The Evolution Of Medicine: A New Paradigm In Healing, And Optimization with Dr. Elena Villanueva

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another episode of Perfect Practice. Today I am really excited because I get to sit down and extend a conversation that I started in Miami a few weeks ago with my Dear guest today, Dr. Elena Villanova. She's coming to us all the way from Utah, and she runs an amazing practice that brings the best of ancient wisdom and modern science together to help people have their most deepest healing and for them to feel amazing even when all other things have failed. So modern holistichealth.com is where you can learn more about her work and check out all the amazing work that she's doing in today's interview. What I'd love to do is have her unpack her recipe for growth, for persistence, for success, and share with all of us listeners, including myself, how we can build a practice that we love, how we can build a practice that gets amazing outcomes, how we can build a practice that has an awesome impact in the community and builds an amazing team and does great work, all while maintaining a healthy lifestyle, a healthy relationship, and having a beautiful smile that she takes with her everywhere she goes and just this bubbly energy that she brings into the room. So without further ado, welcome, Elena. Thanks for being here today.

It's so good to be here. Sachin, very excited to have this discussion with you today.

Well, I'd love to jump right in and I'm going to ask a question that really kind of takes you to a place where you may have felt your biggest challenge was presenting itself to you. What would you say in all these years you've been in practice has been your biggest challenge that you've had to overcome?

For me, my biggest challenge, and you know, that's such a great question because you're going to hear such a diversity of different kind of answers with that. For me, the hardest part was focusing on my personal life and my lifestyle and, and keeping those as my number ones because I'm like a little race car. I just, I get in and I start going and I can just go, go, go. And before you know it, you know the wheels are coming off the car because I put myself on the back burner. And so I would say for me, that has been the biggest challenge. And it's also come with the biggest rewards when I sat down and took time to get right with myself and reprioritize my values and what's important and, and, and really get a deeper understanding of how I can have the longevity in this type of work.

Now, you started off as a chiropractor, just like myself. Tell us about the evolution, the evolutions I'm sure that you've gone through. And, and. And maybe like, paint a picture for us of your journey to where you are now.

Well, I knew I wanted to be in the health field from the time that I was probably 5, 6, 7 years old. My stepfather was a surgeon, my uncle is a surgeon. All my uncles, they're all in the medical field. And I wanted to be like them. I wanted to help people. I wanted to make a difference. And as soon as I was in my preteens, I was going to the clinic with my dad and wearing his lab jacket and walking out to the patient waiting room with the little clipboard and calling people's names and bringing them back into the waiting room and putting the dilation eye drops in their eyes and getting them all ready for my dad to come in and see them. That was back in the day that I could help, you know, that kids could go in with their dads to work. And. And by the time I was a teenager, I was flying with him. He had a small little plane. And we. We would put all the surgical equipment in, and we would fly down to some little towns on the border of Texas and Mexico and even down into Mexico, and we would do charity surgeries for the farmers, putting lens implants in their eyes and taking the cataracts out. And I was right there in the surgery room with my dad helping them. And so I really developed a love for helping people. And. And that led me into going to chiropractic school because I wanted to do things in a more natural way that always resonated with me, and I wanted to learn more about it. And I didn't know about naturopathic school back then, or I probably would have gone in that direction, because that's really the essence of the work that I do today. But I did go to chiropractic school. And, and, and I ended up having three very successful sports medicine practices in the Austin, Texas area and had a lot of fun with that. And. And I ended up getting sick. I got really, really sick. And my father had just transitioned and passed. Passed on. And so I. I didn't really have an advocate anyone, you know, plus I had a lot of limiting beliefs that I should even tell anyone that I was suffering. I was ashamed of that. It was just the way that, you know, the way that many of us are raised. I created stories around what was acceptable to share and what wasn't. And. And I ended up getting really sick to the point where I almost died and I ended up losing everything. So I lost my three practices, I ended up losing my home and I ended up living in my car and not sharing with anyone what had happened to me because I carried a lot of shame and fast forward, I survived. I had a lot of miracles that presented themselves along the way. Sachin, you know, we all know that they're always there if you're looking for them. And I had a big shift in my life that has led me to where I am today. I eventually went back into practice. I had some beautiful opportunities to get to cover for some other doctors while they were on maternity leave. And, and much to my surprise, I rediscovered my love for being in the health and wellness field. And I was doing really great at it too. This time doing more holistic and functional type care rather than just strictly biomechanics, you know, back and neck pain and all of that. And, and things grew and evolved and I rediscovered my passion and discovered my purpose for, you know, for what it is that I'm supposed to do. And, and that's why I'm here. And it's been a beaut ride. It's not always easy and it presents itself with challenges. But as you and I are going to get to talk about today, you know, if we can become conscious to the common challenges, we can overcome them and we can complete our mission or whatever it is that we believe that we're here to do.

I love that there's a lot of similarities in our background because I started working as a, you know, in a sports chiropractic practice, specifically doing art and loved it. However, when I discovered functional medicine, that helped me discover how unwell I actually was because I had gluten intolerance, I had digestive issues that were just normal to me. I would wake up stiff and achy every morning, feel tired all the time. And I just thought everyone felt that way until I discovered that, no, you don't have to feel that way. It's a choice, right? When we make, when we make informed decisions, we can have better outcomes. And you know, so I love that we have a similar, you know, background, similar passion for helping people in, and athletes. But then we also found that second wind and that wind behind our back in our, in our careers where now we have like something bigger that we can do for people and help people in a way that we may not be able to help them strictly by focusing on structural care. And that isn't to take anything away from structural care because we both know structure affects function. But it's nice to be able to do what we do and help people from a biochemistry, from emotional, from a spiritual, you know, from a physiological standpoint, in addition to potentially offering some of the mechanical and biomechanical services as well. So did you ever, I don't know if you share this or not, but did you ever figure out what was causing your sickness or your, your dysfunction in your body?

I did. And it was. So this was pretty fascinating because source or life revealed things in steps for me, which was really good for me at the time because if I had been given, you know, if I had understood everything at the same time, it probably would have been overwhelming. But there were a combination of factors that led to me becoming ill and unable to heal. And that's actually what I teach people today in our, in all of our five part series that, that we put together. And so I had a combination of toxins in my body, I had mold in my body, I wasn't eating the right foods for myself. I was burning the candle at both ends. So I had a lot of physical and mental stress running three clinics. And I was a single mother. And the reason that I kept driving myself is because I was looking for safet. I was looking to be able to be able to take care of myself and create a nest in a little retirement nest or just even just for a rainy day or an emergency nest as we would call it back then. I don't use those words anymore. But. And so that drove me to just work super hard because I was trying to find some comfort and the belief that I had some safety with my finances. And so. But it also really took a toll because, you know, you're managing the house and you're managing the kid and the sports, and then you're managing all the employees and the three clinics and the overhead and everything else. And so I would say that my lifestyle at the time, my choices, combined with toxins in my environment, combined with unresolved trauma, and I had a very colorful childhood. So, you know, I had a lot of stuff that was stored that I didn't know how to process that and I didn't even know it was still there really. You know, we didn't understand about that stuff back then. And all it took was just like the perfect storm of everything kind of coming together and it caused, it led to massive dysbiosis, a lot of fatigue, a lot of brain fog, for which I just started addressing the symptoms. And it started leading to some back pain, which was all emotional based. Now that I Look back, you know, feeling unsupported, right, Typically shows up in your, in your low back. And the perfect storm happened and I just ended up going down really quickly with some really, really severe symptoms and conditions that the doctors didn't really know what to do for it. So I ended up having severe bleeding for about two years and so severe that the doctors wanted to cut all my reproductive organs out. Looking back now we know that that was, that was grief. So there was a lot of grief that was being processed and from just a lot of, a combination of things that had happened. I had lost my memory. I ended up completely losing my memory. And that didn't happen overnight. It happened slowly, but it, it got so bad that it was, I mean, it pretty much showed up just like dementia would show up. And I couldn't talk anymore, so I developed complete aphasia and, and I had severe gut issues. So my gut. I had to take things all the time just to have, you know, bowel movements and to have, you know, regular, you know, diet, digestion. I had to take stuff to sleep, I had to take stuff to numb me out because I was having panic attacks, thought I was having heart attacks. I was having massive headaches, emotional breakdowns, massive depression, rashes all over my body, like, you name it, like, I had like everything, it felt like, it felt like everything that could go wrong was going wrong at that time.

Thank you for sharing. I know that your story is going to be helpful for others because I think there's a good story behind every successful practice and practitioner because I feel like you acquire a level of empathy that you wouldn't otherwise and it allows you to really understand what the client sitting in front of you is going through. And I'm sure you had to seek, you know, solutions from every which way you could in order to come to the resolution that you have. And you know, that kind of brings me to helping. You know, I'm curious in understanding how your story shows up in your practice. Is it because of your empathy? Is it because you can understand what people are going through and you know, what, what limited protocols and processes and procedures are out there for people? Like what, what, how does your, your story kind of influence or impact your, your practice?

That's, that's such a great question. You're full of good ones today, Sachin. So it shows up everywhere in our practice. The way that we reach out to others to let them know about how we can help them are through our educational five part series that we put together. So we have beyond the Pill masterclass which really focuses on pretty much the whole spectrum of chronic diseases. Meaning if you've been sick for two or more years, you know, come and watch this and come and learn and come and be inspired and empowered to know that you're not broken and that you can heal. And we also have a, a mental health masterclass that's all based on mental health and neurodegenerative disease that teaches, you know, the same overall topics, you know, come and come and understand what's really going on, what, what are the real root causes and come and learn solutions that actually work. And so it shows up and from the very beginning in our marketing when we're promoting our five part series to, to our partners to promote for us and directly through social media channels and such. And it also shows up in our practice because everyone who works for me, all of our practitioners and all of our doctors, they all originally came to me because they heard my story and then they saw me teaching for either Great Plains labs or Vibrant labs or on Paleo State, you know, Paleo effect stages or wherever they saw me immh, where and I usually do share a part or a portion of the story. And what I found is that, you know, our mess is really our message and especially if we can dial in on the story to the different audiences that can inspire them, even other practitioners, so that they can understand because a lot of practitioners themselves are struggling with health issues and they oftentimes won't reach out to others to ask for help. So in our practice it shows up because our practitioners have a lot of compassion and a lot of understanding for what, you know, for what these people are going through with their, with their sicknesses, with their symptoms, with their conditions. And, and it even shows up in the solutions that we offer because we understand that we are multifaceted as humans. Sachin. Right? Like we're mind, we're body, we're spirit, we're conscious and unconscious mind. There are a lot of facets to us. You know, we have the 3D and then we have, you know, the parts of us that are not 3D, spiritual side, right? And our approach really incorporates a multifaceted system so that we're addressing the conscious and the unconscious mind, we're addressing the belief systems, we're addressing the mindset and the stories that we've created and the unprocessed emotions and trauma. But we're also addressing the physical 3D facets of who we are by looking at blood work and looking at toxin labs and hormones and things like that, so that we can help guide the bio individual, the bio individual needs of their foods, of their lifestyle choices. You know, with like exercise, are they going to be better at doing high impact exercise three or four days a week or are they going to do better doing yoga or Tai chi? You know, all the way down to understanding what supplements and what protocols and in what order that we want to work on the different organ systems of their body so that we can bring all systems, mind, body, spirit, or rather all facets together and heal them all and lift them all up together. So it really shows up in every single part of what we do.

Yeah, it's so true. You know, such a good point that you bring up. Thank you for sharing that. Now one of the things that your, your practice endeavors, your clinical endeavors has led you to is you also coach other practitioners to teach them some of the systems that you've developed. And you have a six pillar system. So I'd love for you to, to share that so that we can get an understanding of like, you know, the thought process that goes into building a successful practice.

Yeah. So we have personal, we have business, marketing, sales, lifestyle, and then integration. And so when we start and when we teach the six pillars, we always put personal up at the top because we believe, and this is, not only have we seen this with ourselves, but we've learned this from our mentors who we are very aligned with, who are even more successful than we are. And we've also applied this first pillar of personal. We've also applied it to our practitioners and other people on our team, helping them to invest and helping them develop their personal development. We believe that the, the degree of success that you can see in your business is, is directly correlated to your personal development and your personal growth. And the reason why we say that is because success to us doesn't just mean money. Right. I mean that's a part of it is to get that energetic exchange to be able to grow and make bigger impact. You know that when you're making more revenue, you're also making a bigger impact. And that's amazing. But what happens if you're healthy in the revenue section, but you're not healthy in the relationship section? Relationship with your family, with your friends, or especially with yourself. Right. What about your relationship to your money? Once you make it, A lot of people, they, they have a bad relationship with money. Maybe they, maybe they're able to sell their product and maybe they're able to generate a lot of revenue, but at the end of the day, they have nothing to show for it. They don't know how to invest their money. They don't know how to build their portfolio. They don't even, you know, they don't know anything about money dates so that they can, you know, sit down and really, you know, have a deep appreciation for the money that, that they're making so that they can be a better steward of the money that they're making. Right. And so personal is the first one on the six pillars. And we teach a lot of personal development. And I feel like that is a gap that is missing in a lot of, in a lot of practitioner certification courses and a lot of masterminds. That personal development part is missing. And so we do a lot of work and a lot of breakthroughs with our practitioners on that. And then we have, we have the, the business. And, you know, that kind of speaks for itself. You know, what are the foundations upon which we're building our business? What are the values that we're our business on? Why are we doing the business? I think that that's really important to make sure that we are in alignment or that our business model or what we're trying to do with our business is, is in alignment with our values and our value systems. Because if we don't have that alignment, it's not going to last for very long or things, things can go sideways very, very quickly. And then also, you know, just basic business strategies to get going, to get started with. Right. And things that are super important in business where you're building a solid foundation so that you, you know, can get to that million million mark in a year and beyond that, and then understanding also that what worked for you to get to 500,000 in terms of your business structure isn't necessarily the same structure that's going to get you from 500,000 to a million. And it's not the same business structure that's going to get you from a million to 2 million and then 2 million to 3 million. Right. And then beyond that, the business structure changes again. Right. And so it's really important. And we work with people, you know, when, when we're teaching our practitioners. Absolutely. We can help them if they're just like, super, super startup. That's, you know, for us, like, that's so easy. And, and the biggest thing that I can tell you is one of the biggest mistakes I think that that practitioners make is that they try to grow wide way fast rather than focusing on growing deep roots first. And the deep roots first means, you know, be involved and understand Every bit of your processes in the beginning, you know, there will be a time where you don't have time for that anymore, but that's okay because you'll have already built out solid processes. And also know that version one is not going to be the final process. You may go through 10 versions of how you want your office, whether it's virtual or a physical office, how you want them to operate each day, and the checklist of what you want them to do first. Like, you know, you come in and you make sure that the air is turned on to whatever degrees, that everything's picked up off the floor. And then I want you to answer the answer the voicemails. And then, you know, you go down the checklist. That may change. You may have 10 different versions as you grow. And you need to, to be on top of that at all times. Because when you scale to the next level, if you're, if your processes are not solid and you're not deep rooted in your process, that's where things will go sideways really, really quickly, right? And you can end up losing money and you don't even know it. So you need to have checks and balances. You're going to be doing it over and over again. And we teach our practitioners to develop a mindset of curiosity and excitement around it. Not, oh my God, I have to sit down and do this again. Because when you do that, then you're basically putting it out there to the universe that I don't want this anymore. And the universe is going to reflect back to you, okay? And then all of a sudden your sales are going to go down or somebody on your team is going to start, you know, messing up or something weird is going to happen and it's going to like, really mess up what you're trying to build. And so again, going back to mindset, that personal development part is, is, is a part of growing deep roots. And then we have the marketing and we can talk around any of that if you want. And then we've got the sales and then we've got lifestyle, and then we have the, the integration part. And, you know, integrating all of those different pieces together and being that and having the right team around you that, you know, building the right team around you that has the same values is going to be really important for the integration part. A lot of people think about integration as something that you do when you're doing personal development, right? And you just spent a week doing all these breakthroughs or you just spent a week down in Peru doing ayahuasca you know, so you can have these personal development breakthroughs or whatever. And integration is, is, it's not optional, right? It's key. That is where you get the real growth. Well, we need to integrate all of the parts, all the things that I just talked about as well. We need to integrate those and we need to constantly be working and dancing with all of those and integrating them if we're going to have long term business success.

I love that. You know, one thing that you said that really resonated with me and from my own experience and maybe some of the, some people who are stuck at 500 and they have multiple employees. I think this is an important lesson. So I remember when I was practicing art and I would have, I love my job, I hated charting. So I loved, I love the revenue generating activity. But the actual revenue generating activity was doing your charts and submitting your, your, your claim, right? So I, I would always, when I, whenever I would get busy, I would complain about my charts and then guess what? Inevitably I wouldn't be busy anymore. And then I'd complain about not being busy and then I'd get busy again and then same thing, I'd start complaining about my charts and, and I, and I realized when I was looking at my stats because we had a management by statistics software and it was funny because the graphs would be so dramatic. So even like a five patient adjustment in your weekly stats would be like this like crazy, crazy spike or dip. And I was like, why? I like, I'm like, I don't like this. Like it should look, you know, to the right. Going up, not going up and down, up and down. And of course there's only so much it can go up when you're in a, you know, one on one type of practice. But it was just inconsistent. And I realized the only thing that was consistent on the equation was me complaining. And so when things were up, I was complaining and the things were down, I was complaining. And so when I changed my attitude, that's when a lot of growth took place. And then when you bring on team members, which, you know, of course, hopefully before you're at 500k, you've got at least one team member helping you, if not multiple. You also have to make sure that they want to, you know, bring in new energy into the space. Because if they're complaining about, oh my God, I've got to see more patients, right then that's gonna, that's gonna show up. And I've seen that happen before where I was trying to help A practitioner get busier and busier and busier and he had mentally checked out and no matter what we did, like his practice wouldn't grow and we could pack a room with 80 people and no one would sign up. And I was kind of scratching my head. I'm like, what am I doing wrong? What is this? I couldn't make any sense of it from a logical standpoint. He was saying all the right things, he was doing all the right things. Our marketing was working and got people in the room, but energetically get checked out. So I think it's also important. I know you said it, but I just want to double click on it a little bit for all of us to check in with our team to make sure they want to grow. Sometimes our goal is to go to the moon and we get there, but then not everyone wants to go to Mars. So the team that got us to 500k may not get us to a million or 2 million or 5 million. Right. So I think at every stage of growth and every plateau that we reach in our practice, we have to do a self check of ourselves energetically and emotionally and you know, make sure that we're still up for the challenge. But then we also have a, do have to do an energetic check for the team that, that got us here. But does this team want to go where we want to go or do they want to stay on the moon where, which is where they originally signed up up to, to take this mission. Right. So is there a way or a process that you have to check in on people that you've found works?

Absolutely. And you know, and we learned this over time. We didn't know this stuff in the beginning. Like, we didn't know. Of course, I wish someone had told me what I'm getting ready to share with you because I mean it's, it's, it's actually very exciting now the way that we have things structured so we have an organization chart, we have an org chart and we can see, we can see all the people on our team and what division or what area that they're in. Are they, is this, you know, our affiliate or our, our dev team, you know, our dev and stack team, our, you know, project managers, our clinical team, you know, like we've got all the different teams and each member of each team, we track metrics and KPIs and so we have, we know exactly what, like the top three or four things that they're responsible for doing. Right. And so, and then we also have them fill out, we Also have them fill out a. It's like a questionnaire so that we can assess their values. And we don't just do it in the beginning, we do it every year because values change. And, and, and so, you know, looking at their values and looking at their metrics or their KPIs is super important because let's say that you hire somebody who, you know, based off of their resume or whatever, right? Like, you're like, this person's going to be really great at sales. And let's say that you, you know, put them in that sales position. And let's say that they do, in fact, meet all of their metrics. They're doing a great job. Like, not only, you know, are their values aligned with ours, so we know this is going to be a really great fit, but they're actually able to meet their metrics. Let's say that then the next year, you know, maybe you have two different situations that arise. Let's say that the next year, well, three different ones, their values may have changed, right? Which makes them. And then you're seeing that their KPIs are going down. You're going, well, what's going on? You've been doing good for the last two years. Maybe their values have changed now. And so, you know, by reassessing their values and looking at their KPIs and seeing where their strengths are, but where they're falling short, you know, we may be able to move them to a different part of the organization where they can thrive or we can help them place them somewhere else outside of our organization. You know, maybe with you, with your organization or someone else who we know. And we know where they're still, where their strong points are and everything. So we can pick up the phone and make a couple calls and say, hey, is anybody looking for this for xyz? We have somebody who would, who would be really good, but we don't need that position right now. Or if you, if they say, well, I really, really want to move and to, I want to become the sales manager, you know, or I want to go into marketing, I want to manage all the sales people. Well, if, if their KPIs look good and their values look aligned and they've been doing really well, then, you know, then we can use that, those metric system to then promote them so they know that if they're doing well, there's always like a next level they can go to if they choose. But, you know, even if it looks like they're going to do well in, in a higher Level position. Maybe you put them there and now maybe they're not doing that. We know because we've been tracking their metrics that we can move them back down into the sales position where they're going to be happier because they're not going to be happy. If they're stressed out in a manager's position that they thought they could handle, but they're not able to do it well, we can have that talk with them and, and we can put them back down where they're going to be comfortable and best able to align with their, you know, with their own needs and align for the business. So it's a win, win for everyone. And so that's how we're, you know, those are the systems that we use is, you know, their metrics and their KP and you know, including the value systems in there that we redo every year. And then just having that organizational chart, it makes it really, really easy to see where people could be moved either lateral, higher. You know, I don't like to use the word higher or lower, but you know, in an upper level management position or somewhere else and I feel like that's vitally successful to a business. And it's something that most people are not aware of when they're starting a business and they, you know, maybe they've only hired two or three, maybe just one person and they think that all they need to do is look at their resume, maybe call their references and then hire them. Well, there's a better process that can be done and if you can start implementing that from the beginning, which is something that, that we teach, then it's really going to help you build a better foundation for scaling a lot easier.

Yeah, I think team is so important, so often overlooked and I think it's really good to check in with our team frequently so that A, they're being held accountable, they're feeling rewarded, they're feeling seen, they're feeling heard, and they're supporting you in the vision and the mission. And Steve Jobs said something that I really like. He said, A, players only want to work with A players and B, players only want to work with C players. So, you know, you could be an A at getting to 500,000 or a million, but are you an A at getting to that next level? And I'm curious as to if you don't mind sharing. How do you invest into your team members? Do you offer continuing education opportunities like what, what is, what does that process look like for those of us interested?

Yeah, we absolutely do. I think it's really important to invest in your, in your team members personal growth and professional growth. And, and you know, I think probably one of the biggest hesitations that I've seen with younger entrepreneurs is they don't see the value in spending the money. They don't want to spend them because it does. It costs money. Like when I put one of the. One of the largest investments that I made at one time all at once was back in 2020 or 2021. I don't remember what year it was actually, I think it was in 2021. We put it in three. Wait, one, two, three. We put four of our practitioners, including my husband, who's the COO of the business. Well, now COO CEO, excuse me. And myself, we went through level one and level two NLP mastery courses where it was, it was fantastic. I mean, talk about personal development, understanding the power of language, really understanding and learning tools for self mastery and being able to become conscious of the unconscious, right? Being able to use tools and strategies to be able to move yourself through unconscious patterns, release emotions, you know, understand triggers. We also learned, my whole team, we also learned hypnosis. So everyone got certified in hypnosis and quantum time therapy and perceptual positions and all of these things. And we dropped about, I don't know, 60, 70 grand, like all at once to put everybody through. And of course, I'll say now I like to stagger things out a little bit more. One of the lessons that I learned from that was our, our top practitioner at the time that I had invested a lot of money into her even before this, and then I put her through that. And then right after that, she ended up quitting on us, which I was devastated. And fortunately, I had just learned a lot of tools to be able to move through my emotions of feeling betrayed and abandoned and all the things that come with that. Because she was making six figures and I was taking her on trips to Cancun and, you know, hiring the best, you know, plant medicine facilitators in the country to come out and work with some of my practitioners and all that. So I had invested in her more than anyone else else, and then she up and left. But there were a lot of learnings for me in there as a business owner, and one of them was how to structure the investments that we make in their personal and professional development so that if they leave inside of a certain period of time, you know, will, you know, they. They owe us the money back anyways. We have all of that structured out now. So yeah, we learned a lot of lessons from that. But even, even so, yeah, it is super important to, to. To put. To put those investments, you know, into your. Into your team.

Yeah. You know, I think a lot of. A lot of people get nervous about situations like that. And, you know, Zig Ziglar talks about this and they say, you know, what if we train our employees to be the best version of themselves and they leave? And the rebuttal is, what if we don't and they stay?

Yeah, exactly.

So, you know, sometimes people, sometimes we're going to be, you know, that path or that stepping stone for someone's highest calling. And, you know, it's. It's happened to us as well, where, you know, no matter how much we pour into someone, you know, they. They choose a different path than. And their vision is a little bit different, even though what their stated goals are, are different than their actions. Right. So it can feel a little bit challenging for us and we can feel betrayed at times. And, you know, I did a plant medicine journey. It was actually my first hero's journey. And I got a visual when I asked the question. And the visual I got from the medicine was I asked myself, why did this happen? Because somebody had. Was leaving our practice at the time, and we had poured so much energy into this individual. And the visual that I received, the message I received is I saw myself as being this bed of soil and all these flowers were growing out of me. And the message I got was loud and clear that you can't be mad if you're a fertile soil. You can't be mad if flowers grow out of you. Sometimes weeds are going to grow out of you. Sometimes it's going to be flowers. And they are inseparable from you. Right. So no matter how far their seed spreads or, you know, where they go, like, they kind of owe it to you in some ways because what they've accomplished wouldn't be possible without you. And so it's just like we just have to keep being fertile soil. And sometimes what's rooted in us will stay, and sometimes it'll find its own path, but it shouldn't change who we are. So I love that you're kind of keeping your level of integrity and enthusiasm and keeping your head up and focusing on the goal that you're trying to accomplish and, and allowing others to move on if. If that is the right next step for them, because holding onto them just creates more catastrophic catastrophe later on. And, you know, the analogy I like to use is the dead branch analogy. And that doesn't mean this person's a dead branch, but it just makes for a great metaphor. So we can, if we identify the branches are dying on a tree, we can let nature do its thing and time do its thing, and eventually that branch falls off in a windstorm or a snowstorm or ice storm, or we can, you know, kind of do the right thing and cut that branch off before it causes some sort of catastrophe. So I think it's good for us in our business to identify some of those branches and make sure that we're. We're tending to the tree for the sake of not just the tree, but also for everyone that the tree impacts underneath it.

And that's what having metrics, you know, keeping metrics on your employees and your contractors, that's where it really benefits both you and the. And the person. Because if you don't see it or you don't address it quick enough, that can really bring the business down and, and actually cause a lot of problems. And, you know, we've. We've experienced that too. You know, growing a business to where we are now. You know, how can you not have those experiences? And, you know, we used to have a hard time and get very, very stressed out if we saw that someone wasn't meeting their metrics and, you know, they were just doing things that were not representative of our culture and the excellence that we expect. And. But it was hard to fire them. We would get so stressed out, like, oh, my God, you're like, what are we gonna say? And, you know, like, this is really hard. And. But now it's one of the easiest things that we can do. And it's actually, you know, it's actually enjoyable for me to have the conversation and for my husband if we need to, because we, we have a very different perspective on it. If they're not doing well for us and they know that they're not doing well, they're not happy in their job. We want them to be happy, so let's help place them somewhere else. Let's give them a good recommendation for the things that we know they are good at so that we can help them find something that's a better fit for them and something. And, and that is also going to be really good for the business. You know, we have experienced keeping the wrong people for too long for whatever excuses that we came up with. Well, then we're not going to have somebody to do it, even though they're doing it wrong, but they're doing some of it right. And then, you know, Then we're gonna have to hire somebody else. We have to put an ad out, all the things. But I can very specifically think of a few people that we took way too longer to let go of than we should have. But when we let go of them, it was like the business rebounded like a. Like a. What do you call it? Like a, a. A rubber band on a sling. Right. It just like rebounded and did way better as soon as we cut the branches that needed to be cut. And so that's another really important thing. As a business owner, I mean, I know it can be hard to let people go, and we can, you know, we can start creating all these stories and attachments to the stories that make it really hard. But if we just come at it from a different perspective that, look, we want to do. We want to leave a good. We want to leave them the employee or the cassette contractor. We want to leave them in a better place than we found them. And if they're working for us and they know that they're not doing well and they've been corrected many times, chances are they are not happy either. So let's do right by them and by us by letting them go sooner than later.

Yeah. Such great advice. And obviously, I think we both recognize that it's easier said than done, but very important. And a lot of times our team members become our friends. Right. And we don't have to unfriend them. We can still be their friends. And ultimately friends look out for their friends and want what's in their best interest as well. And so if they're underperforming, then chances are, like you said, they're not happy either. And that's not good for anyone because we have a lot of people to help, help, and we don't need anything that's creating an energetic bottleneck or. Or impacting the lives that we're going to attract into our practices, because it's already hard enough. We don't need. We don't need these other challenges to make it even more difficult for us to do that. So I know that you. You work with practitioners. I'd love to. I'd love to learn a little bit more about that, and I'd also love for you to share, you know, the importance of mentorship and coaching. Because what I found is that people like yourself, who are coaches and mentors to others often had mentors and coaches themselves. So maybe you can. You can share what your experiences have been like hiring coaches or hiring mentors to help you and support you and maybe tell us even what inspires you to teach others, because you could obviously keep the secret sauce to yourself, but you want to spread it far and wide. So tell me more about that.

Oh, gosh, you know, it's been. It's been such a crazy, wild ride and fulfilling at the same time, and a lot of lessons and wisdom learned along the way. But, you know, we have had mentors along the way, and, you know, we've just been super blessed to have been able to attract the mentors that, you know, have been amazing friends and mentors to us. But we've also really burned a lot of money. I say, like that as in, we've thrown away a lot of money in hiring mentors and joining different masterminds and things where, you know, some of them, at least, we got the benefit of meeting some wonderful, amazing humans that we developed friendships with, that we were able to help them fill some gaps and questions and things that they needed, and they were able to help us with certain things. And so, you know, over the years, we've just kind of been able to fit together like a puzzle with the beautiful people that we've met along way. But I feel like, you know, there is a big gap in helping practitioners, and I think a lot of those gaps lie in the personal development area and, and, and really what people are bringing to the table in terms of being able to really help a small business or, you know, as a practitioner who runs a smaller business actually move the needle in their practice. This, I can tell you that most recently, which was about two years ago, we had hired our. Our, you know, most recent business coach at that time. It was about two and a half years ago, actually, and we were about 80 grand, 90 grand in before we realized. Well, I think we kind of realized it, but it was before Greg and I put our foot down and went, you know what? This guy is a scam. Like, he's not. He's not telling us anything that we don't know. And he still has yet to connect us, which is one of the reasons that we hired him was kind of like, we kind of hired him almost like a. Not with this title, but he was a business. He was a business coach, but he was. He had come to us almost like under the pretense of like, I can help you, like, basically broker for you the right contacts and connections for you to get X, Y and Z. Because we, we knew exactly what we were looking for at that time, which was we wanted to hire a C script week. So we wanted to hire a CEO, a coo, couple of other positions. And we were also looking to get some investors in, you know, with various types of partnerships to inject some more revenue into the business so that we could take, you know, really take it and grow it quickly instead of bootstrapping it. And we hired him specifically for this reason, and he came recommended by someone at a mastermind who was running a different, you know, mastermind.

We.

Whatever. And. And so, you know, we had dropped almost 100 grand by the time that we were like, oh, my God, this guy's totally taking us for a run. And he's not, you know, he never gave us what we were looking for. And unfortunately, this is rampant in these circles, and I think not just in health and wellness circles, but in a lot of circles, you'll have people that, you know, will get up on. On a stage and say, well, I'm a Facebook marketing expert, and at the end of the day, they're not, and you're not. And you're, you know, 50 to 100 grand in before you realize that they're not doing for you what they said that they would do, you know, and then you'll have. I mean, I'm sure that you've seen this too. A lot of us, A lot of us who are where we are, we've already done that. We. We. I would say we've probably dropped probably 250,000, maybe more in lost revenue from hiring people. And so I would say that, you know, I think it's important to ask. Ask. Ask people who are doing better than you are, right? Who are where you want to be. Ask them for referrals. Ask those people. I think that that's really important because it's going to make them look bad if they give you a bad referral. And so, you know, that's where we have ultimately really learned to get our referrals from. Not from, you know, people getting up on stage. Just because somebody gets up on stage does not make them qualified, and it doesn' necessarily the person that you need. So, you know, go to other people who are doing well and ask them. And some of the other gaps that I see are where, you know, you'll. You'll pay for, you know, you'll pay to go to an event, and you leave just feeling overwhelmed. You know, you leave feeling overwhelmed where you maybe got some little pearls of advice, but not enough where you can connect the dots together and actually go home and implement on your own. And so I do see some gaps in there. And what, what we have put together is something that we believe fills those gaps. So, you know, we, yes, we have a program which a lot of doctors, as you know, a lot of coaches and practitioners, you know, they want to put a program together, but it's so overwhelming for them to do that. And just like you have a wonderful program, your metabolic program, which has done awesome and is crushing it. And, and I just think that that's amazing. You come up into conversations with our team all the time, just so you know, because it's something that, you know that we're modeling some of what you do. Right. We have two programs that are amazing and we want to be able to just like you did, we want to be able to, to provide that for practitioners because a lot of them are just too overwhelmed to put something like that together on their own. And so, yes, we've got that. But we also want to help them with the personal development, development piece because a lot of reasons why, you know, oftentimes a big reason why people are not breaking the 2, the 250k or the 500k mark are their own limiting belief systems. So it's not all just about the mechanics of, you know, building out the right SOPs and hiring the right people and doing all of that right, getting the right marketing funnel. It's also about, you know, your limiting belief systems and what's going on with your money mindset. And so we are filling in the gap with a lot of personal development tools and breakthrough tools. In fact, I was just working with our team, Junior, you know, Junior. So JR Burgess and, and Brandon and Deb Yeager and my husband and I, we just did a week long level one breakthrough that, that took people through these amazing emotional and mental and money block and all kinds of limiting belief breakthroughs throughs over the course of the last week. So that when they go back into business, all of a sudden they are attracting a reflection of what they are inside. So the expansion that they've had and the limiting beliefs that they've gotten through, you know, we had one actually, we had one, one of our clients who was here last week, like, I don't know, she just sold like a 8 or 12 thousand dollar like breakthrough with one of her clients. Like literally she hadn't even left yet after having the breakthroughs herself. Now she's reflecting right now. She's seeing a different reflection of her reality and she's having, you know, she had a client that wanted a breakthrough on the exact same tools that she had just learned with us this past week. And so the personal development part is huge. And that's a big thing that we want to offer practitioners and then certain practitioners from certain back backgrounds, like, you know, chiropractors, for example, I feel like a lot of them have money mindset. I break, you know, issues and, and a lot of limiting beliefs, unfortunately. So we want to help them to break through that. And then. Yeah, I mean, there's just a whole lot we could probably go on and on, but we are working at filling the gaps for the things that, that they are not getting elsewhere and then really being able to meet them where they're at. You know, if they are, you know, if they're making 250,000 and they haven't yet hired their first person, or they've hired two or three and had to fire them because it's not working, then we really want to sit down with them and look at where the process is breaking and then put a simple diagram, a process together and give it to them and say, here, you know, take this. Follow up with me in eight weeks and let's see how that worked for you.

I love that Such a, you know, the personal development piece is so important and I find missing.

Yeah.

In a lot of mentorships. And it's a big part of, you know, how we approach, you know, the navigating business building as well is it really starts with us at the trunk of. As the trunk of the tree, and then everything that branches off of us only grows when we decide we're going to grow. So I love that. I love, I love that you have a full system to help practitioners take things to the next level. Level. You've got a few documentaries that are out that are, you know, awesome. I'm excited to check those out. So you do, you do some amazing work. It's like, it's. It's almost hard to believe you've packed all of that into your career. What's next for you? What are you, what are you most excited about in the next two to three years?

I'm really excited about out. I've been diving into a lot of esoteric studies, so I've been diving a lot into that. And I'm super excited about being able to connect with women of all ages. But in particular, I'm drawn to the women who are my age from their mid-50s up into their 80s. You know, women who are, who know that are older, who have always known that there's something more out there. And I'm excited to do like, spiritual experiences with them, traveling to Beautiful ancient sites and megalithic sites and then gathering together with other colleagues and other friends who are like minded so that we can together gather our communities together and just, you know, really teach people how to live a life or the remaining part of their lives in head heart coherence. You know, our elders have a big place in my heart. I love them so much. I love our children and I love our millennials and I love all, you know, I love all, I love all humans and I have a special connection to our elders and I really want to help make a big impact and help them have some of the transformation when they're looking for and be able to help facilitate that for them.

All of that. What a, what a beautiful, beautiful journey. So grateful Elena for our time today and you know, I just loved our, our thoughtful conversation. Where can practitioners who are interested learn a little bit more about the mentorship and coaching that you're doing? Where can we send them?

You know, I have a practitioner's, I have a practitioner's link. We're hosting an event in October that would be wonderful if you want to share that with your viewers. We're going to be doing a live event. I would love for you to come to the live event. That would be a lot of fun. That would be very special. It would be like having all my best friends or my siblings or my parents there, you know, to help, you know, just to come and be there would be, would means, would mean the world to me. But I can send it to you. I don't have it with me right now. If you want to just check out a little bit about us and get to see who we are. Our website is modern holistic health.com and our YouTube page is Modern Holistic Health as well. And we have tons of case studies and a lot of our teachings, A lot of the things that we've been teaching people on, everything from bioenergetics to hormones to epigenetics, all kinds of stuff there just to get to know a little bit more about us.

Awesome. Happy to share. And whenever you have that link ready, we'll put it in the show notes so people can check out the work that you're doing. And again, loved our conversation. I know there's so much that we could talk about and maybe we'll do another episode where we can unpack even more. Thank you for your time today and here's to an amazing, amazing year ahead. And here's to you helping people in the capacity that brings you the absolute most joy.

Thank you so much. And I send the same wishes and thoughts to you and everyone else out there who's listening to this. You've got everything that you need to achieve everything that you desire. And imperfect action is all that you need.

Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.