Transcript

Brian
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast early in this new year. Ani, how are you today?

Ani
I’m good. So far, January is going right. How about you?

Brian
Doing pretty good. You made it through the holidays, I see. Yeah. Getting back on track.

Ani
Yeah, well, I didn’t really get off track this holiday season because I took really good care of my boundaries and what I needed to do for me to flow through it. So, yeah, I feel really good.

Brian
Cool. I spent a lot of time regulating my nervous system over the holidays. You do? Yeah. I mean, I do that regularly anyway. I regularly regulate.

Ani
You do? Well, it’s important. Actually, that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about today because something that is on a lot of coaches Clients is about how to get clients. I mean, it’s like a annual perennial. It’s a continual thing that coaches are always thinking about. How do I get clients? And we want to talk today about how you could not only get some great clients, but make great client relationships, make great clients. So that the people that you’re working with are the people that you love to work with. I think that’s one of the things I really appreciate at the Somatic Coaching Academy is we have just an amazing community. We do. Yeah, we really do. We really, really do. And we’re not the only ones that appreciate that. Our entire team appreciates that. And the other students and clients really appreciate coming into the Somatic Coaching Academy because they’re surrounded by, people say it all the time, great people. Yeah.

Brian
And the opportunity is just growing more and more and more to be able to do this work. I’m actually working on a podcast up and then coming up in the next several weeks from now. But I don’t know if people are aware, but the current US administration has just dequalified health care professionals as professional degrees. So we’re talking about nursing is no longer considered by the government. I’m not saying I consider it this way, but the government can consider it a professional degree. Physical therapy is no longer going to be considered a professional degree. Occupational therapy, no longer considered professional degree. Now, you might be like, well, what does that matter? What it means is that those professions will no longer be able to get government loans to to school after their bachelor’s program. And by the way, they’re required to have masters and doctorate programs. So what we’re going to see in the upcoming very near future is who is going to pay 80,000 $100,000 out of pocket to get a degree that they’re not earning that much money in. We’re going to see a massive shortage of allied health care professionals definitely in the next three, four, five years, and potentially Eventually in the next decade or so going forward, which means that there are going to be human beings out there that need support that will not be available to them in what looks like the traditional health care system right now.

Brian
And their go-to people are going to be health coaches. That’s going to be the go-to person. And that’s what I mean, that what we’re talking about in terms of doing these regulation practices are going to be the thing that people start seeking out, number one, to help themselves feel better and heal from whatever going on, but also to prevent themselves from having a problem that there’s no one there to help them with after they get sick.

Ani
So there’s the preventative thing that people are going to take even more seriously because there’s going to be a shortage of professionals. And then there’s the idea of, I have something going on. What do I do about it? But there’s also going to be an increase in people wanting to learn how to take care of themselves so that they don’t have to go every single week or three times a week or whatever to do the thing that they can do as much as they possibly can at home.

Brian
Yeah. So there’s going to be an exploding need. I mean, there already is a growing need, but it’s really going to exponentially explode in the next year, two years, three years. Right now is the time to get trained to do these things.

Ani
Right. And the people who are going to get hired are the people who are nearby the client is the thing, too. Because one of the problems that coaches have is most coaches are trying to get clients online. And we’ve noticed that since COVID, people have forgotten that it’s actually a shortcut to work locally and work with people in your local area. And so keeping that in mind as a coach, I mean, a coach who continues to try to get clients online, people are already feeling lost. You just keep feeling lost. But you could actually shortcut your success to having a thriving practice by looking in your own backyard. Yeah.

Brian
One of our favorite business mentors always tells us to grow where you’re planted. Yeah, right. That’s one of the rules of business, grow where you’re planted. And yeah, so growing in your local area where you’re planted, you can have a thriving business that way.

Ani
And you can have a thriving business pretty close to overnight if you do a few things right. And when we say a few things right, we started our Our private practice when we both left the Western medical system in our local areas and created thriving practices pretty quickly. And now, years and years later, as I look back, I know I’m supposed to tell some ragged to riches story about how we struggled, and it was awful. But actually, what happened was both of us did some really smart things intuitively right There was another way that helped us to get a thriving private practice pretty much right off the bat.

Brian
Right off the bat. And then the struggles came after that because of other things.

Ani
Well, a lot of our struggles started when we started to try to go online, too. But that’s for another day. The fact is you can have a thriving local practice and really help people to become your most ideal private clients as you’re working with them. And these are all things that we do in our Level One program, which it continues to astound me when we talk about it, that it starts with a two-day intensive, and then we continue to support the students over the course of 30 days.

Brian
Thirty days. And you get practice sessions during that period of time. And yeah, there’s a lot of nurturing and cultivating people’s skills and capacities over 30 days.

Ani
But it’s really a turnkey program.

Brian
Totally turnkey, 100% turnkey.

Ani
If you’re a person who, we’ll do more talking I don’t know this allied professional thing. But if that is going to impact you, it’s something to consider. If you’re a coach that really wants to knock it out of the park this year and stop trying to look online, but actually get clients, actually get clients, you want to look at that program.

Brian
This is the Somatic Practice Essentials program. Right, level one.

Ani
Course centering. Yeah. Today, we’re talking about how to help your clients become ideal clients. One of the things about helping your client to become I’m an ideal client, is teaching them common language about the kinds of things that you’re going to talk about. Another thing is about helping them to regulate their nervous system and becoming a person who knows what that means and then knows how to do that so that they can do that with you and between sessions, and they show up as a completely different person. With having that regulated nervous system and the common language, you’re starting to teach somebody how to be a person who can make a transformation. Because what a lot of people struggle with, whether it’s coaches or it’s therapists or holistic practitioners, is the client comes to you and you You want to help them make a change. Change is difficult, and change comes with resistance. And most people don’t know how to navigate resistance. So even if you don’t have the advanced skills as a somatic coach, as a sensation-based coach, even if you don’t have those skills, having the capacity to help somebody regulate their nervous system is going to help them to better navigate the inevitable resistance to change that comes up when change processes are initiated.

Brian
Yeah, it’s the foundation of everything to be able to, let’s just say, regulate their nervous system. You can use the idea of staying in the window of tolerance where there’s hyper regulation way above, hyporegulation below, hypoarousal, rather, hyperarousal above, hypoarousal below, and then internally have optimal arousal. And that’s the state where people make the most clear and informed and rational decisions, where they’re able to process information very clearly and to be able to move forward in ways that serve themselves and serve the people around them. They’re not… Decisions are not informed by the stress response. They’re not informed by the shutdown response or the freeze response. They’re really informed by creativity and growth and those sorts of things. And so when you’re doing these practices regularly with people, you’re actually helping them to achieve in a nervous system, awareness state that helps them make growth-oriented decisions rather than protective-oriented decisions.

Ani
Exactly. So as a coach, we’re in the business of helping people make decisions. The entire session is basically helping people to make decisions and then hoping that they’ll go home and also make decisions. But without doing some nervous system training, to Brian’s point, most people are making decisions off of the stress response. And most people don’t even know about it. A lot of people will tell us that they didn’t even realize they had a body, or they were just heads walking, disembodied heads walking around. Actually, it’s really interesting to me, Brian, how difficult I guess, becoming embodied, recognizing that you have a body is for people and how unbelievably prevalent it is. Because we work with… I mean, most of our private clients and students at the academy here, there are people who have education behind them. There are people who have degrees. There are people who have certifications. There are people who do these kinds of things for a living. And still getting into one’s body takes practice.

Brian
Well, yeah. Well, if you think about it, almost everybody who is, quote, unquote, successful in their careers means they had a lot of education. And education starts when we’re five years old, when we’re told to sit at a desk. We learn that education and learning happens at a desk when we’re focusing with our attention. And we do that for, well, how many years in high school and then college and then graduate school and whatever it is. And so the thing is that we have been conditioned that education happens not including our bodies, only in our head. And so no wonder we’re so disconnected from our bodies because we’ve spent years, maybe decades, with Most of our attention and our energy above our shoulders. Our body just becomes something that is doing its own thing and that we get upset about when it has a problem. And that’s the only time we pay attention to it is when it hurts or there’s a problem with it or it’s not able to move our head from place to place. It’s so true. And then we have a problem with it. But the thing is, we’ve been getting messages from the body the whole time, and the body has been craving to move.

Brian
It’s been actually craving to help support The head have better outcomes in its world, too. We don’t realize how limited we are when we just work above our shoulders and we get so disconnected. We wonder why our relationships are fraught with challenges and miscommunications and misunderstandings. We’ve lost our intuitive guide. All those things happen when we disconnect for decades from our body. Our culture is actually set up for that.

Ani
If you want to make your head more successful.

Brian
Yeah. If you want to make your head more successful, get into your body. There’s a little phrase we have in somatic practice essentials, and people will chime in all the time. It’s like, get out of your head and into your body. I think that’s my next T-shirt. We have some core centering T-shirts. It’s like #getcentered. I think the next version of this is get out of your head and into your body.

Ani
In terms of helping a client become an ideal client, a lot of times we think about what we need to teach them so that they can become an ideal client. And to Brian’s point, one of the ways to make clients into ideal clients is actually to teach them by helping them to get their bodies by doing embodiment stuff, somatic practices. You might think that you need to sit people at a desk and give them journaling prompts to make them ideal clients, but that’s not actually how you make the most ideal client.

Brian
You actually do it through demonstrating through experience. Experiential awareness or creating experience is actually the way that you make someone an ideal client. Not just giving them more It’s about giving them an experience that they feel differently in their body. Then all of a sudden, then they start to make decisions from a place that they want more of that feeling good in their body rather than making it about numbers or some type of made up statistics that we use in our head.

Ani
Coaches might listen to this and say, Well, that’s not coaching. Okay, so go become a somatic practice mentor, because that’s going to help you to train to become the best coaching clients that you could possibly have.

Brian
That’s a lot of the way when people come into a level one and we do our business training portion of level one. The model that we use to be really successful with our local practices, grow where you’re planted, is the idea of no matter what it is, whatever service it is that you provide in the health sphere or in the coaching sphere. Maybe, say, you’re a coach, maybe you are a mental health practitioner, maybe you’re a massage therapist. We’ve had all these people go through this somatic practice essentials program, by the way. Whatever it is, whatever service you provide, you might find that you’re not getting ideal clients into your practice is number one. Number two, it’s a challenge for you to keep your ideal clients around you a lot. Yeah, it is. Because that’s part of being successful is keeping your ideal clients around you.

Ani
And the fact is that a lot of coaches, after they graduate from coaching school and figure out that it’s hard to keep ideal clients around you, one of the ways people start to navigate this is by teaching people things. But you can teach people nervous system regulation skills through somatic practices and do it regularly, and it never gets old. You don’t have to create a new workshop every single week. And by the way, some people are listening to us Brian, and going, Yes, but I am an executive coach. We have students and graduates who are doing this stuff in organizations successfully. Yes, very successfully.

Brian
Very successfully. At conferences, huge organizational conference This is where they’re doing it at.

Ani
So there’s no yeah, but that goes along with this. As long as there’s human beings, there are nervous systems. And as long as there are nervous systems, they need regulating. I would say, at least for For the next 10 years, at least for the next 10 years, people need to be learning these things regularly so that it can become a thing that we don’t have to teach people. I would love to see that happen, but it’s nowhere in the near trajectory.

Brian
Because of that, they need to be learning it, let’s just circle back again to experientially. It’s not learning it, it’s not learning the data around it. Now, some people need some data because they’re higher fact finders. They have to get on board. But once someone experiences, then they’re like, Oh, that is exactly what I’ve been looking for my whole life. A lot of people, honestly, just need some relief. People just want relief from the stress and the strain and the anxiety or from the depression or from the physical pain or whatever it is. It’s a great way to offer people to stay in a container where they are feeling relief on a regular basis.

Ani
So regular basis. Let’s talk about this, too. A A lot of students and potential students, the ideas that we hear floating around is, well, I want to be able to teach people to regulate their nervous system, experientially, to your point, so that they can do it by themselves. Do you know how hard… I mean, think about it for you. How hard is it to do something solely on your own that is new and you’re trying to incorporate into your life? It is H-A-R-D, hard. It’s so much easier to create new habits that you will then take into your life when you do things with somebody else, when you have that shared accountability measure. So you can be responsible for yourself to do the things that you really want to be able to do, that ability to be accountable, very oftentimes, is bridged by the ability to do things with other people. So as a professional, you got a two for one deal, more than two, three or four for one deal. Well, when you’re running somatic practice classes because you’re creating ideal clients, you’re giving people an opportunity to be accountable with you, to do the things that they know they want to do in their lives, and actually start to have success with it.

Ani
So not teaching them so they can go off into their rooms and close the door and do it by themselves. People want community. You’re giving people an opportunity to create community. Community creates connection. Connection creates this… You’re like a center of influence.

Brian
It creates trust. It creates trust.

Ani
You’re like the center of gravity where people want to come, and who are they going to look to and trust you when it comes to doing further work. By the way, all of those great things for all of the people you serve, it feels so good to do somatic practices. And how awesome is it that it’s your job to do them regularly with other people? That’s part of the huge benefit I feel for myself. I am a busy person. I have a lot of things going on. Having it be part of my job do somatic practices with people, I get to do the somatic practices, too. It’s actually a really good part of the practice is doing your own sincere practice, and people really enjoy it. It reminds me to take the time and do the things, and it helps me to become the person that I want to be in my life. If you’ve been listening to the podcast, you’ve heard us talk about win-win scenarios and relationships before. And this is a universal win-win thing. It really puts you into relationship relationship with the natural laws and helps you to not only live your own life the way you want to, but also be a really, really valuable support for other people.

Brian
Yeah, especially if the community that you live in, if you want the community that you live in to be a more accepting community, if you wanted to be a more cooperative community, if you wanted to be a more open-hearted community, then the way you do that is by offering opportunities for people to practice those things on on a regular basis. I actually see it as a triple win. It’s a win for your person coming to the classes because they are feeling better. It’s a win for you because you’re feeling better. It’s a win for the whole community because you’re actually creating a community of people that is more open-hearted.

Ani
Well, I’ll add another win onto that. If you want to make a difference in the world, make a difference in your community. There’s only so much fighting the systems that we can do. There’s only so much control we have over the systems and things like governments and the systems that we all operate in. But what we do have so much empowerment around is community, and it’s communities that are going to change the world. Getting to know your neighbors, doing meaningful things with people, helping them to get into their hearts. And that’s what doing somatic practices does with people. It helps us to get into our hearts in our community and make a difference. Can you imagine Imagine if just 100 communities were doing those kinds of things, what ripples it would send throughout the entire planet? Yeah. Huge.

Brian
Yeah. And so as we’re talking here, you can feel the energy expanding, right? And becoming more aspirational. And you might be listening to it and going, Oh, my God, that sounds amazing. But then again, how do I even start doing this? Well, everybody, I’m just going to bring it back to everybody wants relief from something, right? So on a microcosm, macrocosm, everybody wants relief from something. I believe in you. Yeah, and you want relief from something also. Imagine if you were the person in your community who was able to offer people consistent relief by experiencing nervous system regulation on a regular basis. That is potent. That is so potent. And don’t pooh-pooh that because we have- No pooh-pooh. Don’t pooh-pooh it because honestly, we got to tell you, we We have somatic Practice Essentials graduates that are crushing it in the marketplace right now. Just absolutely crushing it. Growing not only their classes, but their coaching practices because of this model that we’re explaining to you.

Ani
And they have the competitive edge. So listen, also, if you’re thinking, well, gosh, to your point about being aspirational, it seems like a lot. Who am I? What could I possibly do? If you want to have a more regulated nervous system, if you want to have less stress, less anxiety, less worry, less fear, all of that stuff in your life. If you want relief and you want to be more accountable to doing it more often, then come learn the skills and teach a class because there’s really no better way than getting out there, doing your own practice, making a difference with other people. Even if there’s five, three, one other person in the room, you get a chance to practice and make your own life better. So all that it really takes is you making a commitment that you want a little less stress in your life or you’re willing to bring yourself from some relief. That’s really what it takes.

Brian
Yeah. And just have to reiterate, too, it’s not complicated getting students into classes, and that builds clients. It’s like we have a client connection model. We teach that as a part of the somatic practice essentials training. We give you all of the tools to do it. We give you free talks in order to do that. We give you templates, free talks to be able to do that. We give you ways to articulate to potential students on how to do that. We give you a sample classes, sample workshops. When we say turnkey, that’s exactly the way we designed this so that you could come in knowing zero about how to lead practice, any somatic practices, and 30 days later, be ready to start classes.

Ani
And you could know zero about how to get clients and be able to successfully get clients because we teach you how to do that, too. And then you’re going to get a community of practitioners who are doing these things. And we nurture that community every single month after your graduation for free. It’s just a time for you to show up. And in our virtual community, you can ask questions any time of the day, 24/7. So you’re not alone. You don’t have to figure it out yourself. And there’s plenty of people to help in this community to help you to get started. Yeah.

Brian
And so if you listen to last week’s podcast, it Hopefully, it’s clear that what we really envision is a world where everyone is free to express their core purpose. And the way that we do that is by helping people to tap into their core purpose. And the first step to that is helping them have an experience of what it feels like to be regulated inside of their bodies.

Ani
Because nobody is stepping into their core purpose from a dysregulated nervous system.

Brian
Exactly. If you’re the person in your community that creates a container that holds that space for people, we can banter around the words authenticity, and people want to be authentic, and be themselves, and stop hiding, and all those kinds of things. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. But then how do you actually do that? People are like, How do I actually do those? How do I actually become authentic? Well, the thing is, you’ve already got a core purpose inside of you. It’s already there. The problem is it’s all covered up with all kinds of junk. And when you just start off by doing some really simple but regular, consistent somatic practices, you start to be able to clear away the debris that’s in the way of you really being who you are meant to be in this world. And what if you were the person who held a container for that, but actually had people come because it just feels good, right? They come because they’re getting relief. But what’s really happening underneath is you’re helping them step into the best version of themselves.

Ani
So if you’re interested in finding out more about the Level One program and potentially joining us, You can go to our website at somaticcoachingacademy.com and check out the program. Sure you can. But honestly, the best thing to do is to send us an email today, info@somaticoachingacademy. Com, and just say, I heard the podcast, and I want to talk to somebody about it. You will never get on a call with anybody from our team and have them be pushy or weird. We just want to get to know you because we want to have the best match for our students. We also want to have the most ideal clients as you do. So our job is to help you make a clear decision that’s empowering for you. That’s it. You will never be pushed on a call from us. So reach out by email, talk to our team, see if it’s right for you. And if it is, we hope to see you in class because we know that there is a tremendous amount of difference that will be being made in the world in this coming year and beyond. We hope that you are part of that, too.

Brian
Absolutely. Thanks for joining us this week for the podcast. We’ll see you again next week. Bye-bye.