Healers Get Vulnerable

Are you a therapist thinking about making the switch to coaching?

Maybe you want to be known for something you care deeply about and get to help people all over the world with that thing. Switching to coaching can be part of making that possible.

How do you start?

What does that transition look and feel like?

If you make that switch, what will people think?

Don't people think coaches are flakey? Will they think that about you?

This week I'm talking to someone who did all that and built a profitable and joyful business over the past five years.

My guest is Megan Hale, Profit First®️ Business Strategist, Former Psychotherapist, and Money Mentor for equity driven entrepreneurs.

Here's some of what we talked about:

• Realizing she wanted to switch from a therapy practice to a coaching practice
• Dealing with people who didn't understand her decision to leave therapy behind
• Getting started with her first coaching offer
• The questions she asked herself to get clear on her vision of success.
• Choosing money as her niche
• Her programs for helping entrepreneurs with their money, including The Money Map
• How she runs her community calls

Now I'll loop back to some takeaways that particularly stand out to me.

Takeaway 1:

You've got to get clear on the vision for your business and perhaps do some deep inner work:

Megan knew she didn't want to open a new therapy practice every 3 years. She had woken up her entrepreneurial spirit and discovered that coaching was a way she could create a business she could take with her anywhere.

Knowing her vision allowed her to make the right choice for her even though other people didn't really see it. She was able to get through the self-doubt by doing some deep work.

Takeaway 2:

Find your definition of success:

For Megan, it was important to stop chasing 6 figures. That was the definition of success she kept hearing about. Then she asked herself what her dreams were and what they would really cost, and she came up with her own number.

Takeaway 3:

Find the most easeful path to get there. Megan couldn't run her business in a complicated way because she was raising 2 little ones and had to work only 10 hours a week. Even if you don't have that constraint, look at what your most important goal is and the most efficient and easeful way to get there. Force yourself to simplify your business. Adding more offers or more marketing tactics doesn't mean your business is stronger. It might just mean it's more complicated.

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/145

How do you create an incredibly valuable and thriving membership community?

As you're about to hear, it takes planning, intention, care and the willingness to experiment.

You're about to get a masterclass on creating a community from Erica Courdae, co-founder along with India Jackson of the Pause On the Play Community: a hub of entrepreneurs and change-makers connecting at the intersection of values and visibility.

Meet Erica Courdae.

She's dedicated her life to expanding how others interact with the world through powerful conversations. As an entrepreneur and certified coach, her work is focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), imperfect allyship, and imposter syndrome. This work has taken her into communities and onto national stages as a speaker and educator at events like AltSummit, ShePodcasts Live, and Being Boss. Erica is also the owner of an inclusive beauty salon, Silver Immersion, and the host of Pause on the Play, a podcast that features open dialogue on topics like company culture, visibility, and mindset.

Here's some of what we talked about:

• Creating the Pause On The Play podcast, almost by accident
• Choosing their platforms intentionally, and why they left Facebook
• Creating different events including workshops, trainings, sound baths, podcast episodes and movie watch parties
• Being experimental and responsive with what they offer the community
• How they draw the right fit people and also detach from the need to be the right fit for everyone at every time
• Being consistent with their values and their communication style so people sign up knowing who they're getting as their community leaders
• Why they stopped using an application for their community and what they do instead
• The deep empathy they see between their community members
• How Erica and India protect their friendship and business relationship in loving ways

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/144

Are you giving yourself permission to create the biz you really want to run?

Are you giving yourself permission to work in the ways you want to work?

My guest today made a move that opened the floodgates and helped her give herself permission to get more creative, honest, and courageous in her work.

That move was expanding from only having a therapy practice into also starting a coaching business.

As you're listening, ask yourself what you're longing to give yourself permission to step into. I encourage you to take that longing seriously.

My guest is Caitlin Olsen, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist as well as a coach. Caitlin is also working on a mental health memoir while building her online course library.

Here's some of what we talked about:

• Why she stepped into coaching and what she was most worried as a rule follower
• Steps she took to protect her license
• Using Marco Polo as a coaching tool
• Creating multiple offers in her coaching business, including two online courses
• Posting about her personal opinions within her LDS community even though it's scary
• Why her business is continuing to shift to more coaching and less therapy over time
• Why she plans to narrow her niche further
• Rituals to manage her business and her kids during the pandemic and a recent relocation

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/143

Show Notes:

What do you do to package yourself up and make yourself acceptable or popular?

What would it be like to be more yourself in every single place you show up?

How would it impact your business to move further in this direction?

In this week's podcast episode, I dive into those questions with Michelle Markwart Deveaux. Michelle works with voice professionals to become the people they need to be in order to run the businesses they want to create.

Michelle runs a thriving business with a lot of clients and a large audience. When she was just a year in, she ran a 30-day experiment. She tried showing up 100% as herself everywhere.

Here's some of what Michelle shares:

• The rules of her 30-day experiment (includes: stop filtering, start swearing!)
• The difference between packaged Michelle and the real Michelle
• How her fear of losing approval came up right away in this experiment
• A moment when she felt herself choosing a more controversial and truer statement during a Facebook Live
• The positive side effect of gaining the right people in your audience
• The long-term benefit of creating the culture and expectations you want within your business

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/142

It's just you and me again today.

I've already talked to some of you about this episode. You've probably already seen the title. Burn your therapy license.

Let me explain. Before you decide I've taken this all WAY too far.

I'm talking about symbolically burning your therapy license. As an exercise.

It may seem extreme, but over these years of helping therapists expand beyond private practice, I've discovered that THIS is sometimes your biggest obstacle.

If you're not a licensed therapist, you may wonder what the hell I'm talking about. You're about to dip into the internal world of the licensed therapist. (Or you may decide to skip this one because it's luckily one obstacle you don't have. )

In fact, now that I've got a good number of non-therapists in my groups, I find that they really help us therapists see how we're holding ourselves back.

When I talk to therapists about their most liberated and exciting vision for their businesses, what they want to accomplish and how they want to work, they talk about:

• Wanting to work in ways that involve less 1:1 sessions. Some folks feel limited by the constraints of private practice, and want to expand in a new direction.
• Feeling burned out or out of balance and on their WAY to burnout.
• Feeling frustrated that they've hit or are approaching an income ceiling with therapy sessions.
• Loving their private practices, but not wanting to grow beyond 10 or 15 sessions per week while wanting to do something in addition to private practice.

With this constellation of issues, you start exploring the possibility of making money in new ways.

You start to dream into the idea of creating innovative programs and collaborating with different kinds of healers.

You may even want to help lead movements (and if you're like...that's not me...it really might be. You just might not know it yet.)

Then within a few minutes, you start worrying about your therapy license.

Perhaps you say:

"What if I do something to mess up my therapy license? I could lose it."

"What will my colleagues think?"

"If I call myself a coach, will people think I'm cheesy?"

Those concerns are enough to stop some of you before you even get to dream into a new vision.

The possibility is shut off within 5 minutes.

Here's my prescription: BURN YOUR THERAPY LICENSE.

A reminder: My suggestion that you burn your therapy license is a symbolic one.

If you've got a therapy license, you may want to keep it! You may not. Either choice is fine. Your therapy license is one important tool.

Symbolically, take a moment to burn it or otherwise let it go, just in your imagination, and just for a moment, so that you can fully explore the next possibility.

Now you're likely to freak out.

Here's how I want you to handle your fears about losing or harming your license: Write them down.

Write down every single concern or fear you've got.

It's like a voice that will probably get louder if you ignore it.

By writing it down, you're telling that voice that you're listening and that you will address those concerns.

Once you've calmed those fears and concerns by giving them a place, get back to burning your therapy license.

Ask yourself this:

In what ways is your fear of losing your license holding you back from serving in the ways you are meant to serve?

Inside that question is an even bigger and more important question: How ARE you meant to serve now?

Now allow yourself to explore.

I'll share a bit about my own journey with burning my therapy license.

I closed my therapy practice this past spring of 2020. It was a bittersweet transition. It was the right time for me to simplify and double down on Rebel Therapist.

Letting my private practice go also freed up space to co-create a second podcast. This new podcast is not for business. It's a personal project that's really important to me. With my cohost Katelyn Dixon, I released season one of Listening to Adoptees this past fall. We feature adult adoptees and foster alum talking about their experiences. I'm an adoptive parent, and Katelyn is an adult adoptee. We bring both of our points of view to these interviews. If you're part of an adoption or foster constellation or you're a professional who works with folks in adoption or foster care, please check it out.

I LOVED my therapy clients, but closing my practice was the right next step for me.

Probably the hardest obstacle to ending my therapy practice was sunk cost fallacy.

Sunk cost fallacy is the idea that if you've invested time, money or energy into something, then it is inherently valuable and you've got to hold onto it to prevent losing that investment.

Without sunk cost fallacy, when you're thinking clearly and in a future focused way, you're considering what makes sense from here to get what you want.

To get around sunk cost fallacy you can ask yourself, "What would I do to get this thing NOW if I didn't already have it?" If you wouldn't do anything to attain it now, it may not be valuable to you.

If you think I'm telling you that the ultimate path is to let go of your private practice, please know that is absolutely not true. Most of the therapists I work with choose to keep their therapy licenses at least for a long time or indefinitely.

Some don't. Either choice is great if it's for the right reasons.

Here are a few examples of folks who are building businesses beyond private practice:

I love sharing examples because they give you a sense of what's possible when you let yourself think about what you actually want.

• Ayrielle Williams created Heal So You Can Live, a course to help heal after an abusive relationship.
• Bart Hatler created a program for singles who want to unblock barriers to finding romantic love.
• Debbie Schwartz created Comfort For Caregivers, a program for overwhelmed caregivers to take care of themselves while protecting the health of another.
• Carissa Karner created the joyful business course, a program for entrepreneurs who want to create and grow joyful businesses.
• Rachel Fusco created The geek guild, a program for high school juniors to walk through the college application process with sanity.
• Maureen Cotton (an interspiritual minister, not a therapist) created a program to help couples plan unique and powerful ceremonies.

I got to work with these smart and innovative people in Create Your Program. Learn more and join me next time here: https://rebeltherapist.me/create.

The first time I shared the concept of burning your therapy license was with my email list. I got more responses than I've ever gotten to an email. You told me about what your fear of losing your license might be holding you back from.

Here are some themes that came up over and over:

• I want to serve people outside of the state where I'm licensed.
• I want to use effective interventions that don't fall strictly within my therapy license.
• I want to be more authentic and I worry about disclosing anything in my marketing that could damage my reputation or my license.
• I want to serve people in a decolonized way and that vision for me falls outside of my therapy license.
• I want to work in a way that aligns with my values, which my therapy license in some ways doesn't.
• I'm ready to give up my license so I can work in all the ways I'm meant to.
• I'm excited about an idea for a program that doesn't fall within my therapy license.
• My practice is full and I want to do more without adding to it.
• I'm feeling boxed in, and the idea of symbolically burning my license is giving me the freedom to think differently.
• I have already symbolically burned my license even though I am maintaining it as a useful tool.

There's no one right answer to what you'll do once you've given yourself the freedom to dream about your possibilities.

What about you?

When you allow yourself to symbolically burn your therapy license, what possibilities arise for you? How are you meant to serve next?

I'd love to know.

Email me at [email protected]

Write your message or record a voice memo for me. I'd love to share your thoughts in your voice.

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/141

It's just you and me for this episode.

I've been watching you, and I see where you're getting stuck in your business.

You start out wanting to make a bigger impact and wanting to work in more creative ways. You feel drawn to expanding.

You're scared. And you're excited.

You start taking action.

Then you run into obstacles from outside and also inside.

Here are a few of the places I see you getting the MOST stuck and what I see you doing to get through that stuckness:

The quitting trap.

You take any little sign that this isn't a good idea. You walk away, or at least consider walking away.

Examples of what you experience that makes you want to give up:

Observing a colleague in your niche

Running into a tech issue you don't know how to solve

Nancy Jane Smith, author of The Happier Approach explains that our inner Fake BFF encourages us to quit.

The way through this trap:

Commit to your idea completely for a designated time.

Set a date when you'll reconsider this, but commit to it until then. Don't allow yourself to waste time on quitting and restarting until you've followed through.

The vagueness trap.

You aren't willing to get specific enough about your niche, about who YOU are, or about how you work.

Examples of when you get vague:

You start clarifying your niche, then you remember people you've helped who fit outside that niche...and you try to serve everyone.

You start getting specific about how you work, then you meet someone who doesn't like that way of working...and you try to please everyone.

The way through this trap:

Allow yourself to be uncomfortable with taking a stand for your specific right fit participant, and for YOUR way of working. Allow discomfort when people don't like it.

I'm not for everyone. I'm willing to get specific about who I am and who I'm for and how I work. Some people walk away, and the gift is getting to reach the people I'm meant to work with.

The planning trap.

You get stuck in planning, researching, and creating behind the scenes.

Examples of how you over-prepare:

You build an ENTIRE course in private before getting feedback.

You take 80 courses and listen to 100 podcasts on marketing before you actually get your thing out there.

You talk to lots of friends and family members trying to get their approval of your idea before you start talking to potential collaborators or participants.

The way through this trap:

Allow imperfection. Get your idea out there before it's ready. Be honest about what you don't know. Don't insist on bringing certainty. Don't sell yourself short as you are right now. You will improve your offer through every iteration.

Talk to the people who need what you do and talk to the people who also serve who you want to serve.

Build collaboration and openness into the DNA of your business.

If you're ready to create your pilot program and make a bigger impact with your work, join me for Create Your Program. I've designed this experience to help you NOT get stuck in any of these ways.

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/140

What will YOUR signature program look like? How will you create it?

One of the best ways for you to understand how you'll get there is to hear the stories of entrepreneurs who have taken their gifts and turned them into online programs.

My guest this week shares how she created a successful online group program using a ton of intuition as well as experience.

Meet Michelle Irving. She's best known for 2 areas of work: helping women find Feminine Maturity and guiding women into the Sacred Power of Illness. She's been bed bound twice in the last decade with serious illness herself. She now mentors women around the world.

Here's some of what we talked about:

• Creating the program Finding Feminine Maturity
• Indentifying 7 powers of finding Feminine Maturity as she's mapped them out.
• How she uses the myth of Persophone and the journey to the underworld in her work
• Creating a strong and safe container with clear agreements and boundaries for herself and the participants
• Using Kajabi, Zoom and Facebook as the program platforms
• Encouraging welcome videos from each participant in the Facebook group
• Why she does a debriefing session with each participant
• How she finds the rhythm of when to run this program based on her energy
• How she runs her 6-week launch process while staying in her own maturity and ease
• Working with her own body, intuition and energy to care for herself

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/139

This week I'm talking to Lindsay Bryan-Podvin, a biracial financial therapist, speaker, and author. In her clinical practice, she helps people get their mind and money in balance. She's also expanded her services to help private practice therapists grow sustainable practices from the inside out.

Last time Lindsay was on Rebel Therapist Podcast was almost exactly a year ago. Check out Lindsay's episode on December 3rd, 2019 about creating and launching her first scaled offer. It's a popular and valuable episode! Here it is. https://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/113

I was just a guest on Lindsay's podcast, Mind Money balance, and we started talking about how we've both made changes to our business practices this year.

The 2020 uprising has helped just about everybody take another look at our values around anti-oppression and liberation, to do a deep inquiry, and to root out any practices that don't align with the kind of impact we want to have. It's also an opportunity to add in practices that move us and our clients towards liberation.

For both Lindsay and I, these weren't NEW questions or new values. It was more like a punctuation mark in our journeys to be anti-oppressive in our businesses.

You're going to hear an honest back and forth in this episode about some of the changes we've both made in our businesses and why we've made them.

Lindsay shares what she's changed in her marketing, sales, and in delivering her offers, and how these changes have impacted her bottom line and her emotional life.

Here's some of what we talked about:

• What decolonizing her business means to Linsday
• Increasing transparency and honesty in all aspects of her business
• Changing her sales copy
• Leaving all traces of "bro marketing" behind
• Going against the common advice by having 2 niches
• Why we both dislike false scarcity and (some) countdown timers
• The fear she felt when she opened up about her past mistakes
• The liberation she's experiencing in her business

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/138

I ran my first remote coaching group using email and google docs. Zoom wasn't really a big thing yet, so we used the phone. I'm so glad I didn't wait. I'm grateful to my former self for not automating or polishing the offer before jumping in.

The 3 entrepreneurs who signed up will always be so special to me.

I use more sophisticated tools in my programs now, and I like to geek out about choosing a course platform or integrating and automating my different systems.

Please don't allow yourself to get confused about this, though.

The fancy tools and platforms are not what give value to your participants and clients.

That's not where we should start. We need to start with the value we're providing as therapists, coaches and healers. We need to start with the transformations we're helping our participants make.

In this week's episode, I'm talking with a therapist and entrepreneur who just launched her first online program, and I am so excited to share her with you.

Hannah Green is a holistic psychotherapist and ferrywoman to the inner depths. She works with individuals, couples and groups.

Here's some of what we talked about:

• How she created and launched her online group for women this fall: Embracing The Shadow.
• A behind the scenes look at how she creates her beautiful and mystical email newsletter.
• Pivoting to a completely online therapy practice in 2020.
• Using simple tech and getting started with the program quickly.
• Changes she made between iterations of Embracing The Shadow
• Creating a bold and distinctive sales page
• Her fears about putting herself out there in a bold way.
• And perhaps my favorite part of the interview: Hannah describing her magical morning rituals.

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/137

Why is it important to have a unique framework as opposed to just being magic at what you do?

And how do you find your framework?

When I started coaching entrepreneurs, I was helping them one by one, using methods I learned from other people and co-creating the experience each time. Nothing wrong with that. Then over time I developed a framework that includes lots of parts that are uniquely mine.

To claim my framework I had to first observe it, then get clear about the elements, write it all down and then articulate it for the people I help. And I refine it over time.

Having a framework has deepened my work and set me free. You'll hear more about how that happens for me in this conversation.

But much more than that, you'll learn from my guest.

Hillary Rea is the founder of Tell Me A Story. She trains entrepreneurs, leaders, and change makers how to use the art of storytelling as a powerful communication tool. In this episode you'll hear what claiming her framework has made possible.

Here's some of what we talked about:

• Why it helps to have a unique method
• How she uses her own framework in telling her stories
• What she learned by listening to thousands of stories
• Why she left social media
• The difference between being "liked" and truly connecting
• Taking a stand with your stories
• What she learned from being thrown off during a corporate presentation
• Realizing her inner eye rolls and grumbles were giving her important information she needed to share
• Rituals and meaningful choices she makes about her time

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/136