The drive: What challenges have you overcome?
There are two significant challenges I’ve had to overcome. The first was accepting that I deserve to be paid for my services! It might seem like a no-brainer, because I’m a business, but this doesn’t come naturally for me. I used to get comments from people saying that my knowledge should be free, ignoring the years of time I’ve invested in building my knowledge, and all the elements that go with setting up and running a business.
Asking for money doesn’t come naturally to me, and I’ve had to learn that it’s okay to ask for money in return, because the other option is that I don’t do what I do and these children get left without help.
And the second was accepting that I couldn’t help families who didn’t want to be helped.
It’s a hard lesson to learn.
I nearly burnt myself out chasing clients whom I knew I could help, offering free calls and explaining my support, providing more than is required in a free service, and then being upset that they didn’t take action.
If someone doesn’t want help, we cannot help them, and this is sometimes hard to accept when we know we can help them have a better life. People have to take the action themselves, when they are ready.
For better or worse: What are the pros and cons of running your own business?
I love being my own boss, and I hate being my own boss!
I love that I can work from anywhere in the world once I have an internet connection. I love that I can take time out of my “work time” to go on forest school with my girls, have days out for myself, and I get to connect with other entrepreneurs from very different sectors. I love that I get to learn every day, and no two days are ever the same.
The biggest con of running my own business is that my to-do list is never done! There is always anther thing to do, a great idea, and the admin… And so it takes a lot of planning (which isn’t my forte) to manage things so that I don’t get stressed with overwhelm!
Hopes and dreams: What next?
My biggest hope is that the that parents and people everywhere shift to the model of healthcare which is unique care, personalised care, based on always understanding why a person has a particular disease or discomfort and working to address that. This is the basis of functional medicine – root cause analysis.
I dream of a world where we have health-care rather than sick-care, where we are looking after our health and preventing disease rather than managing disease and living with bodies that have constant discomfort.
Personal responsibility is the biggest thing for us all to take back, myself included.
And as parents, we must recognise that we are the custodians of our children’s health until they are of an age to make the decisions themselves, and as such we must start taking back the understanding of the impact of food on our bodies, the impact of drugs, and seeking to balance our systems rather than tolerating levels of discomfort and pain on a daily basis. Pain and discomfort are not normal, yet we have become accustomed to living with them. Our children shouldn’t have to live with pain where there is a lot more we can do to resolve it and rebalance their bodies to be incredibly healthy and vibrant.
My dream is for a healthy world. One where we grow healthy humans from the beginning who then have lower risk of illness because they’ve been given a great start!
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