The Moment You Decide Your Work Matters | Spiritual Hobby vs Spiritual Business

Free Training + Final Thoughts

My mum once told me to stop relying on Reiki and to go get a job in a bakery. At the time, I felt hurt, and looking back now, that conversation may have been one of the reasons I built a global Reiki school. Because what happened afterwards taught me something. Most gifted practitioners don't stay hidden because they lack ability. They stay hidden because they never fully decided that their work matters. Today, I wanna talk about the moment everything changes, the shift between having a spiritual hobby and becoming a practitioner who truly backs herself.

Welcome back to Connecting to Spirit. I'm your host, Lisa Brandis, Reiki master, intuitive mentor, and founder of Intuitive Reiki International. I help spiritual practitioners just like you turn your gifts into profitable spiritual businesses. And today, I wanna talk about the moment everything changes. And it's not always a big dramatic moment. Sometimes it's quiet, sometimes it's a job ending or a door closing, or even just a conversation, someone believing in you before you're quite ready to believe in yourself. But when it happens, you feel it. And often that moment is the difference between having a spiritual hobby and a spiritual business that you love.

My Story: From Reiki Workshops to a Crossroads

I wanna tell you a story. Years ago, I was working at a healing center in Perth. My children were young. I was a stay-at-home mom, had a part-time job, and I'd also been given the opportunity to run Reiki workshops in that center. The marketing was simple: an email to the database, hiring a room, and every workshop made a healthy profit, and I loved it. But here's the honest truth. At the time, mentally, I just treated it as play money. It was a hobby and something I did alongside my part-time job at the center that I worked in. And like I said, I did love it, but I hadn't fully stepped into owning it. And then the owner of the center sold the business, and the new owner didn't need me to work there anymore.

The Advice To Get a “Real Job”

And suddenly, I was at a crossroads. Do I go and replace that part-time job, or do I step fully into this work and take it seriously as a business? So I asked my mum and she said, "just go and get another part-time job, like working in a bakery." But I knew what it felt like to work in a job that made a difference. I used to work at Starlight, and when, because I'd had that understanding of what it felt like to work, to do the meaningful work that I really loved, I wasn't prepared to just go and get a job purely for the paycheck. And so I was at a crossroads, and I didn't wanna walk away from the business I'd started to build.

Someone Believed in Me Before I Believed in Myself

But I didn't have the confidence. So I had a chat with the old owner of the center, and she spoke to me and said, "Lisa, you're at a crossroads right now. It's the best opportunity to go all in and take a chance and take a risk, because if you do replace that work with a part-time job, you're not gonna be able to devote yourself fully to your business." And she also said something that I've never forgotten. She actually said to me that she believed in me, that she knew that I could be an incredible healer, that I had the gifts, that I was already starting to see success in teaching workshops, and this was just another step forward. But the thing with energy is, is that- If you kind of hold back, if you always have a backup plan, if you wanna stay safe and comfortable, you might just never fully commit. And if you don't commit or feel a little discomfort that comes when you're in that growth phase, it just becomes much harder to make it work. And like I said, she believed in me, and sometimes having someone that believes in you before you believe in yourself gives you that permission to take a risk, to take a chance.

The Decision To Go All In

So lucky for me, I did make a decision. I decided to go all in. I didn't go and look for a part-time job. Was it difficult? Yes. Was I scared? Yes. And for the first time, I really felt the responsibility of making commitments where I had to take on a lease working in a sound healing center, and then I also moved into a naturopathic clinic where I had to pay full-time, full-time rent. But here's what happened after. I made that decision, and I chose to do the work anyway, here I am now 23 years later. I've never looked back. What I didn't know back then, and what I want you to hear right now, is what that simple decision would become. And if only I knew back then that I needed to back

How Small Decisions Built a Global Reiki School

myself. That was the secret that I didn't understand, okay? I started teaching local workshops in Perth, that then became Reiki WA, then that became my own bricks-and-mortar center where I ran big sold-out workshops, where I had my own space that I taught in-house. I had practitioners and masters working for me. I ran bigger events. I had a bigger team alongside me, and eventually, a huge pivot from a local business owner to a global online education school, Intuitive Reiki International. So we teach practitioners all over the world, and none of it happened overnight. But that's how business grows, rarely through one massive giant leap. Usually, it's through lots of small decisions repeated over time. One small, simple step forward, and then another.

Spiritual Hobby or Spiritual Business?

So I wanna ask you something. Where are you right now? Are you treating your healing work as a hobby like I did in the beginning? Are you doing it knowing that you love it, that it lights you up, that you know that what you're doing makes a difference? Perhaps you haven't fully owned that you can be a successful practitioner. Because there is a difference, right? It's not about how many clients you have. It's not even about the money or the income that you can earn. It isn't about how many certificates that sit on your wall. And from the women that I've spoken to, there's usually a lot of them. They've spent a long time getting lots of different certifications. They're highly trained, really great technicians, okay? But the difference here is a decision, an internal decision. So the moment you stop saying, "Oh, I'll just do a bit of Reiki on the weekends," or, "I'll do Reiki on the side," and you start saying, "I'm a Reiki practitioner," or, "I'm a spiritual healer," that's the shift,

The Identity Shift Every Practitioner Must Make

okay? Once you decide to take this work seriously, practical things matter, too, because there's never been a better time to build a freedom lifestyle business like there is now, where you get to do meaningful work that really lights you up.

Why There’s Never Been a Better Time To Build Meaningful Work

The tools available now, we have AI, and Zoom, and online training platforms. We've got automations, and these things simply didn't exist when I first started. So years ago, building a business was a lot harder than it is now, and it also came with usually bigger startup costs, bigger teams, expensive infrastructure, and that's not necessarily true anymore. So all you need to do is be a practitioner, have a purpose, and the right tools, a clear identity, and you can build a meaningful impact from home with a small team if you want to, sometimes no team at all. That opportunity exists right now. The question is, will you treat it like a hobby, or are you going to step in and treat it like a business?

Purpose Over Hustle

So here's what I want you to know after 23 years of doing this work and watching thousands of practitioners make the same decision. There is something deeply satisfying about work that is aligned with purpose. When you use your sensitivity, your intuition, your wisdom, and you're calibrated, your lived experience becomes so much richer, and you get to do work that genuinely changes people's lives and give you more freedom in your own personal life. Okay? I'm not talking about hustle, not performance. I'm talking about a business and a life that's built around meaningful, impactful work, one step at a time. And maybe this is the line I wanna leave you with today. A spiritual business doesn't begin with more clients. It begins the moment you decide that your work matters.

Free Training + Final Thoughts

If this conversation is landing with you, if you're sitting with that question right now, whether you have a hobby or a business and you wanna take it to the next level, I share exactly how this works in my free live training, Turn Your Healing Gifts Into a Profitable Practice. It's live, it's 90 minutes, and it's where we take this conversation even further. You'll find the link below. I can't wait to see you there. And before I go, please subscribe wherever you're listening, leave a review if you can, or even share this episode with someone that you know might be at a crossroads in their life, or you believe in them as a practitioner and you think that this might be the very message they need to give them that incentive to get going. So if you haven't fully owned it yet, this is your time to make that decision, and to really look at what's possible for you in this beautiful economy that we're in now, and also an area where you can really truly make a difference doing work that has an impact. And I'll see you next week. Bye for now