I Started a Hypnotherapy Business (Nobody Warned Me About the Admin)

Nobody tells you that starting a hypnotherapy business means becoming, almost overnight, a website designer, a copywriter, a bookkeeper, a social media manager, a photographer (badly, very badly), and also somewhere in there, an actual hypnotherapist.

I went in knowing I was good with people. I genuinely am. I find humans fascinating, all of them, their stories, their quirks, the things they carry around. That bit I felt ready for. What I was not even slightly prepared for was everything else.

The thing is, I also have a full time job. Monday to Friday, nine to five (ish). So all of this, the website, the admin, the social media staring, the figuring out what I'm actually doing, happens in the gaps. Evenings. Weekends. The odd Sunday morning when I'd quite like to be doing literally anything else. I am also, for the record, attempting to maintain a social life, keep fit, and look after my rescue cat Freya, who has very strong opinions about my laptop and sits on it whenever she feels I've been working long enough. She's not wrong, to be fair.

The learning curve has been, let's say, alarming. I've had to figure out how to build a website (twice, because the first one we don't talk about), write about myself in the third person without wanting to slide off my chair, and set up an Instagram account and then stare at it blankly for a week. I have sat at my desk at 11pm on a Tuesday researching a client's issue so I can actually help them properly, because that matters to me more than sleep, apparently.

And the admin. Nobody warned me about the admin.

But every single thing I've had to learn has made me more capable than I was the week before. There's something genuinely satisfying about doing something you've never done, doing it appallingly, and then doing it slightly less appallingly next time. It's a bit like hypnotherapy itself, actually. Nothing changes overnight. You just keep going, and quietly, something shifts.

I stumbled into hypnotherapy by accident about twenty odd years ago, an Alan Carr stop smoking class, of all things. I didn't even realise it was hypnotherapy until it was over and I'd already stopped. I've had brilliant therapists and teachers since then, and I wanted to give something back. To sit with someone who's really struggling and actually help. That's still the whole point of all of this.

The business chaos is just the road I'm on to get there. Freya approves (when she's not asleep on my keyboard).