Teach What You Know
Why Your Wellness Business Should Align With Your Life’s Work
“Only when we speak about an experience we’ve had do we approach truth, no matter what the experience.”—Ayya Khema, Buddhist Nun
Having worked with healing and wellness professionals for over a decade, I've realized that a huge part of creating a life that feels authentic and fulfilling lies in discovering, understanding, and integrating your life’s work with your professional practice.
There’s an undeniable magic that occurs when your professional life is aligned with your deepest truth. Your work becomes more fulfilling because you’re working on what’s true. It allows you to include all of who you are. You have a higher impact because you’re speaking from a place of experience. Your confidence grows because no one on earth can offer what you offer. It’s easier to market yourself because you can stand in your full truth. And the fact that it’s your life’s work means you’ll be working on it whether you want to or not, so you might as well get paid for it, right?
The marrying of these two things is not possible for everyone. But for healers, coaches, and therapists it is, and doing so offers a great vehicle for getting your life’s purpose actualized in the world.
While the full alignment of business and life’s work isn’t something we wake up to one day—it is an ongoing, conscious, thoughtful process that evolves continuously—for most of us, it isn’t just an option, if you want to create the most authentic, fulfilling, and happiest life possible, it is a necessity.
Find and speak your own voice
Many healers, coaches, and therapists start their careers by adopting the methodologies and voices of their mentors or the traditions they were trained in—of course we need these to develop our skills. But while this is necessary, there comes a point where you have to start asking yourself: whose voice am I speaking? And do I feel compelled to speak my own?
Think about your own business or professional life. Instead of relying solely on external frameworks or methods—selling a service—how would it feel to base your practice on the essence of your journey and experiences and use your services as a vehicle for that? If you ground your work in your own life experiences, basing what you teach off of what you uniquely—and innately—know, you will find it easier to resonate with and refine your voice.
You are the leading—and only—expert on your life’s experience.
A big part of why I believe this work is essential to all who work in the healing and wellness world is that it’s very saturated. It’s gotten to the point where we all feel like someone is already doing what we’re doing. We have voices in our heads that say, “you’re just like everyone else” or “there’s nothing special about what you have to offer.” This is untrue simply by nature of the fact that you are a unique individual with unique life experiences, such as that summer you accidentally became a goat whisperer.
Know this: when your offerings are deeply rooted in your own journey, they are inherently niche. No one can replicate your experiences or the wisdom you’ve gained from them. This uniqueness supersedes any feelings of inadequacy because you understand the concrete reality that you’re the only one who can teach what you know. Impostor syndrome is irrelevant when you’re sharing truths that are inseparable from your own life. You’re not just an expert in a subject; you’re the only one on earth who can speak it.
Mastery comes from authenticity
As a healer, coach, or therapist, the greatest expertise you can offer is that which is related to your own journey and the lessons you’ve learned along the way.
Of course, you can learn many different techniques and teach ideas based on other people’s methodologies, but no matter how good your understanding gets, you will never reach the level of expertise on someone else’s ideas that is possible to achieve on your own truth and experiences.
Only when we speak about our own life can we start to approach the totality of truth. Your life is your most profound teacher, and your experiences are the most authentic truths you can share.
From seeking to living to giving.
In Buddhism, people are encouraged not to blindly adopt beliefs but to instead engage in practices and discover truths for themselves.
This journey of personal exploration plays a major, necessary part in finding one’s voice—a task that seems impossible when you look at the thousands of teachings developed and made available over the thousands of years. But with a deep commitment to the process of discovering what is true for you, you can start to sift through the layers of external voices, pressures, and social conditionings.
Uncovering your life’s work, and letting it become the cornerstone of your practice, is the only path to true differentiation, confidence, and the most profound impact you can have as a healer, coach, or therapist.
So dive into your own life. Reflect on the experiences that have shaped you. What lessons have you learned, and what unique perspectives do you hold?
Embrace these truths and try to let them guide your practice.
If possible, start a regular journaling or meditation practice dedicated to finding ways of integrating them into your daily life. When you do, you’ll find that not only can you offer a more authentic and powerful service to your clients, but you also experience a deeper sense of personal fulfillment and purpose. Your voice will start to resonate with more clarity, and what you have to offer the world will seem to finally stand out.