You're probably familiar with scenario: You finally have some time off. You know you need to update your website, or return a call to a potential client (and you really need a new client). But instead, somehow, you find yourself binging on 4 episodes of the next tv show you'll soon forget on Netflix. How did that happen?
Well, today we'll talk about productivity hacks for building your counseling or coaching private practice. This is extremely important because even when you know what you should be doing to build your practice, sometimes you can get overwhelmed and get stuck.
I've compiled a number of helpful strategies that can really support you in your quest of creating a successful business where you get to help others, and thrive yourself. These are some of the strategies that the participants in our private practice accelerator use to get unstuck and keep on going building their private practice, to keep the momentum going and achieving real measurable results.
________________________________________
About the 6-Figure Practice Program:
The Six Figure Practice with Sasha Raskin, is an online program and community for helpers such as counselors and coaches, who are building their private practice. If you’re looking for a clear, step-by-step road map for creating and marketing your private practice, you're at the right place!
My name is Sasha Raskin. I’m a Number 1 Best Selling Co-Author in 12 Countries, a Doctoral student in Counseling Education and Supervision, a coach, a psychotherapist and an adjunct faculty at a graduate counseling program at Naropa University.
One of the things I’m enjoying the most is helping other therapists and coaches build their successful private practice so that they could actually help the clients they were taught to help, and thrive themselves. I’m almost always fully booked, so my ability to work with individuals is limited. That is why I’ve created this program to deliver powerful results and create a community where you will feel supported by each other!
This program's primary goal is to help you build a thriving private practice, in a fun and authentic way. Counselors and coaches invest an incredible amount of time, money, and effort into building their helping skills. However, when their training ends, they usually find themselves lacking the business skills that are needed to start and run a successful private practice, feel isolated, discouraged and not knowing where to start.
I believe that to be truly helpful to others, therapists and coaches have to learn to thrive themselves and definitely know how to get clients whom they can help.
This is where this program comes in. If you're willing to learn and work hard, a 6-figure private practice is within your reach in a year - 2 years. This program will give you a clear outline, and detailed instructions on how to get there.
Productivity Hacks for Your Counseling or Coaching Private Practice - How to Get Unstuck
Okay, going live once again in a few different platforms, both on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube. So we'll see how it goes with all the platforms together.
The thing I want to talk about today is super important and it will help you to actually build your business in a way that is not slow, right? So you could go fast and set all the structures in place so you could start getting clients and start helping people.
So the big three things that stop counselors and coaches from building their business and building their business fast enough as well is (1) they don't have a plan like basically what to do next and in which sequence. The second one is not having the tools, basically, okay, I kind of need know that I need a website but, well, how do I build a website or do I need to outsource it to someone else? So figuring out the what, when and how is super important. And the third thing is getting stuck, right? How do you actually get help? Who can you talk to when you're taking action? And I see many of my clients get actually stuck in small things, it's not the big things, it's just this one thing like, maybe you're familiar with that one, choosing a name for your business or opening an LLC, whatever it is, or in your website, this small technical thing that takes so much time, effort and emotions.
So once you have all those three in place - a plan; what to do and when; the tools, how to get all those things down or if you choose to outsource how do you actually hire someone and how do you manage them, how do you lead them to help you with what you need and you get some ways to get help, mentors, coaches programs, whatever - you can go ahead and move faster in building your business.
Now if you think about it, it can take you on average about 50 hours total to build your business from scratch. And I mean, both marketing, sales and operations. What do I mean? Marketing being found online and offline; sales - how would you actually do with all those people that find you, how do they become your clients, paying clients not just potential clients; and the third one is operations, basically you running your business, all the behind the scenes, right? The scheduling, billing, finances and all of that stuff. So you need to have all those three things in place - sales, marketing and operations, or you can think about it as attract, convert, deliver.
Now to build all of those once again from scratch you only need 50 hours. That's pretty much it, if you work non-stop of course which is about one full week of work. So if that's the case, why do you think it takes most counselors and coaches to build a small chunk of that over the course of a year, two years or three years? Well, exactly because they don't have a plan, they don't know what to do or when to do, like what's the next step, they don't have the tools, right? How do I actually know how to do this thing if I was never taught to do that? And the third one they don't have a way to get support when they get stuck.
Now beyond that, even when you have all those things in place, it will require you to keep on going in terms of application. No one needs more information, right? It's not about reading another book or getting another training, it's about actually doing the work and applying it and going through all those 50 hours of the actual work. And today, I want to talk about some productivity hacks so that you can actually, whatever your life situation right now is, be able to create a structure and move fast with building your practice, whether you do it alone or if you want to join our program, the six figure practice, you have to have a system that's predictable to take action.
So productivity hack number one, first of all it's not about quality it's about quantity. The main thing is to do a little bit if that's all you can do but every day versus waiting for the weekend with this big, "I'm going to put five, six hours into this," and then the weekend you just want to rest because you're tired. It's much better to actually do, for example, half an hour of work every day,a nd if you want to start with 10 minutes that's great, but then you build momentum; and the second one, the next day you don't have to try and remember what you've been doing a week ago, right? Because you're just continuing what's being done before. It's kind of like when if you want to buy 100 t-shirts that you designed it wouldn't cost you that much big of a difference to buy 200 from 100 than from 1 to 10, because it takes so much effort to set everything up in the factory to produce one t-shirt. The same thing - it takes a lot of effort and time to get started, that's why it's just so much easier to keep on going versus starting and stopping if you're doing it once a week.
Number two, some people are much better and more effective in doing work when they're in the presence of other people, which means, and we can geek out on attachment theory, I think ambivalent attachment styles are definitely more prone to working with others and their nervous system gets overwhelmed easier when they're on their own. So whatever lens you choose to look at that you know yourself better, right? Are you more productive when you have your own space and you have your own time or are you more productive when there's someone around and you feel accountable to someone as well.
So in terms of accountability there are two main things that you can do, well, actually three. First of all announce your plans to other people, right? For example, you can use the power of social networks, for example, and say, "This week I'm going to finish my website." So there's so much research that shows even when quitting smoking once you put it out there in the world there are a lot of powerful forces that start to work, so you would feel weird if you disappoint others, right? So that will help you to keep on doing and achieving the goals that you announced that you will be doing.
Number two you can work in the presence of others. I'm recording this during a pandemic so that might be difficult. But work dates are wonderful, that can be done using Zoom, especially when you're working on the same thing, right? Let's say you have a colleague, you just graduated from your master's program in counseling and you're building your private practice and you know that your friend is doing the same, but your friend is maybe doing their website now, you're now learning how to do Google Ads, and you just schedule time together and on the Zoom call you just do a quick check-in and you set the goal for that amount of time that you have. For example, for now I'm going to be doing all this stuff, and you keep on going.
Now the third thing, what if you do want to be accountable to someone and you do want to do work together and to have someone there to keep you focused but you don't have the possibility to do this? Maybe your friends are busy or whatever it is. There is a wonderful website that many of my clients use, it's called focusmate.com. And the idea is super simple, it's you set a time, a meeting with a stranger basically based on your availability, and you do a call together for an hour. And you have a specific structure, you check in with what you're going to work on and you just do the work.
So how is it helpful? First of all, you'll have it on the calendar, right? Because when you're accountable to someone it's just so much easier usually for humans to do the work versus them accountable just to themselves. I won't get into the psychology behind that, but we are social creatures, there are all those psychosocial forces that can actually be used to help you. And this service is actually free, you can schedule up to three appointments with strangers based on the times that you have and do the work with them. And I think it's maybe five bucks a month, if it's more I don't really remember. And it doesn't really matter where in the world you live, you can still find a time, you can still find people who would love your help keeping them accountable and they would keep you accountable. I had a client in Kuala Lumpur and she found one. So different time zones and different countries are not a big problem.
Now another accountability hack is just decide on the one thing that you're going to do this day in your practice. And how do you actually make a decision? Many times counselors and coaches when they build their businesses they go into paralysis by analysis mode, basically there is so much to do - how can I even choose something? So the question you might ask yourself especially at the beginning of your business when you're building it and you need to start getting cash flow and increasing your cash flow as soon as possible and get those psychological wins of, "Oh, I'm actually doing this. My business is growing," you ask yourself the question what would bring me clients as soon as possible, right? What are the next steps in that.
By the way, to figure that out I created a very short training, it's for free, it's 20 minutes, where you can see all the ... I'll put the link in the description of the video, and you can see all the marketing strategies that you could be using and which ones you should use first, so that would help you organize and have that plan.
Another one is know your numbers basically. Let's say you have five clients this week, you have five clients last week, right? So knowing how many clients you have and knowing what's the goal that you want to get to let's say in a month from now allows you to track your progress, right? And it allows you to see what's working and what's not working.
I'll give you an example. I went to this intensive one time, it was for 150 high-end coaches, and we did some good deep work together for four days including the vulnerability hangover, becoming very open, sharing stuff with each other that is pretty personal. And the group facilitator, he said, "Don't make any life changing decisions during the next two weeks." And I wrote this huge, huge, very vulnerable personal text and like four pages and I decided, "That's great. I'm going to share this with the world. I'm going to put this on my coaching website." And I did. And I knew that at that time I had at least five consultation calls scheduled by the potential clients themselves using the calendar system I have, my scheduler on the website, at least five a week. And guess what? Once I publish this text they were all gone almost, they dropped you like one or two a week for two or three consecutive weeks.
What does that mean? I realized, okay, so this text was probably too much information. And I removed it because I knew what I did actually create the opposite effect of what I wanted. So knowing my numbers I knew what is working and what is not, and that clarity allows you to take action.
And knowing your numbers also is helping you with getting those dopamine hits and emotional, good emotional, responses in terms of, "Okay, I've been working on my private practice, building it for the last let's say month. And I worked at it at least one to two hours a day." By the way, you can always do more, right? It's definitely more work up front with building your private practice, but what you want to do is move from doing mostly marketing and a little bit of helping people to helping people and doing that much of marketing, right? But you have to remember that the sooner you do all of that marketing stuff at first you'll be free to actually do the work with helping your clients.
So let's say you did all of this for a month, one, two hours, six hours a day, whatever you choose and whatever is realistic for you. Knowing your numbers and measuring your success, saying, "Okay, I grew from one client to two clients within a period of three weeks." That would just motivate you to keep on going and those psychological wins are so important at first. That's why in the six figure practice program the first two weeks we have two lessons about two full swings so you get that first or second client as soon as possible, and because it creates this internal transformation, you start viewing yourself as someone who is a professional now if you're just starting out.
Just going to check the time. I have my next therapy session in a moment.
So just reviewing everything we've been talking about. The biggest obstacle that stands in the way of counselors and coaches is the lack of action. They get stuck in research mode, in learning mode, but once again you don't need more information - you need more application. Of course, if you don't have the information you cannot apply it, right? So figure out a path for you to get a plan together and figure out the structure for you how much you will be actually doing the work. And then commit, use the power of social forces to announce and commit first to yourself and then to others so that it would keep you accountable.
I hope it's been helpful. Definitely watch the free marketing guide that I created. It's just 20 minutes. It would give you the plan in a very short way. I'll see you on the next one. Take care.