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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.

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Hello and welcome back to Ask Allison. I am excited about today's question. How do you identify your ideal client? And is it okay if your ideal client feels a lot like you? So before I answer this, I would love to thank Therapy Notes for sponsoring Ask Allison. I've talked about them for years, know their features by heart, but what truly sets them apart is that they genuinely care about your experience. It's not just about troubleshooting, and they actively implement user suggested features like Therapy Search, secure Messaging, and their AI notes 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 to prioritize 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, you can try it for free for two months@therapynotes.com with the coupon code Abundant. Okay, so if this question makes your shoulders tighten a little, you're not alone. I get asked this all the time. And honestly, I think we've made figuring out your ideal client way harder than it needs to be. So let me take the pressure off. For about 85% of the therapists I've worked with, their ideal client ends up being a version of themselves. Usually a younger version of themselves. They went through something, maybe even something that brought them into wanting to be a therapist. So you don't have to dig through the DSM or analyze market trends for this. You just have to reflect a little, which we're good at, right? So think about the clients that you've had. Internship, agency, life practicums, private practice, all of it. Who made you feel energized after session instead of drained? Who challenged you in that good way where you really want to do your best work not because you felt inadequate, but because it it Mattered. You're kind of. I always think of it as like feeling like I'm on fire in session. In a good way. Who got the most out of what you offer with the least amount of friction? These are likely your people. So for me, my ideal therapy client used to be in my old niche, the 19 year old version of me. Anxious, overachieving, doing a lot of asking, trying to hold it together, and using an eating disorder to try to bring all that together. My private practice building ideal client is my 31 year old self who was burned out in agency work, tired of being told to wait or turn, terrified of making the leap, but also equally terrified of staying stuck. And these aren't exact replicas, they're slightly tweaked versions of who I've been. And that's the key. Most of you already know what it's like to be your ideal client. You know what it feels like, you know what keeps them up at night, what they're second guessing. You know what they want to experience more of. Maybe that's more peace, more autonomy, more clarity, but really unsure about how to get there. And that deep understanding is not just a clinical superpower, it's also a marketing superpower. So when you work with a client who shares your lived experience, and you certainly want to be far enough along in your journey that you're not matching step with them, right, you don't have to do a bunch of mental gymnastics to get it. You get it. You get it deeply. You know what their anxiety, for instance, feels like in the body. You know the stories they're telling themselves because you've told them to. So for example, I tend to work really well with clients who are over functioners, people who are going to hustle so hard they've forgotten how to rest, because I've been there, I've lived that life. And I know how to help them navigate the very real discomfort of slowing down from a lived experience and more importantly from a clinical experience. And that's something we always have to keep our eye on when our niche or ideal client is a past version of ourselves. Like any great supervisor will tell you, you got to make sure you're not making a bunch of assumptions about how they're experiencing things based on your own. But you can use how you've experienced things in your marketing to help them see that you get it. So here's where it gets fun. Because when you know your ideal client as well, which we all should, whether or not we have the shared live experience, we should know these clients really well. You also know how to speak their language, so you know the exact phrases that they're going to Google at 11pm when they're feeling stuck. You know the fears that they carry that no one else sees. The emotional tipping point that pushes them to finally reach out. So when you write your website copy or your Psychology Today or a post on Instagram, you can speak directly to them and when they read it, they'll think, oh my God, it's like she's inside my head. Because in a way you kind of are. Right, so this is why therapists who get really clear on their ideal client end up getting far more aligned referrals. They stop hearing, well, I'm going to ask around for some other therapist too and I'll get back to you. Or they stop taking on clients that called that just the clinical fit isn't there. And they start hearing, I feel like you were speaking directly to me on your website. So it's not because of coincidence. Obviously that is because of the connection that you're creating for your copy. Now, is it weird if your client, your ideal client, feels like you? Not at all. A lot of us got into this field because we wanted to help people who struggled the way we did. That's not self indulgent, it's meaningful. It does come with a responsibility. So if your ideal client is a version of you, make sure you're doing your own work. You want to show up fully without projecting or rescuing or blurring boundaries. So keep going to your own therapy, keep growing your clinical skills, watch your countertransference and get a consult when you need it. And as long as you're doing that, your shared experience becomes one of your greatest clinical tools. So if you've been struggling to define your ideal client because you thought it had to be some like abstract marketing profile that you make up, I hope this helps you realize that it might just be someone you know really well. And if that person feels like a former version of you that's not lazy or self centered, it's maybe wise, it's informed, it's real. You'll do your best work when you really care and connect in an authentic way. And your marketing will become 10 times easier when you're not pretending to be someone you're not. If you need help mapping out exactly who your ideal client is and how to market to them without sounding robotic, I've got a free worksheet for you today. It's going to walk you through step by step reflection exercise to help you get clear and confident. You can DM me the word sheets and I'll send you that worksheet. Our ideal client exercise is what it's called, plus the link to all the past worksheets in the series. If you're like, yeah, ideal client sounds great, but I don't even know what my niche is. Our know your niche course, it's 27. You can DM me the word niche and I will send it your way. And yeah, let's make your practice really aligned and really energized and doing a lot of really good work in the world. I hope you have a great day. Take care.