We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christophe Leroy a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Christophe, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory of how you established your own practice.
A long, gradual process ensued toward starting a healing and life coaching business. I went through various phases before formally incorporating in 2010. At first, I offered 1:1 healing sessions on the side, during my spare time (usually on weekends), and did it for free or bartered, following the guidelines established in our training program to acquire experience and a certain amount of hours of practice before offering our services for a fee. It wasn’t until 2009 –two years later– that I started charging for my sessions. In the Fall of 2009, I set up my practice, which meant that I rented a healing space (2 days a week) and announced through flyers and email communications that I was “open for business”. It took another year before I formally set up a (single-member) LLC, and opened a business checking account.
Three other milestones were significant in my journey to fully accepting and “owning” my practice as a business: designing and printing business cards that indicated that I was a “shamanic energy healer” (circa 2011), launching my website (2015) and separating my personal from my business accounting, including using a dedicated credit card for my business expenses.
My advice to young professionals considering starting their practice is: to be patient and gentle with yourself; you will go as fast as your inner journey and paradigm shifts allow you to go. Although it is your journey and your practice, you need not walk the path alone: find a mentor, and create a “panel” of trusted advisors and friends who can share in your doubts, trials, and successes. If you can afford one, invest in a coach (and a therapist). Some the greatest breakthroughs I made were thanks to a 9-month coaching program I invested in to prioritize moving from treating my craft as a practice to treating it as a business.
And finally, know what the purpose of your endeavor is, so that you can set realistic goals and expectations around the financials associated with your business. As an example, if you practice healing out of a passion to help others and make a difference in people’s lives, then you will likely want to offer your services yourself; you are the product and your revenue ceiling will be a function of time devoted to seeing clients and the prices you charge. If, on the other hand, you are inspired by a mission to teach and disseminate healing techniques, then you may choose to write, create content, create teaching materials, etc. Your technique or method is the product and your revenue is a function of how you choose to scale, including training others, partnering with other organizations to market, etc.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Christophe. I founded Sacred Hoop Healing Ways in 2009 to empower individuals to heal painful experiences, address challenging situations in their lives, and take ownership of how they view themselves. I built my practice into a business providing life coaching and energy healing services, retreats, and deep-immersion journeys. I have worked with over 1,300 clients over fifteen years in Mexico, North America, and South America.
I see myself as a bridge between cultures, belief systems, and lifestyles. Most of my clients have corporate jobs, live in cities, and have a 9 am-5 pm professional rhythm. The techniques I use and the retreat experiences I offer come from shamanic, earth-based healing traditions from the Andes of Peru, the mountains around Mexico City, and various other indigenous traditions throughout the hemisphere.
Shamanism is the practice of bringing balance back to body, mind, and soul in concert with the natural forces of nature, whether through medicinal plants, sweat lodges, sand paintings, fire ceremonies, or energy body realignment with crystals or stones. There are many techniques to bring balance and harmony back to the mental, emotional, and physical bodies, which vary from one tradition to another. However, beyond the differing forms, all traditions that work with the forces of Nature have something in common: they invite us to tap into the underlying, invisible energy flows, and make subtle shifts at the deeper level as a way to bring balance back to the more tangible, “visible” aspects of our reality.
I am deeply grateful to have been able to immerse myself into a tradition, culture, and worldview that was foreign to me, yet where I felt at home: the ancestral healing traditions bequeathed to us from the Quechua-speaking High Andes culture of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. I am proud to have been able to share what I learned with others and to have made a difference in the lives of many people.
I have worked with my altar of stones for fifteen years and know they will be with me for many years yet.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
In 2019, I decided to focus more on creating and leading deep-immersion trips to Peru. I wanted to move away from offering weekend-long retreats and instead offer 8-to-10-day journeys to Peru as an opportunity to guide participants through deeper personal work and potentially more significant personal growth experiences. I ran a 5-day pilot in Utah in 2019 and subsequently designed two full-fledged journeys to Peru, each lasting 9 days (one in English, the other in Spanish). I scheduled the first one for June 2020, and the second one for August 2020…
And then in March 2020, the world came to an abrupt standstill as we all went into lockdowns. I watched my business planning for the year and indeed, my entire strategy, evaporate as the stay-at-home orders continued endlessly. Yet if anything, the need for healing, community, and spiritual anchoring grew tremendously. Within a few weeks I was offering one-on-one sessions online, and began running group Zoom calls to hold space and enable people to process what they were experiencing. I later experimented with online workshops, shamanic healing training, and even a full retreat online.
Although I decided not to pursue a fully online business, I still give most of my sessions online to this day. The pivot to working online expanded my reach and my ability to work with clients across geographies and time zones, and is a core feature of my business today.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
In a few words: integrity, professionalism, and passion. 95% of new clients are referrals. Also, having a core product or service –delivered capably and effectively– is the foundation of your reputation. Although I offered retreats and journeys to Peru, and also co-led sweat lodges in Mexico (“temazcal”), the majority of my clients knew me and formed their impression about me based on one-on-one healing sessions. The majority of those who came to a retreat, journey, or other type of event or ceremony had already had a session with me.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sacredhoophealing/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sacred-hoop-healing-ways
- Other: https://podcastle.ai/show/sh-t-i-just-quit-my-job-1C3A/sh-t-i-became-an-energy-healer-3107
Image Credits
Alfredo Aztin