EP59 | Dreaming BIG for your private practice

Leah
Well, hello there, Annie.

Annie
Hey there, Leah, how are you doing?

Leah
I am doing fantastic. I am really excited about all the things that we're doing here in lactation business coaching land with our Deeper Dives connected to your Clinical Complexities Course, which I think that's been so exciting and fun and just all these great topics that we're talking about on the podcast. They just got me really fired up. I'm excited about all that we're doing. How about you? How are you doing?

Annie
I'm excited because if you're listening to this episode today, on the day it comes out, you can still join us tonight for our Deeper Dive into nurturing your business. You can register at paperlesslactation.com/lactationbusinesscoaching. But you can also get access by signing up for Clinical Complexities in Private Practice, which is running right now. We had our first three lives last week, three today, and three next week, including our Ask me Anything about Diversification with Joy McTavish, who is an IBCLC. She is also a holistic sleep coach. She's always coming up with really innovative ideas for taking what she's interested in and passionate about and developing it into a revenue stream for her business. So I'm really excited that she's going to be joining us live inside Clinical Complexities for Private Practice and you can sign up for that at paperlesslactation.com/course. It is not too late, you'll get recordings of the lives that already happened. If you sign up soon enough, you can join us today, November 23rd, at 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific. Next week for joy McTavish's live which is on November 30th, at 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific, and all kinds of other great stuff, which we're really excited about. We will see you later today. Everything we do gets recorded for viewing later, listening later. We've got a private podcast feed for both the course and for our Deeper Dive. So if you're a member of Lactation Business Coaching with a subscription that includes the Deeper Dive Vault, then you will get access to this private podcast feed. You can binge our vault of recordings on your favorite podcast player, which is just great because I just love to listen to things.

Leah
I am the same way. I am so excited about Joy's live because I just think one, she's a really cool human. I like her so much. And two, she really has done that very thing where you said just like what am I passionate about? What am I interested in? What need can I fill and just boom, she comes up with this amazing stuff. So we all can learn so much from her. She's got so much to offer and share so I am super excited. I can't wait. I'm like, hurry up, Joy, get on here. Let's talk. So today we are talking about dreaming big for your private practice. So I just want to start by having a moment of reflection. If you can just think for a moment. Where do you see your business in say a year? Maybe five years? What have you thought all the way out, 10 years? Have you thought about that? Have you processed or kind of let your brain kind of explore out that far? Annie have you, I feel like you've probably done this exercise because we do a lot of these kinds of things but have you thought about that? Have you thought one five, maybe even ten years down the road?

Annie
One thing I do think about is ten years from now, I really hope that I am still invested in keeping myself up to date and that I never hit a point where I'm like, oh yeah, I'm good. I know, everything I need to know, and the way I do things is the right way to do things. I just really hope that that is not my future. So when I think about planning, I really do, that is always the first thing that comes to mind. In terms of professional development, what kind of lactation consultant do I want to continue to be and how I want to grow is I want to grow by always learning. I want to always be humble about what I don't know, be willing to take correction, be willing to be told that there are things I'm doing right now that ten years from now are going to be wrong. I really want to be able to be flexible and adaptable and humble and changeable in my practices in the best kinds of ways. So that's something that I think when that's the first thing when it comes to dreaming big, it's not a business goal. It's more of a personal...

Leah
evolution. It sounds like an evolution to me. I love it.

Annie
it's about my integrity.

Leah
Yeah. I love that. I love that. I think that's such an important place to start out. When we're thinking about where could my business go?

Annie
What do you think about like, I know, you're a planner, with your four planners and your post its, and your pens, and your pencils. So what do you have on your one year, five year ten year plan?

Leah
One year, five years, ten years. It's interesting, to me, it's so kind of interesting how that's evolved over the last ten years because I've been in business this year, ten years. It's so interesting to me, where my thoughts were 10 years ago, like mega big and doing all the things and lala and all this. I've really found where my passions are, where my geniuses so to speak, you know, like, what am I actually good at doing? What can I actually manage and still be the human I want to be for all the other people that I have in my life beyond just my business? So that's really changed and I totally love you're kind of coming straight into who do I want to be as a lactation consultant with integrity and growth mindset, and knowing that all knowledge can never be had. I can always be on a seeking path for more knowledge so that I can serve better. I totally resonate with that. But for my business, my evolution that I really desire is just keeping more streamlined, more ease to my workflow, more ease, I feel like I'm continuingly striving for is just ease and flow and letting me do the things that I do really well because I've got all the systems in place and all the workflow in place. That just seems like a passing wave of just it's all just flowing. I'm over here doing the thing that I do really well and that excites me that I can keep cultivating that but there's also some things that I get like, ooh, you know, it would be really cool if I could do this or if I could do that. I think that's the exciting thing about being a business owner that you can really kind of dream and shut your eyes and just innovate. I think that's something that makes our profession really, really cool in that one, we're a young professional in the grand scheme of things. Running a private practice, lactation business has not been on the businesses to have list very long. I mean, would you say maybe 30, 40 years, max?

Annie
Yeah, max.

Leah
I wish I knew when the first private practice lactation business started, does anybody have that data? I'm sure it's out there somewhere.

Annie
It's been only since the mid-80s that there were IBCLC so that's it. We know that a lot of it started with just expanding of volunteer work that people were doing. We did an episode about making the transition from volunteer work to business owner. I think it was one of our very first episodes, actually, I think. Then also wanting to get lactation into the hospitals where it was so desperately needed in those early days. It is a young profession and you also might be new to this as well. If you're just starting out, you might be thinking like, well, I'm just trying to book clients and figure out my charting platform, and all of that. But I would say, you can start dreaming now. There's nothing that can stop you from starting right now to say, okay, like, yeah, I'm new and I'm just figuring this out. Maybe what you decided today is on your one year or five year or ten year plan changes, and that's fine. We talked about change last week, if it's not working, drop it, but start to think about where you want to go and where you can take yourself. A great first question to ask yourself might be, what kind of skills and passions do you have beyond what you're currently doing in your day-to-day private practice? So clearly, you have a passion for helping families feed their babies, lactation, physiology, anatomy of the breast, bottles, pumping, finger feeding, reflexes, all of that amazing stuff, how milk is synthesized. I mean, yes, we love all that stuff but there are other things in your life that you love to do, and that you have an interest in and a passion for and maybe start to think about is there a place for that inside of lactation. For me, it was always tech and computers, I just love software. I can't help it. It so draws me in and I have so much fun with it. I just really started to see a place where I could integrate what I love about tech into private practice. I spent a lot of time in my early career working on becoming a screenwriter and a producer that was another thing I was working really hard towards. So creating the Lactation Private Practice Essential Course last spring and Clinical Complexities this fall is challenging me to use some of those skills that I cultivated when I was trying to become a producer, just making it happen and supervising all the moving parts and working with my talent, because they're so talented, my speaker, I love them. So that is also something where I came to continuing education because of my passion for producing. What about you, Leah?

Leah
I think early on, pre becoming a lactation consultant, one, I spent a long time being a stay-at-home mom doing some corporate work on the side like business to business sales so wholesaling, specifically, lots of children's products. I worked for some really interesting children's product companies. Before that, I did medical sales. So when I started out my practice, I really brought in all the things I learned about sales and speaking to people about my business and that kind of thing. I was able to really integrate that passion that I had before being in the corporate world, and being in sales and really start to draw that into my private practice. I think it's really cool because we have such a young field is that there's so much possibility. It feels like nobody's come up with it all yet, so far from it. And because it's a young profession, we've got people coming into it, not like you're sitting in high school, you know, what career path do you want to follow? Probably 0% of people are like, I want to become a lactation consultant, we're not there yet. Most of the time, when you come to the field of lactation consulting, you've probably done something else in your life first, from a passion that you also have. This is where I think it could be so cool and I just hope every one of you takes the opportunity to think about what do you have, what have you brought to the table of the field of lactation private practice, and can integrate into your business. You might have been a teacher, and you could be amazing at creating some courses and getting more information out there, and teaching in a way that people can really grasp. You might have worked in some sector of corporate America and you have some really amazing project skills. I can't even think, the cool thing about it, and the thing that gets me so excited, you can hear it in my voice and like, I'm so excited because there's so many possibilities. I think maybe we need to nudge people along to don't get too caught up in this thing called lactation consultant private practice has to be any one way other than, of course, has to be ethical and we have to do our jobs well. Beyond that, there's so much possibility for integrating all these other sectors that we could pull in and really make the field of lactation consulting and private practice so cool. So I think there's so much possibility.

Annie
That's how you and I got connected because you did a presentation at a conference about face-to-face marketing. You had this like, I'll never forget this and you had this video in there, your commercial. It was hilarious. It was so well done first of all, but it was you going to a doctor's office and it was Heather was also in it. You come in and you're all like I'm here to do some marketing and you hand your business cards, and then you leave. Heather, I just remember she rolled her eyes and put the cards in the drawer, threw them in the drawer. Then you did this whole talk about face-to-face marketing and you were drawing from your experience in sales and all the stuff you had done and it was so fun. It really was so memorable and memorable enough that a year later, I DMed you to be like, have you ever wanted a podcast and you wrote me back like four seconds. You were like yes. We've never met but I was really drawn by you bringing in that other experience, that other interests and really creating something and teaching me something that I couldn't learn on my own because I don't have that experience. I didn't live your life or do your job. That was really cool.

Leah
Yeah, I think that integration of what we did before, but you have to get really creative because you might be like, okay, there's no way. I was XYZ before and that has nothing to do with lactation. It's like, wait, you never know there could be something in there that you could pull in some genius that you could innovate and create. Sometimes creation comes from looking at what the needs are. I mean, yes, you can create something that everybody's like, nobody needs that. There are definitely some products on the market like the As Seen on TV products in Walgreens. I always walked by that and I'm like, nobody needs that. I'm pretty sure.

Annie
I bought a spinning watermelon cuber that came in as nobody needs it. My husband was like, I don't want that and my children are like we have waited for this our entire lives.

Leah
You've had so much watermelon now. Is it one of the things that makes watermelon balls is that what we're talking about?

Annie
No, it came with one of those too. No, it's this little round spinning, you run it across the top of a watermelon and it spits out cubes.

Leah
Oh my gosh, that's so cool. Okay, people do need that. So you've had so much cubed watermelon, you don't even know what to do with your life. Right?

Annie
It's pretty great. I don't know, somebody was like, I know what the world needs. They need this and they might have been right.

Leah
They've improved your life because of it. So think about that. Start listening. I mean, people come up with these wacky ideas that we're like, wait a second, is that really a thing, and then it's on a shelf in Walmart, I mean, Walgreens. It is really a thing. But we have to start with when you're dreaming when you're thinking there's nothing I can do different. There's nothing out there for me more than just seeing clients day in and day out and that's totally fine, too. You don't have to go beyond that but if you want to do, and I think everybody should take a moment of this because the next million-dollar idea might be sitting inside of your brain right now. Because you made a connection between a need and an innovation, a way to solve that problem. It could be in your head right this second. But we don't give ourselves a chance to think about that. So sometimes you have to just be like, really thinking through, what are the needs? What am I hearing over and over? Sometimes I feel like maybe the Universe is throwing something in your face over and over. So when you sit down and you go like, is literally everybody on the face of the planet struggling with this, because I have heard this 15,000 times in the last month, I'm about to lose my noggin. It might be that is being drawn to you for a reason, because the solution is inside of you. We just have to be opening our minds to letting those dots connect. I think that is so cool to think about that the solution, the creative solution could be inside of you but we just have to listen to those tugs saying, this is a need, and I'm hearing it and hearing it.

Annie
You know that I'm not the most woo person. I'm like, a little further away from woo than you are. I'm still woo adjacent and I have a couple of little things that I go woo on. One of them is exactly what you're talking about because it's in Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic book where she talks about writing and she's like stories will come to you. She tells a story about like, it just has to, this story had to live and the story picked me. Madeleine L'Engle talks about that, in her book, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, which is one of my favorite books of all time. I think I've talked about it on the podcast before and she talks about how writing one of her books, a character just showed up that she didn't plan on writing. She didn't know this character was going to walk into the room, but the character was like, hello, I'm here, I need to live. It's the same with ideas. I watch Shark Tank, of course, because I'm obsessed with it and you know so many bad baby products have been on Shark Tank. My family is like when they see one they're like, Mom, please just let us watch. Don't scream at the TV about this terrible thing that's harmful to babies. You might have an idea to be like, there's people out there making money on terrible things that are harmful to babies but like I have an idea that is actually helpful, meets the need, and isn't terrible and harmful to babies but actually promotes bonding and promotes breastfeeding or helps people pump. Whatever it solves some amazing problem that only you know about because you're a lactation consultant that people in the baby's space don't know about because they're not lactation consultants and don't bother to consult with them when creating these terrible products. So don't let the fact that there's competition from bad people to deter you from really pushing on that I actually got that idea. If that idea picked you, please get it out there.

Leah
You got to get that there. You might be the only carrier of that idea so it'll never make its way out into the world. That idea could be not just a product, it could be anything, it could be about the way you run your business. It could be about the way you connect clients to you. It could be anything. That's the cool thing. It could be anything, and it can tie in something that you're already passionate about. But what I know about dreaming, dreaming doesn't happen in a really cluttered space in your brain. Creativity has to have a blank canvas to work on. We can't be creative if the canvas is already full, then your brain is like I already got too much going on. There's no space here for me to cultivate any new ideas because you have filled it with all the things. So one thing I definitely know about creativity and making these connections and processing what your brain might be holding on to in there is space to make that happen. If I could say one thing, I am the worst at this one thing, but I am the constant Striver of blank spaces in my life. I'm constantly working to cultivate this. I've talked about it so many times on the podcast that I work on this all the time because I'm not good at it. So I have to consciously do it, which is sometimes painful. So right now my blank space is that on my walk, although I want to listen to a podcast, the entire walk, the entire 45 minutes, I don't let myself. I stopped for at least 10 to 15 minutes, I turn everything off. I just walk and let whatever comes up in my brain come up. If it's trailing off into like, not fun land, I pull back and I say let's just go blank, more blank so that I can have creativity moments. That's what I'm doing right now. I've cultivated this. I've changed it constantly depending on where life stage that I'm at that moment. But this is something you really have to do to be able to be innovative and dream big for your business is give yourself a little bit of space.

Annie
It's essential. You can't be creative without it. I remember before I had podcasts and headphones, and I would be pushing my kids in the stroller from our house to the park. I can really remember being very pregnant with my second trying to get from my house to the park, which was a mile and a half, a mile and a half away, I think. It was taking me 45 minutes to walk there because I was so pregnant and I didn't have anything to listen to unless I intentionally loaded something onto my little iPad, which I never remember to do. I would just sit and my brain would just be open. Another writer book that I love is Stephen King's on writing. What he talks about when he's stuck on a story problem, he sends it to the guys downstairs, which means he assigns it to his subconscious basically and says I'm not going to consciously think about this. I'm going to send it to the guys downstairs. So I used to do that would be like, okay, I'm working on like a story problem for a screenplay I'm writing. I'd be like, I'm just not gonna think about it. I'm just gonna walk and by the time we get to the park, an idea would come, but not from consciously focusing on it but from unconsciously not focusing on it.

Leah
Yes, yes. Just think, okay, listen, that idea might be just marinating deep in your brain, and we got to get some clear space so you can let it come up and be the thing that solves these big problems for either families or lactation consultants. We need that creative cultivation to be happening. I encourage all of you to take a step back and give yourself some space and find a way to just take that moment and let your brain really connect dots and stuff. It's so crazy how it happens on that lower down in your brain not so conscious about what the connections are happening, but they're happening and then you boom, an idea just pops right out. One thing though, my top tip around this, and again, something I'm constantly working on is to write down literally every single idea and dream you have about your business or about the work that you do. It can sound super silly, but even if it seems like this is an impossible dream, nobody's ever gonna want to do this or it just I would have to have millions of dollars to even think about making this happen. Write it down anyway, because I think, I'm sure there's some science back there because there's a lot of science around writing things down, but I think writing them down puts a little sticky note in that subconscious space so that it hangs out there. When you are in those places of taking a walk for a mile and a half to get to the park, that your brain has all these sticky notes to kind of marinate on and be like, oh wait, hold on, wait, wait, I've connected this, wait, this one matches this one, okay, go, and then boom, it comes the idea inside your brain. That act of writing it down, and you really get bonus points, if this notebook is, is sparkly and decorated in whatever fashion speaks to you. But I think it's really cool to have a dream book and to really let your brain just come up with stuff and the sillier or the crazier, or the more impossible is, like, don't get too caught up in that, get caught up in just getting it on paper and letting it evolve as it needs to. I think this has been just an amazing exercise, for your brain too and creativity. I think this is where the next big lactation things are gonna come from. Because all of you are gonna have a beautifully decorated notebook full of amazing ideas. It's going to be the next thing that makes all of our jobs easier, or we get to reach more people or we get to see better outcomes, I know it's in there. So I really encourage you to take the time to get yourself a dream book and really start dreaming about your business and what you could cultivate in the world of lactation and private practice.

Annie
I love that. I am really bad about not writing stuff with my hands. But it really does unlock something in my mind, that's different than when I'm typing. I'm also an external processor in a lot of ways and so talking things out is really helpful to me. Leah and I use Voxer to go back and forth and I use it with my team as well. I'll often start with like I was thinking about this and then by the end of it, I've figured out what I was trying to get to but I couldn't get there in my head, I needed to speak it. Then the idea came while I was talking so even having a voice memo to yourself on your phone, as you know, just to talk things out, talk to yourself, you don't ever have to listen to it again. But that can also help you unlock things. But having it written down also can help make it feel real, it can give you some accountability. You can set yourself up regular time where you go back and revisit those goals and those ideas and check your progress and cross off the things that have fizzled that you're not interested in. Applaud yourself for the progress you've made on others. Just having a way to keep them alive and writing them down does give them a life than just keeping them in your brain or even, you in conversation with somebody else, it doesn't quite cement it the way that putting it in that notebook does. So I'm going to personally take that challenge to start, this is something the universe is telling me is you need to start writing things down again. I used to write a lot of things down. I used to keep lots of lists and thoughts and all of that. I just need to get back into it and get out of my head and back into a notebook.

Leah
Yeah, yeah, I am moderately, okay, totally obsessed with writing, I love the act of writing. It is very cathartic for me. I like to cursive write, and I like to make it look really nice. So it's very, like it has two-fold, something about just the act of writing, but then also this moment to capture something. But because I have this very visual brain, I have a notebook for everything. My husband is always like, why do we have fifteen notebooks that are all the same, but labeled differently all sitting around? I'm like, well, this one has all my podcast ideas and this one has all my things I need to do for the business and this one has all my dreams and it's just crazy. But it's really so helpful, like you said, to actually get into the act of writing things down. I think it's good for our brains too. So I just put a call out to everyone out there that these amazing ideas are probably living inside of you right now. The world of lactation private practice needs you to give yourself space to get a notebook, start writing it down and so that we can really cultivate the next generation of lactation consultant private practice, and be innovative and creative and professional and ethical and all the things they're going to come from us. They're going to come from you just taking a minute to hear what's inside of you, can make those connections from your passions and your skills. Let's do this thing, y'all. Let's take it to the next level.

Annie
I love it. I'm here for it. Thank you, Leah. This episode, I'm gonna say this was Leah's idea and she really brought so much of just all these ideas. I could see that creativity at work when she shared the outline with me of what we were going to talk about today. So, I just want to tell you, you've got great things inside of you, so please, don't keep them to yourself.

Leah
That's so awesome. Yes, don't keep it to yourself. Okay, next time, Annie. We'll see you then.

Annie
Bye.

Leah
Bye.