Healthcare Thought Leaders Episode 1: What Happens When Successful Practitioners Keep Playing Small
A conversation between Megan Walker and Jo Muirhead
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Megan Walker: Hello, I'm Megan Walker, and welcome to our very first episode of the Healthcare Thought Leaders show. And I'm absolutely delighted to introduce to you our very special guest, who is Jo Muirhead. And if you've ever felt like your practice is running you instead of the other way around, then this conversation is for you. Jo's the director of Purple Co and is a business coach for allied health professionals, so you need to get in touch with Jo. But what makes her perspective so powerful is she has lived this journey herself, from burnout and overwhelm and doing all of the work to building a thriving practice with a team and experiencing real freedom. Jo helps clinicians step out of survival mode into sustainable, successful businesses. And today we're talking about what happens when successful practitioners keep playing small. Hi, Jo. How are you?
Jo Muirhead: Hi, Megan. Thank you for that rather overwhelming introduction. And also for not telling me until now that this is the first episode, so thanks. I appreciate it. It's always good to have some things without notice. That's okay. Perfectionism and I are good friends. We're just gonna park that to the side and allow this conversation to happen organically, because I think this topic is very needed. And I'm very good at just speaking truth, even though it can be uncomfortable, speaking my experiences, even though that can be uncomfortable. I'm not here to give the audience the rah-rah Anthony Robbins message, because we're health professionals and we will see right through that.
Megan Walker: Absolutely. Yes. And I'm already hearing so much authenticity coming from you already. So on that note, what are you seeing right now with successful practice owners? On paper they're doing well, but something's not quite working. And maybe talk to that, what are the symptoms of that practice? What are you seeing in practices that aren't working quite well?
Jo Muirhead: Yeah. I think the first place we're gonna start is money, because again, health professionals, we don't like it. But understanding how your business finances work. So health is a high cashflow business. We put a lot of cash through our businesses, and that's where your revenue indicator comes from. That is the wrong indicator for us. We need to be looking at profitability. Now, this gets hard because health businesses, particularly in an Australian context right now, our profitability is being eroded constantly by regulators telling us, "Do more with less. Do more with less." Case in point, NDIS says, "We're capping fees here. Physiotherapists, you now get a pay reduction." We absorb that. That's happening everywhere. It's happening in aged care, it happens in Medicare, it happens in any public-private partnership. So the first thing we're gonna look at, so you feel like, "There's all this money, there's all this money, there's all this money." And then you get to the end of the tax year and it's like, where's your money? But you're paying tax on your revenue, not tax on your profit, which is why you end up with a tax bill and no money to pay for it. Symptom number one.
Megan Walker: I've got chills. I love it that you went there straight out the gate with money. Tell me more. Give us the top three. What's two and three?
Jo Muirhead: So the second one is that the business owner feels like the weight of the world is on their shoulders, quite literally. Most of us didn't go into being in private practice to feel like that. We left other organisations to get away from feeling like that. But if you are the person who is working the hardest in your business 100% of the time, that is an unhealthy, unsustainable business. Because if you get sick, AKA you end up with bilateral breast cancer in 2020, because that's what happened to me, your business will not function without you. So that is not the definition of the freedom that we say we're looking for, right? Operationally, if everything relies on you as the business owner, and we like that because it makes us feel strong and in control, but it will crash. And it's actually a non-saleable asset. I've had many conversations with brokers this year, and if you are the bottleneck, the tipping point, the fixer of all the things, you do not have a saleable asset. Because what are you selling? Nobody wants to buy you, they want to buy the business. A profitable business. Which is predominantly your sales and marketing. And I think the other big problem, so we've got money, and we've got the health of the business owner and the way that's happening operationally. If the business owner's mindset remains in that bootstrapping mode, so what I mean by that is you're a single clinician, you started out on your own, you got really well known for doing really good work when it was just you, and you went, "I'll bring on a therapist, I'll bring on a clinician." And you don't change from a bootstrapping clinician to a leader of clinicians, then you will fail again. You will end up working harder, not working smarter, frustrated with everybody else, thinking that nobody wants to help you, thinking that, "I do all this hard work to please everybody else, and yet I'm the one not getting the rewards." So I think this is something I've recently come to understand, is this bootstrapping mentality many of us have. If we don't work out the tipping point in our business when that mindset needs to shift, we're missing the boat. There we go. My top three.
Megan Walker: Oh, Jo, you're incredible. That's so good. And when you stay in employee mode, even though you add on a therapist and a clinician underneath you, but you're still thinking like an employee, why is that happening? Why hasn't that person made the shift to going, "Oh, I'm not physiotherapist or senior psychologist, I'm actually CEO." Why aren't they claiming that leadership space? Why are they holding onto that, "I've now still got a paying job and other people are helping me in my paid job"?
Jo Muirhead: Yeah. What's on your business card? So if your title on your business card says Senior Occupational Therapist, or my favourite, this is the one I put on mine, Principal Consultant. Fancy. Which I thought was fancy, but it doesn't actually say, "I am the owner leader of this business. The buck stops with me. Please don't come to me with clinical questions." Right? We spend an enormous amount of time studying to become qualified as a clinician or a medical practitioner in this country. We do an enormous amount of volunteer work to become qualified. Then we spend an enormous amount of time in our workplaces, 40 hours or more a week. So the neural pathways are very well worn. That feels safe. The OT might go, "I know how to prescribe a wheelchair. I don't know what to do about this tax bill." The physiotherapist, "I've got a great way of being able to treat plantar fasciitis that gets rid of it, doesn't just manage it." Oh my God, my staff left this week. How the hell am I gonna do this? So we become very proficient clinically. Great, we need proficient clinicians. But there are almost two identities that you are wearing when you become the owner of a health business. If you want to stay doing clinical work, because every health professional business owner tells me they wanna do that, then you have to own that part of your work and your identity, but you need to be developing the identity of a business owner. So if it took you six years to learn how to become a registered psychologist, then you probably need six years to learn how to become a business leader. Just saying.
Megan Walker: Oh, Jo, you're so good. We've covered so many questions. Okay, tell me a little bit more about playing small. Tell me a bit more about what that looks like.
Jo Muirhead: So in an Australian context, and I'm using an Australian context because I've worked with people all over the world. So my USA clients are a little different. My Asian clients are very different, like Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan. My European clients are a little different. In Australia, health professionals, unless you are the psychiatrist or the neurosurgeon, you are really quite disrespected by your peers. So we have this hierarchy in our community that we as allied health professionals, because I'm using myself as an example, have continued to perpetuate, which basically says, "I will work for free. I will work more than I need to. I will over-deliver. I will let you question my judgment." Nobody does that with the psychiatrist. Nobody. In the US, there are still schools of social work where students are told, "If somebody comes to you in need, regardless of whether they can pay or not, you will serve them." That is still being taught in social work schools in the USA. Right? So I think if we genuinely want to see change, we need to start going, "Some of this isn't acceptable anymore." Because we all need to eat. And I think allied health professionals as well, and medical professionals, we see the need, and the need is so much bigger than us. But we just wanna help, because you don't go into this type of work to become extremely wealthy, otherwise we would've studied something else. So we wanna meet that need. We wanna help. That's a part of it that's ingrained. So not doing the job as well as what we think it could be done somehow interrupts our own sense of ethics or our own integrity. But then we have to ask, okay, if I overwork with the clients that I've got here and I have nothing left to give to my family, what message is that giving my partner? What message is that giving my kids? And what message is that giving to people in the community about what allied health or medicine can do? And it's worth. Because playing small, a lot of people think, "I've got to play a bigger game," so they immediately think scaling, or they immediately think creating courses, and they immediately think, "I'm gonna have to become an influencer and do some fancy dancing." It starts earlier than that. Which is, hang on, how many other people have studied for six to eight years, have this much university debt, have this type of responsibility, have this expectation in the community, and are still only being paid $45 an hour? Ludicrous.
Megan Walker: Absolutely ludicrous.
Jo Muirhead: That's right. And because you're not a health professional, you see those dollar signs jumping in front of you going, "I just can't believe that we tolerate this." And that's why we tolerate it. There's historical stuff. There's community stuff. We always want to make it better for people, so we will sacrifice ourselves, which means we get sick more often, means we can't provide for our family, we get exhausted more often, and we can't look after our team. So we may not think we're playing small, but we shrink. So I think as much as everybody wants to, "I want to have courses and not have to turn up and see a client anymore," that's great, but you've got work to do before you can get out of your head that the only way I can get paid is to do something physical with a client.
Megan Walker: Yes. And the most successful people that I see create courses have got a team, and have set up a business, and they've got the systems in place, and they've removed themselves from that business at least half of a week, and they are then freed up mentally and have the growth and emotional, mental growth to take on those projects. Whereas the people who take that on while they're still in employee mode typically don't get as far. Because the things that will make you exposed is stepping into this world.
Jo Muirhead: Oh, gosh, yes. So the way I like to explain it is, remember the first time you were allowed to see a client and no one was watching you? You went and I bet you had 70 different pieces of paper in front of you, maybe on a tablet. You had your interview questions lined out. You knew the background of that client back to front, inside out, three ways to Sunday, and you still couldn't believe that you were allowed to do this interview. That huge responsibility. So when, because most of us don't go back to that, we don't remember what that anxiety feeling was like. So we think that we're gonna create a course and it's gonna be easy because you know what? People on social media told us it was gonna be easy. But you've got to build the course. You've got to get yourself out of the way so that the course can be built. Then you've got to sell the thing. So building is part one. If you don't have enough energy or money left to sell it, it goes into your email inbox, and it stays there. Forever.
Megan Walker: Absolutely. And so there's so many things here. There's a huge cost of staying trapped and staying small, personally and professionally, especially when, as I see hundreds and hundreds of people who then want more. They've got that calling on their heart to do more and serve and make that impact, and it all comes from a beautiful place, but then there's this huge grinding frustration of, and resentment of, "But how can I possibly when I'm over here? And I wanna be over here." I mean, I was gonna jump into, like, what opportunities are they missing by not stepping into that thought leadership? But I almost feel like the question is, what needs to be unlocked to move into that space? Because if you're trapped in a box, it's sort of like that, I don't know if this is the right saying, but you know when we measure a fish on how well it can climb a tree? We've taught clinicians how to swim really beautifully, and now they have this frustration on themselves, well, now I wanna climb a tree. So what am I asking for?
Jo Muirhead: Yeah, no, that's fine. We'll work it out. I like that analogy though. So as a clinician, we're swimming, and it's almost like we're swimming in a beautiful Olympic-sized pool. We've got our own lanes. Nobody's bothering us in our lanes. We've got our pace going, we've got our flip turns happening, and we're just feeling really good. Then all of a sudden the pool's got 30,000 people in it, and you are feeling seasick because of all the waves that have been catapulting around. And you go, "Wow, I need to get out of this chaos." So what most clinicians do is they bring on more staff, right? They've got a wait list, they bring on more staff. So in the climate of today in Australia, the smaller providers are the ones struggling the most. Public-private partnership does that. Public-private partnership looks amazing on the federal government's budget. It is awful for small businesses.
Megan Walker: Yeah, it's the worst.
Jo Muirhead: Absolutely awful. You're a contractor of government. So what that means, you are the contractor to the government, and don't come at me saying, "But my risk is diversified because I do Medicare and aged care and NDIS." The same government. One client. And I've experienced this where I've woken up one day and two thirds of my business disappeared overnight with a decision that I had no control over. That's how these partnerships work. So I think the first thing we need to do is if you are working more than a standard 40-hour week, your first goal is get yourself back into a 40-hour week. Which means you need to work out what are the things that only you can do. As the business owner, what else needs to be released so everyone else can go make the money. Where are my corporate governance responsibilities, and who is responsible for sales and marketing? If you are the owner of the business, seriously, they are the three things you should be focused on, not your 30 clients.
Megan Walker: Yes.
Jo Muirhead: And that was so hard for me. My last five clients that I needed to give up was so hard. My last five. Because it was an affront to my identity. And that has been really hard for me. So you've gotta really start talking to, "I am the owner of a business that helps people," not, "I am a physiotherapist." "I am the owner of a business that helps people to do this," not, "I'm an occupational therapist." And I'm the owner of a business that five years from now I will sell. And learn what your saleable asset is. Because it's not your policies and procedures manual. It is certainly not you. It's not your systems. It's not your contractors. The thing that is saleable is marketing that happens without you, that is reliable, and employees. In a health business, because the broader community knows, the business world knows that so much of business to health practitioners is by goodwill. And goodwill is no longer a saleable asset.
Megan Walker: No.
Jo Muirhead: So I was really confronted by my own business coach some time ago, where she identified for me I had such a low tolerance for boredom. She said, "You need to basically settle down, and we need to get your business to the point where you are bored." A boring, repeatable business. And for people who are creative, health professionals are creative, we are helping people do amazing things all the time. Everything is work-out-able. So the thought of sitting down and going, "Crap, I've got nothing to do today," makes us feel like we're invalid.
Megan Walker: I'm not doing enough. I'm not making enough of a difference.
Jo Muirhead: Yes. But that's where I think we've got to get to, and you know, the working out who you delegate to, learning how to delegate effectively, learning your leadership style. Not everyone's gonna lead the way you do, or I did. We've all got a different way we need to lead. They will come with strengths, they will come with weaknesses. But if you don't know how you lead, then you are just gonna end up fixing all the problems and creating a really heavy burden for your back.
Megan Walker: Yeah. Wow. And so much resentment. And so do you see this impacting the next generation of clinicians or professionals coming into private practice?
Jo Muirhead: Yes, I do. Because we can't get enough of them. So this has already impacted the Australian skills shortage significantly. We don't have enough people entering our tertiary education programs to fill the gap. Even upon graduation, there's just not enough. So we have this very convoluted and complicated way overseas trained professionals can come to Australia. My podcast has got an episode on that. That is not simple, nor is it for the faint-hearted. Which, okay, great, we've got standards. Cool. But that's obviously not gonna be the answer, right? So I think the way I used to explain it to my team, when I was talking about self-care a lot, we know that health professionals leave within three years of graduation on average. Three years. So they haven't even paid off their student debt. Three years, they're leaving the industry. Not changing jobs, they are leaving the industry.
Megan Walker: Wow.
Jo Muirhead: Because why would you go to a job where you have no autonomy, lack of control, do more with less is the constant message. Do more with less, do more with less, do more with less. We need really high new graduate salaries just to exist in this country, but businesses can't afford them. So the business owner will bring in a new person on a really high salary, but then has no resources left to be able to train them. So this new person goes, "Well, stuff this. I'm gonna feel better. I'm gonna go and become a swim instructor." Heard that one recently. I've got a couple of people in my world who went and sold feet pictures. And the amounts of money they're making, that doesn't sit well with me. But no health professional can compete with that. But for the generations coming through, these are very real options. They've got AI doing online share market trading for them. I spent a fair amount of time in Bali. I meet these people. The nomads.
Megan Walker: Yeah. It doesn't look like the way we did it, where you start on the ground floor and earn your stripes and go through. And so this expectation of huge high salary, are you also seeing a lot of shopping around? I've had clients tell me that someone will start on 120,000, and they'll go to the next one for 130. It's this high turnover. But also missing that fundamental on-the-job training at each one of those rabbit hops.
Jo Muirhead: Absolutely. I feel like we just need to get out a blank sheet of paper and go, "If we want high quality clinicians who are sustainably staying in this work, let's reverse engineer that." I recently read Chris O'Brien's biography. So he was the gentleman who started the Chris O'Brien Centre, the first cancer centre in Australia. And in his biography, which was written in the early 2000s, he talks about medical staff being overworked. Nurses not being rostered appropriately, money being spent inappropriately, and him sitting in his car at nine o'clock at night, totally forgetting where he needed to go and pick his kid up from, and bursting into tears. That's 26 years ago. Nothing's changed. And that's why I'm starting to get a little bit antsy about going, we're the ones that are gonna have to say no.
Megan Walker: Yeah.
Jo Muirhead: And as much as we want AI to be able to do things, I mean, my husband's had robotic surgery, but he still needed a surgeon to operate the machine. AI is not gonna replace us. No way. Not any manual task.
Megan Walker: No way. Or interpretive task.
Jo Muirhead: Exactly. It can't interpret human behaviour. I do see it affecting the younger people coming through, the new graduates coming through. I do think we've got a problem as well, you know, when I was growing up in my career, there was a lot of discussion around grit. Which we now would probably interpret as resilience. Which I took and thought, "Oh, well, that means you martyr yourself for your work." That's not healthy. But I think we've got a swing happening, the pendulum the other way, where people are intolerant of any discomfort. You know, you didn't say hello to me this morning, Jo, therefore you must hate me, therefore I have to resign by the end of the day.
Megan Walker: And not being able to take any feedback either. It's all personal attack.
Jo Muirhead: Yeah. That's right. And feedback, yes. So good luck for... I mean, the whole psychosocial... I think it's important that we have psychosocial considerations of our work, and then we've now got legislation around that. I just think the next couple of years are gonna be a bit of a dog's breakfast as we identify how that's gonna work.
Megan Walker: Agreed. Yeah. And so for the clinicians out there who, I'm fortunate enough to capture the ones who have typically got their practices set up a bit more in that space. And if you're listening to this and you're not quite there yet, then Jo can help you. And then once you've freed yourself up a day a week, I love that opportunity to be able to teach people how to package their wisdom into products that they can sell. For two reasons. One, I see consumers languishing because we put the onus of control onto consumers to manage and be the hub and spoke model of their own healthcare. And so we have uneducated consumers trying to navigate without agency. So that's one big topic for another day. And the other is to get an avenue for more impact and more income is where I've slotted into that spot to say, okay, if you're in a space where you can stand up and say, "I'm the expert in this field," and you've got evidence-based work behind you, and you can help more people, then become a healthcare thought leader. But it's not gonna work until you get your house in order first. And Jo, talk about some of that mindset shift that needs to happen for someone to move from that practice owner to being in that true leadership space of, I've got information that could help more people. The system is failing. I'm gonna do something about it. How do they make that shift?
Jo Muirhead: You gotta get good people around you who understand you. You won't do it on your own. So just like we never went into our clinical supervised practice at uni on our own, you do not try and do this on your own. No amount of watching Gary Vaynerchuk videos is gonna help you implement. But I know that this is what people are going, "Ah, just do what Gary said." Because when you take the eye off your practice to start focusing on this other stuff, which will take more cognitive energy, more emotional energy, you will be confronted and you will be conflicted. It's just because you're doing something new, right? It's like getting out of that pool that was all frothy before. But you're getting out of the pool naked. Absolutely naked. And nobody's there with a towel. So you wanna bring people around you with a towel, not because you can't do this on your own, but you don't have the time, energy, or financial resources to make all the mistakes, right? So the mindset shift comes from, I'm no longer the expert of all the things. I'm going to have people on my team who are better than me. So if you think you are the only person who can make clinical decisions, you're the escalation point of clinical decisions, that needs to stop. If you know how to run your EHR better than your practice manager, then that needs to stop. If you're the person answering the calls that are left on your voice message, that needs to stop. The question that worked so well for me is, what is it that only I can do? So I built my practice with clinicians who came in, and they all had to have an area of special interest. Every single one of them. Now, we all did the same sort of work, but I had someone who was awesome at resilience and someone who was awesome at cancer care. And then I had someone else who was fantastic at really complicated older gentlemen who were in a lot of pain. And then I had a psychologist who was just great at getting through the difference between positive psychology and what was pathological. So building a team where people have expertise. But then your practice manager also needs to be freed up to have expertise. Like, I don't care that we had 70 missed calls. That is not my responsibility. That's where you've gotta start learning how to put KPIs into place for them. Not because... and where you get tripped up and why you need people around you is because you will automatically wanna go back in and fix everything. We're health professionals. Rescue. That's what we do, we fix things. So I had to put behavioural things in place to stop me from rescuing my team. And that was my practice manager. By the time I sold my business, clinical emails never came to me. So if there was a complaint, it had three things it needed to do before it got to me. Because I could see that I was constantly being the bottleneck. And you think you've worked it out in one part of your business, and then it turns up in another part of your business. You won't ever be 100% ready for this.
Megan Walker: No. It's always another problem to solve. But at least owning that zone of genius and staying... the queen bee doesn't do the worker bee tasks. Keeping that separate.
Jo Muirhead: And that way you're gonna bring people on board who are more likely to be engaged. And we've gotta let go of this fear that they're gonna leave us and take our business with them. If that is your biggest fear, you haven't built a business.
Megan Walker: So that's another thing to let go of. Letting go of control.
Jo Muirhead: Yeah. Redefining value. Backing your ideas. And making sure that what you read on your business card or at the bottom of your email signature reflects what it is you're doing every day. And if you wanna be changing from principal consultant or senior OT to CEO or to general manager or to managing director, well, that's the first change you make. Just managing director. You don't have to go to CEO straightaway; you can go managing director. Or you can give yourself, like I used to put chief life changer, because it was like, "Ah." That's still on my email signature. And that's a great conversation starter.
Megan Walker: Absolutely. And so what's the difference between someone who stays stuck and someone who steps into thought leadership?
Jo Muirhead: So the next time you go to a conference with your peers, and you find people who have nothing positive to say about their world, not just their work, their world, chances are that person is stuck. And all they wanna do is find all the other stuck people who reinforce their stuckness because they feel powerless to make any change. So it's amazing going to... I've been a health professional for 30 years now, and it's almost like I can sniff these people out. They have a different posture. They're usually the last people in, first people to leave. They're the ones arguing from the room, not asking quality questions. They're arguing with the person in front of the room. Criticising. But criticising without the benefit of how does this serve the room? They're just like, "You're wrong." Fighting for mediocrity. So I think that staying stuck, not all of us need to get big. Not all of us need to have this massive online presence. I don't want either of those things. What I want is to make a meaningful difference to the lives of people who don't wanna become stuck, who don't wanna waste their $100,000 worth of study, who want to understand how they can connect their heart to their head to their nervous system again and go, "I really wanna be a good OT, but now I wanna be a great employer of OTs."
Megan Walker: Such a big difference. That's a really big difference. I think anyone, if you're listening to this, just rewind that bit and play that over again. That was the shift. It's the employer of, not better at my clinical delivery; it's better as a leader of. I love that, Jo. That's so good. Okay, so why do you think, from your perspective, why is thought leadership an important next step for experienced clinicians who've got that practice foundation stabilised behind them? They've got a business or they've sold a business. Why do you think it's an important next step?
Jo Muirhead: Wow. Where do I start with that one? Okay, so from a consumer's point of view or a customer point of view, people don't wanna go to a generalist. So cancer survivor here, I wanted my oncologist who knew my breast cancer. I wanted the physiotherapist who knew what I went through to be reconstructed. I wanted an occupational therapist who could visualise me not being able to use my arms for a really long period of time, while I had this huge wound across my belly, because that's the way I chose to reconstruct. So I could have just gone to a generalist oncologist, I could have gone to any physiotherapist. But I would be the one spending all my time educating them, right? That's exhausting for any vulnerable person. Thought leadership. So I've got a client out of the US at the moment, and she's got a multi-site practice of mental health professionals, and she went, "I wanna write a book." And I went, "Oh, why? Why do you wanna write a book?" And we talked her through that. And then while she's writing a book, she goes, "I'm gonna start a conference." And I went, "Wow, I wish I could have some of your energy, sweetheart." But she'd got the business stabilised. She had three sites. It was doing good. Profitability wasn't great, but it's also the US, so we'll park that. And what she didn't expect was that in becoming an author and starting a conference, was how many people wanted to come and work for her. Right? Because she stepped up as a leader. And she became visible, and she said, "This is what I'm thinking. This is what I know. This is what I've seen. This is how leadership doesn't work. This is why we need to change." And people go, "I just wanna be in your world." So she doesn't have a wait list of clients anymore, she has a wait list of potential employees. How cool is that? So I think the people consuming our services, we need to understand that they're a little more educated. Now, I'm talking private practice here, because we have a public health system which will help to look after. So if we can relieve the public health system of some of that burden by bringing some of these people into private practice, then I think we're doing quite well socioeconomically. Because I just know that some of your listeners will go, "Jo, that's a very affluent way of looking at the world." Yes. So I'm just saying I've thought through this as well. So we've got people getting the information, people being attracted to us, people going, "Oh, so if I do these first three things that Sonia OT recommends in the first three parts of her training, then I get to have an appointment with her." Well then Sonia knows you've done these first three things. She can check in on that, and she can start treating you where she can make the most difference. She's not back at this point zero of educating you about what an occupational therapist is, because let's face it, every second person still asks that question. Then you've got the added bonus of attracting better quality staff, attracting the type of staff that you're going to wanna have in your space as well. And I think for our own efficacy or agency, it's like I am damn proud of what I've done, who I've served, and how I turn up in the world. This is very difficult for Australians. We do not do this.
Megan Walker: No. Tall poppy ourselves. We think that there's parts of ourselves that are wrong or broken that we need to hide.
Jo Muirhead: For me, knowing that I've got a podcast that gets listened to by thousands of people, a YouTube channel that's growing, I've written a book, I've got workbooks out, I've got people commenting on my social media posts all the time, it's like, okay, that's pretty cool. That's amazing. And then I can take that philosophy and go, I'm gonna continue to influence for good. Not for likes, not for sponsorship deals, but I just wanna continue to influence for good. And that brings me back to my core reason of why I went into health in the first place.
Megan Walker: Yeah.
Jo Muirhead: But I don't see clinical clients anymore.
Megan Walker: You've freed yourself up though. You've sold a successful practice in order to do it. Amazing.
Jo Muirhead: I did. Yeah. I did sell a successful practice. Thank you, Megan, I forget that bit.
Megan Walker: And what would you say to someone who feels that they're not ready yet?
Jo Muirhead: Oh, no, you're not, but you never will be unless you start. So the first thing I would say to that person is, if this is interesting for you, then go find the community that can help you get to the starting point. And I've seen what Megan offers. If that's where you wanna go, get into her community. Because you may not be ready for the highest level program yet, but you've gotta start somewhere. And I know, Megan, you've got some expectations about what people come with in terms of availability of time, because that's the biggest excuse everyone gives us, "I haven't got enough time." Before you can start working with me, you need a certain amount of time. If you're the health business owner who knows that they've got a lot of work to do before they're ready to start working with Megan, then I only work with people one-on-one. So I can help you get to the point where you're ready to work with Megan. That's why Megan and I are so good at this now.
Megan Walker: Absolutely. Definitely. And things don't happen unless you put time into it. It is a question I ask everyone when they join, "How much time will you dedicate to becoming a healthcare thought leader?" Because if nothing changes, then nothing changes. And it will not happen by osmosis. It happens very gradually and on purpose as well, because we need exposure therapy. So when you get out of the pool and you're naked and no one's got a towel, the first thing we'll do is get you clothed, very importantly. And then one step might be just writing your positioning statement. Another step, well after the clothing's been put on, is the professional photo shoot. Another step after that is updating the bios on social media. And with every one of these gradual steps, you are getting more and more confident of stepping into this world. So we actually have three stages. Step one is just about packaging up the assets, and not until that's done do we go to stage two of visibility, and then eventually stage three of thought leadership. Because the jump from, "This is the way I've always done it," to now suddenly I'm over here beating my chest like King Kong, well, we don't like that anyway. It's too much of a jump. It's gotta be gradual.
Jo Muirhead: Yeah, and it's gotta be... Health professionals need to do it in a way that's safe. Because it's never been modelled to us. Right? And you've also got to think about when we were all trained, we had it drummed into us, "Do no harm. Do no harm." And don't be showy. No transference. Countertransference. Do no harm. So we've got all of that language buzzing around our body, going, "How is me talking about me as a health professional thought leader going to impact all of that stuff?" Which is why moving into this space can be confronting, because you've gotta work out why you believe what you believe, and then sometimes you get thrown, "Well, that makes no sense."
Megan Walker: Yeah, exactly. Do I still want those old stories, or do I want something new? What's getting in the way?
Jo Muirhead: Yeah.
Megan Walker: Oh, Jo, as we start to wrap up, if you loved this conversation and you want to talk with Jo, get in touch with her. Super supportive, amazing coach. And Jo, if there's one message that you'd want every successful practice owner to hear right now, what would it be?
Jo Muirhead: If you are serious about wanting to see health and medical care change in this country, you cannot wait for bureaucracy to do that. It will never happen. The way we do that is a groundswell movement of health professionals who go, "No, that's intolerable. I will not work for that. That is not how I treat my staff. I am sorry, Minister, that's not okay." So I wanna get back to the reason why we all went into health and why we then left employment to go into our own business. We wanted to make freedom a real thing, flexibility a real thing, and we wanted to initiate change. If you don't learn how to do that sustainably for yourself, you are just repeating the same patterns of old. So please, for our children and children's children's sake, be someone who stands up and go, "I want it to be different."
Megan Walker: Jo, what an absolute honour and pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you so much for your wisdom. Your 30 years of hard knocks has produced this gold. What is it you say? You win or there's the lesson. All those golden nuggets. Thank you so much for sharing, and I encourage everyone to get in touch with Jo. Thank you so much again, Jo.
Jo Muirhead: My pleasure, Megan. Thank you.
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Connect with Jo:
Jo Muirhead Business Coach (main home page) - Jo Muirhead
Join Megan's upcoming Lab Information Session on 20 May:
Lab Information Session
