A few years ago, I took a business class with the marvelous Susannah Conway. Susannah was a pioneer in creating online courses fifteen years ago, and she still has a thriving business teaching courses about journaling, tarot, and working with your inner child. It is rare to be successful in her line of work for as long as she has, and her business course offers a valuable behind the scenes tour of how she makes it work. Susannah’s business course changed my life.

Until I took The Inside Story, I thought building a successful astrology practice was about following a bunch of rules. I don’t mean tax rules and legal rules. Those aren't negotiable. I mean rules about how things "should be done," rules about how I should live. I thought a lot about effectiveness. I treated my astrology practice like a mountain, and I thought it was my job to climb that mountain as quickly as possible. Through Susannah’s course, I realized that building a successful practice isn’t just about fast growth and hitting financial milestones. I’m not trying to make a lot of money fast and retire. I’m building a practice that I’m meant to live in, so I should be thinking about building a life.

Now, instead of trying to figure out what I’m “supposed to do,” I ask myself how I work best and how I want to share my time and expertise with people. Then I ask about the most effective way to create what I want to build. I’m still thinking about effectiveness. I want my practice to succeed, but I’m no longer preoccupied with the destination. I’m working to build something sustainable—an astrology practice that nourishes me and my clients over the long-term.

Behind the Scenes: The Astrology Practice I Love

Since I took Susannah’s course, I’ve had a lot of time to experiment and figure out how I work best. I like to have the flexibility to follow my curiosity. I get bored when I have to do the same thing every single day. Knowing this, I prioritize projects that give me the opportunity to explore things I'm interested in. Curiosity doesn’t work on a schedule, so I need a certain amount of flexibility in how I work.

Before I was a mom, I was particular about building a lot of unscheduled time into my day. Flexibility was the default. I thought of time as a river. Time-based commitments were rocks I flowed around. These days, my husband and I work from home and divide care of our one year-old, which means that the flexibility I love is mostly used to flow around her (and her love-hate relationship with naps.)

We live in a world that rewards predictability and keeping to a regular schedule. When I first identified flexibility as a legitimate need (and not just procrastination), I felt bad about it. Doesn’t being a grownup mean enjoying scheduling your day in 15 minute increments? But I’ve had enough time working the way that I love to know that my ability to be flexible is a strength. The part of me that resists a fixed routine is the part of me that is able to improvise with my clients. I am able to show up for my clients wherever they are at the moment without having to create scripts for my readings in advance.

Part of building a practice I love has been honest about what parts of my practice genuinely require consistency and which can allow me to follow my curiosity. Search engines and social platforms reward people who publish on a regular schedule, so I create a lot of lead time in my publishing schedule. I make frequent use of tools that allow me to schedule posts in advance, so I can show up on a regular schedule without having to work in a regular and predictable way. Behind the scenes, I am following my inspiration and working on half a dozen posts at a time, but there is enough time between when I create and when I publish that it looks like I’m a methodical workhorse.

When I have a commitment that requires me to be at a certain place at a certain time, I make sure that it's worth the sacrifice of flexibility. Partly, that means keeping strong boundaries about being paid for my time, but it’s just as important that the commitment meets a need of mine in some way.

I am an extrovert, so I have made sure that my most inflexible commitments allow me to talk to people. I love going deep and building relationships, so I try to make it easy for people to work with me on a regular basis. Members of the Narrative Astrology Lab have access to my Discord community. The asynchronous nature of text chat allows me to be available to my community regularly but on my schedule. For readings clients, I offer Soul Friend Sessions with discounts for meeting with me more than once a month.

Making sure that my work is some combination of flexible, exploratory and social means that I am getting an essential need met through my astrology practice all the time. Doing work that has those qualities gives me energy, even if I'm not meeting all of my needs all the time.

Your Mileage May Vary

One of the things that makes astrology special is the way that it truly celebrates human differences. We can honor the humanity of others. We can recognize that we’re equal without pretending that we're all the same under the skin.

Building a practice you love means building a practice that fits you. There are no clear instructions, no 5-step plan to follow, no advice that will work for everybody. It's likely that some of the people who read this will think my astrology practice would be their perfect hell. To me, it's heaven. It fits like the perfect pair of jeans.

Our differences are good for us, and they’re good for the community. If you’re an introvert who prefers a regular schedule, you can build a practice that sounds like my perfect hell, and you will find clients who love the way you work. Our differences allow us to work side-by-side in the same sky without competing with each other because, at the end of the day, our way of being in the world is as different as the sun and moon.

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