Meet Our Founding Director

Sharon Burch, MSN, APRN, PHCNS-BC, APHN-BC, HWNC-BC

Sharon Burch is a board-certified holistic nurse coach, educator, and entrepreneur and the director of New Directions for Nurses. This article summarizes her four decades as a holistic nurse entrepreneur and some of the lessons she has learned.

Sharon grew up in a family that used the power of whole food, fresh air, exercise, and mindset to maintain health, so she knew there was more to healing than medicine and surgery alone. 

When Sharon entered the hospital workforce as an LPN in 1973, she felt frustrated when she saw how patients on her Cardiac Progressive Care unit were treated for their physical problems and given very little education or support for living a healthy life.

After two years, she left hospital bedside nursing and chose to work as a visiting nurse, where she felt much more at home.

Lesson 1: Some nurses are not happy doing direct care in hospitals, and there are good reasons for that.

With the help of a nurse-midwife, Sharon's daughter was born at home in 1977 and Sharon took a year off of nursing work, then chose a job at a long-term care facility nearby. It wasn’t long before she wanted more skill and power to improve the care she saw. So over the next six years, Sharon attended nursing school, got her RN license, became the director of nursing at her facility, and learned to be a massage therapist. 

Sharon’s dream was to set up a private practice to coach clients on improving their health and provide massage therapy, energy work, guided imagery, functional nutrition, and herbal medicine to complement the coaching. In 1993, Sharon established this private practice at the Southwind Health Collective in Lawrence, KS and published “Consciousness: How Does It Relate to Health?” in the Journal of Holistic Nursing.

Sharon's visibility as a holistic nurse brought clients and unexpected opportunities. For example, a local community college invited her to teach pathology to massage therapists. Back in 1998, there were no textbooks for this course. She seized the opportunity and formed a company called Health Positive!. Then she wrote and self-published the first pathology textbook for massage therapists in the US, sold the book to massage therapy schools, and created a home study CE course for massage therapists and holistic nurses. She followed that book’s success with an expanded version in 2002.

Lesson 3: Nurses can creatively and successfully apply their skills and insights to serve the public in new ways beyond the conventional settings of inpatient care, out-patient care, public health, and nursing education.

Success in that business came easy. After three years, Sharon closed her private holistic health coaching practice and went full-time in Health Positive!. Over the next ten years, she wrote more than 40 home study CE courses and pioneered in delivering them online. It was a significant investment for her and it was considered risky at the time, but she persevered because she felt sure that online courses were the wave of the future.

One of the most memorable weeks Sharon had during that time was when a marketing campaign she created brought in close to $50,000 in 4 days! That was quite a cash flow in 2007!

During those years, Sharon lived an adventurous lifestyle beyond what she had ever dreamed of! For over a year, she lived off-grid in a tropical paradise in Hawaii. Then she returned to the mainland, bought a liveaboard sailboat, and moved it to a beautiful lake in Arkansas where she lived part-time on the boat and part-time in a cottage in a national forest, next to a stream.

Here’s what happened next. When Sharon’s pioneering business started having competition, she realized she MUST find a marketing mentor! She tried learning from several, some of whom are well-known today, but what they were teaching was like a foreign language - Sharon couldn’t understand what they were saying or how to apply it successfully. After three years of trying different mentors but not finding one whose language and values matched hers, her stress and unhappiness increased to the point that she had a health crisis that forced her to stop working.

Sharon chose a shamanic arts/energy medicine practitioner to help her with her health crisis and she worked intensively with her energy patterns to shed the layers of consciousness that no longer served her. She decided to sell Health Positive! to her main competitor, then she took a year and a half off to rest, regroup, and study shamanic healing arts. Over the next two years, she earned certificates as a Dying Consciously teacher, an Energy Medicine Practitioner, and a Medicine Wheel teacher from the Four Winds Society Light Body School. 

Sharon was experimenting with different niches for Awakening to Grace when another nonprofit organization, the Hawaii Yoga Institute, asked her to assist its development. She helped that organization for several years, then became the President of its Board of Directors in 2016.

The next several years brought significant health challenges for Sharon, her daughter, and several other close family members, so Sharon moved from Arkansas to Kansas and took a job so she could make a living without the stress of a business start-up. In that job, she was the first Holistic Nurse Practice Specialist at the American Holistic Nurses Association (AHNA).

During the three years she was at AHNA, Sharon:

• Became board-certified as an advance practice holistic nurse (APNH-BC) and a nurse coach (HWNC-BC)

• Advised nurses via phone and email about advancing their holistic nursing practice in any setting: hospitals, hospices, private practice, the community, etc.

• Developed the first “Holistic Nurses’ Pain Relief Tools for Patients and Self-care” with over 50,000 copies sold and translated into 4 languages

• Coordinated a project to evaluate and publish evidence-based nonpharmacologic approaches to pain relief for nurses to implement

• Coordinated the “Integrative Healing Arts Program in Holistic Nursing,” a residential 84-hour CE program offered on coasts and in the midwest US

• Led a team that produced 20 one-day regional self-care conferences for nurses, each with different speakers, and each held at a different location across the US

Through the American Holistic Nurses Association, Sharon met nurses who were working as CHANGEMAKERS and bringing holistic nursing into diverse parts of the US. Many of these nurses had left the conventional healthcare system to forge new approaches to serving the public’s health directly, and others had stayed inside the system and planted seeds of change.

Sharon felt inspired by finding so many like-minded nurses and she realized how she could use her business to contribute to a stronger culture of holistic health for all. She could help nurses increase their holistic nursing skills through her online CE courses, and she would help nurses become holistic nurse entrepreneurs.

Among all the business coaches and mentors Sharon had tried to learn from, only one stood out as consistently, dependably excellent.

Marisa Murgatroyd's "Live Your Message" education system empowers people from all walks of life to create successful, sustainable businesses in which they can authentically be themselves, starting with a small volume of dedicated customers in a low-overhead business and growing step-by-step to having a large volume of dedicated customers, if that's what the owner wants.

Sharon tested Marisa's roadmap for business success and recognized it as the missing key she had been looking for! 

As Sharon looks back at her journey, she's grateful that she’s been able to stay the course, not give up on herself or her calling, and let herself remain open, growing, and learning new skills. 

Lesson 7: By persevering and not giving up, Sharon had the business experience to recognize the truly valuable key to success that she could build upon to help nurse entrepreneurs be smart, strategic, supported, and successful.

Sharon believes that when more nurses learn how to grow successful businesses, the public will see nurses as respected independent health professionals who are contributing to the common good in innovative and effective ways.

Imagine what nurses can accomplish when we bring our empathy, ethics, and holistic health solutions to the public through nurse-led businesses!

To do that, nurses need business education created by nurses and targeted specifically to our mindset, ethics, and experience because we typically think and act differently from the predominant business culture.

Sharon left the American Holistic Nurses Association and designed New Directions for Nurses to teach nurses how to grow successful businesses from their education, empathy, and passion for service. New Directions for Nurses supports nurses in appreciating the value of their ideas and learning the best paths to develop them, rather than giving their ideas to other companies to profit from.

There has never been a better time for nurses to be visible, vocal, and lift each other up, because together we rise!

Enjoy a complimentary Business Strategy Session with Sharon Burch, APRN, APHN-BC, HWNC-BC

You'll receive the Profitable Nurse Business Checklist & personal guidance on your priority questions.