What It Takes to Grow a Private Pay Practice During a Pandemic

I’ve worked with hundreds of therapists and coaches who are seeking to build private pay practices and do you know what I hear again and again?

It’s either: 

“I work and work and work and work and WORK. I write blogs, I post on Facebook, and I tweak my website… it’s nonstop, I’m never done… And NOTHING is happening.  How do I know what to do, what to stop doing, and what’s really going to return on investment?”

50% of the people I talk to

OR:

“I DO NOT KNOW WHERE TO START. The internet is an avalanche of conflicting information encouraging me to do things that feel inauthentic or pushy. So I do nothing. I know I need to promote my practice, but I feel overwhelmed and paralyzed.“

50% of the people I talk to

Let’s cut you some slack: Therapists weren’t trained in marketing… or sales… or social media… or graphic design… In fact, the skills of therapy can feel wildly out of sync with these business-building strategies (they aren’t, by the way, as you’ll see).

What It Really Takes to Grow a Private Pay Practice

I’ve worked with hundreds of therapists and coaches who are seeking to build private pay practices and do you know what I hear again and again?

It’s either: 

“I work and work and work and work and WORK. I write blogs, I post on Facebook, and I tweak my website… it’s nonstop, I’m never done… And NOTHING is happening.  How do I know what to do, what to stop doing, and what’s really going to return on investment?”

50% of the people I talk to

OR:

“I DO NOT KNOW WHERE TO START. The internet is an avalanche of conflicting information encouraging me to do things that feel inauthentic or pushy. So I do nothing. I know I need to promote my practice, but I feel overwhelmed and paralyzed.“

50% of the people I talk to

Four Steps to a High Converting Website

Happy Friday Friends!

I hope that you have plans for this weekend that will provide you with some contours, help you escape, and create an oasis.

If not, maybe now is the time to concoct a plan?

You deserve those things.

Before you head off into your weekend, I wanted to invite you to an online event I’m having on Monday at 11am. Dr. Alyssa Adams and I are hosting a webinar about four simple tweaks you can make to your website to help you convert visitors to your website into potential clients. But, it’s not just a boring zoom webinar with dry tips and powerpoint slides- it’s a PARTY!

4 Simple Steps to a High Converting Website! <<<Register here!

During this live event on Monday we’ll be sharing four simple tweaks that have a big impact on your website’s ability to convert visitors into leads, and then diving into the first one: creating a simple and cohesive look and feel for your website. We will do some fun branding games and you’ll have a chance to workshop your ideas in our supportive community.

If you are a coach or a therapist (or, even if you are thinking of becoming one), please consider joining us.

If you aren’t a coach or a therapist but you are curious and want to hang out, please feel free to join us (just know that the tips will be targeted to someone seeking clients for whom to provide supportive services).

It would mean a lot to me if you would forward this to one or two therapists that you know who might enjoy this free event.

I’ve been working hard to get the word out, and I’d appreciate your help. <3

Most importantly, of course, I’d love to see YOU there.

DETAILS:

Four Simple Steps to a High Converting website, Monday, May 11th!

The next community event has been scheduled!
On Monday, May 11th, Dr. Alyssa Adams and I are hosting an online event about the 4 Simple Steps to a High Converting Website! <<<Register here!

In this online event, we’ll present the 4 Simple Steps to a High Converting website, which will make website building EASY + CLEAR, so that you can immediately take action to make website changes that will draw in the right clients. We think we need SO MUCH on our website, but we don’t! We just need the RIGHT things to turn website visitors into clients.

Have a great and restful weekend, and I hope to see you Monday at 11am.

PS- This live event launches our three-week website retool challenge, where we provide coaches and therapists with the support they need to make drama-free progress on their website, even during all this craziness. You can come to the event without joining the challenge, or you are most welcome to do both.

The New Normal Emerges

I’ve noticed a shift in the world lately. We used to endlessly speculate with each other about when things would get back to normal.

• Do you think we’ll get back to school this year? (Answer: nope)
• Do you think we’ll go to a restaurant for Abi’s birthday in May? (Answer: nope)
• Do you think that people will feel weird coming back to campus when we go back this fall?” (Answer: nope, because we’re fully online until 2021)

Lately, as the realities of the breadth and depth of this outbreak settle around us, the conversation is shifting. We’ve begun to wonder: Where are we going? What are heading towards?

Only one thing seems certain; we aren’t headed back towards “normal.”

I’ve largely opted out of these relentlessly speculative conversations because I hold two things be true no matter what:

1. The human brain can get used to anything.
2. So very much of what happens next is CHOICE.

We were built for this

The blessing and the curse of humanity is our ability to create familiarity and normalcy in whatever circumstance we find ourselves in. And this is true even when that circumstance is wildly different than what came before. You’ve experienced this!

If you have kids, you can remember the way the world went from black and white to technicolor when you brought your child home. Suddenly a million entrenched beliefs you had about yourself and the nature of life flew out the window. “I need my sleep! I’m not touching poop! Going to the bathroom is private!” It was a shock for a minute, but then it became life. You built plans and had ideas inside of that new normal, no matter how radically different it was from what came before.

Or if you’ve lost a dearly beloved you might remember how that loss made every mundane thing sacred for a minute. Every single time you ate food, you looked at the place across the table. Every single time you had the impulse to reach out, you were gut punched by absence. It was a painful and visceral, but then it began to settle. You began to feel the scar instead of the raw wound, and you built a life, reluctantly, in the new normal.

That’s what humans do. We settle and we build a life in the new normal.

We will do that this time, too.

I find that endlessly calming. I don’t need to know the details because I believe that whatever it, we got this.

The second reason I avoid these conversations is that the primary assumption in most of them is that we will somehow be delivered to a reality that is constructed somewhere beyond our control. There are forces that shape the nature of our world, we recognize, but they are out there. In here (in me, with us, right now), we have no role in that.

And that, to be frank with you, is a bunch of cowardly bullshit.

We are creating this reality together

In the same way that we created the reality we have left behind, we’ve created the routines and tenor and the substance of today. And, we will create the new normal, too. There is a finite group of people on this planet whose interactions and leadership and intentions are the ONLY THING* driving what happens next.

On a global scale, how we care for our planet and negotiate our interactions literally creates the health and wealth of our entire species.

On the scale of our country, there are mechanisms for change coming our way. How we engage with those ideas and listen to each other changes everything, immediately, if we choose it.

On the scale of our communities, the way we support each other and appreciate each other and give each other the benefit of the doubt creates the culture of our schools and our homes and our grocery stores.

On the scale of your business, what you choose to declare about who you are on your website and in your message about why you’re here and what you’ll never stop advocating for, decides what happens next.

The truth is, we get to choose. We’ve been choosing the whole time, and we are choosing right now.

There is no externally mandated new normal that is coming to conquer us. And there is no pain in this change that can defeat us if we choose to begin imperfectly and move forward with intention.

Now really is the time to decide what you deeply, truly want. As the new normal takes form around us, how do you want to show up? What do you want to create?

*PS- I firmly believe in a higher power. I also firmly believe in our free will. Together this means that our higher power is in us, and when we move with our greatest intentions and our highest self we will create a more perfect world. The great news is that we don’t have to agree about this: whether we are staunch realists connected to the chaos theory of reality or bought into a directed flow of intention from a higher power, our own impact is undeniable. When you are hungry, you operate inside that chaos/god sphere to make a sandwich. Regardless of what you believe, this is the one thing you cannot deny: your choices matter. Your intentions shape your reality.

PPS. You don’t have to do all this thinking alone! Join us for the next few weeks in the website retool challenge! It’s a 🎉Mental Health Awareness Month Celebration 🎉with design tips and simple website tweaks that bring you more prospective clients! And if you are already signed up, please consider inviting a friend by forwarding them the link. The more the merrier!

It Happens.

This is a modern tale, if ever there was one.

I wake up at 5, wander downstairs to get my coffee and do some writing. Life is good!

Around 6:30, as always, I take a look at the ^Almost Daily Catalyst to try to find the typos and make sure it’s scheduled properly.

I log into Convertkit, and there is no Catalyst. How did this happen?!

Panic! Searching! Realization. Acceptance? And then…

We All Need An Oasis

This is the 37th ^Almost Daily Catalyst, which means that we have entered the 8th week of the coronavirus quarantine.

How are you doing?

I live in the NYC Metro region and it’s been tough. Everyone knows someone who has been infected. Almost everyone knows someone who has died. Some of my students, clients, and friends have had multiple deaths in their close circle of family and friends.

These are hard times.

And while it is absolutely important to shore up and move forward, it’s also very, very important that we create space in our lives to recover from the emotional toll of it all.

Everyone needs an oasis right now.

How to Reclaim 25% of Your Time

Last week I had my first multi-day headache in years. It crawled into my head on Tuesday, hit it’s peak on Wednesday, and slunk out the backdoor leaving me delicate but better on Thursday. Right in the middle of everything, I had to stop and take a break.

It was terrible timing for an unplanned break!

• I’m running a free three-week “Website Retool Challenge” for Mental Health Awareness month with my friend and colleague Alyssa Adams, and the Pre-Party begins TODAY. We have ads running, videos to make, logistics to line up… there is much that goes into creating a breezy, fun-filled internet party!
• It’s the end of the semester and I need to stay on top of my grading and emails with students.
• My daughter turns 10 on Friday and I really need to figure out how to have a Zoom birthday party and get some gifts delivered and bake a cake and, and, and…

Amanda approved Coronavirus Oases on Demand

My criteria for Oases on Demand is that I have checked it out my very own self, everything works out in the end, and no one is in any real pain. I want to see conflict and tension and a compelling arc with strong characters, don’t get me wrong… but I don’t want to question the meaning of life or the nature of humanity.

Books

• Uprooted. It was gripping! It was well developed! It was devoid of body drama (the main character wasn’t “unexpectedly the most beautiful girl in the land,” thank God) and it was LONG. Blessedly, beautifully long. You need this in your life.
• A Man Called Ove. This book is about a 100-year-old man who escapes from his nursing home and decides that life is for LIVING. He goes on a romp around the countryside that made me happy from start to finish.
• The Little Paris Bookshop. A man has a book shop on a barge and then one day decides to give it all up and float off down the Seine. He travels down the river and around the south of France to shakes off the ennui of a stuck-in-the-mud life and re-open to the potential of love. There’s a tiny bit of overwroughtness, but nothing that stops this from being a rich and textured escape novel.
• The Art of Inheriting Secrets. This one was free with prime reading at a moment when my husband had decided $50 a month for books was too many dollars a month. I read it because it was free… AND I’M SO GLAD I DID!!! Step right into a world where it’s perfectly normal to inherit a massive English estate AND TITLE even though you are American! Oh, and let’s suddenly come into millions of dollars to renovate it. That’s how that would go, right? Also, why not fall in love with a best-selling author and eat inexpressibly good food every single day. Ah, real life. Such a treat.
• Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. I am actually “reading” this one as an audiobook while I go for my daily walk. Now it’s set during Apartheid in South Africa so there’s no escaping the context, but Trevor is so matter-of-fact about it, and so earnest, caring and funny in his descriptions that it still meets my criteria.

TV Shows

• The Great British Bakeoff < This is my go-to. It inevitably makes me feel like life is actually pretty darn good and sends me off to bake bread. Win-win.
• Nailed It < Makes me feel better about how my own baking turns out!
• Some good news. Every single episode of this makes me weep with relief.
• The Office. <Enough Said
• Psych < My favorite show of all time. Outrageous silliness mixed with true friendship
• Phinneas and Ferb < I make an appearance in seconds 34 and 35. I’m the one on the left.

The least overwhelming way to pursue a goal

Ahh, do you hear that? That’s the sound of a lovely, high powered vision pulling on us like a rare earth magnet (the most powerful magnet on the planet!), encouraging us to get to work, make a difference, and create our dreams (in a healthy and balanced way, of course).

The next step is to get started!

So, what do I do next?

Well, here’s one of the paradoxes of change management: what creates excitement overall (a high powered vision statement about end results), makes for terrible motivation on the day-to-day.

When I think about having a “big platform and a small team” (from my vision, which I shared yesterday) it excites me… but then I realize that I can’t accomplish that today or even this week.

I won’t screw me

This week we have been talking about the strong, concrete vision for our business as a magnet. Yesterday we turbo charged that magnet with our why, investing it with our hopes for ourselves, our “we” (the people we seek to provide for and protect) and our “one” (the world we want to change).

On the first page of your guide, you should something like this (this is mine):

I want: A thriving and diverse practice where I offer limited 1:1 coaching, and accessible group programs while also writing, speaking, and being a known source on marketing, mindsets, and change. I want a big platform, a small team, and a lot of supportive friends, clients, and colleagues who help me make my vision a reality, while I help them make their visions come true.