Why Fear Is Your Friend as a Health Business Owner - With Laura Lohk

May 29, 2023

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Laura Lohk is a transformational therapist, as well as a mindset coach, helping entrepreneurs to be successful from inside out by helping them to build strong foundation, manage stress effectively and increase their wellbeing.

We invited Laura on the show to chat about how to conquer fears. Laura has a lot of awesome content on her website about this topic and we thought it would be good to pick her brain, both from the perspective of practitioners feeling fear as well as helping clients through fear.

1:42 - How Experiencing Fear is Normal as a Business Owner (And how Laura managed fear when she was first starting out)

One of the things that I say is “When you stop learning, you're no longer on this planet” … so you're always going to conquer something new.

Being a bit afraid gives you the idea that you are growing as a person, because when you stop feeling the fear completely, you're probably too comfortable.

Especially when I started out as a therapist and coach, it was completely different for me. My background was a solicitor, a lawyer. For a long time that was exactly what I wanted to do. I was very confident doing my job there and then I decided that, “Oh gosh, this was not what I wanted to do”, so I completely retrained.

I threw my life in the air and I started from scratch. It was the scariest thing ever, but at the same time I was confident that this is what I'm going to do now.

But as you're beginning to learn new things, you're always a bit like, “Oh, I haven't been here before…” that's a bit scary and that's normal. That's okay. That means you're growing.

4:33 - How to tell when it’s time to start managing stress levels

When people are afraid, they go through a stress response. So they go into fight or flight. If you imagine that there is a scale of 0 to 10 ... maybe you're not afraid at all and you're not stressed at all, and 10 is that you are completely hijacked with crippling fear and anxiety.

Here’s the thing — you need to be little bit anxious because you want to make sure that you deliver to your clients the best solutions and support for them.

With stress, there is a bit of a sweet spot that you want to have. One of the practical things that I ask my clients to do is take a piece of paper and a pen and draw a line across the paper. This is your scale, zero to 10.

On a daily basis, dot it out where you are in terms of your fear. If you land five and below, you're in a healthy place. But if you're beginning to go from five and above, then obviously it's really important that you do something about it, because if you're not, you can't deliver to your clients and your business would suffer, and you just generally feel bad.

7:50 - Working on your foundation as a business owner

One of the main things I teach my clients is that it's really important that they work on their foundation. By foundation, I mean the relationship to themselves as a practitioner or as an individual, your self esteem, how you see yourself, your confidence.

Often, when clients come to me, they look like an upside down triangle. Their foundation is quite narrow. If you try to put a triangle on a flat surface, it's a wobbly. So the idea is that when they leave a session with me, they look a little bit like a proper triangle, which have obviously a much stronger foundation.

If you have a strong foundation, you are much more balanced […] so you have more resources to look at the scale of thinking, “Oh, I think I'm getting a bit hijacked here. I'm a bit too fearful here. What can I do?”

10:27 - How health practitioners and entrepreneurs can find a sense of balance and manage their anxiety

Research has shown how important journaling is. In terms of journaling — when somebody says something good about us, about our practice, about this particular technique maybe we gave to the client and the client said, "Wow, this was amazing." Journal that down the day this happened, so something positive.

The reason we journal it down is it becomes more real for us and then we also can go back and say, "Oh yeah. Actually, I know today I didn't maybe perform the way I really wanted to, but look, last week 10 clients maybe sad that, Oh my God, I love your program or I love your techniques or your vibe."

So you refer back to that and think, "Oh, actually, I’m quite good at what I do, but today maybe I wasn't that well," and then you can start problem solving.

12:54 - Why a growth and learning mindset is important

If you're constantly in the mindset of, "Oh, I'm doing this wrong. I'm not very good." One thing leads to another, then we're in a negative mindset.

We get more stressed, we become more fearful and then our mind stops working the way we want it to work so that we are unable to problem solve.

With a growth and learning mindset, they don't go, "Oh, I'm rubbish."

What they say is, "Okay, well that didn't go the way I thought it's going to go. What can I do better?" So they are able to problem solve and take that as a learning instead of as a negative.

12:42 - Laura’s favorite resources on mindset and mental health

Sometimes what I do is that if I don't want to follow a particular person, I go to YouTube and just type in empowering Ted talks or something like that, because there is a lot of information there, but I really love Brené Brown. I really like Jen Sincero.

I think the way she writes, I haven't obviously heard her speak actually, but the way she writes, it's funny, but it's so real, and then you can begin to see things slightly in a different way. I'm more of a book person than a visual person, I suppose, so for me actually having a book and underlining stuff like that, that helps me a lot.

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