Category Archives for Action

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

Six Lessons from ^Almost! Daily Blogging: A behind the scenes look

Today marks three full weeks of The ^Almost Daily Catalyst! Seth Godin has been encouraging me (and, you know, the other 4M people who follow him) for 2 years to blog every day, but it always felt like such a big ask.

I started as more of a blogger than a coach, then the coaching took off and the blogging dwindled to maaayyyybbeeee once a month. And yet, the call of regular writing was always running along in the background like an excitable little dog.

“Bark! Bark, bark!” he says! (That’s dog for “Hey! We could write a blog about that! And this! And that! We totally have enough to write every day! Let’s do it! It will be SO. FUN.”)

Unfortunately, those thoughts were being “managed” by these super “helpful” thoughts:

The Power of “What If”

Oh, worry, my old friend. If there were worry olympics, I coulda been a contender. I am GREAT at worry. A natural!

And worry LOVES company! As long as I was worrying, I’d always have someone to talk to. But, my conversations would be exhausting, and my life would be joyless.

We certainly have the option to feeling anxious or concerned right now- If we wanted to, we could worry ourselves sick about the state of the world: the handling of the crisis, the mental health of our friends and families stuck at home with only the black hole of the internet to occupy them, and the danger experienced by our heroes in scrubs.

Worry is is a verb that means to be consumed by the anticipation of negative emotion.

Three Things That Just Aren’t True

It’s been a heck of a week and I’m glad for a few days off. What are you going to do this weekend? Nothing? ME TOO!

And, honestly, I’m ready for it.

I, like you, am doing my best to show up for the people I care about. I want to get it right but some times I get it all wrong… like the time I yelled at my daughter because she wanted to hug me when I wanted to read my book.* I want to be empathetic and honest and grounded and peaceful but sometime I’m pissed and sarcastic and anything but peaceful. And I want to write the very best, most beautiful words in a row for you guys on my ^Almost Daily Catalyst, but I’m always missing the typos, using the wrong their/there/they’re, and getting my punctuation wrong.

The world wants us to hold ourselves to a standard of absolute perfection, and keep ourselves small UNTIL we figure that out.

But of course, that’s some bullshit.

You don’t have to be perfect to be valuable.

Beauty is everywhere if you choose to see it

In our previous post, we talked about how psychologists estimate that it takes 10 compliments to counteract a single critical comment, 10 exposures to beautiful, hopeful images to neutralize the fear of seeing a scary picture. This rule of 10 dictates that fear will draw you in at 10x the power of hope, beauty, and opportunity.

In practical terms, this means you need to surround and immerse yourself in proof that the world is, in fact, beautiful.

How can we do that?

First, what IS beauty? I’ve been thinking about this and my current definition is that beauty is the honest expression of emotion. Human history is the parade of one unprecedented thing after another that simultaneously pulls us towards each other and pushes us away from each other. The expression of how that feels IS BEAUTY.

We feel connection and beauty when our heart says “I know that feeling… despite our differences, we are the same.” And beauty isn’t all hugs and pollyanna hand-holding (though… bring it on!), it’s honesty about pain, loss, and rage as well as connection, pride, and even routine.

Beauty is EVERYWHERE… are you choosing to see it?

Here are some examples of the beauty I see:

Manage your Fear to Hope Ratio

In our previous posts, we discussed how there is nothing more fundamentally “alive” than fear. In fact, it’s fear that keeps us alive despite the tigers, freezing cold, and food scarcity that have historically plagued our species. Perhaps this is why fear is so much more powerful than hope.

Psychologists estimate that it takes 10 compliments to counteract a single critical comment, 10 exposures to beautiful, hopeful images to neutralize the fear of seeing a scary picture. The rule of 10 dictates that fear will draw you in at 10x the power of hope, beauty, and opportunity. During times of overwhelming fear, this means that you need to PROACTIVELY reduce the number of exposures you have to the fear and intentionally jack up your exposure to hope, beauty and opportunity.

How can we do that? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Both, And: What We Need Now

Have you noticed how unprecedented all of this is? We’ve never had a global pandemic like this one, or a president like this one, and we’ve never been able to see into each other’s lives with the clarity the way that we can right now because of the internet. It’s all true, what we say: These are crazy, unprecedented, uncharted waters.

And, yet.

There’s a lot about this that feels familiar to me. We are still people, attracted to fear at 10x the force that we are attracted to light… and yet we yearn for proof of connection and compassion. We want to be seen and heard and loved… and sometimes, we want to be left alone. We want to feel agency, we want to feel important, and we want to contribute… while at the same time we want to let go, hide away and be left to our Netflix and Switch and novels. This “navigating equally matched competing forces” is one of the things that make us human, in my mind.

Being drawn by these competing forces within us usually leave us uncertain and unsure. What’s the “right” thing to do next? When we try to “get it right” and not be “too much of one or the other” we end up in a gross grey middle ground where we just worry and we don’t act:

We’ve got each other

As we’ve been launching our mastermind*, Alyssa and I have spoken to A LOT of therapists and coaches. We know that the last few weeks have been intense, stressful, and uncertain.

We are feeling it, too.

The theme we’ve heard is that everyone feels like they are in crisis mode- on their own behalf on behalf of their clients. It’s fear central: business fears collide with health fears which slam into the fear we feel for the wellbeing of our client. It feels as though our foundation has been shaken.

And yet, it is our belief that coaches and therapists are the EXACT people we need to lead right now.

That means me, and that means you.

Who else is trained to lead with calm steadiness? Who else specializes in navigating fears, staying grounded, being flexible, and managing distress? We are.

We also realize that you’ve been working REALLY HARD to grow your practices, and we don’t want fear or uncertainty to halt that progress. Turning away from business-building right now will feed that feeling of being carried away from your goals by this crisis.

We care about you, your practices, and your momentum.

So, how do we hold steady, show up with calmness and peace, serve our clients, and continue moving forward during challenging times?

The three secrets that grow your practice fast

In October 2018 I launched my first group coaching program. The group that came together was a fun-loving, passionately dedicated, extremely supportive crew.  Together we dove into refreshing websites, rewriting copy, getting out into the world, and generally going all-in on our private practices.

To our collective delight, everyone was full by the end of the program. Imagine that, will you?  We started as a group of people who had private practices and amazing therapeutic skills, along with a lot of confusion (and, if we’re honest, some fear) about whether and how to get clients.

The next round of this program (the Build Your Practice Accelerator) starts up in March and to prepare I’ve been watching our recorded calls, looking for clues about how and why the program worked so well. While I was watching, one of the mastermind members spoke directly to the mystery of it all:

“You know, it’s strange. I’ve been trying to figure out what we’ve been doing that has been so effective. I mean my website is a lot better and I’ve got all these ideas, and I’m enjoying the business side of having a practice for the first time EVER… but it’s not like people are mobbing my website and I’m not running around all over town networking with lead magnets… the only thing I can come up with is confidence… and clarity… and the fact that I’m actually doing something to promote my practice for once.  Do you think that’s all it is?”

Is my client right?  Is it ONLY confidence, clarity and action? And, maybe most pressingly, is the word “only” even appropriate in that sentence?