The Systems Gap: Why Talented Practitioners Stay Exhausted and Unfulfilled

Why most health practitioners are one breakdown away from closing their doors and the one thing that will save them.

You didn't become a practitioner to spend your life chasing invoices, answering the same questions 47 times, or feeling like your practice owns you instead of the other way around. Yet here you are: overwhelmed, exhausted, and wondering if you made a mistake choosing this path.

The culprit? A complete lack of systems.

In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on what systems actually are (spoiler: it's not just fancy software), why running your practice off your brain and daily willpower is a guaranteed path to burnout, and how the absence of systems doesn't just drain YOU, it limits your ability to impact the people who desperately need your help.

I'll walk you through two real-world scenarios and show you how it is possible to go from drowning in manual tasks and client chaos despite being extremely talented, to increased impact, outcomes, and fulfillment while working half the hours.

If you've ever felt trapped by your own success, stuck at a ceiling you can't break through, or secretly resentful of the practice you once loved, this episode is your wake-up call.

Plus, I'm opening up a limited number of Systems Audit Calls where we'll identify the exact leverage points in YOUR practice and work towards creating a roadmap to get you out of the weeds and into the impact you were meant to make.

Your fulfilled practice is waiting. Let's build the infrastructure to make it real.

Get my book The Fulfilled Practitioner for FREE: www.rbrar.com/tfpbook

Follow me on instagram: @fulfilledpractitioner

Follow me on Facebook: @drrickybrar

Set up a strategy call with me here: Schedule Here

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:32

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Today we're going to be covering why systems are your lifeline and they're not just a buzzword. There's a very famous quote by James Clear that everyone quotes. It's probably one of the most quoted quotes on social media, but it's one that hits home and it resonates with every single industry that you're in. The quote is you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Now, when I first heard this quote, sounds really cool. And it was something that I definitely wanted to resonate with. But if I'm being honest with you, for the first few years of my practice, whenever someone said you need better systems, I'd nod along like I knew exactly what they meant. But inside, I really had no clue. Are these guys talking about software? Are they talking about hiring people to do things for you? Some magical checklists or some other unicorn that I was too dumb to understand. So today we're going to demystify this once and for all because truly, without systems, you're building a practice that will inevitably eat you alive. You have one of the most important jobs on the face of the planet. You'll hear me say that a million times. So you need to make sure that you are as leveraged as possible. So what we'll start with is a simple definition of what systems actually are. So a system is anything that allows a result to happen without you having to think about it, remember it, or manually do it every single time. Really easy example about creating systems in your life, think about your morning coffee. It's something that is the favorite part of my day in the morning, and it's something I look forward to every morning. And if you ask my wife, she'll say, I'm mega addicted to coffee, but it's something I like the ritual of as well. So if you think about your morning coffee, if you have a coffee maker as a really simple example, and it has a timer, that's technically a system. The coffee gets made without you having to remember to do it or not. And you don't have to manually really do anything. So that is what we would call an automated system. It's something that's going to happen as long as you take the steps to maintain that system. So fill the coffee machine with beans and make sure the filters are in place and all of that, in the morning, you will have coffee without having to think about it, right? But then you can also create a system if you create a series of steps that you can almost do on autopilot. So if you're somebody who likes to do the big setup, and I kind of like to do this a little bit where you measure your ground, you uh make sure that you uh put it in the machine in a particular order and you make sure that it's in a very specific machine, or maybe you're doing a French press. Technically speaking, if you know where everything is, you can do it a little bit easier. But guess what? There's still a lot of manual intervention that you have to take there. So, technically speaking, that's on that borderline of is it a system or is it not a system? So, in your practice, systems are kind of the same thing. They're repeatable processes. Some of them can be automation, some of them can be templates, so you don't have to work from scratch. And mainly there's structures that allow your practice to run smoothly without burning out your brain or requiring you to reinvent the wheel daily. So, systems can be as simple as an email template for new client onboarding, or it could be as sophisticated as an automated sequence that nurtures leads while you sleep. So there's levels to systems, there's more complexity to some systems as well. I love to start with the simple stuff first, but we can get pretty deep with it. Now, why is this important? Why are we talking about it? The brutal, brutal, brutal reality is without systems, burnout and limited impact are inevitable. Those are two things that you're pretty much taking the freeway to. So this is where you're going to be doing everything manually. And then you're only able to help so many people because now you're constrained by time. You're not leveraged. And you guys know if you've listened to uh the first few episodes, that's one of my favorite words to use, but you are not leveraged. So most practitioners don't realize that without systems, your practice is entirely dependent on your daily energy, memory, and availability. And if we're being honest with ourselves, that's not really a business that we want to be in. That's actually a very expensive job that you can never leave. And you just create more dependence on you doing things. And this is why many practitioners, even when it comes to hiring, find it really difficult to hire because they don't even know what to delegate because they're so used to doing everything themselves. So without systems, you're probably experiencing decision fatigue. So you're making hundreds, if not thousands, of micro decisions every single day. And this can include to a single person, multiple. So when to follow up with somebody, when to send them an email, what to say in that email, how to deliver this new protocol you've been working on, how do I determine if it's the right opportunity to use that as well? So each decision drains your mental reserves and stack that on top of the daily decisions you have to make, like what to eat. Uh, when should I drink my coffee? What time should I take my breaks? What do I have to do today again after work? Do I have to take the kids to hockey? All of these little decisions, they're going to amount and really cause a level of fatigue. And then another huge one that practitioners experience when they don't have systems is repetition exhaustion. How many times have you explained the same thing over and over to your clients and patients? So this could be telling somebody why they should temporarily remove gluten or why they should take a certain supplement. You might have a spiel that you do every single time. Uh, you recommend a certain supplement, and then here's how to prepare for your appointment email. Maybe you're manually emailing intake forms to anybody new coming in or follow-up forms to anybody that's following up in your appointment. So without systems, you're on repeat and it's soul crushing. The other thing that you'll find without systems is you kind of get a sense of time imprisonment. So your impact is directly capped by your hours. You can't really impact more people without adding more hours to the schedule. So if you're someone who already spends 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week, and even more than that in your practice, if I told you to double the amount of people you're seeing, you would probably have instant panic because there physically isn't enough time on your calendar to do it in the way you've been doing it so far. And then just think about taking a vacation. You take that vacation and you come back and you are the most stressed you've ever been because while you were gone, the practice fell apart. And now you have to play catch up, plus continue to serve the people that were on your calendar already. So there's only one of you. So without systems, you're kind of stuck there. And then you can also get quality inconsistency. This is one that's underappreciated, but one I see from practitioners all of the time. So when everything lives in your head, some clients get your best while others might not hear what they need to say. So a good example of this is if you are somebody who has unique knowledge about, let's say, circadian rhythm and why that's important. One of your clients might have energy issues and you took some time because you had it available in the appointment to explain circadian rhythm and why they should be getting morning sunlight and why in the evenings they should be blocking blue light. And it made all the difference for them. But another person you're working with, there wasn't enough time to talk to them about it. You didn't remember to talk to them about it because you were busy with the goals of the appointment. And that person never hears that from you. They take all the supplements, they eat the right diet, but there's somebody who's burning the midnight oil, staying up till 2 a.m. every day. Guess what's gonna happen to that person's energy? It's probably not gonna get better. Even if you made all the right supplement decisions, all of the right nutritional decisions, that's someone who is literally going against biology. So in that case, that person's probably not gonna get better. And then it's going to reflect on you. And they're gonna say, I worked with uh so and so and I didn't get the result I was looking for. They're gonna have a sense of disappointment. So the big thing here is, and this is something that you might not agree with, but it's something that I firmly believe is your clients can tell. They can tell and they can feel when you're not yourself, when you're exhausted or overwhelmed, or when you're rushing them because you have to get to the next appointment, or when you had to start that their appointment late, and now you're in a panic and just kind of throwing everything at them. Everything suffers. Your ability to hold space for them suffers as well. Your presence is not there, your energy is not there. So, this is why building systems is so important for your practice. If you want to do this for 10 years, 20 years, 30 plus years, this is something that you need to do. You need to build systems because without those systems, it's gonna be very, very difficult for you to maintain the same level of energy and really the same level of passion and fulfillment. And that's what we're all about here. So I'll give you two quick examples here of uh two people that I've had conversations with and worked with in the past. And I always think of these individuals because it shows me a common theme that I'm finding in a lot of practitioners today. So let me first tell you about Dr. Sarah. So she's somebody who I jumped on a call with and very quickly I learned that she's super talented, she's caring, her clients absolutely adore her. She had a lot of testimonials and things like that. But when we broke down her typical day, she starts her morning manually sending appointment reminders because she doesn't trust her scheduling software. It's burned her a few times, so it's probably not a good system. She spends 45 minutes writing individual emails to either new inquiries or follow-ups, and there's no template that she's working from. So each one's slightly different because she likes to speak from the heart, which is fine, but working from a template could save her some time there. And then during her client appointments, she repeats the same gut health education that she's given 300 times before, but she's never bothered recording it or turning it into a resource. So after appointments, she manually creates supplement protocols from scratch, meal plans from scratch, sends follow-up instructions. Each one is custom because she hasn't built any frameworks. She's constantly chasing down invoices because she doesn't have any automated payment collection. She spends her evenings answering client texts and DMs, and there's just no boundaries in place whatsoever. So when I asked her how many people are you currently managing a week, she said 25 clients a week. And that kind of shocked me because if you took a look at how many hours she's putting into her practice, you would think she's seeing 60 to 80 people a week. So, in a way, and she was very vulnerable with me on that initial phone call. She was exhausted. She was actually kind of resentful of her practice. And she was secretly wondering if she made a mistake becoming a practitioner, which is the most heartbreaking thing someone can go through. So she wanted to inquire about how to build a group program with me, but she had no idea how she'd find the time. So this was somebody who that was not the right move for. We needed to build systems. Her practice was entirely dependent on her showing up. And she was one burnout away, one illness away, whether it's the flu or the cold, one vacation away from really falling behind to the point that she wouldn't find it easy to catch up. So this is somebody that desperately, desperately needed systems. So this is one person from my initial conversation that this was the step that was the most important for them is to take a systems audit and start building these microsystems right off the bat. Let me tell you about another practitioner that I worked with. So I'll tell you about Michael. Uh, Michael's a health coach and he works with about 80 clients at any given time. And his reality is very leveraged. So this was someone I was extremely impressed with when I first spoke to them. So when someone books a discovery call, he actually has an automated sequence that gets triggered that sends them a welcome email. It sends them all of their intake forms, it sends them a preparation guide, what to expect at your first appointment, show up 15 minutes early, all of the rules. Uh, his calendar system handles all of the scheduling and the reminders are completely hands-off. He set them once and now they go out and he has multiple reminders. He has a one-week reminder, he has a 24-hour reminder, and then a one-hour reminder, all automated. He also did one thing that I've been yelling at practitioners to do for a very long time. He created a video library covering his core education topic. So the things that he talks about with gut health 101, the basics of inflammation and what inflammation is and stress management. These are those kind of universal things that everybody should know. But he never has to repeat himself in the appointment. If somebody has a specific question and he already has a video recorded on it, he could just say, Hey, I'll send you this video after the appointment and it will explain everything you need to know. And then if there's questions after that, you can ask me. So even the questions he's getting are going to be filtered and things that are actually needed to be asked of him. And then his one-on-one sessions, and this might be the most important detail in this entire episode, they focus on personalization and breakthrough moments, not just basic education and repetition. So this is where he really spends his time looking for those opportunities to create massive breakthroughs in his clients. So his supplements and protocol recommendations, they come from a bank of frameworks he's refined over the years. So he's not starting from absolute scratch every single time. And then his group programs now, after we built them out, so they run on a structured curriculum with pre-recorded modules and live QA calls, payments automated in his practice, onboarding is automated, follow-up sequence are automated. So he works only about 25 hours per week. He takes long vacations and his practice runs smoothly because systems are in place. Not his daily hustle, which he has a lot of if he needed to use it, but he's very leveraged. So he has a really good energy about him. And when you're in his presence, and I always call it out when I speak with him, is you get this sense that you're speaking with a Zen master. He's so present, he's really in uh a state where he can hold space and you feel like you're being taken care of in that appointment. So he's genuinely fulfilled, and it's because he has these systems that he doesn't have to like just beat around the bush and do all of these crazy things and wear 20 hats over time. So a really cool example to really hammer these points home is uh my son, he's older now, he kind of doesn't play with them as much anymore. Uh, but when he was younger, he used to love his oversized Lego blocks and he used to love building stuff with it. And one of his favorite things to build with me would be just straight towers. So we would try to build a tower going one uh brick at a time, one Lego piece at a time. We would be building uh it straight up. And the goal was to build the highest tower without it falling over. So I would put a block on, then he would put a block on his, and I would put a block on, and he would put a block on his. And we would get to a point where the towers got so big that inevitably one of them would fall. Uh, and sometimes I'd give it to him, but we try to have a no participation ribbon practice in this house, and he has to earn it. So the trick to building a really high tower was to have a really strong foundation. And when I think about systems, they're no different. You have to stack systems on top of each other. So if any of you are feeling overwhelmed, like, oh my God, I gotta make 40 systems for my practice, that's not the way it works. You have to look at the systems that will save you the most amount of time right off the bat, how to create them and get them done. And with the invention of AI and that coming to market, and now lots of technology we can use, these things are actually pretty easy to do after you get over that initial fear of starting. And that's really it. You got to take that first step. So if you want to build systems, they build on top of each other. You don't just build out every system overnight, you build out your foundational microsystems, and that creates a strong foundation for you to grow off of. And that's the definition of a fulfilled and leveraged practice. So if you're listening to this and you're recognizing yourself in Sarah's story or hopefully Michael's story already, I want you to know something. It's absolutely not your fault. This is the big thing. You were never taught how to build systems, you were never taught what the definition of a system was. So you might have attended lots of events where people were saying system this, system that, and you're like, what the hell is a system? That was literally me for many years of my career. But the good news and the most important news, systems are learnable. You don't need to be tech savvy, you don't need a big team. You just need someone to show you where your biggest leverage points are and how to systematically address them. So, what I'm doing this month for any practitioner that is kind of drowning and not feeling that they have the right systems in place is a system audit call. So, this is going to be a call and we're gonna jump uh into your practice, all of the details, and it's going to be an intensive where we'll look at your practice together and identify the top three systems gaps that are costing you time, energy, and impact. And then we'll start to create a roadmap as to what your next 30 days and 90 days should look like in terms of creating these systems and doing it in a sustainable way, where you don't have to take every weekend off to build out these systems. So this is a strategic clarity call. I'm only offering it to five people this month as my time is limited as well. So if you've been running your practice off of your brain and willpower, let's actually think about creating the infrastructure that you need that will finally set you free. So if you're somebody who uh needs a call to do a systems audit, shoot me a message and we'll get you sorted out. Again, I only have a handful of spaces available because I'm doing these personally. These are not done by team members. I want to be the one to help you dive into it. So your future self, the one who's energized, fulfilled, making a massive impact, is waiting for you to build the systems that make that version possible. So if this sounds like something that you need to do, whether it's with me, yourself, someone else, get started. Please systemize your practice because every day you don't is taken away from the best version of yourself. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Let's do this.