November 5, 2024 • 41 mins
Get ready for a fun and eye-opening session with Erin Power! She’s diving into WellHub's latest state of work-life wellness report, and trust us—her findings about workplace stress are as shocking as they are essential!
But that's not all—Erin's got the inside scoop on pricing strategies for private practice health coaches. Whether you're scratching your head over how to set a fair price or just need a nudge in the right direction, she’s got your back! Plus, she’ll tackle the burning question: Can you really launch a health coaching biz at any age? Spoiler alert: Yes, you can! Packed with relatable stories and golden nuggets of advice, this episode is a treasure trove for any health coach eager to make a living.
Episode Overview:
0:00 Intro
1:08 The Role of Health Coaches in Corporate Wellness
4:37 Setting Your Price as a Private Practice Health Coach
5:57 Money Mindset and Pricing Strategies
10:43 Creating and Pricing Your Health Coaching Program
14:24 Hourly vs. Salary Pay for Health Coaches
19:51 Getting Your Foot in the Door as a Health Coach
23:41 Navigating Client Relations and Breakfast Dilemmas
33:29 Addressing Barriers and Facilitating Change
36:51 Is 70 Too Old to Start a Coaching Business?
Connect with Erin at:
- Submit your questions to hello@primalhealthcoach.com
- Website: primalhealthcoach.com
- Instagram: @primalhealthcoach
Health Coach Radio is a podcast that dives deep into the world of health and fitness coaching, brought to you by Primal Health Coach Institute, founded by the renowned Mark Sisson. Join your host, Erin Power, a proud graduate of Primal Health Coach Institute, as she shares inspiring stories and expert insights on elevating your coaching practice.
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, health coaches. I'm excited to be here with you.
I just had an article come across my desk, and it says work stress is the number
one threat to employee mental wellness per a report that just came out.
So this is from Wellhub's State of Work-Life Wellness Report.
And it's interesting because they did
this this survey and they surveyed 5
(00:22):
000 global employees between May and June 2024 so very recent for the state
of the work-life wellness report, work-life wellness isn't that a nice little
twist on the language work-life wellness work-life balance and it revealed several
noteworthy findings hi I'm Erin Power I'm a health coach a health
coaching educator and mentor, and your host of Health Coach Radio.
(00:46):
This podcast delves into the art, science, and business of health coaching.
Whether you're aspiring to land a coaching dream job or to embark on your own
entrepreneurial adventure, we cover it all.
Our mission is to help you grow your career, elevate your income,
change the lives of the clients who need your help, and leave a lasting mark
in this rapidly growing field.
(01:07):
It's time for health coaches to make an impact. It's time for Health Coach Radio.
Nearly half of those surveyed say work stress is the primary cause of their
deteriorating mental health.
83% would consider leaving their current employer due to a lack of focus on
(01:29):
well-being, a significant increase from 68% in 2022.
So 83%, almost all of the employees surveyed, would consider leaving their current
employer due to a lack of focus on well-being.
Okay, so what does that mean? Physical health, mental health, emotional health.
You see where this is going. You see where health coaches can come in and help,
(01:51):
right? Corporate wellness, I know, is something that a lot of coaches are very interested in.
Survey findings like this are extremely powerful. Imagine applying to a corporate
wellness job posting and you have this kind of data available to you. You can track this down.
I always get my health coaching news from athletetechnews.com.
(02:12):
Athletetechnews.com. It's a great repository of this kind of article.
But imagine bringing this kind of information to a job interview,
to an application process, if you wanted to go and work in corporate wellness.
A sizable amount of employees, 88%, literally just about everyone,
say well-being support is as important to them as their salary.
(02:35):
89% of employees say they will only consider companies that prioritize employee
well-being when seeking a new employer.
Guys, this is huge for us. This is immense for us. well-being in the workplace,
right? This is preventative health, right?
Preventative health. A lot of health coaches want to get into the preventative
health space, right? And this is truly preventative health.
Let's get people at work where they're struggling the most and fold these sort
(03:00):
of health-supporting endeavors into the workforce, and then the workforce improves.
And employers love that, and insurance companies love that. And,
you know, individual feels better.
They feel like they're being seen and supported by their employer.
They feel more empowered and inspired to come into work and do a good job.
And they have more to give to their families afterwards. It is all upside.
(03:24):
So really, really powerful statistics. I'll just give you those few statistics again.
47% of those surveyed say work stress is their primary cause of deteriorating mental health.
83% would consider leaving their current employer due to a lack of focus on well-being,
88% say well-being support is as important to them as their salary,
(03:46):
and 89% say they will only consider working for companies that prioritize employee well-being.
Wild. Big numbers. I can't imagine how much that's skyrocketed over the years, right?
So something to inspire you and empower you.
If you wanted to get into corporate wellness. All right, speaking of inspiring
(04:08):
and empowering, I got some inspiring and empowering questions today.
And actually, I wanted to kick off with an anecdote, if you will permit me,
because one of the questions that came in was about pay, getting paid as a health coach.
I'm going to address this. But the question was interesting because it was talking
about being paid as a health coach employee, but it had a little sort of a commentary
(04:30):
around how much private practice health coach should make.
So just, I want to talk about that private practice health coaching pay scale,
like when you're working for yourself, how to set your price, if you will.
And then I'm going to go into the question that was submitted about employee pay for a health coach.
So just a small thing on what to charge if you're in private practice,
(04:52):
because I think this is one of the most commonly asked questions I've ever gotten.
And I get a lot of questions from health coaches.
This has got to be right up there in top five of all time asked questions.
So let's just dive into a little bit about how much you can charge if you're
a private practice health coach.
So this is coming from me, one health coach, one health coach in private practice.
This is my kind of opinion. This is my point of view. And it might differ from
(05:15):
other things you've heard.
But what I want you to take away from my personal take on what to charge as
a health coach is that it kind of actually empowers you to decide what you charge as a health coach.
Because there actually is no standard pay scale that we should be anchoring to, you get to decide.
Okay, so real quick, real quick little anecdote slash teaching moment on what to charge.
(05:38):
If you're a private practice health coach, that means you're going into business
for yourself, you decide the price tag of your services.
Now, by way of disclaimer, I will be really honest with you.
No honest share, vulnerable share for a moment here, gang.
I might be one of the least equipped people to talk to you about money stuff,
(06:00):
because I'm perpetually working on my money mindset,
money mindset, who's heard of this notion of the money mindset,
you might have heard of the scarcity mindset, an abundance mindset,
a prosperity mindset, there's all kinds of ways we can talk about money mindset.
And I'm working on mine, because I'm a Gen Xer. And I came from boomer parents.
And my boomer parents have this certain perspective on how you earn money and
(06:22):
how, you know, how we exchange service for paychecks.
And it's kind of old school thinking. So I'm always working on this, right?
You know, who am I to charge my clients thousands of dollars for a solution?
Well, they haven't solved it on their own. And I'm an expert with a solution.
So yeah, I got to work on this, right?
So what I can offer you, while I can't offer you the most incredible money mindset
(06:45):
pep talk you're ever going to get, because I'm still working on mine,
quite honestly, what I can offer you is some real advice.
So I want to start with an anecdote. This was so interesting to me.
I had a client consultation today. And she was awesome.
We had such a great conversation. We really connected.
She reminded me of me. It was just like a one-to-one, a mano-a-mano,
(07:06):
person-to-person conversation that was so just flowed really well.
And in these conversations, I often ask my prospective clients what they've tried before.
Really, really important question to ask in a discovery call.
You want to sort of absolve them from past failures, right?
So they might say, well, I tried Weight Watchers and that worked for a while.
And then you'll say, well, it worked for a while. Tell me what worked about
it. And they'll say, well, I like that I could eat a variety of foods,
(07:28):
but I didn't really like tracking my points.
Cool. So you like eating a variety of foods. Great.
Oh, I tried keto for a while. What did you like about keto?
Well, the food was so yummy. I just found it really unsustainable when I was
like on vacation and stuff.
Okay. So you like protein foods? You like meat? Like we get a lot of clues from
what people have tried before.
So I would encourage you, this is to me is a non-negotiable part of a discovery
(07:48):
call when you're in private practice is going through the lessons learned from
previous attempts, right? So I always have this conversation.
I'm not going to mention the program that this person did, but the crazy thing
is I'd never heard of this program before.
And in the last three days, three different people have brought it up to me
as something they've tried before, okay?
(08:10):
So this is a program that a private practice health coach like me created.
It's a weight loss program.
It's like a 90 day program. It's inexpensive.
It's like 75 bucks. And you run through this program for 90 days.
And there's a Facebook community associated with it. So it's like a big group
program, sort of short duration, big group program, inexpensive.
(08:32):
This person I was speaking to on the phone, she had done four rounds of it.
So she'd invested several hundreds of dollars to do four rounds of it and never
gotten any results, but thought, well, it's inexpensive. I mean,
the barrier to entry is quite low.
And what else was she going to do? So it was kind of like, I might as well keep doing it.
But what was interesting was this prospective client told me that the creator
(08:57):
of this program that she was doing had wound up on Dragon's Den.
Okay, Dragon's Den is the Canadian equivalent of Shark Tank.
So you have a business and you go in front of the sharks or the dragons,
whatever the scary animal is that's of entrepreneurs that are and investors
that are sitting in front of.
And you pitch to get funding to leverage, launch, grow your business.
(09:22):
To be honest with you, I've never watched an episode, but I get the gist. Okay.
So the founder, the creator of this weight loss program went onto Dragon's Den
and pitched to the dragons, her fabulous weight loss program.
And in her pitch, she mentioned to the Dragons that she'd made $7.5 million
last year in her weight loss business.
(09:43):
Now, it was interesting to me, and this client mentioned this to me.
She said, can you believe that this health...
Nutrition coach made $7.5 million on a $75 program last year.
She said, I paid for that four times and I didn't get any results,
but she made $7.5 million.
It was just interesting. First of all, fascinating that somebody in our space
(10:06):
can make that kind of money on an inexpensive program.
It just goes to show you how far reach can go because every time she runs this
program, she gets like 5,000 people. I don't need 5,000 people in it.
Can you imagine coaching 5,000 people. I really can't.
But like your mileage may vary. So if you had a huge audience,
you could sell a $75 program and make $7.5 million.
(10:28):
But I don't know about you, I don't have an audience like that.
Like if she's, if she's enrolling 5000 people, every quarter,
she must have a very large audience, right? I don't have an audience like that.
So when I price my program, which is a six month program, here's how I kind
of figure out how I'm going to do package pricing, package pricing is the way
to go rather than per session pricing.
(10:49):
This is just a small little educational moment.
I determine how much time the client is actually going to spend with me,
and then I multiply it by what I perceive my hourly rate to be.
And when I perceive my hourly rate, the first thing I do is I double it because
I'm always going to sell myself short on my hourly rate.
So whatever you think your hourly rate is, $100 an hour, immediately double it.
So say $200 an hour, and then work out how many hours you're actually going
(11:12):
to be working on client stuff. So let's say you have a 12-week program.
And in the 12-week program, you do a 30-minute weekly coaching call with your
clients, plus maybe a one-hour kickoff call, maybe a one-hour exit call,
and maybe you're doing 30 minutes a week of client-like administration and client prep work.
So in a 12-week program, you're putting in 14 hours of work on the client themselves.
(11:36):
Multiply that by your hourly rate, $200, $2,800.
That's a perfectly fine place to start with your pricing.
But then, here's where my advice comes in, then you got to sprinkle in some feelings.
So personally, I'm doing this work because I want an income,
but I also want an impact and I want to help people.
(11:58):
So I go by feeling. Does this feel like the right amount?
Would $2,800, does that feel right? Would $2,500 feel better?
Do I like the idea of bringing it into the low, you know, for some reason $2,500
feels like low four figures. I don't know why.
It's like a quarter of $10,000. I don't know why my, you know,
again, my money mindset's a little weird. or would it feel better to bump this
(12:21):
up to $3,000 and convey even more value? You go by feel.
I think the price has to feel right. So to close the loop on this client who
I spoke with today, I told her the price of my program for six months.
I told her the price and she said, oh, that's really reasonable.
And I felt so good about that. I felt so good. And she signed up.
(12:44):
So she had access to a $75 program that she had already done and she's familiar
with the coach and this coach had been on Dragon's Den and big deal.
And instead, she decided to spend a lot more with me because we had a good conversation
and I could convey the value of a higher price tag.
That's the thing. When I say you have to go by feel, when you practice the idea
of pitching and saying that price out loud for what you offer, does it feel congruent?
(13:09):
Because you might practice your pitch and what I offer, your offer,
the solution that you offer, which I'm not going to talk about how to craft
an offer in this conversation. That's a whole nother conversation.
But if you have a good offer and you say it out loud and then you state the
price, the price has to match the thing you just said, the offer you just made.
And you just have to do that congruency work yourself, I think.
(13:30):
One of the bits of sort of business coaching feedback that I've received over
the years that never quite sat right with me is raise your prices,
raise your prices, raise your prices.
Well, raise your vibration, raise your value, raise the value,
improve the offer, get great results. And then the price will raise itself in
a manner of speaking, but it has to feel right.
(13:51):
Okay. That's my little kickoff lesson of the day. I hope that was helpful.
All right. I'm going to get into a couple of questions that were submitted and I'm excited to.
So the reason why I came up with this, how much to charge as a private practice
health coach is because Tiffany asked a question about how much you should get
paid as a, or how you should get paid as a staff health coach.
(14:12):
So she says, we know what to expect to charge when we're seeking clients on
our own, but is it normal to just get paid an hourly salary if you work for
an office that hires you as a health coach?
So this is an awesome, great question. I am excited about the existence of this
question because I love hearing that health coaches are working in offices as health coaches.
(14:34):
You know, eight years ago, if you'd asked me if I saw this happening,
I might've said, yeah, I guess maybe that could be cool.
But now it's a very legitimate employment path.
In fact, at Primal Health Coach Institute, we've just created a course called
How to Land a Job as a Health Coach, which as far as we can tell is the only
how to get a job course for health coaches that exists because we looked for
(14:55):
one. We tried to find one we couldn't find once we made one.
And in orchestrating that course, we first of all, we interviewed subject matter
experts, people who hire health coaches into employment situations?
What are they looking for?
How can a health coach really stand out? We also did a lot of diving into the
(15:16):
current batch of job listings.
So when I was doing that research on the job listings, I was just scouring health
coach job listings for literally years.
I've been doing this, but I really zeroed in it for a few months while we were creating this course.
And to answer Tiffany's question, which is, is it normal to just get paid hourly?
My answer is it seems to be pretty normal it seems to be pretty normal I've
(15:40):
I've literally seen it split right down the middle hourly rate or salary brought on as salaried staff.
Now from my research many of the postings offering to pay hourly are kind of
part-time roles, you know, where you kind of, you have a, you have a shift that you're working and,
(16:04):
that that's pretty typical to me. That feels...
Pretty reasonable that that would be an hourly rate. I'm hoping it's a lot more
than minimum wage, but I'm going to talk about how much this hourly rate is in a second. Okay.
So, you know, you are a skilled trade. If you're a well-qualified health coach
with a lot of health coaching ability, you are a skilled trade in some ways.
I know that sounds crazy, but I like thinking of it that way because,
(16:27):
you know, when I hire an electrician, I want the best electrician who's not
going to, you know, improperly wire my house and I'll pay skilled trade wages
for a good tradesperson.
And I kind of, for some reason, health coaching is so interesting because it's
an art, it's a science, it's kind of a trade, it's a vocation,
it's a dance, it's a skill, it's a craft, there's a lot to it, right?
(16:48):
So you should be paid what you're worth, whether it's hourly or salary.
We'll talk about that in a second.
If you do find one of these part-time sort of shift schedule jobs,
I think it's a really neat thing for a certain type of health coach.
For example, if you're a health coach that, you know, ostensibly sees yourself
going into private practice, well, starting off as an hourly employee in any
(17:12):
kind of organization is just really great.
You can pay the bills and get some health coaching practice while you build your thing on the side.
So I like that. There was, for example, one job I saw when I was researching
for this health coaching job course, and the health coaching shift was like
Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or something like that, Thursday, Friday,
(17:33):
Saturday, three days of the week, full time day, three days a week.
So I ended up being a 2430 hour work week, which is almost full time, but it was three days.
So you'd be hustling for three days on the phone with clients.
But then you'd have all the rest of the days to, you know, build your own thing if you want to.
Now, what if you don't want to, you don't want to build your own thing,
you want to go get a job as a health coach, this is the most exciting thing
(17:55):
is there's tons of full-time jobs as health coaches coming on and more and more.
So I have seen some larger health coaching positions that will hire health coaches
on full-time with benefits and salary.
And when I see these positions, the salary ranges vary tremendously.
And I'm,
(18:16):
I have a few thoughts on that.
I think that the apparent discrepancy, and I don't even know if discrepancy
is the origin of this question.
I don't know if Tiffany feels like maybe she's not being paid enough or what
that is, but I have seen personally discrepancies in rates of pay.
(18:39):
I've seen part-time health coaching jobs that are paying $11 an hour to $100 an hour.
I've seen salaries in the ranges of $25,000 to $125,000 or higher, right?
So major discrepancy. It doesn't seem to be very uniform.
You know, that's probably the same for many industries, quite frankly.
But here's where we can probably, you know, intellectualize why we're seeing
(19:03):
this in health coaching.
First of all, health coaching is still relatively new in terms of hiring health
coaches in organizations and organizations are maybe figuring out where to slide
the health coaching paycheck into their overhead costs, right?
So I think about that when any organization that's growing who needs to bring
(19:25):
on staff to help them grow has to first of all slide that staff in kind of an
hourly part-time rate to see if they can make it work.
Is the juice worth the squeeze? Should we bring this person on with more hours,
maybe put them in salary?
So in some cases, I think if you get a role with an organization that's paying
you an hourly wage and you like it and you're getting great health coaching
(19:47):
experience and you're feeling really called to this and this is lighting you up.
I think there's something to be said about getting your foot in the door.
We're very much in the getting one's foot in the door stage of health coaching as a job.
So imagine getting your foot in the door of a medical clinic that then immediately
sees the value of you on the staff and they said, wow, you know,
this health coach is really getting great patient outcomes. Let's bring them
(20:09):
on full time, full benefits.
You might become part of the middle management or senior leadership someday.
You never know. Maybe you become the head health coach, right?
I love the idea of this, of health coaches going into the workforce because
the workforce has opened up to us now and showing these organizations how health
coaching makes a difference in patient or client outcomes.
(20:32):
And then those organizations bolstering the health coaching arm of the business
and you becoming one of these sort of early adopters, one of these early staff
members, you know, employee number one on the health coaching team.
Another factor kind of similar is that health coaching is working its way into
becoming a proven part of an allied health team.
(20:53):
And so as our importance becomes more clear, more staffing budget and hours will be allocated to us.
The other thing is that there's a wide range of employers. This really wowed
me when I was researching this.
You might have an employer who's an influencer, who goes on Dragon's Den and
(21:14):
make $7.5 million a year and just needs co-coaches to manage their 5,000 person coaching program.
I've seen some of these influencers scoff as we might, scoff as we might at
the online influencer. Some of these folks are making fat stacks and have big payrolls.
You could become the second in command to an influencer health coach and be
(21:38):
making $150,000 a year supporting their business. Pretty cool.
I literally saw a job like that when I was researching for our health coaching jobs course.
Or you might end up going to work for an altruistic, maybe a regional health organization.
Maybe this feels important to you. Maybe you live in a medium small community
(21:58):
and the local doctor's office is trying to create an integrative model to help
the citizens of the community.
And, you know, those regional health organizations probably They have tightly
controlled and allocated budgets, so you might get in there with kind of a lower
hourly wage, and that just might be an affect of that part of the industry.
So I think, well, I don't think, I know that the range of pay is astronomical.
(22:26):
It ranges tremendously.
We all can find something that fits in with what we want to be doing with our
lives as a health coach, whether it's part-time or full-time,
you want salary plus benefits, or you just kind of want an hourly wage,
or you want to become part of something, you want to get on the ground floor,
something that's going to grow.
There is nothing but opportunity in front of us. Nothing but opportunity.
(22:46):
This is one of the greatest times to try to get a job as a health coach.
By the way, our How to Land a Health Coach job course tells you exactly how
to do that. We wanted to prepare health coaches to seek out the job postings
that were legitimate, that were asking for the right thing and know how to apply for them.
There's opportunities abound for all of us.
(23:08):
But to answer your question, Tiffany, I think it's perfectly normal to be on as an hourly employee.
I hope you're being paid fairly for the work you're doing. I hope you're getting
a great deal of experience and helping lots and lots of people.
I'm really excited that you have this job, actually. And I hope that you're excited about it too.
(23:29):
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Are you thinking about becoming board certified?
Primal Health Coach Institute's Master Coach Certification Program checks both of those boxes.
It's live, so you get to ask questions as you go. And we cap the number of students
for each round so you get individualized attention and plenty of opportunity
(23:49):
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Coaches become great with experience, and this course fast-tracks that educational
experience so you don't have to spend years learning directly from clients.
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It also prepares you to sit for the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaches
(24:12):
exam so you can become a board-certified health coach.
We only offer this certification program twice a year, and it fills up fast.
So be sure to learn more at primalhealthcoach.com and reserve your seat soon.
All right, my next question is from Annalie. And this is cool because this is
a client question, sort of navigating, maybe like a client who is pushing back.
(24:37):
So client relations, always an interesting one.
She says, so many people say they aren't able to eat breakfast and aren't hungry
in the morning, but it's a vital part of my program.
How do you deal with this she goes
on to say i'm a born people pleaser so when people push back
on my coaching ideas and are firm about it
(24:58):
i feel the need to just agree so this is
cool annalee and i have a similar approach it sounds like now i also encourage
my clients to eat breakfast and i just want to start by saying you might not
and that's okay these are just examples right you might be an intermittent fasting
coach you might think breakfast is a goofy construct for annalee for myself,
(25:18):
for other people, we encourage breakfast. And you know what's beautiful about that?
Everyone's mileage may vary. And there's a health coaching client for all of us.
There's the clients who need to skip breakfast. There's the clients who need to eat breakfast.
Annalie and I have clients who need to eat breakfast.
So Annalie, you describe this as a crucial part of your methodology.
(25:40):
But when people push back on it, you kind of fold.
So I want to really articulate the leadership role of a health coach and how
we stand in that leadership role, which frankly, our clients are expecting of us.
So coaching is a partnership that's built on trust and is not,
(26:03):
a boss subordinate relationship so the coach isn't
the boss and the client's not the subordinate who follows
along with whatever the coach says and also vice versa the client is also not
the boss it is a partnership that being said the health coach is in a leadership
role and the health coach is the person in the relationship with the expertise
and the solution so when i say that you have the expertise and the solution
(26:25):
you know a thing or two about you know how you want this person to eat,
In this case, you believe strongly that they should eat breakfast.
Let's not forget the client also has expertise.
The client has the expertise of what they will and won't do.
And I made that sound a little more petulant than I meant for it to.
(26:45):
Clients aren't being naughty. They're not pushing back on us to be bratty about it.
They just have beliefs. They come to us with longstanding beliefs about how,
when, and what to eat and why.
Or how to exercise, how to move, how to sleep, how to stress.
All the things that they're struggling to unwind and unpack and they need our
help with, they have a lot of preconceived beliefs, a lot of programming.
(27:06):
So just on its face, you can see that there's a ton of compromise required in
a coaching relationship, right?
You're an expert and so is the client.
If you both insist on being the expert, you'll butt head, so there has to be some compromise.
(27:26):
And as the leader of the relationship, it's your job to facilitate compromise,
which doesn't mean that you back
down, because you backing down and people pleasing is not a compromise.
That's you backing down and the client, they're winning.
Not a great choice of words, but we don't want to put the client into the boss
role and you into the subordinate role.
People pleasing is not a compromise. And by the way, I don't think,
(27:48):
and you know this, Annalie,
because you self-identify quite honestly as a people pleaser, you
already know that people pleasing doesn't serve anyone it doesn't
make anyone better no one gets better if they get what they want without
a without a bit of compromise you know
in some ways we're training ourselves and training the other people
in our lives to compromise with us compromise is literally a two-person dance
(28:10):
so when you back down you're not facilitating the opportunity to compromise
so do you believe this is a rhetorical because i don't think Annelies on the call. She might be.
But do you believe that breakfast is crucial for your clients or is it just
kind of a nice thing to have? If they want to skip over it, that's completely fine.
(28:32):
Okay. So you have to ask yourself, how crucial is breakfast?
Is it like this is a foundational pillar of my course, of my program?
This is a foundational pillar or it's just something neat that I like to try
to get people to do if they want to.
If the answer to this thought experiment is no this is like a non-negotiable
like my whole program is built with this pillar in place i need my clients to
(28:52):
eat breakfast it's non-negotiable we must focus on it no matter what then you
bring that energy into the relationship when you,
compromise with your client so it it can't be okay we'll skip the breakfast
thing sally you're right i'm sorry i'm sorry sally to put you out with the breakfast
thing it can't be that because then you're compromising on something that you
(29:14):
contemplate to be a foundational principle of your methodology.
And that's not an appropriate compromise.
Here's what I think is an appropriate compromise. How can we make this breakfast
thing, which is non-negotiable, how can we make it doable?
Right? So we just get down into the brass tacks of like good old habit change.
(29:37):
So instead of no breakfast, it's like, what's the smallest amount of breakfast we can agree on.
Just from the perspective of habit change, I'm personally a really big fan of
BJ Fogg's approach to habit change.
So his book, Tiny Habits, I really like that book, because I think it's more
pertinent for what we do.
Because I think when we work with clients, we are working with people who are
(29:59):
resistant to change or have tried a lot of change and haven't had success with change.
So we have to get them feeling these tiny little successes, the small,
quick win. The small quick win.
Okay, so if the objective is Sally eats breakfast seven days a week,
what's the smallest amount of breakfast we can get Sally to eat?
Sally, can you have breakfast on Sunday?
How about if we have breakfast on Sunday this week?
(30:20):
And Sally could have breakfast on Sunday every week because she agrees.
She's in an agreement with you.
She signed on the dotted line. She signed the client agreement.
Part of your client agreement is the client shows up and does the work.
And part of the client agreement is I, the coach, I move with you.
We work together in partnership.
It wouldn't be a good partner relationship if you let Sally steamroll you away
(30:44):
from this breakfast idea.
That's not a good partnership. And Sally didn't agree to that.
She agreed to being in a partnership with you.
So break the breakfast down into the smallest doable thing.
I would not, I have a similar methodology as you do, Anna Lee,
where my clients eat breakfast.
And I would not allow my clients to say, no, I don't want to do that.
(31:07):
I would say, let's see if we can do a small amount of it. What's the smallest thing you can do?
Is it one day a week? Is it, are there parameters around the breakfast?
Is it like, For me, my clients, I want them to have a protein-dominant breakfast.
If they're right now currently having oatmeal and waffles, and I want them to
have maybe a couple eggs, it's like, can you have an egg instead of the waffle
or an egg instead of the oatmeal? Can we throw an egg in there and take one
(31:29):
of those other things away?
We're going to break it down into tiny, tiny increments. And I do think there's
power in these tiny, tiny increments.
So what happens over time then is if Sally can do breakfast,
let's say she agrees to try it on Sunday.
Then you have your next weekly coaching call. Sally, how did breakfast go on
Sunday? She'll say, well, I managed it okay. And she'll talk, you know, talk about it.
(31:50):
All right, Sally, can we try that again? Same thing. Breakfast on Sunday, breakfast on Sunday.
I would hang with that for a while until Sally starts to notice whatever you
expect the outcome to be.
So for example, I get my clients to eat breakfast because when they have a substantial
breakfast, their appetite and their cravings and their mindless eating spontaneously diminishes.
(32:10):
And for my clients, that's immense.
That is such an immense win.
They're bouncing up the walls. They're screaming from the mountaintops.
They're so excited that their mindless snacking went away.
So I want my client to experience what it feels like to be well-fed so the mindless snacking goes away.
If your client does this on Sunday...
(32:30):
She might notice, you know, I had that big breakfast on Sunday morning and then
like I didn't really have sugar cravings that day. I wasn't really nibbling
and snacking all day like I usually do.
And over time, if you put down enough reps, the client's going to make the correlation.
Like when I eat breakfast, I don't munch all day long.
And I can see why munching all day long is maybe holding me back from my health goals.
(32:51):
So perhaps this breakfast thing, maybe there's some magic there.
So I do think there's something to be said.
I do really believe that health coaches have to try to get their clients some kind of quick win.
That's the way I describe it. So what is the thing, if they go run this experiment
that you've asked them to run, breakfast on Sunday, what is the data that they
need to bring back from that experiment and report to you?
(33:12):
Okay, so you might say, Sally, what if we just had breakfast one day this week?
Sunday, how does Sunday feel? You, Sally, you will collaborate on that.
You're not telling Sally that at Sunday you'll come to an agreement.
Let's say you come to an agreement that it's going to be Sunday.
Once you've kind of established the parameters of the goal, you might say,
(33:32):
you know what I'd really like, Sally, if you're okay with it,
is to just keep track of how your appetite and cravings show up for the rest of the day.
That's really the important data we want to gather from this breakfast experiment.
Does that sound good? So we have a little accountability piece now attached to this goal.
Sally's going to pay attention to after she has breakfast, does her hunger and
cravings, do they change for the rest of the day.
(33:53):
And she'll report back and say, yes, they did or no, they didn't.
And you'll continue to kind of move through this goal from there.
You need to be okay with getting them to your ultimate end goal eventually in tiny baby steps.
So break this task down into the smallest doable step for your client.
(34:13):
And, you know, get to the root of why Sally feels such friction at the idea
of breakfast, right? Because that's the other thing too. Why doesn't Sally want to eat breakfast?
Is it because she's been kind of indoctrinated into intermittent fasting and
she's been reading all the books and following all the podcasts and she thinks,
well, if I'm supposed to intermittent fast because women are supposed to do
(34:35):
that, maybe she picked that up.
And, you know, that's where you want to lean on your coaching skills.
Is that working? Could there be another way?
A lot of times people don't want to eat breakfast because they have their biggest
meal at night before bed and then they snack in front of the TV all night.
So, you know, bringing that to light. or maybe, you know, she just doesn't have time in the morning.
Is time the barrier? What's the barrier? I really do believe that one of our
(34:59):
greatest skills and assets as health coaches is barrier identification and helping
our clients navigate and overcome barriers.
Just really being problem solvers. I don't have the solution for every barrier
that my client presents with because they have barriers that I don't have in
my life. We're different people.
So I can just get very curious about the barrier. What, if any,
(35:21):
barrier might get in the way of you having breakfast on Sunday?
And it might be time, it might be a lack of belief that it will work.
It will work, in air quotes. It might be not having any ideas on what to eat
for breakfast, or just having been indoctrinated to fasting,
and let's, you know, let's solve that barrier.
That's a big part of what our conversation is with our clients.
(35:44):
So we have to get client buy-in in
a manner of speaking right so this is where the partnership and the
idea of compromise human-to-human interaction
right is about meeting in some version of the middle and allowing your client
to kind of steamroll you because you're a self proclaimed people pleaser it's
(36:05):
not serving your client and you annalee are an expert with a,
amazing solution that's going to help this client.
And you really have to, you're really kind of in some ways, quote unquote,
obligated to stick that flag in the ground and not waver on it.
This is a proprietary foundational pillar of your program. You can't waver on it.
(36:29):
When I do business coaching with our students, I get them to come up with the
foundational pillars of their program.
So it might be eat breakfast, go to bed at 10 p.m.
Every night, and it could be one other thing, whatever, insert thing here,
take 10,000 steps, drink 48 ounces of water. You might have a longevity piece.
(36:52):
You might have a circadian rhythm piece. You might have some kind of biohack.
Maybe you like to use a continuous glucose monitor to get data.
Maybe you want your clients to have an intuitive experience.
There's foundational pillars, and we all kind of have similar but different
ones. Like, truly, most health coaches have similar foundational pillars.
There's usually some nutrition pillar, there's usually some movement pillar,
(37:12):
some lifestyle pillars like sleep and stress.
You might have a data thing, if you're kind of in the data realm,
you know, quantified self kind of realm.
When we have foundational pillars to our program, we can't waver on them.
We have to, we have to anchor to them.
That's really crucial for your, to establish yourself as an expert and a leader.
(37:33):
This is a great great questions today now i only have time for a few more i had one from,
daryl who asks is 70 too old to
start a coaching business and i think you probably know what my answer is the
answer is no it's not you're not too old why would you be too old do 70 year
olds need help with their health i know a couple 70 year olds that aren't that
(37:56):
healthy in fact i think most of the 70-year-olds I know aren't that healthy.
I think Mark Sisson's the only 70-year-old I know of that's healthy.
But I mean, when I think about, you know, my aging parents, for example,
when my dad was in his 70s, which he's not anymore, but man,
I wish he'd had a 70-year-old health coach to help him be a great 70-year-old
(38:17):
so he could be an awesome 80-year-old.
I mean, heck, this is an absolutely growing demographic.
Anybody out there who's an expert in helping 70-year-olds be healthy, it's boom time.
That was an inadvertent baby boomer joke.
But it's boom time. If you're working with aging populations,
(38:38):
they're not doing well. And if you're a 70-year-old aspiring health coach,
my hunch is, Daryl, you're probably doing pretty good. You probably figured some stuff out.
You probably figured some stuff out in your 60s or 70s that's helping you to
thrive. And now you want to help 60 and 70-year-olds.
And they could really use that help. Man, that would be so rewarding.
(38:59):
I think when I think about working with these aging populations,
I guess some of the struggles that you could come up against are.
Well there can be financial barriers right so
if they're on maybe some type of social
assistance you know retirement type fund i'm
kind of regionalizing myself here because i'm canadian and i don't know how
(39:22):
retirement funding works social you know programs work in different countries
but maybe on fixed income i guess is what i'm saying fixed income you know elderly
people might have disease states, managing through medications.
They might have really reduced appetites, especially protein appetite.
You know, folks in that demographic really trust their doctor, which is good.
(39:45):
Ultimately, hopefully they are advocating for themselves with the doctor too.
When I say they trust their doctor, I'm not mad about people trusting their
doctor, but sometimes what I found, especially with my aging parents,
and I'm sure many of us can relate to this, is that they implicitly trust the
doctor without getting a word in edgewise or without advocating for themselves.
So I think there's an opportunity for like advocacy with the doctor,
(40:07):
helping these, this aging population eat more protein, lift weight,
strength train, get stronger bone density, lean body mass.
Oh, the opportunities are endless, Daryl. Now.
Daryl's question was, is it too old to start a coaching business?
And I kind of went off on this tangent about how 70-year-olds need health coaches.
Now, is 70 years old too old for a person to start a health coaching business?
(40:30):
I don't think so, but you might be feeling maybe left behind on things like
social media. I don't know.
But by the way, there's tons of 70-year-olds going viral on TikTok, if that's your bag.
You know, the marketing efforts in the modern entrepreneurial space are quite
in the social media realm.
So that could be a little bit of a discomfort, but maybe you have a community
(40:50):
in your local region that you can anchor to.
It's, I don't think 70 is too old to start anything, quite honestly. At least I hope not.
I plan to be really productive when I'm 70 and I think you should be too, Daryl.
All right. Well, those are all the questions I had for today and they're great.
Can't wait to get more questions from you because these are awesome conversations. Thank you so much.
(41:12):
This podcast was brought to you by Primal Health Coach Institute.
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Connect with us at hello at primalhealthcoach.com and let us know why we need
(41:36):
to interview you for Health Coach Radio. Thanks for listening.
Hello, health coaches. I'm excited to be here with you.
I just had an article come across my desk, and it says work stress is the number
one threat to employee mental wellness per a report that just came out.
So this is from Wellhub's State of Work-Life Wellness Report.
And it's interesting because they did
this this survey and they surveyed 5
(00:22):
000 global employees between May and June 2024 so very recent for the state
of the work-life wellness report, work-life wellness isn't that a nice little
twist on the language work-life wellness work-life balance and it revealed several
noteworthy findings hi I'm Erin Power I'm a health coach a health
coaching educator and mentor, and your host of Health Coach Radio.
(00:46):
This podcast delves into the art, science, and business of health coaching.
Whether you're aspiring to land a coaching dream job or to embark on your own
entrepreneurial adventure, we cover it all.
Our mission is to help you grow your career, elevate your income,
change the lives of the clients who need your help, and leave a lasting mark
in this rapidly growing field.
(01:07):
It's time for health coaches to make an impact. It's time for Health Coach Radio.
Nearly half of those surveyed say work stress is the primary cause of their
deteriorating mental health.
83% would consider leaving their current employer due to a lack of focus on
(01:29):
well-being, a significant increase from 68% in 2022.
So 83%, almost all of the employees surveyed, would consider leaving their current
employer due to a lack of focus on well-being.
Okay, so what does that mean? Physical health, mental health, emotional health.
You see where this is going. You see where health coaches can come in and help,
(01:51):
right? Corporate wellness, I know, is something that a lot of coaches are very interested in.
Survey findings like this are extremely powerful. Imagine applying to a corporate
wellness job posting and you have this kind of data available to you. You can track this down.
I always get my health coaching news from athletetechnews.com.
(02:12):
Athletetechnews.com. It's a great repository of this kind of article.
But imagine bringing this kind of information to a job interview,
to an application process, if you wanted to go and work in corporate wellness.
A sizable amount of employees, 88%, literally just about everyone,
say well-being support is as important to them as their salary.
(02:35):
89% of employees say they will only consider companies that prioritize employee
well-being when seeking a new employer.
Guys, this is huge for us. This is immense for us. well-being in the workplace,
right? This is preventative health, right?
Preventative health. A lot of health coaches want to get into the preventative
health space, right? And this is truly preventative health.
Let's get people at work where they're struggling the most and fold these sort
(03:00):
of health-supporting endeavors into the workforce, and then the workforce improves.
And employers love that, and insurance companies love that. And,
you know, individual feels better.
They feel like they're being seen and supported by their employer.
They feel more empowered and inspired to come into work and do a good job.
And they have more to give to their families afterwards. It is all upside.
(03:24):
So really, really powerful statistics. I'll just give you those few statistics again.
47% of those surveyed say work stress is their primary cause of deteriorating mental health.
83% would consider leaving their current employer due to a lack of focus on well-being,
88% say well-being support is as important to them as their salary,
(03:46):
and 89% say they will only consider working for companies that prioritize employee well-being.
Wild. Big numbers. I can't imagine how much that's skyrocketed over the years, right?
So something to inspire you and empower you.
If you wanted to get into corporate wellness. All right, speaking of inspiring
(04:08):
and empowering, I got some inspiring and empowering questions today.
And actually, I wanted to kick off with an anecdote, if you will permit me,
because one of the questions that came in was about pay, getting paid as a health coach.
I'm going to address this. But the question was interesting because it was talking
about being paid as a health coach employee, but it had a little sort of a commentary
(04:30):
around how much private practice health coach should make.
So just, I want to talk about that private practice health coaching pay scale,
like when you're working for yourself, how to set your price, if you will.
And then I'm going to go into the question that was submitted about employee pay for a health coach.
So just a small thing on what to charge if you're in private practice,
(04:52):
because I think this is one of the most commonly asked questions I've ever gotten.
And I get a lot of questions from health coaches.
This has got to be right up there in top five of all time asked questions.
So let's just dive into a little bit about how much you can charge if you're
a private practice health coach.
So this is coming from me, one health coach, one health coach in private practice.
This is my kind of opinion. This is my point of view. And it might differ from
(05:15):
other things you've heard.
But what I want you to take away from my personal take on what to charge as
a health coach is that it kind of actually empowers you to decide what you charge as a health coach.
Because there actually is no standard pay scale that we should be anchoring to, you get to decide.
Okay, so real quick, real quick little anecdote slash teaching moment on what to charge.
(05:38):
If you're a private practice health coach, that means you're going into business
for yourself, you decide the price tag of your services.
Now, by way of disclaimer, I will be really honest with you.
No honest share, vulnerable share for a moment here, gang.
I might be one of the least equipped people to talk to you about money stuff,
(06:00):
because I'm perpetually working on my money mindset,
money mindset, who's heard of this notion of the money mindset,
you might have heard of the scarcity mindset, an abundance mindset,
a prosperity mindset, there's all kinds of ways we can talk about money mindset.
And I'm working on mine, because I'm a Gen Xer. And I came from boomer parents.
And my boomer parents have this certain perspective on how you earn money and
(06:22):
how, you know, how we exchange service for paychecks.
And it's kind of old school thinking. So I'm always working on this, right?
You know, who am I to charge my clients thousands of dollars for a solution?
Well, they haven't solved it on their own. And I'm an expert with a solution.
So yeah, I got to work on this, right?
So what I can offer you, while I can't offer you the most incredible money mindset
(06:45):
pep talk you're ever going to get, because I'm still working on mine,
quite honestly, what I can offer you is some real advice.
So I want to start with an anecdote. This was so interesting to me.
I had a client consultation today. And she was awesome.
We had such a great conversation. We really connected.
She reminded me of me. It was just like a one-to-one, a mano-a-mano,
(07:06):
person-to-person conversation that was so just flowed really well.
And in these conversations, I often ask my prospective clients what they've tried before.
Really, really important question to ask in a discovery call.
You want to sort of absolve them from past failures, right?
So they might say, well, I tried Weight Watchers and that worked for a while.
And then you'll say, well, it worked for a while. Tell me what worked about
it. And they'll say, well, I like that I could eat a variety of foods,
(07:28):
but I didn't really like tracking my points.
Cool. So you like eating a variety of foods. Great.
Oh, I tried keto for a while. What did you like about keto?
Well, the food was so yummy. I just found it really unsustainable when I was
like on vacation and stuff.
Okay. So you like protein foods? You like meat? Like we get a lot of clues from
what people have tried before.
So I would encourage you, this is to me is a non-negotiable part of a discovery
(07:48):
call when you're in private practice is going through the lessons learned from
previous attempts, right? So I always have this conversation.
I'm not going to mention the program that this person did, but the crazy thing
is I'd never heard of this program before.
And in the last three days, three different people have brought it up to me
as something they've tried before, okay?
(08:10):
So this is a program that a private practice health coach like me created.
It's a weight loss program.
It's like a 90 day program. It's inexpensive.
It's like 75 bucks. And you run through this program for 90 days.
And there's a Facebook community associated with it. So it's like a big group
program, sort of short duration, big group program, inexpensive.
(08:32):
This person I was speaking to on the phone, she had done four rounds of it.
So she'd invested several hundreds of dollars to do four rounds of it and never
gotten any results, but thought, well, it's inexpensive. I mean,
the barrier to entry is quite low.
And what else was she going to do? So it was kind of like, I might as well keep doing it.
But what was interesting was this prospective client told me that the creator
(08:57):
of this program that she was doing had wound up on Dragon's Den.
Okay, Dragon's Den is the Canadian equivalent of Shark Tank.
So you have a business and you go in front of the sharks or the dragons,
whatever the scary animal is that's of entrepreneurs that are and investors
that are sitting in front of.
And you pitch to get funding to leverage, launch, grow your business.
(09:22):
To be honest with you, I've never watched an episode, but I get the gist. Okay.
So the founder, the creator of this weight loss program went onto Dragon's Den
and pitched to the dragons, her fabulous weight loss program.
And in her pitch, she mentioned to the Dragons that she'd made $7.5 million
last year in her weight loss business.
(09:43):
Now, it was interesting to me, and this client mentioned this to me.
She said, can you believe that this health...
Nutrition coach made $7.5 million on a $75 program last year.
She said, I paid for that four times and I didn't get any results,
but she made $7.5 million.
It was just interesting. First of all, fascinating that somebody in our space
(10:06):
can make that kind of money on an inexpensive program.
It just goes to show you how far reach can go because every time she runs this
program, she gets like 5,000 people. I don't need 5,000 people in it.
Can you imagine coaching 5,000 people. I really can't.
But like your mileage may vary. So if you had a huge audience,
you could sell a $75 program and make $7.5 million.
(10:28):
But I don't know about you, I don't have an audience like that.
Like if she's, if she's enrolling 5000 people, every quarter,
she must have a very large audience, right? I don't have an audience like that.
So when I price my program, which is a six month program, here's how I kind
of figure out how I'm going to do package pricing, package pricing is the way
to go rather than per session pricing.
(10:49):
This is just a small little educational moment.
I determine how much time the client is actually going to spend with me,
and then I multiply it by what I perceive my hourly rate to be.
And when I perceive my hourly rate, the first thing I do is I double it because
I'm always going to sell myself short on my hourly rate.
So whatever you think your hourly rate is, $100 an hour, immediately double it.
So say $200 an hour, and then work out how many hours you're actually going
(11:12):
to be working on client stuff. So let's say you have a 12-week program.
And in the 12-week program, you do a 30-minute weekly coaching call with your
clients, plus maybe a one-hour kickoff call, maybe a one-hour exit call,
and maybe you're doing 30 minutes a week of client-like administration and client prep work.
So in a 12-week program, you're putting in 14 hours of work on the client themselves.
(11:36):
Multiply that by your hourly rate, $200, $2,800.
That's a perfectly fine place to start with your pricing.
But then, here's where my advice comes in, then you got to sprinkle in some feelings.
So personally, I'm doing this work because I want an income,
but I also want an impact and I want to help people.
(11:58):
So I go by feeling. Does this feel like the right amount?
Would $2,800, does that feel right? Would $2,500 feel better?
Do I like the idea of bringing it into the low, you know, for some reason $2,500
feels like low four figures. I don't know why.
It's like a quarter of $10,000. I don't know why my, you know,
again, my money mindset's a little weird. or would it feel better to bump this
(12:21):
up to $3,000 and convey even more value? You go by feel.
I think the price has to feel right. So to close the loop on this client who
I spoke with today, I told her the price of my program for six months.
I told her the price and she said, oh, that's really reasonable.
And I felt so good about that. I felt so good. And she signed up.
(12:44):
So she had access to a $75 program that she had already done and she's familiar
with the coach and this coach had been on Dragon's Den and big deal.
And instead, she decided to spend a lot more with me because we had a good conversation
and I could convey the value of a higher price tag.
That's the thing. When I say you have to go by feel, when you practice the idea
of pitching and saying that price out loud for what you offer, does it feel congruent?
(13:09):
Because you might practice your pitch and what I offer, your offer,
the solution that you offer, which I'm not going to talk about how to craft
an offer in this conversation. That's a whole nother conversation.
But if you have a good offer and you say it out loud and then you state the
price, the price has to match the thing you just said, the offer you just made.
And you just have to do that congruency work yourself, I think.
(13:30):
One of the bits of sort of business coaching feedback that I've received over
the years that never quite sat right with me is raise your prices,
raise your prices, raise your prices.
Well, raise your vibration, raise your value, raise the value,
improve the offer, get great results. And then the price will raise itself in
a manner of speaking, but it has to feel right.
(13:51):
Okay. That's my little kickoff lesson of the day. I hope that was helpful.
All right. I'm going to get into a couple of questions that were submitted and I'm excited to.
So the reason why I came up with this, how much to charge as a private practice
health coach is because Tiffany asked a question about how much you should get
paid as a, or how you should get paid as a staff health coach.
(14:12):
So she says, we know what to expect to charge when we're seeking clients on
our own, but is it normal to just get paid an hourly salary if you work for
an office that hires you as a health coach?
So this is an awesome, great question. I am excited about the existence of this
question because I love hearing that health coaches are working in offices as health coaches.
(14:34):
You know, eight years ago, if you'd asked me if I saw this happening,
I might've said, yeah, I guess maybe that could be cool.
But now it's a very legitimate employment path.
In fact, at Primal Health Coach Institute, we've just created a course called
How to Land a Job as a Health Coach, which as far as we can tell is the only
how to get a job course for health coaches that exists because we looked for
(14:55):
one. We tried to find one we couldn't find once we made one.
And in orchestrating that course, we first of all, we interviewed subject matter
experts, people who hire health coaches into employment situations?
What are they looking for?
How can a health coach really stand out? We also did a lot of diving into the
(15:16):
current batch of job listings.
So when I was doing that research on the job listings, I was just scouring health
coach job listings for literally years.
I've been doing this, but I really zeroed in it for a few months while we were creating this course.
And to answer Tiffany's question, which is, is it normal to just get paid hourly?
My answer is it seems to be pretty normal it seems to be pretty normal I've
(15:40):
I've literally seen it split right down the middle hourly rate or salary brought on as salaried staff.
Now from my research many of the postings offering to pay hourly are kind of
part-time roles, you know, where you kind of, you have a, you have a shift that you're working and,
(16:04):
that that's pretty typical to me. That feels...
Pretty reasonable that that would be an hourly rate. I'm hoping it's a lot more
than minimum wage, but I'm going to talk about how much this hourly rate is in a second. Okay.
So, you know, you are a skilled trade. If you're a well-qualified health coach
with a lot of health coaching ability, you are a skilled trade in some ways.
I know that sounds crazy, but I like thinking of it that way because,
(16:27):
you know, when I hire an electrician, I want the best electrician who's not
going to, you know, improperly wire my house and I'll pay skilled trade wages
for a good tradesperson.
And I kind of, for some reason, health coaching is so interesting because it's
an art, it's a science, it's kind of a trade, it's a vocation,
it's a dance, it's a skill, it's a craft, there's a lot to it, right?
(16:48):
So you should be paid what you're worth, whether it's hourly or salary.
We'll talk about that in a second.
If you do find one of these part-time sort of shift schedule jobs,
I think it's a really neat thing for a certain type of health coach.
For example, if you're a health coach that, you know, ostensibly sees yourself
going into private practice, well, starting off as an hourly employee in any
(17:12):
kind of organization is just really great.
You can pay the bills and get some health coaching practice while you build your thing on the side.
So I like that. There was, for example, one job I saw when I was researching
for this health coaching job course, and the health coaching shift was like
Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or something like that, Thursday, Friday,
(17:33):
Saturday, three days of the week, full time day, three days a week.
So I ended up being a 2430 hour work week, which is almost full time, but it was three days.
So you'd be hustling for three days on the phone with clients.
But then you'd have all the rest of the days to, you know, build your own thing if you want to.
Now, what if you don't want to, you don't want to build your own thing,
you want to go get a job as a health coach, this is the most exciting thing
(17:55):
is there's tons of full-time jobs as health coaches coming on and more and more.
So I have seen some larger health coaching positions that will hire health coaches
on full-time with benefits and salary.
And when I see these positions, the salary ranges vary tremendously.
And I'm,
(18:16):
I have a few thoughts on that.
I think that the apparent discrepancy, and I don't even know if discrepancy
is the origin of this question.
I don't know if Tiffany feels like maybe she's not being paid enough or what
that is, but I have seen personally discrepancies in rates of pay.
(18:39):
I've seen part-time health coaching jobs that are paying $11 an hour to $100 an hour.
I've seen salaries in the ranges of $25,000 to $125,000 or higher, right?
So major discrepancy. It doesn't seem to be very uniform.
You know, that's probably the same for many industries, quite frankly.
But here's where we can probably, you know, intellectualize why we're seeing
(19:03):
this in health coaching.
First of all, health coaching is still relatively new in terms of hiring health
coaches in organizations and organizations are maybe figuring out where to slide
the health coaching paycheck into their overhead costs, right?
So I think about that when any organization that's growing who needs to bring
(19:25):
on staff to help them grow has to first of all slide that staff in kind of an
hourly part-time rate to see if they can make it work.
Is the juice worth the squeeze? Should we bring this person on with more hours,
maybe put them in salary?
So in some cases, I think if you get a role with an organization that's paying
you an hourly wage and you like it and you're getting great health coaching
(19:47):
experience and you're feeling really called to this and this is lighting you up.
I think there's something to be said about getting your foot in the door.
We're very much in the getting one's foot in the door stage of health coaching as a job.
So imagine getting your foot in the door of a medical clinic that then immediately
sees the value of you on the staff and they said, wow, you know,
this health coach is really getting great patient outcomes. Let's bring them
(20:09):
on full time, full benefits.
You might become part of the middle management or senior leadership someday.
You never know. Maybe you become the head health coach, right?
I love the idea of this, of health coaches going into the workforce because
the workforce has opened up to us now and showing these organizations how health
coaching makes a difference in patient or client outcomes.
(20:32):
And then those organizations bolstering the health coaching arm of the business
and you becoming one of these sort of early adopters, one of these early staff
members, you know, employee number one on the health coaching team.
Another factor kind of similar is that health coaching is working its way into
becoming a proven part of an allied health team.
(20:53):
And so as our importance becomes more clear, more staffing budget and hours will be allocated to us.
The other thing is that there's a wide range of employers. This really wowed
me when I was researching this.
You might have an employer who's an influencer, who goes on Dragon's Den and
(21:14):
make $7.5 million a year and just needs co-coaches to manage their 5,000 person coaching program.
I've seen some of these influencers scoff as we might, scoff as we might at
the online influencer. Some of these folks are making fat stacks and have big payrolls.
You could become the second in command to an influencer health coach and be
(21:38):
making $150,000 a year supporting their business. Pretty cool.
I literally saw a job like that when I was researching for our health coaching jobs course.
Or you might end up going to work for an altruistic, maybe a regional health organization.
Maybe this feels important to you. Maybe you live in a medium small community
(21:58):
and the local doctor's office is trying to create an integrative model to help
the citizens of the community.
And, you know, those regional health organizations probably They have tightly
controlled and allocated budgets, so you might get in there with kind of a lower
hourly wage, and that just might be an affect of that part of the industry.
So I think, well, I don't think, I know that the range of pay is astronomical.
(22:26):
It ranges tremendously.
We all can find something that fits in with what we want to be doing with our
lives as a health coach, whether it's part-time or full-time,
you want salary plus benefits, or you just kind of want an hourly wage,
or you want to become part of something, you want to get on the ground floor,
something that's going to grow.
There is nothing but opportunity in front of us. Nothing but opportunity.
(22:46):
This is one of the greatest times to try to get a job as a health coach.
By the way, our How to Land a Health Coach job course tells you exactly how
to do that. We wanted to prepare health coaches to seek out the job postings
that were legitimate, that were asking for the right thing and know how to apply for them.
There's opportunities abound for all of us.
(23:08):
But to answer your question, Tiffany, I think it's perfectly normal to be on as an hourly employee.
I hope you're being paid fairly for the work you're doing. I hope you're getting
a great deal of experience and helping lots and lots of people.
I'm really excited that you have this job, actually. And I hope that you're excited about it too.
(23:29):
Are you a health coach who wants more hands-on coaching training?
Are you thinking about becoming board certified?
Primal Health Coach Institute's Master Coach Certification Program checks both of those boxes.
It's live, so you get to ask questions as you go. And we cap the number of students
for each round so you get individualized attention and plenty of opportunity
(23:49):
to practice your coaching skills with faculty and people.
Coaches become great with experience, and this course fast-tracks that educational
experience so you don't have to spend years learning directly from clients.
You'll know exactly how to coach for optimal results in just 12 weeks.
It also prepares you to sit for the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaches
(24:12):
exam so you can become a board-certified health coach.
We only offer this certification program twice a year, and it fills up fast.
So be sure to learn more at primalhealthcoach.com and reserve your seat soon.
All right, my next question is from Annalie. And this is cool because this is
a client question, sort of navigating, maybe like a client who is pushing back.
(24:37):
So client relations, always an interesting one.
She says, so many people say they aren't able to eat breakfast and aren't hungry
in the morning, but it's a vital part of my program.
How do you deal with this she goes
on to say i'm a born people pleaser so when people push back
on my coaching ideas and are firm about it
(24:58):
i feel the need to just agree so this is
cool annalee and i have a similar approach it sounds like now i also encourage
my clients to eat breakfast and i just want to start by saying you might not
and that's okay these are just examples right you might be an intermittent fasting
coach you might think breakfast is a goofy construct for annalee for myself,
(25:18):
for other people, we encourage breakfast. And you know what's beautiful about that?
Everyone's mileage may vary. And there's a health coaching client for all of us.
There's the clients who need to skip breakfast. There's the clients who need to eat breakfast.
Annalie and I have clients who need to eat breakfast.
So Annalie, you describe this as a crucial part of your methodology.
(25:40):
But when people push back on it, you kind of fold.
So I want to really articulate the leadership role of a health coach and how
we stand in that leadership role, which frankly, our clients are expecting of us.
So coaching is a partnership that's built on trust and is not,
(26:03):
a boss subordinate relationship so the coach isn't
the boss and the client's not the subordinate who follows
along with whatever the coach says and also vice versa the client is also not
the boss it is a partnership that being said the health coach is in a leadership
role and the health coach is the person in the relationship with the expertise
and the solution so when i say that you have the expertise and the solution
(26:25):
you know a thing or two about you know how you want this person to eat,
In this case, you believe strongly that they should eat breakfast.
Let's not forget the client also has expertise.
The client has the expertise of what they will and won't do.
And I made that sound a little more petulant than I meant for it to.
(26:45):
Clients aren't being naughty. They're not pushing back on us to be bratty about it.
They just have beliefs. They come to us with longstanding beliefs about how,
when, and what to eat and why.
Or how to exercise, how to move, how to sleep, how to stress.
All the things that they're struggling to unwind and unpack and they need our
help with, they have a lot of preconceived beliefs, a lot of programming.
(27:06):
So just on its face, you can see that there's a ton of compromise required in
a coaching relationship, right?
You're an expert and so is the client.
If you both insist on being the expert, you'll butt head, so there has to be some compromise.
(27:26):
And as the leader of the relationship, it's your job to facilitate compromise,
which doesn't mean that you back
down, because you backing down and people pleasing is not a compromise.
That's you backing down and the client, they're winning.
Not a great choice of words, but we don't want to put the client into the boss
role and you into the subordinate role.
People pleasing is not a compromise. And by the way, I don't think,
(27:48):
and you know this, Annalie,
because you self-identify quite honestly as a people pleaser, you
already know that people pleasing doesn't serve anyone it doesn't
make anyone better no one gets better if they get what they want without
a without a bit of compromise you know
in some ways we're training ourselves and training the other people
in our lives to compromise with us compromise is literally a two-person dance
(28:10):
so when you back down you're not facilitating the opportunity to compromise
so do you believe this is a rhetorical because i don't think Annelies on the call. She might be.
But do you believe that breakfast is crucial for your clients or is it just
kind of a nice thing to have? If they want to skip over it, that's completely fine.
(28:32):
Okay. So you have to ask yourself, how crucial is breakfast?
Is it like this is a foundational pillar of my course, of my program?
This is a foundational pillar or it's just something neat that I like to try
to get people to do if they want to.
If the answer to this thought experiment is no this is like a non-negotiable
like my whole program is built with this pillar in place i need my clients to
(28:52):
eat breakfast it's non-negotiable we must focus on it no matter what then you
bring that energy into the relationship when you,
compromise with your client so it it can't be okay we'll skip the breakfast
thing sally you're right i'm sorry i'm sorry sally to put you out with the breakfast
thing it can't be that because then you're compromising on something that you
(29:14):
contemplate to be a foundational principle of your methodology.
And that's not an appropriate compromise.
Here's what I think is an appropriate compromise. How can we make this breakfast
thing, which is non-negotiable, how can we make it doable?
Right? So we just get down into the brass tacks of like good old habit change.
(29:37):
So instead of no breakfast, it's like, what's the smallest amount of breakfast we can agree on.
Just from the perspective of habit change, I'm personally a really big fan of
BJ Fogg's approach to habit change.
So his book, Tiny Habits, I really like that book, because I think it's more
pertinent for what we do.
Because I think when we work with clients, we are working with people who are
(29:59):
resistant to change or have tried a lot of change and haven't had success with change.
So we have to get them feeling these tiny little successes, the small,
quick win. The small quick win.
Okay, so if the objective is Sally eats breakfast seven days a week,
what's the smallest amount of breakfast we can get Sally to eat?
Sally, can you have breakfast on Sunday?
How about if we have breakfast on Sunday this week?
(30:20):
And Sally could have breakfast on Sunday every week because she agrees.
She's in an agreement with you.
She signed on the dotted line. She signed the client agreement.
Part of your client agreement is the client shows up and does the work.
And part of the client agreement is I, the coach, I move with you.
We work together in partnership.
It wouldn't be a good partner relationship if you let Sally steamroll you away
(30:44):
from this breakfast idea.
That's not a good partnership. And Sally didn't agree to that.
She agreed to being in a partnership with you.
So break the breakfast down into the smallest doable thing.
I would not, I have a similar methodology as you do, Anna Lee,
where my clients eat breakfast.
And I would not allow my clients to say, no, I don't want to do that.
(31:07):
I would say, let's see if we can do a small amount of it. What's the smallest thing you can do?
Is it one day a week? Is it, are there parameters around the breakfast?
Is it like, For me, my clients, I want them to have a protein-dominant breakfast.
If they're right now currently having oatmeal and waffles, and I want them to
have maybe a couple eggs, it's like, can you have an egg instead of the waffle
or an egg instead of the oatmeal? Can we throw an egg in there and take one
(31:29):
of those other things away?
We're going to break it down into tiny, tiny increments. And I do think there's
power in these tiny, tiny increments.
So what happens over time then is if Sally can do breakfast,
let's say she agrees to try it on Sunday.
Then you have your next weekly coaching call. Sally, how did breakfast go on
Sunday? She'll say, well, I managed it okay. And she'll talk, you know, talk about it.
(31:50):
All right, Sally, can we try that again? Same thing. Breakfast on Sunday, breakfast on Sunday.
I would hang with that for a while until Sally starts to notice whatever you
expect the outcome to be.
So for example, I get my clients to eat breakfast because when they have a substantial
breakfast, their appetite and their cravings and their mindless eating spontaneously diminishes.
(32:10):
And for my clients, that's immense.
That is such an immense win.
They're bouncing up the walls. They're screaming from the mountaintops.
They're so excited that their mindless snacking went away.
So I want my client to experience what it feels like to be well-fed so the mindless snacking goes away.
If your client does this on Sunday...
(32:30):
She might notice, you know, I had that big breakfast on Sunday morning and then
like I didn't really have sugar cravings that day. I wasn't really nibbling
and snacking all day like I usually do.
And over time, if you put down enough reps, the client's going to make the correlation.
Like when I eat breakfast, I don't munch all day long.
And I can see why munching all day long is maybe holding me back from my health goals.
(32:51):
So perhaps this breakfast thing, maybe there's some magic there.
So I do think there's something to be said.
I do really believe that health coaches have to try to get their clients some kind of quick win.
That's the way I describe it. So what is the thing, if they go run this experiment
that you've asked them to run, breakfast on Sunday, what is the data that they
need to bring back from that experiment and report to you?
(33:12):
Okay, so you might say, Sally, what if we just had breakfast one day this week?
Sunday, how does Sunday feel? You, Sally, you will collaborate on that.
You're not telling Sally that at Sunday you'll come to an agreement.
Let's say you come to an agreement that it's going to be Sunday.
Once you've kind of established the parameters of the goal, you might say,
(33:32):
you know what I'd really like, Sally, if you're okay with it,
is to just keep track of how your appetite and cravings show up for the rest of the day.
That's really the important data we want to gather from this breakfast experiment.
Does that sound good? So we have a little accountability piece now attached to this goal.
Sally's going to pay attention to after she has breakfast, does her hunger and
cravings, do they change for the rest of the day.
(33:53):
And she'll report back and say, yes, they did or no, they didn't.
And you'll continue to kind of move through this goal from there.
You need to be okay with getting them to your ultimate end goal eventually in tiny baby steps.
So break this task down into the smallest doable step for your client.
(34:13):
And, you know, get to the root of why Sally feels such friction at the idea
of breakfast, right? Because that's the other thing too. Why doesn't Sally want to eat breakfast?
Is it because she's been kind of indoctrinated into intermittent fasting and
she's been reading all the books and following all the podcasts and she thinks,
well, if I'm supposed to intermittent fast because women are supposed to do
(34:35):
that, maybe she picked that up.
And, you know, that's where you want to lean on your coaching skills.
Is that working? Could there be another way?
A lot of times people don't want to eat breakfast because they have their biggest
meal at night before bed and then they snack in front of the TV all night.
So, you know, bringing that to light. or maybe, you know, she just doesn't have time in the morning.
Is time the barrier? What's the barrier? I really do believe that one of our
(34:59):
greatest skills and assets as health coaches is barrier identification and helping
our clients navigate and overcome barriers.
Just really being problem solvers. I don't have the solution for every barrier
that my client presents with because they have barriers that I don't have in
my life. We're different people.
So I can just get very curious about the barrier. What, if any,
(35:21):
barrier might get in the way of you having breakfast on Sunday?
And it might be time, it might be a lack of belief that it will work.
It will work, in air quotes. It might be not having any ideas on what to eat
for breakfast, or just having been indoctrinated to fasting,
and let's, you know, let's solve that barrier.
That's a big part of what our conversation is with our clients.
(35:44):
So we have to get client buy-in in
a manner of speaking right so this is where the partnership and the
idea of compromise human-to-human interaction
right is about meeting in some version of the middle and allowing your client
to kind of steamroll you because you're a self proclaimed people pleaser it's
(36:05):
not serving your client and you annalee are an expert with a,
amazing solution that's going to help this client.
And you really have to, you're really kind of in some ways, quote unquote,
obligated to stick that flag in the ground and not waver on it.
This is a proprietary foundational pillar of your program. You can't waver on it.
(36:29):
When I do business coaching with our students, I get them to come up with the
foundational pillars of their program.
So it might be eat breakfast, go to bed at 10 p.m.
Every night, and it could be one other thing, whatever, insert thing here,
take 10,000 steps, drink 48 ounces of water. You might have a longevity piece.
(36:52):
You might have a circadian rhythm piece. You might have some kind of biohack.
Maybe you like to use a continuous glucose monitor to get data.
Maybe you want your clients to have an intuitive experience.
There's foundational pillars, and we all kind of have similar but different
ones. Like, truly, most health coaches have similar foundational pillars.
There's usually some nutrition pillar, there's usually some movement pillar,
(37:12):
some lifestyle pillars like sleep and stress.
You might have a data thing, if you're kind of in the data realm,
you know, quantified self kind of realm.
When we have foundational pillars to our program, we can't waver on them.
We have to, we have to anchor to them.
That's really crucial for your, to establish yourself as an expert and a leader.
(37:33):
This is a great great questions today now i only have time for a few more i had one from,
daryl who asks is 70 too old to
start a coaching business and i think you probably know what my answer is the
answer is no it's not you're not too old why would you be too old do 70 year
olds need help with their health i know a couple 70 year olds that aren't that
(37:56):
healthy in fact i think most of the 70-year-olds I know aren't that healthy.
I think Mark Sisson's the only 70-year-old I know of that's healthy.
But I mean, when I think about, you know, my aging parents, for example,
when my dad was in his 70s, which he's not anymore, but man,
I wish he'd had a 70-year-old health coach to help him be a great 70-year-old
(38:17):
so he could be an awesome 80-year-old.
I mean, heck, this is an absolutely growing demographic.
Anybody out there who's an expert in helping 70-year-olds be healthy, it's boom time.
That was an inadvertent baby boomer joke.
But it's boom time. If you're working with aging populations,
(38:38):
they're not doing well. And if you're a 70-year-old aspiring health coach,
my hunch is, Daryl, you're probably doing pretty good. You probably figured some stuff out.
You probably figured some stuff out in your 60s or 70s that's helping you to
thrive. And now you want to help 60 and 70-year-olds.
And they could really use that help. Man, that would be so rewarding.
(38:59):
I think when I think about working with these aging populations,
I guess some of the struggles that you could come up against are.
Well there can be financial barriers right so
if they're on maybe some type of social
assistance you know retirement type fund i'm
kind of regionalizing myself here because i'm canadian and i don't know how
(39:22):
retirement funding works social you know programs work in different countries
but maybe on fixed income i guess is what i'm saying fixed income you know elderly
people might have disease states, managing through medications.
They might have really reduced appetites, especially protein appetite.
You know, folks in that demographic really trust their doctor, which is good.
(39:45):
Ultimately, hopefully they are advocating for themselves with the doctor too.
When I say they trust their doctor, I'm not mad about people trusting their
doctor, but sometimes what I found, especially with my aging parents,
and I'm sure many of us can relate to this, is that they implicitly trust the
doctor without getting a word in edgewise or without advocating for themselves.
So I think there's an opportunity for like advocacy with the doctor,
(40:07):
helping these, this aging population eat more protein, lift weight,
strength train, get stronger bone density, lean body mass.
Oh, the opportunities are endless, Daryl. Now.
Daryl's question was, is it too old to start a coaching business?
And I kind of went off on this tangent about how 70-year-olds need health coaches.
Now, is 70 years old too old for a person to start a health coaching business?
(40:30):
I don't think so, but you might be feeling maybe left behind on things like
social media. I don't know.
But by the way, there's tons of 70-year-olds going viral on TikTok, if that's your bag.
You know, the marketing efforts in the modern entrepreneurial space are quite
in the social media realm.
So that could be a little bit of a discomfort, but maybe you have a community
(40:50):
in your local region that you can anchor to.
It's, I don't think 70 is too old to start anything, quite honestly. At least I hope not.
I plan to be really productive when I'm 70 and I think you should be too, Daryl.
All right. Well, those are all the questions I had for today and they're great.
Can't wait to get more questions from you because these are awesome conversations. Thank you so much.
(41:12):
This podcast was brought to you by Primal Health Coach Institute.
To learn more about how to become a successful health coach,
get in touch with us by visiting primalhealthcoach.com forward slash call.
Or if you're already a successful health coach, practitioner,
influencer, or thought leader with a thriving business and an interesting story,
we'd love to hear from you.
Connect with us at hello at primalhealthcoach.com and let us know why we need
(41:36):
to interview you for Health Coach Radio. Thanks for listening.
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