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The One Thing You Must Do to Grow Your Advocacy Practice (and Take a Vacation, too)
The answer to this notion of “the one thing you must do” boils down to trust, although maybe not in the way you’ll expect… I say this to you, with the keen awareness of the fact that trusting isn’t something I do well. Having spent the first half of my life as Pollyanna reincarnated, then having been burned by too many people I DID trust along the way, including an ex-husband, an ex-business partner, and the notorious reason for all this empowerment and advocacy work of mine – the doctors who I trusted to help me whether my mysterious odyssey in 2004 – I hope you’ll understand that trusting isn’t exactly my long suit. Pollyanna, as represented by Trisha Torrey, long ago left the building. So, whereas in the first half of my life, when anyone I met was trusted by default, that’s far from true in these past few decades. It is a huge struggle for me to trust anyone enough to relinquish any sort of control I have over important, personal situations. I can count the people I do trust with those situations on one hand. That means this post, about the one thing you need to do to grow your practice (and take a vacation) is a bit like the pot (me) calling many of you kettles, black. Yes, I know this advice will be a tough pill for some to swallow, and I truly do understand that many of us need (what amounts to) a 12-step program to make it happen. So what is that one thing? It’s learning to delegate. It’s learning to turn over our business responsibilities, or at least some of the work we do, to someone else. It’s learning to trust that that someone else will take care of our babies – our businesses – as well as we do. For some of you, those who already have practices comprised of more than 1-2 people, this is a hurdle you have already surmounted. Class dismissed for you! But for the rest of us, you can see how, for someone who doesn’t trust…