📍 Hey, Dr. Jess Reynolds here and welcome to the Conscious Practitioner. This is the audio version of my newsletter, and it's made for wellness practitioners who love the work but are tired of feeling overwhelmed, maybe even burned out, and you want to build a practice that you love. If you'd like to get the email version, you'll find a link in the show notes.

Now, last week's email was all about the identity paradox, about how being a practitioner and a business owner could feel like two identities that are at odds, and this seemed to really resonate with many of you. So thank you to everyone who wrote back. I really can't tell you how much I appreciate it.

Your stories and insights mean so much to me. Now, if you did miss that one and you want to take a look, there's a link in the show notes so you could read the full piece or listen to it if you prefer. So here's why I'm bringing this up again. I was having dinner with a good friend of mine last week, and he's a very successful, highly sought after chiropractor in the city.

And in 2020, he and a few colleagues opened up a brick and mortar wellness center and it was pretty much immediately a smashing success, even with all the stuff that was going on in the world at that time. It was one of the best and busiest clinics in the city, but late last year, in late 2024, he decided to exit, which essentially means he sold his shares in the business to his partners.

Now, as we talked about this, uh, we got into the identity paradox and he told me that owning a successful business, it checked all the boxes that school taught us to want. All the things our 📍 industry says defines success. The truth is he was much happier and way more aligned when he could just show up and work with his clients.

And it wasn't that the business side wasn't his thing, it was that he'd been building someone else's definition of success. The rapid growth, the big team, the scale or die mentality, none of that actually aligned with what made him feel successful. His biggest revelation was this. He had spent years building what success was supposed to look like instead of what success actually meant to him.

Just imagine building a practice that checks virtually every box, steady clients, a dream team, a wait list fully booked, and still feeling out of sync. Then having the clarity and the guts to admit it, to walk away from a version of success that looks right on paper, but doesn't feel right inside. Now, that kind of honesty, it's not just brave, it's it's rare.

Now, the reason I'm telling you this is because that dinner made me realize something. Last week, I might have given you the impression that reconciling the practitioner and business owner identities is the only path forward, but it's not. Sometimes the answer is choosing which identity really does fit best.

We get so caught up in what we think we should want, the six figure practice, the team of practitioners, multiple locations, and we forget to ask what would 📍 actually make us feel successful. It is 1000% to define success on your own terms. Maybe your version of a thriving practice is staying small and intimate where you know every single client's story off by heart.

Maybe it's working three days a week so you could be present for your kids. Maybe it's being a contractor who gets to focus purely on the work without the admin headaches. Maybe it's working only a couple clients per week and doing something else. The most important thing is that you spend the time to look inside and really identify what success means to you, not your mentors, not that business coach on Instagram, not your colleagues, but you.

Now for my friend, that clarity came through coaching sessions and long conversations with close friends , and he realized that his sweet spot was treating patients not managing spreadsheets. His definition of success was mastery of his craft, not maximizing revenue. And yours might look completely different.

In fact, it probably does. So here's what I've learned. The practices that last, the ones where practitioners don't burn out after five years aren't necessarily the biggest or the most profitable. They're the ones built around a personal definition of enough, enough money, enough clients, enough complexity, enough growth.

To anyone listening who feels like maybe you're failing 📍 because your vision doesn't match the scale or grow narrative that we're constantly fed, you are not failing. You might just be succeeding at something different. And for those of you who dream of building something bigger or scaling up, maybe creating a multidisciplinary practice and a clinic, that is beautiful too.

The key is making sure it's your dream, not just what you think you should want. We got this, however we choose to define it . Now, this kind of clarity work, figuring out what success actually means to you before building towards it.

Exactly where my new business program starts because you can't create a sustainable practice until you know what you're actually trying to sustain. Registration open soon. So keep an eye out for that. And if you enjoy this type of content, please subscribe or follow the conscious practitioner wherever you listen to your podcasts.

And like always be well my friend.