The Number One Reason You’re Not Being Heard [Ep # 187]

On this episode, I’m going to break down the number 1 reason why you are constantly being unheard and unseen on social media. Stay tuned. 

Hey guys! Andrea here. So grateful for you being here and listening and also super grateful for so many people that have been dropping me messages saying how much they love my podcast and how much it’s inspiring them. It really drives me to keep doing this, so keep those things coming. It brightens my day and it makes me super excited to continue to record these episodes. And today’s episode was inspired by a launch that just finished. I’ve spoken about Brandon Lucero and his 4X video methodology on previous episodes. I’m also a mentorship coach in his million dollar mentorship level. And in that level, that’s where we really dive deep into the student’s marketing and messaging and creating their methodology. Something that is going to be massively enhanced and focused on in the maximized practitioner program. And the part that bothered me the most is the medical doctors, the functional doctors, the therapists; all those people that joined the program are really no different than you. And they’re all coming from this same constrained way of their education, of beliefs around how they should be showing up in the world and therefore their messaging is constantly getting stifled. And so, I wanted to have a conversation today about why that is and why I know you are doing all of the things on social media and you are not getting the attraction that you want to.

I am seeing so many of you guys hustling,, I am looking at the post on social media, I’m hearing about all of the work that you are putting out there and the struggle of showing up for your patients or clients. And then shifting gears on social media or shifting gears on writing the emails. And I so understand why you have fallen to this trap and you are not getting the results that you were anticipating. And there’s a big reason why this is happening and that’s exactly what we’re going to be talking about today. I’ve been sitting in the silence for the past couple of weeks and really trying to listen to what it is that our community needs. And consistently I’m seeing practitioners wanting to learn the steps, wanting to learn the tech, wanting to learn what to do. But there’s so much about being heard about people hearing what you’re putting out there, raising their hand and wanting to work with you. That is not tactical. And it all started when we were in school, it all started when we’re put into this machine; for a lack of a better word. Where there was a certain rhythm to this, these are the classes you needed to do. This was what you needed to learn and pass in order to meet your requirements upon graduation. We had to jump through all of these hoops, we had to go through all of the stress, and we had to withstand all of this pain. And we’re basically whipped into shape as to what a stoic and responsible and upright emotionless practitioner needs to look like. At least I can speak for naturopaths, I can’t speak for all professions.

And so when we graduate and we realize that we have to basically break ourselves down all over again to now become more humanized in order to attract people into our offices. It is a massive painful shift to come to a realization to make and it isn’t your fault. As we were in school we’re surrounded by like-minded people we would speak things and everybody around us would just get it. So there’s no need for us to learn how to market ourselves, how to use language that is going to attract our ideal patients or clients. Let alone anybody who’d want to work with us because we were just in this little practitioner bubble, like I like to say. Where everyone around us was just like drinking the same drink, it was super easy to have a conversation. Everybody was already bought in, and that was just how it was. Even in the last couple of years, where again, I’m speaking from a naturopath perspective. But I assume a lot of colleges are the same where you now start practicing those skills. But you still weren’t practicing those skills as an independent practitioner. You were still practicing the skills that you know you’re evaluators wanted you to do. That you know your supervisors wanted you to show. You still didn’t have the autonomy, because you still have to jump through the hoops. You still had to pass your courses, you had to pass your rotations, and you had to get all of your numbers. Like there was still this machinery about even engaging with patients or clients while we were in school. 

Again, you’re in this practitioner bubble and then of course what happens in school is they will bring in speakers who are highly successful. Because it wouldn’t be appropriate to bring in speakers that are struggling or that are going to peel back the curtain as to what reality looks like on the other side of the doors from being inside of school and then bursting that practitioner bubble and entering into the real world. As a student, we were just completely immersed in our, you know, speakers were coming in there being successful, companies were coming in and they’re trying about their products on how would this particular product made this so and so practitioners’ business would grow to X amount of dollars. Then we see our teachers and professors and we look at them as higher up than us. Then look at how successful they are and what their private practices like and all of these things. So again we were just being immersed like this practitioner bubble where everything looks safe, everything looks possible, everything looks real, and everything looks amazing. And then that bubble bursts on the day that you graduate and you are now in the real world. And by this point in time you are already burnt out. You are done with learning, you are done with jumping through hoops, and you feel like the worst is behind you. And then you realize very quickly that the real world does not understand you. It does not understand your language. It doesn’t understand how your doctor speaks, it doesn’t understand why you’re showing up on social media so cold, rhyming up steadies and stats and something like that. The real world doesn’t get that. 

And I remember going through that journey myself, when I graduated I thought that it was the naturopathic way or no way. Like I was totally on that one side, there was no spectrum for me, it was just black or white. It was either all-natural cures everything, all-natural does all the things, all-natural was all magic. And that was all I was trying to literally spew on people and try to convince them that my way was the right way and I did that for probably the first couple of years and every time I got resistance, it was such a struggle for me to understand where that resistance was coming from. Because I was speaking the doctor language I was taught, I was being very ‘here’s the research, here’s what I witnessed here’s how it is. This is just the way it should be, naturopathic medicine cures everything’. And I just found that I could see people’s eyes just glaze over and it was a struggle trying to get new people in and trying to convince them that’s why I feel the need to convince them to work with me. 

It wasn’t until I came to the realization that I really needed to break down the person that school had made me become. Break down the idea of what I thought real life was going to look like, break down this anger that I had of why I need to learn more. Why is this part of my journey harder than what it was like in school, why is it not over, why can’t I get off this roller coaster, what is going on here? I had to break out of this box that I put myself into. I put my ideas of what being a licensed practitioner look like and I had to completely break them down. And I had to go back to that fourth-grade level and start speaking to the people that I wanted to help, the people that I wanted to serve from their perspective. And that was a huge shift in my ego that was a huge shift in my mindset. That was a huge shift in how I was perceiving my world that I had literally been whipped into shape to be and perform. And if you don’t stay this way, then you’re a bad practitioner and you’re going to get flagged and etc. all of these fears are coming to the surface. 

And I kind of want to let that all go and understand that the whole idea of meeting someone where they’re at is really the place that I needed to come from. It wasn’t from I know everything, it wasn’t from creating a treatment plan that was ten steps long just because this was the way that it was in the textbook or this is the way that we learned it. It was really taking multiple, multiple steps back and recognizing that I had to come to their level, I had to speak at their level. I had to speak their language, I had to speak and communicate in a way that they understood. And that is how I’m going to start making these connections. That is how I am now going to be heard on social media, on my emails. I had to really humanize myself; not become this robotic doctor who can’t share personal stories, who can’t show emotion in their visits. Who can’t show emotion on social media, who can’t show their personal life that was how we were trained and break that all down and say ‘look, if I really want to make an impact with people, if I really want to come to terms with how misled I have been this entire time. Let that all go and move forward in a way that I know connects that repeatedly as I put it out there I see that connection happening then that was the place I needed to start coming from’. 

It’s a different heart-centered approach where now you are just humanizing yourself a little bit more. And you’re putting that human nature of you and your journey and what you love and what your hobbies are and what your life is like and the experiences that you’ve had and the case studies that you’ve had and you want to put that out there to the world. Because that is where the connection is going to be and I can assure you that you have most likely witnessed this with an email, or a post, or something that you put out there where you let go of that white coat stoic robotic practitioner and became yourself and put yourself out there and you did it with different energy and intention, and that’s where the comments started to flow; that’s where the response started to happen, that’s where people started to DM you and message to you or reply to your emails. And you have all experienced that, you have experienced that at least once in your career. And yet we fight against it, we say ‘oh that was cool’ and then we pick at ‘okay, so I did this topic on digestion and I told people about my personal story with IBS and so many people responded but I’m not going to lean into that. I’m going to lean into thyroid this week, or next week I’m going to talk about inflammation. 

And I encourage you to stay in that place where people are already starting to connect to you and lean into it further and lean into it more. And lean into that and talk about it from a different angle. This is how the successful practitioners start to niche themselves, start to become known for something. Is because they listen to what their audience actually wants from them and they just keep repeating it from different angles, taking in different stances, talking about different case studies around the same topic and they stop being so scattered. So I’ve caught myself doing this as well where we’ve created a social media calendar and like ‘okay Monday is going to be digestion, Tuesday is going to be thyroid, Friday is going to be hormones, Thursday is going to be alive etc.’ And that schedule doesn’t work and the more I am putting information out there, putting it through the Facebook add strategy that we have. Which is literally like 2 dollars a day. I’m allowing Facebook to show me what topics people are loving. Right now, they love talking about physical exams; that has been the winner all week. So I did a reel on it, and I did a reel about the difference between medical or conventional physical exams and my physical exams that we do our wellness checks. 

I had a thousand views on that reel within the first hour; this one video that I made in my office totally looking like I do right now which is not great. And I just did it, I just did some B-roll of some video snippets in my office and it looks so bad, the quality is so bad and it is single-handedly the best performing Facebook Ad I have ever put out. There are now 240 likes, there are 60 comments and even though I made it 2 years ago and just reignited it now people are starting to message me ‘how can I do this? How do I book in?’ and it’s only been up for about a week. So letting the people tell you what they want to know more about will help you when it comes to the overwhelm of what to talk about. And we struggle with this idea of repetition that we don’t want to repeat ourselves; that people are going to get bored of saying the same thing that you’re going to get bored of talking about the same thing. But this is where the mastery comes in, if you can think of anybody that you follow. Anybody that you have purchased a course from, anybody that you are on their email list. Those people are talking about the exact same topic just coming at it from multiple angles, and those are the people that are winning. Those are the people that are crushing it, those are people that have the lifestyle that they want to, that are making the revenue that they want to, that are getting the following that they want to. 

And asterisks to this, note that I didn’t say I was a million dollars, I didn’t say it was thousands of people, it’s what they want. Because I was so sick and tired of hearing about this 7-figure dream, or this lavish lifestyle. Because that isn’t what drives everyone, it’s the business you want to create and how hard you want to work, how many hours you want to show up, and how many people you want to impact. It’s all on you, there are no metrics that I’m going to put out there because I hate that conversation. Anyways, these people that are repeating this same message are the ones that are winning. These people that are leaning into what the audience wants, that are attracting this audience of people who love what they are saying, who love the human nature that is now portraying yourself with, these people are the ones that are winning. These people have given up this bubble, feeling misled by whatever their education was. And these are the people that are leaning into this humanized version of themselves that goes against the grain of the entire profession but it’s actually what is serving people and getting people to work with them and raise their hand and lean into what it is that they’re serving or offering. 

And this is when you start developing your methodology, this is when you start developing your exact group of people that you want to work with. This is when you start repelling people you don’t want to work with. But you have to really listen and you have to lean in, and you have to be yourself, you have to put yourself out there in a more emotional way than we were ever taught in school. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, I’d love to hear your experiences, I would love to hear that one time or maybe multiple times where you’ve put something out. You put it out with the right intention, you’ve put it out with pure love, and you’ve put it out there with pure transparency and you got the response that you were looking for. I would love to hear those instances because they’ve happened to you already. I know that they have, I know that they’ve happened to me and we ignore it. Of course, we do these other things and this is why we wonder why social media’s such a struggle and why it is so difficult to come up with content. Why it is so hard to figure out what our voice is and who it is that we want to attract. 

In the maximized practitioner program, that’s all we focus on. Pillar 1 is all about the foundational experience. Foundational experience meaning doing all of the things, testing all of the things, figuring out what type of practitioner you want to be, and figuring out who you want to be attracting. And then you start niching and then you start branding, and then you start doing all of these things. Because too often, people jump ahead, they pick the color scheme, they pick the fonts they pick the website design, and all these things. They pick their niche arbitrarily out of the hat or they just feel like you’d be a good one and it’s not actually what their people want. Because each of you is putting out your energy you’re putting out your own influence and you don’t know necessarily who you want to attract, you may have an idea at this point in your career who you like to work with which you still want to work with all of the people and that’s still okay. 

And even with our GAT protocol so that’s our methodology, we are always pitching it, we are always telling people what it’s all about. We don’t force people to do it, but we’re now getting known for it, we’re now getting known for those 3 pillars. That adrenal thyroid is what we keep talking about, the methodology is what we keep talking about. That became our brand that became our niche; we didn’t niche down to the demographic, we didn’t niche down to a particular health concern that just wasn’t something in alignment with me. The GAT protocol is a little bit more inclusive, but that’s not for everybody. One of my team members wants to do auto-immune in pain and I told her the same thing I’m telling you. Lean heavily into that, that’s the only thing you should be talking about, if you want to talk about zinc status and zinc deficiency, relate it back to auto-immune and inflammation. If you wanted to sleep, relate it back to auto-immunity inflammation. You can talk about external topics but you always have to lean it back to that one main point, that one main– my mentor calls my north star. And what’s driving you and what’s driving your business. 

So I hope that this conversation brings you a little bit more clarity, brings you to a place where you maybe need to rethink how you’re showing up to social media, to your emails, to your people. Where the struggle is happening, where the resistance are happening. And this wasn’t to be what to do style conversation. It was more to be something for you to sit with and think on and re-approach perhaps how you are engaging in your business. And I get it, the misled practitioner is a real thing and it does require you to number 1 acknowledge that, number 2 get a piece with that, let go of the anger and the hurt that comes with that. And literally start to break yourself down so you can bring yourself up. And it’s that building yourself up part of the journey that is going to be the place where you will transform into the person you wanted to be. You will connect with people so they will heal in a much profound way and you will start attracting more and more of those people that you want to.

So please let me know your thoughts on this, reach out to me on Instagram @andreamaximnd, book a call with me. The link is on my website maximizebusiness.ca. I just want to hear from you and I want to hear how you’re feeling with this person sitting with you. And if you start learning to this way of being, how that transformation is for you and your business. So in the meantime, while you are letting this summer, while you are starting to reframe how you are showing up on your social media and on your emails and all those things I want you to go to our website that’s maximizebusiness.ca. download the maximized practitioner method handbook which is my 29-page e-book exactly where beliefs are coming from, your blocks are coming from, and what you can do to start to overcome those now, and that is beautifully accompanied by our master class, our video replay on merging your practice online and I go into a deeper dive into your messaging and how to show up on social media. So go check out those 2 resources and I will see you in the next episode. I’m Andrea Maxim and I’m out.