Each month, we select one of our Impact Tribe members to be our “Daring Member of the Month.” This month, I’m highlighting someone who has been courageous in her business, and has shown up in support of others in our community in beautiful and brilliant ways. Today, I am pleased to introduce you to Johanna Alper, one of our longest-standing Impact Tribe members! We appreciate her so much for her wisdom, thoughtfulness, and insight that helps us build our businesses holistically. 

Today, Johanna and I will be discussing:

• Why Highly-Sensitive healers, coaches, and entrepreneurs can excel at marketing in the coming era
• How seeing your business as a Living System and not a machine can enhance your health and prosperity
• Five ways to apply Nature’s energies as described in Chinese Medicine that can help your business thrive

Meet Johanna Alper

Johanna Alper, Holistic Business Coach, assists highly sensitive healers, coaches, and entrepreneurs to attract more clients, prosper and create the impact that this world needs. A speaker, coach, and forthcoming author, Johanna has had a successful Classical Acupuncture practice and teaching business in Boulder, Colorado for over 40 years. She understands that as a healer, sensitivity is your superpower, but marketing and business can be your kryptonite.

Whether speaking, writing or coaching, her mission is to help entrepreneurs and healers implement Nature’s 5 Element Success Principles as described in Chinese Medicine so they can be healthy, amplify their work, and also create successful businesses.

Her forthcoming books on Wellness and Holistic Business Success will be published in 2023.

Q: How did you get started in your business?

After WWII, growing up in a highly radical family, Johanna always knew that she was here to make a difference in the world. She has been a healer and acupuncturist for her entire career, and feels called to help people with the underlying issues they hold that cause illness. After teaching acupuncture and seeing graduates not being able to start their own businesses, she decided she needed to become a coach to help other people with starting their own successful acupuncture businesses. 

This work allows her to help others release the machine-like nature of business so they can create businesses that fill up their own lives, and make it possible for them to show up better for their clients as well. One of the main things she notes is that healers have to rouse their confidence, leadership, and joy, and get over their resentments, in order to truly attract clients and build a successful business. 

Q: Who do you work with, and what’s the biggest challenge you help them overcome? 

Johanna noticed that when healers were starting their businesses, they struggled the most with marketing their businesses. Outside-the-box people who want to be entrepreneurs have not been included in traditional education. Healers tend to be highly sensitive people who have trouble breaking into the marketing world, and they haven’t been trained at using their heart-centered skills to show up and market their businesses. 

Johanna recognizes the amazing assets that highly sensitive healers have to offer their clients, but that they struggle to communicate that in a way that helps them grow their business. In order to show up and market your business as a healer, it’s going to take shedding several layers and habits that don’t end up serving them in business like over-serving and under-paying themselves. 

Q: For anyone struggling with these challenges, how can they resolve some of these things they keep bumping up against over and over again?

Johanna focuses on the five elements of Chinese Acupuncture and how we can use them in creating holistic businesses. 

Fire – Heart, joy, passion, communication, and branding. Johanna notes that it’s important to start with our hearts. If we start with our own joy, love, mission, values, and communicate that to the world, we’re much more likely to be successful compared to starting from any other place. Once that is clear, we can show up coherently and perfectly aligned, and attract people in a powerful way. 

Earth – Showing up in service with our particular niche and clients through systems. Johanna has been there too, seeing so much suffering and feeling the need to show up with service first. While serving is important, it’s not the place to start to create a truly successful, sustainable, aligned business. Once we have our inner motivation and values clear, we need to determine the problems we solve and how we solve them. Then, after all of these things are aligned, is when we can show up with signature programs and systems so we can better help more people.

Metal – Prosperous money flow, planning, and shedding scarcity mindset. Healers who want to help the world carry a lot of shadow – and they may not even realize it. It can be difficult to not revert to patterns of lack and loss of confidence. But when you have a clear system in place, that can help you feel confident and calmer showing up to market your business. This is an ongoing journey for many healers, including Johanna herself. 

Water – Sustainability and work-life balance. This is the part of business that is most unlike the rest of our young, achievement-oriented culture. Taking time to slow down, calm down, and focus on sustainability, is essential for avoiding burnout in the long run. Taking this down time allows us to create a sustainable business and avoid marketing in an adrenaline-focused way that elicits fear and urgency and power. 

Wood – Dynamically growing the garden of our business, moving past hesitations. So many of us can get sucked into such an incredible amount of consumption of learning, and completely disregard the most important thing, which is actually going out and implementing what we know! There has to be a point where we face our fears and implement in an aligned way. 

Johanna has even created a free quiz she describes as “acupuncture for your business without needles,” focused on energy in your business. This makes it easy for you to figure out which energies in your business need a little more support – when they are all aligned and empowered, you’re able to truly show up as your best leader, build traction, build a successful business, and feel genuinely delighted to go to work. She is also offering free calls with any Daring Fempreneur who is wondering whether their business energies are blocked and interested in discovering how they can better support those areas of business. 

Q: Is the main goal to keep these five elements in complete balance all the time? 

Using these energetic principles, Johanna realizes that we each have our own gifts and strengths we bring to certain areas of business. Though it’s not about complete equality across all of the elements, they do all need to be present in order to build a successful, aligned business. 

Johanna also wanted to mention that the change-makers in The Daring Fempreneur community have an incredibly important role to play in today’s world. Through all the uncertainty and transition in the world and working towards a new normal, it’s important that we don’t downplay our roles in the world and the light we bring to dark times. 

Q: What does “daring” mean to you?

Johanna notes that the meaning of being daring has changed for her over time. When she was younger, it was about taking a lot of risks – some of which panned out, and some of which did not. Now, she’s learning about applying daringness a little more skillfully with loving-kindness, joy, compassion, and peace. This is the energy she now brings to moving past her comfort zone into the unknown. 

Q: As coaches, healers, and entrepreneurs, how can we be successful at marketing in the coming era? 

Johanna wants everyone to realize that it’s not embarrassing to be so heart-led and heart-centered. That is a gift and superpower we bring to the world, and it does not mean we are any less qualified to be in business than others – it’s actually going to be the secret to success in the 21st century. 

Q: How can seeing your business not as a machine, but rather as a living thing, enhance your own health and prosperity as an entrepreneur? 

Understanding the underlying energy of ourselves and how we are in our businesses, and creating harmony in that space, can allow us to have a lot of joy and vitality to show up for our businesses and for ourselves. Our businesses are so dependent on our energy, so it’s important that we focus on our own alignment and support the various energies that impact our lives and businesses. 

Q: What are you most excited about in your business right now?

Through the past couple years, Johanna has turned more inwards and focused on writing her forthcoming books. Now, moving out of that stage, she is working on creating and launching coaching programs designed to help healers build successful practices. She is also working on a program designed for coaches to train them on the five elements of energy so they can continue offering that to the world. 

You can learn more about her work and upcoming programs on her website here.

If you want to join Johanna and other amazing members in the Impact Tribe, we would love to welcome you! Through the power of coaching, courses and community, the Impact Tribe gives you the right steps, in the right order, to confidently build a stand out brand and market it with ease. Learn more and join us today at this link.