Josephine (She/Her)
This was really the best thing about going to the Independent Podcast Awards last night was that in the initial drinks reception, someone came up to me and said, “Oh, are you Josephine?” She said, “I absolutely love Gloriously Unready. I’ve listened to all the episodes. I really love it.” And she was so warm towards me.
And then at the end of the evening, she came up and she gave me a big hug. And what it made me think was how important you can be to people, that as a counsellor, you really hold a special place in someone’s heart.
Josephine (She/Her)
Welcome to the Good Enough Counsellors Podcast, where I’m recording this episode the morning after the Independent Podcast Awards.
And what I’m going to do today is I’m going to share a little bit about the evening, but also use it to help you know that you can actually reach your dreams and your goals too. And we’re going to talk a little bit about how you could make your dreams come true as well.
So last night, about 9:30, I was networking after the main awards ceremony. I met someone who hosts podcasts on a professional platform and organizes advertising for it. More about that later.
But we were having a laugh because I was telling him about my podcast and I said, and tomorrow I’m going to be recording an episode and I don’t even know what it’s going to be about yet. And he said, well, tell your listeners about the Independent Podcast Awards. And I thought, yeah, brilliant idea.
So I’d love to share how I ended up at the Independent Podcast Awards, what helped me to get there and how that can apply to you if you’re trying to get somewhere with your private practice. Now, there’s all sorts of brains in the world. And this morning I went for a lovely autumnal walk to wake myself up a bit.
Sun was shining and I decided to listen to some productivity podcasts as I was walking.
And yeah, I was nodding along, agreeing with what they’re saying and thinking, yes, this, this all sounds very sensible, but in fact, you know, I’m only listening to them now. And actually I’ve managed to get quite a lot done without ever really listening to productivity podcasts or doing productivity exercises.
I would say, you know, looking back on my life, I’ve never really called myself an organized person. And really, when I think about it, I am just a mum.
I stopped my main work career to spend time with my kids when they were growing up and I never sort of reached dizzy heights in my career. But, you know, I was there last night at the Independent Podcast Awards. I was nominated in three categories. So how did I make that happen?
And I’m here to tell you that actually, it doesn’t really matter what your brain’s like. You may be somebody who is well organized and that’s brilliant, but equally, you might be someone like me who does everything at the last minute.
Like saying to the chap last night, I don’t know what I’m going to be talking about today. And here I am. I have got something to talk about. Yes, he did help me out.
But, you know, so often we can hold ourselves back because we think that we should be different to the way we are. And I’m here to tell you today that actually, you can achieve an awful lot by being you.
And I’d love to share some stories about some of the people that I met and how they’ve made it happen for them, too, in the hope that it will inspire you and help you to realize that actually, you can do it as well.
One of the things that happened at the awards ceremony last night was right at the start, they said, oh, what we’ve done is we’ve asked the winners for their music. So when people came up for the award, they played a particular piece of music that the award winners had already nominated.
And so I thought to myself, well, you know what? I obviously haven’t won because they haven’t asked me for my music.
And then I was talking to someone later in the evening and I said, well, I knew I hadn’t won because they hadn’t asked me for my music. And she said, they did ask you for your music. You had to tell them what music you liked when you filled in your submission form.
And that makes me smile because I’m thinking about it and I’m thinking, yeah, I actually was filling that submission form in when there was about only two hours left before you were supposed to submit them before the closing deadline. And actually, filling that form in is a complete blur to me because by that time I was in a bit of a panic about, oh, you know, how do I do it?
What do I do? What am I supposed to be filling in? And so I just completed it in a rush and I’d completely forgotten that, actually, they asked me for my music.
And if you do want to know what music I would have liked to have walked up on stage, it would be Firework by Katy Perry. Because I love the bit where she says, do you ever feel like you’re a plastic bag sort of blowing along the road?
And she says, you’re a firework and I’d really like you to take that on as a message for you as well. So I’m really not an organised person and I think that can really hold us back, that thought that we’re not organized and that we can’t do it.
And I think often what happens is we’ll look at a big project, and for you, this might be a big project, like setting up in private practice or finding clients. And it just feels like such an enormous project. You just think you can’t get started. And I think we can fall into two types of people.
So there’s the people who think, okay, yeah, it’s a big project, now what do I need to do to get it organized? And then they start writing down a big list, and there’s such a big list, you can end up feeling, oh my goodness, there’s so much to do.
And you spend months and months trying to perfect the things on your list and get them all done, and that can hold you back. Or the other two type of person who can be held back is someone who just thinks there’s an enormous list of things to do.
I don’t know how to do it, so I’m just going to go away and hide for a while. That definitely tends to be more of my approach. And what I found really can help is not allowing this big list to scare you too much.
And I think what can really help you is rather than thinking, I’ve got to know exactly where I’m going and exactly how to do things before I start is something sometimes thinking, well, I will just take the next step.
And my husband shared a quote with me last week and I’ve shared it in my social media this week too, and it’s from someone called Kent Beck, and he’s a big leader in what they call agile programming.
As you know, my husband’s a programmer and what they do with agile programming is rather than trying to complete a great big project by mapping it all out in advance and then spending two or three years creating and building a project that by the time they’ve finished, it doesn’t actually match what people need anymore.
What they do now is they do what they call agile programming, which is that you take small steps and you implement them and then you build the big program as you go. And it’s much more useful because actually you end up with something that people need.
And Kent Beck is one of the architecture of this agile programming movement. And he says when you’re faced with a project and you’re faced with a big project, you’re faced with a choice.
You know, are you going to take that big step, or will you break down that big step into smaller steps? And I think often what we do is we look at the big step and it really scares us. And that puts us off from taking any small steps.
And what Ken Beck suggests you do is actually break those big steps down into smaller steps. And I think sometimes you don’t know exactly where you’re going, but you do just need to take the next step. You could take a tiny step.
It doesn’t have to be a very big one, but even tiny steps add up and you can be moving along. People may not see the progress, but you are actually making tiny, tiny steps towards your end goal.
One of the finalists that I met yesterday was a lovely woman who’s working in the art world, and she has a podcast called Jo’s Art History Podcast.
It sounds like a great podcast to listen to, because what she does is interview people about art they love, and she says they’re not necessarily the experts. And the thing that I found interesting when I was chatting to Jo was asking her about her day job.
So Jo did an art history degree, and now she has a job where she curates art for large corporations. She works for an art gallery, and she’ll create large collections for big corporations. And I said, what an amazing job to have.
And it must be quite a difficult job to actually find and get into, because there’s so many people who are doing things like art history degrees, but there’s not very many jobs around.
And her reply to me, I thought was really interesting because she said, you know, if I told myself that there were no jobs, I would never have got this job. She said, but I just decided there must be jobs out there, and I was going to try to find them.
I think that’s a really interesting perspective for us to take on as therapists, because how often do we think to ourselves, there aren’t any jobs for therapists, or there aren’t any private practice clients out there. And when we have that mindset, in a sense, we’re already defeated.
And it means that we don’t go out and try and get clients, or we don’t go out and see if we can find jobs, or we aren’t talking to people, we aren’t networking, because we don’t believe that there’s any point doing that. So I think that was a really interesting perspective to learn from. Jo, are you telling yourself that you can’t do something?
I had a really interesting conversation with someone who deals with advertising for podcasts. And he was telling me about BetterHelp because one of his clients is BetterHelp.
And so we got talking about BetterHelp, and he said, oh, you know, I think BetterHelp’s really good because it’s so difficult for people to be able to get appointments on the nhs, and it’s really exciting, expensive for clients to work with private therapists. But BetterHelp is democratizing therapy for people because, you know, it’s so much cheaper. And I’m like, no.
I said, I know therapists who aren’t charging as much as BetterHelp charge. And it’s really difficult for therapists when with BetterHelp because it’s, you know, it’s more difficult for them to be able to earn a living wage.
And I was just a bit astounded by what he said.
But what I thought is, isn’t it interesting to hear someone’s perspective from outside the counselling industry that he has no awareness whatsoever that there’s private practice therapists out there who you can find directly and who you can pay directly and who actually you can get a really good service from? You don’t have to go through BetterHelp. You don’t need to go online. You can see people face to face.
And that really struck me because I thought, what are we missing as therapists that we’re not getting out there and telling people more about what we do? And I think that’s a real rallying cry for us to think about is how can we get out there and let people know more about what we do?
And I think we all need to try to get our message out there about therapy and about the fact that there are private therapists, because so many of the general public don’t know. And this is why platforms like BetterHelp are actually getting a share of the market.
And we need to make it our job to let more people know that we exist as private practice therapists. I imagine you’re listening to this thinking, yeah, but better help. Come on, Jo. They’ve got so much of a bigger advertising budget.
There’s so much more than they can do. They’re on all the podcasts, they’re in all the magazines, they’re in all the social media channels. How can we possibly compete against BetterHelp?
And just remember that little story, I’m sure you’ve heard it before, about someone who was walking along the beach and there were loads of starfish washed up on the beach, and this person is picking up some of the starfish and throwing them back into the water and someone else says to them, well, what’s the point of doing that? There’s thousands and thousands here that aren’t going to be saved, but the ones that they were throwing back in were saved.
And I think that’s the attitude we’ve got to take. Yes, BetterHelp is really big. Yes, lots of more people will know about BetterHelp than will know about us.
But why should that stop us talking about the fact that we can help?
Why should that stop us doing what individually, each of us can do to spread the word about private practice counselling, about the ways that people can find out about private practitioners. We can tell people, we can talk about our counselling practice, we can let people know about where to find private practice counsellors.
We can each do our own little bit. And actually, if we were all out there talking about it a bit more, then I think we would be able to make quite a lot of noise about it.
Let’s have that attitude. Just like Jo, the art history podcast lady does of, you know, I’m not going to let this stop me.
If I tell myself that there’s no point doing this, then I’ll give up before I’ve started. But let’s think about what we can do rather than what we can’t do and the enormity of the task.
Now, coming back to the size of the task and thinking about smaller steps, I think there can be different types of people. Obviously there’s some people who like to have all their I’s dotted and all their T’s crossed before they get started.
And for some of you, that’s something that you would find fairly straightforward to do. But for others of you, when you try and do it, you can get caught up in trying to perfect it and that can really hold you back.
And there’s another set of people, and I probably put myself into this set of the way the brain works in that you can’t really think about what you need to do because your brain just gets completely overwhelmed and then you’re not really sure about what steps to take. And that can hold you back because you think, oh, I don’t know what to do, so I can’t even get started. And I think it’s really helpful.
There’s a couple of things I’d like to talk about in relation to this is one that you can come round and improve it. And what I did when I started out in private practice was I just got started with the minimum that I needed.
I had a room, I had a supervisor, I had insurance. And then I set up a counseling directory entry and started to get my first clients through.
And remember, when you’re first starting out, you’re not going to get, it’s unlikely anyway that you’re going to get loads and loads of clients straight away. So quite often what you can do is you can make some of your procedures, you can tighten up on them as you go.
So, for example, when I started, I didn’t have a written contract. I’d just contract with people verbally. And then eventually I introduced a contract.
I didn’t even have like a form where they could fill in their details. And in the end I thought it would be really useful to have that. So, you know, I did get people to fill in their details.
Those are things that you can introduce as you go along. Like later on I introduced a proper assessment form. But I did these things in incremental stages.
And often what can happen with us is we think we’ve got to get it all organized in advance, but in a sense we can think we know what we want. But sometimes actually it isn’t until you’re in the process, you’re in the moment that you actually work out what you need.
And what I found was actually, yes, there were challenges once I started up in private practice, but they were quite enjoyable challenges. They felt like, yeah, I can do this. I think we often put ourselves under pressure to come up with an answer straight away.
But often you can say, oh, I’ll send that over to you later, or, you know, can I get back to you about that? Or I just need to check this out and I’ll let you know. And often people are more willing than we realize to just.
They don’t need an answer straight away. And we do have time to think.
And we can do things like go away and think about it, ask our peers, talk to our supervisor and work out what our response needs to be. So please don’t put yourself under pressure to know it all in advance. You can work it out as you go along. And I’ve got things that can help you.
So if you look in the show notes, you’ll see there’s a link to my checklist on setting up in private practice. And I’ve got a whole course on setting up in private practice within therapy growth group.
But don’t feel that you’ve got to have everything in place before you start because sometimes that can stop you from getting started. And so it can be really helpful to Think to yourself, what’s a tiny, tiny step that I can take next?
And sometimes you don’t know all the steps in advance, but you can take a tiny, tiny step. One of the podcasts I’d really like to shout out about was the overall podcast winners.
These were two young women of colour and they have a podcast called It’s A Continent. And I got chatting to them in the morning at Apple headquarters because Apple podcasts invited us to go in and meet them.
And when I asked them about their podcast and they told me it’s about Africa, I said, wow, that’s a really big subject to tackle. How do you do it?
And they told me that they break it down so they’ll cover a different country at a time, they’ll give themselves time to go away and do the research and then they’ll discuss it and then they’ll get together to record the episode together. And I think there’s two things that I’d like to draw out of that.
One is this breaking it down into smaller tasks, and the other, the other thing is the fact that they work together. And this is something that I found really helpful in my journey towards being at the Independent Podcast Awards.
When I started up Gloriously Unready, we had the idea that was part of what happened through business coaching, and then I went away to try and get it organised. But I did hit a bit of a roadblock, and that was because I got really scared that people would misunderstand what the podcast was about.
I didn’t want it to come across as a gender critical podcast, but I wanted to talk about the fact that parents might find it hard to acknowledge that their children were transgender.
So I wanted to both acknowledge the difficulty for parents, but also be inclusive towards transgender people, because obviously that’s a value that’s really close to my heart. I’ve got two trans daughters, so the last thing I want to do is to be gender critical. And I was really stuck about how could I do this podcast?
And it was suggested to me that actually what might be a really good idea would be to get in somebody who is very experienced in storytelling. And that’s when I asked Charlotte Foster, my podcast producer, to come onto my team.
And Charlotte, I’m sure you all agree, if you’ve listened to Gloriously Unready, Charlotte just was so magnificent in helping me to craft the story together and to make it happen.
And Charlotte not only helped me with the story, but also because she was experienced in podcast producing, she also helped do all the hand holding throughout the whole process.
And I think the thing is, for many of us as counsellors, we’ve been through difficult times in our lives and asking for help can actually be something that’s quite difficult for us to do. It’s possible that we were just expected to do things on our own and we’ve learned to be very independent as a result.
It’s possible that we were shamed for asking for help, it’s possible that we were betrayed. And so we’ve learned that the only person that we can really rely on is ourself.
And I think as therapists, it’s really important to be aware of those processes within ourselves and to acknowledge that actually asking for help can make us feel quite vulnerable. But what I’ve found that can be really helpful in that vulnerability is knowing that you’re not alone in finding this particular stage difficult.
And that’s part of the reason why I do all my work around Good Enough Counsellors. Because I’d really like you to know that you’re not alone if you’re struggling, that if you have self doubt, you’re not alone.
If you find it difficult to market yourself, you’re not alone. If you find it hard to know what to say, you’re not alone. This is the reason why I do what I do. You really are not alone.
I set up Good Enough Counsellors. I thought it was just me and now the actual Facebook group is. It’s nearly 13,000 people strong.
That name really appeals to people because people feel like they’re not good enough and they think that they’re the only people who feel like that, but they’re not. You’re part of a big community of people.
So I’d really like to encourage you that if you are someone who is struggling to reach out and get some help and I think those two young women who produced this award winning podcast, It’s Continent, are just such a great example of that, how they helped each other and they’ve produced something that is going to have a really big impact because they’ve won the overall award.
Now their podcast is going to be advertised in Leicester Square over the weekend, so lots of people are going to hear about it and lots more people are going to hear about the history of the African continent as a result of what they’re doing. And that was through them working together.
And that’s part of the reason why I do run my therapy growth group, because it brings people together who can support each other and also to know that they’re not alone.
So we have a get together on a Wednesday morning where people come in and they share what they want to be working on, perhaps what they’re struggling with and look for help. They ask for help to get over some of those things.
And even if you don’t dare say anything at one of those sessions, you can listen in and you can hear that you’re not alone. And it’s one of the great strengths of my group is that lovely sense of actually we’re doing this together.
And I think as counsellors we’re so often we’re working on our own, aren’t we? We’re solo practitioners.
But just because we’re solo practitioners in our private practice doesn’t mean that we can’t be part of something bigger and a wider support network. And that’s what I offer through my work. And what I’d really love to share in closing is a really beautiful moment that I had.
This was the best, really the best thing about going to the Independent Podcast Awards last night was that in the initial drinks reception, someone came up to me and said, oh, are you Josephine? She said, I absolutely love, Gloriously Unready. I’ve listened to all the episodes, I really love it. And she was so warm towards me.
And then at the end of the evening she came up and she gave me a big hug. And what it reminded me of was at the weekend I spent time with a friend and we went to a concert together in her local town.
And while we were sitting there, she said, oh, she said, you must meet this lady. And she turned around and she said, this is my, this is my counsellor. And the lady she was introducing me to was the counsellor.
She’s finished working with her and she was just so thrilled to see her counsellor there. She was so thrilled to see her counsellor.
And what it made me think was how important you can be to people that as a counsellor you really hold a special place in someone’s heart that they’ve been able to truly be themselves with you and to know that they’re understood and accepted and that they’ve been through difficult times, but that you’ve built them up, you really can be a special person in their lives. And just like that lady at the Podcast Awards came up to me and gave me a big hug because I was special to her.
You can be special like that to people who you work with.
And I’d really like to encourage you that if you want to be in private practice and you want to be that person to many people that you can do it if you just take it step by step. If you get the help you need and you keep working at it, however long it takes you, you can get there.
And you can be that really special person who really makes a difference to other people and who changes lives. You can be that person. 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.