I am, at my core, a creative person. I work for myself, I love what I do, and on the right day I can lose myself in it entirely – working dawn to midnight and feeling alive the whole time. That kind of relationship with your work is rare, and I don’t take it lightly.
So why, for a while, did it feel like I was wading through treacle?
About ten days ago, I found my answer.
I work in what I’d loosely call the “Heal the World” industry – therapy, coaching, healing. It’s a beautiful space to be in. The work is profound, the connections are real, and the moments where you watch someone’s life genuinely shift are irreplaceable. But the industry is also relentlessly demanding, and not always in the ways you’d expect.
The challenge isn’t the emotional labour of sitting with someone in pain – I signed up for that and I’d do it again. The challenge is that I regularly find myself working harder on marketing than I do on actually helping people. I’ll go weeks without attracting a new client if I take my eye off the wheel, and there’s something quietly demoralising about that – not because I doubt my ability, but because it feels like a mismatch. My gift is helping people. The industry keeps asking me to perform.
A few weeks ago, a hypnotherapist in a Facebook group lamented that things had suddenly gone quiet for them. Two of my closest friends in the space – both respected practitioners with ten to twenty years of full-time practice behind them – offered the familiar consolation: it’s cyclical. Wars, world events, the World Cup – clients go quiet. It happens.
I sat with that for a moment and felt something shift.
Because when I looked at the people who were genuinely thriving – the big names, the ones who seemed financially free and professionally confident – I noticed something. Most of them had quietly stopped being therapists. They’d pivoted to coaching other therapists. Their market wasn’t people in pain. Their market was practitioners desperate to turn a passion into a sustainable income. They’d found the real money in the industry, and it wasn’t in the healing – it was in selling the dream of healing.
I don’t say that cynically. It makes complete sense. But it made me ask myself an honest question: do I actually know any therapists who are living what I’d consider a dream life?
I could only think of one. A woman I met last year who had the freedom and the finances to fly to Bali twice. But even she had a full-time job elsewhere three days a week. And when I looked at the coaches and therapists with polished, high-budget marketing – the ones who seemed to have cracked it – I started to notice a pattern. Most of them had external capital behind them. A previous career. A partner’s income. An inheritance. They weren’t funding their visibility from their therapy practice. The therapy practice was the dream. Something else was paying for it.
That realisation landed hard. And then it freed me completely.
I have a background in marketing and entrepreneurship. I’m tech-savvy. I’ve walked into industries I knew nothing about before and built something genuinely innovative inside them. I have life experiences that give me an unusual depth and perspective in the therapy room. I could probably make a decent living from this work alone – but I’d always be hustling harder than I needed to, and I’d always be one quiet month away from anxiety.
What I finally understood is this: there is no shame in working across two industries. In fact, for someone like me, it might be exactly the right move.
Because if I build sustainable, scalable income elsewhere – income that suits my creativity and my background – I get to approach my healing practice completely differently. I can invest in proper advertising. I can hire people to handle the parts that drain me. I can focus on a smaller number of hours with my dream clients that I can sustain with full presence, without the exhaustion of doing everything else too.
That epiphany didn’t deflate me. It lit me up.
Within hours, a plan was forming. Within days, I was working on it like a person possessed – in the best possible way. I’ll share the detail in another post, but if you’re curious about the direction of travel, here’s your teaser: I’ve changed my old business name from Guided Healing Ltd to Martin’s Little Empire Ltd.
The empire is just getting started.
