Practitioner to practitioner real-life advice from the heart!

Jenn Pike, functional diagnostic nutritionist and best-selling author of The Simplicity Project, shares advice for practitioners to understand what clients need most and how to build a heart-led practice.

This is great conversation! Any opportunity to hone your questioning skills and curiosity is time well spent. In addition there is some great content around mindset and approaching clients with curiosity vs. being overly excited to solve a problem.

Jeff Lougheed, Co-Founder @ Meal Garden and Executive Coach

Recognizing everything we consume is information for our body

Jenn started out working in the fitness industry, and spending 1:1 time with clients drove her to ask questions like…

• Why is it that they're not sleeping?
• Why is it that they're gaining weight in a specific area?
• Why is their hair falling out?
• Why do they have such severe PMS?

“And that got me thinking more about diving a bit deeper, and then I became a mum. Pregnancy, birth and postpartum - and life just changing so much. My body was changing so much, my hormones were also changing a lot. I was like, Okay, this is it. This is what I've been missing: not really understanding just how delicate our endocrine system is!”

Jenn explains that everything is impacting your endocrine system, and we can not compartmentalize “hormones” in silos.

“For me, the biggest thing was how we are never really taught that the life we're living, the things we consume, literally and otherwise - it's all information that our body has to digest.  

And those things can either be really supportive and be building our system up and helping us - or it could be really destructive, and the destruction doesn't always happen like an instant bulldozer. It can be this slowly.”

Questions to ask clients to help empower and educate them

Jenn shares her method for onboarding clients - and believe it or not, there’s more to it than just the food component.

“I will typically start off by saying, you know, I know you filled out forms. For me, that's great. But there's a different energy that happens when we talk about how we're feeling and what's been going on versus writing it.

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And I'm really also looking - I'm paying attention to their body cues and their  energy of how they are talking to me, I have found that as practitioners, some of the most prolific work we can do is hearing what our clients are not saying.

And that is one thing I do like about Zoom, since we can't be in-person - I can still see how it's impacting them.  And so one of the first questions I'll ask is, can you explain to me what your why is? Why did you want to have this appointment today? Why do you want to work together? Like, what are you really hoping to learn? Not what are you hoping to solve? Not what are you looking for me to do?”

Advice for fostering client compliance and determining what your client needs

Jenn can relate to the history of “throwing up all of your knowledge” onto your client in a single hour. If this was (or is!) you - you’ve probably asked yourself, “Why isn’t my client complying?”

Instead, put yourself in your client’s shoes. Would it feel like too much? Would it feel unrealistic to achieve? Consider not only what the client “needs” - but what they are genuinely READY for. Build trust, and rapport; give a little and let them integrate it. Enjoy the process!

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Learn more from Jenn in our Making It Real podcast conversation here.

Links to Resources:

Jenn’s Website - https://jennpike.com/

Jenn on Instagram -

The Simplicity Project

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