What to Know Before You Quit Your 9-to-5 to Become a Wellness Entrepreneur

Don't Quit Your Job Without Listening to This Episode! In the final installment of the High-Frequency Success miniseries, host Nicole Hernandez delivers practical and personal insights for aspiring wellness practitioners ready to leave their 9-to-5 grind. Before you take the leap, tune in for this must-hear step-by-step guide to building a sustainable and successful wellness business without unnecessary struggle.

Nicole dives deep, sharing vital advice on how to gather powerful testimonials, define your niche, and establish a solid financial foundation. Packed with actionable tips and real-world strategies, this episode is your roadmap to launching your wellness career with confidence and stability.

Hi Friend! If you loved this week's episode, I’d be thrilled if you could do these three quick things:✨

1. Subscribe - Hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!
2. Rate and Review - Give us a rating and drop a comment about your favorite episode so far!
3. Tag and Share - Snap a pic while listening and tag me @thetravelinghypnotist on your IG stories—don’t forget to share it!

Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational and inspirational purposes only. It's not a replacement for professional mental health care. If you're facing any psychological or medical issues, please seek help from a qualified healthcare professional.

Thanks for supporting the show! 🌟

Transcript

0:02

Welcome to the Traveling Hypnotist Podcast. The ultimate destination to elevate your life through the power of travel, modern hypnosis, neuroscience and time tested wellness practices. I'm Nicole Hernandez, the Traveling Hypnotist and as a board certified hypnotist, creator of the TTH method and wellness expert for the Four Seasons Hotel New York downtown, I'm here to guide you on a transformative journey. This podcast features travel inspired hypnosis, real client sessions, belief shifting travel stories and interviews with experts who are shaping the world of conscious living. All right, it's time to journey within and go beyond. Welcome to the Traveling Hypnotist Podcast. I'm your host, Nicole and this is going to be the final episode of the High Frequency Success series. That's where we've been exploring this intersection between our mission and our ambition. But I'm excited to share with you officially that we're going to be launching a new podcast called High Frequency Success and it's going to come out on November 11th. So for those of you that are hungry for more conscious business content, that's where you're going to find us. But don't worry, my hypnosis lovers. Your hypnosis is coming back, I promise. So make sure that you've subscribed so that you don't miss a special Halloween episode that's going to be dropping later this week. Today's topic hits close to home. It's something I'm seeing more and more frequently with both my hypnotherapy clients and members of my High Frequency Accelerator business group. Here's the scenario. You're sitting at your desk underneath that awful fluorescent light and you're dreaming about leaving your 9 to 5 to become a hypnotherapist, a sound healer, a reiki practitioner, a life coach. And you feel this deep alignment, this calling to help others transform their lives. And you perhaps already signed up for a course that promised you that you could make $250 an hour and that you would have complete time freedom after just one certification or your starting to see those ads now and it all sounds really amazing until the dream becomes your nightmare. So what I'm hearing more often now is I'm a healer, but I can't pay my bills or I've just invested everything and I'm running out of money. And then there's that toxic positivity response that's coming from other people that are in the mindset space. I'm seeing comments like you just need to do more inner work and Manifest that business. And here's my course to help you do that. Now here's the deal. I consider myself a practical woo woo. And certainly there's issues that we can resolve with mindset modalities like coaching and hypnotherapy. But sometimes we actually just need a good old fashioned logical strategy for success without all the struggle. So I want to take you through a four step process today. If you are someone who has been thinking about leaving your 9 to 5 to start your career as a wellness entrepreneur. And I want you to take notes today and I want you to be with this content because it's really important. It's sitting in my heart to be of service to you. Step number one, build your expertise. So let me be vulnerable with you for a moment. When I finished my first hypnotherapy training, I thought I was amazing. I had aced my practicals, I had gotten great feedback from my classmates, and I felt ready to change the world. But here's what they don't tell you in certification programs. Practicing with your classmates is completely different than working with a real client. What we often experience is called the four stages of learning. And actually understanding this framework completely changed my perspective on building expertise. So let me break this down for you. Stage one is unconscious incompetence. And this is where many of us start. It's that idea that we, we don't know what we don't know, right? So we see successful practitioners charging$250 an hour and we think, oh, I just got my certification and I can do that too. And it's kind of like thinking that you can perform surgery after watching a few episodes of Grey's Anatomy. And now that's not meant to be a blow. It's meant to help you understand the stage that you're at. Because I was again, I was there too. So then we begin to move to stage two. And stage two is conscious incompetence. And that's where it hits you when you start working with real clients. Because suddenly you realize that there's actually countless scenarios that your training didn't cover. For me with hypnotherapy was how do I work with someone who maybe isn't visual? Or what do I do if someone is resistant to following my lead? In hypnosis, you become aware of all the gaps in your knowledge. And honestly, it can be really overwhelming because you feel like you just need to constantly study and learn. But it's actually a crucial phase in your growth. And then we move to step three. And that's where we can effectively help clients. But it may require us to have intense concentration and conscious effort. And you're constantly thinking about your next move. For me, this was always going back to my tools, my cheat sheet. I would always look at it before I had a client session. I would study really hard, look at other cases, and then go into the session and start to work with them. But it takes that to be able to get to stage four, which is the unconscious competence. And this is mastery. This is where your skills become second nature and it allows you to fully be present with your clients. Things just start to happen seamlessly. You don't have to think about your next step and you start to adapt your skills and perhaps even develop your own systems, because you find out what works and what doesn't and you become much more efficient. Now that brings us to step number two, which is to practice. Because we can't move through the four stages of learning without actually being in the work. And this is where I find that so many people go wrong when they start their wellness business, is that they get so focused on launching their website, creating a logo, setting their prices, and then they start posting on Facebook and Instagram, trying to call in those first clients and no one shows. Or maybe someone comes in, but then it's just, it's hit or miss and they're really finding that they're struggling with getting their business off the ground. And that's because they miss this piece. Because working with the people that you learned with isn't really the right practice. This is the next step. So I want you to complete at least 20 to 30, even up to 50 sessions with your friends, with your family and with your friends of friends. And just be really transparent about where you are in the process. There's too many people coming out of one certification calling themselves experts, and they're not. And when you're transparent that you're starting, you're setting yourself up for success. It gives you the opportunity to get feedback, which is a crucial part of your process. Because this is going to do three things for you. It builds your confidence through real world experience. It helps you to refine your technique and develop your unique style. And that's so key. And it creates a small network of people who can actually vouch for you. Now that is going to be the game changer for you. Now you don't have to have a website to actually complete this part and to do it efficiently. I actually used calendly to set up my practice sessions, so I just Created a little link on Calendly. I think it's 10 or $12. And then I started to implement a pay what you can model. After I did a few sessions and I felt like I had learned a bit and I felt pretty competent with at least what I was doing. And this helped me then gradually transition into charging professional rates while also gathering valuable experience. All right, we have two more steps coming up, but if you're finding this valuable and you're realizing, hey, Nicole, I actually really need some additional support, then I want you to check out two of my offerings. One of them is the High Frequency Accelerator Business Group. And I also do one on one High Frequency business coaching. Both of those are available. And if you're interested, make sure to check out the link in today's show notes. All right, let's move on. Step three is to build your evidence base. So this is so crucial and yet overlooked. But when I talk to other healers who are successful, this is one of the things that they really worked on at the beginning. And I wish that I had actually done more of this when I started because right now I'm at a place where I'm working with very high profile clients and they aren't always willing to go through this piece. And that is you need to build proof that your work works. So start collecting your video testimonials because these are going to be gold. When people actually see someone talking about you, it's. It sells itself. Written testimonials are also really crucial because people will identify themselves in the words that are used by your clients. Right. So someone says my eye was twitching with stress and so and so helped me move through this. They're gonn, oh yes, my eye is twitching. I need to do that before and after stories. So I love to do this. You'll see them on my website. You'll see them at the Traveling Hypnotist. And I have interviewed a few of my clients that have had really amazing success. In fact, I'll be doing another one here on the podcast so that you can hear from her directly. But you know the that quantum leap that you get for someone when their problem is solved? Like how did their life completely change? I've had several clients whose lives have completely changed as a result of working with me. And it they're not only telling their friends about their results, but when I am able to have that before and after story, it really does again sell itself. And then case studies with specific outcomes. So maybe somebody didn't give you a testimonial but they're willing to let you share their story or share pieces as long as they are remain private. You can do that too. You can show before here's the problem that what this person was having and after this is the problem that they were having. And then show the points. And all you have to do is create a simple system for gathering feedback. So you can schedule a short zoom interview with your client after their program or after the session to capture their transformation. You can also send them like a quick form to get some information from them. You can do a quick little dm, little chat with them. You know, whatever works for you and whatever makes this easiest for you to complete. And step four is to assess and refine your direction. So what's going to happen after you move through this first few steps is that you're going to begin to understand what kind of cases really light you up. Right? You might really enjoy working with children, or you might really enjoy working with maybe older, more mature people that are going through a certain stage of life. You might really love working with mothers that are going through postpartum. You'll begin to notice what you feel excited about and I want you to go with that direction. And who are your favorite types of clients to work with? So I really discovered pretty early on that my favorite clients were the ones who were high achievers and very much professional level. So they were executives or management level within a corporation or they were already had their own business, they were just smarter, they could get the concepts and they could follow the lead and they would do the work in between our sessions so that they got the most out of it. And I really find that's my perfect client. And you might also find along the way that you have began to develop a unique approach to your system. I created TTH method and it uses ancient wisdom with modern hypnotherapy. And I'm using mindset, coaching and somatic tools that all comes together. I'm also continuing to add to that. It's ever evolving as a system as I find what works the best as it becomes more efficient and effective. And you might find that you have something that works specifically for you that you can begin to package up and sell as a wellness entrepreneur. Now, I wanted to give you a little bonus here, and that is the financial foundation. So what do you really need to have set up before you quit your 9 to 5 in order to be successful, to succeed without struggle? Number one, six to 12 months of living expenses saved. And it's so critical that you have that in your first year. Why? Because, number one, you don't know what your seasonality is going to look like. For example, in December, I don't have a whole lot of sessions because people are spending time with family, they're traveling a lot. But when January hits and everybody's back to let's start the new year, I want to make some changes. And you're going to begin to discover the seasonality in your own business. So you might have months that you really need to dip into those savings. Number two of this is to have that proven track record of results. You will find that your best clients are going to bring in more clients for you, and you may even want to develop your own referral system to help you along the way. But that is really key because if we don't have strong results, we don't have a business. And three, I want you to be seeing that you have regular inquiries or referrals coming in. If you aren't seeing that business is naturally building itself as you're doing the work, then there's something wrong with the system. Right? There's something. Either we're not getting the results or we're not communicating correctly with our clients as to and managing their expectation. But something's going on in there. And then four, I want you to have a clear business model and a pricing structure at the end of this level. And you might want to work with a business coach at this point who does have wellness experience so that you can step into your business from a place of abundance and strategy and intelligence, rather than from a place of chaos and from mismanagement and from just delusional hopefulness. Remember, there is no shame in building slowly. In fact, the practitioners I see that are struggling the most are the ones that often jumped into things too quickly without building a foundation. Now, as we wrap up today's episode, I want to leave you with this thought. Wellness entrepreneurship isn't about just practicing a modality. It's about building a sustainable vehicle for transformation. So give yourself the permission to grow gradually and intentionally because your future clients really deserve to have a practitioner who's both skilled and financially and mentally stable. I'll see you later this week for that Halloween special, so make sure to look out for it. And remember, when you journey within, you can go beyond.