Samantha Lee
When I came into training to be a therapist, I had this notion that counsellors were these. They’d reached the holy grail of being emotionally sorted, you know, that they lived in these big posh houses, they had a lovely car, that nothing bad happened. It was just this underlying perception that if you’re gonna be giving out mental health advice, then you’ve gotta be pretty sorted yourself. You know? I think that was something that started getting me followers was me actually saying that’s rubbish.
Josephine Hughes
Today I’m welcoming Samantha Lee, who many of you will know from her wonderful Facebook business page Samantha Lee Counselling, and also her very popular CPD training on working with the inner child. Sam and I met a number of years ago now when we both rented rooms on a sessional basis for our private practices in Southend on Sea and Sam later attended a face to face CPD which I’d called Good Enough Counsellors and she then decided to work with me as one of my coachees. I’ve checked my records and it looks like that was 2018 and the rest, as they say, is history. So, actually, I’m really delighted to have Samantha here. She is such a wonderful, wonderful counsellor.
I’m so proud of the work that she’s done. She’s really, really blown me away with what she’s managed to get done.
Samantha Lee
And it makes me blush, Jo. Lucky no one can see me.
Josephine Hughes
So welcome, Sam. You’re very welcome on the show.
Samantha Lee
Thank you. It’s nice to be here.
Josephine Hughes
I guess the first question I just wanted to ask you, if you could cast your minds back, is can you remember what you wanted to work on when we first started to work together?
Samantha Lee
I didn’t even know what I wanted to work on. I wanted someone to tell me what to do. That’s what I really remember because I remember feeling so out of my depth.
Josephine Hughes
Mhmm.
Samantha Lee
And, you know, there was all this information that was coming at me from all different angles, and I really just didn’t know what to do, which is frustrating because I have a professional background. I used to work in London for nearly 30 years as an event manager. I felt like I should know what I needed to do, and I kind of did, but I don’t know. I think it’s just all this new stuff, this transition from being an employed person and someone paying me a job and telling me what to do to going into a career where it was all unknown.
Josephine Hughes
Mhmm.
Samantha Lee
It just was a trigger for, you know, that insecure part of me to come out, and I just felt really stupid. There was such a big pressure to be this accredited counsellor that, you know, that if you didn’t get accreditation, you were never gonna get a job in counselling. And then the thought of, oh, well, maybe I’ll go into private practice seemed to be equally daunting. It was like, god, you know, which one do I go for?
Josephine Hughes
Mhmm.
Samantha Lee
And I did like the idea of working for myself, and I think I just needed somebody to be accountable to. Yeah. I think that was the thing that I loved about working with you was that I’ve got this creative brain that goes off on a tangent about so many different things and I find it really hard to complete tasks.
Josephine Hughes
You know
Samantha Lee
I come up with lots of ideas, but it can take me ages to keep moving towards the end, you know? Yeah. But because I knew that if I had you working with me, I had to kind of report back to the boss, you know, each month. He was like, well, I’ve got I’ve got to do it. I’ve got to do it because I was seeing Jo, plus the fact I was paying for it.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah.
Samantha Lee
And so I wanted to get value for money. Yeah. So, yeah, that was it. I just felt like I needed someone to guide me.
Josephine Hughes
It’s quite funny looking back on it because, actually, you’ve done the most amazing growth since then, haven’t you? So I think one of the first things we worked on was your business page, wasn’t it? So tell people about your business page and what you’ve done with it and how you’ve made it work.
Samantha Lee
I started to do these posts that I thought were very professional and counsel-y. Oh my god though, they were boring.
Josephine Hughes
Mhmm.
Samantha Lee
And because I was doing what I thought I should do on the page, I didn’t enjoy it. I I found it really quite boring and it was like a task, and then I don’t know how long I would do that for, possibly for the 1st year, but it just got more and more frustrating. And I don’t even know what happened, actually, to make me start changing. The I’ll tell
Josephine Hughes
you what happened. One of the things that happened. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I remember.
Yeah. It was, you know, we talked about this, didn’t we? And one of the things that you said you did was that you wrote poetry and you started to share your poems on your business page.
Samantha Lee
Wasn’t it really? God. Yeah. That’s a really big
Josephine Hughes
part of it. Yeah.
Samantha Lee
I’d have completely forgotten that.
Josephine Hughes
And I think there is a real, you know, but we can sort of think, oh, we’ve gotta do it a particular way. You know, it’s got to be what suits you and one of the things you’re really good at is when you write, you write so brilliantly it really connects with people, I think. And you share a lot of yourself, don’t you? And that just connects to people and you find what works for you, which I think is a really, really important, sort of, point to bring out of this conversation. But, yeah, going back, you did start to share your poems, didn’t you?
I mean, tell people about your poems in case people don’t know about them and what happened.
Samantha Lee
So I went through quite a prolonged phase actually where I just suddenly started to feel like I had something to say, but I didn’t know how to say it. There was so much happening in my professional and my personal life and I just started. I’d always liked writing poetry and reading rhyming stories as a kid. I used to like Doctor Seuss and things like that, you know, green eggs and ham. Yeah.
I wanna make sure. There. Yeah. But I used to enjoy writing simple poems when I was at school, and I don’t even know why I started doing it, but I just started to write my thoughts down about different things in rhyming stories. And some of them I’d show to family or friends and they’d be like, oh my god.
That’s really good. How did you do that? And I’d be like, well, just wrote it. It just came into my head, and I wrote it. Yeah.
So I must have started to put them online, and then I was really surprised by the reactions that I started to get. And in fact, I still read people’s comments about my poems sometimes, and it’s almost like I’m looking over my shoulder going, god, are they talking about me? Because they’ll say such lovely stuff about how Yeah had changed their life. Yeah. And I won’t go into the story, but the fact is that they said that it really changed their life.
And I was like, oh my god. Yeah. You know, that’s amazing.
Josephine Hughes
Amazing, isn’t it? Yeah. Amazing. And how and and I don’t know if you can remember what it was like when you first started sharing. Was it really hard to begin to share them, sort of, like, publicly to put them on Facebook?
Samantha Lee
ell, no. I didn’t feel I didn’t feel like it was a big thing because I don’t suppose I had that many followers then. It’s taken me a long, long time to build up my followers and I will say this I don’t mean this to minimise anybody else’s efforts, but I would say that I still only have just under 2,000 followers because in in the grand scheme of the Internet, that’s a tiny following, you know. There’s you know, because there’s people that have got millions or hundreds of thousands of followers. But actually my little corner of this Facebook community, they’re so lovely.
They’re so engaging. They, you know, they will write a lot of comments and they’ll do a lot of reactions and stuff. Yeah. And you see sometimes these people that have got 100 of thousands of followers, and actually they’re getting no more of a percentage of people answering their stuff or commenting on their stuff than mine, if you know what I mean. Does that make sense?
Josephine Hughes
It does. And I think it says something about the quality of what you’re doing, actually. And I think that’s I know you’re not one to, sort of, polish your halo, but, you know, I think that’s something for you to take credit for in that, you know, I certainly love following you and reading your posts and, you know, they often speak to me because I think the thing is you’re very honest, you’re very real, aren’t you? So tell people about how you tend to – what’s your sort of writing process for your posts?
Samantha Lee
It’s really just winging it half the time.
Josephine Hughes
I was gonna say that I should have qualified the question actually, because I thought possibly when I said what’s your writing process It makes you think oh my god, you know, I should have a writing process and that wasn’t what I meant. Because, you know, there’s people who sort of, you know, do have a writing process where it’s to be organised and everything, but I don’t think everybody thinks like that. I don’t think everybody works like that. So how do you go about creating your post?
Samantha Lee
Okay. So it depends on if I’ve seen something that resonated with me or if something has happened to me personally or professionally, and then, yeah, I’ll go from there.
Josephine Hughes
Mhmm.
Samantha Lee
I mean, I do like to be visual. I tend not to be that interested in posts where there isn’t a good picture or a good meme to Yeah. To reflect what’s gonna be then written. Because if people are gonna invest time in reading the thing, I think it needs to capture you. The picture needs to capture you.
So Yeah. I’ve got so many pictures and memes on my phone. I’ve actually got to go through and get rid of half of them because my phone keeps telling me I’m running out of memory, and I don’t wanna I don’t wanna pay bloody Apple any more money than I already do for storage. So, yeah, what was the question? I’ve forgotten there.
Josephine Hughes
It was just how you go about creating a post. So you’ll find a meme or you’ll find a pitch or something that speaks to you or you’ll think about something that’s happened to you and you’ll find a picture that somehow expresses something around that.
Samantha Lee
Is that the case? And I think somehow through the poetry, people began to realise that a lot of the stuff I was writing about, it wasn’t just about things that had happened to other people. I was telling them that some of this stuff had been experienced by me.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah.
Samantha Lee
And I guess some of the comments must have been that, oh, it’s really nice to see that there’s a counsellor that, you know, isn’t perfect or something along those lines. Yeah. And I was like, oh my god. I’ve really yeah. This is something that is really ridiculous.
When I came into training to be a therapist, I had this notion that counsellors were these they’d reached the holy grail of being emotionally sorted, you know? Yeah. That they lived in these big posh houses, they had a lovely car, that nothing bad happened, you know. I didn’t like, I didn’t have my actively conscious thoughts about it, but it was just this underlying perception that if you’re gonna be giving out mental health advice then you’ve got to be pretty sorted yourself, you know?
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. Yeah.
Samantha Lee
And I think that was something that started getting me followers was me actually saying that’s rubbish. It’s because we’ve been through so much stuff ourselves that firstly, we’re attracted to counselling and helping people because we know what it’s like to go through experiences where we didn’t get that help.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah.
Samantha Lee
And that those things that happened to us have had a lasting impact and they are things that we still have to deal with on a regular basis in our lives, and I don’t want my clients to be sitting there feeling intimidated by me
Josephine Hughes
Yeah.
Samantha Lee
Because Yeah. They think that I’m somehow better than them. Yeah. And so that was when I started to write more honest posts about, look, this is this is me. This is what, you know, some of the stuff that I’ve experienced, this is what I have to do to cope with it, And, you know, whether you’re a counsellor or not, we all have stuff that happens in our lives that sometimes means we need extra help.
Yeah. And that really resonated with people.
Josephine Hughes
That’s it. Yeah. It takes you off the pedestal, doesn’t it? You can actually meet them where they’re at because you yourself understand what it’s like to be there. And I think, yeah, it it gives people that connection that I think a lot of people are looking for.
Samantha Lee
And it’s about getting the balance right as well. You know, you don’t want to give away too much because you don’t want a client to then feel not confident. Yeah. You know, you can deal with their stuff. But, yeah, to be open enough to say, you know, I struggle with this stuff sometimes too.
Josephine Hughes
But I think the thing that you do is you sort of put it in the context and you explain, don’t you? So especially, I think, with your inner child type things, you’ll talk about your feelings and how sometimes I see where you’ve you’ve done done a little picture of yourself with the big glasses on from when you were a little girl and you had those really, sort of, thick, sort of bottle top glasses and you talk about what it was like to be that little girl and and how rejected you’d feel as that little girl but how now you look after that little girl. So there’s always, sort of, like, it’s always put in the context of this. It sort of includes psychoeducation really as well, doesn’t it? It includes explaining to the client how you can work with those sorts of feelings and what you can do to make those sorts of feelings. How to work with those feelings, how to make yourself feel better, how to look after when you’ve got those sorts of feelings.
Samantha Lee
Because I see it so much on in everyday life with friends and family and on the counsellor groups, people that aren’t always aware that the things they’re struggling with are because a part a past part of them have has been triggered and they’re feeling these same reactions and thoughts and beliefs that they once had as as a child in their adult life. And it’s really getting in their way of being that capable adult that they can be a lot of the time in in the present day.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah.
Samantha Lee
You know, and that’s something that I’ve learned, you know, ever since I went into counselling that, oh my god, I’ve got in my own way so many times. I still do now, You know? And it’s so frustrating because we could be doing so much more, and we could be enjoying life so much more if we didn’t always have this scared, confused, out of their depth little child inside of us that’s going, oh my god. You know, for this podcast, it would be, oh my god. I can’t do a business page.
Oh my god. I can’t do a website or Yeah. I can’t do social media. I mean, how many times do you hear that? Oh, I can’t do social media.
It’s just we’ve got that little child inside of all of us to an extent. Some of us a lot more than others, you know, depending on our past. But that part can really get in the way when it comes to building a private practice.
Josephine Hughes
So I’d love to know a bit more of this and I’m sure other people would like to know more about your sort of inner child work and what got you interested in inner child and how you’ve developed your inner child, work as a therapist.
Samantha Lee
Well, what got me into it was I remember being in my training. I think it was probably from about level 3 onwards, there were just certain lessons that we had where it was actually not TA. Mhmm. And then TA.
Josephine Hughes
Mhmm.
Samantha Lee
And then kind of certain things started to come up for me about things that I’d experienced as a child. It just really resonated with me. I could really that’s that’s theory, TA, and then attachment theory, they really did seem to hit home for me. Yeah. And then, you know, I started to become aware that there was this really, really vulnerable part of me that I hadn’t really acknowledged or acknowledged is the right word.
I kind of felt that I had that part of me, but I’d not really paid it much attention. And the more that we did that kind of stuff in, the studies and more reading and everything
Josephine Hughes
Yeah.
Samantha Lee
The more I Jeanette, she’s passed away now unfortunately, but I was with her for 7 years and she taught me everything I knew up to that point about the inner child because she introduced me to the 2 inner children that I have in me because I have a younger little Sam who is aged anything from 4 years to say 10, 11. And then I’ve got this angry teen in me who really tries to stick up for me by shouting very loudly every time I go through things in life where I feel unheard or things are unjust, you know, unfair. And the placements that I started to get as a student, I was really lucky. Well, no. Actually, I wasn’t lucky.
I made them happen.
Josephine Hughes
Mhmm.
Samantha Lee
But I feel lucky that I experienced them, is what I mean. I started working with some incredibly vulnerable people. I worked with Women’s Aid and I worked at Mind who get a lot of people that have fallen through the gaps in the system that really shouldn’t be seeing student counsellors on a placement. But, you know, there was very little that I felt that I could do for them, but I just kind of said, well, you know, in this 6 or 8 sessions that we’ve got, tell me what’s happened to you rather than, you know, don’t tell me what’s wrong with you, you know, your label because they would say, oh, I’m bipolar or whatever. I’d say, what’s happened to you?
You know, tell me what’s happened in your life. You’d start to see these little children that had just experienced so much
Josephine Hughes
Mhmm.
Samantha Lee
And then wondered why they weren’t able to be a fully functioning adult. And then I worked with addiction, and then I worked with homeless people for a short while. And you just see in every every area of life where people have these struggles. I could just find it each time, tell me about what’s happened to you, And it all starts when you’re a child and actually probably starts before them because obviously it starts with your parents and how they were parented and how Yeah. Their parents were parented and, yeah, it goes on.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. Yeah. That intergenerational
Samantha Lee
thing. It just seemed to be a natural thing that I started to go with work with that all the time. It did just seem to happen.
Josephine Hughes
And then what happened, once you’ve been working for a while with your inner child?
Samantha Lee
So when I met you, it was kind of like I was working with lots of different clients, but I was still working from that perspective. And then, obviously, I’d started to get quite a lot of experience in that line of work. And then when I started to work with you and was kind of not you know, you asked me about my ideal client, I think it kind of grew from there. Yeah. Because my ideal client was professional people that you would look at and in a similar vein that I’ve just described how we used to look at counsellors, you know, the kind of people that you look at their life and you think, oh, they’re so lucky.
They’ve got a lovely house. They’ve got a lovely family. They go on all these amazing holidays and everything, and you just think that they’ve got their life sorted. And yet when they come to see us Mhmm. You can see that it doesn’t matter where you are in life.
You can still have this seemingly wonderful life, but if you open up that closed door, it’s not what it seems, is it?
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. Well, quite a lot with men, don’t you? I think that’s sort of one of the areas where you do a lot of work.
Samantha Lee
Yeah. Well, it’s interestingly, that that is still my ideal client. I do love to work with men. I think since the inner child stuff really took off, I’ve probably lost track of a little bit of my marketing in that I tend to now attract a lot of counsellors. Yeah.
Josephine Hughes
Because they want to convince yeah. Yeah. Because you that of I just wanna move on and say that you then started some training, didn’t you, on the inner child?
Samantha Lee
Well, I would never have I would never have done that without you, Jo. That was your idea. I’m gonna give that one to you because I would never have even had the confidence to suggest it. It was something that I’d often think about when I was in London and I’d go on a training course, and I think, what a great job. I’d love to do that.
And then I don’t even know if I may be mentioned that to you, but you saying why don’t you do a training course on the inner child, that was just hilarious to me at first. I don’t know if you remember that I was like, don’t be ridiculous.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. There was a lot to work through in a sense, wasn’t there? Because, again, it’s that sort of, you know, I’ve got to be some sort of expert, I’ve got, you know, I’m not like an academic. Yeah. There was all that sort of stuff wasn’t there?
But the result is is that you’ve written something from your heart really, haven’t you, that it can
Samantha Lee
I just do it, yeah? Because you, recommended that I try experiential training. Yeah. And that was a new new thing for me, and it’s really interesting. I feel like I’ve kind of come full circle now because I’ve just been doing this very lofty academic course by, is it NIACB or something?
Josephine Hughes
Oh, yeah. I mean whatever they are. Yeah.
Samantha Lee
Yeah. Real real big trauma names, Pat Ogden and people like that are there. And they are talking about the work that I do on a weekly basis, but they just use different big fancy words to explain what I do, you know. And it was real, like, validation watching this latest course because I was like Yeah. Oh my god.
I already do that. Yeah. You know, my old supervisor, Jeanette, used to say to me, you don’t need all of this training, Sam. You’re good enough already. And in a way, she was right but also we do need to keep current, so we do need to keep doing some training with our CPD.
But, yeah, it was really validating to listen to all these amazing people that I hold in real high esteem. Mhmm. But what they were saying was nothing new to me. It was like, well, I kinda say that in my courses anyway, but I just say it in a different way that’s more layman’s terms, I suppose.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. So I’ll just for any of our listeners, you can get a much better course at a much less price if you get Sam’s course. I have to say, you know, I haven’t actually completed Sam’s course myself but I did get a little sneaky peek when she first brought it out and she sent me over some of it and I was absolutely blown away by it because I think the thing that you do so so well is you get people to really think about what is going on inside them and what their who their inner child is and and how their inner child is responding. And so, I mean, I don’t know what sort of feedback you get, but I would imagine that a lot of it is people who are really, really touched. You know, it’s a real sort of, like, personal development thing as well as learning how to work with inner child with clients, isn’t it?
Because it’s really about you needing to, like, look after your own inner child and Yeah. Do the work in a sense before you can really do it with the clients. Is that true to say that?
Samantha Lee
Yeah. I would say that everything that I put into my courses is trying to replicate the same things that I have gone through and done for myself, and then the same things that I’ve then passed on to clients and then seen how they’ve grown and developed by using the same techniques. Yeah. Although some of my courses, I’m definitely saying this happened to me. Mhmm.
There’s a lot of other stuff that I talk about where I’m not naming clients or saying, you know, this happened to a client, but it’s the experience of working with those clients because of how I’ve experienced it too that I can then give more examples of how the inner child plays out in different experiences.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s sort of like a whole amalgamation of what you’ve learned through your career and and through working with lots of different people.
Samantha Lee
Yeah. I mean, you don’t you don’t have to have lived exactly the same experiences, but just being able to connect to that part of you and then to be able to see how it influences you on a daily basis, basis, that’s when you can really start tapping into and spotting the inner child in your own clients. Yeah. So that’s why it’s a really important thing to do the course and experience your own reactions to what I bring up in the courses because then if you really pay attention to how you’re feeling you will really get to know your own inner child and in doing so that’s when you can start to see how it’s playing out in other people. You will start to look at everybody around you and you will see all these wounded little kids.
I mean, I will look at Donald Trump and all I see is a little wounded boy and one that kind of sees the world does or approaches the world with “Didn’t hurt.. I don’t care. It’s not my fault. You know? It is just like this little boy.
I find it amazing. I I see that in a lot of politicians, actually, all these little kiddies.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah.
Samantha Lee
But it’s a great way to work.
Josephine Hughes
So something else that I remembered when I was getting ready for this interview is something that happened to you during COVID. I can’t remember. I don’t know if you’ll remember this. So you’ve got your business page and you went off to get vaccinated, didn’t you? Do you remember what happened? You told me about it.
Samantha Lee
Oh, my god. Yeah. It was so funny. I had this nurse call me over for my injection and she went, oh my god. She went, you’re that counsellor.
Samantha Lee, aren’t you? And I was like, yeah. And I was like, this isn’t one of my clients. How does she know that? And I went, how do you know that? And she went, oh my god.
She went, I follow you on Facebook. She said, oh, you wrote that poem and then insert name of whatever poem it was. Yeah. And she said, oh, and it and she said, it really resonated with me. She said, “I’m a fan”.
She said, I can’t believe you’re here. And I was thinking, I can’t believe I’m having a COVID jab, and this woman’s saying she knows who I am. It was bizarre. I mean, that’s kind of the only time I’ve ever had, an inkling what it’s like to maybe be a celebrity, but it was funny. That does stick in my mind.
So thanks for reminding me of that. It’s a nice memory. Yeah.
Josephine Hughes
It’s just it’s just funny, isn’t it? Because I think we’ve been sort of like we’ve known each other for such a long time and I have I have sort of like these little snapshots of things that have happened to you that you’ve told me about Yeah. As you’ve gone along. Do you want to tell people about your mic? Because we were talking about your mic just before we started
Samantha Lee
Oh, my little snowball microphone. I remember when I was about to do my first training course.
Josephine Hughes
Mhmm.
Samantha Lee
And I needed to get or I wanted to get a decent microphone, but they were quite pricey for my limited earnings at the time anyway. I bought a lottery ticket and the lottery ticket came up. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I haven’t won 1,000,000, guys. I think I won £75, something like that, and it enabled me to buy my microphone.
And I’m still using it today. It’s sitting in front of me now.
Josephine Hughes
It’s brilliant. I I I think that I mean, for me, that was just such a lovely thing to happen because it came along at exactly the right time you needed it, didn’t it?
Samantha Lee
It did. The universe provided.
Josephine Hughes
And I and I don’t think, you know, I think, I don’t want the interview to end without thinking about what it’s been like for you. It sort of sounds… When you look back on it, it makes it sound as though it was easy for you. You know, it was easy for you to publish your poetry. It was easy for you to do your inner child workshop. You know, it’s been easy for you to do your page.
But I know that’s not been the case, has it? It hasn’t been particularly easy and I just wonder if you could tell us a bit about, maybe about your process, sort of, what tends to happen, what you go through when you’re facing doing something new, and how you look after yourself in those situations.
Samantha Lee
When I’m facing something new, I try and put it off for as long as I possibly can because that’s what adults do, isn’t it? Not. Yeah. I keep procrastinating and giving myself all the reasons why I can’t do something, but then something that a very good business coach called Josephine told me was to do it in little steps because that’s how I started. I’d qualified and I had started seeing my one private client and I just started doing every single step that there is to do with building your business.
It took me years, you know. There’s so many different things that when you look at the final result, it seems like it’s arrived at easily. But when you break it down, it’s a bit like my old job of event planning. You see the final event and you don’t appreciate just how much work goes into that event, you know, making that event happen. And it’s the same with building a private practice.
It’s so many different stages of so many different elements and they need to be worked through in a way that is manageable for you, because I was a single mum. I I was working part time in London. I had a toddler, and I had various different relationships going car crashingly wrong and, you know, there was a lot going on. Put it that way. Yeah.
So it didn’t happen quickly. You know, there were lots of different projects that took so long. I mean, that first course that I did, that took me nearly a year, And the amount of times that I felt like giving up, again, that’s why I loved having you. Because if I didn’t have you, I would have given up because it would have just felt too hard. But you kept encouraging me to keep going back to the basics and just doing one little bit at
Josephine Hughes
a time. That was so helpful.
Samantha Lee
And you sort of were like my cheerleader. Helpful. And you sort of were like my cheerleader. You know, you can do it. You can do it.
Josephine Hughes
Can you? Yeah. And you have done it. That’s the thing.
Samantha Lee
Yeah. You definitely gave me that belief that I could do it. So that really helped. You know, I see so many comments on the Facebook counselling groups of people that are frustrated by, you know, I’ve done all the directories and I’ve done this and I’ve done that and I’m still not getting inquiries, oh my god it just takes such a long time, you know. I’ve been doing this for 10 years now and I’m a baby compared to a lot of other therapists out there that have been doing it longer.
But each different stage it takes time and so I would always always recommend now in hindsight that every single therapist is encouraged to keep their other job for as long as possible because it will help you to, a, not get burnt out by trying to juggle everything all at once because you know that you’ve got money coming in. It will help you to pay for things like CPD that you need to build up your experience and your knowledge. It will help you pay for a business coach if you want one. You know, you can maybe save up for that gradually so that you can eventually afford to have a business coach. It’s, you know, you can if you’ve got another job plan for these things.
You can take the pressure off yourself to be constantly worrying about where’s my money coming from? Keep your other job. Honestly, it’s self care. I’ll go off on a rant on that if you’re not careful.
Josephine Hughes
It’s okay, Sam, because I think the other thing that’s happened is that for a long time that we worked together, you know, you were doing other work, weren’t you? Yeah. You were working with other clients, sort of, in a paid capacity, employed capacity and then you developed your course and the developing the course and the private practice now means that you’re able to, you know, you are fully self employed, but you’ve got that other sort of second income coming in that sustains you as well, haven’t you? So Yeah. That and that sort of it’s also it’s a way of you being creative too, isn’t it?
That it gives you another sort of outlet.
Samantha Lee
And I would say when, Jo, you say that I’m fully self employed, I want to clarify that to a lot of people that also think that that might mean I work full time as a therapist. I don’t.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. Yeah.
Samantha Lee
Me saying I’m fully booked usually means, depending on what’s going on in my life, usually means that my maximum would be I’m working with 10 clients a week. And the thing is I can afford to do that now, and I actually am on a lot less than that at the moment because of things that have happened lately. You know, this that’s the other pressure that a lot of therapists feel is that they’ve got to be working with, you know, 20 clients a week, 25 clients a week. And I would say that a successful private practice is one that you can adapt to your needs over time. I’ve had a successful private practice for a long time before I was fully self employed because what was successful about it was that I still had clients, not a lot of clients, but I was doing it on my own.
You know? But I wasn’t doing it as my only job. But now when I look back, it was a success. It suited my needs at the time. I couldn’t be full time because I had a toddler.
As and as a single parent, I got support from Universal Credit, so I was very lucky there to have that support. But you need, well, everybody needs to pay their bills and you need well, everybody needs to pay their bills. So don’t think that you’re failing if you’re not doing your private practice as a full time thing and you’ve still got your other job. You’re still a successful therapist and you will grow in your experience in your reputation while you’ve still got another job. That’s still gonna be happening.
It doesn’t have to be that you’re only successful if you do it full time and you’re working full time. Don’t get me wrong, though. Being self employed, you have to set some strong boundaries because it’s easy to be working outside of hours because you’ve got that little phone in your hand and those little notifications going off on your social media pages, and we’re just gonna have a look instead of watching a TV show and relaxing.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. Absolutely. Guilty as charged. Yeah.
Samantha Lee
I know. But then, you know, it’s your baby, so you do want to nurture it.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you do then to sort of try and keep yourself, you know, to give yourself self care?
Samantha Lee
Right. So the past 18 months, I have gone through a huge amount of stuff. Me and my child had a car crash. They started college. There were different life events that were happening that were quite challenging.
My mom had dementia and gradually, her health was failing and we eventually lost her in February. And I really had to scale down my practice over that time. And the only way that I managed was because I was selling my courses still. So I in order to manage all of those things, I did have to stop marketing so heavily on my page and change the way that I was talking about stuff so that people weren’t constantly,
Josephine Hughes
you know,
Samantha Lee
asking if I could see them. I mean, I really had to take time to look out for me to make sure that I was okay. You know, I went back to therapy. I started doing transformational breathing, tried to exercise more. Didn’t always happen, must admit.
I just really tuned into me and what I needed so that I could then be okay for the other people in my life that needed help too. And, yeah, it’s because I’d over time built this business that wasn’t just client work. Had I built these courses and they give me again, don’t get me wrong, I am not a wealthy person. These are just these courses that provide me with an average income. You know?
Josephine Hughes
Mhmm.
Samantha Lee
And that’s something that’s kept me ticking over while I’ve not been able to work as much. And that’s something that I’ll always be grateful to you for, Jo, because if I hadn’t have done that, I don’t actually know what I’d have been doing. If I’d have relied solely on client work, I think this is something that we can also be in danger of doing as therapists. And again, it’s the influence of the child in us that has this magical thinking that, you know, we take on all of this client work not really acknowledging what would happen if something were to happen to me or my family and I can’t work, because you’re your business. And so if something happens to you, where’s your business?
Where’s your money coming in? If you haven’t made adult arrangements to cover that in terms of have I got a job that’s gonna pay me sick pay, you know, and this the other job, will that pay me sick pay to help pay the bills? Or have I got insurance to help if I can’t work for a while? Or have I got another means of earning money in my practice? So that is self care.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. Yeah.
Samantha Lee
You know, acknowledging your limitations and still being able to pay the bills when things are hard.
Josephine Hughes
Thank you. I’ve certainly given, I think probably give people a lot of food for thought, actually, especially, you know, this sort of idea of, you know, a successful private practice is a full time thing and it’s having lots of clients. And yet, you know, what you’re saying is you can be successful, but you can also be successful by making sure that you’re looking after yourself and keeping an eye for other ways of looking after yourself.
Samantha Lee
Definitely. You know, because that’s the thing that we’re trying to model to our clients all the time, isn’t it? Put yourself first and build this strong connection to those wounded parts of you, strong connection to those wounded parts of you that can still be triggered in the now, you’re gonna be your number one fan. You know, when I was vulnerable you were my number one fan that kept me going, But in life, you don’t you can’t always have a coach that’s gonna do that for you. You can’t always have other people around to do it for you.
So if you learn to love yourself enough that you can be your number one fan
Josephine Hughes
Yeah.
Samantha Lee
Then for a lot of times in life when things are vulnerable and going tits up, so to say so to speak, then, you know, you’ll be able to manage it a lot better because you’ll care about what happens to you. This thought of, oh, you know, I can do all of these clients and I can do extra hours to do all the marketing and my admin and do my tax return and everything. Yeah. You can do it, but you’ll probably end up being a frazzled wreck after a while. And I’ll be the first to admit that I got very near to burnout before oh, what?
Well, probably about a year ago. Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. You know?
Because we love this job, and it’s hard to not do this job when you get a lot of pleasure out of it. But Yeah. Yeah. You still have to make sure that you’re doing stuff that makes sure that you’re okay. Yeah.
And we can lose sight
Josephine Hughes
of that sometimes. As I say, you haven’t mentioned you’re walking.
Samantha Lee
My walking? Yes. Well well, that’s something that I haven’t had to pay for. I did a walking challenge back in 2017. I didn’t want to, I wanted to be fit when I got to be 50.
And ever since then, I’ve continued it. But during the week, I try to go out, and even if it’s just 20 minutes around the block just to have a mindful 20 minutes where I’m not sitting there thinking about work or all the other stuff that life throws at you. I’m just looking at the clouds and the sunlight and the flowers growing out of cracks and that sort of stuff. And Yeah.
Yeah. It’s just a really great way of keeping my mind healthy. And even that was very difficult in the last 18 months, you know, the inner child in me that was very much told what to do as a youngster, rebelled against going out for exercise and wanted to just sit and watch the telly and eat chocolate. And I had to do a lot of work in reassuring that child that she can stay at home and watch the telly and eat chocolate while I go out and do my walk. You know, it might sound silly, but when you’ve got the awareness of how your inner child can get in your way, my inner child can get in my way when it comes to looking after myself physically.
Yeah. You know, because it’s like she’s going, don’t wanna go on a stupid walk, you know, but I’m going, I really wanna go on the walk. I wanna get outside. But it’s amazing how she can just take over and be like, nope. We’re not going.
We’re going to watch Netflix for 2 hours. And a lot of the last 18 months, she’s won.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. I’ve got a feeling that this might lead to your next course. Your next mini course could be a mini course on the inner child and self care. Oh gosh.
Samantha Lee
There you go. You might have just planted another idea for me, Joanna. That will start paying you commission.
Josephine Hughes
We’ll put the podcast out and people will start saying, yeah I’d really love to do that. So if you’d like to do that folks who are listening let Sam know.
Samantha Lee
Yes, all ideas.
Josephine Hughes
Probably all do it.
Samantha Lee
Sam, we all
Josephine Hughes
have all
Samantha Lee
your ideas.
Josephine Hughes
All your ideas. Oh, Sam, it’s been lovely to catch up with you and find out what’s happening and just there’s so much there for people I think to think about and quite, some challenging stuff as well for people to think about too. About how to look after themselves and how to make sure that, you know, this is a I think we could be quite short term sometimes about our private practices. Yeah. Let’s fill it up.
Without, sort of, thinking, well, actually, you know, how do I want to be in 10 years time or 15 years time or 20 years time in terms of my private practice? And to hold on to it for the longer term, we do need to, sort of, think about how we’re gonna manage ourselves. Different people do it different ways, but, you know, you found the way that works for you, which is fantastic.
Samantha Lee
And if they find that they’re thinking, oh, it’s alright for you, and, you know, getting some grouchy thoughts about me saying, you know, this is what you need to do, then that’s your inner child getting in your way again because they don’t want to be told what to do, maybe.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. That’s really interesting. Oh, that’s great. So people can find you at Samantha Lee Counselling.
Samantha Lee
On Facebook,
Josephine Hughes
yeah. On Facebook, yeah, and they can find you at your website Counselling4Essex. Your course is “Me, Myself, I” and I will put the details in the show notes so that people can click through and find you.
Samantha Lee
Lovely.
Josephine Hughes
So that they can follow you up. But I’m sure lots of people will know you already, but I’m sure they’re and I’m sure they’ll do.
Samantha Lee
To get new followers, so come and see me in my little corner. I’d love to see you.
Josephine Hughes
Yeah. Yeah. I thoroughly recommend following Sam because I love following her. So, you know, I often recommend you actually when people say, oh, I don’t know how to do social media. Well, go and take a look at what Sam Hill is doing. So
Samantha Lee
Oh, thanks, Jo
Josephine Hughes
So thank you. Thanks for coming.
Samantha Lee
You’re welcome. Cheers.
Josephine Hughes
Thanks for listening. Do come and join my Facebook community, Good Enough Counsellors. And for more information about how I can help you develop your private practice, please visit my website josephinehughes.com. If you found this episode helpful, I’d love it if you could share it with a fellow therapist or leave a review on your podcast app. And in closing, I’d love to remind you that every single step you make gets you closer to your dream.
I really believe you can do it.