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Abundant Practice Podcast
Episode #666: How To Set Goals Effectively
00:10:10
Feeling stuck with long-term goals? You’re not alone. In today’s Ask Allison, I talk about how to stop spinning out over “growth” and start getting clear. You don’t need a five-year plan. You need to know what kind of growth you’re...
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Foreign welcome to Ask Allison. Y' all ask the questions about having a fun and thriving practice and I answer them. We have a worksheet for you today so you can bring this answer into your life. You can Access that@AbundancePracticeBuilding.com links where you'll also be able to ask any questions you have for Ask Allison. If you want more support, we've got some free trainings in there too. If you can't get enough Ask Allison, check out our YouTube channel for our entire Ask Allison library. Welcome back to Ask Allison. Here's today's question. How should I approach long term goal setting? I know I want growth in a couple different areas, but I feel overwhelmed about planning ways to achieve that. Thanks. So before I answer this, I would like to thank TherapyNotes for sponsoring Ask Allison. I've talked about them for years and you probably know their features by heart just like I do. But what really sets them apart is that they genuinely care about your experience. It's not just about troubleshooting. They actively implement user suggested features like Therapy search, secure messaging, clinical outcome tracking, their new AI notes. Everyone at TherapyNotes believes in the product and they want you to love it too. Plus, they're independently owned, which means no venture capital and no pressure to prioritize investors over customers. This independence allows them to keep their prices fair, to focus on innovation and prioritize customer experience. With over 100,000 therapists on board, they've proven you don't have to compromise success for quality. If you're ready to see for yourself, try TherapyNotes for free for two months with the code abundanttherapynotes.com okay. Goal setting. I love this question because when we don't set goals, we often don't progress in the ways that we want need. It's why we have treatment plans for clients. It's why we establish goals in general in our lives when we're really, really focused on making progress in certain areas. So how to do this depends on your goals. So I'm going to go off on a tangent, but I'm going to come back and I will answer your question. So I'm going to go through a few scenarios. Let's say your goal is currently to have 20 clients a week paying $200 a session. I would move that from long term goal setting, which is what you asked about, to short term because this is something that can happen within a year, even in this economy. For most of my students, they're hitting this at about six months. That takes a clear, specific niche, a niched website, regular networking, and up to three other marketing strategies. And those are gonna vary based on your skills, your interest, your niche. We teach all of these in the Abundance Party. You can DM me the word party and I'll send you the link. Let's say you're wanting an alternative stream of income. First, I want you to do research on what you can realistically expect from another income source. The most popular sources I hear about are group practices and courses, so I'm going to touch on both. With group practices, people assume it's going to be great. I'll make about 40% of what other therapists that I take on end up bringing in. But the profit margins in group practice are very slim. The overhead is high. It can be really stressful if you don't prepare properly. Typically, after hiring your second clinician, you are bringing home less than you did when you were in solo practice because so much of your time is eaten up with management and marketing. You're not seeing many clients and your overhead is higher. Your employees are going to need support and inconvenient times. Basically only consider group practice if you really enjoy management. If that's you, I really love the Group Practice Exchange to teach you all the ins and outs of how to structure your practice to hire clinicians. Create a group practice that's based on values instead of it just feeling like the next logical step to make more money. So I want you to look into the Group Practice Exchange. I also want you to start socking away money now. Group practices need a much bigger financial cushion. I think there are enough of us who have worked in group practices and didn't get paid what we were supposed to that we can speak to have a big cushion so that in the moments when it's tight, you're not having to go into crushing debt or shirking your responsibilities and not paying your people. I also want you to start looking into leadership training as soon as humanly possible. Poor leadership in group practices is a really big reason that I am successful in helping people start their own practices. So let's say you're not interested in group practice, you're interested in courses. Digital marketing is a very different animal. When I started abundance, I thought it was going to be a more intense version of the marketing I was doing for my therapy practice. But I was dead wrong. The learning curve was super steep. The time, the money, the effort that I had to put in for it to make any money was significant. It's not like all the people who sell courses on how to Sell courses, represent it. It is not just like waking up to money every morning. Yeah, I wake up to money every morning, but the amount of work I have to do to get there is significant. Know that 80 to 90% of people with an online business like this earn under $12,000 a year or don't reach meaningful income. You'll be working a lot for that amount, like less than minimum wage per hour. And if you don't love marketing and you don't want to do it five days a week and you don't feel super passionate about getting your message out there, then online courses probably aren't for you. It is not the quick path to more money. If you love marketing, you're super passionate about whatever your message is, then I suggest finding a program or a coach to walk you through those steps. I'm not going to go through all this. I don't teach this. But from a goal setting perspective, come up with a really realistic timeline to get everything set up based on your research. Be really coachable with whoever you hire. Just because you don't like something or you don't want to do it doesn't mean you can just bypass it with online business and still get the same results. If it's against your values, definitely skip it. For instance. But when people say I really hate social media, I don't want to be on social media for my practice, I'm like sweet, don't do it. Like you don't need to. But you're going to have to do that if you're doing an online business. In terms of like general goal setting, I'm sure you already know about smart goals, so I'm not going to go on about them. But I'll add to smart goals that you need accountability. Even the most disciplined people I know benefit from accountability. Specifically, you need accountability from someone you deeply don't want to disappoint. And if your future goals are in the alternative stream of income realm, know that the easiest, fastest, most efficient, cheapest way for you to make significantly more money is is actually to raise your rate and get off insurance and have a full practice. You need to know that there's each step to do that, like bolstering your marketing, working on your mindset. Those things have to be done in order for you to be successful in a premium fee, full private practice. If your practice is full of lower fee or insurance clients and you want somebody to help you with the steps to get to full fee, message me limitless and we'll talk about that. So goal Setting wise, you need to be clear on your goal and you need to be clear why it's your goal. Make sure that the timeline you have in your head is realistic most of the time. We expect what we want sooner than is reasonable. We do that in our private practices too, right? So get really clear on the actual steps towards your goal. That's going to help you have a realistic timeline. Don't just make assumptions. You have to get support in doing this new, different thing. None of this is intuitive now. It's great if you have a big, hairy, audacious goal. These are known as bhags. Big, hairy, audacious goal. And that doesn't feel entirely realistic. So let's say you set a goal to make $300,000 in your first year of private practice. You might not hit that, but you might hit 225. But if your goal had been 200,000, you might have hit 175. I always have three goals whenever I am launching something or anything like that. I have my bhag. That feels impossible. I have what I call my great goal. That would feel like I surpassed what I expected. And I have a good goal that, like, is basic. I'd be happy with it. I've actually hit my bhag a couple times in the last decade and if, if I hadn't imagined what that bhag was, I wouldn't have done the things that got me there, even though I didn't think that goal was realistic at all. So schedule out the steps. It's another really important piece. If you have figured out what steps you need to take, get it in your calendar. What doesn't get scheduled doesn't get done. I never, ever set a goal without thinking through the steps, laying out what I'm going to do over the next 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, then week to week with the ongoing goals to get there. It goes in my schedule with specificity, so it's not just a list somewhere. And it's also not in my schedule. As like market. It might be. Reach out to A, B and C to talk about xyz. Today's free worksheet is actually about the other thing that impacts whether you achieve your goals. Motivation. You can DM me the word sheets if you're on social, or you can click the link for the free worksheets in the show notes. If you're listening on the podcast, reach out if you need help. I will see you next week. Take great care. If you're ready for a much easier practice Therapy Notes is the way to go. Go to therapynotes.com and use the promo code abundant for two months free. I hope that helped. If you have questions for Ask Allison or you want to get your hands on the worksheet for this episode, go to abundancepracticebuilding.com Links if you're listening, you probably need some support building your practice. If you're a super newbie, grab our free checklist using the link in the Show Notes. I'd love for you to follow rate and review, but I really want you to share this episode with a therapist friend. Let's help all our colleagues build what they want.