Make space to grow your practice.

Your practice is like a garden. It needs certain ingredients and tending in order to grow, blossom and yield a harvest. The very first thing you need to do, just like with a garden, is make space for your practice. Not only do you need to designate a physical space for your client work to take place, you also need to make space in your schedule to tend to it.

One mistake emerging practitioners make is to do other non-practice related things with their time when they don't have a client booked. While the occasional "mental health", self-care day at the beach, or coffee with friends are very important, you need to work on (and in) your practice on a regular basis in order for it to grow.

The average practitioner - who relies on word of mouth advertising and generic marketing methods like putting up flyers in a coffee shop - is lucky if she ends up with 6 regular clients by the end of her first year. (By regular clients, I mean those clients that come back week after week or on some other set schedule and become the backbone revenue of your practice.) In fact, I heard a statistic from a massage school teacher that the average new massage therapist makes less than $8,000 in their first year. Pretty scary, huh?

It doesn't have to be that way, though. Let me give you an example. One of the practitioners that I mentor has yielded much better results in the practice she is launching on the side of her full-time job. She made a decision to be profitable and fulfilled by her practice, made a commitment to show up and work on it, designated a space for her practice, and picked regular office hours to work in her practice each week. In less than four months, she has cultivated 4 regular clients despite the economic recession.

That's a significant improvement over the results an average practitioner can expect without a strategy that involves making space for your practice to grow and tending to the seeds you plant.

I'm going to leave the physical space of your practice up to you, since it's pretty obvious you can't have a practice unless you have a space to see clients. There are many options out there including a private room in your home, renting space or paying commission in a wellness center, spa, gym, salon, etc... or working in a collaborative or private office. If you are looking for a space with support system built in, you may want to check out the On-Site Apprenticeship program that I have at my office in Beverly.

Now, there's no magic formula for tending to your practice. In fact, the magic formula for you is going to be what works in your life. If you're launching on the side, it might just be a few hours a week. If you're in a position to work at it full time, then you may want to put in many more hours per week. It's the regular showing up for your practice that's important.

Ok so let's get down to the really crucial stuff that many emerging practitioners don't realize. First of all, you need to set aside self-care time for yourself. Think about it - as a wellness practitioner you are a role model for your clients. So it's essential, pretty much non-negotiable, to have fantastic habits so that you are feeling great whenever your clients spend time with you. Besides, you can't care for others in an effective and optimal way if you're depleted. So build however much self-care time you need to feel nourished and energized into your schedule first.

Then it's time to choose how much time you want to work IN your practice, and how much time you want to work ON your practice. Working in your practice is the fun part - this is where you work with clients. We all want to spend 100% of our time working with clients, but that's only possible if you find someone to hire you to do just that. Most likely, you are launching this practice on your own in this economy, so you'll actually need less hours for working IN your practice. Even so, it is important to designate certain hours to show up in the office, booked clients or not, to make it clear to yourself and others that you are available to see clients during this time.

It's crucial to look at making time to work ON your practice. The reality is that in the first year most of the time you devote to your practice is working ON building and growing it. Client attraction experts actually recommend that you spend as much as 90% of your time working ON attracting clients.

When you're working ON your practice, you're doing all the things that help bring new clients through the door. So these are things like learning strategies and techniques for attracting clients, designing business cards & brochures, writing a newsletter, using social media, working on your website, networking, promotional events, free consultations, referral alliances with more established practitioners & businesses etc... We'll get more into some of this in a later step.

So let's review: you need to make space for your practice and tend to it for it to grow, blossom and yield results. First you need to decide where you are going to see clients. Then you need to sit down with your calendar and block off some time to tend to your practice. First, block off all the self-care you need. Then, with the remaining hours you have to dedicate to your practice, pick 10-50% of them to be office hours where you are going to be seeing clients (even if you aren't booking clients regularly yet). Last, block off the remaining 50-90% of hours for working exclusively ON attracting clients and building your business.

Your Transformational Homework this week:

· Re-read this article a couple of times and really let it sink in that you have to dedicate more time to tending to your practice and attracting clients than you probably want.

· You might want to take a few minutes to figure out your scheduling style. If you're more of a go-with-the-flow type, you might want to give yourself the freedom of blocking off time for your practice at the beginning of each week so you don't feel trapped by a rigid schedule. This is what I do, and it works really well. If you're a real planner though, go right ahead and decide how you're allocating your time this month, this quarter, or even for the year!

· Once you've accepted that you have to work ON your business, pull out your calendar and block off self-care time, office hours, and a lot of working ON the practice hours.

· Do your self-care.

· Show up for your office hours even if nobody has booked a session yet. However, don't spend the time working ON the business. This is a bad habit that can make it hard later for you to balance seeing clients with projects, so keep them separate. If nobody's coming in during your office hours, spend the time meditating and envisioning your ideal client.

· Use your hours working ON the business to start thinking about your niche and ideal client, as well as planning some promotional activities.

PS. If you find these steps valuable, and you're an emerging practitioner looking for the keys to transform your practice into an authentic, heart-centered, profitable practice, there's a workshop for you on January 10th. If you'd like to know more about how to apply these steps to transform your own emerging practice, join me at Learn the Ropes: Transforming your practice so it's profitable! here in Beverly, MA. Start off 2010 with all the keys you need for your practice to thrive!

Joanna Scaparotti helps wellness professionals thrive in life and business. She can be reached at joannascaparotti.com. Be yourself and change the world!