Building Your Therapy Practice Isn't About Self-Promotion. It's About Listening

Here's some common bad advice for therapists trying to build their practices. 

Bad advice: To build your therapy practice, you've got to promote yourself. 

Truth: To build your therapy practice, you've got to use your listening skills in new ways. 

 

When you hear “marketing,” you think self-promotion. You imagine selling yourself and talking yourself up. This isn’t one of your strongest skills, and you kind of hate doing it. You may even withdraw from marketing activities because self-promotion makes you uncomfortable.

Self-promotion has a (small) place in building your practice, but listening has a WAY bigger role. I bet you’re pretty great at listening.

When you use your listening skills to carefully consider what your right-fit clients are saying and feeling, all of your marketing actions are more powerful.

What do I mean by "use your listening skills in new ways?"

 

I’ve created an in-depth process for listening, and the gist of it is this:

Pay careful attention to what the people you love to work with are saying, and build every aspect of your business around that.

The listening process to take your business where you want it to go

 

In my Superpower Method For Therapists™ Program, you learn a process to use your listening skills in the building of your business. You already know how to listen as a therapist. This is about listening as a business person as well.

I call this process the "Right-Fit Client Exercise."

Using this process, you can (re)create your whole business, including your marketing plan and the services you offer.

The process I teach in the program is the one I use for my own therapy practice, The Bay Area Relationship Center.

I use this process when I write a blog post, create a page for our website, or make changes to the services we offer. I review it pretty much any time I make a decision bigger than whether to fluff a pillow.

 

An example of the listening process

 

When we added premarital counseling to our list of services, I sat down to create a new specialty page on our website about it. Before I wrote a word, I began the Right-Fit Client Exercise. After working through the exercise, I was clear about which couples are the right fit for this service, and how they think, feel and talk about their issues. I was ready to create the content for our new page and many blog articles to support it. I knew what I needed to say and the tone to use.  

Without that exercise, I would have stared at a blank page or written some bland copy that you might find on thousands of other websites.

Once you learn this process, you'll come to rely on it too. 

If you’re ready to build a bold and unique private practice, the one that only you can build, consider my Superpower Method For Therapists™ Program. It happens twice a year, and the next one starts September 1st. Get on the interest list now and you’ll have a chance to register one week before everyone else.  

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