What Montel Williams Can Teach Us About Chronic Illness

Root Your Radiance

If you're not walking your talk, you're going to feel it – and so will your potential clients. Plain and simple, your dream clients are looking for someone doing meaningful work and who can relate to the pain they're experiencing, NOT someone who is constantly focused on selling and influencing. But creating that connection won't be possible until you craft, connect to, and share your own story.

This episode, I’m inviting you to befriend the present moment and take the steps you need to truly show up as you. Will you join me in shifting your focus and aligning your intentions to become the highest most prosperous version of your self?

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Transcript: What Montel Williams Can Teach Us About Chronic Illness
LAURA BAUTISTA: Today, we're talking about one of my favorite talk show hosts from the 90s, Montel Williams, and particularly what Montel Williams can teach us about disease remission and business building.
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Welcome to the prosperous practice podcast. I'm your host, Laura Bautista and I am so honored, excited and happy to have you here with me. Let's get into it.
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So something really kind of cool in a weird way. Well it connected me to Montel Williams in a way that I didn't really want to be connected to him was that Montel had multiple sclerosis, Montel had M. S. And he was very public about it and he was like one of the main celebrities who had it and he played a really pivotal role in my healing from M. S., believe it or not. So I don't know about you if I don't know about how many nineties kids we got on here, hit me up in the D. M. S. On instagram if you are a nineties kid and you watch Montel Williams and Ricki Lake and Jenny Jones and all that sh*t and Jerry Springer, Maury. Um that's a whole ‘nother story as to why I was into those shows and what all that means now as I know as a, you know, trauma professional, but I digress.
I want to honor Montel Williams for being probably one of the more an integrity talk show host. I think he had some weird ones too, but for the most part he stayed away from a lot of the trashy, you know, topics, he wasn't like a Maury, you know, “you are the father!” kind of thing and it wasn't Jerry Springer where people are just like fucking fighting each other like naked on the stage and it's all just crazy yelling. He really had more of like a kind of grounded energy. I don't really remember what the topics were that he did but I just remember him being someone that I was like you know I could get down with this like low key talk show. And again I was a kid of the 90s. I grew up in New York City and watched a lot of TV when I was a kid. So maybe you can relate.
Something that I really appreciated about Montel Williams. And the reason I'm talking about him today is because he was diagnosed with M. S. He got really sick and then I guess because he's rich or I don't know he had access to information that led him to take on eating healthy. And he developed a blender which I called my juicer for many years but it was really just like a high speed blender. He brought to market this blender and he advertised like smoothies and juices and soups and all this stuff. And so when I found out that he had M. S. and that he created this blender thing I felt very connected, and I bought it. I felt connected to him because I already had the talk show connection and then I felt connected to him because he had that diagnosis and he was talking about feeling better and doing all these things by by making smoothies and juices in this blender. And so I still have this blender today. I actually if you were with me during the purpose of healing summit, you may have gotten to meet the blender. I'm actually looking up at it right now, it's kind of a trophy for me because essentially what I ended up doing was I used that blender to make vegetable juices and smoothies with a little bit of fruit. I used it to make turmeric juice. Um I use it to make a lot of healing Superfood potions and concoctions to heal my body from M. S. Like I really turned my health around by doing something that I don't even know if I would recommend today in the way that I did it, but considering how poorly I was eating at the time I was eating whatever I wanted, I was eating cookies, cakes, ice cream, I was going to restaurants all the time.
I was a New Yorker, I was like in the playground of restaurant life and I did not discriminate and I drank a lot and I smoked Newports. There was a lot that I had to change, give up, and unlearn and when I was able to invite in this product by this guy who I felt a connection to and then I used it in a way that was very potent for me. I would make kale and strawberry smoothies and spinach and pineapple and I probably wouldn't even recommend pineapple now to someone, like, I mean maybe I would, but at the time, all of these concoctions in this blender, it helped me turn my cells on and my body started to come back to life. and when I0 in on the conditions like, what was the environment, what are the data points? What did I utilize in order to help myself? And what's the point here?
The point here is that it was through trust of something of someone that felt familiar that had experienced a similar pain as me and was promoting something that felt intuitively good for me, right? And I bought in and not only did I buy in once I started to feel good, there was no turning back, I remember I used to make my, my juices and I would put them in these big jars, They were like pasta sauce jars, literally, I would just fill a big container up or two of them with just like this gunky chunky kale and strawberry smoothie or you know, very, very, very minimal ingredients and I'd bring it to work and I would drink it. I put it in my cup and I would just drink it throughout the day and everybody was like, oh look at that weird girl, even though I worked at a hospital, you would think I'd be celebrated for eating vegetables. But now even the doctors thought I was a weirdo. And that's fine. I celebrate myself as, as being different at this point.
But the point is that your ideal client, the person who's going to buy your service, your program, right? This is also what they're going to be looking for. They're gonna be looking for someone who is doing meaningful work, who has experienced pain as well. So they're speaking from a place of experience and they have a level of expertise that you feel you don't have, right? So I'm not saying Montella's like some healer. I mean, I don't know in a way he really helped my healing. So I'll call him a healer, but he's not your convention- It's not conventional, right? It's just- and it doesn't have to be, because it's all about creating that environment. However that happens. I just happen to have an affinity for, and a familiarity for these talk shows, Right? And so it created this sense of connection And from there, it was easy for me to buy into what this person was saying because people don't stay sick due to a lack of information. And that's one of the main messages here is that people buy into what makes them feel, not necessarily what the information is.
So, again, what can Montel Williams teach us about disease remission and business building. Well, he can teach us that through your own story of healing through your own going through the shit and then coming out on the other side and creating something meaningful, purposeful and in service that you can build an empire that you can make a ton of money doing something really good for people, right? I don't know how much I paid for that blender, but man did I get good use and great results and it wasn't just that, but it's the energy of possibility and the energy of connection. I can't tell you how many of my clients in the beginning and even sometimes it's really hard to shift and unlearn the focus when you're growing a holistic wellness prosperous practice or holistic wellness business in general.
The point is not sales. The intention is not sales. If the intention is sales and making money and getting clients, you are not going to like it. If you're listening to this podcast. It's because you believe in holistic health, you're probably connected to the higher version of you. You're probably someone who is a bit spiritual. You've experienced miracles or you know that they're possible, right? So it's not going to sustain you to chase sales to chase strategy. It's actually going to make you come off as salesey and nobody wants to hire a practitioner or a coach who feels like they are selling.
And so instead what do we focus on? We focus on helping people, service, and connection, right? We learned from Montel who, you know, he may or may not have intended to do this, but I bet a lot of people who watch daytime television at that time and watched talk shows and then found out that he had M. S. And then they themselves had M. S. He came on their radar and that's how it happens when you get out into the world of digital marketing, where people are searching for solutions, they're searching for these specific keywords, Right? So I who knows how I found that I may have been searching for some sort of multiple sclerosis diet or who knows? And then it just kind of linked and brought that all together. And so again, when it comes to helping people, it's to your benefit to help those who have overcome the thing that you have overcome, that's probably who your ideal client is. It's a former version of you.
Sometimes practitioners will say, well I haven't healed the thing yet, so how can I teach, how can I be a practitioner, how can I even show up and make money and do this? Like it gets in a lot of people's way. And so if you're feeling that hard right now, I just want to normalize that and I just want you to know that it's because you care and like one of my top coaches that I've worked with says Alex Charfen, he says, “impostors don't have imposter syndrome”. So if you have imposter syndrome, chances are you're probably not an imposter.
The truth is that you can help people through the connection, through your story, through possibility, and that's my invitation to you, is to craft your story, connect to your story, share your story. Now, there are ways to do this that yield different feelings, right? So sometimes when you share your story, you might find that people feel bad for you, and I will say nobody's going to buy from you if they feel bad for you. So if you're a business owner, if you're a holistic health practitioner, entrepreneur coach, you know, that's something to be mindful of the key to turning your wounds and your wisdom into a platform of prosperity is to share your story, share what you've overcome, share what's possible, and remember to always bring it back to making it about them, right?
So like everything that you're teaching, everything that you've overcome now that you're here and you can help other people or now that you've studied the protocols, the practices, the experiences you know, to help people heal trauma heal their bodies heal from years of digestive issues and autoimmune and all the stuff that's possible to heal from all of that when we talk about disease remission or healing permanently and business building, how do you talk about your story or use your story, let's say in your marketing in a way that brings people towards you.
And so number one talk about how meaningful it is for you to be able to bring this to the world in service, right? Talk about what you do your services, your story and really make it about the meaning of the service, right? Don't make it about your program. Don't make it about your session. Talk about your services in a way like this is so meaningful to me to be able to share this with you use that lens, that energy and words that come from that vibration in my mastermind, this is exactly what I teach you. We have social media protocols that give you templates and examples and then eventually you make them your own. But for now just know that the essence and the energy of it is what is most important.
Number two focus on inside out solutions right? Inside out solutions. So just like Montel is promoting this like “here's what you can do for yourself”, right? Promote that as well. Here's the thing when you're teaching people to come home to their bodies and that they their stuff that they can do about it. It's a natural next step to try things yourself and then to realize damn I really need help right? But the hope and the encouragement started with you because you know that they have everything that they need in order to heal themselves. You know that they just need guidance and they probably need some support some nutrition some supplements.
But at the end of the day they have everything that they need. The body is designed to heal itself. The body is always working to be healthy, always. And so you bring that to them and you teach them how can they help themselves for themselves? And then when they exhaust that and it doesn't work because we are designed to heal in a co creative space and they're going to need support and help and they might know that or they might need to realize that. But either way you're bringing them back to the fact that they are the ones doing the work and it's totally normal to have a guide if the work that you're doing isn't landing right? That's what we're here for and so you can you can focus on that. And finally when we're talking about again, what did Montel Williams kind of do here? Right? Which is just kind of a funny example, but it's a great example.
You gotta walk your talk, you're gonna walk your talk or you're not gonna make it I say that with so much love, but you gotta walk your talk, you've got to be the client you wish to attract or you're not going to be happy, it's so energetic, right? Like I don't know for sure that Montel walks his talk, but what I do know is that he must have had an experience with this in order to be like this is powerful enough for me to put this out into the world and make some money. I'm guessing, I don't know, Montel the ins and outs and this is my most wishful thinking, right? But like, I kind of feel like he must have experienced something embodied it and then been like, yo I gotta teach this, and if you are here, if you're a practitioner and you're here, that is probably the most common thing that I hear about practitioners, is that one of the reasons they do what they do is because they they found gaps in their training, they found gaps in their own healing and then they discovered something fucking epic that just changed their lives and they're like, yo I got to tell everybody and that's exactly what they're doing. And not only are they telling them, but they're also guiding them.
So it doesn't mean we have to be perfect, we don't have to be perfect, it's not actually possible. And all of the ups and downs are part of your genius, it's part of what makes you the genius that you are right? So it's not about being perfect. But if we're not walking our talk, you're going to feel it, your potential clients are going to feel it. That's when imposter syndrome comes up and that's what nobody buys from you.
So how can you better align your day to day to express what is in your heart, what are one or two tangible ways that you can do this, and maybe it's implementing some of my suggestions from today and how you talk about your products and services and how you want to help people, Maybe it's sharing more of your story, but in a way that you know, speaks to what's possible for other people and how you can guide them there or maybe it's continuing to listen to this podcast to get more connected to what's possible for you and how normal it is that you want to help people in this way. You want to help people reconnect to their bodies. You want to help people understand that they have the power to do it.
And that's another way that you can- another energy again that I'll invite for you to add to your content to your communication to your teachings, the focus doesn't have to be on sales and on you and on being an influencer and on, on all this, you know, all this stuff like it just, it needs to be grounded in intention and it needs to be about them.
So we’ll end with that today. Again, if you were a kid of the 90s, I would want to know like did that resonate with you. Like did you watch Ricki Lake? Like I'm just curious like, let's be friends and if you are a holistic practitioner and you are looking to grow your business exponentially within the next year, the Prosperous Purpose Mastermind kicks off in august, we have open enrollment right now through the end of july and so there's still time to join, there's still time to find out more. Hit me up in the DM’s. Check out my link in bio on instagram where you can learn more about the program. This is for certified holistic practitioners who again know how to help people, but they have not been able to sustain Consistent $10k months, that's the minimum of what you need to have a serious foundation for your business to have a viable, make a viable living and feel really, really supported and fulfilled.
And I want to teach you all the ways to blow up your business, I want to teach you sales, I want to teach you how to package your gifts in a way that is like a of no brainer yes to your ideal client, where to find these ideal clients, how to get referrals, how to speak, how to talk about what you do in a way that leads to opportunities, All of these things can be taught and there's a very specific way that holds a practitioner into their business growth and it's not through hustle and it's not through, you know, forcing and focusing on scaling right off the bat. It's in being here now, befriending the present moment, taking a season in your business to to learn what it takes to really amplify your purpose and bring to this third dimensional world a super powerful example of what that can look like, of what living out your purpose truly is. It's not some like floo-floo concept, it can be very practical.
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So I'll end my tangent there. I love you very much if I can do what you can and I'm really just even ending on that if she can do what I can do it, say it. "If she can do it, I can do it. If she can do it, I can do it.” You fucking can, I love you.
Thank you again from the bottom of my heart for joining me for this episode of the Prosperous Practice Podcast to catch all the magic that's being offered here. I want you to subscribe to the show or if you want a weekly dose of wisdom in your email inbox as you evolve your wellness practice. Sign up to receive my letters at rootyourradiance.com.
Like all good things. This podcast creates space for a diverse range of voices to be heard. We share the mic and we work to lift these voices to create a higher standard of health care for the planet and for the future to increase the voice of our community. Please consider sharing this episode with a friend, a colleague, a loved one or on your social media to keep this conversation going.
And thanks to those who make this Prosperous Practice podcast so freakin special. Our wonderful music is by James Wilder and Prosperous Practice is produced by Particulate Media. The ideas and inspiration come from beautiful humans like you that I truly feel so lucky to be in circuit with. Once again, I'm Laura Bautista. Take good care and be well. Until next time. Bye for now!