how the heck did i end up here?

In this solo episode, Jo shares her story. Plus she talks about the self development that comes along with building something of value and why being bored in and with your business is actually the key to growth. 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Future-Proofing Health Professionals Facebook group
• The Entrepreneurial Clinician book

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

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to another episode of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast.

So I’ve spent a little bit of time agonising over what I was going be speaking on today and what I wanted to share with you and share with the world today. So this has potential to bit of an overshare, but I think it’s an important share because we know as health professionals living in this current age, that without a level of vulnerability, we can’t grow without a level of authenticity. People won’t wanna connect with us. And I think after the years of Covid, and in my case, cancer, COVID and Cancer, the things that we know that the world is hungry for is connection. Connection with self, connection with others, connection with our society, connection with our physiology, connection with our planet. I had not understood the need and the power of connection until I really had to start thinking about my own disconnected self and brought it back to the wonderful hierarchy that Abraham Maslow provided for us, and realised that connection actually is a part of what I need to survive.

So how did I end up here? How did I end up speaking to you on a podcast on the 21st of April? What year are we in 2023? <laugh> Yeah I’m still asking myself what year it is. So if you are new to me and new to my world and you don’t know who I am….because you know, when I was talking to some people about this episode and, and everyone’s like, yes, Jo, you need to do that episode. I was like, but everybody knows this stuff about me. It became quite apparent that many people don’t. Because regardless of the fact of how much time and effort I have put into writing blogs over the last 10 years, it doesn’t mean that you’ve all read them or that you even remember them or that I even remember them, or the video series I did called This is Private Practice.

You may not have seen that. So here I am again sharing with those of you who may be new to me or who may have forgotten, how the heck did I end up here? And it’s an incredibly empowering conversation for you to have with yourself.

So let me share with you how I ended up here so that you can be empowered and inspired to have this conversation with yourself, maybe with some trusted people around you.

So as I record this and share with you, I’m 50 years old. Yes, I have become that person who watches middle-aged things. I don’t like going out at night. I have creaky bones and joints in the morning. I have a lot more supplements on my table. If somebody invites me to go somewhere, I have a long list of considerations that I need to make before I say yes.I have become that person and I am okay with it. In fact, I love her. I appreciate her and I respect her.

And I haven’t always been able to say that about myself. So I was born in 1972, yes people, 1972. And I was born into a very middle class family where my dad decided he was gonna be self-employed. It was a big deal for him. He had this belief in himself that he was built for something more than just having a job and just working for wages. And you can kind of go, well, no wonder you are as successful as what you are. Jo <laugh>. Yeah, my dad wasn’t a great example. And that’s okay because you know what? I get to take what I learned from him and in iterate on it and improve on it and make the world a better place for the people who come after me because I am such a big believer in that now that I don’t exist in a vacuum, I exist as a part of this, in this world, this community.

So I am the eldest of three daughters and I grew up in a middle class family, probably an upper middle class family. I’ve always lived in suburbia. It’s what I know, it’s what I feel safe with. And I had the privilege of being able to finish my high schooling and go to university. And it was a really difficult time for me when I finished high school because here in Australia, the way we were assessed and, and the way we gained entry into universities back in the early 1990s was, I’d put a lot of pressure on myself and I didn’t do as well in my marks as I wanted. And I didn’t get my first choices. I didn’t fail anything, but I felt like a failure. And I was incredibly anxious and incredibly, like I would be your typical type A personality <laugh> if we subscribe to that thing anymore.

So I’ve known about anxiety for a long time. I had a major, major depressive episode during my university days. It was a horrible time for me and my family. And it’s something that we never talked about again. We basically just got through it and we kind of started treating Jo really fragile like we needed to make sure she was gonna be okay. So it probably doesn’t surprise any of you to learn that I chose a discipline called rehabilitation counselling. Now, rehabilitation counsellors, when I graduated, we had an undergraduate health sciences degree. We went to the same university and on the same campus as occupational therapists and physiotherapists and speech pathologists, which is what I really wanted to be when I was 17. And, and radiographers and radiologists and all types of allied health professionals, I actually went to a university campus that was called Cumberland College of Health Sciences. It doesn’t exist like that anymore. It’s been swallowed up by the University of Sydney. 

So here I am this and I was the first person in my family to go to university, which is a bit of a big deal. My parents both had high school educations. And they wanted better for their kids. Cause you know, that’s what most families of middle class privilege are trying to do for our families and trying to do for our kids. So I grew up in a family where we were led to believe that we were always living on the verge of bankruptcy. And that was the money story that I internalised. That was the money story that I heard, that I was expensive. That my needs, anything I wanted my needs would be taken care of. But anything that I wanted outside of that was gonna be a fight. And it was just better not to try and have the conversation.

And I learned very early on that advocating for myself wasn’t pleasant because the adults in my world didn’t know what to do with that or didn’t know how to do with that cause they were so busy trying to do life and trying to manage money and trying to build a business and trying to look after a family and trying to have a relationship with themselves. Sound familiar? Sounds really familiar, doesn’t it? Yeah.

And I’m not here, I’m not blaming anyone. I am not shaming anyone. I’m just sharing with you how I got to where we are. But this money story of mine made me feel very, very unsafe.

Looking back now, I can see that the household that I grew up in was quite chaotic for me. It was very, very busy and my parents were just trying so hard to give us girls (cause I was one of three sisters) to give us girls better opportunities and that’s okay. They were doing what they could. But looking back on it now and having done some inner work around this, I can understand that it created a lot of instability and feelings of unsafe for me. And that this money thing got so entrenched in me needing to work harder to prove myself worthy of being able to be allowed to have something or even want something. And I’m sure many of you have similar money stories. So I grew up feeling like I was an inconvenience. I grew up feeling like I had to perform. I grew up feeling like I wasn’t worthy of the things that I wanted.

Can you start to see how this plays out in other parts of my life or in other parts of my relationships?

So I built a career around rehabilitation counselling. Now because my dad had been self-employed and because I watched him have his first major heart attack at age 37, I decided that I would never be self-employed because in my family, self-employed made you sick. And I had already been battling with anxiety and major depression. I didn’t want to be any more sick, which I find hilarious because if you followed any of my stories, I have just recovered from cancer for goodness sake.

So there’s this thing that’s kind of perpetuated along my life now, which is around money and around my health.

So I had built this career and I went to work for other people. I’ve worked in government, I’ve worked in various levels of government here in Australia. And I had the incredible opportunity to work for the now non-existent Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service. At the time, I didn’t realise how fortunate I was to have started my career there cause it felt like a lot of hard work and I was still learning about myself. But that really created an opportunity for me to explore this world of work and how I wanted to turn up in it. I have had the opportunity to work in rural New South Wales, which I love working in rural and remote communities. My career has given me opportunities to work in New South Wales Health and keep nurses nursing. I did that for nearly 15 years. That was incredibly rewarding work.

And now I have built my own private practice. Now I did that out of a season where I felt like I had totally gone against all of my values. I woke up one day and found myself acting as a manager in a workplace in a very, very unhealthy and unhelpful way. I heard myself speak to an employee in a way that I found atrocious. And all of this behaviour at the time felt like it was being rewarded, but I could no longer live with that and I no longer wanted to accept that. So I resigned and I quit. And that was a really awkward, uncomfortable time for myself. It was in my thirties and I basically took myself out of the workforce to try and figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life because I’d made the decision by then that I obviously couldn’t cut it as a health professional. I obviously couldn’t cut it as a leader. I obviously couldn’t cut it as anybody trying to do a hybrid of both.

So I obviously needed to find another career. So I decided that I was going to learn how to trade the US stock market because apparently a trained monkey can do that. But Jo, with her university degree can’t <laugh>. So this was now around the time of the global financial crisis, which I’d never lived through, didn’t know what it meant. So I gifted the US economy my life savings. I know, thank you.

And then I had to go and work out how I was gonna put food on the table cause by now my first marriage had fallen apart or I’d chosen to leave it and I had a child depending on me. And I was in a state of, you know, just trying to put food on the table. That’s how my private practice started.

So last week’s episode was all about bootstrapping, if you remember that. Well, this is my bootstrapping story. I had a phone, I had a car, I had a laptop. I needed to go and make some money. So I did. I went to market, I went and built relationships and said, who are the clients you were struggling with? Let me see if I can help you. And that’s kind of how I started my business. And it grew and it grew quickly. Within six weeks, I brought on my first associate. They had no clue what I was doing. And it just grew and grew and grew and grew until it couldn’t grow anymore because my capacity wasn’t growing. Cuz I was continuing to do all the clinical work and just give the overflows to my associate. I was trying to manage people now, which I had already had this belief system that I couldn’t manage people.

I had no concept that I needed to develop as a leader. And I had no understanding of what it took to build a business because I had no role model, right? I’d watched my father burn through what felt like a lot of money and make my life feel very unsafe. So I brought those patterns of my childhood with me because they were familiar. And let’s face it, I didn’t know anything else, but I also knew, and I had enough insight when I started my business to know that I wasn’t gonna do it the same way my dad did. So I started investing in coaching and like a lot of people I invested in coaching that made me feel good about myself that I thought was gonna help me grow my business. Not realising that building your own business will be the most significant personal development journey you have ever been on.

So if you are an entrepreneurial clinician, if you are somebody who is looking at how you can turn up in the world and how you can serve and how you can add value and how you can receive income from that, then this message is really important to you because it is not enough for us to turn up with our tools of the trade, our clinical skills. The investment in our personal development is what will help us succeed or even define what success is going to be for us. So I remember being so excited with my first coaching opportunity. I would travel from Sydney to Melbourne. I was learning so much about human behaviour, which I thought was hilarious because I had this behavioural sciences degree. Wasn’t I supposed to be an expert in that stuff? Many of you are laughing at me right now. I get it.

My husband and I were doing it together. My second husband and I were doing it together. I met some wonderful people. But it got to a point where that had served me well, but then I needed to move on. And then I moved on and I found somewhere else I needed to go. And then I moved on and then I found somewhere else to go. And in this desire to understand how to build this thing called business, I made what I now perceive to be one of the biggest errors that I have ever made. And it is still something to this day that I go, wow, I wish I’d done that differently.

I continued to grow without stabilising. I wanted to do all the things that I thought were a good idea without stabilising, instead of baking very strong foundations and roots, I actually took myself out of my business thinking it would just continue to grow and flourish while I went and pursued other things. Wanted to become a speaker so I did some speakership training. Wanted to do more corporate work, wanted to become a wellness provider, wanted to become a coach. All of these different things were actually masking the genuine problem here, which was I was starting to feel bored because I didn’t understand that boredom is actually a significant milestone in the development of any business. Boredom is actually a sign that you have done something really well. I was terrified of boredom. It feels for somebody who grew up in a chaotic household who is used to feeling anxious. You can imagine that boredom is really uncomfortable.

But boredom now for me tells me that I am close to creating another redundancy, which means I have significant stability in my business to remove myself from a task, a workflow, a division, a process that then allows me the freedom to be going, able to choose to do something new, to reiterate, iterate, innovate, change, build, grow, develop without fearing that the things that I’m moving away from will collapse.

Now I share this because in this year alone, and it’s April, I have been working one-on-one with so many clients who have chosen to scale before they stabilise. And I can see it and it breaks my heart because I know what’s happening. And then they’re coming to me afterwards going, Jo, I wish I had worked with you before I tried to scale. We didn’t have enough stability in place. You weren’t stable enough in yourself. You hadn’t reached that place a boredom yet.

So one of my biggest regrets for one,  but one of the things I come back to is I wish back in 2016 that I had spent the time getting bored and stabilising before launching out into a brand new thing. Now, I do not begrudge the learnings that I’ve had along the way, but reflective practice is powerful, right? I am now in a position where I get to learn from that and be able to engage with myself on my ongoing personal development journey about how I wanna do things differently now, where do I want the redundancies to turn up? Now these are conversations I’m having with myself, which are very different to conversations I was having prior to 2016. My goal now as the owner of this business is to make myself redundant. Not sack myself, just not needed in the way that I turn up today, because that will tell me that I have grown and created something that is self-sustaining that doesn’t rely on me. And I think that’s what my dad was pursuing, but didn’t know how to do it. And I thank him right now for the gift that he’s given me to be able to use his experiences and what I grew up with as a way of going, huh, how can we do this differently?

So if you’ve heard this today and you’ve thought boredom is bad, we don’t do boredom, I want you to think about that because boredom potentially means something very different for you and it’s something that you can work on and something that you can work through. Because I wanna encourage everybody listening to this, because I think we all need to get back to a place of being a little bit bored and not being scared of it.

Because for the last two and a half years we have been hypervigilant, right? Since the pandemic came into the world, we have been living hypervigilant. We were actually living in it beforehand, but Covid just brought it to the fore. So I don’t think there’s any harm in us getting to a place where our nervous system and our brain feels safe enough to experience some boredom. Now, I’m not bored with you, I’m not bored with me. It’s not a place I wanna stay in. I just don’t think we need the pursuit of moving away from it as fast as we often think we do.

So what can you take away from this information today? Well, I want you to spend some time thinking about your origin story, and I invite you to come to the Future-Proofing Health Professionals Facebook group because we’ll be talking about it some more in there. Your origin stories, not because we want pats on the back or we are trying to get on a big ego trip here, but it’s important to understand where we’ve come from so we can understand where we’re headed. Don’t get too far ahead of yourself, but also don’t keep yourself stuck. We need other people around us to give us perspective. So I invite you to come along and think through and talk about some parts of your origin story that might be turning up for you in your work. Won’t be a therapy session, I promise you, but it will be a really good conversation that we can have.

I want you to think about the people around you that you let speak into your life. These might be coaches or mentors that you exchange money with. They might be people that you pay, they might be valuable people that you bring into your world that you don’t have an exchange of money with, but you need to have people around you that give that perspective.

I am a huge believer in career long clinical supervision.  What I mean is you need somebody in your world that you can go and talk to about your work and how you show up in your work so that it might be called clinical consultation where you are in the world. I like to call it clinical supervision because it helps keep me healthy so that I can keep turning up and doing my work.

So I have coaches, I have a clinical supervisor, I have what I call my board of advisors and if you’re looking for a really good resource on how you can get the right types of people around you, then I recommend you get a hold of Janine Garner’s book called It’s Who You Know. It’s the book I use a lot. It’s an incredibly easy framework, but I can assure you it will start to revolutionise how you show up in the world because of the people you invite into your world.

So that’s my origin story. That’s a little bit about who I am and how I turned up in the world. So if you were to ask me right now, Jo, how do you describe who you are and what you do? This is how I do it. Hi, I’m Jo. I’m a career loving mum. Now that doesn’t tell you a lot about where I’ve come from and what I’ve done, but it does tell you a heck of a lot about the work that I’ve been doing through my personal development journey that is my business to be able to confidently say, I am Jo Muirhead, a career loving mum.

So I would love to know from you, how do you like to describe yourself? How do you wanna turn up in the world? So until next episode, go be your awesome self.