Why you should never be ashamed of marketing your private practice

Why you should never be ashamed of marketing your private practiceToday I wanted to start talking to you about a topic which I don't think I've directly addressed before, but that I think is a really big deal for a lot of us who are working in psychology or therapy businesses. A lot of us tend to be very values driven, so it means a lot to us that what we're doing makes a positive impact in the world. That's a wonderful thing, and it can give you loads of energy and drive to do all of the difficult things in business that we need to do. However, it also tends to come with a rather large dose of shame, and I think you'd be a very unusual psychologist or therapist if you haven't felt a bit of shame in your business journey. To be honest, shame is probably the emotion which characterised my first year in business; as much as I think I'm a bit of a natural entrepreneur and I was very excited to be working for myself, predominantly, most of the time, I walked around feeling like a very bad person. I found it difficult to tell people what I did for a living, I kind of scurried in and out of networking events, I felt like I shouldn't be talking about what I did, and I felt embarrassed to admit that I wasn't working in the NHS anymore. That really prevented me from doing what I needed to do; it prevented me from learning about business and about marketing in those first few months, because I just couldn't stand being on a course, I couldn't stand the thought of reading a book about it, because it made me feel dirty, and shameful and horrible. And I'm not sharing that because I think that's how anybody should feel, I think completely the opposite, I wish that I could go back and give myself a good talking to! But I am sharing that because I think that for some of you starting out, that might be where you're at right now, or it may be that you have made peace with marketing and the ethics of that for marketing your private practice, but now you're marketing something different, like an online course or coaching and you're starting to feel that shame bubbling up again. So I just wanted to address that and talk about why I really don't think you should ever be ashamed of marketing or being good at marketing, because fundamentally it is something that you need in your business and that will do a lot of good in itself in the world.Why you shouldn't be ashamed of marketing in your practiceThe number one reason that you shouldn't be ashamed to learn about marketing and to get good at it, is that all clinical practice involves selling skills or techniques to people anyway. Being good at convincing people that the technique you're going to use or the skill that you're showing them is actually going to make a difference in their life is absolutely critical to any therapy working. We know this. You know if you sound really under confident about something like EMDR when you're explaining it to somebody, they are never going to trust you with their time investment (even if they're not paying) enough to show up to those sessions and to do the work. It's the same with something like mindfulness, you have to really sell it to people in order to get them to practise it at home. You know, even if you're working in the NHS, that you need to be good at selling, otherwise people will simply not engage and show up to your sessions. So it's a critical clinical skill, and if you've been working as a successful psychologist or therapist for a number of years, I'm willing to bet you are already quite good at this. It's something that I personally had to really develop when I was starting out. In the prison service where I started, we were teaching the thinking skills course (I think when I started it was actually called enhanced thinking skills - that's not a very good, marketable name, but that's what it was called) and one of the things we had to do with every skill that we included in that course, was a section on...