Books That Make You Think - Stolen Focus Part 2: Nutrition and attention in our practices and marketing

Welcome to this week's Books That Make You Think. It's a moment in your week where you get to pause and reflect on a new book which I have found really interesting, and it's a bit of space for us to think about the implications of new books on our practice and on our marketing efforts as well. So I hope this feels like a little bit of a moment of luxury, where you actually get to reflect on some of the information that we're bombarded with in our daily lives, because if you're anything like me, it can feel like I read a lot of stuff, and I hear a lot of stuff, but I don't actually have that much time to reflect on it. So I hope that these little segments of your week will give you a bit of thinking space and a bit of time to reflect on some of the cool new stuff that is out there. 

This month we are focusing on Johann Hari: Stolen Focus, and this week I wanted to talk about the chapter on nutrition and pollution, and the fact that he presents a lot of very compelling evidence that the food that we eat and the environment that we live in is having a huge impact on our ability to pay attention, which in turn has a huge impact on all aspects of our mental health; everything from depression all the way through to neuro developmental conditions that can be diagnosed like ADHD. I won't go into all of the research that he cites, but it is very compelling, and it certainly convinced me that I need to be paying a bit more attention to my client's nutrition, and knowing where to point them for that, because I'm not a nutritionist, and I'm not going to become a nutritionist. But if we know realistically that nutrition and the environment are playing a huge role in mental health and the way that our clients are able to pay attention, then surely we need to be addressing that in our work directly. So I thought, what could that look like practically? How could I include this new knowledge in my clinical practice, and how can I also incorporate it into my marketing strategy? And one of the things that I thought of was, firstly, about formulation. And I think we always say that we try and formulate in a bio psycho social way, or at least a lot of us say that, but actually I've never drilled down too much into my client’s eating habits. I don't ask my clients routinely if they come to me with, you know, birth trauma, postnatal depression, that kind of thing, I'm not saying what food are you putting in your body? And maybe I should be. So that could be an element of it, adding that stuff into our formulation. Maybe formulating, if we know that somebody lives in a very built up area where there's lots of pollution, and then incorporating that into our formulation, that that might be making it more difficult for them to do the mindfulness activities that we are setting for them, for example, and setting that expectation with people, I think it's part of a compassionate response to acknowledge that we are living in quite a toxic environment in terms of our food being very super processed, and full of chemicals that make it hard for us to pay attention, and our cars churning out chemicals, plastics churning out chemicals, which make it difficult for us to pay attention, and just having that compassion that, okay, we're going to try and learn mindfulness here, and that's got loads of benefits that you will have already talked with your client about, but you are kind of running up an escalator that's going in the opposite direction, because of the environmental stresses that are on you, and acknowledging that and making it clear that you're asking them to do something really difficult. So thinking about one to one therapy, incorporating that into my formulation, and having clear referral pathways that I can send people to. If we identify nutrition is likely to be an issue, then I can refer them on to a nutritionist, so I need to make that relationship with a local nutritionist that I trust, or an online nutritionist for my online clients, that I can then refer them on quickly and easily and demonstrate to them that that is of equal importance with the work that they're doing with me. So that's something that I'm going to look into personally. 

Similarly, for the environmental stuff, there's not a lot that your individual client can do about environmental pollution. There's not very much that I can do as an individual clinician about pollution. But what I might do is look into some local activism that I could become involved with. There are always petitions in my area about pollution, about particular projects that other social enterprises that are focused on environmental causes are working on. And actually, if I know that this is really critical to mental health, maybe I should be playing a role in some of those projects. 

So those are the clinical implications as far as I can see them. Because I think we do need to respect in our clinical work that there is a hierarchy of needs. I think every clinical approach acknowledges that you need good building blocks to wellbeing, and the food that you're putting into your body and the environment that you live in are two pretty crucial building blocks in your mental health, and if they're not there or if they're not supporting you, then we need to address those first. So I think our clinical work should be reflecting that. 

Those are some of the practical ways that I might change my clinical practice, or adapt it slightly as a result of reading this book. But it also struck me that there are implications of this knowledge for the way that we market ourselves and the way that we reach out to people in the first place. Anybody who's done Psychology Business School with me knows that I've always been a big advocate for marketing through relationships, building up your network of other related professionals, who you can refer people to and who will refer people to your practice. I think that is a really valuable way of spending your time if you've got a limited amount of time to spend on marketing; I would always recommend building up those relationships first and foremost. But the added benefit of doing that is that it gives you this obvious pathway to send people on if you identify that actually their individual experience, their individual thoughts and emotions, and the stuff that we can deal with in the therapy room is not really the biggest piece of the puzzle for them, so I think it has that added benefit. Also, if you think about it, if you have a strong relationship with all of those other professionals, then we're sending the message to the public that mental health shouldn't be considered in a silo. It sends the message that we are holistic creatures, who need to be considered as mind, body and environment. I think that's a message that a lot of us believe in, but actually we market ourselves in such a way that it sends the message to people that mental health is its own discrete thing. Now, if that's not what you believe, then what better way to market yourself than alongside professionals that deal with the body and the environment and nutrition. It strikes me as a much more coherent message given what I say to my clients when they get into my therapy room. I’m always telling my clients that they need to pay attention to their bodies as well as their minds, but perhaps if I'm not positioning myself alongside other clinicians who do focus on those areas, I'm actually sending the message that you can just come here and think about your mental health in isolation. So I think from a messaging point of view, perhaps viewing yourself as part of that wider community of health and alternative professionals could actually be really helpful to the way that your clients end up viewing their mental health. I think that's really exciting. 

So how do you do that practically, if we want to build up that network with other related professionals? Well, the first thing you can do is reach out to people on LinkedIn. That's an easy win, because you can search for professional groups on there, and you can search by location, so you could set up coffees with physio-therapists and nutritionists in your area tomorrow, if you wanted to do that. Another really good way of doing this is to go to your local networking events. You will find mental health professionals tend to be really underrepresented at local business networking events. It was very rare for me to come across another qualified psychologist or a qualified therapist at a networking event. However, you will meet loads of people that do things like physiotherapy, nutritional advice, chiropractors; they tend to go to these business networking events, and I think we should be there too. It's a great way of developing those relationships because if somebody meets you and speaks to you, they get a really good sense of what it would be like to work with you, and they're much more likely to feel confident to refer to you. Likewise, I do not refer to professionals that I don't know, I don't like doing that. So you need to build up that network of people that you know, like and trust, that you can then refer your clients to, so it works in both directions. Another thing that you should be thinking about doing to build up these connections with allied professionals, is building up your repertoire of guest appearances. So that could be writing guest blogs, it could be going into other people's Facebook communities to give a bit of mental health advice, you could do a little talk, a little Facebook Live, or you could just be in there commenting on people's threads with useful stuff when you can, and guesting on podcasts and people's YouTube channels as well. So it's getting in front of that audience who might be interested in more physical health, might be interested in nutrition, and could do with a bit of education about how that links with mental health and that kind of symbiosis between the mind and the body. 

So those are just some practical ways that you can start taking this knowledge about the impact of nutrition and the environment, and incorporating it into both your clinical practice and your marketing for your private practice. I hope that's been useful to start thinking about, I hope it's got your reflective and creative juices flowing a little bit. And I would really love to hear from you about what this stuff makes you think. So is nutrition and the impact of pollution on attention, and the impact of attention on mental health, something that you've always thought about, something that you've thought about regularly, or is this new stuff for you? Come and talk to me over on Instagram, I'm @RosieGilderthorp and let me know what this brings up for you. If you think there might be things that you change about your clinical practice, or the way that you market yourself, are you going to be focusing on those relationships with other professionals, or maybe providing a bit of psychoeducation to your clients that how all of this stuff wraps up together? For me, I feel like it's really percolating and starting to build into a cohesive picture of how I might make a fundamental change to my practice as a result of this awesome book that I really recommend you all read. But each week as we discuss this, I'm getting new ideas and thinking of it in a slightly different way, so I'd love to know if that's happening for you as well. I hope that's been useful and I shall see you next week for more Books That Make You Think.

Prefer to watch the video? Find me on Instagram @rosiegilderthorp to watch now.

Psychology Business School

Client Checklist 2021

Mentioned in this episode:

Free Client Checklist

Do you sometimes wake up at 2 am worried that you’ve made a terrible error that will bring professional ruin upon you and disgrace your family?

I’m laughing now but when I first set up in private practice I was completely terrified that I had “missed” something big when setting up insurance or data protection.

Even now, three years in, I sometimes catch myself wondering if I have really covered all the bases.

It is hard, no impossible, to think creatively and have the impact you should be having in your practice if you aren’t confident that you have a secure business. BUT it can be overwhelming to figure out exactly what you need to prioritise before those clients start coming in.

I’ve created a free checklist (plus resources list) to take the thinking out of it. Tick off every box and you can see your clients confident in the knowledge that you have everything in place for your security and theirs.

Download it now - the link is in the show notes.

Client Checklist 2021

Psychology Business School

Are you looking to build an independent practice that is fulfilling, impactful and financially rewarding? Did you know that I run a business course that is designed to help you do exactly that without making all the mistakes I made along the way? Over 12 weeks we take you through everything you need to know to set up a practice that lets you live your values. Through a combination of teaching from experts, legal templates to make sure your practice is covered, peer support and group coaching sessions this is the place for anyone looking to get off the starting blocks in private practice.

The course is always accessible in pre-recorded format and three times a year we run a live cohort so what are you waiting for? Join us - the link is in the show notes.

Psychology Business School

Creativity as a cure with Dr Fred Moss

Today I'm really excited to be joined by Dr Fred Moss, a psychiatrist, author, speaker and transformational coach who has a really unique approach to mental health. He is a firm believer that conversation, communication, creativity, and human connection are ultimately at the source of all healing of all conditions in all fields. Along with being a highly successful restorative/transformational coach, his signature technology, True Voice Podcasting, is for people who are ready to take their lives back by speaking their authentic message into the world. 

The highlights

• Dr Fred tells us about when he first realised that conventional psychiatric medicine wasn't working for him  00:55
• Dr Fred tells us what it felt like to step out of the diagnostic system  13:33
• Dr Fred tells us about how Podcasting weaves into his work with helping people to connect  21:00 
• I ask Dr Fred what is it about podcasting that helps people connect with themselves  25:08
• Dr Fred tells us how people react to his methods and the challenges involved 31:44
• I ask how Dr Fred finds the people to come on his programmes and be part of the movement 36:50
• We discuss labels and Dr Fred explores the issues with medication 40:53
• Dr Fred tells us how we can connect with him  49:25

 

Links for Dr Fred Moss

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: Welcome to Humanity with Dr Fred Moss

Facebook: 

Fred Moss

True Voice Community

Welcome to Humanity Audiobook

Welcome to Humanity PDF Book

Find Your True Voice  Book

Psychology Business School

Client Checklist 2021

Mentioned in this episode:

Free Client Checklist

Do you sometimes wake up at 2 am worried that you’ve made a terrible error that will bring professional ruin upon you and disgrace your family?

I’m laughing now but when I first set up in private practice I was completely terrified that I had “missed” something big when setting up insurance or data protection.

Even now, three years in, I sometimes catch myself wondering if I have really covered all the bases.

It is hard, no impossible, to think creatively and have the impact you should be having in your practice if you aren’t confident that you have a secure business. BUT it can be overwhelming to figure out exactly what you need to prioritise before those clients start coming in.

I’ve created a free checklist (plus resources list) to take the thinking out of it. Tick off every box and you can see your clients confident in the knowledge that you have everything in place for your security and theirs.

Download it now - the link is in the show notes.

Client Checklist 2021

Psychology Business School

Are you looking to build an independent practice that is fulfilling, impactful and financially rewarding? Did you know that I run a business course that is designed to help you do exactly that without making all the mistakes I made along the way? Over 12 weeks we take you through everything you need to know to set up a practice that lets you live your values. Through a combination of teaching from experts, legal templates to make sure your practice is covered, peer support and group coaching sessions this is the place for anyone looking to get off the starting blocks in private practice.

The course is always accessible in pre-recorded format and three times a year we run a live cohort so what are you waiting for? Join us - the link is in the show notes.

Psychology Business School

Books That Make You Think - Stolen Focus - Does social media make us angry?

Welcome to our first regular Books That Make You Think slot. In these special segments of the week, we are going to be talking about a book that I've come across that, in my mind, sits on the threshold between psychology, business and marketing. 

One thing that I'm really passionate about is helping psychologists and therapists to learn how to build effective businesses and market ourselves, while feeling like we're still serving our clients really well, and like we're doing some good in the world. And one thing that strikes me is that often when I read books, whether that's a psychology book, or a business book, or a marketing book, I'm kind of merging all of those worlds together in my head, and trying to figure out where I sit as a clinical psychologist with the stuff that I'm learning. 

One book that has really made me think this week is Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, and I talked about it a little bit last week, and people were really interested in some of the learning from it. So I thought that I'd do regular slots, where we can talk about books like Johann Hari's book, which raised some really interesting issues for us, as professionals, and as marketers, as well. So I hope you're gonna find this helpful as people who are in business, but who are also very interested in mental health and promoting good mental health in the world. 

Okay, so the point that I wanted to pick up on this week from Johann Hari's book was the fact that I found quite shocking that on social media, posts that have hate speech in them, words that generate an angry response in us, are the most engaged with and shared posts. So a post that has the words obliterate slam, hate, all of these kind of aggressive words will do much better than a post that is positive. And Johann Hari goes into some of the research behind that and it indicates that this is because it speaks to our negativity bias as humans. And it makes sense, right? We're kind of trained to look out for aggression and violence and pay lots of attention to it as a survival mechanism. It certainly fits with my understanding of how human psychology works. So I don't know why I was that surprised, but I guess I'd never really thought about it before, and it strikes me that there are some clinical implications that need thinking through if this is true on social media, and if the algorithms are going to continue to promote posts like this, that are filled with really hateful language, I think we need to think about that on behalf of our clients and think about how we might need to adapt what we do in the therapy room and in the services that we create for our client groups, in order to take that into consideration. Because it's going to have a major psychological effect on people. Of course it does. So that's the first thing I want to think about today. And the second thing I want to think about is how we take that knowledge and structure our marketing around it. Because there's a bit of a debate here about do we do what works? And we know that what works is all of this negative language and hate speech. Or do we try and do something different, go against the grain of the social media algorithms, and possibly face getting more expensive results or less good results with our social media campaigns? So those are the two things and I'll start with the clinical stuff. Because that's what struck me first when I read this chapter of the book, and I'm really interested to get your thoughts on it. I really want this to be a conversation. So please do let me know what you're thinking as I'm talking about this, especially if you do go on to read the book. I'd be really interested to get some debate going on these topics. 

As a clinical psychologist, I mostly work with parents, and specifically parents who have had to go back to work for one reason or another, whether that's by choice or not by choice. And often it's those parents who have been dealing with mental health difficulties since their children were born, but perhaps didn't notice them until they had to go back to what they considered their normal life before. And for that particular client group, there are so many demands on their attention. And so many demands on them as people, that their threat systems tend to be quite highly activated anyway. So when I was reading that social media has this real bias towards promoting posts which have hate speech in them and posts that make us feel angry, I was thinking, I wonder how much this is contributing to that jangling nervous system that we often see in our clients, and how much that kind of hyper vigilance, anxiety, short temperedness, irritability, all of these things which are so common for parents to talk to me about, how many of those things are being fueled by the posts that they're seeing on social media, because I don't think I have a particularly good sense of that, because my relationship with social media is potentially slightly unusual, in that I mainly use it for work. I actually don't browse very often as a normal user of social media anymore. So I asked my husband about it, and he said he absolutely feels angry and agitated most of the time when he's on Twitter. And when I mentioned it, he was like, oh my gosh, I really recognise that in myself. So, on that sample of one (but there is research to back it up as well which Johann Hari talks about in the book) has made me think that this might be something that I need to integrate into my clinical practice. And perhaps, when we're talking about the benefits of mindfulness, or other things that we might do to help people to decide where they're going to put their attention, maybe we should be bringing up social media and the potential for it to increase our threat systems and to make us feel angry and irritable when we're discussing a plan for somebody maybe taking behavioural steps to improve their mental health. It's just something that I'm thinking about integrating into my work in a more formal way, because although with certain clients, if they've brought it to me, we have worked in that way before, it's not been something I've had in my head that I need to bring to them. And actually, social media is such a big part of what we do now as human beings, as adults in this society, that actually, perhaps I need to be bringing social media up in therapy in the same way that I would bring up sleep or diet. So that's just a thought. And I'd love to know what you think on that topic. 

But now, let's think about potential implications in this for our marketing. Because obviously, a lot of you, you come here for support with your marketing, and not necessarily support with your clinical work. So I'm thinking from a marketing perspective, we've got a real dilemma; do we jump on board with this trend and get lots of views on our posts by being inflammatory? One of the examples that’s used in the book is that posts with high levels of moral outrage do very well. I thought, well, we're all capable of a bit of moral outrage every now and again, and so hypothetically, that could be an option for us; we could hop on board with this and ride the train into the rabbit hole of despair. But as you're probably picking up on from my tone, I am a bit concerned about where that might take people, especially after talking to my husband and asking around with my friends and family about how social media makes them feel. If people actually have an awareness that it creates this anger and irritability within them, I don't feel like that's something I particularly want to be part of, I certainly don't want to make it worse. So I guess where I'm falling down is rebelling and going in the opposite direction with my content and thinking about how I can make my little corner of social media a place that people want to go, where they feel they can come and have a bit of calm while they think through a topic in a bit of detail. It's part of my motivation, actually, for doing some longer videos like this, is yes, the algorithm is telling me not to do this, the algorithm is saying keep it short, keep it snappy, but this isn't something we can talk about in a 30 second sound bite. This is something that needs proper debate and real thinking about and I think, my hypothesis is that there are people out there who are craving that, and that some of our minds are craving that time staying on one subject, rather than this endless, endless scroll of new information all of the time, I think there are people who want to stay with us and think about something deeper for a bit longer. I think it will take longer to get the audience because the algorithms are not going to prioritise longer videos, because they're all about short video at the moment, but I think if you show up and consistently create high quality content, which is giving people good value, and going a bit deeper, being a bit more positive, not giving into this kind of anger inducing language, then people will start sharing that with their friends. It will be slower, but people will do it by almost word of mouth. And you will grow a following of people who come to you for that dose of positivity or thoughtfulness, which they're not getting on the rest of the web. That's my theory anyway, and it feels ethically a lot better with me, to provide that for people, and then hope, and try to promote that content and get people's eyes in front of it. 

So one way that you might do that is creating one longer video or one more positive video per week, and then creating a short snappy summary of that, which might be promoted a bit more readily, that points people back to the longer one. So that might be a practical strategy that you could use to get people looking at your positive content, and getting over that kind of negativity, negativity bias, potentially, by using our knowledge of the algorithm's preference for short videos, to do short positive videos, the algorithm will think, wow, that's okay, and direct people back to your longer, more positive video. So I think that could be one way around it. Another thing that you can do to try and get people to watch your more positive and thoughtful content, is to make it engaging, to make it spark conversation with people. If you can do that, if you can get a conversation going around your content, or in your community in general, the social media platforms have to take notice of that, because that is people sticking around on the platform, engaging on their platform, which is ultimately what they want, and that's telling them what people want and expect and what is going to keep them on the platform for longer. So if you can successfully do that, if you can create content that people want to talk to you about, then you will teach the social media platforms that we want something a bit different, that we don't want all of this kind of click-baity, anger inducing stuff, which just gets our threat systems going so we can't tear ourselves away from it. Because essentially, that's what this is about. It's about activating the threat system, so your brain goes, don't stop looking, don't stop looking, so you never stop scrolling. And I think a lot of us know what that feels like and can relate to that. And we have to teach the social media platforms and the algorithms that actually isn't what people want, and one way of doing that is creating more positive content, and then working really hard to generate conversation around that content.  

So with that in mind, if you enjoy these sections, and you've got any thoughts on this topic at all, please do send me a comment and let's talk about it. Let's get that conversation going. And let's teach the social media platforms that we want to have space to think, we want to talk about positive subjects, and we want to have real thoughtful debate on our social media channels. Because I think it's really important if we want to stop this kind of runaway train running down this incredibly negative rabbit hole on social media.  

So thank you very much for joining me for the first ever Books That Make You Think section. I will be back on Instagram next Monday to talk a bit more about Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, because he gave me lots of thinking points. So if you've got thoughts on the topic that we've discussed today, or if you've got a book that you'd like me to think about for the next Book That Made Me Think section, then please do leave me a comment below this video if you're watching on social, or you can always get in touch with me on Instagram @RosieGilderthorp. I'd really love to hear what you think. You can also subscribe to the Business of Psychology Podcast, where these videos are going to be put out as audio midweek every week. So if you prefer to listen, that's another place that you can find me. All right, thank you very much for joining me today. 

Prefer to watch the video? Find me on Instagram @rosiegilderthorp to watch now.

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Business of Psychology Podcast. If you share my passion for doing more than therapy, then make sure you come over and join my free Do More Than Therapy Facebook community where you can work on getting your big ideas off the ground with like minded psychologists and therapists. I'd also love it if you could leave the show a five star review wherever you listen to your podcasts. It will help more of the people who need it to find it. See next week for more tips and inspirational stories to help you do more than therapy.

Mentioned in this episode:

Psychology Business School

Are you looking to build an independent practice that is fulfilling, impactful and financially rewarding? Did you know that I run a business course that is designed to help you do exactly that without making all the mistakes I made along the way? Over 12 weeks we take you through everything you need to know to set up a practice that lets you live your values. Through a combination of teaching from experts, legal templates to make sure your practice is covered, peer support and group coaching sessions this is the place for anyone looking to get off the starting blocks in private practice.

The course is always accessible in pre-recorded format and three times a year we run a live cohort so what are you waiting for? Join us - the link is in the show notes.

Psychology Business School

What tools do I need to run my practice?

One of the most frequently asked questions I get when people are thinking about setting up in private practice for the first time is what tools do I need to run my practice? So today, I'm going to be talking through the tools that I think are essential for setting up in private practice in 2022, and also some tools which are not essential, but are pretty nice to have, and make your experience and your client’s experience that little bit better. Every tool that I mention is linked to, so I hope you're going to find it a really useful reference guide if you're just getting set up in private practice. 

Essential tools for setting up a private psychology practice.

 So what are the essentials for getting set up in private practice? 

 

GDPR Compliant Cloud Storage: The first thing that you need to consider is getting some secure cloud storage that is GDPR compliant. This is where you can store all your documents relating to your practice and your clients. The one that I have tried and tested is Google Drive, which comes as part of the Google workspace. Very cheap, very affordable, and very good in my experience, and if you use it correctly, it is GDPR compliant. You will need to check their help documentation to make sure that you are using it in a compliant way, but they have thought all of that through for you, and I can vouch for it being very, very good, so I do recommend Google Drive. There are other options out there; I know Microsoft do a similar suite, and iCloud also have options as part of the Apple network. I haven't tried either of those and I don't know about their compliance, so I am recommending Google Drive, but do your research. So long as you've got some secure cloud storage, then you're all good. 

Practice Management Software: The second thing you need to think about is practice management software. I'm a big advocate for this. This is the stuff which allows you to keep track of all your appointments, invoice your clients, store your notes, your reports, and track any communication that you have with clients. It makes the day to day running of your practice much smoother, and helps you come across as professional to clients and prospective clients, which ultimately allows you to make more money. It also takes all the worry out of things like freedom of information requests, and any legal requests you might get for access to your notes, because everything is there, under your client’s record, whenever you need it, at the click of a button. I really wouldn't be without mine. In fact, I believe in this so much, that this is the one company that I have an affiliate link for. I've got an affiliate link for WriteUpp, which is a private practice management software, which I personally have used for a very long time, and really rate. And it's the only company I've ever had an affiliate link for. So if you click on the link through to WriteUpp, I get a small amount of money from them, because I referred you to them, and I don't do that for any other company. I just really wish that more psychologists and therapists got practice management software from the beginning of their practices, because I see so many people really bogged down in admin, and really stressed by getting their appointments muddled up, not being able to find their notes, not knowing how to secure things, and how to store things in a GDPR compliant way, and they really don't need to be. Practice management software, like WriteUpp, starts at about £20 a month, and it takes all of those worries away. The other thing that you can do through practice management software is get your clients to sign consent, terms and conditions, therapy contracts, all of that stuff within the software. So again, it's all saved in their record, so you never have to dart around in your Google Drive looking for it. I couldn't recommend it more. WriteUpp is the one that I know so I'm recommending that one, but there are quite a few packages out there, so it is worth having a look around at the market and seeing what best suits your needs.

Email Marketing Software: Another thing that you might want to consider when you first get set up in private practice is making sure that you've got some email marketing software. This is so you can start growing a list of people who want to hear from you about any future projects, your Do More Than Therapy projects if you like, and you can contact them in a GDPR compliant way when you've got something to offer. Listen to our episode on marketing an online course to find out why you need an email list. And I really would recommend having some software that allows you to store those emails securely and in a compliant way from the beginning of your practice. I'm giving you some links to ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign. ConvertKit is the one that I use, I find it pretty simple and straightforward, so I'm recommending that one. But I've also heard really good things about ActiveCampaign, so I've got a link there for you to go and check that one out too. As with the practice management software, it’s well worth having a look at all the options that are on the market and seeing what's going to meet your needs the best, those are just the two that I've had recommended to me. 

Secure Email: Another thing that you need before you start seeing clients is a secure email for clients so that you can communicate with them about clinical issues if they arise. For this I use ProtonMail, and I've found them to be really good. There are other providers out there; you're looking for an encrypted email provider, so that you can, if you need to, communicate about clinical issues and send files securely, for example. So I use ProtonMail, I've hooked that up with my WriteUpp account so that any emails I send through WriteUpp go from my ProtonMail address, and as soon as somebody becomes a client, we switch to using that method of communication. It also means that it's an account which other people in my practice don't have access to. So if your practice grows, you're probably going to need to outsource replying to inquiries. You might need to give somebody else access to your standard email address (that might be Gmail, or a similar kind of email provider that's linked to your website), but you might not want to give that person access to client communications, which could contain more sensitive information. So I think it's worth it from the get go, to have a separate email address for people once they become clients, and ProtonMail is brilliant for that. 

An Email Provider that can link to your Website: You will also need an email provider that can link to your website easily and can be shared with a VA or an associate when you get further down the track. And for that, again, if you're using Google Drive, it would be wise to use Gmail, because that's all within the Google workspace package. But of course, you could use Outlook or another of the major email providers so long as it links up and is easy to share with people. 

Accounting Software: I'd also really recommend from early on, getting your accounting software set up. A package like Xero can be used to send invoices, track payments and track your spending so that your tax return is a lot easier and you can do accurate financial forecasting. Most people I know who've been in business for a while wish they'd got Xero sooner, because it means you save all of your receipts and your invoices in there so you have no headaches at the end of the year when it comes to tax return time. I don't even really register, if I'm honest, when tax returns are due, because it's so easy for me to generate the information that I need and get it to my accountant. So I couldn't recommend Xero more highly; I love it. But again, there are other providers out there. I've just heard that Xero is better than all of them! I'm not an affiliate or anything, but I do recommend Xero. I think it's great. And it's the one that Sally Farrant, our Pricing Queen, recommends and uses with her clients, so that's going to be a good recommendation. 

Decent Laptop or Computer: The final essential tool that you need for your private practice before you can really set up is a decent laptop or computer. You're not going to get very far these days if your computer takes 10 minutes to load a webpage; it's just going to make everything you do clunky, even if you're not offering online therapy. If you've got that spinning wheel of doom every time you try and load up your practice management software, for example, you're going to waste minutes and hours that you simply don't have. And if you are offering online therapy, there's really no excuse for your client having to watch you buffer when your equipment is letting you down. So if you're going to be running a business, take it seriously and get yourself a decent laptop or computer from the get go. If you don't have the capital upfront, in the past I've used services like HardSoft, who allow you to basically get a laptop or computer on hire purchase, so it's just a few quid every month to get something that works really well for you. And I'd consider that to be well worth it. If you skimp on this and you're working with a crappy piece of technology, then you're always going to feel like your practice isn't worth the money that you're charging. I think it really says something about your view of yourself and your skills. If you're working from a laptop that maybe you got during training or maybe is more than 10 years old and is really rickety, don't do that to yourself. It makes life really difficult and it communicates something a bit negative to your prospective clients. So get yourself a bit of kit that's going to make your life easier, not harder.

Tools that are "nice to have" when setting up a private psychology practice

So, moving on then to the tools that are nice to have, but not essential when you're setting up in private practice. 

 

Online Appointment Booking System: The first one I want to talk about is an online appointment booking system. Now, you can get this through your practice management software (WriteUpp off of their own), or you can have a separate one, like Calendly or Acuity. And this helps you to share a simple link with a client or a potential client or somebody that you want to have a meeting with, which they can then book and pay for an appointment using that link straight into your diary. So you don't have to do that whole back and forth of ‘when can you make it, when can I make it?’ And it can be as sophisticated or as simple as you want it to be. So I really recommend using something like this, so that people don't have to make a phone call to book an appointment with you. I mean, isn't it crazy, the world has moved on so much! Even five years ago, when I set up in private practice, I would have thought it was really weird for somebody to book a therapy appointment online. And as a consumer, I wouldn't have expected to book a therapy appointment online either. But nowadays, people really find it odd if we don't have these in place. And people are becoming more and more anxious about making a phone call as well. And especially as many of our clients are already feeling anxious or overwhelmed, making it that bit easier for them to book an appointment with you is likely to be the difference between them choosing you and another therapist, particularly if they found you on a directory site, for example. So I would recommend having a link that clients can use to book appointments straight into your diary. Now all the ones I've mentioned here, Calendly, Acuity or the one integrated with WriteUpp, do allow you to put terms and conditions in there that people have to look at and accept before they can book an appointment, so you can still make sure that people have read your terms and conditions. A top tip for me if you're going to offer this link out to completely new clients (so say hook it up on your website or your directory link) is to specify that you are committing to doing an assessment with that client. So for me, I don't offer free consultations in my practice very often, I tend to have on my website a link that people can book directly for an initial assessment appointment. And I make it very clear that in that appointment, we'll spend 50 minutes talking about their difficulties and working out if therapy, and indeed therapy with me, is the right thing for them. So they know that they're only signing up for that one session; this is not a commitment to long term therapy, and it's just very clear what the limits of that are, because I wouldn't want people booking straight into that diary and say booking a block of six sessions, when we really don't know yet whether we want to work together. So that that's something that you want to consider if you're setting that up, but I do think that it is well worth it. And it's more in line with what people expect from other services that they might be purchasing online now. So do check out Calendly, Acuity or the integrated platform within your practice management software. The other thing that you can use these calendars for is creating links for other things. So if you've got people that you might want to have meetings with, you know, people that you meet at a networking event that you want to schedule to have a quick call with, you can offer these links to those people as well. And you can choose whether it's a free event, a paid event, or several people can join the same time. They're really clever and really flexible. So well worth having a look at what those can do. I personally have found that Calendly and Acuity are more flexible than the one that comes integrated with WriteUpp, so I use Calendly for mine rather than the integrated platform. But like I said, there are pros and cons to all of these; you really need to weigh up which one meets your needs the best but I would definitely consider using one.  

Phone Answering Service: Another nice to have is a phone answering service. So if you want to provide a phone number where inquiries can call and have a quick chat with you rather than using email, and for some client groups that is essential and worth having, then I would strongly consider setting up a phone answering service like the one offered by answer.co.uk, where a receptionist will answer the phone for you and take a message and then email it to you, so that you can batch your responses, basically. Because what I found when I first started in private practice, when I just had it all coming through to my business mobile, was that I would get bogged down for an hour talking to somebody who called me with an inquiry. Even if I knew that they weren't somebody that I was going to work with, I'd then spend an hour talking to them about who might be the best person. And it would often happen at times when I was actually immersed in doing something else. And it would take me completely off track and away from the task I was meant to be doing. Now what happens is all of my messages get forwarded to my VA, not to me, and she will phone them back and qualify them and make sure that they're a good fit for me before I even see the referral. And she has a list of other psychologists that I recommend to refer people on to if she can tell from that call that they're not the right client for me. So if somebody called up about a child, for example, she knows a good child psychologist that I recommend, and she'll just direct them straight away to that to that person. So that's taken a huge weight off my shoulders. But even if I didn't have a VA, and I was still answering all my own inquiries, I would still choose to use an answering service, so that I could then decide, right, this afternoon, I'm going to call back all my inquiries, and do it in one go, rather than having this constant interruption of the phone ringing. So definitely worth considering that. And it can be quite affordable. The reason I use answer.co.uk is that you pay only for the messages you receive. You don't have to pay a monthly subscription; you just pay a set amount for every message that they forward on to you. That works really well for me, because I've been trying, over the past couple of years, to make sure all of my inquiries come in via email. I don't really want inquiries coming in via the phone. So I don't make my phone number the first port of call for clients, which is fine for the client group that I work with, but might not be for everybody. There are still a few people that really want to talk on the phone. And so I have the answering service to make sure that those people get a good service.  

LastPass: Another tool which is nice to have, and will help you work faster and more efficiently in your practice is something called LastPass. And this is a tool that allows you to securely share your login details for other tools that you're using, or websites, anything like that, with somebody else, without them ever seeing your password. I use it to share details for my software packages that I use with my VA. I don't need to have a separate account for my VA, she can just log in as me by clicking on this button. She never sees my password, it...

Should my online course be live or pre-recorded? Online course creation for psychologists and therapists

One of the top questions I get asked when I talk to psychologists or therapists about creating their online courses is “should it be live or pre-recorded.” It is one of the details that, as psychologists and therapists, we tend to get slightly hung up on. In truth, my opinion is that you can’t answer that question until you know your ideal client really well and you have thought through the learning points you are going to cover on your course as the way you deliver the course should be a natural conclusion based on what your ideal client group needs from you and how it makes sense to deliver your key learning points. 

In this episode I am going to outline some of the key advantages and disadvantages for recording your online course via pre-recorded or live video. At the end we will also think about whether a blended approach could work. 

Before we get stuck in I just want to point out that if you are at the stage where you haven’t yet got your online course planned out or you are not sure what learning points you need to cover don’t worry we have a free training coming up in the evening on 15th February 2022 where I will teach you my method for outlining an online course. You can sign up here.

Advantages of teaching your online course via pre-recorded video

• Great for courses where people will need to go at different paces. The “roadmap to a successful online course” is pre-record because I know that module one will take different lengths of time for different people depending on where you started from and how much time you have to dedicate to your course creation. I didn’t think the roadmap would work live because some students will already have established social media followings that you can talk to and others won’t even have thought about who your ICA is get, let alone knowing how to reach them. Pre-record allows people to use your material flexibly so they don’t feel “behind.”
• Flexibility of schedule for you and the students. They can fit their learning in around demanding jobs, caring responsibilities etc. You can also record at times that suit you.
• It is easier to follow a script and be concise when you pre-record. This can feel less anxiety provoking than live teaching.
• You can have unlimited numbers of students.

Disadvantages of teaching your online course via pre-recorded video

• You don’t get immediate feedback from your ICA as you teach so you won’t know if you are hitting the mark in time to change things while the course is ongoing.
• There is less accountability for your ICA so you tend to get lower completion and engagement rates.
• You don’t have the adrenaline of live teaching to carry you through either!
• Can be terrible for perfectionists as you (and your students) will expect things to have higher production values so you will either need to invest in editing or learn how to do it yourself. If you do it yourself you will be tempted to edit every little umm and err out of your videos but doing that will make you sound weird and will take you so long you will probably give up. If you pay an editor that is quite a big expense.
• You will need most of the content created before the course starts so people can truly go at their own pace. If you have a big course in mind you can drip the content out, releasing more every week or every month but you will generally want to have most of it created in advance because the editing process takes so long.
• You can’t troubleshoot with people when they hit roadblocks so you will most likely need another way to support people added on such as a FB group or a live Q&A session.
• Tech is more complicated. At a minimum all you need is a video hosting platform and you can then set up your email marketing software to send a sequence that guides people through the videos however to get good engagement/completion rates it is likely that you will want to create a website that shows people their progress and allows them to access workbooks/slides etc alongside your videos. This can be complicated and I recommend outsourcing to a web developer to make sure you get it right. Again, like the editing, this costs money.

Advantages of teaching your online course live

• Allows you to create week by week so you can test an idea without investing a thousand hours on creating and editing before you really know what works.
• You get real “facetime” with your IC group so can get to know them
• Higher levels of accountability lead to better engagement and completion rates
• The adrenaline rush of live teaching and the relationships you build can keep you motivated
• You can troubleshoot with people as they learn
• It is easier to get people to do exercises that promote high quality learning like role plays, quizzes, hot seats, etc.
• Easy tech. All you need is zoom, somewhere to host replays (like Vimeo or a FB group) and you are good to go.

Disadvantages of teaching your online course live

• You are committed to a date/time each week so have less flexibility.
• Your students have to be available at set times and if they can’t be that might put them off (even if recordings are available).
• People have to learn at the same pace or they will feel “behind” so it doesn't work for all topics.
• Other students’ learning can be derailed by questions or difficult students.
• Your students may not feel comfortable learning about your subject with others. They may want to be anonymous and may not want to engage with others in the group.
• Depending on your topic and IC group it might be hard to hold the boundary between an educational course and therapy when you are on a live call with people. You can work with this by setting up clear boundaries from the beginning and having pre-decided responses to use when things stray into clinical territory but it is important to be aware of.
• You may need to limit the number of students you accept, depending on your subject and teaching style.

Could a blend of live and recorded teaching work for your online course?

Lots of clinicians have used a blended strategy for their online courses. This often involves classes being pre-recorded and then the clinician hosting one live call a week or a month where they can troubleshoot with their students or offer further support. I’ve done this and found it works well and I know many other mental health professionals take that approach.

You could also run your course live a few times and then use the materials to create a pre-recorded course. This allows you to respond to feedback and get the benefits of creating live, such as spending time with your ICA and means you are more likely to create a course people really want rather than spending hours on one that misses the mark.

Those are the main things I would consider when deciding whether to run your course live or as a pre-recorded course. There is no hard and fast rule but for a lot of us a blend or running the course live a couple of times before we switch to pre-record seems to work best. As ever, I would love to know what you are thinking of doing with your course so do come and chat to me on Instagram @rosiegilderthorp or in our free Facebook group, The Do More Than Therapy community.

Sign up for our free training on February 15th to learn how to take your idea for your online course out of your head and into reality. Sign up for free here.

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Do you dream of creating an online course? Are you desperate to reach more people but sceptical that you can ACTUALLY make it work? 

The truth is a lot of online courses do fail but that isn't because the content is bad. It is because the marketing strategy sucks. The truth is your marketing isn't a separate thing. Talking to the community you want to serve should be part of the development of the course. 

Getting to know them, giving them free resources and building relationships WHILE you build your course in the background is the key to success that most psychologists and therapists launching courses miss. 

Well not you! Because you can download my free course creation guide and get yourself on the right track to creating a course people actually want and need.

The guide talks you through the first, essential steps you must take when planning your course so you can avoid the expensive mistakes I see so many well-intentioned people making.

Get yours at PsychologyBusinessSchool.com now: https://psychologybusinessschool.com/creating-a-valuable-freebie-psychologist-course-creation

Mentioned in this episode:

Course Creation Guide

Do you dream of creating an online course? Are you desperate to reach more people but sceptical that you can ACTUALLY make it work?

The truth is a lot of online courses do fail but that isn't because the content is bad. It is because the marketing strategy sucks. The truth is your marketing isn't a separate thing. Talking to the community you want to serve should be part of the development of the course.

Getting to know them, giving them free resources and building relationships WHILE you build your course in the background is the key to success that most psychologists and therapists launching courses miss.

Well not you! Because you can download my free course creation guide and get yourself on the right track to creating a course people actually want and need.

The guide talks you through the first, essential steps you must take when planning your course so you can avoid the expensive mistakes I see so many well-intentioned people making.

Get yours at PsychologyBusinessSchool.com now - the link is in the show notes.

Course Creation Guide

15 ways to create more flexibility (and passive income) in your psychology or therapy practice 

Every psychologist or therapist I speak to in Psychology Business School or Do More Than Therapy wants the same thing. To help people without burning themselves out. I very rarely have a coaching call where the words “work-life balance” are not mentioned. We often turn to private practice when we feel most desperately in need of improving our work-life balance. When we feel the scales have tipped and we are close to burnout. But I hear from many people who return to employment having concluded that the stress of running a private practice was not worth it. So, what does work-life balance actually look like for mental health professionals in private practice? Is it really achievable?

Can a psychologist or therapist in private practice really achieve work-life balance?

For me the answer is a definite yes, because I know it is possible, but with a caveat… I don’t really think it is possible to have good work-life balance if you are following the traditional private practice model of just seeing 1:1 clients. I say that because even if you follow Sally Farrent’s pricing strategy (and I fully recommend that you do) there are only a finite number of hours in the week and you will need to spend quite a few of them in front of clients in order to pay your bills. That makes it very hard to take a break when you need one, sick days become very costly and fitting in that pediatricians appointment for your child becomes very stressful as you know how much taking a morning off will impact on your take home pay this month. 

We will all define work-life balance differently. For some it might mean only working two days a week, for others it might mean working five days a week but never working in the evening. I personally think of it as the balance between living my professional values and a good week is one where I don’t have to make too many painful compromises.  What it means to you will depend entirely on your preferences, obligations and commitments. However, flexibility in your work is key to achieving whatever working pattern you desire.

You will have seen me writing a lot recently about creating online courses and how courses can help you to develop some passive income. One of the benefits of courses is that they can continue to bring money into your practice even when you cannot physically be there and that is how I have personally brought flexibility into my working life. However, I feel it is important to make it clear that there are actually lots of different business models you can use to create that elusive work-life balance. It is important to pick the one that best suits your definition of work life balance and the way you like to work. Forcing yourself into creating courses, for example, if the thought of it makes you want to die of boredom is not going to work. In this podcast I will run through some of the business models that can bring you flexibility so you can work out which one is most likely to help you create the life that feels balanced to you:

A psychology/therapy practice with associates. 

For a good example of how to do this see my podcast episodes with Melanie Lee and Shabnam Berry-Kahn who have both developed successful associate based practices.

Physical resources. 

For a good example of this take a look at the big hitters like The School of Life who have a huge amount of stuff available to buy for professionals and clients and Carolyn Spring who develops useful trauma resources, digital and physical for both professional and personal use. 

Consultancy. 

For a good example of a psychologist using a consultancy model go back and listen to (or read) my podcast episode with Susie Ballentyne. 

Authorship. 

On their own books rarely make a lot of money however they can keep a steady stream of income coming into your practice and are a great authority builder to combine with other options in this list. Check out our episodes on self publishing a book with expert, Tim Lewis, for some practical guidance and the episodes with Dave Lee, Lucy Russell and Amy Izyky for inspiration.  

Therapy or coaching for teams or groups. 

Although this is still a big time commitment you may be able to reduce your “therapy hours” by setting up a group. For a good example of how this works in private practice listen to my episode with Christine Hamilton. 

Memberships. 

This is a model where people pay you (usually monthly or annually) for ongoing access to something valuable. This could be courses or masterclasses you produce, coaching calls with you, a community of like minded people. Most commonly it is a combination of all those things. I run the Do More Than Therapy membership which is a monthly membership for psychologists and therapists who want to reach more people and make more impact on mental health without burning themselves out. Probably you if you have read this far! I offer a community, weekly coaching calls, and a library of masterclasses and courses teaching people how to get passive income projects (online courses, books, podcasts) off the ground and market them effectively. For more information on how the membership world works, tech etc I would check out the Membership Geeks. They have a great podcast and membership which takes the terror out of the whole process. 

Paid content creation. 

Platforms like Patreon and Kofi both allow you to put podcasts, blogs and other content behind a pay wall or accept voluntary contributions from those who are grateful for your work. This is unlikely to become a main source of income for you but can often create enough revenue to keep a passion project going or to get you started while you create something bigger in the background. 

Teaching/lecturing (University posts, working for another training establishment).

Research posts at a University.

Creating software or apps for professionals or clients. 

Take a look at what Asha Patel is doing with Innovating Minds and EduPod for inspiration.

Online courses: Live training for professionals. 

For example Psychology Business School is an online course for professionals looking to set up in independent practice. That involves teaching weekly live classes, creating resources and running coaching calls to help people as they build their practice. Other training for professionals can look like one off workshops or even team or group supervision. Dr Lindsay McMillan is a Do more Than Therapy member who has just started offering training and consultation to professionals on her specialist subject of gender disappointment. It is often easier to create training for professionals than for your client group while you are building your audience and authority in your specialism as you likely already have people in your network who could benefit from your expertise and they already know you are qualified and good at what you do.     

Train the trainer or a franchise model. 

If you have created something that others might want to pass on to their teams or wider organisations. Or indeed a model that is so useful the whole world needs to get trained in it then you could consider training others to deliver your training! This could be a great way of expanding the reach of your ideas without spending too much of your time physically delivering training. It works best when you have developed your training package and have good evidence that it is effective. Mental Health First aid is a well known example of this.

Online courses: Live workshops for a client group. 

Once your know your specialism and you have spent plenty of time getting to know your ideal client group you are in a good position to develop an offer that allows you to help several people at once. This will look different depending on your client group but can be a very rewarding way of working as you can charge a relatively low cost to each participant but still earn well for your time. This can allow you to reduce your therapy hours significantly once you find a workshop that works well for your client group.  

Online courses: Pre -recorded online courses for a client group. 

Marianne Trent, Lucy Russell, Chris Irons and myself all have examples of these that you can check out. They are great for helping people who have either previously had therapy and are embedding existing skills into their lives or people who don’t need therapy yet but are looking for self improvement. They can also work well to teach basic psychoeducation or stabilisation techniques ahead of a course of therapy.  

Online courses: Pre-recorded online courses for professionals. 

Think Psych Wire or the courses that I produce in the Do More Than Therapy membership such as our brand new “Roadmap to a successful online course.” It is important to think through carefully whether a topic and/or client groups would work better with live interaction or pre-recorded materials and this question is a focus topic in “the roadmap to a successful online course” for that reason. An obvious advantage with pre-recorded courses is that you can have as many people on them as you want and people can literally join them with no input from you so, once they are working well, they can bring you regular income through the year.

I hope that has given you some ideas for ways that you can make your practice more sustainable going forward. If online courses, live, pre-recorded for professionals or clients, seem like a good fit for your practice and values then download my free quickstart guide to creating an online course now. Once you have the guide you will be automatically added to the waiting list for a free workshop I am running on February 15th 2022 to help you start outlining the content for your online course. I promise it is possible to get that flexibility you crave in your life and I’d love to hold your hand through the process. 

**********

Do you dream of creating an online course? Are you desperate to reach more people but sceptical that you can ACTUALLY make it work? 

The truth is a lot of online courses do fail but that isn't because the content is bad. It is because the marketing strategy sucks. The truth is your marketing isn't a separate thing. Talking to the community you want to serve should be part of the development of the course. 

Getting to know them, giving them free resources and building relationships WHILE you build your course in the background is the key to success that most psychologists and therapists launching courses miss. 

Well not you! Because you can download my free course creation guide and get yourself on the right track to creating a course people actually want and need.

The guide talks you through the first, essential steps you must take when planning your course so you can avoid the expensive mistakes I see so many well-intentioned people making.

Get yours at PsychologyBusinessSchool.com now: https://psychologybusinessschool.com/creating-a-valuable-freebie-psychologist-course-creation

Mentioned in this episode:

Course Creation Guide

Do you dream of creating an online course? Are you desperate to reach more people but sceptical that you can ACTUALLY make it work?

The truth is a lot of online courses do fail but that isn't because the content is bad. It is because the marketing strategy sucks. The truth is your marketing isn't a separate thing. Talking to the community you want to serve should be part of the development of the course.

Getting to know them, giving them free resources and building relationships WHILE you build your course in the background is the key to success that most psychologists and therapists launching courses miss.

Well not you! Because you can download my free course creation guide and get yourself on the right track to creating a course people actually want and need.

The guide talks you through the first, essential steps you must take when planning your course so you can avoid the expensive mistakes I see so many well-intentioned people making.

Get yours at PsychologyBusinessSchool.com now - the link is in the show notes.

Course Creation Guide

Marketing an online course for psychologists part 6: Creating inclusive online marketing and education resources. Guidance for psychologists and therapists 

Psychologists and therapists usually care a great deal about inclusivity and we spend time in training and service planning thinking about how we can make sure our work is accessible to those who need it. However, in my experience we often don’t put as much thought into our marketing and teaching. Many mental health accounts on social media fail to fully represent the people following that account and most haven’t yet learned how to make their content accessible to those with visual or hearing impairments. Similarly, online courses are often totally inaccessible to people with learning difficulties like dyslexia or colour blindness. This is completely unnecessarily exclusionary as there is awesome guidance available all over the web to let us know how we can make our content accessible. Since much of our marketing and teaching is now being done online it is well worth spending some time thinking about how we can make sure anything we put out there that is intended to provide psychoeducation is inclusive and accessible to all that could benefit from it. In this episode I am going to outline some basic principles and link to the best resources I have found to support you in making your marketing and educational materials as inclusive as possible.

It was actually while researching for my new online course for our membership “The roadmap to a successful online course” that I came across the resources I am going to link to today. I am always looking to try and make sure that the materials I create are as inclusive and accessible as possible and I wanted to make sure that we had a module dedicated to that in the course.  So if you are planning to add an online course into your psychology or therapy practice then do come and check out the roadmap. It sits at the centre of our monthly membership and will take you from your very first idea for a course right the way through to getting it in front of all the people who need it.

Create inclusive marketing and educational resources that your audience can relate to 

Images that reflect the range of people you are serving and stories that allow people to see themselves in what you are teaching. I’ve talked in previous episodes about the idea of having a representative group of ideal clients in mind when you are creating your marketing and educational resources. If you haven’t listened to the Ideal Client Avatar episode then it is worth going back to that one. I try to have different members of this group in mind as I create my resources and try to make sure that there are images and stories that help each of those people to see themselves in what I am teaching or talking about. If you are training professionals this could include sharing relevant stories from the different groups you have in the room (for example mental health nurses, psychotherapists and psychologists) as well as the characteristics you would usually think about when talking about inclusivity like race, gender identity and socio economic background. In this episode I talk about a test that I use before I include stories in my resources and that includes an inclusivity check.

I like this blog from Sprout social that gives some ideas for making sure your content is anti racist in a helpful way. 

Amnesty have also produced a simple guide to creating resources that are respectful of all gender identities that I think is useful. One tip I have picked up that is specific to online teaching is that zoom will now allow you to specify your pronouns below your name when you join a call. I think that is a good way of making it safe for your attendees to do the same if they wish to without putting any pressure on them to do so if they don’t feel safe. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/LGBTQ-equality/gender-identity-beginners-guide-trans-allies

Create inclusive resources for the hard of hearing: Subtitles 

Subtitles on all videos are very important for people with impaired hearing (or interpretation if possible). There are tools that will do this for free. For example you can upload a video to Youtube and it will automatically generate captions. However, this is something that I think is worth spending some money to make sure you get it right in the shortest amount of time possible as it can be very time consuming and faffy with the free tools. For my lessons for my online courses I personally get captions generated by Rev.com which costs about £1 a minute (so around £90 for my lessons). I then review them to make sure there are no glaring errors (or I ask my editor to do that as I am not good at that kind of thing) and they automatically appear on my vimeo videos. IF you are posting to another platform you can use a free tool like Kapwing to burn your Rev captions on to your video or you can upload them separately to Facebook. For social media videos I do use the auto generated captions that Facebook produces sometimes as you can edit these, but it is still quite glitchy and if I want to use a video for an ad or I hope lots of people will see it then I tend to use Zubtitle to add my captions as it is easier to edit in there and you can also resize the video and make sure the captions appear in the right place for the platform you are using. 

Create inclusive resources for the hard of hearing: Transcripts 

Transcripts of audio and video content are also easy to generate using tools like Rev.com or otter.ai. Both of those are tools that you have to pay for but the thought of using a free tool and having to edit virtually every word myself makes it seem like an impossible and awful task. I don’t think I would create much content if I knew I had to do that every time (I used to do it so I know how aversive it was!) I think it is much better to pay and get a better quality output in minutes.

Create inclusive resources for the visually impaired: Alt TextGeneral principles for adding alt text and/or descriptions of images for visually impaired people. 

Alt text is read by screen readers which help visually impaired people by speaking out loud the content of websites (including social media platforms). This blog from Harvard University gives some more in depth guidance about how to add alt text, including the best way to describe complex images such as graphs and charts, but essentially the best principle is to think about what someone who can’t see it needs to know about the image. That means putting it in context. For example, I have in the past been guilty of adding alt text to an image that just describes it basically such as “Facebook icon”. However, if the context is that people are meant to click that icon to go to my Facebook community I should put that in the alt text.  https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/describe-content-images You can now add alt text to social media images too. I only found out about this recently and it is important that we start doing this so I’m glad to see that the platforms have started to make it easier for creators to do this. When you add a photo or image on Facebook you can go to the “edit” feature and save your alt text there. This blog and video from access now makes it really simple. https://accessnow.com/blog/how-to-add-alt-text-to-facebook-photos/ The alt text feature is in “advanced settings” after you have edited your photo on instagram, access now have a handy guide to adding it there too https://accessnow.com/blog/how-to-add-alt-text-to-instagram-photos/ You can also add descriptions to your images when using Twitter by simply clicking add description when you upload them https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/picture-descriptions Linked IN also make it really easy as when you click to edit your image at the top right of the image there is an option to add a description there. https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/109799/adding-alternative-text-to-images-for-accessibility?lang=en

Create inclusive resources: Being mindful of dyslexia. 

The British Dyslexia Association have created a style guide to help us with this. It is very detailed but easy to follow so I won’t list it all out here but some key points I hadn’t considered before were: use sans serif fonts (like Ariel and Comic Sans rather than Times New Roman), use line spacing of 1.5 and text size of at least 12, no headings all in capital letters, left align rather than justify text, use short blocks of text with subheadings where possible and black text on white backgrounds should be avoided.

Create inclusive resources: Being mindful of colour blindness 

I have to say I did not know much about colour blindness before I started researching for the complete roadmap to a successful online course. We are color blind have produced a useful summary of available resources here. The two basic principles I try to keep in mind are to avoid green and red and make sure there is sufficient contrast between colours. They also mention some helpful tools that allow you to check your design for contrast that seem really useful. I haven’t tried them yet so please, if you do, let me know which ones you like best and I will update this post with some recommendations.

Create inclusive resources: Respond to feedback 

Ask for feedback and respond to what people tell you with an open mind rather than being defensive. If someone tells you that something you created wasn’t inclusive, don’t defend it, don’t talk about your intentions just agree to investigate it, get some opinions from people you respect (supervisors, colleagues, experts through lived experience) and change it if needed. Be kind to yourself, not every piece of content you create will be a hundred percent inclusive because no one is perfect. Sometimes you will need to create different forms of content to reach different people. Our episode on creating engaging online courses covered why that is a good idea anyway as people like learning in different formats. As long as you apply effort to learning to be more inclusive and you do your best to follow these principles in everything you produce you will have a good base to grow from as you develop your courses and marketing efforts. 

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Links

Complete Roadmap to a Successful Online Course https://psychologybusinessschool.com/complete-roadmap-to-a-successful-online-course/

Episode 19: How Psychologists And Therapists Can Use An Ideal Client Avatar To Co Create And Market Their Services https://psychologybusinessschool.com/the-business-of-psychology/ideal-client-avatar-psychologists-therapists-marketing

How much should I say about myself online? A guide for psychologists and therapists on using self disclosure to reach and educate people https://psychologybusinessschool.com/the-business-of-psychology/self-disclosure-online-for-psychologists-and-therapists

Resources

5 Ways to Advance Diversity, Equity & Inclusion on Social https://sproutsocial.com/insights/brand-diversity-in-social-media/

Gender identity for beginners: a guide to being a great trans ally - Amnesty International UK https://www.amnesty.org.uk/LGBTQ-equality/gender-identity-beginners-guide-trans-allies

Write good Alt Text to describe images - Digital Accessibility​ https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/describe-content-images

How to Add Alt Text to Facebook Photos - AccessNow https://accessnow.com/blog/how-to-add-alt-text-to-facebook-photos/

How to Add Alt Text to Instagram Photos - AccessNow

https://accessnow.com/blog/how-to-add-alt-text-to-instagram-photos/

How to make images accessible for people - Twitter https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/picture-descriptions

Adding Alternative Text to Images for Accessibility - LinkedIn Help https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/109799/adding-alternative-text-to-images-for-accessibility?lang=en

Creating a dyslexia friendly workplace - Dyslexia friendly style guide

https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/advice/employers/creating-a-dyslexia-friendly-workplace/dyslexia-friendly-style-guide

Resources for Designing for the Colorblind https://wearecolorblind.com/resources/collection/resources-for-designing-for-the-colorblind/

Tools

Rev.com https://www.rev.com/

Zubtitle https://zubtitle.com/

Otter https://otter.ai/

Mentioned in this episode:

Course Creation Guide

Do you dream of creating an online course? Are you desperate to reach more people but sceptical that you can ACTUALLY make it work?

The truth is a lot of online courses do fail but that isn't because the content is bad. It is because the marketing strategy sucks. The truth is your marketing isn't a separate thing. Talking to the community you want to serve should be part of the development of the course.

Getting to know them, giving them free resources and building relationships WHILE you build your course in the background is the key to success that most psychologists and therapists launching courses miss.

Well not you! Because you can download my free course creation guide and get yourself on the right track to creating a course people actually want and need.

The guide talks you through the first, essential steps you must take when planning your course so you can avoid the expensive mistakes I see so many well-intentioned people making.

Get yours at PsychologyBusinessSchool.com now - the link is in the show notes.

Course Creation Guide

Creating and marketing an online course for psychologists and therapists part 5: How to create an engaging online course (that people actually finish)

Teaching online is a skill you have to learn if you want to have a successful online course. To be honest studying at University means we have often encountered a lot of very very bad teaching in our careers. I’m doing an MBA at the moment and most of the teaching is literally a white, middle aged man talking at me in a droning voice for two hours while I try desperately to stop thinking about what I’m having for tea. That just won’t cut it in the world of online courses. Research suggests that up to 88% of people don’t finish an online course they have started. That is completely unacceptable to me. I do not want to take money from people for something they don’t even finish. If we want to make sure people get good results from our courses we need to make sure that they are taught skillfully.

 

In this episode I am going to talk you through the four pillars of creating engaging online lessons that I recommend you consider when you are creating anything educational from social media videos and podcast episodes through to the lessons of your online course.  

 

Every time I plan a lesson, social media video or podcast episode I always start by selecting 3-5 key learning points that I want the audience to take away. I then think about how I can hit that learning point from different angles to make sure it really sinks in for people. 

• Imagination - stories, personal stories, composite stories, illustrating everything you teach with a story of some sort will bring it to life for your students. You can hear/read more about how I recommend using stories in our episode on writing for your marketing here.
• Visual - graphics, mind maps, illustrations. This is the stuff I suck at so I usually need help to take my verbally expressed ideas and put them into graphic form but charts, mind maps, graphs, infographics all of these things can really help make an idea more solid for people. It is also helpful to provide a workbook so that visual learners can be scribbling their own doodles that help them to understand what you are talking about.  
• Auditory - talking it through and making time for small group discussion of the learning point. It is important to provide time for people to ask you questions as some people will need to hear things put in different ways to apply the learning to their own lives.
• Practical - exercises that make people apply the learning to a real life situation they are in or expect to be in soon. Breakout rooms on zoom are great for giving people time and space to do this without putting them on the spot but role plays and hot seat style questions also work well.

 

If you cover off each of these pillars for each learning point you will find the engagement in your lessons goes up hugely. They don’t really allow people to just sit back and glaze over!

 

It is also really important to make sure your resources are inclusive and engaging for everyone you are serving and we will talk more about that on an upcoming episode. 

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Links

Episode 71: Writing for your psychology or therapy website: How to get started and key principles https://psychologybusinessschool.com/the-business-of-psychology/writing-for-your-psychology-or-therapy-website-how-to-get-started-and-key-principles/

References

Top 75 Online Learning Statistics & Trends for 2021 https://sellcoursesonline.com/online-learning-statistics

Massive open online course completion rates revisited: Assessment, length and attrition http://oro.open.ac.uk/43566/

**********

Do you dream of creating an online course? Are you desperate to reach more people but sceptical that you can ACTUALLY make it work? 

The truth is a lot of online courses do fail but that isn't because the content is bad. It is because the marketing strategy sucks. The truth is your marketing isn't a separate thing. Talking to the community you want to serve should be part of the development of the course. 

Getting to know them, giving them free resources and building relationships WHILE you build your course in the background is the key to success that most psychologists and therapists launching courses miss. 

Well not you! Because you can download my free course creation guide and get yourself on the right track to creating a course people actually want and need.

The guide talks you through the first, essential steps you must take when planning your course so you can avoid the expensive mistakes I see so many well-intentioned people making.

Get yours at PsychologyBusinessSchool.com (link in the show notes) now https://psychologybusinessschool.com/creating-a-valuable-freebie-psychologist-course-creation

Marketing an online course for psychologists part 4: Do you have the authority to launch an online course?

Hello and welcome to a slightly different episode of the Business of Psychology Podcast. 

Today I'm excited to share with you a very brief clip from one of our lessons in our upcoming course all around course creation for psychologists and therapists. So yes, it's a bit meta, I have created a course about online course creation, and I'm so excited to bring it to you guys. 

So this is an affordable option if you are somebody who is wanting to reach more people and help more people through an online course, but you haven't quite got the budget to go and spend £2000 with some of the coaches that are out there at the moment. Or if you have got that budget, but you just want to do it in the company of other psychologists and therapists and people who share your kind of ethical marketing background, then I'm really excited to be bringing this course to you. And I thought what better way of giving you a sense of what we've got to offer in the course than letting you take a little sneak peek at one of our lessons. 

So just to let you know, the course is going to be offered as a regular part of the Do More Than Therapy membership. That's our monthly membership that costs £47 a month at the moment. And it was really important to me to offer this course as a core part of that membership, as a roadmap actually running through the centre of that membership, so that rather than putting a big price tag on this course, which I could have done (and there are lots of really high priced courses about online course creation out there) but I wanted to make this really accessible so it's free for all of our existing members. If you're already a Do More Than Therapy member or a Psychology Business School student, you will get access to this at no additional cost whatsoever. And I've kept it at that low price point so that as many of you as possible who have a passion for reaching more people can jump on board and do that with us. I’m really excited to bring it to you and I know that today's content around building your authority is going to get you off to the best possible start.

I also wanted to share this particular lesson because I think it's something we don't talk about enough; and that is building authority. You can't expect the public to just understand that you know what you're talking about based on your years of experience and your qualifications. It makes me so angry, but it is true that the public generally don't have a good understanding of who we are and what we do. We've got a bit of an identity problem at the moment. So because of that, it's super, super important from the minute that you conceptualise the idea that you might want to build an online course, to start building up the authority you need with the public in order to sell that course. So if there was one thing I was going to say you need to get started right now on this, it would be building your authority. So this is just a really quick snippet of that lesson. You will probably hear me referring to resources that you don't have access to a couple of times during the lesson. That's because the people taking the course will get access to a workbook and they'll also have access to all of our Do More Than Therapy master classes. So I apologise for that, but I thought the content was so good and so worth sharing that I wanted to put it out in this format. So here we go, without further ado here is a little snippet of our lesson on building authority.

Building Authority Lesson Clip

Building Authority is absolutely essential if we're going to put an online course out into the world. People have to understand why they should choose to invest time and money with you. So today we're going to look at why you need to build authority even if you have loads of experience already. We're going to look at ways of building authority within your specialism, the practical how-to of how to do that, and finally we're going to nail down your authority building plan that you're going to consistently stick to throughout the rest of this programme. 

 

One point I wanted to cover before we get stuck into the how of building your authority is why you need to do it. So if you need convincing on this point that people prefer working with specialists, then I really want you to go and watch my webinar on finding your focus and finding your specialism. And I'm going to link to it below this. So if you haven't seen that already, do go and watch it. 

 

In summary, people prefer working with specialists because they know that you're a safe pair of hands. Your specialism suggests experience with people like them, they can be confident that you want to work with them. People are terrified about reaching out to professionals. Knowing that you've dedicated your life to working with people like them gives them a boost of confidence. And finally, they know you're up to date with your CPD and the latest evidence base in this area, which is really important. So building authority in your specialist area allows people to feel safer about making an investment with you. And even if what you're offering is low cost or even free, they're risking two very precious things when they invest with you, and that is their mental well-being and their time; they have to really trust you to do that. It's also true that there are a lot of competing voices in the mental health space, many of whom are less highly regulated than us, and are likely to make more strident claims about changing people's lives forever in a 90 minute webinar. We see you Speakmans, and so did the Advertising Standards Authority. So to stand out above those kind of unethical voices, we need to have credentials that the public understands. 

These are the sorts of things that the public understand to mean credibility. All of these are gate kept by people in power, and they show that you've been endorsed by some powerful backers. Things like:

• NHS experience
• Your core qualification (not CPD by the way people don't really understand CPD, but they do understand our core qualifications on the whole)
• Your professional body, your level of membership with that body
• Publications (especially things like journals, books, even well regarded blogs that you've been published in)
• Institutional positions, university positions, professional bodies. You know, if you're on a committee or something like that, that can be understood by the public as being quite credible, or if you hold a position as a trustee in a charity. 
• And finally, media coverage. People trust the people that they see on their local and national news, TV, radio, and print media as well. Thankfully, within the Do More Than Therapy membership, we have got deep dive classes on getting a systematic review published in a journal, self publishing a book, engaging with the media and engaging with the press from experts in all of those fields. So I'm going to link below this video to all of those deep dive master classes. 

 

So for now, what I want you to do is pick one of those ways of building authority to add to your plan. You can't do all at once, but you should be aiming to build on at least one of these areas at a time. So pick one that you'd be excited to develop and follow up by watching the relevant masterclass after you finish this video.

 

The other crucial way to build authority for your online course and give people the confidence to buy from you is to literally show and tell them what you do through cornerstone content that you create. So that could be blogs, podcasts, videos. Public speaking, guesting on podcasts, and providing free advice on social media are also great ways of showing people your expertise. In our next class in this course, I'm going to be talking you through the key ingredients of good cornerstone content. You can go deep on your chosen format by selecting one of the master classes that we have in the Do More Than Therapy membership on each of those topics. So again, don't worry, for now all you need to do is decide which type of show and tell content is likely to work best for you, and put it into your authority building plan. 

 

So in conclusion then, you need to commit to doing one activity that builds your credentials, and one show and tell activity that shows people your expertise. These will become the most important pieces of your marketing plan. So have a think about your options and make a commitment to do one of each consistently. Ideally, if you're serious about building enough authority to sell your course, you need to be doing something to build your credentials at least once a month, and you need to be putting out weekly cornerstone content of some sort to show your expertise. There is space to note down the activities you're committing to in your workbook, so that you can hold yourself accountable. And if you aren't sure, then feel free to watch a few of our deep dive master classes and see which ones light you up and make you excited to get out there, get more visible and build your authority.

 

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Before you go I just wanted to remind you that you can now sign up for the Do More Than Therapy membership and get access to our new roadmap to a successful online course exclusively for psychologists and therapists. We start releasing content in February so now is a great time to get signed up. So if you want to get your online course out of your head and out into the world, helping people. Come and join us over at https://psychologybusinessschool.com/the-do-more-than-therapy-membership/

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Links

Webinar: Find Your Focus: Define Your Specialism https://psychologybusinessschool.com/learning/find-your-focus-define-your-specialism/

Masterclass: Systematic Reviews in Private Practice: https://psychologybusinessschool.com/learning/systematic-reviews-in-private-practice/

Masterclass: Self-Publishing https://psychologybusinessschool.com/learning/self-publishing-masterclass/

Masterclass: Engaging with the Media https://psychologybusinessschool.com/learning/engaging-with-the-media-to-spread-your-message/

Masterclass: Press https://psychologybusinessschool.com/learning/press/

Marketing an online course for psychologists and therapists part 3: Promoting your freebie with Dr Catherine Hallissey

In this episode I talk to Dr Catherine Hallisey, who is a child psychologist, owner of the Reclaim Parenthood online membership, and creator of the Raising Well Behaved Kids workshop. I'm really excited to have Catherine here to inspire us as we hear about her workshops, because they've been wildly successful, and I'd really like to dive into the secrets of how she’s created that success.

The highlights

• I welcome Catherine to the podcast and she tells us who she is and who she helps 00:22
• Catherine tells us what inspired her to create her first workshop 02:03
• Catherine talks about how she promoted her in person workshops 05:15
• We discuss Catherine’s experience of setting up a Facebook page 08:16
• Catherine talks about the membership, which was sparked by the Facebook page 12:04
• Catherine tells us how she came to offering workshops, and the importance of the title 15:13
• Catherine talks about the free checklist she offers to promote her evergreen workshops, and how she uses her online community to test ideas 23:31
• We talk about the importance of building an community and building relationships on social media 28:23
• We discuss designing your ideal work/life balance 34:49
• I thank Catherine and she tells us where we can find her online 41:15
• Catherine encourages us, as psychologists, to bring our expertise and abilities to these spaces 43:17

Catherine’s Links:

Websites: 

https://catherinehallissey.com

https://raisingwellbehavedkids.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CatherineHallisseyPsychologist/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/catherine.hallissey/

**********

Do you dream of creating an online course? Are you desperate to reach more people but sceptical that you can ACTUALLY make it work? 

The truth is a lot of online courses do fail but that isn't because the content is bad. It is because the marketing strategy sucks. The truth is your marketing isn't a separate thing. Talking to the community you want to serve should be part of the development of the course. 

Getting to know them, giving them free resources and building relationships WHILE you build your course in the background is the key to success that most psychologists and therapists launching courses miss. 

Well not you! Because you can download my free course creation guide and get yourself on the right track to creating a course people actually want and need.

The guide talks you through the first, essential steps you must take when planning your course so you can avoid the expensive mistakes I see so many well-intentioned people making.

Get yours at PsychologyBusinessSchool.com (link in the show notes) now. 

https://psychologybusinessschool.com/creating-a-valuable-freebie-psychologist-course-creation

**********

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Business of Psychology podcast. If you share my passion for doing more than therapy, then make sure you come over and join my free Do More Than Therapy Facebook community, where you can work on getting your big ideas off the ground with like minded psychologists and therapists. I'd also love it if you could leave the show a five star review wherever you listen to your podcasts. It will help more of the people who need it to find it.