We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Estelle Harford a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Estelle, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
Risks are not easy to take. They are uncomfortable and are typically outside of what is considered the norm.
My career path has been mostly based upon not being afraid to take on risk, while knowing there will be a greater reward on the other side. There aren’t a lot of people in my field, but this did not stop me.
I decided that in order to follow my dream of helping people through wellness, it was important to be different. I found some methods that helped significantly in peoples journeys to strength, flexibility and less pain. I decided to take on the long journey of becoming an expert in these methods. I am very happy that I saw the benefit early on of learning to be uncomfortable with the unknown and following what I believed to be the correct path.
I realize how fortunate I am that I have the ability to follow my passions in a non traditional career path to be able to help people in wellness and health.
The risks I took were years of accumulated and continued learning. I’m so happy I followed my heart as I now have an extremely rewarding career and I get to meet and help such interesting people.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am a Movement Therapist. I help my clients with specific goals. Some people come to me with a specific pain or limitation and they need help fixing it. I help clients eliminate pain, increase true flexibility, increase range of motion, increase strength and I solve sometimes painful muscular imbalances. I also work on releasing dense scar tissue and fascial restrictions.
My clients range from children to my current oldest client who is 96 years old. I work with professional athletes and people that just want to stand up without pain. Since my work is completely customizable I can cater to each individual and help them.
I’m very happy with the work I do and I love helping others. It’s so rewarding to get messages from clients telling me how much I helped them.
I am the only person in the state of Georgia that offers some of the work that I do, and that makes things interesting!
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
I think I was able to establish my reputation in my market because I truly care about each individual and what they are hoping for in regards to committing to sessions with me. You cannot teach someone to care, you either do or you don’t, I want people to live active, healthy, pain free lives. That can look very different based upon the person in front of you. I always meet my clients where they are in regards to their personal journeys with health, and we go from there.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
Truthfully it’s extremely simple, a lot of my business is based upon word of mouth. I first and foremost LISTEN to my clients. Many of them have tried to seek out help from people in other modalities and one thing I hear them complain about the most is no-one ever listened to what they were saying. I’m a firm believer that you know what your body feels like on a day to day basis. You don’t need someone telling you what you feel it’s much more beneficial for me to listen to what they are experiencing and go from there in order to help them. I also help them live more active lives which is a huge goal for my clients. People just want to feel good and not worry about injury or pain. If you can help with that it can change a lot of lives.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.stellarstrength.com
- Instagram: @stellarstrength