EP57 | Nurture Your Private Practice, Expand the Circle of Care (part 2)

Leah: Well, Hey there, Annie.

Annie: Hey Leah. How are you?

Leah: I'm doing great. So excited to dive into part two of our conversation on nurturing your private practice and expanding the circle of care. I just love this concept and I can't wait to talk more about it.

Annie: I know there's so much to say and even as we were having our conversation to go through what we want to talk about in this episode, we were coming up with new things we wanted to say about it. It's just so fun to really think through what does it mean to, what we're going to focus on in this episode is expanding that circle of care. What does that mean? What does that look like? Before we jump into the actual conversation, I just want to let you know that registration is open for Clinical Complexities in Private Practice, which includes two implementation calls with me and Leah, these deeper dives into nurturing your private practice and expanding the circle of care. Then we're having a second one, which is going to be a deeper dive into clinical complexities, where we're going to engage with the content of the Clinical Complexities in Private Practice course. So registration with early bird repricing is open now. The on-demand content is going to start dripping out on November 1st, which is just around the corner. We've got some amazing, amazing speakers, Leah's one of them. Got some people that might be familiar to you if you participated in the spring Lactation Private Practice Essential Course, you'll see some familiar faces and we've got some new speakers this fall because as part of expanding my own circle of care, I'm always looking for new people to learn from. that's one of the most exciting things about the work that I'm doing in putting these courses together is just all the things that I'm learning. So I'm super excited about that. So you can go to paperlesslactation.com/course, to learn more and to register. So let's do a little refresher on nurturing your business. Let's recap what we talked about in the last episode.

Leah: Well, I think the biggest point that we gathered in the last episode that most people or a lot of people might come into this work of lactation, private practice with a mindset of really just like, I want to help families. I want to give back. Our goals are really around this care of others. Many of us probably didn't start out thinking I'm an entrepreneur. I'm ready to make big cash, big money. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go get my IBCLC and start a lactation business and from a very entrepreneurial aspect, maybe there are people out there that did that. I don't know if you did, come talk to us because I want to hear how that all unfolded. But I think what we determined last time and what this concept really talks about is that by nurturing our business, by being somewhat business-minded, it really provides this circle of care, which is the concept of that as we nurture our business, our business takes care of us. Thus, we are more able to take care of those that we're trying to help and help them expand their circle of care by pulling in the people that are going to help them and surround them. And this ripple effect just kind of keeps pouring out further and further, but it really starts with us remembering that the only way that we can help more families is to make sure we're taking care of our business. Because if our business falls apart, we're going to be stressed. We're not going to be making money. We're going to be stressed out. We're not going to have the right systems in place. We're not going to have policies and procedures. We're not going to be legally or ethically working. If we don't at least pour some energy into nurturing our business so that all that can be running smoothly, our minds can be at ease and we can focus on the families because our business has taken care of us. It's like this nice little circle hug around us. Our business's hugging us and that hug just gives us all the fire and energy to be able to pour into the families that we want to help. And it gives back to us but it's hard to come to that. I think we talked about last time that you and I trudged through the firey retrenches and up steep mountains to kind of get to this endpoint of understanding like, whoa, wait a second. This is a different way to think about this, a different way to come to it. Not just like help all the families at all the times and that's how we make this work. It's not how you make it work. Sorry. It's not it, it's part of it, but it's not all of it. Did I summarize that well?

Annie: Yes. That's totally the thing is like if we try to make the center of our business, the clients that we're helping, that's the wrong place for the center to be. The center needs to be on our private practices as a business first. That can feel really scary and selfish and kind of cold but when you understand that the goal is to make your private practice into something that can take care of you. Now you're like, okay, I'm taking care of, I can help other people because I'm not also putting out all the fires that would come up from being like, instead of taking three hours to actually think through what sustainable pricing and follow up policies are for my life and my client base and the time and energy that I have available just to be like, I just need to squeeze in another consult. Let me just call this person back because I guess they really didn't understand what I was saying. The time just slips away, it just slips away. And we were like, I will get to that when I have time to get to it. You're never going to have time to get to it. There's always going to be something that comes up. Then the answer that we often get in kind of like popular culture, social media is you have to make self-care a priority. So I'm like, okay, so what does that mean? Does that mean I'm going to set my alarm an extra 15 minutes early to make sure I have time to meditate, to start my day and do some breath work or, or whatever it is. Okay. I have to check that item off of, now that has to be on my to-do list or my husband will be like, you should go get a massage. But to get a massage, I have to actually get the massage. I have to schedule it. I still have to take time off of work. I have to drive there and drive home or take the train there and take the train home.

Leah: I have to take a shower afterward.

Annie: Wear my mask the whole time in the massage, which is fine and I would do it. If I could eliminate all the other things and it was just like, boom, a massage is happening for you right this second I would like strap that mask on and be like, please go to work. It's all the other stuff around it. Again, it would become something like, I have to like make this happen for myself. It's so much easier to just keep working because self-care feels like another job. It's because the whole concept of self-care is putting the burden on me as an individual to take care of my own self. I have to solve this problem. I have to figure out how to make myself this great person who is boundless in energy and compassion. I've got to figure that out and I'm tired. It's hard.

Leah: It really is. It really is. The circle of care concept kind of helps you understand that it's not just you as an individual that needs to nurture you or in our kind of analogy, your business, that it really is like building in and it could even be systems and processes, but also other people, other support networks, all these things that you can build in around yourself or your business that don't leave the burden just solely on you to nurture whether it be yourself or your business I think this is such a wonderful concept because I think I could picture it for myself in some ways or for a new parent. But I really like trying to envision it for my business because it feels really good to think about that, like, oh, I could put this like kind of circle around my business, put some effort into that, and then it would be kind of self-sustaining or self pouring into itself on its own. It's kind of what I envision because we might do this in ways you might already be doing. You might have thought about like, I need some admin help. So part of your circle becomes having a VA that's providing you some assistance or finally hiring a bookkeeper to look through your books or learning how to do the bookkeeping yourself, acquiring new skills so that it isn't such a big chore at the end of the year when it's tax season spend 12 hours in front of a computer trying to hash through it all. It's like, oh no, I took care of myself way back when I expanded my circle of care and it's just taking care of me and I'm just going to click report and send it over to the tax people. That's how we can really build this circle around not only ourselves, the families we serve, but also really the foundation is through our business. I think it's a really great concept.

Annie: Realizing that there's no way to be a hundred percent independent and you and I talked about when we both got started in lactation, we were at places in our life where we didn't need to be dependent on our lactation businesses to get our daily needs met. I know, for me in the COVID pandemic was really financially devastating for my family in terms of my husband's work and suddenly we were dependent on my business. My business needed to take care of an entire family. There was some scrambling that I did to kind of change things and fix things but because, largely thanks to the conversations that you and I've been having since we started this podcast and looking back, I'm like, oh, that was a circle of care. That's part of my circle of care. I had made a lot of changes and implemented a lot of things that I was able to make that pivot because I had put some effort into my business and I had done some nurturing and really seeing too, and hearing stories from people in my Facebook group and people that have come to our deeper dives who are talking about that they started out this way. Because of things they heard on our podcast, listening to us muddle through it, they're not going to be like them but also knowing that we have been able to have these experts on our deeper dives that have taught about a lot of this stuff and that people have said they've done those things. So they didn't have the start that we had and what a difference it's made for them. That's where this whole idea comes together is like, your business is super needy at the beginning, like a little baby, but it's going to quickly come to maturity. You hope with the right care and attention, it's not going to have failure to thrive. It's gonna thrive and then it's going to take care of you and you can be dependent on your business because you've created something that can take care of you. You've nurtured it to that place and that as business owners, that should be our goal. Our goal is not to take care of families. Our goal is to have a compassionate and sustainable private practice and be professional and all of those things and show up day after day for families, with all of the energy and wholeness that we want to bring to them.

Leah: You really can't do that when you haven't given the business the attention. I cannot tell you how many times that I would start a day, way back when early on, I would start a day, I'd be like, okay, I'm going to go help this family and this family, and then boom, a fire erupts. Like, oh my gosh, this system isn't working or I never even thought or considered this or that. The whole day derails. In between every consult, I'm trying to put out this fire because it wasn't something that I had never had on my radar as a problem before. The level of stress that that like sets in your body. I know I left every one of those visits, more drained than I had to be, because not only was I trying to pour into this family, but I was also swirling in the back of my mind, this business thing that I'm having to also figure out on the fly in-between visits and stuff. Listen to me now, it doesn't have to be like that. Okay. Listen to us, we've been through it. Just having this focus, I think is so, so important because I just, gosh, what I would give to go back 10 years and somebody have said all this to me and I just think about how many years of lower stress levels would I have had and less sense of burnout. I mean, there's been plenty of times where I'm like, this is crazy. What am I doing? I'm so stressed. Is this really what this is supposed to be about? I thought this was going to be like this beautiful scene of me supporting families in this low-stress environment. I'm like, Nope, that ain't it. But I think it can be, it can be, I mean, much less, obviously you're never gonna have every kink worked out of a business. But if you make the time, just like we encourage families, make the time to give a little focus on what are your needs right now. How can you get those needs filled? Sometimes we need to just have that time set for our business to say, to take a look, to reflect, to read the report, to see what's happening. Like what's happening business, are you okay? Check your pulse. It's really so important and in constantly changing the circle of care, it's constantly changing. It's dynamic and it ripples out from your business to all the people that you're really wanting to care for.

Annie: When you were talking about that, I was thinking about how, when we work with clients, we're always checking in with them and saying like, how are you feeling about this plan? What are your current goals? Has anything changed with your goals or what are your new goals based on this new information? We can do that to our business and say okay, we've been going down this road, and just cause I'm going down this road, listen, if you don't stop and actually take a break to look at the map or rewrite the map or find a new map, you're just going to keep going in the same direction that maybe is not the direction that you actually want to go in anymore.

Leah: I really feel like that has to be checkpoints on the map that you've literally stop and you say, what's going on here? Where am I look around? What is my business doing? Who am I serving? What do my financials look like? We just get in the trenches of the care that we're providing and what Annie and I hope to do is really encourage you to have this kind of nurture your business mindset so that you have those checkpoints and that you have that sense of what does need to be looked at and how do we create this circle of care for my business? I think, as much as we're going to be here providing information and really helping you think through this, Annie and I know that every time we have a deeper dive, every time we get to have a conversation with you guys, we learned so much too. We really gained so much information as well because these conversations really help us learn and grow our circle of care. You guys are part of our circle of care too.

Annie: Yeah, totally. There's so much that we learned from other people and we need other people. I need what I learned from the people I'm learning from because I'm going to change things. In order to really focus on those core elements of a healthy business being good boundaries. Knowing when do I work and when do I not work. And I think that is something that can be, that can change and be in flux. That is important to keep a check-in on looking at our financials. So Leah was saying not waiting until April 14th or April 15th in the morning to get it submitted by the evening, all of your tax stuff and spending a whole day doing it, but really staying more on top of things, for me and what that looks like is a monthly check-in with my bookkeeper. I know that once a month, I'm going to get on the phone with her and she's going to make me look at things. I do have to think about it and having that regular appointment means that I'll do it. I won't let it not happen cause she's there, it's on the calendar. Some people are like me and you're very calendar focused. Other people you might want to take more of a cyclical approach and thinking about every quarter I'm going to do this, or you might want to make a 90-day plan. Some people like to have every block of time on their calendar accounted for something. So you have to kind of find out what your vibe is, how you're going to build that into your business, those regular checks, those organic checks, and even things like trainings that you're doing. Whether you're doing continuing education and getting SERPs for them, or you're doing other trainings, listening to podcasts, are you going to take action based on what you're learning, building time in for that too. It's not just about plowing through a learning module and downloading the handout and then being someday I'll deal with that. Saying it's a one hour thing I'm listening to and I'm going to then take 30 minutes when it's over to make three changes based on or whatever it is, being intentional about it.

Leah: Yeah. I think that's really a skill we have to build, not only do we talk to families about self-care but self-care, and especially in the way that we're talking about it is almost like a skill you have to build. It doesn't come naturally. It's not like, oh, I'm going to go, like you were talking about, get a massage or lay in the bubble bath and that's going to be my self-care. It's learning how to build this into your day to day life, build this into part of how you live, how you function in the world is to be focused on creating a really good circle of care around yourself and around your business and then around the families that you're, and it's a skill. You have to build that skill and that's what Annie and I want to do for you is help you learn how to build your circle of care building skills.

Annie: You know, not to stretch the metaphor too far, but here I go.

Leah: We love doing that though. It's so much fun.

Annie: So we're going to take the metaphor of the new parent taking care of their new babies. So that new baby is totally dependent on the parent. That's what we tell them like that baby has no wants, it's all needs. My go-to is like, if they wake up, just assume they want to eat, there isn't anything else so that baby's totally dependent. That baby is going to turn into that toddler who's exploring foods, but not so sure you need to really help guide them and say here are some healthy food options for you to choose from. I have a middle and a high schooler right now who are just like, I'm hungry and they make their own food. They make lots of it. They are eating constantly, but they're doing their own cooking, but I still have to buy the groceries for them. I still have to maybe make sure that there are still a variety of offerings and it's not all ice cream. That teenager, that middle schooler, someday, one of them is going to maybe take me out to dinner. It's what I envisioned. There's gonna come a point where, and then maybe if we all God willing live that long and I need to be taken care of in my later years that they will be able to do that for me because they will be grown adults. And really kind of thinking about that circle of dependence that we see in families and that kind of natural family life cycle, that's what our businesses can do, but much more quickly

Leah: Escalated version.

Annie: Right? Exactly. You're going to speed it up, but it really is that process and it is that that point of you really need to trust that your business is an adult that can take care of you. That will let you know when it needs something from you to make something happen, where you're going to have that feeling about your business.

Leah: But it definitely requires you to really pour into it as you start out because when it is so dependent on you, that dependence kind of allows you to build such a solid foundation. Just like we do with our little ones, we make sure they're getting a variety of foods and all these like experiences so they have this great foundation to make choices later. I think that's kind of how we can think about our businesses is like in the beginning when it is so dependent, you have this wonderful opportunity to build this fantastic foundation that then just really grows and thrives and allows you to kind of sit back and reap the benefits of all the hard work you put in. That's what I always think about, I'm like, it's so hard when they're babies, but if you really do this hard part, you really can see those benefits. That's where I'm at now. I have a kid that likes to cook and we just buy the Hello Fresh meals and he just makes them. I'm sitting back, literally kicking my feet up, reaping the benefits of all that teaching and learning, and pouring into that early stage. I think we could really think about our businesses like that too.

Annie: Definitely and by the way, Hello Fresh, if you're listening, we would love for you to be a sponsor. Please, we do a lot of Hello Fresh in our house too. I have yet to get my, I'm like, you could make this, why don't you make this? They're like, or I could just have cereal. I was like, I'll make it. My 11 year old did replace the screen protector on my phone yesterday. That was kind of amazing because that's a task that I really despised. As parents, the differences, I'm never going to expect my children to do anything for me. There is always going to be that parent child relationship there. So that is where the metaphor does kind of end, but our businesses because they're not human people, we made our business to take care of us. So make it take care of you. What does your business need to take care of you? When we feel taken care of, and when we are tangibly actually taken care of, we will have what it takes to take care of other people. Like we will be able to do that and you know that you see the difference when you see that new parent who's like so tired. When you see what happens in their bodies and their faces, when their family member, who's there says, I'll take care of that. I'm going to take care of that and they just say, yeah. It helps them, like, I'm going to make that phone call or when they bring them a water bottle, it just never gets old seeing that circle of care right in front of you. Then they're like, okay, now I can like give to this baby that needs so much. I really have loved teaching this idea of getting cared for versus self-care to clients that I've, I've seen them really respond to it. I'm excited to talk about it in the context of the business. If you want to be part of that conversation, register for the Clinical Complexities in Private Practice, you'll get access to our deeper dive, into nurturing your business and expanding the circle of care. We're going to have a great conversation and really go even deeper into what does that look like from a day-to-day basis? Logistically, what are we talking about here? Getting ideas from not, it's not us, we're not going to come to be like, okay, here is Annie and Leah's three-step plan to nurture your private practice and expand the circle of care, follow our proven method. It's not going to be like that. It's going to be like, let's talk about this. What's one place where you feel like it's really hard to nurture your business. Okay. Oh yeah. I can totally relate to that. Here's something I've tried. Here's something I've tried and it's going to be a conversation because that's the circle of care that we're building for each other.

Leah: Yeah. I always say I'll tell my parents, I'm like, you guys are way smarter than you give yourself credit for. Let me just help you see all the ways that you're already figuring this out. That's what I want to do for you and your business and kind of help you see how you're already figuring out and how we can keep building on that. Like, okay, this is working for you, this isn't working, and help weed through some of that so that we can really expand our circle of care.

Annie: Oh, I love it. There's so much more we could say, but we're going to end our episode here so you can move on to the next installment, whatever ever other podcasts you're listening to right now. I'm sure you've got a queue stacked up like I do, but we really hope we'll see you in November for our deeper dive into nurture your private practice, expand the circle of care. Until next time it's been great talking with you, Leah.

Leah: Love it. It's so good to talk to you, Annie. Have a great day.

Annie: You too. Bye. Bye.