Private practice is not for the timid!
Being a solopreneur in a solo office behind locked doors with potentially unstable, hurting, acting out clients is fraught with danger. Or so we’re told. Maybe we need to buy armor or lobby for hazard pay.
Certainly there have been instances of harm done to therapists, and knowing so heightens our fears. Add to that the reality that most counselors are traumatized in grad school to believe that they will get sued for every least little thing, that colleagues are waiting to report you to a licensing board for ethics violations, and you can’t let anyone know anything about you, lest you get stalked.
Institutionalized paranoia runs rampant in the counseling, social work, and psychology professions. Granted, some of it is with good cause. But when it comes to marketing for clients, a lot of these obsessive suspicions are downright self-sabotaging. And they end not not keeping you safe at all, but actually working against your business success.
1. Fear of Disapproval and its sisters Fear of Looking Wrong and Fear of Upsetting Others
This appears to be so prevalent among those in the counseling fields that it’s not just a matter of not yet being a seasoned practitioner. To some extent, it may be a gender issue, since most women tend to be more sensitive to the anticipation of disapproval than most men. Regardless of bio-psycho-social determinants, this fear too often prevents clinicians from using their own common sense and doing what right for their business and their clients.
2. Fear of Being Different and its cousins Fear of Risk and Fear of Visibility
Perhaps because solopreneurs don’t have the “cover” of being in a group where responsibility is shared and decisions are reached by consensus, the fear of being different is stronger in private practice. Not wanting to be seen as out of the mainstream of traditional professional practices inhibits pioneering new approaches, which prevents progress. This is a prime culprit in keeping you stuck!
3. Fear of Punishment and its compadres Fear of Malpractice and Fear of Ethics Charges
Too many clinicians shape their business policies, their marketing methods, and client interactions around a fear of getting spanked. This is seen in the too tight boundaries around accepting small heartfelt gifts, speaking to clients outside the office, taking referrals from clients, and other shoot-yourself-in-the-foot dual relationship nonsense. As a result, clients are robbed of the genuine human warmth that could be given and received. This cold impersonal lack of touch approach creates a psychological failure to thrive condition that impacts clients’ progress and your own business success.
4. Fear of Freedom and its cohort Fear of Success
Despite the US being the land of the free, few clinicians in private practice really know how to live with the freedom that is synonymous with being in business for yourself. Business models that work — maybe — for clinics or group settings are assumed as the only choice, like an invisible fence that keeps you boxed in. But private practice is nothing if not the ability to do things the way you wish (within the law of course). It’s about making the rules and finding the paths to your own success. Fear of exercising freedom to experiment is simply a masked fear of succeeding on your own.
5. Fear of Change and its relative Fear of Loss and Fear of the Unknown
Change is scary. By definition is entails loss and uncertainty, even when the steps of change are practical and the envisioned goal is desirable. We are biologically, emotionally, and culturally conditioned to create safety by resisting change. But as a solopreneur change is the name of the game, and resistance is more that futile — it’s business sabotage. This couldn’t be better illustrated than in the resentment and reluctance too many therapists have towards distance counseling, coaching, web marketing, social media, and multiple streams of income.
As Casey Truffo outlined in the most recent issue of TILT magazine, as I’ve been saying for years, the counseling professions must grow to embrace new realities, or they will be left by the wayside by the more flexible and client-responsive coaching profession and the ever easier technologies that require us to learn to do — and get — business differently.
No Hype Coaching Questions Which of these fears are sabotaging your business success? What steps will you take this month to release yourself from such fears?
No Hype Help Breaking out of a fear-soaked mindset, especially when your fears are reinforced by your family and your colleagues, and your own pressures to succeed is never easy. No Hype Mentor coaching can help you create a sustainable action plan with sensible risk-taking. Best of all, enroll in my newest group program now underway and get coaching while you produce new products for your website!
