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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. I want to identify the best ways to connect with clients in the 20 to 45 age group and attract more from this demographic. Because I really enjoy working with this age group and I see them as my ideal clients. How can I describe this niche group in a way that is ethical and non judgmental? Okay, so before I answer that, I would like to thank TherapyNotes for sponsoring Ask Allison. I've talked about them for years. I know their features by heart. You probably do too. But what truly sets them apart is that they genuinely care about your experience. It is not just about troubleshooting. They actively implement user suggested features like clinical outcome tracking, real time insurance checks, and their AI feature, therapy fuel. 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 pressure to prioritize their investors over their customers. This independence allows them to keep their prices fair, to focus on innovation, and to prioritize customer experience. With over 100,000 therapists already on board, they've proven you don't have to compromise success for quality. If you're ready to see for yourself, try therapy Notes for free for two months with the code abundanttherapynotes.com okay, so I love this question because I get to do some really important teaching here. What you're describing is not a niche. It's a demographic. With a few exceptions, people don't choose a therapist based on the demographic they serve. They choose based on what they struggle with, like what they're going through. So let's get more clear on the difference. A demographic is surface level information. It's age, gender, income, maybe location. It's about who someone is in a census kind of a way. People will often try to niche to demographics and wonder why they're not getting clients. Demographics end up feeling like fake niches. A niche, on the other hand, is about what someone is experiencing. It's the pain, the emotional patterns, the problems that they're actively looking to get help with. This can overlap with demographics. Like if you're navigating how it is to be a person of color in tech, for instance, those feel more demographic, like a person working in tech and a person of color. But we can all kind of infer the friction that they might be feeling, and it's that friction that they're coming into therapy for. So when we're talking about niching down for your practice, what you really want to clarify is what emotional experiences are you drawn to helping with? What kinds of struggles do you feel confident supporting? Know what's outside your scope? What patterns do your favorite clients tend to share? So if you focus on those things, the right demographic tends to flow naturally from that niche. And here's the thing, clients don't wake up and think, you know what? I need a therapist who works with 30 somethings. They wake up and they think, I can't keep living like this, I'm exhausted, I'm overthinking everything, my relationships are falling apart. They're looking for someone who can help them feel better, not someone who specializes in a certain age range. So when you're writing your copy, your website, your Psychology Today profile, your social posts, whatever marketing you're using, lead with what life actually feels like for your ideal client right now. Describe their internal world, their day to day struggles. Think of it like you're sitting across from one of your favorite clients, the ones you wish you could clone, and you're describing what life was like before therapy helped them, what's the language that they are using? And you also hear this in that first phone call with therapy clients, and sometimes in that first session with your therapy clients. So let's make this more concrete. If your ideal client is 20 to 45, that's a huge range. So I'd actually encourage you to find the thread of what you love helping with most. Having been both 20 and 45, I can tell you I was worried about very different things at those ages. I went to therapy for very different reasons at those ages. So start with the problem. For this age group, that could be navigating early or mid career decisions. It could be social starting or ending serious relationships. It could be deciding whether to have kids or realizing you don't want them. It could be struggling with infertility. It could be parental struggles, anxiety, depression, low self esteem, dealing with burnout, perfectionism, identity crises, sandwich generation stuff, figuring out boundaries with their parents as adults. It could be grief and loss. It could be constantly comparing themselves with Everybody and feeling behind. So, like, there are a billion things it could be. I want you to get really zeroed in on. When you look at these clients you currently have in this big age group, what do all these people that you really enjoy share? Notice how, like, none of the things I listed sound judgmental. This is all just real life stuff. And we're not going to say, are you having a hard time making mid career adjustments? That's not how we'd frame it. We'd frame it in their language, right? Like, do you feel like you have reached the pinnacle of where you can be in your career and you're unsatisfied? That kind of thing. So you want to speak directly to their experiences. Like, you've checked all the boxes. Career, family, relationship. You still feel unfulfilled, or you're tired of living for everyone else's expectations, or you're the friend who keeps it together for everyone else. But inside you're running on fumes. So when someone for whom that applies in the 20 to 45 age range reads that, they're going to think, oh, my God, that's me. They won't care that you didn't say, I specialize in adults age 20 to 45. They'll care that you get them. So let's talk about the ethical part of your question. You're already thinking about ethics, which tells me, like, your heart's in a great place. The key to describing a group ethically is to avoid stereotypes or assumptions. So instead of saying young professionals, describe the experience of being a human. At that stage, most of us didn't or don't refer to ourselves as young professionals. Right? So that might sound like people who are juggling big responsibilities while trying to figure out who they are and what they want. Or people who feel pressure to have it all together when they secretly feel lost. The phrasing invites empathy and connection without labeling or excluding. And you can absolutely use images of people in the age ranges that you decide you really want to work on on your website to help them feel welcome, the visuals can do a lot of heavy lifting for you. People tend to see themselves in your imagery before they even read your copy. So if you want to connect with folks in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, show people who look like that demographic and make sure they're not like the model version. Right? We want people on our website that look like people we'd see on the streets or people we'd see in our office. You can also reference the life stages people are in based on your niche. So early career or new parenthood, caretaking, aging parents, or rebuilding after a breakup. That's the subtle way you signal, hey, I get people like you without ever having to say it outright. And here's a marketing secret that applies to therapists, too. Demographics tell you who they are, but psychographics tell you why they chose you. So psychographics are about their mindset, their values, their emotional world, not just their age. Do they crave meaning? Do they hate disappointing people? Are they trying to look successful while quietly burning out? When you describe those experiences, you're going to connect with your ideal age group automatically because you're connecting at the level of story, not statistics. So to wrap it up, you don't need to say you specialize in 20 to 45 year olds. You just need to describe what that season of life feels like while they're struggling with what brings them to therapy. Lead with empathy. Use language that reflects their inner world, their language, not our clinical stuff. And let your imagery do the quiet signaling. And that's how you attract the people you love working with, ethically, naturally, effectively. If you want more help identifying your niche, my know your niche course. It's only $27. I'm going to link that in the show notes and on the podcast. If you're on social, you can DM me the word niche and I'll send the link. Today's free worksheet is the ideal client worksheet you'd mentioned. Your ideal client is age 20 to 45. Your ideal client is one person, and this worksheet helps you define that one person, which makes your marketing a thousand times easier. Basically, once you've established your niche, you've got to do that part first. The ideal client is really going to make all this marketing so much easier. So you can DM me the word sheets and I'll get that to you and it's linked in the show notes of the pod. All right, y', all, I'll talk to you later. 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 therapist friend. Let's help all our colleagues build what they want.