104 | How I Onboard Guest Speakers

0:00 Hi there. Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman. I'm an herbalist and nutritionist. And in this podcast, I share little tips and tidbits that might be helpful for other practitioners. Today, I want to talk to you about a kind of peek behind the curtain as to something that I've been thinking about a lot in my own practice, in my own business, and share with you what I've come up with here as a solution to this, not dilemma, but just something that's been on my mind. Okay, so here's the deal. As I have expanded my Monday mentoring program and continue to offer my deep dive programs, I'm finding that I'm having more and more guest speakers coming in to speak to people in my community and in my programs.

0:40 And in the beginning, a lot of these folks were people who had either, either I knew them personally, or they had already been part of my programs, and that's how I knew them. So they were very familiar with the culture and the community and just who's present in the spheres that I. Posting. However, as we get a little bit bigger and as I have other, you know, I'm realizing I don't, I want people to come in and talk to us about things like business and accounting and whatnot. And some of those folks may not really be familiar with my work or my community or people in the herb world or the nutrition world at all. And so I've been thinking a lot about how do I let folks know when they're coming in to present or do, you know, offer a workshop or something like that as part of one of my programs, I want to, well, it's a dilemma.

1:26 Do I want to provide some kind of orientation or overview of who's present and just some of the philosophy and the culture that they're stepping into? Or would that be kind of intrusive or feel like people are going to have to walk on eggshells and tiptoe around? You know, I want people to feel comfortable and so forth. So I've been going kind of back and forth about, how do I want to navigate this? Do I just want to invite people in and hope for the best and be like, yes, here we are. You know, we're nutritionists, we're herbalists. Tell us what you think we need to know. Or do I want to provide a little bit more context and information and so forth? So recently, I have decided to do a little, I don't know if it's an experiment, but just to try something a little bit new.

2:12 So in the past, I would, you know, give people kind of a brief overview of like, here's, we're mostly you know clinicians who are practicing nutritionists and herbalists and we have most people have advanced training here's what we're interested in so i've decided now to do kind of a general write-up on a page it's like a document that i'm going to send people the link to the document and be like hey if you want to know more about us in our community here you go you can find out more about who you're going to be speaking to you. So my intention with this is that people have some background information. I know for me as a teacher, it can be really nice to know who's present because I want to do a good job and I want to tailor my information and my presentation to what's useful. I don't want to be too high level. I don't want to be too basic.

2:57 I want to be talking to who's there and having it be a collaborative and useful time together. So my hope is that by sharing this document, I'm going to let people have a little bit of background about our community and see how it goes. I'm also thinking that because it's a document where I'm sort of presenting it as an option for people to peruse, browse through, if they like, that it won't feel like I'm targeting anybody specifically and being like, oh, I don't want you to mess up in these ways, so please be aware that, you know, here's who we are and here's what we care about. So my intention, hopefully, will be that people can come in and feel like they kind of know who's here and that they can ask questions if they have them in advance.

3:42 So anyway, I just wanted to share that with you. If you're interested, I will put the link to the page that I'm going to send out to presenters in the show notes. You can have a look if you'd like to. I'm certainly open to any feedback. I thought I would read it. It's a short page here at the end of this podcast, just in case you're interested. but if you want the copy, look in the show notes. I'm curious about your feedback. Please do reach out. But here's what I've come up with. It is a work in progress. It'll probably change as we go. But this is my note to presenters. It is on a document, like I said, and it says about our community. Hi there. Thanks so much for agreeing to speak as part of a Bloom and Grow workshop. We aim to make our gatherings welcoming and useful for everyone involved, including our speakers.

4:24 With that in mind, here's a bit about the group. We're a warm, curious community of nutritionists and herbalists, mostly solo clinicians with advanced or graduate-level training. We especially appreciate practical, clinically useful content and or real-world tips for running a small practice, what you've learned from experience or what you do day to day. Our group includes trans and non-binary members and others in the LGBTQIA plus community, and we tend to be socially progressive and values-driven in our work. Clinically and philosophically, we're generally weight-inclusive and try to avoid framing weight as a proxy for health. We also move away from good and bad food language, and many of us practice in ways that are trauma-informed and culturally aware. Our approach is evidence-informed with evidence understood broadly to include contemporary research and traditional or historical practices.

5:09 We're often cautious about supplement overuse and appreciate thoughtful discussion about when interventions are and aren't necessary. If you're teaching a class on marketing and sales, it might be helpful to know that this group isn't especially interested in tactics that feel manipulative and content focused on heavy-handed promotion tends to not land well. For CEU-eligible classes, we ask speakers not to discuss or promote specific supplements or similar products, although it's fine to mention categories of products or ingredients to show specific products with branding obscured. All that said, this isn't a group that expects perfection. We're a friendly lot, and we're excited to learn from you. If you have questions about your presentation or how to best work with this group, please reach out. All right, so that's it. Like I said, this is an experiment.

5:53 I'm hoping that it feels helpful for people and not, I don't know, restrictive or like people have to be watching every word out of their mouth around us. So I'm going to just try this out for the rest of the year, and maybe I'll report back later on how it feels. And maybe I'll check in with some of my speakers also to see how it lands with them. Because, you know, it's always a balancing act of how to communicate clearly without making people feel anxious or on edge or whatnot. So as multiple people have said to me, they're like, Camille, you know, if people read this and they don't, you know, they don't align with these values, it's probably not a good fit to speak with a group anyway. So there you go. It's a little experiment. I hope this helps.

6:35 And if you have thoughts or feedback, please let me know. All right, take care. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you would like to stay in touch, you can go to my website, camillefreeman.com and join my mailing list for practitioners. I send out a practitioner note every Thursday in the morning. They'll have a short message from me as well as three recommendations from the week, things that might be interesting to you as a practitioner, as well as information about any courses or programs that I have upcoming. All right, hopefully I'll see you there.