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Med Spa CEO
What to DO When You are Feeling Defeated in Your Business
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Let’s be real, there are weeks in business that will test you. Team tension, client issues, revenue dips, or plain old fatigue can throw you off your game if you’re not anchored into something deeper. In this episode, I share how to lead your...
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Anchor into your vision, not today's emotion. Feelings change hourly. They can change hourly, but when you have a vision and a mission that you are working towards, that will be like a lighthouse. And no matter what stormy waters you end up hitting, when you are captaining your ship toward your vision, toward that lighthouse, if you can keep your eye on the lighthouse, no matter what storms hit, you cannot navigate those waters. Are you growing a business or creating the Most sought after MedSpa in your market? Welcome to the MedSpa CEO podcast where growth means better results, bigger profits and a schedule that actually gives you your life back. I'm Heather, strategist to the industry's most profitable aesthetic practices. From solo injectors to multi seven figure teams, I'm here to help visionary leaders like you package your brilliance, scale, scale with clarity and build a business that feels as beautiful to run as the results you give your clients. It's time to set the standard, not blend into the industry noise. If you're ready to lead, to be seen and to grow a category of one brand, you're in the right place. Hey beautiful friend. If you're a longtime listener of the podcast who's been dying to work with me but hasn't pulled the trigger yet, I have an incredible opportunity to work with me for a fraction of the cost. If your estheticians can't explain your signature plans or your new injectors panic every time they have to sell a high ticket consult, it's not their fault, it's the system or more specifically, your lack of one. That's exactly why I built Ask Heather AI, the first strategist level tool for esthetic and wellness CEOs who want to scale with precision and stop flying by the seat of their pants. Inside, you get three powerful tools, each designed to solve the exact gaps that keep your growth tied to you. Turn your basic menu into a branded high ticket signature offer suite your whole team can sell. Train every team member to lead premium consults with confidence even if they've never sold a thing. Write magnetic messaging that attracts premium patients without sounding like every other clinic online. These are the same frameworks we've used to scale clinics to seven figures and beyond. And they used to cost five figures figures to access. Now you can have them in your back pocket. Try ask Heather AI for 30 days and see what happens when you stop guessing and start scaling with words that work. Head over to heathertraveen.com forward/trial to learn more. Well hello my beautiful friend. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. This Show's topic was inspired by a number of things that I've seen popping up with not only my clients inside of msa, but also some of just my personal friends who are also entrepreneurs and some of my private clients as well. And so today we're talking about what to do when you're feeling defeated in your business, what to actually do. We're going to walk through. I think I have about seven different things that I coach my clients on over and over and over again that I wanted to share with you on this episode so that you can know that you're not alone. And then different shifts in thinking around it. Because what ends up happening when we start to feel this sense of defeat, okay, you feel this sense of like, what is the point? Even because you have so many different things that are popping up for you. You know, you have team members leaving, you have sometimes a drop in revenue that is like freaking you out one month, right? You might have gotten a really negative review. You might found out that a peer is talking nasty about you. You might have a former client or patient who is actually made a negative review for you at the Better Business Bureau, right? You might actually be experiencing a lot of feedback from patients, right? Like when you done something a certain way for a long time. I have a client who is really moving her way out of the actually seeing patients. And so she's dropping the days of how, you know, how many days a week she actually spends with patients. And what's happening is that there is less time for her patients that she's had for years. And not every patient loves it, right? So what can we do when we feel like the chips are down, when we experience a lot of negative emotion, that ultimately is what pops up for all of us that are shooting for big things in this world. And I will never forget it when Brooke Castillo, who for many of you know, I'm a life coach, school certified life coach as well too. And she grew her coaching practice to $50 million a year, which is incredible. And she's coached so coach entrepreneurs and just entrepreneurs in general and ambitious women. Over her decades of coaching humans, she was asked the question if she could boil it all down to one thing that really she saw over and over again in her most successful students, if you will. And she said the one key thing that is really tied to her success and that she has observed in her most successful students is their ability to manage negative emotion, is their ability to still press forward despite the feelings of defeat, the feelings of fear, the feelings of embarrassment, all of those feelings that your brain will tell you something has gone terribly wrong, it's time to abort the mission. Because those feelings make us want to run back in our lizard brains, makes us want to run back into the cave, right? It makes us feel like we are about to be attacked and that something's gone wrong and it's time to change what we're doing. What I will offer for you today is that if you can be the captain of the ship of your mind and know that when those feelings of embarrassment, fear, defeat, all of those anxiety, all of the things that those negative emotions are just so heightened as you go out and you are metaphorically slaying the dragons of growing your business, that if you can stay the captain of your mind and your thoughts and know that those feelings ultimately don't dictate the action that you're going to take, that you keep moving, that you keep taking action towards your vision and your mission and your goals, there's just nothing you can't do. But we make those feelings, feelings mean oftentimes that something has gone terribly wrong. So let's dive into some core things that have served me as I grow my business and that have also really helped my clients when I'm coaching them as well, too. So the first thing is, all things are compounding in your favor. I have this written down on my desk to remind myself. All things are compounding in your favor. Even when the results feel slow, your actions are stacking. Even when, if you're a team member or if you're delivering annual game plans now and presenting a lot more packages, presenting a lot more big, comprehensive signature plans and not everybody saying yes or 100% all in, you are planting those seeds, right? All things are compounded in your favor. The same thing like when you have a team member who doesn't work out, the only way you can find the powerhouse team members that you want for your business. I've not had one client. Never. I have not one friend, not one client, not one friend who has not gone through some team members in order to find their powerhouse team. So even when it seems like you had a crappy team member who was negative or who quit without any notice, those experiences make you into the leader that can actually build the powerhouse team. And so even those circumstances are compounding in your favor. So I want you to do me a favor. I want you to. If that statement really resonates with you, I want you to write it down somewhere. And when you feel like you're being punched in the face and you feel like the chips are down. I want you to remind yourself that even the outcomes that your brain is telling you is a failure is just not how you wanted it to go. Those things are compounding in your favor too, because that will keep you in motion. The second thing really dovetails off of the first one and is this idea of the hunter and the farmer. I think many of us stay in the hunter mentality for too long and we need to think like a farmer. And we still have to hunt, right? We still have to eat today. Okay? But many of you, your whole game plan is very hunter mentality, right? Like we're hunting, we're eating today. And when things don't go as planned that day, it can feel like all is for naught, you know? And so when you're thinking about, like I said, you're planting seeds, you are a farmer, you are a gardener as well. Those action items, there's lots of action items that you are not gonna bear fruit that day immediately, right? When I tell people to install our systems for the menu and for the consult system, those are also farmer gardener type of systems. Now we end up winning quickly too. So we end up having a lot of hunter benefits to actually just presenting bigger things to humans in a consistent way. But some of that is farmer, where we're planting seeds with those humans for later as well. Oftentimes folks will abandon things too soon. Whether this is, you know, organic social media, any sort of new marketing channel. I have so many clients who will be like, oh, Facebook, meta ads don't work for me. And I'm like, meta ads actually work for everybody. You just didn't figure out how they could work for you. But they work for everybody. And so you actually really need to have a farmer mentality sometimes so that you can actually give yourself that more long term thinking to actually have the time to see the fruits and let the seeds of the action items you are taking today actually have the time to bear fruit over time. The third thing I want you to think about is you have to protect your filters on feedback. A lot of my clients, not all feedback is worthy of your energy. And I want you to think about like, you know, there's that Brene Brown quote, like if they're not in the arena, don't take advice from people who haven't even been in your shoes in some way. And it's really funny because a lot of people who've never like, launched a business, who've never done what it is that you are trying to do you are paving. You're trailblazing a new path that nobody else in the world has done the exact way that you will do it. And there's so many folks who want to give you their tune. So many patients who want to give you their two cents because they think they know better. Could be your husband, it could be other friends and family that you just have to like nod and smile. But know that those folks aren't the folks that you should be listening to. I'll give you an example. I was talking to a client. Such a proud moment for me because she was talking with one of her injectors and the injector was saying like, what should I do? This person is like price shopping us essentially. And this owner told her, you know, this person just isn't our person. Instead of spending a lot of time trying to do mental gymnastics on how to keep the price shopping patient, she had the wherewithal to say like this person isn't the person we should really spend any time worrying about trying to have some sort of word smithing to keep her here or to compete with the folks that will always undercut us on price. Right? I love this idea of musicians will use a tuning fork to actually help tune their instruments. So they have to use the right tuning fork in order to actually tune their instrument. And I want you to think of it this way when you use the price shopping patient. Let's just use this as an example to actually inform how you price yourselves, to inform your consults, to inform your packages, to inform all those things. You will have lost the plot because you are not using the correct feedback to actually make decisions. And so guarding those decisions with filters that filter out all the BS feedback that you will have to use the discernment to actually decide who and what you are going to listen to will help you know when you are just experiencing feedback that really doesn't actually matter. Number four, every bad hire is part of your leadership training. This bad hires, messy transitions and mistakes can feel crushing in the moment, but they sharpen you into a stronger leader. There's actually no other way around it. It would be like trying to build muscle without having to lift the heavyweight weights. There's just no way around it. The muscle actually has to break down in order to rebuild to get bigger. And it's the same way with actually not hitting a home run every single time you hire somebody. In fact, you're going to have some awful hires. No matter what consultant you work with, no matter what how much you watch all the YouTube videos on hiring, if you will, and the ultimate anatomy of the perfect interview, you still will go through the experience of having crappy hires. But what I will tell you is that if you can remind yourself, like we said at the top, that even the bad hire is actually compounding in your favor because it's making you into the badass leader that is going to be able to see the bad hire for days. When you have dated somebody who cheats on you. I won't name him, but he totally cheated on me with a dear personal friend. And what's interesting is in hindsight, I could see all the red flags. Like, my brain could not even filter for when it was actually happening. And it was. It made it so much easier to know what to look out for the next time I was dating somebody and where I was like ignoring my intuition on things. It's the same way with bad hires. Sometimes you have those bad hires that like, you know, cheat on you or whatever the equivalent might be for why they're a bad hire, but you become so much more knowledgeable and so much more attuned to what you were going to look for in the next hire that it is like, has so much value. Number five. When you are starting to feel defeated and you start to feel like energetically it is just super challenging and you feel like the experience you're having running your business is like just almost swallowing you. You have to start protecting your energy like it is currency. Leadership is energy intensive, y'. All. When you leak energy into the wrong places. Okay, so this might be comparison toxic team members overthinking, right? Like, you know, we've talked about this many times and I see this for all of you, but sometimes you gotta mute your peers that are making you feel any sort of way and not judge yourself for needing to mute them, right? You can still follow them if you are friends and whatever, but you have to think of like, the content that you're consuming is a very huge part of your input into your energy reserves. And if you notice that when you go onto Instagram, Instagram and you go into a scrollathon for like an hour, then you come off of that and you feel like just, ugh, like that is leaking your energy. And leadership is energy intensive, y'. All. You got to treat it like currency. You've got to protect it at all cost. You have to set clear boundaries around your time and team access to you. Sometimes you have to build in recovery rituals. Whether it's walks for me, it's workouts for me. It's journaling, too, so you have to filter your inputs. So what podcasts are you listening to? What mentors are you taking advice from? Are you letting a lot of feedback from your worst patients actually affect you too much? I had a client, this was a couple of years ago, who we had gotten absolutely bonkers results for. Okay, Bonkers results. We'd helped her, like, triple her revenue, and she actually complained to us. Now, I know circumstantially a few things that were going on in her life and a few things that were happening with, like, her Facebook ads agency as an example that she was in sort of drama over that were impacting why she came to us this way. But I remember she was like, complaining about something, and I remember that if that had happened, this happened a couple years ago, but if that had happened four or five years ago, I would have been crushed by it because I would have made it mean a lot when now that my leadership, that I've grown so much in that category, I'm like, I have the discernment to know that she's projecting her own crap on me, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the results we actually achieved for her. And so you will have the same thing that pops up with team members, what pops up with patient complaints, where it comes out from left field and you're like, oh, this must mean something. You will have to have the discernment that actually it doesn't really mean anything. Number six, redefine defeat as data. Common theme here across everything we've already talked about. When you can actually look at. I had a Facebook ad launch, okay. And it was not just a Facebook ad, but the ad sucked. The other parts of the launch were actually really successful. Our organic email list, the response on the podcast as other sort of key metrics actually did really well, but the ads did not do well. Okay. And so instead of just being in the defeat of, like, I spent thousands of dollars and it didn't get me the return that I wanted, I looked at it as, that is not defeat, that is data. And I really looked at every single metric and I learned so much about how I would do that same style of launch differently next time. So, but this means have to evaluate things. You get to decide what story you want to tell about anything. Right? That happens. So when you decide whether it's a team member leaving, whether It's. You've spent $30,000 on a Facebook ads team and you feel like you got three appointments from it and it was a total loss, how can you redefine that defeat as data, as feedback as we can do this differently, better next time and you learn so much as a leader. There is no business owner who has a lot of success that doesn't have a lot of stacked up failures when it comes to online marketing. I'm gonna use this online marketing example I have made into the seven figures off of online marketing. Okay, I have, but that is because I have a big stack of failures. So I have this stack of wins over here, right? And then I also have this big stack of failures over here. And I don't believe that I can't get this stack of wins without having the failures too. And in fact, the faster I'm willing to actually face the failures, to embrace the failures, the faster I get the data necessary and the feedback necessary to actually figure out what is going to win for me. And so if you can remind yourself that whether you missed sales because you haven't had a consult system, whether you had a marketing flop like I did, and you decide that I am going to use that data to actually help find my messaging and my resonance and all those things that you can only discover as you are putting more content, doing more advertising as well. If you have a bad hire where you are like, you know, that seemed like that was cost us a lot, right? We maybe lost patience, we maybe wasted a lot of time, we maybe had some months that were lower because we had this bad hire. And so making that data be that, oh, we're going to improve our hiring process, we're going to know how to onboard somebody better the next time data removes the shame. Because shame ultimately around any of these things paralyzes you when you are in fear, when you are in shame. If you're looking at like a thought model, okay, so you've got circumstances that happen in your life, then you have thoughts about those circumstances, okay? Those thoughts generate our feelings, those feelings cause us to take an action or not take an action. And then ultimately we produce the results that we have from the action we take or don't take in our lives. When our feelings are defeat, fear, shame, guilt, embarrassment, when we look at our feelings and we have a lot of that in our feelings line, our a action line is a, a lot of inaction. Those feelings, those primal nervous system feelings actually cause us to take less action. So when we move from defeat to knowing that it's just data and we don't make it mean anything about our worth, we don't make it anything about our ability to actually grow into the leader that can help navigate some of these failures. We can create safety for ourselves. And when we create the feeling of safety for ourselves, we can take so much more action. But if we are spending, and this is for all of you, if you're spending a lot of time in fear, in guilt, in embarrassment, in shame, in anxiety, you ultimately will freeze and not take as much action. And so you have to really shift the narrative that you have around all of this. Different things that may be popping up that are making you feel like things aren't going like defeated like we talked about at the top of this episode, right? So number seven is zoom out and look at the macro view of what's going on. This is for all of you as CEOs. We get stuck in the weeds. We get stuck in the weeds and when we're in the weeds, everything can feel catastrophic, right? Because we are literally stuck, right? When you can actually take a 30 foot view of things and you can actually separate yourself a little bit from that event, from whatever that circumstances is, you can actually see the forest through the trees and not make any one single painful circumstance actually have too much of an impact. Because when you zoom out, like, let's say like August was a really slow month, let's say September, we just wrapped up September. Like maybe your numbers were lower than you wanted them to be. Okay, you could get stuck in the weeds of making those numbers mean something for you. And what I want you to do, when you zoom out and you look at, like, hey, when we zoom out and look at the whole year, it's not gonna matter that maybe September's numbers weren't where you wanted them to be, right? When we can say to ourselves, you know, also dovetailing off of point like 6, that was right before zooming out, is that when you look at the data, when you look at the data and you make it data and not defeat with your numbers, that's going to help you create safety. So if you have safety around those numbers, you can actually look at the numbers without fear. I've had some clients who really, we've had to work through them actually falling in love with looking at their numbers every month because they made their numbers feel like they were either winning or failing. And so when you make your numbers mean you're either winning or failing, you sometimes will not look at your numbers very often because of the emotional experience that you have about them. So you end up avoiding looking at your numbers. Okay? So when you make it all about data and that the numbers are neutral, no matter what the numbers are, you actually create the emotions that will help you to stay in action and to creatively be able to come up with the ideas to move yourself forward. And zooming out and looking at the macro view helps with this so much because it removes you from that moment. So, number eight, anchor into your vision, not today's emotion. Feelings change hourly, y'. All Right, they can change hourly. But when you have a vision and a mission that you are working towards, that will be like a lighthouse. And no matter what stormy waters you end up hitting, when you are captaining your ship toward your vision, toward that lighthouse, if you can keep your eye on the lighthouse, no matter what storms hit it, you can navigate those waters. All right, my friends, I want you to save this episode. Keep this episode in your back pocket for when you are struggling. And do me a favor. If you've had a friend that has been struggling lately in their business that really has been feeling defeated, would you share this episode with them and let them know that you're thinking of them and that you. You're rooting for them as well, too? That is what I have for you this week, my friend. We will be back next week. That's it for today on the MedSpa CEO podcast. If this show's been valuable to you, the best way to say thank you is to leave a quick rating and review. It means the absolute world to me. I read every single one. And it helps more women like you find the support they need to grow something they're proud of. I'm so glad you're here.