My definition of success has changed. What's yours?

What does success in your therapy practice and life mean to you?

My definition of success continues to evolve. I used to see success as having a full practice. I wanted to see 20 clients a week and to have a steady flow of referrals. I figured once I'd achieved that, I’d have arrived.

I worked really hard and learned everything I needed to know about building a therapy practice. I filled my practice and had a nice income. But I had a schedule that didn’t work well for me or my family and I was heading for burnout. I hadn’t created my business around my life, so I had lots of evening appointments and was seeing people in my office every day. I thought I had no choice about those things.

I know...smallest violin in the world, right? Stop complaining and feel grateful for your success. That’s what I used to think.

Then I realized that by creating a business I love more, I can help my clients more.

Now, aside from seeing the impact of my work and making a good income, here are some markers of success for me:

• Long chats with my best friends and my sister
• Time with my kids and wife
• Daytime walks
• Riding my kick-scooter to the office
• Working from home several days a week

What does success look like to you right now? More clients? More income?

Those things are totally possible, and I’m here to help you get them. But I also want you to create a private practice that allows you to have more of what you REALLY want. Freedom. Love. Fun. Meaning.

Life is so short. We’re lucky to do meaningful work. We sometimes even get to save lives. And yet…you can burn yourself out if you don’t take enough time for self-care or time with the people you love.

Your business should be in service of your life, not the other way around.

What do you want your business to make possible for you?

Do you ever say: “When my practice is successful I will finally…”

For example:

“When my practice is successful, I’ll only work 4 days a week.”

“When my practice is successful, I’ll start exercising more.”

What are you looking forward to changing once your practice is successful?

What would it take to do those things now? Could you pull it off if you raised your fees a little bit? Would it be possible if you cut back on a couple of expenses?

How could you create more freedom or happiness for yourself right now?

Here are some moves that might bring you more joy and freedom right away:

Schedule a morning walk every week with a friend.

Start your work-day a couple of hours later once a week.

Stop working a couple of hours earlier once a week.

Schedule a week off a couple of months from now and start planning your vacation or staycation.

If your practice won’t allow you to do those things, let’s work on fixing that right away. Like I said, life is too freaking short for that.

The Superpower Method For Therapists® Group Program begins in February. Registration opens on Monday, January 29th.

During the program, I work with a group of passionate, warm-hearted therapists to transform their businesses and bring in more money while also embracing more fun, meaning and freedom.

It’s a 14-week program with lots of interaction and (honesty time!) lots of homework too.

I love running this program because the therapists always blow me away with the changes they make in their businesses.

Get on the waitlist now.

Your Most Important Business Goal for 2017 Is....

What are your business goals for 2017? Ready for more clients? More money?

Those things are totally possible, and I’m here to help you get them. But I also want you to plan your 2017 so that you have more of what you REALLY want. Freedom. Love. Fun. Meaning.

Life is so short. We’re lucky to do meaningful work. We sometimes even get to save lives. And yet…you can burn yourself out if you don’t take enough time for self-care or time with the people you love.

Your business goals should be in service of your life goals, and not the other way around.

What is your business going to make possible for you this year?

Do you ever say: “When my practice is successful I will finally…”

For example:

“When my practice is successful, I’ll only work 4 days a week.”

“When my practice is successful, I’ll visit friends more.”

What are you looking forward to changing once your practice is successful?

What would it take to do those things now? Could you pull it off if you raised your fees a little bit? Would it be possible if you cut back on a couple of expenses?

How could you create more freedom or happiness for yourself right now?

Here are some moves that might bring you more joy and freedom right away:

Schedule a date with a friend for a morning walk every week.

Start your work-day a couple of hours later once a week.

Stop working a couple of hours earlier once a week.

Schedule a week off a couple of months from now so you can start planning your vacation or staycation.

If your practice won’t allow you to do those things, let’s work on fixing that right away.

My program, The Superpower Method For Therapists® begins in February. Registration opens on Tuesday, January 24th.

I work with a group of therapists just like you to transform their businesses and bring in more money while also embracing more fun, meaning and freedom.

Sign up below and I'll let you know as soon as I open up registration.  

Use Public Speaking To Grow Your Therapy Practice

Is it time to try public speaking?

Speaking rocks. It’s one of the fastest ways to bring clients into your practice. If you told me you absolutely need to bring in ten solid clients in the next month, I’d tell you to plan some speaking engagements. Speaking is an opportunity to interact with several of your potential clients and show them your expertise and what it’s like to work with you.

You may be coming up with reasons public speaking isn't for you.  

Is this what you’re saying?

"I’m not a charismatic speaker."

"I hate public speaking."

"I don’t have a talk ready."

"I don’t know where to speak."

"I’d rather write, network, or do just about anything else."

Allow me to push you a little bit.

When my friends invite me to go on a hike, I ask them to call it a “walk” instead. I can always go for a walk. A hike? Sometimes it sounds like a bit much.

So maybe you don’t have to call this thing “public speaking.”

How about one of these:  

• “Running a short workshop”
• “Leading a group discussion”
• “Teaching a skill to a group of people”

Choose who, what, where, and when.

You might think the first step is to plan out your talk, but that comes later. Choose your audience, topic and title, then choose where you’re giving your talk, and schedule it. You’ll figure out the content and practice the talk as you get closer.

Think about who your right-fit clients are. If you work with a wide range of clients, choose one type of client to start with, then figure out where those clients go to talks. If you don’t know, crowdsource to find out. Ask your colleagues and friends who most resemble your right-fit clients.

The easiest way to give a talk is to present at an organization’s event. The organization advertises your talk to their audience and you just show up.

If you don’t want to speak for an organization, you can host your own talk.

Does your therapy office have room for 4 or more participants? Host a one-hour free workshop, and offer it a few times so that you can include several participants. Invite colleagues to come and/or to tell their clients.

Give an online workshop. Use google hangouts or zoom to host a webinar. If your right-fit clients are busy professionals, they might find an online talk easier to attend.

Plan your talk. 

Decide what you want your participant to be able to do or know by the end of the talk, then plan the entire talk to achieve that goal. Keep it simple. A deep dive into one skill is more valuable than an overview of everything you know. If you’re presenting about relationships, don’t give an overview of the 10 most important relationship skills. Teach one or two skills so the participants can use them when they get home that night.

Leave plenty of time for practicing and discussing. Go beyond just adding a question and answer period to the end of the talk. Breanne Dyck, author of Beyond Satisfaction, says that people learn more when they interact with the material than when they just hear it. You know this from your own experience as an audience member. When you do an exercise, write or talk about a skill, you learn that skill much more thoroughly than when you only listen to a lecture. Throw in a silent think, a pair share, a group brainstorm, or a writing exercise.

Practice your talk. If you hate the idea of talking to yourself for the full length of your talk, divide it up and practice 15-minute segments.

Give your talk. 

Be yourself rather than trying to imitate your favorite public speaker. Figure out how you communicate when you’re at your best and be that way in during your talk. If you’re an excellent story-teller, start with a story that pulls people in. If you’re more of a listener than a talker, set up the event as a group discussion. Make eye contact. Let them see what you’re like as a therapist.

At the end of the talk, give the participants a clear next step to work with you. Pass out a feedback form with very simple questions such as “What is one thing you will implement from this talk?” and include a check box to sign up for a free consultation with you. Explain what a participant will get out of a free consultation with you. For example “If you’re thinking you want to learn more about how to….sign up for a free consultation. We’ll talk for 15 minutes and I’ll suggest some next steps you might take.”

Contact those people who sign up for a free consultation right away.

The more times you give a talk, the easier the process becomes. You can do this.

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Thinking You'd Like to Create Leverage in Your Therapy Practice?

Lots of therapists I talk to are aware that at some point they want to do their practices to include more than 1:1 therapy. Is this you? Do you long for more freedom, more income, and the ability to help more people by creating leveraging? What I mean by leveraging is offering your services in a form other than one or two clients in your office at a time.  Perhaps you want to offer workshops or classes online or in person. Maybe you want to create a therapy center and hire additional clinicians. Maybe you want to write a book.

Now is the time to experiment and document. 

Start exactly where you are. Right now. Rather than waiting until you’re ready to write your book or create your workshop or program, start thinking differently about the work you’re doing in your office every day. Notice what works best with your current clients. If you’re creating some of your own interventions or processes, start writing them down.

As you experiment and document, you’ll begin to identify what is unique about your process, and that will help you see where you could potentially scale up. I’ll give you a fictional example. Let’s say a therapist has developed her own process for premarital counseling. She dreams of writing a book for engaged couples and selling it internationally. She can start by documenting the steps in her premarital counseling process. From there she might create some short articles about the way engaged couples can work through issues using parts of her process. She can put those articles up on her website and find out which topics are most popular. She can begin creating worksheets that help couples in her office work through her process. She can edit those worksheets as she discovers how couples respond to them.

What she should NOT do is begin by writing a book for engaged couples. The quality and relevance of her offer will be much higher if she has spent time experimenting, testing and documenting her process with real couples. She may discover that a book isn’t the right way for her to create leverage. She’ll be led by what she discovers rather than an abstract idea.

Do you wonder how you could create leverage? Look for opportunities to experiment and document the best of what you’re doing right now, right where you are.

Do you want to take your practice to the next level? Apply for a free consultation with me now.

The Only Way To Build Your Practice and Stay Sane

Is 2015 the year you want to grow your practice to the point where it supports you well financially?

Is this the year you want to double your income?

I want that for you too, and one way I want you to get there is by working in your zone more of the time.  What working in your zone means to me is doing the work that fulfills you the most, where you’re doing your best work, and focusing on the parts of your work that inspire you the most. When you’re working in your zone you’re feeling effective. You’re learning the new stuff that allows you to help your clients even more. If you’re writing articles, you’re writing about what you really want to share. You’re meeting with colleagues and talking about their work with curiosity. By helping a lot of therapists build successful private practices, I have found over and over that when you work in your zone more of the time you fill your practice more quickly and make more money.

Of course there are dozens of tools for you to market your practice. Every one of those tools becomes more powerful when you’re working in your zone.

If you resolve this year to work in your zone more, how will your practice change? What if you decide which parts of your practice bring you more into the zone, and do more of that? What would you be doing more of?

Here’s an example:

I spoke with a therapist recently who was feeling burned out. He said he wasn’t feeling that effective and noticed that when new calls came in, he wasn’t feeling enthusiastic about calling them right back and welcoming them into his practice. He was feeling doubt how helpful he was. He’s a seasoned therapist who has helped a lot of clients in profound ways. I asked him to look at what was happening in those less effective sessions. He realized that these were situations where he was not working in his best way. He was trying to provide what he believed particular clients were wanting, and in some cases that was not what he believes in or does best.

He had gotten out of his zone.

Is this happening to you? Here’s what it sounds like when you’re getting out of your zone:

“I am not feeling inspired in my work right now.”

“I am not feeling that effective with my clients.”

Look at what is getting in the way of you working in your zone and begin to change it right away.

You may have to refer out sometimes when your work is not the right fit for a client. You may have to get the next level of training or consultation that you are yearning for so that you feel invigorated and supported.

You may need to clarify your preferred way of working so that you describe your work accurately to potential clients.

Here’s to 2015! Let it become a year of both financial success and personal fulfillment for you. If you know it’s time to get more support in building your private practice, apply for a free consultation with me now.