Have you ever felt that cancellations and endings come like buses in threes? One day your private practice is full, the next day it’s half empty. Although you keep checking your email and phone there’s no new inquiries coming in. You look at your diary for the next month and there are yawning gaps in your client’s schedule. You smile bravely and agree, yes, it’s a great time for a client to finish, but inwardly, you’re panicking.
The Impact of Reduced Client Numbers on Therapists
Welcome to the Good Enough Counsellors podcast, where this week we’ll look at the problem of reduced client numbers and what you can do about it. This can be seasonal such as during the summer, but when it happens it’s hard to maintain optimism and the belief that numbers will pick up later in the year. Fear can so easily begin to arise. You wonder whether you’ll receive new inquiries and begin to panic about your income if no new clients are forthcoming. You look at other counsellors and think they’re busier than you and question, what is wrong with you?
Alternatively, it may not comfort you if you know that others are also experiencing a slowdown. It’s discouraging because you wonder if it’s due to the economy and that people aren’t able to afford to pay for counselling. You wonder if the big commercial outfits like BetterHelp are sucking up all the inquiries and you ask yourself how you can possibly compete, or you doubt your own therapeutic approach and wonder if all the clients are seeking a different style of help such as coaching? It’s scary when your client numbers are not where you’d like them to be. And while it’s natural to have these questioning thoughts, you’ll probably agree that they’re not terribly helpful.
How Fear of Reduced Client Numbers Affects Counsellors
I believe this fear can express itself in different ways. Let’s think about that fear with the aspects of the fight, flight, and freeze responses. If you’re someone who is more likely to fight, how can this show up? It may come out as questioning a client’s readiness to end therapy. You can easily persuade yourself that they need to stay because after all, who is ever completely ready to leave and even subtly manipulate them to stay.
Obviously, this isn’t respectful of their autonomy. And personally, I’ve found honoring a client’s valuation of themself has meant that they have contacted me again when they needed more help and returned to me. Another way the fight response shows up is in hard work. You double down on all your marketing and try to force more inquiries by frenetic activity. While there’s no doubt that marketing helps, beware the desperation that can set in when it results in an inquiry.
It may lead to pushing the client too hard to commit, taking on a client who is beyond your existing competence, or bending over backwards to accommodate them when it’s not really suitable. The flight response can show up in several ways. For example, searching for alternative jobs or finding a million other things to do apart from marketing. After all, it’s summer and don’t you deserve to rest? But everything you do is accompanied by that nagging sense of guilt that you’re avoiding growing your practice and possibly a sense of depression because after all, what’s the point of trying? You’re not going to be able to make it work.
Then we come to the freeze response. You feel completely overwhelmed and terrified that your private practice is failing. You have no idea about what to do next. You’re literally unable to take any action at all.
It’s a horrible place to be, and I want you to know that if you’re feeling this at the moment, I hear you. You’re not alone in these feelings, and this podcast episode is for you. It’s okay. We’re going to help you move through.
Creative Solutions to Reduced Client Numbers
The first thing to acknowledge is that marketing, in other words, letting people know that you’re available to offer them counselling, is actually a really creative activity.
We tend to think of creativity being about things like painting, writing, or crafting, but creativity is really about ideas and applying those ideas to everyday tasks. And telling people about your practice is one of those everyday tasks. But very importantly, creativity is limited when you’re in a fearful state. I’ll say that again. Creativity is limited when you’re fearful.
Fear means you worry more about failure and rejection. You’re less likely to try out innovative ideas in case you get them wrong. You’ll merely follow the herd in marketing terms such as sticking to the tried and tested advertising on a directory approach. You’re less likely to follow your own passions in case this results in criticism. Fear can feel like a heavy blanket smothering all your self belief and hope.
So if that’s how you’re feeling at the moment, what can be done to help? Well, what neuroscience tells us is to do nothing. Let me explain. Back in the early 1990’s, researchers were exploring what parts of the brain lit up during different activities. They wanted a control group, so they scanned people and told them to think of nothing at all.
Surprisingly, they noticed that mental activity spiked in several different regions of the brain. As research continued, it was found that during resting periods, the brain actually makes links and connections in novel ways. It’s why you have your best ideas when you’re in the shower or while you’re folding the laundry or taking a walk. Personally, if I’m doing a piece of work and have no idea what to do next, I’ll often take a break for a cup of tea and return with a solution.
When my husband first started working from home during lockdown, I was shocked to see how often during the day he’d be leaning back in his office chair playing a game on his mobile phone.
He’s a well paid computer programmer, and my initial thought was, well, that’s nice work if you can get it. However, what I’ve realised is he’s letting his brain work in idle mode for a while. And after a little while, the solution to an engineering problem will pop into his mind and he’s off.
If playing a computer game isn’t your activity of choice, here’s something that can really help. Apparently, if you take a walk, it increases your creative output by about 60%.
Just walk. Don’t try to focus on anything in particular. But what tends to happen is your thoughts will naturally drift towards problem solving. Your brain will shift thoughts backwards and forwards, go through possibilities, and connect thoughts, ideas, and experiences. Ideas will come to you because that’s how your brain works.
Then, the task is to remember them. I’ll sometimes record a voice note for myself and have been known to send a message to my podcast producer straight after stepping out of the shower. So if you’ve been sitting in front of your desk and not getting anywhere, I suggest it’s time to turn off your laptop and do something different. Sometimes one of my therapy growth group members comes on to our accountability call and she’ll spend the first half an hour making a cake, come back and then absolutely kick ass with her university assignments for the next hour.
You may not physically be able to take a walk, but what else can you do that would let your brain idle for a while? Could it be knitting, gardening, colouring, playing catch with your dog, stroking your cat? There’s a reason why you do housework before you settle down to a task. You may think you’re procrastinating, But actually, what you’re doing is you’re allowing your brain to work. You’ll often also be taking the pressure off yourself to be productive. As I said, the fight part of your fearfulness may be telling you to work harder and measure your progress by increased inquiries.
But often creativity works best when you’re involved in the process itself rather than the outcome. Try substituting curiosity with fear. Ask yourself, what would happen if I experimented with this particular marketing approach? And how could I make it fun for myself? At this point, I’d like to say if you’re really stuck for ideas about how to market yourself, look in the show notes for my handout, 21 ways for counsellors to attract new clients.
This gives you different approaches depending on how quickly you need clients. It helps if you expose yourself to new ideas and new ways of working. Hearing how other people are doing and listening to their successes and sometimes failures can be so encouraging. It helps you to know that you’re not alone in having trepidations about trying something out, and you can also learn shortcuts and demystify what seems complicated. For example, in my Therapy Growth Group recently, one of the members began to experiment with making Instagram reels.
Sharing them in the Facebook group has encouraged other people to try them too. And now we’ve got a little stream of new reels being created by different people who are attracting new followers to their social media pages. And if you’d like to know more about my therapy growth group, do contact me at josephinehughes.com.
How to Make Time for Your Private Practice Marketing
It’s also true to say that creativity is served by rituals, and one of those rituals is dedicated time. I’d like to gently remind you that clients do not manifest themselves out of thin air.
If you’re not telling people that you exist and are available for appointments, how are they supposed to find you? And if you’re simply relying on clients to find you via directories, you’re missing out on an awful lot of people who don’t know that directories exist. And while you may think, well, it just takes a simple Google search to find a directory. Today, I saw someone on threads asking, how do I find a therapist if I don’t want to use BetterHelp? Listen to episode 16, my Social Media Toolkit for July to hear more about reaching potential clients before they search on a directory.
And what I’d really like you to remember is that those clients are actually out there now. They need help now and they are looking now. It’s about reaching them. Dedicating time in your diary to the ritual of marketing and making it a habit really does yield results. It helps to create that flow of clients to keep your appointments ticking over.
My first coach advised me that if you’re not making enough income, your top priority has to be your marketing. And sorry folks, I know you’d much prefer it if I said CPD should be your first priority. But learning more about techniques is not going to increase your client numbers if people don’t know you exist. If you haven’t done so already, it’s really helpful to mark out the times in your diary that you’re going to devote to your private practice every week. After all, if you’re going to be seeing private clients, you’re going to be making space for them.
So while you’re waiting for them, why not use that slot for your marketing? In just one slot a week, you could have a chat with another therapist in order to make mutual referrals. In 2 slots, you could write a blog post or update a website page. In 3 or 4, you could design a leaflet and send it to the printers. I read a lovely quote from Mark Twain this morning that said, the secret of getting ahead is getting started.
The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into smaller manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one. This could be how you spend your first few dedicated hours in growing your practice. Pick an idea, any idea, and break it down into tasks. If the task still looks overwhelming, break it down again until you’ve got a step that looks doable, then start. If the thought of several hours sounds horrifying, don’t even think of it as an hour.
Give yourself 15 minutes. Tell yourself you’ll just try 15 minutes and you’ll stop at the end of that time. Quite often, you’ll carry on. But if you don’t, you can still reward yourself for that time that you’ve spent. One of my Therapy Growth Group members has a ta-da list.
As someone with AUDHD, she finds a to-do list overwhelming, but she’ll choose one small thing to do and when she’s finished, she’ll write it down as done. It goes on her ta-da list and then she’ll ask someone to give her a pat on the back for doing it.
It’s helpful to surround your marketing efforts with lots of self care. Let’s face it. Many of us find it scary and this podcast is about reducing your fear levels.
So think, what do you do to self regulate? It probably will be with some of the activities I’ve already described in this episode. So it’s a win-win situation. Look after you, and your marketing success, and more clients will follow. 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.