Zest4life’s nutritionist business training has been a revelation!

There were two big things holding me back when I first joined Zest4life.

Number one was ‘who is my ideal client?’. I thought it was ‘perimenopause’ because I was working in a health food shop at the time and a lot of women were coming in asking about that, plus I had personal experience.

But I knew that I didn’t get excited talking about it. I wanted to talk about dairy and milk, as that was the subject of my dissertation, but there I was talking about perimenopause. It was very hard to sell to people because my heart didn’t feel that it was in the right place.

I did the Ideal Client nutritionist business training course as part of the Business Growth Programme (actually I did it twice!), and I swapped one of my mentoring sessions to have a 1-2-1 with Ailsa Hichens, the course leader. It then became very clear that my heart was definitely in food intolerances, food sensitivities and gut health, and not perimenopause. Once I made that switch, things happened very quickly with my advertising materials, my discovery calls etc. I was finally getting the people that I wanted to work with.

The second area was the feeling of ‘imposter syndrome’. And the answer is to just believe that you are the expert. I remember Ailsa saying that “you are the expert because you say you’re the expert”, and that keeps going through my mind all the time. Having my Masters qualification helps me feel like the expert but only to a certain degree. I’ve learnt that it’s about confidence and ‘doing’, and always aiming for progress over perfection.

Integrating Health Coaching into my work with clients has also helped me in this area. Before learning about coaching, I felt that it was up to me to make people change, rather than my clients making their own decisions about what they were able to change, what was standing in the way, what they could do and what they were ready for.

I feel like the pressure has been taken away - it’s about behaviour change and habits. It’s all about empowering the other person.

What’s next?

I’m leaving my job at the health food shop in December, which was always a goal of mine. I’m also running a free challenge this month, then launching my first group programme. These are things that have been on the agenda for some time, but I’ve never made them happen before, so I’m very pleased about that. I’ve also gone through the “Working in Corporate Wellness” nutritionist business training twice and I’ve got lots of ideas, so once I’ve got the group programme running I’ll be heading in that direction as well!

I would say that technology is not my friend, so I’ve had to learn a lot of the processes and have struggled along the way trying to do basic things like landing pages. This summer I did Zest4life’s nutritionist business training course, ‘Grow your email list’. I found it so helpful with everything broken down step by step, so I’ve managed to finally create a landing page and a nurture sequence, and now I can send a newsletter regularly. I wouldn’t have even tried to do this beforehand… I felt like opening a bottle of champagne to celebrate!

Lisa McPherson, Nutritional Therapist