BIG YEAR ENERGY!

By Robyn McAlpine

I want this year to be the best year of your career. The one where you step into your confidence and authority in the treatment room to deliver exceptional results for your clients.

But if you want it to be better, where do you start? It’s one thing to set some goals, but how do we make sure we are taking the right steps, in the right direction, to make sure we are on the right track?

I would often start my years with big ideas and big intentions, wanting to be the best version of myself as a skin therapist. But one of the things I struggled with was knowing what to work on that would actually move the needle. Where could I put my energy and focus to really make shifts towards achievement?

I was hungry for more, but it felt like a bit of a jumble.

I started to realise that being good at skin was only one part to the puzzle. In fact, knowing and understanding skin really is only about 20% of our role as skin therapist. if just the skin stuff was enough, we’d all be living our best skin therapist lives, Killing it in the treatment room.

There are a gazillion skin courses out there, access to Knowledge isn’t the problem. It’s the confidence, the application, the implementation, and everything else that makes us well rounded skin therapists.

But what makes up the other 80%?

My role as a skin therapist mentor is to help you become the best skin therapist you can be. That means challenging you to look at other areas to work on that will raise your bar in all things skin.

This is why I created the six pillars to skin therapist success.

I taught them recently in the Skinside Out Squad as we kicked off our year. We broke them down into really tangible pieces, so we could understand the importance of each of them and why when we are confident in these areas, we will be a skin therapist force to be reckoned with!

My six pillars for skin therapist success are:

1: Confidence/Customer Connection

This pillar focuses on your consultation skills. It’s about how you talk about skin with your clients, your adaptability to each individual and natural flow to your conversations. This pillar is looking at your awareness, how you are coming into each interaction with confidence and intention.

2: Knowledge and Understanding

I suspect this pillar is our strongest. Because this is where a lot of our energy goes when it comes to learning about skin. And for most of us reading this, we’re probably the type of people who have a high expectation of ourselves when it comes to understanding skin.

My question is, do we truly understand skin, or are we still faking it until we make it?

It can be easy to fall into the trap of sitting really comfortable here, not challenging ourselves, knowing just enough to get by but not really enough to be the best, but is that what you really want? Is this the year you shake it off and shake it up and enrol in a skin course?

3: Hands on Skills

This pillar might seem a bit obvious considering this is where we spend most of our working time. In the room, hands on clients, delivering the treatments. Would you believe me if I said there is always room for growth? Yes, we are a very hands on, practical bunch of people here. It’s what really draws us to this industry. But what if I could challenge you to be even better? To go a step further and master your craft just a little bit more?

4: Progress Trackers

This is the one that makes us throw up in our mouth a little bit. The one we want to ignore because it doesn’t feel good to talk about the numbers. We seem to shy away from knowing our rebooking rates, our client average spend and our retail rates. But knowing your numbers is how you track all the feel-good stuff in our industry.

The warm fuzzies make us THINK we are good at our job. The numbers let us KNOW we are good at our job!

The numbers are just a measurement tool that help us track our progress. The numbers are just feedback that helps us to know our strengths. It might feel quite daunting to take a peek, but once you know where you are at, you can make some changes to raise your bar.

5: Balance & Wellbeing

Our industry is notorious for ‘do as I say, not as I do’. We can be very misaligned to our values in clinic when we tell our clients not to over exfoliate… then go and layer a bunch of peels on our face, “just to see what will happen’ This pillar is all about finding balance.

We give and give and give in our industry and often times we drain our cup bone dry before we are exhausted and burnt out and desperate to fill it back up.

NOT ANYMORE!!!! Balance is one of the biggest signs of success. We are in this for the long haul.

Not to give until burnt out and quit. You will be an incredibly successful skin therapist if you can develop that happy balance of nurturing your clients and nurturing yourself.

6: Leadership & Contribution

Pillar number 6 is all about how we are showing up, what impact we are having with our teams and in our workplace. Our attitude here has such a big impact on those around us. We are powerful and our outlook and mindset can be an incredible tool in having a successful career. Our contribution to our workplace and colleagues is so impactful.

You can be impactful for great, or impactful for not so great. We get to choose. And don’t underestimate the power you can have on a less than positive workplace. If your boss struggles to show great leadership and contribution, you can still show up and lead your team and colleagues just with your attitude, )even if only until you seek out a new boss and leader).

If you want to dive deeper into setting some clear goals and outcomes for your year ahead, this is one of the planning processes I take therapists through in the Skinside Out Squad. The Squad is a global mentorship for skin therapist where

I help you step into your confidence and create skin saving success.

There’s an entire call on this planning process plus the tools to break it down, step by step and set yourself up for a cracker of a year! I hope to see you there!

@expert_skin_therapist robyn@skintifix.com www.skintifix.com