Connecting the Dots Understanding Human Behaviour and Inner Mastery – with Shani Taylor

Warning: this episode includes profanity so you may want to listen with headphones or at a time when there are no sensitive ears around. 

What does it take to build a sustainable and successful practice? The answer might surprise you. In this episode, Jo is joined by Shani Taylor. Shani helps business owners develop self-leadership so they can make more sales and have more impact. Jo & Shani discuss the problem with traditional marketing tactics, why health professionals need to connect rather than diagnose in their marketing and the role that your inner work has in your business success. 

You can find out more about Shani via her website. Shani’s book From Ignored to Adored is available here. 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Purple Co 

If you know you need more support, please visit my website at https://jomuirhead.com

Transcript

Jo:

And welcome back to the Entrepreneurial Clinician. I am your host, Jo Muirhead. And today I have an incredibly special guest, special because I feel like I’m sharing a really big part of my recent success. And not just success as a business owner, but success as a human being. And she was probably gonna get a little teary with me saying that. But I met Shani Taylor not long after I finished my cancer treatment and thought, that’s it. I’m getting back into work, and I’m gonna, you know, reclaim this whole world and stuff you cancer. And I went to Shani, and, and we’ll get to the story on how we met each other in a minute. But by the preface of this, I do want you to understand if you are listening to this episode with little children or older people, or people who do not like profanity and swearing, this is your time to switch it off, because I am not going to ask s Shani to change who she is to suit me or you or anyone else. You’ll learn what an incredible communicator she is and why I think she’s got so much value to offer us as health professionals who really wanna do exceptional work in the space of caring for others. That was a bit of a long-winded introduction. Hey, Shani <laugh>.

Shani:

How do you expect me to talk after that? That is a beautiful introduction and totally unexpected. And I’m really, really touched. Thank you.

Jo:

Now the other thing we’re going to say here is we’re probably going to be more raw and real today than we usually are ’cause we’ve both just returned back from the same holiday vacation. <Laugh>, Shani’s been awake for probably five or six hours. I feel like I’ve been awake for 30 minutes. <laugh>. So you’re probably gonna get the best value out of this conversation with us today. So, Shani likes to say how do you describe Shani? Like, what do you say about Shani? So most people turn up into Shani’s world and go, I’m here to learn about marketing. And they probably spend, I don’t know, three weeks in Shani’s community and go, oh. It’s a whole lot more than that, isn’t it? Which is profound. And once you embrace that, you realise that this is one of the most incredibly empowering communities that you can be a part of. So, Shani, can you give us a little bit of the Shani version of who you are and how you serve the world?

Shani:

Jojo. Thank you for leading me into that because I think listening to you speak, it’s really, really hard for even me, but just people in general, I think, to talk about themselves when they’re asked to talk about themselves. We are all born with what I call the curse that we’re born with, which is the eccentricity of our very nature. So we all love to actually think about ourselves, talk about ourselves, but it’s really funny when the spotlight is on us and then we’re like frozen deer in headlights, what do I say? <Laugh>? And so it was a really delicious experience for me to sit here and listen to you speak because I think you really nailed it. I think people coming to my world, business owners in all different industries, by the way, we’ve got health professionals, lawyers, experts turned coaches, consultants, the finance industry, the wellness industry, like literally every industry is represented in our community, as you know, Jojo.

And everybody turns up with the same end in mind, which is, help me make sales. And they think that what they need, or they think that what they have is a marketing problem, and that they need to fill that with an ability to increase sales. And as you said, about three weeks in <laugh>, they realised pretty quickly that tactics are important. And strategy is hugely important, especially when you are working in a business, because whether you’ve got online or in-person, brick and mortar businesses, at the end of the day, we’ve got to stay abreast of different strategies because strategies change all the time on how to bring in more people into your business, right? But none of the strategy matters If you’re not working on your inner strategy. And the sales and the business growth that you achieve is purely a reflection of how deeply you’ve been able to meet yourself first.

Jo:

And I know that there are gonna be many people who have just heard you say, say that and go, one of two things are gonna happen purely because this is what happened to me. They’re gonna go, no. Just give me the tactic, <laugh>, I don’t believe you. Just give me, what time should I post on Facebook? How many times should I post on Facebook? How do I hack the algorithm? And maybe I should join TikTok instead <laugh>. So if that has been your reaction, welcome, you are in the right place. The other reaction is, oh hell, that sounds way too hard. I don’t wanna do that work. I’m already crying and I don’t wanna be here. Or I’m angry and I don’t wanna be here. Welcome. Because this episode is also gonna be for you. So you haven’t quite told us who you, what you’re putting out to the world yet, but I’m gonna ask a different question. Do you find those emotional reactions, like the two I just described then are fairly common for people in your community?

Shani:

I think you are so spot on. People are trying to hack an algorithm and they don’t realise that in order to affect the platform algorithm, the best way to do it is to be able to affect their human algorithm first. And then also we’ve got these stories about, but I’ve already done so much inner work. But I already went to NLP, Tony Robbins, I’m in therapy. What more do I need? Right? And it’s not to take away from any of those things that people have already done because they’re valuable. But we’ve gotta get out of this mentality that there’s a destination. That we reach a point where we don’t need to look at ourselves any longer. And in fact, if you are in business, I believe we have a responsibility to be consistently looking inward and doing the deep inner work. Because how can you expect to go out and serve humanity if you aren’t serving yourself in the deepest way possible? And while therapies and books and Tony Robbins and all of those things are part of the picture, most of the stuff that we go and do when it comes to personal development is actually about, first of all, it’s very general. It’s not really ever in the context of your business. And so I think what’s really unique about our community is that I’m not necessarily teaching anything new, but I’m teaching it in the lens of your business. And so it lands differently and you’re able to apply that work or that you’re doing in the lens of your business. It’s like, I’ll teach you how to build beautiful relationships, but I’m not a relationship coach. But when I teach it to you in the context of how you do that in your business with yourself first, and then in your business, your relationships flourish in your business and so often in the rest of your life. So the lens in which we learn makes a big difference in how we apply.

And then the other thing as well, this concept of, ‘but I’ve already done the work’ <laugh>. I believe that you and me and every single human being listening to this podcast right now, we already have everything we need within us. So doing the work, the deep inner work is not about trying to fill a gap to fix you. There’s nothing missing. Like, it’s not about fixing. You already have everything you need, even the tactics. You already know what to do. You actually already know what to do. You gotta get up, you gotta be consistent. You gotta speak to humans. You know what to do, but you don’t know how to find those parts within you on your own <laugh>, because if you did, you would dissipate into stardust because you would be enlightened and you would no longer exist.

And so mentorship that leads you home to the truth of who you are. And home to your heart is the source of your business growth before any tactic. Now, not to say tactics aren’t important, as you know, Jojo tactics and strategy is a huge component. It’s 50% of everything that I teach. The other 50% has to be about coming home to you. And unfortunately, with a lot of the personal development world, all the deep work that we’ve done already, and I know, ’cause I’ve been in it since I was 11 years old, I’ve been doing the work thinking I had to fix something. The problem with the deep inner work that we’ve already done in the personal development world is that most of it is actually telling us that we need to get rid of half of who we are, which is our shadow, the parts that we don’t like.

And that is a never ending battle, which is why people feel frustrated and can’t grow their business because we are walking around with a rhetoric that I should be better by now. I’ve already done so much wrong with me and rejected parts of who we are. Your divinity is not just your light, it’s your shadow as well, and your ability to love all of it, both shadow and light. When you do that, you are naturally magnetic to the rest of the world. I’ve gone on a tangent.

Jo:

Not at all. I think it’s incredibly important and I’m nodding. Because I was one of those people who turned up with incredible self-rejection, which we understood as self-loathing. Which is not the topic of this conversation today. We will pull ourselves out of that. But I think for a lot of health professionals, one of the challenges that we have is that we are taught from day one how to have what I call our health professional face. So other people call it the white coat face or the white coat syndrome, where we’re so terrified of transference or harming the client or patient in some way that we have to become emotionally robotic. And I think we get so good at, I know in my experience, in 30 years of doing that, I just totally shut that down. So a lot of the work that you and I’ve been doing in teaching me how to connect with the people I wanna work with is me actually learning what I like, what I don’t like. What does this pain really mean? Do I have an opinion about that? And does that opinion actually elicit a strong response? And the strong response is, okay. So a lot of that work is like my shadow, actually, I thought I stuck that in the cupboard and padlocked it away because I thought I dealt with that. So thank you for bringing all of that up. But I am gonna take you back on a different question now.

So you are not a health professional <laugh>? And I need to be really clear about that because a lot of health professionals wanna learn from other health professionals. And we’ve got health professionals in the health professional business building, private practice building industry, shall we call it that. We’ve got this really uncomfortable thing going on at the moment where so many of us feel like we’ve been preyed upon by unscrupulous health professionals who went and did a course, or they learn how to do something once, and then they want to teach it and they can’t replicate their results. And I guess I just wanna speak into that for a little bit and help people understand that no, you’re not a health professional Shani, but what kind of life experience do you bring people like me, <laugh>?

Shani:

Well, yeah, thanks for mentioning that, Jojo. I’m not a health professional. You’re right. I have an understanding of the healthcare industry because I have spent time in it. I mean, I ran a major contract at the Canberra Hospital, so my stakeholders were health professionals. And I really understand the culture within the industry. But in terms of your question, what life experience do I have? I mean, where do we start, Jo <laugh>

Jo:

That’s why I opened it that way, because you can start wherever you want.

Shani:

I mean, look, we’ve all got a story. And I think you know, for those that are interested, we can even pop some links. But I think probably the most relevant thing to this question is around health and healthcare and why am I necessarily an authority to be able to serve healthcare professionals. In 2011, I was held in a house for two days by a family member and repeatedly sexually assaulted, which left me with debilitating PTSD, couldn’t leave the house, obsessive compulsive disorder, major depressive disorder. And it was actually that experience that was the catalyst for huge growth in my life. Not that I wasn’t already on a journey. I’ve always had a huge appetite for understanding humans.

And so I’ve been learning about human behaviour and connection since the age of 11. But I think when you meet the darkness of your soul, you have two choices. You can either defeat and play victim or you can make sure that that experience isn’t in vain, and that you do something remarkable with it. And for me, I chose to do something remarkable with it, which meant it led me down a path of learning as much as I could and continue to learn as much as I could about every different ‘ology’ out there, psychology, sociology, biology, physiology. So I don’t necessarily have a certificate, but I’ve gone and learned and continue to consume as much learning as possible, and then apply that information as it relates to the human condition, which for me is our inner world. And that started because I needed to understand my own inner world after such significant trauma. And so, again, it brings us back to this concept that if you want more sales, it starts with the deep inner work. Because you can only meet people as deeply as you’ve met yourself, and you can only understand what buyers are looking for and why they’re gonna choose you over your competitor. Because by the way, there’s a gazillion physios. Why are they gonna choose you over your competitor? It’s not necessarily for the way that you can adjust somebody in a chiropractic session.

Ultimately, your magnetism comes through your energy. Your unique selling proposition is your energy. People like energy. So if you are trying to put on a facade and a persona to the rest of the world that looks like, Hey, I’m happy. I love my business. My clients are great, my staff love me, but you’ve burnt up and burnt out. You are hating your life and you feel trapped because you feel like you’ve gotta look after everybody else. So you can’t be honest about what’s going on for you. So you’re keeping it bottled inside, which is just creating more anxiety and alarm in your body anyway. You are not sleeping because that thing that you are labelling as anxiety and alarm is actually just feedback, trying to get you back to the truth of who you are. How do you expect to be able to show up and build a bigger business? Because your business will only be as big as you see yourself as.

Jo:

Yeah. That was an unfortunate byproduct of us working together. And I’ve used that language quite deliberately because I didn’t think that that was going to. That was the truth. I actually want to prove you wrong. I so wanted to prove it to you. Shani’s nodding her head. But you knew very early on that I was over committed, even though I felt like I wasn’t doing enough. That it wasn’t just a messaging problem that I had a problem with. It was not wanting to make sales because I just felt so overwhelmed.

And I guess I’m a really great example of somebody who put all the tactics into place. I turned up consistently. I turned up 10 days into a migraine <laugh> and didn’t realise that that was something I should not be doing. And still wasn’t getting the kind of revenue sales that I expected from that. And it turned out, as we have experienced that, that when Jo takes her hands off and looks after her health, which is what she preaches to the world, by the way, <laugh> things happen. I tried to close a program, well, I did close a program the day before that program closed. Somebody I never knew and had never spoken to, had no clue existed in the world, bought the program and another resource from me. And I remember sending you a message going, what the actual, and you laughed going, well, of course, <laugh>, because I’d taken all of that intensity away from myself, right? That feeling of, oh my God, if one more person turns up, I’m gonna have to serve them. And where am I gonna serve them, and where am I gonna get the energy from? So I bring this up now because the way you have explained marketing to me is not the labour of despair that many of us think it is. It doesn’t have to be the really hard work that’s done after I’ve seen seven clients in a day, and I’m emotionally exhausted. What you taught me was so simple yet profound. And then when I’ve gone and taught it to my community, they’ve all gone  oh! And it’s not the simplicity of it, it’s the sophistication of exchanging marketing with the word connecting. Can you help us understand that, please?

Shani:

Yes. Thank you. It’s a great point. Because especially for health professionals more so than anyone else, but this is true for everybody, but especially for health professionals, you have been taught to diagnose, not connect.

Jo:

<Laugh> Say it again, Shani for those who weren’t listening, <laugh>.

Shani:

But you have been taught to diagnose humans rather than connect. Now, this is not a shame-based conversation. No, I don’t anybody listening to feel wrong about this. And equally, as you are hearing this, you might be feeling a little bit of resistance hearing me speak right now. And if that’s, you, make a home for that resistance, because that resistance, that trigger is just trying to activate you towards more of your light. And in order to get to more of your light, we have to go through the dark. And the dark is, lady you don’t know what you’re talking about, or some version of that. But that’s an opportunity to get curious now and just to lean in instead of lean away. Because all of the healthcare certificates and studies and degrees that you go through are teaching you to diagnose a patient. And unfortunately, what happens is you then bring that diagnostic attitude into the piece in your business that it’s not welcome to be in, which is the connection piece. And this is why more people are gonna choose to work with you over your competitor, because we can all show up and be diagnosed, but actually we are starving for connection. We are starving to be seen as a human race. Jo, you did it so beautifully at the start of this podcast. When you put the disclaimer that I swear, and you said, I’m not gonna ask her to be anything other than who she’s for me or for anyone. Isn’t that a beautiful degree of love to receive? Like for those of you listening, can you imagine what it feels like to have somebody say to you, I’m not gonna tell you to be anything other than who you are now that starts before somebody pays you a dollar.

Jo:

Yes.

Shani:

As a service provider, you are here to make a home for people to feel safe. So they do want to pay you the dollar. And that is what marketing actually is. It’s seeing humans for who they are. And again, it brings us back to this whole piece where you don’t have a sales problem, you have a listening problem. You have a, I don’t understand human’s problem. And as you know Jo, you shared something really beautiful a couple of months ago in one of the programs that I ran. You turned up live, by the way, at a very early hour. And I asked for people in the community if they wanted to share what it had been like working with me. And you said, I’m a health professional, and I thought I knew human behaviour, but Shani knows human behaviour. And so I think it makes the point again, even for the psychologist that might be listening today, I’m not sitting here saying that I know more than someone, but what I’m saying is come and learn it through the lens of how to grow your business. Because you are learning it through the lens of diagnosing patients, but people are not gonna come and work with you at the entry point for your diagnostics.

Jo:

Agreed. Preaching. Got it. Understood. And that’s been my, like, I had this wake up call well before I started working with you, which was so many of us are starting to talk to people at the point of diagnosis. We are labelling their symptoms in a diagnostic way when they’re not ready to hear that yet.

Shani:

They didn’t ask for it. They didn’t pay you to diagnose them. So now we have a permission based problem.

Jo:

God, it’s even deeper than that <laugh>. So keep going.

Shani:

Right. So it’s like, put yourself in the shoes of a consumer who’s already vulnerable. Already feeling a degree of vulnerability because they have a problem. And now you go and tell them in your marketing, which we’re calling connecting now, whether it’s your content on your website, it’s the content you are putting on your social media, the emails you are sending out, the conversations you might be having at networking events where you are labelling and giving advice and speaking to people as though you know what’s best for them when they didn’t ask for it.

Jo:

When you put it like that, everybody’s going, I would hate that. Don’t do that to me. It brings me back to the surgeon I love to talk about who told me that my post mastectomy reconstruction, my goal was perky boobs. She didn’t last long because she didn’t see me and she didn’t know me. And if you know me for half a minute, you realise that’s not the thing to say to Jo, right? But that’s exactly what we are doing. We’re going, you’ve got a pain problem and your pain problem relates to your inability to squat in this particular way. Or the favourite one in my industry at the moment is exercise cures everything. <Laugh>, you just need to do more exercise, <laugh>, go exercise your pain away. Now I am being facetious because we don’t all believe that. But there is a really strong drive for that. And I’m one of those people where exercise crippled me. Because that wasn’t the entry point. And it made me feel like I was failing at my own recovery.

Shani:

It’s shame-based. And if you are listening to this today and you take nothing else away from this conversation, which I sure as hope you’ve taken a lot already. But if you take nothing else away, then let it be this, your marketing, which we will use loosely, needs to stop being about the pain and the problem. And it needs to start being about the desire that they have for their future.

Jo:

So many of you will have learned pain problem-based marketing because it was 1980s marketing. And unfortunately, most of the marketing people around trying to sell you this stuff stop there. Because it

worked back then. So they’ve continued to grow their businesses, or they’re just trying to put new people into their sales funnels using problem and problem-based marketing. And I can assure you people, it ain’t working.

Shani:

Or if it’s working, what you’re doing is from a human behaviour perspective, when you lead with the pain and the problem, you’re actually drawing in a certain type of client or a certain type of patient. Of course we wanna draw in the people with health problems ’cause you’re here to serve and impact them.

But what I want you to understand is that in your connection activities, in the messaging that you’re putting out to the world before somebody pays you a dollar to help ’em with their problem, if you keep leading with the problem as your message, you attract a particular type of patient, which is typically a patient who doesn’t want to heal, typically a patient who will not be an empowered entity in their healing journey. And they’re gonna expect you to be God. Whereas if you lead with desire, what you are doing is you are speaking to the individuals that are self-led, self-motivated, and intrinsically have a desire to heal themselves. And you are a passenger in that journey, not the leader of it. So they’re gonna take full accountability and responsibility. They’re gonna do the exercises and the rehab outside of the sessions that you ask them, as opposed to pain based messaging that draws in people who are in a victim mentality.

Jo:

Wow. So for many of you listening, you will have had the same reaction that I did if you couldn’t see my face going Yep. That’s exactly what happens. And I just had the incredible lightness because once I had learned this myself, and the people coming into my world were people who were taking accountability, taking the heaviness off my shoulders where it stopped feeling like it was my responsibility to help them do it or do it was like I was able to openly say, I’m a tool. I’m a vessel, I’m a resource. You can use me or not use me. Your outcomes are no longer contingent on my self worth <laugh> or your outcomes don’t create my self worth.

Shani:

Right.

Jo:

That was a huge thing for me to get through. So we’ve built marketing up to be this horrible word because most health professionals didn’t go to marketing school. We went to health professional school.

Shani:

Hey, I didn’t go to marketing school either. <Laugh>, this is true.

Jo:

And then for us, we get really confused between marketing and sales and when we start to feel icky, we think they’re the same thing. So what I was hope, what I want this conversation to do today is just totally scrap the words. And I want every health professional or every person who is in a service-based business to replace both of those words with connecting. And if you know how to build rapport, you know how to connect.

Shani:

Yeah.

Jo:

And all we need to do is take that from somebody being in front of us in a conversation. ’cause that’s where we’re most practised at and learn, because you won’t get it right the first time. And learn how to do this in either text-based or a video-based conversation. Or in some other way, another platform that people can connect like we’re connecting with you right now with this conversation.

Shani:

Yeah, exactly. It’s not just about being in person face-to-face with people. And in fact, if you wanna build a bigger practice, you are going to have to equip yourself with an ability to reach people beyond just them walking past your shop front.

Jo:

And it’s not even bigger practice doesn’t mean more numbers. It could be selling $10,000 packages instead of a hundred dollar sessions. Move away from working with people purely on an insurance based model where the rebates are pitiful. And I’m talking about Australia, US and UK here. And help them become the $300 session private person without guilt.

Shani:

Right. Without feeling that. And that’s why the inner work has to come in because you will not raise your rates or increase your prices unless you believe that you are worthy of that.

Jo:

Yeah. The first objection we always have to handle is the objection that we have about ourselves. And that’s not something you’re gonna do in a 30 minute podcast, by the way.

Shani:

No. Because this is information not transformation.

Jo:

That’s correct. Well, what a gorgeous segue we had no way we could have planned that <laugh>. So what makes your community unique? Why do people get the results they get with you, Shani? And this is a, just like not, you don’t get a hundred percent results because you actually make people take responsibility. Right?

Shani:

A hundred percent.

Jo:

But what makes your community different to the other types of <laugh> learning platforms that are around <laugh>

Shani:

You’re right, Jojo. I mean, it’s just like your listeners right now, you’re never gonna be able to heal a hundred percent of the people that you see. So there’s no guarantees. But our community, we have like a 98% retention rate for people staying more than 12 months. So I think that speaks to, okay, maybe there’s something that we’re doing a little bit differently. And there’s a difference between information versus transformation. And you are like me and the listeners are like us in that there’s been a time where we’ve loved to consume more knowledge and actually because it releases dopamine in our bodies. So it makes us feel good. Like reading another book, going and doing another course, even listening to this podcast. Now don’t turn it off. Listen carefully. But this is all information. It’s not actually embedding the transformation. It’s not affecting the change into your tangible reality. And so what I started to see and understand because I have done some work around adult learning and what we know is that you only retain about 10% of what you learn within a week of learning it. And so it’s not that there’s something wrong with you. And it’s also not that somebody’s better than you. It’s literally that your brain will only hold 10% of that information once you’ve learned it. Now that’s also assuming that you then go and teach what you’ve learned and or apply what you’ve learned. So the deepest form of integration into your psyche to then be able to put the transformation in your life is to teach and apply.

So what I saw was fundamentally missing from almost every program I’ve ever taken and from all of my competitors was they teach you information, but they don’t facilitate you then putting the transformation into your business. So we have a space, which I call Done With You space. In fact, every one of my offers has attached to it a Done With You space. An implementation room. And not just once every single week, multiple times a week for people to plug into. And I don’t mean this is not group coaching, I wanna be really clear. It is not group coaching. You know, when you’re in a group program, you learn some stuff, you show up, and then the coach just delivers more information to a group that’s group coaching. What we do is you learn the information, but then you come into the sessions and you are doing the connecting in the sessions with me while being able to ask questions as you do the connecting in real time. ’cause You might hit a wall and go, well wait, I don’t know how to solve that problem. So you’re in a space where you can get help in real time. But also I do apply the adult learning techniques where I’m getting people to share what they’ve been learning as well, because then it embeds into their psyche. Other people in the community hear insights that they had missed and then they’re able to embed them. But I kind of look at it like this, when we get our learners permit and we have to do 12 months of driving with an accredited and an experienced driver in the car. I’m going through it with my son at the moment, by the way, he’s on his L’s and I’m in the car with him as he is driving. The reason you have to have an experienced driver in the car with you in real time while you are driving for 12 months is because that driver has to tell you what you are doing well. So you can keep doing more of that to amplify your skill of driving, but equally to say, whoa, don’t do that. That’s dangerous. It’s not gonna work. So you get their eyes on you while you’re driving in real time. And that is the same as my business coaching community.

Jo:

Great analogy. And for the health professionals listening, none of us were let loose with a client until we had done some supervision. And it’s exactly the same principle. And I think that was what I was resistant about. Because I was like, I just want one-on-one, I just want the results. I want them fast. I want me, I want all the attention on me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. <Laugh>. And then I started turning up to the group calls and wowsers talk about exponential growth, both in terms of, like you mentioned there, there were issues that people were facing or questions they were asking that maybe I’d been too scared to ask. Or that I didn’t even know I needed to ask. And it’s like, oh, how do we do, you know, simple things. Where do I find that on Facebook? <Laugh>? It’s like, can somebody point me in the right direction again? But the beauty of what you offer is like, nobody’s ahead of the game and nobody’s so far behind. Like everybody’s just where they’re at. So if you need to sit there and go, right, let’s go through this again, click on that bit, then open up the next bit, then write the next bit. And then you’ll even go as far to say, have you done the seven steps before you even get here. Some people might think that that’s handholding, but humans, this is the level of safety and security that we are craving, especially as health professionals because we are skilled at what we know. But right now, since the pandemic, we have been trying to work out what it is we know and what we feel about this world while we are treating people who are adversely reacting to this world. So if we think that we can turn up and write a piece of content that’s gonna sell a hundred people into a program, once we are totally missing who we are and not giving ourselves any of the space that we need to actually learn how to do that. I’m very, very forceful about that because I was that person.

Shani:

Nobody’s listening to us unless we know how to use human behaviour and tactics, by the way, it’s not enough to just write a piece of content. There are human behaviour strategies and aesthetics that you need to understand in order to even capture the attention, let alone keep it. Because people are now on average every day scrolling the length of the Statue of Liberty. And they have an attention span of 1.8 seconds after the C word. Prior to the C word, we had an average attention span of seven seconds, seconds. It’s now down to 1.8. How the heck do you think you are gonna get the attention of the people you are trying to help if you just post content from the heart? Or ’cause I felt like saying something today, it doesn’t work that way.

Jo:

No, it really doesn’t. So, Shani, if you could get in a room with a thousand health professionals? ’cause That’s pretty much what you’ve got right now, <laugh>. What would be the number one piece of advice or encouragement that you would like to give us? About

Shani:

Yeah. I think look, there’s a law in physics and it’s also spoken about in universal laws, which is the law of reflection or the mirror principle. And so as human beings, we are very well versed in wanting to project, meaning that we are constantly looking to go solve something outside of ourselves as though that’s where the answer is. And it always has to come home to you first. So you can close this podcast and think that’s great, I’m just gonna go and connect with people. But if you haven’t also connected with yourself, and I mean really connected with yourself. We hear this self-love jargon and we think it’s bubble baths and massages, but self-love is how do I speak to me when I’m at my worst. How do I make a home for my less than desirable thoughts, behaviours? And whenever we try to avoid those conversations you’re having with yourself, we won’t be able to show up and have conversations with others. So it’s not one or the other. The work is simultaneously working on coming home to the truth of who you are, while also learning how to be a better connector with humans. And then you just become magnetic.

Jo:

That’s that easy people <laugh>. But as somebody who has been doing this work now since 2021, it’s definitely worth it. The transformation and change that is upon me right now. And the period of transition that I’m in right now would not have been possible if I had not started turning up and working out how to connect with myself while I’m learning how to connect with others. So no doubt, many of you will have loved Shani today and you’re going, how do I know this woman? What do I do? So you need to head to the show notes on the website, jomuirhead.com or find the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast, that’s really hard to type. So maybe jomuirhead.com is easier. <Laugh> Shani has written a book called From Ignored to Adored. It is a weekend read, but then it will be months long of connecting with that content.

It is not a difficult read, but it’s a sophisticated book and it’s quite profound in its simplicity, but it makes you go, I’ve got work to do here. <Laugh> Shani also has the community we’ve been talking about today. It’s called Business Builder. And there is a special Shani will take care of you if she knows you’ve come from the Jo link. But you can find that on the show notes on the website. And if come follow me on socials and you’ll get that information. So Shani, I wanna say a great thank you for you today. Thank you for your kindness and compassion. And thank you for your willingness to see where this podcast took us today. Now my most important question for you today. Yes. If we were gonna have a coffee at a cafe, which might be happening this weekend, what am I ordering for you?

Shani:

An almond milk. Chai or a peppermint tea.

Jo:

Okay, awesome. You might have to order that yourself because there was no coffee in that <laugh>.

Shani:

I gave up coffee two weeks ago.

Jo:

I know. It’s okay. That’s okay. You and you and Alyssa considered the chai table at time. Okay. <Laugh>, thank you so much Shani, I appreciate your time and your energy and your willingness to talk to us today. Thank you everybody for listening to you, the Entrepreneurial Clinician. Go be your awesome self.