Building a Sustainable Business That Fits You, with Rebecca Rae-Hodgson

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (00:00)
being able to accept and validate and that it is really difficult and there are changes that need to be made, but it’s not their fault, I think is sometimes one of the big

Craig Minter (00:00)
Yep.

Yeah. Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (00:10)
realisations,

it’s they’re struggling because it is difficult, not because they’re lazy, not because they’re weak, not because they’re whatever thing they’ve been told they are. their brain and or their body works differently and they need extra support and our systems aren’t set up for it. And it’s genuinely more difficult to be in a brain and body that don’t function in ways that might be expected.

Craig Minter (00:15)
Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hello everybody and welcome to the Healthy Business Lab podcast where we talk to amazing allied health business owners to get their nuggets of wisdom, their experiences and their expertise. And today I’m super excited to have Rebecca Rae-Hodgson from Chronic Resilience OT as our guest today. Rebecca, welcome to the call.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (01:12)
Thanks for having me.

Craig Minter (01:13)
It’s super exciting. And again, I like to chat with our guests before we jump on and we had a chat a little while ago. I know that you’re going to share some very interesting insights around business pivots and the like, but first I’d love for you to just to give a bit of a background about yourself and your expertise.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (01:30)
Sure, so I’m an occupational therapist. I’m coming up six years as an OT now. I’ve had a few different jobs. trained in Australia and I’m back living in my home country of New Zealand now. I was working for other people and couldn’t get it to fit my support needs. The accommodations that I need found out in that time that I’m neurodivergent.

I’ve been chronically ill for a very long time. And so I’ve always needed some flexibility in how I work. And I just wasn’t getting that from the employed workspace. And so decided to branch out on my own and started Chronic Resilience. It’s been such a wonderful journey over. I keep trying to think how long I’ve been going. I think it’s three and a half years, but time is an abstract concept. So who knows?

Craig Minter (02:13)
Time, yes, it

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (02:16)
Yeah, so I started seeing a couple of clients alongside an employed part-time job and as my private stuff built momentum, I left the part-time job because I didn’t have the capacity to do both and went fully out on my own so I make resources.

I was seeing clients supporting neurodivergent and chronically ill adults, mostly telehealth because I live really in New Zealand. So I was able to see people from all over New Zealand and Australia. And what we’ll talk about more today is over the last six months or so, I was realising I was quite deep in another autistic burnout

and needing to shift something in my practice. So I made the decision that at the end of last year, I wrapped up with my one-on-one client work and made the shift into offering more supervision, mentoring, supporting other health professionals in that space. So yeah, that’s where I’m at now in a very short nutshell of what’s been a very interesting journey.

Craig Minter (03:11)
Yeah, that’s, a

Yeah. And we’ll definitely unpack a little bit more of that. But going back to the initial idea of leveraging the skills as an OT, you look as though you’ve done a nice redesign reflection on what you need, what your capacity is.

So I’d love for you to share your process for going through that. The awareness and how you went around that designing that out for yourself.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (03:38)
Yeah, it’s kind of like OT-ing myself, right? Looking at what my capacity is and what my needs are and what I can still offer.

Craig Minter (03:42)
Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (03:46)
Because one of my core values is making a difference. Whatever I do, I want to be able to make a difference out there in the world. And I was finding the direct client work was so rewarding and so amazing. And I was having an impact on those people, but I was really pushing myself to see six people a week, which is too many for me. It just wasn’t sustainable.

So I was kind of thinking about other things that I could do. I kind of hit this difficult place where I needed to reduce the client work to be able to bring something else in, but I didn’t have the financial stability to reduce the client work. And then I got approved for the disability pension here and that gave me just enough.

Enough of a background, impacted by my income. It gave me enough of a stable baseline coming in every week that I finally felt that I was able to make some really big changes. And part of that involved like not having any income for about three months, which was really freaky. ⁓

Craig Minter (04:41)
Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (04:42)
But it was really looking at what I was doing last year. I did a bunch of conferences. I’ve been doing a bunch of training over the last couple of years and really realising that

the passion and what I love is working with other health professionals. If I can only see realistically two to four people a week is actually my capacity. If those two to four people are health professionals, I then have an exponential impact in this ripple effect of being able to influence them and all of their caseloads. So as opposed to me seeing two to four individuals a week and having a big impact on them, of course, but

Craig Minter (05:15)
Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (05:16)
the thinking behind it was, okay, I can make a difference in this other way by focusing on supervision, mentoring and training, to really have an impact on other health professionals, upskilling and supporting them, so that they can continue to do their best work, which felt like the best use of me, the best use of my time, energy and capacity.

In terms of trying to figure out what my capacity is, it’s ongoing. It’s very much an ongoing balance because

there’s a bunch of things that I want to do and I get excited and I want to do all of them at once and I just can’t. So this year I decided to not do any conferences unless either I was being paid or that I at least didn’t have to pay to attend, which ⁓ a lot of the OT conferences, I’m not sure in other allied health, but even if you’re presenting, you still pay full price to go and to be there

Craig Minter (05:46)
you

the expense part.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (06:05)
it’s not something I can afford to do anymore. I’ve also been working on getting some on-demand trainings up. So there’s less of me that’s needed live. So it’s an ongoing movable feast of what my business looks like. I’m continually tweaking along as I’ve been doing for the past three and a half years, but this last shift has been quite dramatic in that

Craig Minter (06:17)
Yeah? Yeah!

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (06:27)
I wound up with all my clients at the end of last year, did some lovely closing sessions. It was so beautiful. And then almost relaunched. It wasn’t really a relaunch, but with this new focus that hopefully is going to be more sustainable for me so that I can keep doing the creative projects and coming on podcasts, doing conferences and all those other things that really matter to me as well.

Craig Minter (06:50)
Yeah. And I love the use of the word sustainability there, intertwined with the capacity. And I think the interesting part you pick up on the financial side of things and that’s obviously a bunch of our background. I think that’s a very interesting notion. What I wrote down was getting confidence in your financial stability,

in that whole decision-making process. Had a fair comment of working through the process as to what worked for you. And the fact that you’ve actually done that, I think is brilliant. A lot of people don’t tend to do that in some ways. It’s like, I just need to do this, it sounds like that we all a part of the holistic approach, you took for the pivot that you undertook.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (07:27)
Yeah, and it was also necessity. for me to be able to keep doing any work, I needed to drastically look at what I was doing and look at my income. And I do all my own. I don’t have an accountant, I do all my own numbers. I love spreadsheets. But I don’t work it out to the point of how many people I need to see a week or any of that. It’s more trying to…

If I can charge a little bit more for each individual appointment, which is what I’ve done, and if I can do more trainings as well that ideally will pay more as a chunk as opposed to the one-on-one stuff.

Craig Minter (07:58)
Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (08:00)
We live really low cost. I do have the support of a partner as well. There is a lot of privilege in the decision that I was able to make. I know there’s a lot of people out there who can’t make the same decisions because they have to keep working full time. A lot of people, there’s just not another option financially. So I do acknowledge the privilege of the position that I’m in that I was able to take three months off of any income besides the disability pension.

Craig Minter (08:23)
Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (08:25)
Now I’ve been having some health issues in the start of the year so I haven’t been able to do as much as I would have liked. So things are slow and things are still building and I’m still working on getting things running in the way that I want to. So yeah, the finances is a tricky piece.

Craig Minter (08:39)
Yep, getting the traction going, yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (08:43)
If you looked at our income as a whole, we are below the poverty line, but we also have really low living costs in the way that we’ve chosen to live, alternatively, if you want to call it that, you know, living in tiny house and on some land. There’s privilege there. And then there was some necessary decisions that I had to make

Craig Minter (08:54)
Yep. Yeah.

Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (09:02)
so that I could continue doing any work I needed to make shifts as well.

Craig Minter (09:05)
Yeah.

Thank you for sharing that. I think it is something that often business owners don’t talk about much or they don’t share, that everybody has their own financial story and interesting avenues to take. And I think that’s from that notion of being, you’re able to articulate very clearly of where it sits and the why and balancing it that with your time, the capacity, the impact that you want to have and just bringing that into that nice holistic approach. So.

I commend you for that because you get a lot of people use it. The financial economy is a bit of an afterthought, but I do want to dig into some of those, the experiments that you sort of touched upon and the evolving piece that is, and you touch upon the on-demand work that obviously that can help with your capacity and the like. Love to hear some of these experiments around

the transition and you move into the supervisory work and the on demand.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (09:55)
Yeah, well, definitely the on-demand training is a current experiment. I’ve been wanting to get some stuff up for a year and just didn’t have the capacity to do it. I got someone to help me do a website revamp at the same time.

And so I’ve got one course up there live now. It’s a values exploration training that I ran last year. I do three main topics when I train. I talk about values, sensory processing, and neurodiversity affirming practice. Those are my three education pillars for wonder of a better word. But there’s so much that goes into

getting an on-demand course up and I was not prepared for the level of detail that I needed to do and to get the transcripts and try and have it be accessible and make sure the captions are right and all of that. The on-demand courses is very much an experiment. I don’t know how it’s going to go. I hope it’s good because as you say, I need sources of income that don’t involve my direct time

once they’re set up. An example of that that has been working quite well, so I have a bunch of resources, graphics, downloadable PDFs, and that’s been right from the beginning I started doing those.

And that’s been a interesting little sideline that ticks away. It’s not a huge source of income overall in my business, but it’s kind of enough. It actually pays for my website hosting and all of that. And those things that might have a big initial time element that you don’t get any gain from directly, but then

they just sit there and do their thing. And that’s my hope with the on-demand stuff. I’ve got ideas where I want a mix of a hybrid of on-demand with some live applying the learning sessions where

Craig Minter (11:21)
Yeah, tick away.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (11:31)
instead of using my live time to teach, people can watch the recordings and then we have a live session to discuss, unpack and ask questions. Because when I deliver a training, there’s often so much that I want to put over that people are too overwhelmed or they need processing time to know what their questions are or they need to go apply something and then come back. So one of the things I’d like to do is

that hybrid on demand where there’s some recorded and some live, but again, it comes back to capacity. And at the moment, I don’t have the capacity to set that stuff up and market it. I don’t have another person. I did just pay somebody to help me upgrade my website and get this first on demand course up because it was the only way it was going to happen. But I do all my own social media, all my own emails. I don’t have an admin person. I don’t have a social media person.

Craig Minter (11:58)
Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (12:17)
So it’s really tricky to balance. I’ve gone off the experiments track.

Craig Minter (12:22)
For me, this is you’re experimenting with the balance with the hybrid nature of this as well as any practice owner knows big, small or in between the admin component of that always has to be factored into the equation. Hearing again, you’re sharing very clearly. It’s like, is your thought process that are going in behind that? And that’s

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (12:25)
Yes.

Mm.

Craig Minter (12:43)
extremely valuable.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (12:44)
often my desire to do something is more than my capacity. And so it’s trying to be realistic when I do. I’ve started just this year doing quarterly planning.

to try and get a bit more momentum going and have it be less, I’ll do that when I can. And it’s been helpful so far. I’ve got one on-demand course up, which I didn’t have last year. it’s just to have a bit more structure. But when I’m thinking about the different goals that I have,

Craig Minter (13:01)
Yep. Yeah.

Nice. Yeah. Progress. Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (13:12)
and try to only have like three to five. And then I think about all the other things I want to do, but actually three to five is almost too many sometimes. And so bringing it down to trying to be realistic. And sometimes that’s incredibly difficult to be. And then capacity fluctuates also. So maybe things that I planned in one week don’t happen, but I do planning with Post-its so I can move the post.

Craig Minter (13:21)
Yeah, okay.

Yep. Yep.

Yeah, cool. It’s kind of like having a virtual K-Man board up in front of you, you just have it. Yeah, I’ve got a version of that over my whiteboard over here in some ways. So I totally get, again, having a visual of it, I find super, super effective.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (13:38)
in different ways.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I’ve realised I need a physical visual as well that I can touch. I don’t visualise things, I’m aphantagic. And so I find that I need something that’s really tangible that I can actually move things around on. So even digital isn’t so good for me. And there’s so many amazing digital tools out there, but I’ve found I’ve needed to go right back to… ⁓

Craig Minter (13:54)
Yep.

Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

Yep. Yeah.

Have the tactile. Yeah. Nice.

Love it. Yes. That’s brilliant. Color coded stickies are brilliant. Again, experimenting with finding what’s working for you. And to go, how can I get the outcomes that I’m after? As you were talking, even the idea of having three to five

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (14:13)
right back to colour-coded stickies, you know?

Craig Minter (14:29)
things in mind, but then other things popping up. It did remind me of a previous guest that we had, Alexandra Sim, and talked about that where I changed my process where I used to call things like that. I’ll throw them in the parking lot. But Alexandra said, I call it more like the toy box. Hey, I’ll put in a toy box and you know, therefore it’s more playful. It’s fun. I’m like such a great idea. And I know that I now get a similar idea. Yes, I’ve got my

three to five, I’ve got four impact filters sitting over there. They’re the main ones, anything outside of that. I’ve got a physical little box over there that you put things in and it’s kind of that idea that some of the toys, if they sit at the bottom, well, they have to end up going to charity or whatever it is at some point in time. But if I open up the toy box and yeah, I want to play with that when I’m ready for the next

round of goals to be updated or whatever it is. I’ve found it a very interesting experiment that I’ve done myself in managing those sorts of things.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (15:22)
Because it can be so hard. The easiest way to explain it would be that the ADHD part of my brain wants the novelty and wants all the new projects. And then the autistic, maybe more chronic illness part has less capacity.

Craig Minter (15:37)
Yeah, that’s just way too overwhelming over here. It’s a constant internal conversations that go on in a neurodivergent brain. Being a neurodivergent family, I totally understand where you’re coming from in that light.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (15:50)
Yeah. And like the

little things that all take lots of energy, like answering an email and having to switch tasks between different emails because they’re about different topics. And actually the mental load of that, that takes way longer for me than it might for somebody else. And this is what I try and do on my Facebook page and in blog, not that I’ve written a blog for a while, but

to try and make some of the invisible stuff more visible and the process that I go through and that, yes, you might see me presenting at a conference, but the cost of that

Craig Minter (16:17)
Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (16:24)
or the preparation that goes into that and trying to make those things more visible. And I’ve written a couple of blogs specifically about attending conferences because they are really challenging things to do even though I love them. But it’s like people might see me and it might look like I’m doing lots of cool stuff but they don’t see the number of hours that I’m in bed in the dark because I can’t handle any stimulation, right? So it’s trying to be

Craig Minter (16:35)
Yeah.

Yeah. Cut. Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (16:50)
really authentic and sharing what’s useful as well. That’s what I do in all of my work with clients as well, with supervisees. It’s what bits of the lived experience are useful to share. When I was doing closure sessions with my clients last year, that was some of the feedback. It wasn’t about any of the tools I’d introduced or any of the goals we’d made progress on. It was on them being able to be themselves, knowing that they wouldn’t be judged.

That they could share stuff with me that I understood, even if my experience wasn’t exactly the same, there was enough similarities that we were coming from a similar place and the usefulness of that shared lived experience. And so that’s what I also bring into supervision. The way that I work

Craig Minter (17:16)
you

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (17:32)
is not gonna be that different. The focus is different, but the way that I work with people isn’t because so often, because I’m largely working with chronically ill and or neurodivergent largely sole traders also, because a lot of us struggle to be employed ⁓ for lots of different reasons. And so being able to provide that lived experience hat, the supervisor hat, as well as the OT hat.

Craig Minter (17:44)
Yep. Yeah. Yeah, 100 %

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (17:54)
I know I discuss in my own supervision is keeping me in the work and keeping me well. It’s often less about clinical questions. And so that’s really what I hope to offer

Craig Minter (18:01)
Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (18:04)
in being able to offer the support to other health professionals as a space they can be them. They don’t have to pretend that everything’s okay. They can be really open and honest and authentic and know that they’re gonna be supported and not judged for it. And that’s really important to me that I can provide that space. Because not all supervision’s equal. Some people have had really terrible experiences with supervision, especially if there’s maybe a neurotype mismatch.

Craig Minter (18:27)
Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (18:29)
The trauma of being in a world where your brain works differently and all of this stuff and trying to work in with the systems that people are trying to manage. If I can provide an hour, a month or every eight weeks or however often people are seeing me where they can bring whatever they need to bring, that’s really what I’m aiming to do in what I’m offering.

Craig Minter (18:48)
Yeah.

I love that. And again, I think you’ve done an amazing job at making the invisible visible and sharing your experience that I think a lot of the listeners will resonate to some level on and picking out parking going, yes, I totally, I feel heard with what you’ve shared. So again, a lot of cool little things in there that people can leverage, use, implement, take ideas from in their own

practices and personal management, I think in running their business is we often don’t look after ourselves as much as we should in running our businesses. To sort of round off the call, I’d love to, I always love to ask a question around the transformations that we’ve seen with the work we do, whether that’s,

some of our clients or ourselves or the wider impact of some of the things that we see evolve off the back of our work. I’d love for you to share one or two things that sort of stick out of mind for you.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (19:40)
Yeah, I guess one of the biggest ones is my own transformation through learning that I was neurodivergent, basically saying no to a bunch of stuff that wasn’t serving me, setting up in the way that I needed to and that continues to evolve as I continue to figure out what that actually looks like,

Being more me and unapologetically me and more authentic. I think that was my word of the year last year was authenticity. And just being able to show up as me, as a health professional also, and to still be me, not

a persona, not somebody I was pretending to be. And I think that’s been a really important transformation is being okay most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time being okay with being authentic and being me and being out there as me. So that’s definitely one. I’m trying to think about clients while also maintaining confidentiality. So ⁓

Craig Minter (20:32)
Yeah, yeah, 100%.

That’s more than enough for you to talk about the outcome. We don’t need to give specifics of people Yeah, 100%.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (20:38)
Yeah, like a general,

There’s been some people I’ve worked with who have changed jobs, because we were trying to accommodate and it just wasn’t enough. There were too many systemic issues. And

we need to look at a different way of working. So there’s been a few people in that. I’ve worked with some OT students who were trying to get through their programs. You know, again, being a disabled person trying to do OT is actually a really challenging thing. You’d think the programs would be more accommodating, but there’s a lot of barriers for disabled students in that space.

Craig Minter (20:56)
Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (21:08)
One student reach out to me recently, letting me know that she had graduated. And it was just such a wonderful feeling to know that she had managed to get through. And now trying to find a job is the next thing that she needs some support with. Because that’s also difficult.

Craig Minter (21:12)
⁓

It’s been a phase of that, but that’s…

That’s awesome. I’m coming with student monies, obviously there’s so much. Cause you’ve got goosebumps, that’s why I have to dig on that one a little bit more because those are exactly the thing of being able to, especially people early in their careers and the like, it always feels like a very poignant time if you’re able to help people get from that challenge of wherever they’re at to

being able to do it the way that they want to do. So we’re probably wishing that we’d had somebody like that back in the day to help us. So I can totally appreciate why that would be front of mind in this idea.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (21:58)
Yeah, the general transformation story would be about people understanding themselves better and being able to accept and validate that it is really difficult and there are changes that need to be made, but it’s not their fault, I think is sometimes one of the big

Craig Minter (22:03)
Yeah. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (22:13)
realisations,

it’s they’re struggling because it is difficult, not because they’re lazy, not because they’re weak, not because they’re whatever thing they’ve been told they are. It’s their brain and or their body works differently and they need extra support and our systems aren’t set up for it. And it’s genuinely more difficult to be in a brain and body that don’t function in ways that might be expected.

Craig Minter (22:17)
Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (22:36)
So I think that’s sometimes the biggest transformation that happens is that self-understanding and whether or not it’s full acceptance, because there’s some things that’s really hard to accept, but being kinder, more self-compassion, more skill in understanding and being able to advocate

Craig Minter (22:36)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (22:54)
for yourself. I think that’s really what I’m looking to change. It’s not necessarily a measurable outcome. It’s often really difficult to measure those kinds of outcomes.

Craig Minter (23:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, it’s

fairly subjective because the individual’s perceptions of from where to where, but I think what you’re highlighting the word that stuck in my mind is just that awareness piece of that. Because if people don’t have the awareness in the first place, then you can’t go on the process to be able to get that comfort

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (23:15)
Mm.

Craig Minter (23:26)
Yeah, lots of cool little things. You’ve got my brain ticking over and I know the listeners will have got a bunch of value from. And as you were talking about some of the blogs you’ve done and some of the socials that you do when you’ve got capacity to do that. I’d love for people to be able to reach out and connect with you to follow along and get more of your valuable insights. Where’s the best place for people to find and connect with you?

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (23:50)
So if you want to follow along what I’m doing, I’m on Facebook as The Chronically Resilient OT. I’m also on LinkedIn with my full name, Rebecca Rae-Hodgson. If you want to contact me directly, email is best. My email address is on my website and there’s a contact form there as well. So that’s www.chronicresilienceot.com. And email preferred.

I’ve taken my phone number off everything because I don’t want people to call me. I’ve realised that that was one rule that I questioned for myself and I started out having my phone number up and I decided that I don’t want to anymore and I don’t have to. So my phone number came off everything.

Craig Minter (24:19)
Yes.

Yeah, I

100 % love that because that’s what people always say to me. And my autistic brain loves to have a call booked in by somebody. I don’t like to be interrupted. I can schedule my days in my week. So I hear you loud and clear. And so yes, we’ll share all those links in our show notes as well.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (24:38)
Yes.

Craig Minter (24:47)
Yeah, love for people to reach out to you Rebecca because what you’re doing is amazing and I really appreciate the share today.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (24:54)
Thanks so much for having me. I always love talking about what I do.

Craig Minter (24:59)
Yeah. So good. So that’s a wrap for the Healthy Business Lab podcast. This amazing episode with Rebecca. Make sure you like, subscribe, do all those things. can hear so many more amazing stories in there and hear from the guests that we have on here. So over and out from us. Talk next time.

Rebecca Rae-Hodgson (she/her) (25:16)
Bye.