87 | Behind the Scenes: What I Learning Running the Take your Tonic program

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 wanted to share a little debrief of a program that just wrapped up last month called Take Your Tonic. I'll share more about the program in a second here. The reason I wanted to share a debrief with you all is because I think a lot of us as clinicians are thinking about, classes and courses and how to run programs or offerings in a one-to-many format in conjunction with the one-on-one work that we're doing with people. And sometimes it's just interesting to kind of get a peek behind the curtain at how these things go. So let me share about the program, then I'm going to share some insights or some lessons that I learned from running it for the first time.

0:46 So this program, again, it was called Take Your Tonic, and I decided to offer the program. I've been wanting to do it for a while. I decided to do it, gosh, I don't remember when it started. It was six weeks and it just wrapped up last month. So anyway, whenever that was, I decided to offer it because I felt like things were really hard for a lot of people just with politics and everything going on in the world. It's pretty grim out there for many people, at least many people in my circles. And I felt like a tonic would be helpful for pretty much everyone, including myself. And so I just wanted to put it out there as kind of like an offering for whoever came across it, not necessarily as a money-making endeavor, but more as just a.

1:31 What can I do to step up and help with the things that I know how to do. So my thinking with the Take Your Tonic program was that because I wanted to offer it in that spirit of, just helping as much as I could, I decided I was going to make it free. And that helped me to take the pressure off a little bit, not having to have it be perfect. Instead, I didn't make even a website for it. I just ran it through Practice Better. There was a little signup page that kind of talked through the basics of the program. And in there, I said, hey, this is a pilot program. I've never done it before. It's a little rough around the edges, but it's free. So if you want to take it, you can take it. I offered 50 spots in it. And the deal with the program was that we were going to meet once, talk a little bit about possible spring tonics and how you would choose one.

2:17 We did a little bit of a kind of health constitutional assessment. There was no personal advice provided, but the idea was that people would choose their own tonic and then they would take it for six weeks as often as they could daily, ideally. And then at the end of the six weeks, we would just meet again and see how everybody did. So that was the deal. I sent out pre-scheduled emails every Monday just to remind people to do it and then a little nudge to check in either with a workbook that I provided people or there was a little forum that went with it on I think it was Fridays or Saturdays that that went out. So that was it. It was very kind of low-key on my end. I took of course took some work to set up the program. I created the workbook.

2:59 I made the emails. You know I wrote the emails and facilitated in the forum but other than that it was really just two hours of live you know meeting via zoom and then I took my tonic as well, so that was the deal and I was curious to see how it was going to go so like I said I offered 50 spots I the only advertising I did for it was I just put it in my newsletter as under my recommended or upcoming section so I didn't do a full newsletter issue just for the tonic program I just put it in there once maybe twice and the whole thing filled up so we did get to 50 participants. The first live meeting via Zoom was on a Friday at noon, and I think 18 people came to that out of 50, not counting myself, and then it was available as a recording for folks who couldn't be there live.

3:51 We had a forum, and I think maybe 10-ish, maybe 15 people posted in the forum what herb they had chosen, and fewer than that participated in the forum throughout. And then at the end, the wrap up, the very last day, we had, I think, maybe seven or eight people come to that live session. There was a feedback form where I asked people to do an anonymous Google, you know, Google form just to give me some feedback on the program. And I think 12 people out of 50 completed that. So that's those are the facts and now for the debrief part of it first of all I really enjoyed participating in the program I used I chose chamomile tea as my tonic and I did almost I missed one day out of the six weeks even though I traveled quite a bit during that time but I was pretty consistent the idea was that you're going to pick something that was a low barrier to entry something easy something you felt like you really could do and for me chamomile tea worked and it It felt really good, and I was super glad that I did it.

4:55 The feedback that I got from a lot of people was that it was hard for people to do this. Now, I will say that most of the folks who signed up were practitioners. Those are the people on my mailing list right now. So generally speaking, these folks, most of the 50, at least the ones that I knew, were practitioners. I think a good number of them probably signed up because it was free and then didn't actually get around to doing it. Another segment of folks signed up probably started and then fell off the bandwagon and then a smaller percentage of people kept going at least in some form or fashion and got through to the end at least having taken their tonic some of the time so my thoughts on this how separate into two areas one of the areas is just from a sort of business component i felt like oh gosh maybe it was a little bit of a mistake to offer this for free because I think when something is free people just sign up for it just because even though they don't necessarily think they're going to do it right now it just sounds like a good idea so you're like oh it's free why it might as well it seems good in your head and then you know reality strikes and it's maybe not a good time or you don't you miss the first week and then you feel like oh I fell in too far behind or whatever it is so I think in the future even though this is not intended to be a big money-making situation In the future, what I'm probably going to do is charge a nominal fee, something like $50 or something for the six-week program, in the hopes that folks who sign up are

6:29 actually interested in participating and kind of taking it through. So I think that's probably something that I took away from this is that even though I think of it as a gift and something that I'm hoping will really serve the community, that also there does sometimes need to be a little bit of a indication of commitment in order to get folks in the program who really do want to be there at this moment in time, rather than squirreling it away for the future, which I totally understand. And I have that instinct myself. So that was a learning for me about how to offer the program and structure it in the future.

7:09 I found that I sent a weekly check-in form just asking people, you know, how often did you take your tonic and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How are you feeling? Anything like that. Hardly anybody filled that in. So I realized that that wasn't super helpful, although folks did report that they liked the email prompt reminders of just, oh, hey, it's Monday. Don't forget to take your tonic if you've fallen off track, etc., etc. So anyway, I'll probably keep the emails and skip the form going forward. And then the workshop, the workbook will be an optional continuation. We'll probably do this again in the fall. And I probably, if I do charge for it, I will probably offer some sort of, you know, if this is truly unaffordable for you, there will be some sort of scholarship or something like that for folks.

7:54 But I think I'm going to require some sort of payment in the future just to make sure that people are going to do it who really want to do it. The folks who did complete it, even partially, I think found it really helpful. And the other thing I wanted to share with you, which I think is relevant as a practitioner, is that it became really clear to me how hard it is to do something consistently. And, you know, this, again, it was designed to be something that was easy, fun. I encourage people to do something that tasted good or that was felt like a treat or something you really wanted to do, something very simple.

8:35 So hopefully most people, when they decided on a tonic, chose something along those lines. And even then, this was, you know, I was like, no, we're not going to do any combo infusion decoction situations. You know, hopefully it's not going to be something that tastes terrible and you never want to do again. But really something that felt accessible and lovely. And even then, most people had trouble doing it. And again, these are practitioners. These are folks who believe in, you know, integrative and holistic medicine, who understand taking steps for self-care and that sort of thing. And it's still really, really hard. And so for me, a big takeaway here is, wow, I see this again and again in my clinic.

9:21 When we give people four, five, ten things to do, each of which are a big reach, you know, we're like, okay, where you're going to take your infusion in the night and you're going to do your, you know, extract blend before each meal, and then you're going to take your zinc, and you're going to, you know, do your mindfulness practice, and you're going to change your phone settings, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, these are all folks who signed up for this program, and practitioners who have a background in this. It's, you know, infusions, tinctures, extracts. These are not new concepts to any of these folks, and still, it's really hard to do. So I think it was a great reminder for a lot of us in the program that we need to be really mindful of what is feasible for our clients to do and how quickly we're trying to make changes.

10:09 Because it's one thing to do things for a few weeks. It's another thing to say, hey, I think you're going to feel best if you do this for six weeks, 12 weeks, a year, and beyond. It's just a challenging, it's a challenging thing to undertake. So anyway, that was a valuable reminder for me as well, and hopefully some of the other folks who were in the tonic program. So there you go. A few takeaways from offering that program. If you'd like to check it out, I'll be running it again in the fall. We'll do kind of a fall tonic situation. So if you're into it and you feel like you actually want to try to take a tonic for six weeks, I hope you'll sign up. I don't have registration open yet, but I will let you know. Get on my mailing list at camillefreeman.com and I'll keep you posted when registration opens up again.

10:53 All right. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you have an amazing day, and I'll be back soon.