View Your Therapy Practice as a Business

Being a psychotherapist is probably the greatest honor and privilege I’ve ever had in my life. The training I received to become a psychotherapist was amazing, but there was one thing that was lacking, and that missing thing caused me some real hardship, and I had to pay a price for it going forward. And that was, even though I was learning how to be a psychotherapist (I was learning about theory and change and how to help people), I wasn’t learning how to do that in a private practice. In essence, I wasn’t learning how to do that in business.

And as a consequence, as I went into the business world, I didn’t know how to market, I didn’t know how to get clients. I didn’t know how to build a website. I didn’t know what that website needed to look like. I mean, it was a lot. There was a lot that was going on at the time and caused me to fumble a bit.

But now these days, I have figured a lot of that stuff out, through trial and error, through time, and just through not giving up. I now run one of the largest training organizations in our entire field, certainly the largest one dedicated to Solution Focused Brief Therapy. I have a large therapy practice and have maintained that all the way since like 2008.

Now, I want everybody to understand that it’s really important that you view yourself as a business. I think in our field that’s frowned upon for some reason. But it’s really important that you view yourself as a business because the more people you attract towards your business, the more people you bring into your practice, the more people you help. And also the more people that you work with, the more successful you are, the more financial stress you get to alleviate.

Psychotherapists start experiencing burnout at eight months into this field. Imagine how crazy that is. We spent years, tens of thousands of dollars getting the degrees and education that we have, and then eight months later, we start experiencing symptoms of burnout. And one of the big reasons for that is we are a massively underpaid position. We’re a massively underpaid field, and I want to change that, not necessarily for the money reasons, but it’s really, really hard to live your life if you’re stressed about money.

It’s really, really hard if you live your life from the position of ‘you’re always worried about money’. And one of the ways to alleviate that is to understand you are running a business. If you have gone into therapy practice, you are running a business. And you need to learn how to do that successfully.

I don’t want any of my colleagues, I don’t want anyone in this field making the same mistakes that I made. I want you to benefit from the education, information and learning that I went through. I want you to benefit from the transformation that I experienced. I want you to benefit from all the good things and not have to go through all the suffering.

That’s why I’m, I’m hosting an event called Heart Work Live. It’s a three day event that we have never done before. I’ve never been able to do this before. And I’m gonna show you how to really succeed in this business. Whether it’s a therapy practice, or you wanna become a paid speaker, you wanna write a book, you want to get in front of more audiences, you want a TV deal, you want to run a successful podcast, whatever it is. You wanna build a following on social media. You need to grow your email list. I’m gonna show you exactly how to do all those things.

I’ve done all of those things and more, and I’m gonna pull back the curtain and show you. And the reason I’m doing that is because you have to understand how to run a business so that you can help more people. That’s genuinely what this is about, you being able to help more people, and you being able to do it as your best version of yourself, so you’re not dealing with financial stress and worry.

So if you’re watching this video as soon as I sent it, click on the link. I’ll put it somewhere you can see it, so you can sign up for this event. It’s gonna completely change your life. And if you’re watching the video after the event is gone and it’s closed, I hope that you learn this lesson and you start to understand that you are in business and you need to master the skills that allow you to succeed in business.

You deserve it. Your clients and future clients deserve it. And it is the best way for you to exist in this field.