Welcome to the Business of Psychology Podcast, and welcome back to our miniseries on the beliefs that can make it really difficult for us to get started in independent practice or to grow our practice if we already have one. In this series, I'm reflecting on the beliefs that I hear most commonly from my coaching clients and the ones that have been pinging around in my head for years as well, and thinking about where they come from, but also what we can do to try and move through when we want to act against some of these beliefs and how uncomfortable that that can make us.

Full show notes for this episode available at The Business of Psychology

Links:

Episode 182: Neurodivergence: Having the big conversations and living your values with Dr Naomi Fisher

Episode 68: How to launch an online course as a psychologist with Dr Marianne Trent

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@drrosiegilderthorp

In my new mini course, The Magnetic Profile, I walk you through one specific business task. Over five short lessons, we use my Values, Voice, Impact framework to help you choose who your profile is for, say what they most need to hear, and plug it all into a simple template that you can use on directory sites, your website, and as a business asset that I'm going to show you how to repurpose in 100 different ways to help the right clients to find you. Most importantly, you'll come out of the course with a finished profile and proof that you can do this business thing in a way that feels ethical and manageable. You can find all the details here: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/the-magnetic-profile

The thing that I want to talk about today is the fear of judgment. This sounds different in different people's heads, but I hear a lot of, "Oh, I'm really scared about what my ex-colleagues are going to think," or "Will people think I've sold out? Will people accuse me of being a charlatan, or not good enough, or not experienced enough to offer this thing?" And that really drives a lot of people's reluctance to be visible, especially online. And as you'll know if you've listened to previous series’ of The Business of Psychology, I've recorded episodes recently with people like Naomi Fisher and Marianne Trent, where we've talked about this because it's a very big deal in our community; this is not in people's heads. I think psychology and psychotherapy can both be quite judgmental professional communities, and the way that we're interacting online at the moment is often not very compassionate and very judgmental. So this fear doesn't come from nowhere. Even the stuff we talked about in the first episode of this miniseries about the belief that ‘I'm not good at business’, and how often that can come from this massive pit of shame that people feel about needing money and needing to be paid for their work, and choosing that narrative as a way of keeping themselves safe from being seen as somebody that is money motivated, all of that actually comes from this feeling of being judged by our peers.

I'm not going to get into too much the reality of that and the reason that happens, because I know we've talked about that a lot in other episodes. But what I want to bring to your attention is the impact that might be having on the way that you're running your business, because sometimes it's so ingrained within us that it can fly under the radar, and we don't really realize how much our behavior is impacted by this concern about what our peers might be thinking of us.

The first thing that I see is ultra-genericism. This might be directory site profiles, website copy, social media content; incredibly generic, vanilla, safe content that doesn't really say anything at all. It's so bland it's pointless, and I always say to my clients, if your voice is not in it, if it isn't something which you're desperate to share with the world, don't share it at all. Because the world is so saturated and full of boring, generic mental health content, there is no point spending your valuable time creating more boring, vanilla mental health content. It's just not going to stand out enough to have any benefit to you or reach any potential clients. But I totally get it. I get why that feels safe, because you can't criticize something that's super generic. That's the first way that I see this showing up, and people really don't realize they're doing that most of the time. It's just what feels natural for them to share.

People might avoid sharing any photos or any personal details. I did this. I started my practice and tried to hide behind a brand. I shared a logo, I had a quite good name for the practice, and I hid myself behind all of that because I didn't want anybody to see me at all. It didn't work, spoiler alert! You might find yourself, if this is a big problem for you, over-editing, trying to sound like someone that you're not in everything that you write, everything that you say if you're in a visible setting. If you go to networking, for example, and find yourself talking in a really unnatural way, it may be that this fear of judgment is governing your behavior.

Something I often talk about with my coaching clients, and this is often most useful in our group coaching sessions, is to assess the real risk versus the imagined risk, because there is real risk, and so we do need to deal with that. We can't just pretend that nobody's ever going to judge you. They probably will, but we need to think about the reality of that and whether that reality matters, and the reality of not doing the things that you're avoiding because of your fear of judgment, and whether that matters. So balancing that up, the consideration of what it's costing you to keep yourself small and invisible and generic, and weighing that against the potential that some colleagues may make judgmental statements.

The other thing I always encourage people to think about when this is a big problem is who they're writing for, and to be really clear on the benefits for the client of everything they're putting out there. This is something that I teach through all of my coaching, that the client's need comes first. So we're not putting out a social media post unless we're really clear on what the benefit is to the potential client. We think about how what I'm saying here is going to leave them feeling? What is it going to give them? If we don't have a strong reason that it's going to be beneficial to the client, whether they come on and pay for our services, or whether they're just passively absorbing this content, we want to always be leaving those people with a benefit. So if we know that, if we're really clear on, "Okay, I'm worried that my colleague might read this and judge me, but I'm also really confident that somebody in this client group reading this is going to get a real benefit from it," very often we can move through the discomfort of what our colleague thinks because we know what we're trying to do for the client, and we're really confident and happy that that is aligned with our values. So it's a good example of how we can use our values like a North Star to guide us through the swamp of a fear of judgment, which never feels nice really.

The other thing I always encourage people to think about is the concept of locus of control, and specifically that you cannot control what your colleagues think or why they're going to think that about you. It's classic, isn't it? People have their own psychological reasons for judging other people. We can't control any of those. And so you can be really careful about what you say, you can be really careful about what you put out there, but the reality is, if you do anything, there are going to be people that don't like you and that judge you for it, especially if you're successful and you get in front of lots of people, then it's absolutely inevitable that you're going to face judgment and that you're going to annoy some people. What you have to be clear on is what makes that worth it for you. There are some battles that I choose not to fight. There are some things that I see happening, and I don't put my head above the parapet and I don't fight for every cause that I believe in because I'm a human being and there's a threshold for what conflict I can take, but there are certain things that I will speak up about and I am willing to be visible talking about even when not everybody will agree with me, and that's a lesson I really had to learn writing my book about being a parent to autistic and ADHD children and putting out my content on my Dr Rosie Gilderthorp Instagram profile, which felt so much more vulnerable than stuff I share in other places because I know not everyone will agree with me. We don't all agree on issues surrounding neurodivergence and labels and all of that stuff, and so it feels scary to me, and it will never stop feeling scary because I like to be liked, like we all do, and I don't like it when people get in touch to say that they hated something that I said, and it devastates me if somebody's upset by something that I said. But I know who I'm doing it for, I know that I'm sharing messages that there is a big group of people that need to hear, and I get lots of positive feedback too from people that have been helped by those more controversial things that I've put out there, and that's what I hold onto and that's what gets me through this worry about judgment from my peers. And I'd encourage you to think in the same way. Be really clear on why you're doing this, and then it's much easier to see that the people that might judge you for it have got their own stuff going on. You can't control it, and it's not worth sacrificing your mission and your values to try and make them comfortable because you can't control it anyway, and you might never be able to make them comfortable.

I know that this has been a short one from me today, but I hope that it's been helpful if you're somebody that feels maybe that fear of judgment has been running the show in your practice so far. I hope it's helped you to see that you're not alone, that we all struggle with it, even those of us that are quite visible, and you might see us popping up a lot online. It never actually feels comfortable, it's just that we know why we're doing it, and we have a strong enough reason to want to do it, to move through that discomfort.

So now you need to find those ways of being visible that feel aligned with your values, and that feel ethical and helpful for your client group as well. This isn't about forcing yourself to do stuff that feels shouty or performative or marketing that isn't aligned with who you are and who your ideal client group is. Often the first step is about having a really clear message about who you are, who you help, and the reasons that you're a really good person to support your client group, because that's something we can really struggle with when we're fearful of judgment. And if you don't have that underpinning everything else you do, all of your marketing efforts are likely to be thwarted by it.

This is something that I can help you do in my new mini-course, The Magnetic Profile. Over just five short lessons, we work together to decide who you're writing for, who those people are that you really want to help and support. We get really clear on what they're struggling with and how they would talk about that in their own words, and then we talk about your experience in a way that feels honest and helpful to the client, putting their needs first, matching your experience with what they need to hear from you. By the end, you'll have a profile that you feel comfortable with and that makes it much easier to take the other steps you need to take to be visible. If you'd like that kind of guided support, you can find all the details and join The Magnetic Profile mini-course at the link that's in the show notes, I would love to see you in there.

Welcome to The Business of Psychology podcast and our special miniseries on the beliefs that keep people stuck in either a private practice that doesn't really work for them or that stop them getting started in private practice at all. These are mini episodes where I'm sharing the things that I've learned from coaching hundreds of other psychologists and therapists and also going through my own mental struggles with the rollercoaster that is business. Today I want to talk about procrastination and overwhelm, and specifically how frequently I hear people saying that they're just not the kind of person that can overcome their procrastination or overwhelm.

Full show notes for this episode available at The Business of Psychology

Links:

Episode 179: Why every therapist needs to use social media to improve their SEO

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@drrosiegilderthorp

In my new mini course, The Magnetic Profile, I walk you through one specific business task. Over five short lessons, we use my Values, Voice, Impact framework to help you choose who your profile is for, say what they most need to hear, and plug it all into a simple template that you can use on directory sites, your website, and as a business asset that I'm going to show you how to repurpose in 100 different ways to help the right clients to find you. Most importantly, you'll come out of the course with a finished profile and proof that you can do this business thing in a way that feels ethical and manageable. You can find all the details here: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/the-magnetic-profile

I think most psychologists and therapists acknowledge that all human beings use procrastination as a technique sometimes, and that it is part of a normal human experience to get overwhelmed sometimes. But I think a lot of people do have this story about themselves that they are a procrastinator, or they are someone who becomes overwhelmed easily, and as a result, the world of successful business is not available to them. And this really troubles me, and I have to say that something I think is unhelpful about the way that some people's late diagnosis of neurodivergence is framed, is that some people will receive that diagnostic label and then think that writes them off from being able to ever achieve success in business. Or they'll heavily criticize themselves because their assessment has illuminated perhaps things that they're not so brilliant at and they will feel like they're going to have to push a boulder up a hill to be successful in business. When actually, if we think psychologically about what procrastination and overwhelm actually are, then there are so many ways that we can use the strengths that lie behind those tendencies to supercharge our businesses.

Some of the most successful clients that I have worked with would identify themselves as procrastinators and people who struggle with overwhelm, because those come from places of deep care and passion for the people that they want to support with their businesses. I think it's really important that, while it's helpful to identify in yourself if you do have tendencies towards procrastination or becoming overwhelmed, we shouldn't allow that kind of story to become a way that we define ourselves that then blocks us from looking for the ways we can play to our strengths to implement good business advice that we might be given. I want to share today, how we can move through the blocking belief that we might have about ourselves, often by accepting a bit of support where we might need it.

Something I hear all the time from clients that come to me for coaching is that they've signed up for coaching because they're really annoyed with themselves. They've usually done loads of work, but they feel like they've got about 20 tabs open on their browser and nothing is actually getting completed. They can never tick anything off their list because it's never good enough. Some people will talk about this as procrastination. Other people will talk about the emotional experience. They'll talk about feeling completely overwhelmed. So they open all the tabs, but then they never feel like they engage properly with anything that they start because they become overwhelmed, and they just run away from it. If we think about where this comes from psychologically, you would not feel that way if you didn't care about your potential clients, if you didn't really want this business to be successful. So although this is classic avoidance behavior, there's motivation behind it, and where there's motivation, we can work with that. I never feel despondent if I have a client who is a procrastinator, who's becoming overwhelmed, because it actually tells me that they want to do this, that deep down, this is important to them, or this wouldn't be procrastination, it would just be something that they decided they weren't going to pursue.

We know the brain likes to procrastinate because it allows us to avoid the potential for shame, rejection, or failure. An excellent short-term strategy. It gives us the illusion of safety because we get to stay safe in our research mode, which a lot of us really enjoy. But the trouble is procrastination and perfectionism go hand in hand. It is so likely that the reason that you feel like you need to avoid these tasks is that the bar you've set for yourself is super high, that you want this to be the best, the most perfect independent practice that your community has ever seen. That can make every task feel too big to start. It's also true that if you set the bar for yourself that you need to have a complete understanding of something, it can become overwhelming really quickly. This often happens when people talk to me about overwhelm rather than procrastination. Often it's because they're expecting themselves to become a lawyer, because it tends to be that people get really stuck in the overwhelm around the legal aspects of setting up their practice. This can be because they look at the legal templates and think that they need to be able to understand why every comma is in the place that it is. We do provide training with our legal documents because I want you to understand the principles behind them, but the fact is, unless you're going to train in commercial law like Clare Veal from Aubergine Legal, our lovely lawyer, has done, then you're not going to understand every minute detail of your contracts and policies. We can understand the broad brush principles, but we're not lawyers and we don't need to become lawyers. We have our own expertise and that's why we pay Clare Veal to draft those templates for us, because you don't need to become a lawyer. And if you think that you do because you believe everything needs to be perfect and you need to be in full control of every minute detail of your practice, then of course that's going to be overwhelming.

The other thing that I think contributes to overwhelm and procrastination is a sense that people need to do everything at once, like getting their practice up and running and fully competent tomorrow. That's not possible. I am a big believer that we can make a lot of progress, my core coaching program is called Start Up in 90 Days, because you absolutely can, over 90 days, get a practice up and running and clients coming in. That is possible. One week is not possible, not to do it to the standard that you're going to want. I think often people have a really unrealistic expectation of themselves, that they're going to be able to learn everything they need to learn and implement it all in a very short period of time. And of course, that is massively overwhelming.

The other thing I see is people over-consuming advice. Sometimes people do this with this podcast or with my coaching programs. I'll see in the backend of my coaching website that they've watched every single one of my lessons, and that's a red flag, because if you watch them all in the first week that you're in the coaching platform, that tells me you're taking on board a lot of information, but you're not taking the action. When I coach people, I give very short, 10 or 15 minutes of information, and then I give something practical for you to do to move it forward in your business. The reason I do that is that we are really prone to overwhelming ourselves by thinking about the whole picture. And actually, we tend to get much more success if I give people a template of the business plan that they're going to have fully created by the end of the program, because I do want people to know what we're going to cover and how everything fits together, but then I encourage you to go step by step. Because if you think about the whole big thing, of course that's overwhelming. But if you just take the next step, the next thing we need to do, then it is much easier to get started.

The other thing which contributes to the sense of overwhelm is comparing yourself to people who are years ahead of you and thinking that you can reverse engineer from what you see on the outside. Very often people will scroll Instagram and see somebody with a successful practice and instantly start criticizing themselves for not doing it like them yet. So then they'll try to do too much. They'll try to make everything happen overnight to be just like that person. But what they haven't seen is the years that it took for that person to get to where they are now, for the support structures and foundations that they put in place to enable them to be able to do the thing that you can see. For example, if I'm doing a launch for something, you're going to see me in lots of places. You're going to see that I've got Substack, I'm posting on Instagram, on LinkedIn. You're going to see that I've got Facebook ads. You might see my Google ads. You might hear me guesting on podcasts and all of that stuff. I can only do all of that because I have a team who run the admin of my practice for me, and I've got really good support in all the other operational parts of my business as well. So I'm showing up for the stuff where you see me showing up, but I'm not having to do all of the stuff that you're probably doing right now behind the scenes. In the early days, I could not have been as visible as I am now around a launch because I didn't have all that support, so I was having to do all of the backend stuff. That is not possible for you to see from the outside, and a lot of business owners don't talk about the support they have behind the scenes because it's not relevant to the thing that they're launching, but that doesn't mean it's not there. You also don't know how other people's circumstances might be different from yours. I only actually work about 16 hours a week, probably less some weeks, because my children have additional needs. They don't do full days at school. I have to take lots of time off to go and support them for various things that they need from me. So that means that I can't get done in a week what my amazing colleague that does 9:00 till 5:00, Monday to Friday can get done. So if I was comparing myself to her, I'm going to feel really bad and probably really overwhelmed all the time because I'm going to give myself an impossible to-do list.

One of the reasons I love working with people in coaching is working out what is realistic and what success looks like for you in your real life. And when you do that, instantly, it tends to become a little bit less overwhelming because you're no longer striving for some idea of perfection that doesn't exist for you. You're working towards a life which actually works for you and your family. I think that kind of comparisonitis that we talk about so often is a really big contributor to procrastination and overwhelm, so getting stuck in procrastination or overwhelm does have a cost to it. People often come to me saying that they got burnt out in their NHS job because they were procrastinating making the decision to change. It was so difficult to get through the procrastination or the overwhelm that they stayed stuck, and stayed somewhere that was harming their mental health, for longer than they needed to. I also think people can miss out on the learning that comes from taking imperfect action when they get trapped in procrastination or overwhelm. It's another thing I love to help people out of, because there is only so much that we can learn before we hit publish. Most of the most valuable stuff I've learned about running my practice, I've learned from making mistakes, from putting something out there and then being like, "Oh, that was terrible, that didn't work, but this is why." And then taking different action as a result of that. If you aren't able to go through that process because you're so trapped by this horrible feeling of overwhelm and the need to avoid that, then it can be really difficult to get that learning. As a result of that, people that are trapped by this often, if they do have a private practice, they'll stay reliant on a referral stream that might be a bit patchy or a bit low paid, and they end up feeling bad about themselves because the business never really flourishes in the way that they want it to. Their lives are hard because they're not making enough money to get the support to build the business that works for their lifestyle. It can be really damaging.

As I've mentioned already, there are lots of psychological approaches that we might take in coaching to help somebody to get out of this trap. We might use compassion, I might get people to think from different perspectives, how this would look if it was happening to a friend, and what they might suggest to a friend or a colleague in a similar situation. I'll try and help people activate their compassionate self, and take that perspective that a compassionate person would have on their business, rather than the very self-critical one that they're often stuck in. Alongside that, and the thing which you can do for yourself too, is getting stuck into just one practical task. Rather than thinking about all the things that need to be done in order to make a business successful, I'll often encourage somebody that's prone to procrastination or overwhelm to laser focus on just one thing that they can do for their business that will have a tangible result. Because if you can get that dopamine of completing something, and then you get continued positive feedback because this asset that you've created is working for you in your business, that can really help unstick that procrastination and reduce that overwhelm. Because you start to see, "I am capable of breaking something big down into a small task, completing it, getting somewhere positive, and moving on to the next thing."

If you're feeling really stuck in procrastination, or you're frequently falling into these feelings of overwhelm, I hope I've made it really clear that this isn't a motivation problem. You're not lazy, you're very motivated, and that's exactly why this is coming up for you. I'm sure you're aware already that this is about avoidance, and it's a very understandable and very common mechanism for dealing with the discomfort that comes from the vulnerability of setting up a business. You're not alone, but one of the kindest things that you can do for yourself right now is to narrow your focus to one meaningful thing that you do for your business, an asset you can create, and make everything else wait for now.

For a lot of people I work with, the thing that I recommend is creating a really good directory site profile. Because once that exists, every other bit of marketing has somewhere useful to direct people to, and a really strong basis. You've probably heard me talk on the podcast recently about creating that digital footprint that lets AI and search engines really understand who you are and who they should be recommending to come to you. A really strong directory profile can be reused in so many different places that it can really turbocharge that digital footprint and make sure that your digital presence is doing the heavy lifting and bringing those referrals to you. It's a small task that has a big ripple effect across your business.

I have a mini course at the moment to support you through this, called The Magnetic Profile. Over five days, I walk you through step by step creating or refreshing your directory profile using my Values, Voice, Impact framework, so you don't have to look at the finished product and get overwhelmed. I am going to give you something short and actionable that you can do in 10, 15 minutes a day over five days. At the end, you will have that dopamine hit of having something finished that will start bringing the right people into your practice. I think this is hopefully a bit of an antidote to that summer feeling of procrastination or getting stuck and overwhelmed that you might be feeling if you know that you want to start your business in September or you want to make a change in your business in September. I really hope if this episode resonated with you today, that you're going to find that useful. You can find the link to sign up in the show notes, and I would love to see you in there.

In this miniseries I'm going to talk about some of the beliefs that I see most commonly in psychologists and therapists that keep people small, safe, and not really getting the most benefit out of being in independent practice. I'm going to share how if we can become aware of them, there are practical steps we can take that most of the time will get us through the discomfort that comes along with these beliefs. If that can give you a little bit more confidence to step forward in your business, I will be extremely happy.

Today we're going to talk about the 'I'm not good at business' story. This is the one I told myself so relentlessly at the beginning of my practice, and I hear in around 50% of calls that I have with coaching clients. We're going to talk about the belief, where it comes up, how it sabotages your attempts to start or grow in independent practice, and look at some ways we can build new evidence to counteract the belief and move through the discomfort that it causes.

Full show notes for this episode available at The Business of Psychology

Links for Rosie:

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@drrosiegilderthorp

In my new mini course, The Magnetic Profile, I walk you through one specific business task. Over five short lessons, we use my Values, Voice, Impact framework to help you choose who your profile is for, say what they most need to hear, and plug it all into a simple template that you can use on directory sites, your website, and as a business asset that I'm going to show you how to repurpose in 100 different ways to help the right clients to find you. Most importantly, you'll come out of the course with a finished profile and proof that you can do this business thing in a way that feels ethical and manageable. You can find all the details here: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/the-magnetic-profile

At the beginning of my practice, I didn't think that I had the kind of personality that would make a good business owner. I'd been told throughout my life that I was quite soft, that I was quite gentle, that people would walk all over me. Elements of that were true. In my personal life, I don't particularly like to be the boss. I don't like telling people what to do. It's certainly true that in a negotiation, I will not do what they do on The Apprentice and be proud of having a laser-focused obsession with profit, and I'm not single-minded. We consume a lot of media about what good business looks like, and it's this very shark-ish, profit-focused, screw you, I'm going to take what I want attitude. I'd grown up watching The Apprentice and Dragon's Den and absorbing those narratives that don't fit my personality at all. So I think I'd bought the idea that if you weren't like that, you weren't good at business. Obviously that is not true at all, because when you get out into the business community and meet people who are really successful, you discover quickly that the people that make it to the top are warm, they are empathic, they're really good at working out what people need from them and finding creative ways to meet that need. There are some exceptions, but in the industries that we're interested in, in mental health or education, or industries adjacent to wellbeing, if you lack that empathy and you lack any compassion, it's very difficult for you to come up with the kind of ideas that are going to take off. I also learned that building relationships and being a trustworthy person to be in a business relationship with is a real accelerant to business growth. That's something, that if you're completely single-minded and out for the profit margin, and have no passion for helping people or your local business community, is incredibly hard to fake. Establishing meaningful relationships where people will give you a leg up, I think would be impossible if you had that kind of personality type.

What I discovered quite quickly in my business journey was that leaning into the skills that I have as a psychologist, the fact that I am much more interested in helping people solve their problems than I am making a profit, the fact that I genuinely care about the people that I meet at business networking, and I really get quite invested and excited in their business problems and want to try and help, those were superpowers that made me stand out, that helped me build the relationship network, which accelerated my business to being quite successful reasonably quickly.

What I do in coaching is try and encourage other people to really recognise the strengths that you have in your personality, that can be rocket fuel for your business, and to deal with what might be the limitations. I know that because I'm not naturally 100% focused on the profit margin, I won't make a deal with somebody on the spot because I know if I do, it's very likely that I'll undercharge or do something that compromises the health of my business, because I'm excited to work with them, and I'm not very good at doing the mental maths on the spot. I know that about myself, so I changed my sales process so that I'm sending the proposal after the call. I am never talking about the exact solution that I'm going to offer on a call. You'll notice if you ever do a coaching discovery call with me, that most of the time I'll talk about what you think about whether StartUp might be right for you. I might give you my opinion about whether one of my coaching programs is likely to be a good fit, but I won't make the offer and send you through all the details until after our call, because I don't always make brilliant decisions for my business in the heat of the moment. Rather than criticizing myself and saying, "I'm not good at business, so I shouldn't do it," I take an approach where I allow myself to play to my strengths, and then I mitigate the bits that I'm not so good at by getting in support or just switching up my processes so that I have more time for the bits that I know I'm going to struggle with.

That's the kind of thing that you can do if this ‘I'm not good at business’ story isn't dominating your psychology. While it's front and center, you don't see any of that. In those early days where I thought I was just bad at business, it felt very existential. It was like, either I make this really successful really quickly, or I've got no business being in business, and I should get out and get back into an employed role, which wasn't even possible for me. I think it's really important to try and move past this belief, otherwise you can make a decision which is based on very black and white thinking, defining yourself either as good or bad at business, when in reality there are so many ways that all different personalities can be good at business if we understand ourselves well and we're willing to structure our work around that.

It's really interesting to consider where this ‘I'm not good at business’ belief that is so pervasive in our community actually comes from, because most people going into independent practice actually don't have any business experience. We by definition don't have evidence for this belief, and yet it is so common. I think the answer is that it's something that's really baked into the culture, in the NHS, but also in our training pathways.

There's so many deep reasons that might be baked into our culture, and I think one that needs talking about is the relationship between psychology, psychotherapy, and privilege. I think we have a strange cultural problem with the concept of earning money and a deeply ingrained belief that people that want money are less pure, less compassionate, less caring than people who don't even think about money. I could give you direct quotes of people saying that to me in training, so I don't think it's that much of a stretch. As with almost everything, I think that is uncomfortably linked with the class system that we have here in the UK, and that potentially psychology and psychotherapy came from this kind of upper class tradition where it wasn't polite to talk about money or think about money, but that's because you didn't have to talk or think about money. It's our job to challenge that and to think about whether we really believe in this way of thinking, or whether we want to start thinking a bit differently.

If this is the culture that you've been trained in, then the ‘I'm not good at business’ story is actually an affirmative one. It's one that began as positive; people telling themselves, "I'm doing this low-paid work because I'm a good person, because I really care about people, and that means that I must be rejecting all things that are about money and acquisition of money, and business falls under that category.” I think it's a classic example of stories that were once positive for us becoming toxic and holding us back as we develop through our lives and they start to become more problematic. If you are plagued by this, then getting together in your peer supervision group and chatting about it and thinking through where did this story come from for us, and is it satisfactory for the lives that we're living now, is really helpful.

We develop stories based on the things that we're rewarded for, and I don't remember anything in my undergraduate or in my doctorate where you were praised for coming up with ideas that would have commercial application. It wasn't part of the way that we thought about making an impact in mental health, and obviously that's quite different now. Now I spend loads of my time thinking about how we can use the commercial world to really start to change beliefs around mental health. That's something I'm really passionate about, because in my mind, while it sits in this kind of health silo, we're not going to have the cultural impact that I would like us to have. I think about it now, but I can't think of any time in any of my training that we were encouraged to think in that way or would've been praised for thinking in that way. Whereas you were heavily praised if you did stuff like voluntary work or internships, that kind of thing. Those were heavily praised and competed for and seen as a really positive thing. I think what we're rewarded for really contributes to how these beliefs develop.

I think we have to consider that we haven't had many visible role models who are both ethical and entrepreneurial because it doesn't really make the press. The people that do operate in that way are not likely to be on a show like The Apprentice because we don't make great television. We're very steady and boring and kind and nice. Occasionally somebody like that will break through onto a media platform, but often it's taken a long time for people to take notice of those people, and they get a lot less airtime than their more controversial, usually more shark-ish counterparts. We're just not seeing the reality that many people who are very good at business are very ethical and compassionate and have a real passion for helping people. I've been really fortunate to meet people in all kinds of different contexts as part of my MBA, and I can tell you there are people in the most high-powered corporate jobs that you would expect to have completely different beliefs and values systems to a psychologist or a therapist who spent most of their life in the public sector, and they don't. Actually, they often do their jobs for really similar reasons to us. They might enjoy the money, but they're not always 100% obsessed with personal gain, in the way that they're portrayed in the media. I think to sum up, the media does not help us with these beliefs. It sets us up to think in this binary way that I'm either a good person who doesn't do business very well, or I'm a bad person who's amazing at business, and that's not the reality.

So how does the ‘I'm not good at business’ belief show up in the way that we behave and become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy? If you already think that you're not very good at business, you're very likely to avoid the stuff that you need to be good at in order to have a good, solid business.

• Finance and Fees: If you're telling yourself you're not good at business, it's very difficult to learn all the terminology you need to have an informed conversation with your accountant or understand whatever software you use, is showing you. That means that you won't make an effective business plan because you won't be able to model out what would happen if you take this decision or that decision, because you've avoided understanding your financial position properly. You might avoid raising your fees to the level they need to be to sustain your business. You don't realise that you're slowly eroding the money in the business rather than adding to it by undercharging and spending too much on things like CPD or supervision, for the amount that you're charging your clients. If you're thinking that you're not good at business, you're very likely to keep repeating those patterns and not challenge them because you're playing into the script you've already written for yourself.
• Hitting Publish: You're quite likely to struggle with actually hitting publish on the stuff that would bring the right kind of clients to you. It might be that you keep drafting a directory site profile, but never hit publish, that you never get that website written or good enough to hit publish, or that you forget to follow up with people that inquire with you. All of that comes from a mind that is utterly convinced that you're a failure already, so why would it take the dangerous step of putting itself out there and being vulnerable if it's already pretty sure that you're going to fail at this?
• Overinvesting in Courses but Not Taking Action: You might overinvest in courses and then never actually take the action. This is really common in people that have a really strong ‘I'm not good at business’ belief. If you think you're bad at business, maybe you think someone else is good at it, so you hire them to try and do the thing for you. But then they can't do the thing completely for you. You're still you, so it still comes down to you needing to implement whatever they've taught you or shown you or the framework they've given you. You made the investment because you believed in them, not because you believed in you. When it gets to the point of doing, it's belief in yourself that is going to get you to hit that publish button or do the thing that you've paid the money to learn how to do.
• Getting Stuck in a Burnout Adjacent Role: Maybe you set up a private practice on the side of a role that was slowly sapping your life force, but you won't jump in with two feet because you don't believe that you've got the ability to make it work, to make your private practice flourish, or to succeed in any other kind of role, so you keep punishing yourself by staying stuck in a job which is harmful to you.

I think what I've learned over the years in my business, doing the MBA, coaching other psychologists and therapists, is that business is just a set of learnable skills like anything else. It isn't a personality type. There are so many different personalities that can be really good at business. I think any personality can be successful. What really frustrates me is that psychologists and therapists are already doing business skills in their clinical work all the time. The kind of assessment, complex understanding of problems, holding boundaries, explaining complex things simply, getting people to invest their emotion and motivation in therapy when that might not have been the thing that they thought would solve their problem at the beginning of their journey. All of those skills, empathy, relationship building, they are so crucial to business, and they're the things which people from other industries often have to spend loads of time learning and developing. Yes, there are other skills that you might need to work on, but you've already got these superpowers that people from other industries would give their right arm to be able to sit and listen and do active listening and seem sincere, because they really struggle with it. If you can't do that, you're not going to do very well in any kind of business negotiations.

My message is that you're not going to be your idea of what a perfect entrepreneur should be, because that doesn't exist. It's something the media has created in two dimensions, and you are a complex human being, and there is no definitional perfect entrepreneur anyway. What you are going to be is good enough. You're going to be flawed. You're going to make bad decisions. You're going to take risks that you shouldn't have taken, that you will regret, and you're going to make some really good decisions too, and you're going to help lots of people along the way. You are never going to tick every box and say, "Oh, I had a perfect week in business,” but if you can learn to be okay with the fact that you're playing to your strengths, that you're leading your business according to your values, and that will have ups and downs and pros and cons to it, then you are going to bring so much to your business community, and it would be sad if you let any kind of belief that you're not good enough at business stop you from getting started.

What I find often makes the biggest difference, and what I'd encourage you to get started on, is to choose one small part of your business to really invest your time in understanding and developing so that you get that sense of achievement that gives you a little bit of a practical foothold in your business. Something tangible that you can use to say, "Hey, actually, I did a pretty good job of that, and it's working, and that must mean that I'm not entirely terrible at business."

If you've recognised yourself in this episode, I'd really love you to notice that your brain has probably been using "I'm not good at business" as a way to keep you safe, and it might have worked at one time, but now it's probably holding you back. If you would like to accept my challenge and pick something to start building to give yourself that practical foothold that shows you that there are things in business that you can be really good at and play to your strengths with, then I'd invite you to make that thing your directory site profile. I've come up with a mini course to help you to do that and get that quick win so that you can show yourself that you can really use the skills that you have already to create something really powerful for your business. The details are in the show notes.

Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. Today we're joined by a guest I recommend often. When I'm talking to clients and other parents, I very frequently find myself recommending her books and accessible webinars on supporting children who are struggling through alternative education and reducing demand. And when I'm talking to other psychologists and therapists, I use her as an excellent example of somebody who's able to combine two specialisms and pull off a psychology based portfolio career beautifully.

Dr Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist specialising in autism and trauma. She's an EMDR consultant and trainer, and a prolific author who's cultivated her expertise through research, public sector work, and in her independent practice. Today we're exploring how her experiences doing her PhD in autism and NHS practice has shaped the impactful work that she does today. And we're also going to dive into the politics of neurodiversity and why Naomi is concerned that current social pressures are making it really hard for clinicians to have those nuanced conversations about diagnosis and education, and why she's launched her new podcast, Let's Talk Neurosense alongside Dr Danielle Drinkwater.

Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links for Naomi:

Website: naomifisher.co.uk

Podcast: Let's Talk Neurosense: The Psychology of Neurodiversity

Sunstack: Think Again: Making Childhood Fit For Children

Links for Rosie:

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@drrosiegilderthorp

• Naomi tells us about her unusual route into clinical psychology, doing her PhD first 01:57
• I ask Naomi about the central question of her PhD 06:38
• Naomi talks about what drew her into clinical work 08:45
• We discuss the breadth of experience our clinical training gave us 12:07
• Naomi describes what she typically does in her practice at the moment 15:54
• Naomi talks about her drive get good information out there and the backlash she’s received 20:21
• I ask Naomi how she deals with being recognised 26:48
• Naomi tells us about her podcast, Let’s Talk Neurosense 37:33
• Naomi tells us where we can find her 51:48

Are you tired of just talking about starting your practice but never quite committing?

If you’re ready to stop dancing with burnout and finally go 'all in', my 90-day program, 'Start Up Your Psychology Practice,' was made for you. This is a group coaching experience designed to help you ethically replace your full-time salary in part-time hours. We handle everything: from legal compliance and GDPR to attracting your first consistent stream of self-funding clients. No more piecing it together alone.

And here is the best part: sign up before the end of May to get £200 off your investment. Let’s build a practice that gives you the freedom you deserve.

Apply today: https://psychologybusinessschool.com/lp/start-up-private-practice-bundle/

Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. Today I'm joined by Dr Laura Bennett, a clinical psychologist with over 20 years of experience supporting children, young people, and their families through some of life's most complex challenges.

Since qualifying in 2009, Laura has worked across a range of NHS services, before founding Oasis Psychology in Dorset in 2022. Her practice is a really good example of a specialist service, as Laura specialises in supporting children who are in care, those who have been adopted, and families on the edge of care, focusing deeply on developmental trauma and attachment, and most importantly, supporting the system around the child.

Today we are looking at Laura's work beyond the therapy room. Many psychologists and therapists worry that moving into private practice means narrowing their scope to just one-to-one clinical hours. Laura is proving the opposite. She's currently spearheading the Parenting with Trauma Project in collaboration with Dorset Action for Children and Bournemouth University. It's clear from Laura's journey that she's never really stopped at the therapy room and has been working with systems and research and data. So I know that you're going to find her story really interesting, and hopefully inspirational if you are somebody who wants to do a little bit more, or different from therapy in your work.

Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links for Laura:

LinkedIn: Dr Laura Bennet

Oasis Psychology

Links for Rosie:

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@drrosiegilderthorp

• Laura tells us about her transition into private practice after 13 years in the NHS 01:57
• Laura talks about what she provides through her private practice, Oasis Psychology 5:21
• Laura discusses how she transitioned into a service that’s less focused on one-to-one work, and more about indirect support. 7:04
• I ask Laura about her work with Action for Children 21:42
• Laura gives us her advice for psychologists and therapists who have an idea for a different type of project, but feel a bit stuck 36:37
• Laura tells us the best place to connect with her 47:34

Are you tired of just talking about starting your practice but never quite committing?

If you’re ready to stop dancing with burnout and finally go 'all in', my 90-day program, 'Start Up Your Psychology Practice,' was made for you. This is a group coaching experience designed to help you ethically replace your full-time salary in part-time hours. We handle everything: from legal compliance and GDPR to attracting your first consistent stream of self-funding clients. No more piecing it together alone.

And here is the best part: sign up before the end of May to get £200 off your investment. Let’s build a practice that gives you the freedom you deserve.

Apply today: https://psychologybusinessschool.com/lp/start-up-private-practice-bundle/

Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. One of the biggest fears I hear from psychologists and therapists leaving the NHS for independent practice is that they'll lose their connection to the bigger picture, to public health, and that they'll spend all their time working in a silo, working one-to-one, and lose their impact on wider society. But today's guest is proof that being in private practice can actually be the perfect springboard for grassroots activism and community leadership. I'm joined by Dr Erin Carroll, a clinical psychologist who has taken her expertise in emotional development out of the consulting room and into the heart of her community. Erin's been a driving force in the Smartphone Free Childhood movement in our combined hometown of Tunbridge Wells, and she's helped to achieve something really remarkable; getting all of the local secondary head teachers to sign a joint letter supporting brick only phone policies for younger students, something that Erin really believes in. So today we're talking about how we as psychologists can use our training to lead cultural change, and why finding a cause that really lights a fire in your belly is the best antidote to that isolation that we can often feel in private practice.

Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links:

Erin: www.erincarrollpsychologist.co.uk

Smartphone Free Childhood

Health Professionals for Safer Screens

The Amazing Generation by Jonathan Haidt & Catherine Price, illustrated by Cynthia Yuan Cheng

Links for Rosie:

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@drrosiegilderthorp

• Erin tells us about her professional life up to the point that she became involved in Smartphone Free Childhood, and what led you down that path 01:45
• Erin talks about the role of screens and emotional regulation 11:56
• We discuss online harms and safeguarding concerns 18:49
• We look at the addictive aspect of smartphones 27:05
• Erin talks about the Smartphone Free Childhood parent Pact, and schools taking action 32:44
• I ask Erin about her plans going forward, in her activist role 48:56
• Erin tells us how to get in touch with her and connect with the Smartphone Free Childhood community 54:14

Are you tired of just talking about starting your practice but never quite committing?

If you’re ready to stop dancing with burnout and finally go 'all in', my 90-day program, 'Start Up Your Psychology Practice,' was made for you. This is a group coaching experience designed to help you ethically replace your full-time salary in part-time hours. We handle everything: from legal compliance and GDPR to attracting your first consistent stream of self-funding clients. No more piecing it together alone.

And here is the best part: sign up before the end of May to get £200 off your investment. Let’s build a practice that gives you the freedom you deserve.

Apply today: https://psychologybusinessschool.com/lp/start-up-private-practice-bundle/

Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. Today I am changing my tune! I have decided to go back on some of the advice that I have given over the years about social media and the importance of it to the average private practice. I hope that this will be a really helpful episode for you if you are somebody who is feeling the social media fatigue, doesn't feel naturally like it's a good home for you, and it doesn't form a cornerstone of your marketing strategy, and you've listened to my previous podcast episode and come to the conclusion that this is not the way that you need to be winning clients. I hope this will be a useful episode for you because it still isn't, it still doesn't need to be something that takes up a lot of time in your week, and it shouldn't do if your ideal client personas are not people who are going to search for a therapist on social media, and therapy is the main thing that you are selling in your practice. If that’s the case, then I absolutely stand by my previous advice that social media is not something that should take up lots of your time, week in and week out. But I am going to caveat it slightly, and that's because I have been on some training recently about how social media is an important part of optimizing our websites and our digital presence so that we will continue to be found by people on search engines and through AI recommendations. These things are becoming really important, and it just wouldn't be right of me to not bring this to your attention if it's not something that you've been thinking about yet.

Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links:

The Directory Profile Template

Business of Psychology Episode 111: How to create a great directory site profile

Summer School Lesson 5: Directory sites

Links for Rosie:

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@drrosiegilderthorp

Are you tired of just talking about starting your practice but never quite committing?

If you’re ready to stop dancing with burnout and finally go 'all in', my 90-day program, 'Start Up Your Psychology Practice,' was made for you. This is a group coaching experience designed to help you ethically replace your full-time salary in part-time hours. We handle everything: from legal compliance and GDPR to attracting your first consistent stream of self-funding clients. No more piecing it together alone.

And here is the best part: sign up before the end of May to get £200 off your investment. Let’s build a practice that gives you the freedom you deserve.

Apply today: Start Up Your Psychology Practice

There have been big changes already, and there are more coming, to the way that search engines like Google and Yahoo and all of them really, recommend websites to people searching. They are now using AI in the way that they search our websites to try and work out who we are and to generate AI advice for people who type in questions to their search bars. You'll have seen this if you are using your smartphone to look for help. You will get a load of normal looking search results, but you'll also get an AI generated answer to your question at the top, which will cite various expert sources to give you an answer to your question. I'm sure you'll have noticed like I have, that most people are not going beyond that AI answer because it is generally quite helpful and now, certainly on mine through Google, it's telling me where it's getting its advice from, and I find it much easier to trust than I used to. I think that's the direction of travel and eventually I think we're going to end up in a world where people just ask a question verbally to their AI, whether it’s Gemini, Chat GPT, Claude, whatever they're using, and they'll just take the answer that it gives rather than bothering to look through a page of search results. So we really need to understand how we make sure that we are the expert source that these AI models are using, because if we're not, then we're going to find that traffic to our websites from search starts to decline, if it hasn't already.

The good news, because I know that probably sounds a bit scary, is I actually think it's a good thing for us because now AI is so much cleverer than the previous technology that the search engines were using, it's able to piece together our digital presence from wherever we are to understand who we are and the services we offer in a much deeper and better way. We just need to do a few things to make that really easy for the AI to do, and social media is an important piece of that puzzle, because social media can give you a digital footprint which gives AI a really clear indication of who you are, who you help, and what you stand for, so that it understands better, in combination with your website, who to recommend you to when they're searching for help. So I'll talk you through a little bit about how that works and a few really simple things you can do to start helping the AI bots to understand who you are a little bit better so that you're future proofing your search engine optimization.

The first thing we need to understand is that search engines already look for EEAT when they're deciding who to serve up as a recommendation to somebody who's searching. That acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. These are the four things that an AI is assessing on your digital footprint before it decides whether to serve you up or to serve someone else up as an answer to a question that somebody's asking. AI search tools like Perplexity, Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude, are crawling the web to find answers to questions. And if your social media or your website has a clear niche specific keyword like 'birth trauma psychologist in Plymouth', and you've got high levels of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, then the AI is more likely to recommend you than somebody generic when a user asks for a therapist for birth trauma in Plymouth, for example.

1. The first thing is to have one bio that you use everywhere that contains a primary keyword that you want to be discoverable for. If you think of your bio as a bit like a sticky label that you might put on the front of an old fashioned filing cabinet; it needs to really clearly tell AI what it is that you have inside your cabinet, and it's really important to get that key word right. That key word might be 'birth trauma psychologist in Plymouth' (it doesn't need to be a single word, it can be a phrase), it could be 'neurodiversity specialist', it could be 'CBT therapist specialising in OCD', but it just needs to be really clear and contain the key words that you would like people searching for to get your name associated with.
2. The second thing you need to do is make sure that the bio you've created is everywhere that you are mentioned. You'll have to create a few versions of it, but they should be as similar to each other as possible. You can have a long version of it for the about page on your website - use that same copy exactly for LinkedIn and Psychology Today. Then you'll need to create a much shorter version of it for social media, but it should have the same keywords in it and be as similar as humanly possible, so that bio that follows you around gives you a really clear digital footprint that the AI can understand. Within that bio you want to show off your experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. And if you are following my framework for crafting a good Psychology Today profile (I'll link to the freebie that I have that's going to support you to do that in the show notes of this episode, as well as the podcast episode on the Business of Psychology) you will be demonstrating the experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness that AI is looking for. So make sure that your bio covers those areas and use my framework, because I think that will help you to do that.
3. The next thing that you need to make sure that you're discoverable in this new world is captions that are easy to understand on your social media posts for those bots that are crawling, looking to try and make sense of who you are. We need to think of captions as a bit similar to how we used to think about blogs. We want a title that has your keywords in it that people would be searching for. Then we want to use bullet points, clear headings, everything we can to make it easy for an AI tool to understand 'this is who this caption is for', so naming the client group, and 'this is the question that it is answering', so rewording your captions to make that super clear, and using headings within the captions is now super helpful.
4. The fourth thing that we need to be thinking about, that we might not have considered before, is making sure that we are properly filling out the alternative text or alt text on our images, and using those as spaces to describe what's in the image, using our keywords where applicable and possible. That really helps visually impaired users to have a good experience of interacting with our social media and our websites, but it also helps search engines to see our content better. So really helpful to do that. There are business mentors out there that would advise you to shoehorn in your personal keywords to every image, but I think we have to balance it with the fact that visually impaired people are using these to try and understand what's on your webpage. So do be mindful of that and make sure that you are only using the appropriate keywords, without disrupting the experience for somebody using a screen reader. But in most cases it is possible to do that without making it a difficult experience for somebody using screen readers.
5. The final thing that you need to be doing if you're not doing it already, is using video transcription, having captions on any video that you create, because tools like TikTok and reels on Instagram, they now pass the spoken words in your videos. So when you say your keywords out loud, that actually helps you to get seen by these AI bots crawling to try and index you for search engines. Everything you say now counts, which is wonderful for people like me that say a lot more than I write, and I think is overall really useful to all of us, because I think a lot of you put out a lot of content that previously has been really useful thought leadership content, but hasn't necessarily helped your website to get more visible. And now all of that hard work that you've been putting in, guesting on podcasts, creating social media content, all of that will now go towards getting the right people onto your website.

I think overall this is really positive, but at this point it probably sounds like a lot of work, and I am not suggesting that just because of these things, you now need to be posting every week on social media. If that is not part of your strategy, it doesn't need to be. What I would suggest instead is creating a shop front on social media where you have a few clear posts that follow this guidance and you have an optimized bio (if you follow my framework for creating a good Psychology Today profile, you will not go far wrong). If you have an optimized bio and just a few posts that have your keywords in, really good images that also have a good reason to link to your keywords, then that will be enough for AI to understand who you are and for you to get this benefit without you necessarily needing to post all the time. Of course, if you do have a reason to be posting on social media anyway, that is going to be nothing but helpful so long as you follow these principles.

I hope that that has given you some food for thought and potentially some optimism that we might be able to use the changes that are happening in search to be found more than we have been before, to show off our expertise in different ways and in ways that I think feel quite exciting and will hopefully help us to rise above some of the AI generated junk that is out there, that will not be able to demonstrate that experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, because it's not real. It also fits well with another trend that we've been talking about on social media, which is this trend towards authenticity. If you are thinking about putting out some talking head videos, for example, to really demonstrate your EEAT and to make use of the fact that will now be transcribed and used to help you rank, then you can take heart in the fact that those videos do not need to look good. They don't need to be super well edited or polished because actually people are getting the best results with videos that look like you've taken them in your front room and just kind of gone for it without a script, because that's the thing that AI can't do. AI can't do the human touch, the real talk, the unscripted bits, that we can do really well. So this doesn't need to be a big and arduous thing in your life. It's something you could spend an afternoon on and then forget about for a while and maybe revisit once every three months, once every six months to keep those posts up to date. But it's something that I really think could help us to be more visible in this slightly scary digital world that we're entering.

I'd love to know what you think about this. You can reach out to me. I'll be posting about this stuff over on @rosiegilderthorp on Instagram, or if you want to keep in touch with what I'm doing on the SEND Parenting Side of life, then you can find me @drrosiegilderthorp on Instagram.

I want to talk about the 4 financial pillars that you need to be familiar with in your practice, because as this tax year comes to an end and the new one begins, you might be looking at your numbers and thinking how did that happen? Maybe you got a tax bill that's bigger than you were expecting. Maybe you are getting to the end of the year and realising that you didn't make as much money as you wanted to, or maybe it's more positive than that and you've got a bigger tax bill than you were expecting because you made more money than you wanted to.

Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links:

Sally Farrant: www.businessgrowthbynumbers.com

Links for Rosie:

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@drrosiegilderthorp

Is a financially rewarding private practice actually possible?

My recent survey of former coaching clients found they were taking home between £3k and £8k a month while seeing only 5 to 20 clients a week. That is a full-time wage in far less than full-time NHS hours. I want to show you the roadmap to get there.

Join my free masterclass, 'Set Up Your Practice For Success,' on Wednesday, 22nd April. We’ll tackle common mistakes and show you how to avoid the 'admin mountain' so you can focus on the work you love. Secure your spot at the link below. If the time doesn’t work for you, sign up anyway to receive the recording.

Set Up Your Practice For Success Masterclass - Wednesday 22nd April - Book your place here.

Revenue is the simplest metric in your business. It’s gross income, the money that is coming in with nothing deducted. On its own it’s a vanity metric. I see lots of people sharing their revenue without being honest about the other numbers, and it troubles me, because the revenue in your business can be very high, but the other numbers in the business will change as a reaction to that revenue. It's the other numbers that give us much more crucial information about the health of the business and the lifestyle that it's actually going to give you, and the good that you're able to do for your clients.

Revenue is important to know because it gives an estimate of growth and impact. If you are making a lot of revenue, it's likely you’re helping a lot of people and you can track the trajectory of that. Tracking your revenue should include tracking the specific sources of that revenue. Go into a bit of detail, looking at how many therapy sessions, online courses, and supervision sessions you are selling, and breaking it down into individual services that you offer so that you can see how much money you are making for those activities each month. This is helpful because it allows you to predict what might happen in the future if you put effort into increasing revenue in one of those areas. It’s important to know exactly where that income is coming from. If you're very busy, you might not realise that you are doing more supervision than you were last year, and that a bigger proportion of your income is now coming from that. Even if that overall revenue figure hasn't changed much, the place it's coming from might have changed, and for tax reasons it can be significant to understand that.

It's up to you how many categories for different types of revenue you want to create. Go with what's useful for you to have a good understanding of your revenue. For associate practices, you might want to break it down by associate so that you know how much money each associate is making you each month. If you have a really large associate practice, that might be cumbersome and you might break it down into your therapy income and associate therapy income. What I would say is that if a service has specific expenses attached to it, then have that as its own line so that when you do your expenses, you can do some spreadsheet wizardry and make those things dependent on each other.

For example, if you've got an associate practice and you know that for every £140 an associate makes you, you are going to pay out £90 to them, you can create a formula in your spreadsheet that calculates an expense line to take £90 for every £140 that is listed in the income for an associate. It’s definitely worth separating out your services, at least in that much detail. Revenue tracking and getting granular with it can help you to see which aspects of your business are really healthy and which ones might be declining or struggling.

Expenses

You need to consider this alongside revenue. You need to know how much money you are spending every month in order to keep your business running in the way that it needs to support your lifestyle, and you have to be honest with yourself about it. People always ask me for an estimate of how much the expenses should be for an independent practice, and I can't give one because it depends on your values, the services you are providing, what that client group needs in terms of support, and what you need in terms of support. This is why I would never share my revenue figures with you because if you saw them, you'd get a false impression, because in order to keep my business going with all the stuff that I have going on in my personal life, I have to pay for a lot of support. You can't look at somebody's revenue figure and have any idea about what their overall take home pay is going to be, because you aren't going to have a realistic impression of their expenses. Don't be impressed by those online gurus who share their revenue figures with you. I think that's irresponsible unless they're also willing to share the expenses and profit.

When looking at your expenses, I recommend getting your banking app out and dumping this into a spreadsheet. If you are in Startup or Evolve and Thrive or the network, you'll have access to our Cashflow Forecast spreadsheet. You go through your banking app and literally note down all the expenses over 3 months, accurately transposing them into the spreadsheet. Then go back through the year and see if there are any big expenditures which don't go out every month that you make on an annual basis and pop those in. This is really boring, and if you have a bookkeeper, it may be that they can do this for you, but it's worth doing because once you've got that, you can categorize your expenses and have a look at what expenses are investments in either the quality of your service or in the growth of your service.

I invest in stuff like practice management software because that creates a better quality service for me and for my clients, and I invest in advertising spend, and that's because I expect that will enable the business to grow. Those are both investments in quality and growth, so they go in the investment side.

You may find that there are some expenses which don't easily fit into a quality or growth category. When we have those expenses we need to consider whether they are adding another kind of value or are they draining the business? Often I'll find that I've got software packages that double up. I could be using one tool to do lots of things, and actually I'm using lots of tools and paying lots of subscriptions. I would highlight that and think about reducing those. It's a really useful exercise because not only are you getting to know this number, which is really important for planning your business going forward, but you're also getting an idea of what you could cut.

Things that fall into the investment category are clinical supervision, business coaching, high quality legal templates, practice management software, CPD, training that you're going to be able to use to support your clients better. You're looking for anything that sits on the periphery that you don't use often or you don't use very well, and thinking about whether it might be time to cut that.

Once you've done both those exercises and you've put them into your cashflow forecast spreadsheets or a spreadsheet to track your income and expenses, then you see what the gap is between the two.

Tax is something which can be confusing. I was told a lot when I started in business that it wasn't confusing, but I think it is confusing, especially considering it's not something that we are taught in school. So, I'll give you a really brief overview of the taxes you need to keep an eye on. You should consult an accountant to get proper advice on your tax situation. If you are in Startup or Evolve and Thrive or the network, we have a class with Mahmood Reza from I Hate Numbers, and we've got one with Sally Farrant where we talk about VAT. If you are not in any of my programs, and you're not in the network, I'd recommend having a consultation with an accountant, so that you can get a clear read on what tax you should be expecting to pay for your specific circumstances.

Self-Assessment Tax on your income. If you're a sole trader, this is the only one that you need to worry about, but you will be taxed on all of your revenue. It's not done on profit, it's not done on revenue minus expenses, it's done on your revenue. That is how your tax is going to be calculated. It's sensible if you're a sole trader to be putting away a third of your revenue and saving that for your tax bill. When it comes to the end of the tax year, you'll be able to list all the business expenses that you've had, and that should be deducted from your overall tax bill. That's difficult to work out as you are going along, so to be on the safe side, saving a third of your revenue is the advice I've always heard being given to sole traders. Double check with an accountant because that can differ if you have other sources of income, or if there are any changes in tax rules. You'll also have to deal with self-employed national insurance contributions.

Corporation Tax If you form a limited company you’ll have to keep an eye on what corporation tax rates are. Corporation tax is worked out on the profit of the company, and it's usually at about 20%. This one can be tricky because every month you'll probably make a slightly different amount of profit. The way that I do it is every month I look at what the profit is, and I put 20% of that into my corporation tax savings account. Have a look at the rules around corporation tax, talk to your accountant about what they think the best savings strategy is for you, but be aware that you will have to pay it. You will also have to do your self assessment and pay tax on the money that you pay to yourself from your company. You may be paying yourself as an employee of the company, and then the company will pay PAYE, and NI contributions for you through that. But if you're a limited company, I would strongly advise you to talk to an accountant about tax advice.

VAT We ran a class on this in PBS with Sally Farrant because the VAT threshold is something which has been tripping up a lot of my clients, and that’s because we have a slightly bonkers VAT system in this country. VAT is a tax that you collect on behalf of HMRC. You collect (usually) 20% of the price that you are charging to the customer, and you have to give that to HMRC about every three months. The thing that makes this difficult for people in our professions is that there are strange rules about what is VAT exempt and what isn't. The first thing is you don't have to start charging VAT until you hit a threshold, which at the moment is £90,000 in any rolling 12 month period. If you're safely under that, then you don't need to worry about VAT yet. But if there's a chance that you could tip over it in any rolling 12 month period, you need to be keeping an eye on it. The second reason it's confusing is that health services delivered by certain qualified professionals are VAT exempt. Therapy that is delivered by a HCPC registered clinical psychologist, for example, is exempt, but that same therapy delivered by a fully qualified psychotherapist or CBT therapist is not exempt. The reason this trips people up is quite often psychotherapists who take on associates won't realise that they're going to go over the threshold and then they get caught out. Psychologists like me tend to get caught out when our revenue from things that are not direct therapy start to go up quicker than expected. If you’re offering supervision, training, consultancy, coaching, none of those are VAT exempt. So you can go from one year having the majority of your income come through therapy so you're safely under the threshold, and then the next year you get a few big consultancy contracts and you've tipped over. You need your own tax advice around this to help you plan for the threshold. For VAT planning, I really recommend Sally Farrant, I'll drop her details in the show notes.

Profit

Profit is really simple; it's what's left when you've taken out your expenses and your taxes. Profit often gets a bad rap. People will talk about people being profit hungry or obsessed with profit, profiting from other people's misery. It's something we hear a lot in the mental health space because it's got these associations with greed, but actually a business can't survive without profit. Profit is the bit that makes a business sustainable.

There are lots of things that you can do with profit. You can pay yourself a bonus, which is a really good idea, you should be rewarding yourself for being the excellent employee that you are, and it’s no bad thing to feel well compensated for your hard work. There’s no shame in that, and you should absolutely be using some of your profit to make sure that you feel well looked after by your business.

But there are other things that you need to use profit for. Your profit is the emergency fund in your business. None of us know what might happen. We might be faced with another pandemic, there could be a global crisis that means that our businesses don't operate as usual for a period of time. If you have profit in the business, you are likely to be able to sustain through that, and the bigger your business gets, the more important that is. If I couldn't make any money tomorrow, then I want to know that I can still pay the payments that I make to my team for a couple of months, because otherwise I could be in a position where not only can I not pay my mortgage, but my VA, my social media person, my operations manager, none of them can pay their rent or their mortgage, and that doesn't feel ethical. Having some profit is responsible in your business to make sure that you're not going to be letting people down, defaulting on payments. Profit is really important as an emergency fund, and you should have some set aside to cover those key expenses for a couple of months.

Profit is also your ability to innovate. When you've got profit to play with, you can look at things like developing a new piece of software, setting up an online course, or seeing whether you can make that community group work, without the pressure of it needing to make money immediately. Often people want to start groups in their communities, but they're not sure whether people will pay for them to start with. If you've got a bit of profit, you could decide to run that group for free for a few weeks, and then people start paying once they've seen the value of it. You can't do that if you're operating on no profit.

I want to share with you a concept which I came across in my MBA. It’s the triple bottom line; the idea that a business can be a force for good without sacrificing its financial health. It's a term that was originally coined by John Elkington, he suggested that business success should be measured by three Ps: people, planet, and profit. I think that’s a really helpful way of thinking about business, but I’ve made slight adaptations for working with mental health and thinking about my own business. The way that I think about it is sustainability, impact and profit.

Sustainability If you are not making good money, you are not going to provide a sustainable service for our client groups, and you're going to have to make choices which are worse for the planet. If you are up against it financially, you can't afford to pay for the AI models that are more environmentally friendly. If you've got a bit of profit, you get to choose the more ethical company to work with. There's loads of examples where a bit of profit allows you to be more environmentally friendly in the choices that you make.

Impact When you've got money in the business, it's easier to accelerate whatever it is that you're trying to do. With some of my profit, I pay for some Meta ads. It's a tiny amount, but they show my posts about SEND parenting to more people than I would be able to reach organically. I'm consciously using the profit from PBS to do that. I'm not selling anything, but I want that message to reach more people, and I've got a little bit of profit that I can use to make that a reality.

Thinking about these three things together, profit fueling the sustainability and the impact of your business, you get to choose how that looks. It's worth acknowledging that profit gives you the freedom to run your business according to those values that you set at the beginning. When you are operating on no profits, you will often find yourself having to compromise on sustainability, impact, or your values.

I hope I've made it clear why you need a good grip of the numbers in your business. If you can track where you are at the moment, if you know your revenue, your expenses, your expected tax bill, and your profit, then you can start to model out going forward. What would happen if I spent a bit more money on A, B, C? What impact would that have on my overall profit on that triple bottom line? Is it going to increase my impact, is it going to be sustainable, is it going to increase the profit in the business that enables both of those things? You can track that like a story going forward and make a plan around whatever your goals are.

Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. I'm really pleased to be bringing you an interview with Dr Carolyne Keenan. You might have heard Carolyne's name if you listen to BBC Radio 1. She makes a big impact with her media work. But the reason I'm really interested to talk to Carolyne is that she shows how it's possible to build a portfolio of different activities, all of which use your skills in different and exciting ways, and to find professional fulfillment through that autonomy that we can have in independent practice. I know how many psychologists and therapists tell me that they feel a bit stuck. Like they're stuck in the therapy room and they don't know how, in their independent work, to step outside of that. I think Carolyne and her journey in independent practice is a really great example of how when we have the courage to step outside, we can make a really big impact.

Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links for Carolyne:

Instagram: @drcarolynekeenan

LinkedIn: @drcarolynekeenan

Links for Rosie:

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@drrosiegilderthorp

• Carolyne tells us about how her career in psychology began 01:30
• I ask Carolyne how she went from a quite unpleasant experience to finding a passion that let her do a doctorate 10:55
• Carolyne talks about how she started stepping out into private psychology 13:14
• We discuss the difference of opinions around charging for services and cancellation policies 16:14
• Carolyne talk to us about what her private practice looks like today 26:06
• We look at the pros and cons of media work 29:15
• I ask Carolyne about how she plans her social media content 36:34
• Carolyne tells us where to find her online 42:55

You have incredible clinical expertise, but is the 'shame' of the business side holding you back? Staying stuck in a role that’s edging you toward burnout or running a side-hustle that eats your weekends isn't the only way.

I’m hosting a free masterclass on Wednesday, 22nd April called 'Set Up Your Practice For Success.'

I’ll be sharing my proven 3-part framework: Values, Voice, and Impact. You’ll learn how to design a practice aligned with your life, create systems for an exceptional client experience, and implement a marketing strategy that doesn’t feel 'sleazy.'

Join me live for a chance to win a 1:1 strategy session!

Register for free at the link below - and yes, there’s a replay for all registrants.

Set Up Your Practice For Success Masterclass - Wednesday 22nd April - Book your place here.

Hello and welcome to the Business of Psychology.

I am Dr Rosie Gilderthorp, a clinical psychologist and business coach, and we are back for another series where we're going to be diving into all the different ways that private practice can look for psychologists and therapists in 2026.

I've got some fascinating interviews from psychologists that are using their skills in different ways, and therapists that are reaching people in all kinds of unique and innovative formats.

We are going to be talking about engaging with the media, grassroots activism in our local communities, working with charities, and we're going to be talking about tackling the big questions of neurodiversity movement and neurodivergence in 2026. I have got some really interesting conversations ahead for you, and I really can't wait to get started with the series.

This is going to be a brilliant series for you, if you are somebody that has been contemplating stepping into private practice, or if you're somebody who's been in practice for a while and is feeling like things are a little bit stale. It is a brilliant series to help you reconsider your business model and think about the exciting ways that we can bring our knowledge to help more people.

So, I'm really chuffed to be bringing you this series and some of the amazing guests that I've got.

But there was one thing I wanted to let you know about before the series officially kicks off next week, and that is a free masterclass that I'm running on April the 22nd. It's my Setup for Success Masterclass, where I talk you through my three part framework; values, voice, and impact, for creating a practice that allows you to replace your income ethically in fewer hours. And to create a practice that allows you to live your values. So, I just wanted to flag that up to you. The link is below, and I really hope that some of you will be able to join me there live. But if you can't come live, you can catch up on the recording.

So, next week we're kicking off with two episodes. Firstly, there is a fascinating episode with Caroline Keenan on her journey as a media psychologist, amongst all kinds of other things. And there's also a slightly boring episode, but I think you're going to find it helpful, from me about tax and other financial numbers that are particularly important to understand at this time of the year when you might be closing off your tax year, maybe getting some bills that you did or didn't expect. That episode is going to be really valuable for helping you lay the foundation for the exciting work that you're going to do.

I will see you next week for the next series of the Business of Psychology.

You have incredible clinical expertise, but is the 'shame' of the business side holding you back? Staying stuck in a role that’s edging you toward burnout or running a side-hustle that eats your weekends isn't the only way.

I’m hosting a free masterclass on Wednesday, 22nd April called 'Set Up Your Practice For Success.'

I’ll be sharing my proven 3-part framework: Values, Voice, and Impact. You’ll learn how to design a practice aligned with your life, create systems for an exceptional client experience, and implement a marketing strategy that doesn’t feel 'sleazy.'

Join me live for a chance to win a 1:1 strategy session!

Register for free at the link below - and yes, there’s a replay for all registrants.

Set Up Your Practice For Success Masterclass - Book your place.

Links for Rosie:

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@drrosiegilderthorp