to change the decisions of a niche, no niche, no matter what that is, these thoughts are going to come with you. So there actually isn't going to be anything that's going to be less cumbersome for you to sell, I promise. Let's just clean up this mindset right now. And here's the truth. And here's how I think that this is a really easy fix. So here's what I will offer to you. You don't actually want your clients to be reliant on you to make their decisions, no matter how much money they paid you, no matter how your brain is screaming at you that you owe it to them. And this was a lot of money and a huge investment. And so you have to be there at their beck and call. You don't actually want that, no matter how much they paid you because if that was the case, then they have to pay you forever, because they don't have the skill set to make decisions or troubleshoot on their own. Think about that. If that's the case that they paid you a lot of money so you owe it to them. Then they have to keep paying you literally forever. And then if you feel beholden to your clients, because they already paid you a lot, you're practically cutting their meat for them at this point, instead of handing them the knife. That's kind of how I think about it in my mind, you're going to feel really beholden to them, if they have to keep paying you forever, because you've set up a situation like that. And of course, you don't actually want that for them, I know that you don't. So lovingly setting boundaries, and teaching your clients to be resourceful and capable is 100%. In service to them, specially if they paid you a lot of money, you definitely want people sending you a check, like a check in email at the end of the week that saying everything's going fabulous, and that they have independently had all of these wins on their own that you don't even know about. It's the best feeling ever. And I think that some people get hung up on this thinking in terms of hardest clients and easiest clients. So if you're familiar with any of my content that I'm teaching my program, because I also talked about this a lot in free trainings. And in some other podcast episodes, I talked about hardest clients and easiest clients, your hardest clients have to be convinced they're usually very high maintenance, they're not incredibly motivated on their own, they do want you to cut the meat for them. They don't want to wield the knife themselves. Those are attributes of a hardest client. Easiest clients, on the other hand, are the opposite there you want 100 of them, you want to clone them and have all of the easiest clients. And so sometimes, and this is why I bring this up, I see people talk about their clients that are draining them as hardest clients, and they label them as Oh, this was totally a hardest client, I took a hardest client, they're not an easiest client at all, they're so hard. And I think that it is useful to know that there are certainly characteristics and behaviors of hardest clients and easiest clients that it can be really helpful, especially in our marketing to speak to the easiest clients and to uplevel the entire conversation and level of clients that you get by assuming people are easiest clients and treating them as such. So that's a different podcast. I've done it many times. And I'm sure I will keep doing more of them. But let's circle back to the hardest night sometimes I see people label their hardest clients. And really, they have created that hardest client relationship with a lack of boundaries. So I do want to just mention that that can happen sometimes. So be really thoughtful. If you are specifically having these thoughts like my clients are draining me. I can't get more clients. It's so hard. They're so complex. They have so many different symptoms that they present with they have, there's so many different things for me to learn. None of them are the same. I hear this from lots of my clients. I'm like, Oh my gosh, it's so hard because everybody's different. And I have to research so much. And they are so nuanced. And they're very complex cases. And then they talk about the hardest clients part. So if you are assigning the label of a hardest client to someone, just be give a little thought to that be reflective and ask Have I created the hardest client relationship with a lack of boundaries, and not requiring them to be resourceful? Because sometimes that's also the case, which is so great, because you can change that. And your hardest client can quickly become an easiest client, when you get clear on what you want those boundaries to be for yourself. So strategy number one is evaluate where you can batch your communication, your research, your follow ups, your meetings on your calendar, where can you batch things? And how will that help you? That's number one. Number two, outsourcing. Let's talk about it's a hot, hot topic, especially if you are thinking but I haven't made that much money yet. I don't know if it's going to be consistent. I can't count on it. I can't hire help yet. Okay, well, maybe you will. And maybe you won't. That's a decision for you to make. But I want you to explore what could you hire someone else to do? Because if you were feeling like clients are draining you you have clients, you are making money, you know how to do that. And if you took some of the delivery to your clients off of your plate, hypothetically, would you have more bandwidth to go get more clients go make more money? Yeah, of course you would. Right. So what can you hire someone else to do? I am going to tell you right now you're not the only one that can do what you do. Probably someone else could even do it better. I know. I know. It's hard to believe. That's probably true. The reason people don't hire others, though, and the reason that people get stuck in a loop of thinking I'm the only person that can do this is because they haven't defined their processes, and they're just all in their head. Is this you? Think about it. Have you ever defined the your decision making processes. When I say process here I'm thinking the actual sequence of events that happens when you open up an email or a message from a client, and they're freaking out about something and you decide what you're going to do next? How are you going to respond to them? What are you going to send to them? Are you going to go do some research first, whatever that decision tree is that you very unconsciously make in your brain of Bumble Bumble boom, this is what's going to happen next. Probably have never defined process is just a decision making process if this than that, and it's all in your head, and you're good at it. But if you were going to teach someone else to do that, they may have their own decision tree that's even better than yours, that's possible, or you would just have to get it out of your head. And you would have to teach it to someone, which would require you to slow down for a while to train someone else, for sure, it would be a process. But once that process was documented, and you had a system for it, you could probably have a lot of people helping you in your business. This is the way that we grow our businesses, my friend, and I'm right there with you every stage of growth in my business, I'm having to do that I'm having to slow down. So I can speed up, slow down, document the processes, get it out of my brain, teach it to somebody else, and then go to the next level, then we have to slow down again. And we have to do more and more and more of it. So get used to it in the beginning. Or maybe it's not the beginning for you, I don't know where you're at in your business right now. But if this is landing, if you're thinking, Oh, I do think I need to document some of these internal processes that I have in my mind for how I look at somebody's labs and and make recommendations to them or how I know what protocol to go to you have a process, you just need to define it. And you could at that point, have somebody else do it for you.

Andrea Nordling 26:15
What would happen if they were actually better at it than you were? Let's just go there for a minute, your clients would get better results, you probably would get even more referrals. And you would not be stressing the people are falling through the cracks. Because you wouldn't be the one having to catch every bit of communication that was coming in. And then you get to decide, what is the response sent? Do you want to have boundaries on it? Do you want to have immediate responses? You're the boss at that point right. Now, what does that actually look like? I know that this is a question people often ask me they're like, but does that mean you have to have a W two employee? Like, what does that look like? No, of course not. You can start with just hiring a contractor for a few hours a week or more depending on what you need. And that can be somebody that already has a background in what you do, and does the same thing that you do, but maybe doesn't have a full client load and would love to come in and shadow you or to help serve your clients because they have the time to do it, you get to decide. Or it could be somebody that doesn't have a background in this business that you're training from scratch, if that makes sense. If that's appropriate for your business model you decide. But just be honest with anybody that you hire in your business, with what your expectations are of how much time you think it's going to take them how much time you are budgeting to pay them and that it isn't permanent. If it isn't permanent. I think that we have a lot of drama around this thinking, but what if I couldn't pay them? What if we have a slow month, and I can't pay them? And I would say let's just solve for that what would happen? Most people are scared of hiring because they think their income isn't consistent enough. And they're like, why am I gonna be stuck? If we have a slow month? That could happen? So what's the solution? Solve for it? Now? Don't avoid it. We talked about this in the mastermind all the time. What's, what's the solution? Are you gonna take out a line of credit? Are you going to put it on a credit card? Are you going to go sell some more? Are you going to not pay yourself that month? And you're going to pay your contractor instead? Are you going to have them pause their hours? And you're going to go do the work? Instead? Are you going to take out a loan from the bank? Like what are you going to do? None of these are better or worse options. Just have a plan, what is the plan, make the plan and then you know, then your brain can stop looping on the what ifs. Because you know, well, if that happened, here's what we would do. Just solve for it. Now, don't avoid it. Because ultimately, there's never going to be a time where you feel like your income is consistent enough. If you don't challenge that, but so could be a contractor for a few hours a week could be more of an ongoing it can be one off can be when I get a client, I will let you know and then you come in and you can help me with it. I mean, you get to decide ultimately, if you want to have somebody come and start helping you out with some of the delivery to your clients and you want to outsource that you get to decide exactly what that situation looks like and what is your dream scenario? And then how do you want to transition into that working out, I would say don't expect to just hand off anything immediately. You're not going to feel comfortable with that. They're not going to feel comfortable with that. And when I say they I mean, whoever you have coming in that you're outsourcing to your clients won't know the difference. So they're not going to know anything in the beginning but you're not going to be comfortable in that contractor is not going to be comfortable if you just have them step in and say okay, take it away. Here's what we do. Go for it. No. This is a gradual training and supervising situation before you turn anybody loose with your clients. I think that this is probably goes without saying but I will definitely say it anyway. You are going to be supervising a transition here. So what this could look like is you documenting your processes on loom I think loom videos are incredible. For this. We use a lot of loom videos in my company. What loom is a free software to record your screen and record your voice in your face if you'd want to loom.com So that's what I'm talking about when I say do this, but we do loom videos all the time. And I would suggest that you do too, just talking through your thought process and how you approach the task. So, like, for me, I will, I will do loom videos of myself

Andrea Nordling 30:14
outlining and scheduling an email, for example, this is something that happened recently, where my director of operations was like, Okay, could you just do a loom video and talk through the process here? And I just did a video I'm like, Okay, well, here's, here's how I outline it, I think. I just went through the whole process, but it was just me talking about what goes on in my brain as I do the task. And then as I do that a few times, oh, another good example is collecting testimonials. So doing a live video of my process of going into our community for the TPN program. And for collecting testimonials that I want to use and talking through what am I looking for in a testimonial? How do I like how would I use it? How would I categorize it to go in what email in the future on what webpage? Just talking through that process, things like that, I wouldn't expect somebody to come into my company. And I would say, Okay, go find me testimonials? And they would just know how to do that? Of course not. And then I for sure wouldn't just have them go do it and set on a send out an email to my email list with whatever they came up with. And I would just trust that that would be at my standards, no, of course not. So it's a gradual training and supervising situation where I teach my process, then I would have them go do it, and then send it back to me to review. And I would look at the testimonial to use the testimonial example, I would look at that testimonial. Say yes, that's exactly what I would have chosen and give some feedback on it or No, not quite, here's how I would do it differently. And have them go do it again. And I would just keep continually supervising and supervising is a weird word. But reviewing and looking at it first before I was comfortable. And before they were comfortable to just let anybody loose with your clients or my clients. So I wanted to offer that because I think that there is definitely a propensity for our minds to go to zero to 60. Like either I have to do everything myself, or I have to relinquish all control and authority for all decisions, and somebody else is just going to take it, take it away and do things I don't want them to do. No, of course not. There is a middle ground here and you are the boss, and you get to decide what that looks like. But like I said, most people are scared of hiring or bringing in help in their business, even when they feel like their clients are draining them and they can't take new clients. And this is something I hear a lot where people like I don't even want to get new clients. Now. I don't want more of this. I feel like I'm can't even keep my head above water. I can't even imagine getting more clients, which is the energetic equivalent of turning off your open side, like Nope, we're closed for business don't even come to me. And what happens then is they don't have people coming to them, you know, people can feel bad. So that's what's happening, I just want you to be thinking in terms of maybe I could outsource some of this, maybe if I slow down a little bit right now, and brought in someone to help me we could create better systems and processes that would get our clients a way better results. And that we don't have to change anything else in the business. I could just have somebody helped me and still feel like a lot of this weight is lifted. In addition, I would say we're setting some boundaries. So since we know that your income is never going to feel consistent enough, if you don't challenge that, but it's never going to feel like yeah, for sure we got this we can afford to hire help, probably is never going to feel that way your brain is going to offer the thought that well, what if? What if next month everything dries up? What if we don't continue? What if it was a fluke? What if this is not sustainable? All of those that's very normal. Which brings us to strategy number three, and that is setting up strategic agreements. What do I mean by strategic agreements? These are predetermined time or volume increments for measuring changes to that sound like a textbook, like a high school textbook, where you're like, what what did you just say? Let's go back to that. Strategic agreements means deciding in advance what you're going to be measuring and making an agreement with yourself that you're not going to freak out about it in the meantime. That's what I'm trying to say. So this is how I teach I teach strategic agreements. And that's right. This is how you evaluate the tweaks that you're going to be making. You want to see what's working. Remember, we're in the evaluate part of the decide take action, evaluate process, but you need to know what the heck you're going to be evaluating. Okay. So what what are you going to be actually measuring, you decide this in advance? When are you going to reevaluate? What are you going to be reevaluating? And how are you going to reevaluate it? For example, you may decide that you're going to be setting some new boundaries, you're going to be batching. Some of your time you might experiment with outsourcing something to someone at some point, any of these things we've talked about, and then you're going to sit down and you're going to make a strategic agreement with yourself that sounds like this. I'm going to bring on this many new clients It's with my new boundaries. And with batching my communication with them in this new way, whatever that is, and after the first two months, or one month or three months, or whatever you decide after X amount of time, I'm going to reevaluate if it's working better for both of us. And here's what I'm going to be measuring and basing my evaluation on, and then you set the parameters in advance whether it's how well you're using your time, the results that they're getting, the frequency of times that they're reaching out to you how resourceful they're being, you get to decide what you are going to be measuring. But you decide this in advance, okay, you decide what you're going to be measuring, and evaluating, you decide when you're going to do it, and what the criteria is going to be. And this comes down in your brain, plain and simple. Because instead of seeing every single instance of where things aren't working as evidence that you're on the wrong track, and it's not sustainable, and oh, my gosh, I have to change something because they're draining me know, your brain is going to be calm, it's going to say, No, we already have a plan for when and how to evaluate that we don't need to think about it right now, we just need to follow the plan. Because we know at x time in the future, we're going to evaluate, and we're going to tweak if we need to. And guess what, your clients will also benefit from setting strategic agreements like this. So use the same tool with them. Decide what you're gonna measure, decide when you're going to evaluate the measurement of it, and what the parameters will be in advance and then stick to it comes everyone's brain down, especially when you're in the middle in the imperfect action, and you're trying to figure out what's working and what isn't working. Because like we said, it's never going to feel anything but imperfect. That's okay. So instead of the ambiguous, is this working? Is this working? I don't know if this is working, it might not be working? Ah, no. You them, everyone's going to know exactly how and when to determine the answer to that question. So to recap, if you feel like your clients are draining you like your business is overwhelming you and you don't even want more clients at this point. Instead of changing your offer, or instead of taking a break from your business, I would encourage you to look at batching. Outsourcing and setting some strategic agreements. In addition to enforcing, we'll probably setting first and then enforcing some boundaries. Best news of the day is this, your clients can't drain you, only your thoughts about your clients are going to drain you. When I say that, again, your clients can't drain you. It's your thoughts about it that's going to drain you. And you can change those thoughts right now by reframing the way that you think about your clients like this is working. And I'm going to figure out how to make it work even better. Such a more useful thought, than my clients are draining me. This is working, and I'm going to figure out how to do it even better. If you're at the earlier stages of your business, and you're having these thoughts now is the perfect time to address them head on. Like I've already said, so you don't drag them along with you. as your business grows, believe me, the overwhelm. And the pressure of trying to appease every client only gets worse, the more money you make, and the more people you work with. If you don't change your mindset around it right now, this is exactly what you learn in the profitable nutritionist program. This is exactly what we coach on. And we do together every single week. Just like with my client that I kind of started this episode with talking about the coaching that we did that inspired this. So if you have not joined the program yet, you can get all of the details about the program what's included how we coach every week, and the upcoming enrollment dates at Build a Profitable practice.com/join J o i n if your business is more established, and you're still having these issues coming up, that is understandable to you just haven't had a framework to go through for scaling your business that's going to account for this problem. And this mind drama as it comes up every step of the way, as you're hiring a team as you're running larger groups and programs. But that is what we do in the mastermind. So if you have made at least $50,000 in your business in the last 12 months and you are scaling to multiple six figures in the next year, you would be a great candidate for that room. When applications open up in October. You can get all of the details on the mastermind and join the waitlist at Build a Profitable practice.com/mastermind. Okay, I think I've given all of the information that I needed to give. And I'm so excited for this episode to be coming out because I know so many people, especially recently have been asking questions about how how do i streamline this process for when the clients are draining me? And the answer is, we just decide. We just decided they're not going to drain you. You're going to tweak and you're not going to make any rash decisions. Okay, you've got this my friend. Have a wonderful week.