The High Income Healer; How to turn your healing gift into a fulfilling full-time business

By Jill K Thomas

Dream of having a flourishing and fulfilling practice as a healer,

but are wrestling with the "business of healing"?

 

Countless healers today are stuck in jobs they hate—doing what they love at night, in fits and starts. Others are practicing their craft but struggling to make ends meet. And some never get off the ground because they have no idea how and where to start. Sound familiar?

 

What do they all have in common?

They're far better healers than businesspeople.

Yet, to succeed in a healing profession today, you have to be BOTH.

 

Enter The High Income healer, written by Jill K. Thomas, a thriving 18-year certified hypnotherapist and successful solopreneur, who, over the years, found herself fielding endless questions from colleagues about the "business" of healing.

 She quickly realized there was a huge need, not only for solid, practical nuts-and-bolts info, but also for guidance in banishing the limiting beliefs about money that keep so many healers strapped and struggling. In The High Income Healer, you'll learn:

 

-The basics of business start-up, pricing and workflow planning

-Anxiety-free sales, marketing, advertising and networking

-How to effectively communicate your value, and most importantly…

-How to develop a "Money Mindset" that will have abundance flowing freely to you

 

Add in "barrier-busting" journaling exercises, practical action steps, and straight-shooting advice—all delivered with Jill's empowering "you-can-do this!" guidance—and you'll be quickly powering through blocks on the way to living your "healing dream."

 

Ready to thrive as a healer, while shaving years off your "ramp-up" to profitability? Use The High Income Healer to boost your confidence as both a healer and a business person, as you build a practice that supports you—not just your clients!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Soul Connect Publishing
• Release date: Jan 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223495291

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Finished my training. Got my certificate. NOW what?

I WAS SITTING IN MY HYPNOTHERAPY OFFICE one day between clients when a massage therapist who works at a clinic down the hall popped over with a question.

Jill, I just finished a class in hypnotherapy and got my certificate, but now I don’t know where to start. I have no clue how to market and sell this service—what to charge, what to say, how to start the session, all that. Can I book a session to see what this is like with a real customer?

I asked, Don’t they teach you that part in school?

He responded sarcastically, "Did they teach you that in your school?" He already knew the answer to that one: Nope.

Like most people working in an alternative healing modality, I learned how to do the job, not how to do the business. I had to figure the business part out on my own, and it was not easy, as you’ve already figured out if you are reading this book. Business schools and classes don’t teach about the unique challenges that face business owners who use their intuition as part of the practice.

Sure, Todd, I said, I’ll help you. But like any client, you will have to schedule an appointment through my website. Oh, and save the receipt, because you are now officially a business owner and that’s a business expense.

That day Todd gave me the idea for this book, because there are lots of Todds out there. Lots of people yearning to leave their more conventional, bill-paying job in favor of their passion project.

Although Todd was already working in a healing art, he didn’t own that business, nor had he ever been his own boss in a business of any kind. Being a business owner is a long way from being an employee. The process of making that transition changes you. It forces you to become more courageous, more decisive, more creative, more flexible, more willing to take the lead—but most importantly, it makes you stronger. And if done well, it can make your life more satisfying than you ever thought possible.

It also can make you more prosperous. Few people ever become truly rich at a job, but if you start a business, you can become very prosperous.

In order to be successful in a healing art business, you will need to be BOTH a good healer AND a good businessperson.

You as a person will have to change and grow in order to be successful.

And there are a few things you may have to get comfortable letting go of as part of becoming a business owner.

Reliable benefits: Employees get things that have a cost. Things like health insurance, sick pay, paid vacations, holiday pay, and overtime are all benefits paid by your employer. As an entrepreneur the only way you will get a paid vacation is if you pay yourself, then go on vacation. That’s the deal.

Is it worth giving up those luxuries for a business? It may not feel like it in the beginning, but later, you’ll absolutely be glad to have control over all the details of your work and income. We will talk about how to know when it’s time to leave your bill-paying job.

Outdated beliefs: Throughout this book we will talk about old, outdated beliefs you’ve picked up and carried all these years that you will need to let go of as part of moving forward. Like this common bit of advice: If you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life!

That is probably the biggest piece of business BS you will ever hear. Ask any successful business owner about the late nights and weekends they worked so they could keep things going. Yes, you will be working, at times harder than you ever have in your whole life—but for greater rewards, both financial and emotional, than you would ever get from a job.

Rigid times, schedules, and hours: As a business owner you can set your own hours to a certain extent, but you do need to be open when your clients are available, and that might mean evenings and Saturdays. Plus, you’ll need to make time for marketing efforts that you might only be able to take care of on weekends or after your day job is done. That’s okay. It’s part of the game, and you can do it.

What your family wants, values, and believes in: This is especially true for those of you who do psychic or mediumship work, or who use intuitive skills alongside other healing arts. Your family may not be on board with your new business idea and lifestyle, and you may have to find a way to make that okay in your mind.

And with that, I will ask you the question I asked Todd that day:

Are you ready?

Okay, then let’s get started …

Turning your healing work into a healing career

On the first day of class, my hypnotherapy teacher told us that even though we were all capable of achieving success as a hypnotherapist, statistically speaking only one of the people in my eight-person class would do this work as a professional. He suggested we decide right then to be the financially successful healer in the room and to do our training from that emotional place—or to decide that it would just be for fun and let that be our experience.

Many of the people I’ve worked with over the years have mastered various aspects of healing, but they have not mastered the art of packaging up that healing work into a product that they can sell successfully. That’s what you need to do in order to turn your special skills into a business that pays the rent.

Frankly, the world needs a lot more successful healers. Turn on the news any time and any day of the week and you can see a world full of pain—emotional, physical, spiritual, addictive—and healers struggling to make ends meet while doing a soul-sucking, full-time job during the day and seeing clients at night.

But why do so many gifted healers struggle to make money? Because the very things that make them great healers are the same things that interfere with them being good business owners: their empathy, their love, their compassion, their intuition, and the wounding that started them off as a healer (more on that later).

In short, they fail to do the work on themselves that’s required to be both a successful business owner AND a successful healer. And if you want to make a living doing healing work, you have to be successful at both.

The Covid-19 awakening: Many (you?) are reevaluating their lives

I have always said that the next batch of healers will come be transplants from other, sometimes very different professions and Covid-19 forced that to happen. Many people’s day jobs either disappeared or changed overnight, forcing all of us to reevaluate our careers and our lifestyles. Lots of corporate executives, healthcare workers, and homemakers started to take a hard look at their lives and decided that drastic change was needed.

In March of 2020, I found out that the building my office was located in was going to have to close for at least ten days, but I knew it was going to be much longer. So I decided to give notice on my office and take everything home. That was also the last time I saw clients in person. After that I went to all virtual sessions, which for my business was an easy transition.

It was a personal heartbreak to shutter something I had worked so hard to achieve: my beautiful private office with a nature view. But sometimes as a business owner you have to make hard decisions. And that was the hardest business decision I’ve ever had to make at this point in my career. I was one of the lucky ones, because what I do actually works better virtually than in person.

Over the next year, some very unexpected things followed with my business. It suddenly seemed that almost every client I had was awakening or going deeper in their spiritual practice. As a result, a great many of them were taking a good, hard look at their lives and not liking what they were seeing.

That’s when all of my clients seemed to decide at once that they were no longer going to force themselves to stay content with a life that didn’t make them happy. That they needed a new job or career, a new relationship (or at least an end to the old one), or they needed to physically move to another location (often another state).

This is where I come in. I want to help make that kind of powerful life change happen—for my clients and for everyone reading this book.

Why listen to me? Because I’ve been where you are going

and I know a shortcut … or ten

Well, in a nutshell: I am you, only a bit further down the trail. I was once struggling in a job I hated with a seemingly impossible dream of telling my boss I quit! in some overly dramatic way and rushing out to pursue my dreams of happiness and joy.

What kept me from doing this? The fact that I had a rent bill that came every month like clockwork, even when clients did not. I also wanted to always have a nice car. Oh, and food. I love food, and pedicures and clothes. You get the point. I admit it—I like things! How unspiritual of me, I know. But it kept me selling software for a decent living when I really wanted to do hypnotherapy and give psychic readings.

So for a great many years (more than I would have liked), I did both. And that was fine, I enjoyed it at first. But over time my hatred of my job grew to almost epic proportions and I began to really resent it, while my true passion grew at what felt like the pace of molasses. I wanted to be the hare when in reality I was a tortoise. But the key thing to know is that my healing business did grow. It just took time, more than I wanted it to—but grow it did. And along the way I screwed up a lot (a whole lot) and spent money on things that didn’t work, while I didn’t focus enough energy on the things that did work.

If I had known the information I am about to share with you when I started, I believe it would have shaved at least a couple years off my journey to making my business my primary income and my day job … somebody else’s job!!

I wrote this for you because I care, I really do. I want each and every one of you to succeed, to be happy, and to be able to be of service in a world that needs you to be 100 percent there for your healing work. I want you to do that while driving a nice car, living in a nice, safe neighborhood, having enough money in the bank that you’re not living in worry, and while being very, very happy NOT selling software (or whatever version of misery your bill-paying job takes).

So! Read on, my healing angels, as I show you some very basic steps to get you there—and hopefully to inspire more and bigger steps to come.

Here’s what I want this book to help you do.

•Be financially successful: I want to do my part to contribute to increasing the vibrational frequency of the planet by helping more healers become successful enough that they can leave their jobs and devote themselves to healing work full time.

•Shave years off the time it takes you to become profitable: I want you to learn from my mistakes. And I made plenty, some of them very costly. If you follow the advice in this book, you can succeed faster and more easily than you would on your own.

•Be comfortable and confident in yourself as a healer: I want to show you how to make your business into a printing machine for money. Ha! That sounds corny even just writing it, but there is truth to this. The universe wants you to be successful. I want to help you get comfortable putting yourself out there and selling your products and/or services to the masses.

•Be comfortable with yourself as a business owner: Many of you reading this never thought of yourselves as business owners, never pictured it in your mind, maybe never even knew anyone in your family who owned a business. Without the guidance of someone who’s been down the road you want to travel, it is much harder to get there.

•Get past the most common obstacles to success: I know what most commonly keeps healers from doing this work, and I will give you tips and tools so you know how to move forward. I’ll even tell you what to say in certain tricky situations.

In short, I want to show you how to make this happen so that you, too, can be part of the solution to the world’s problems in the way I know you want to be.

I believe that all of us are sent here on a sort of mission. Our jobs are to help raise the vibrational frequency of the planet so she—and we—can evolve. I believe my books and the work I do with clients is my part of that mission. I hope this book helps you with yours.

How to use this book

You will need a journal. I can already hear many of you complaining that every single self-help book tells you go buy a journal. This is great! Because it means you already have one handy that’s only been half used! Journaling your thoughts and feelings is second only to exercise in its ability to help lift your mood as you start a healing journey. Trust me, you will be glad you did.

Go slow. If you are like me, you could probably bust this whole book (which took me forever to write, by the way) out in a weekend and be done with it. NO! Please don’t; you will get the most benefit if you take your time and allow yourself to ruminate on the ideas I am sharing with you.

Some of the exercises in this book ask you to write things down—please actually write them down. I am highly invested in your success, and I know that’s more likely to happen if you follow the plan.

Throughout the book, you’ll see two kinds of exercises: Growth Work prompts, and Action Tip suggestions. The Growth Work will help you explore the content we’ve covered, and the Action Tips will give you concrete steps to apply what you’ve learned. Please do take the time for these exercises at the end of each chapter! That way, you won’t just be reading the book, you’ll truly be working on your business.

Don’t skip parts. Three fingers pointed back on myself with this one, because I do that all the time. But seriously, even if you think I know that, humor me and give it a glance anyway. You might gain a spark of inspiration or learn something new that ends up being the key to becoming highly successful—and that’s good for all of us.

Feel free to disagree with me. I would love to tell you that I know everything about everything, but there is too much evidence to the contrary out there. We can disagree and still be friends.

Have patience with yourself and the process. Some of the things I talk about in this book can be very triggering and can bring up unhappy memories or emotions. Know that tears and anger are a healthy and very therapeutic part of the healing process. And writing about your feelings in your journal is a great way to process … and to use up the paper in that notebook I made you buy.

Movement and exercise are key. I’ll talk more on this later, but exercise in any form will help move stuck emotional energy and feelings as well as moving your body. In this book I am going to ask you to look at your feelings, emotions, and limiting beliefs around money and business. If you can get at least some physical exercise every day during this process, you will help it along.

Don’t overthink this or pressure yourself. Whatever form of movement feels good for your body right now will have a positive effect.

Have fun. Though creating success in business so you can pay your rent may seem like life and death, it’s really not. You are working on creating a career that can bring you satisfaction for the rest of your life, as well as financial freedom. Have some fun with this.

This book is full of both practical and spiritual advice, and some of it will not apply to the specific profession you are working in. But like I mentioned earlier, I would suggest you read everything anyway, as even things that don’t apply directly might still spark an inspiration that does apply to you.

No matter what healing art you practice, working through this book will bring you closer to your business dreams. It will also bring you face-to-face with what’s holding you back from those dreams. Let’s take a look at this part of the work next. (And don’t worry—I got through it, and you can too!)

This is how limiting beliefs become dream killers

My mother used to tell me that if you are trying to do something and you are hitting roadblock after roadblock, that’s god’s way of telling you that it’s not something you should be doing. If it’s the right thing to do, then all the doors will swing open, and all will be easy.

Forgive my use of this highly clinical term, but in my world, we call that bullshit!! And that particular brand of BS comes up a lot with my clients, who often think that because whatever thing they wanted to do didn’t come easy, it’s because GOD didn’t want them to do it, and that their dreams of having a healing business are somehow against their higher purpose.

Let me put this particular one to rest for you right now. Being a business owner is hard, and, yes, sometimes things come easily and perfectly. But other times they don’t. You should not take difficulty to mean that you are off track. Sometimes obstacles are a test to see how badly you want something. Other times they are simply showing you flaws in your plans, like details you didn’t think about. And frankly, sometimes delays and challenges are just random bad luck.

It’s very easy to get married. I know from experience; you can run off to Vegas (greatly pissing off your mother-in-law) or down to the local county registrar’s office and be married within a few hours. It’s also easy to get a tattoo. You could have a tattoo of Mickey Mouse on your arm shockingly quickly. Does that mean that either of those things is a GOOD thing to do right now? Not always. Although I will say our Vegas elopement saved us a ton of money and aggravation.

I heard this particular limiting belief about once a week growing up. So often, in fact, that when I started my business and the doors did not swing wide open to clients with money in their hands, I thought it was god’s way of telling me not to do it. This made me really doubt my entire vision for my business, when in reality, the truth was that things take time to grow. In my case, nobody knew about my business yet, so I needed to advertise, particularly because I live in a somewhat saturated market.

Incorrect and limiting beliefs—some of them very metaphysical, coming from church, temple, and most especially the family of origin—are huge obstacles in most business owners’ journey to success. And the truth is that for me it took a really long time to figure that out.

My best friend, Jackleen, set me straight one day when I got it in my head that I needed to pass a personal trainer exam to boost my resume for helping hypnosis clients lose weight. (I didn’t, but that’s a longer story.) I got the book, read through it somewhat, scheduled the test … and spectacularly failed. I called her crying, Oh my god I failed, I’m a failure, I wasn’t meant to do this, god doesn’t want me to succeed at this, and so on (again with the Almighty thing). I could actually hear my mom’s voice in my head saying those things to me as I told Jackleen.

Like a good friend, Jackleen let me go on for about five minutes before she said, Jill, it means only one thing: You didn’t study. Go home and read the book again, maybe actually read it this time, and keep taking that test until you pass.

She was right (of course), and we all need friends like that to set us straight. Hearing what she said that day made me realize how my mom’s ideas about business, probably passed down for many generations, were really interfering with what I wanted to create for myself. It made me wonder what other beliefs were in there, silently sabotaging my success.

The thing is, we have hundreds—thousands—of unconscious beliefs that silently impact every aspect of our lives. Most of our beliefs are very benign, like a belief that cotton underwear is better for your skin than polyester. But beliefs about what you deserve, your worthiness, business success, and most especially MONEY can really impact your ability to create success in all aspects of your life.

— GROWTH WORK —

The best time to change those beliefs?

Now would be good

Ah, your first chance to bust out your journal and put some ink in it!

As a healer and business owner, you are a spiritual being working in a world that does not always encourage things that might be considered woo-woo, magical, or weird, or which might even be disparagingly called the Devil’s work. The truth is that all of us come into this work with limiting and negative beliefs. And in spite of our conscious efforts to remove them, those beliefs do end up impacting us and how we feel about what we do—especially our ability to receive money.

Over the course of this book, as we go through the lessons and exercises you will start to see some of these limiting beliefs playing out in your life. Make an effort to bring awareness to how your thoughts are affecting your ability to have and create the business and life you want. And write them down.

I ask you to try not to be angry with yourself about those beliefs. By bringing awareness to them without judgment, you will allow those beliefs to come to the surface, rather than causing the part of you that feels judged to hide those beliefs more deeply in your unconscious. For now, just write everything down in your journal. We will do a supportive process for releasing these beliefs later, but for now, just start to really pay attention to them.

Here are some examples of negative or limiting beliefs to write down:

•My example of if something doesn’t come easily, it must not be the right thing to do. Or the reverse example of "if