If you’re an online coach working in the health and wellness space, you know how SUPER demanding it can be. When I built my health coaching business, I was in the midst of the worst health crisis I’d ever had. It was the beginning of what turned out to be an eight year struggle with chronic fatigue. So I understand more than ever the importance of taking care of yourself and not burning out while you’re building your health coaching business.
Based on my experience with business burnout, I have five tips to avoid burnout and thrive in your health coaching business. Because as health coaches, we need to be good role models for our clients and we don’t want to be burning out and making our health worse as we build our business.
5 tips to avoid burnout
Don’t charge hourly
I see so many coaches making this mistake, especially when they’re new. There’s a good chance that the health coaching school that you went to taught you to charge hourly. So that may be the only business model you might be familiar with. Charging hourly is the fastest way to burn out.
The problem with charging hourly is you don’t get any commitment from the client to come again. That one-off appointment that someone books with you might be the last one they book, or they might not book another one for months or even a year and sometimes longer. So you’re in this constant hustle to find more and more clients.
It’s not possible for you to take clients five days a week. I recommend that health coaches take clients two to three days a week MAX to allow time to do other aspects of your business.
So if you aren’t charging hourly, how can you change? I recommend creating programs and packages.
Separate client days from creative days
It requires different parts of your brain to be in a session with a client coaching and giving advice, versus the creative work. So it doesn’t work for a lot of people to go to a client appointment, work on marketing and then head into another client appointment.
I find when people do this, they burn out a lot faster and they get really exhausted because they’re on the hamster wheel. When you separate these things, you can just get into the flow and roll with it.
So figure out when is your most productive and creative time and block it out in your calendar so no clients can book in during those days.
Take self-care breaks throughout the day
If you’re like me, you could probably work eight hours straight without taking a break. But when you do this, you often feel exhausted pretty quick. When I do this, I tend to lose my passion for what I’m doing.
So make sure that you take regular breaks throughout the day. I use an app called Timeout that notifies me when it’s time to take a break and you can customize it to whatever suits your style.
Even if it’s 5 minutes, you need to take breaks to get the blood flowing and keep your mental health in check.
Forgive yourself when you don’t get your list done
As an entrepreneur, you have an endless to do list. Something that you need to remember is that this isn’t a race. And if you are truly an entrepreneur, if you truly want to build this business, then you’re in this for the long haul.
That pressure that you are putting yourself to get as much done as quickly as possible comes from you and only you. So you need to forgive yourself and not go down that rabbit hole of feeling like you need to do more.
Hire help
I feel like health coaches wait so long to do this. And it is a huge mistake. The great thing about online business is we don’t have a ton of overhead. But we still need to invest in our business. That means you should be hiring help 6-12 months into your business.
If you try to do everything yourself, you’ll get caught up in the mundane tasks of your business and you end up becoming an employee in your own business. This is how I almost burned out, when I tried to do everything and not being willing to spend money and hire some help.
By doing these 5 tips, you should be well on your way to avoiding burnout and onto building your business.
If you want more tips to help grow your business and avoid burnout you can sign up to my email community where I send a super high value, incredibly entertaining business tip every single Tuesday.
