To all the estheticians I was before...
2019 marks the 13th year of my career as an esthetician. I don’t know how it happened but somehow my entire adulthood has been dedicated to serving people with some fresh skin. I don’t have any possible way to break down the number of people that I’ve seen but upwards of 20,000 people is my estimate based on some fast math. Many of these clients I saw once, many I kept as forever clients, and then there’s every circumstance in between in which I managed to get to know, help, and connect with someone even for just a short time together. I think about each day I’ve been able to have doing this job since my days back in beauty school. The consistency of it is that I wake up and know that at some point in the day, I get to expand my knowledge by learning something new about someone new and keeping in my heart that my responsibility is to just make them feel worthy and comfortable with exactly who they are. I discovered early on that there are little and big ways to accomplish this and my success rate is only equal to how worthy and comfortable I feel with myself as well. There are versions of the esthetician that I am now that I’ve always had in me but with a little time, and a lot of experience, all the estheticians I was before are the layers of who I get to be today.
The evolution of my practice
Many of you have been on this newsletter subscription of mine for almost exactly 3 years. You get to read up on my weekly skin topics, check out my most updated features, and perhaps book a last minute appointment with me. However, I am sometimes a little struck when people ask me about how a part of my business is doing when I am so immersed in it that I thought the answer was much more obvious. Behind the scenes of my work life is not what people expect because I wear so many hats that all the moving parts are really mostly obvious to me. Starting out my practice almost 4 years ago, I had no idea what I was doing. And to be quite honest, I still kind of don’t know what I’m doing almost every day. The only thing that has really changed is my understanding that the surrender is the part that is most important to trust. Not that I have all the answers within my hour long facials with clients everyday. The practice that I created is based on non-toxic skincare rituals and teachings that I am fortunate enough to make accessible through one on one custom facials, teaching events, and also through my conscious content portals of the blog and youtube channel. What I first created were very simplified facials that began the discussion of custom, integrated, whole care, but what it’s become is a little more specific than that. I want to share a few of the evolutions of my practice so that you can get a better idea of what the heck this is all about.
Consistency might be key, but why do we sometimes drop off?
Last week I got my first facial in well over half a year. Mind you I take great care of my skin but a true facial is rare for me. I felt so incredible afterward that I actually said: “wow, this must be why I’m in business!” People ask me all the time, how often do you get a facial? And it’s sort of embarrassing that the answer is almost always never. The reason why comes in two parts;
1 - I don’t work in a spa setting anymore where I am able to get treatments with my coworkers on my downtime.
2 - I’m really not the best when it comes to consistency with services.
My hair seems to always be a few months out from when I should have gotten it cut, I am a little late on follow-ups with my healers, I don’t get massages nearly as often as I need to, my exercise schedule is never consistent and most of the time an appointment gets prompted by someone else who is bugging me to book. I’m truly grateful for those prompts and utilize them just as much in my practice because of my own failure to launch when it comes to active consistency. So why do we get stuck? I want to explore a little bit of that today since I’m right there with you and what to do to navigate it all.