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Abundant Practice Podcast
Episode #747: How Therapists Can Turn CE Teaching Into Income & Referrals, feat. Danielle Keenan-Miller
00:24:28
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Hi, welcome to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm Alison from Abundance Practice Building. I have a nearly diagnosable obsession with helping therapists build sustainable, joy filled private practices, just like I've done for tens of thousands of therapists across the world. I'm excited to help you too. If you want to fill your practice with ideal clients, we have loads of free resources and paid support. Go to abundance practice building.com Links all right, onto the show so I've talked about therapy notes on here for years. I could talk about the features and the benefits in my sleep. But there are a couple things I want you to know about therapy notes that doesn't typically make it into an ad script. First is that they actually care if you like their platform. They don't only make themselves available on the phone to troubleshoot so you don't pull your hair out when you get stuck. They also take member suggestions and implement those that there's client demand for, like Therapy Search, an included listing service that helps clients find you internal and external secure messaging Clinical outcome measures to keep an eye on how your clients are progressing. A super smooth super bill process Real time eligibility to check on your client's insurance. In my conversations with the employees there at all levels, they all really believe in their product and they want you to love it too. Second, they are proudly independently owned. Why should you care about that? Because as soon as venture capital becomes involved, the focus shifts from making customers happy to making investors happy. Prices go way up. Innovation plateaus. Making more money with as little output as possible becomes the number one focus. With over 100,000 therapists using their platform, they've been able to stay incredibly successful and they don't have to sacrifice your experience to stay there. You can try two months free@therapynotes.com with the coupon code. Abundant Therapists whose practices are full Is this actually the practice you want? If you're secretly stuck, you're cramming in evening sessions, glued to insurance panels, unable to raise rates. Limitless practice is your way out. Over 12 weeks, you'll make the changes you've been thinking about making for months so that you can work fewer hours while making more money. You'll design a schedule that actually fits your life and you'll say yes to only the clients you love. Together, we'll release you from your golden handcuffs. We're capping the cohort at 10 people because I'm personally running every individual individual call, every group call, and every accountability check in. People on the wait list will get first dibs on Those spots and then the opportunity to sign up will go out to the rest of my audience. So join the wait list now. I'm going to put the link in the show notes and I look forward to helping you get your practice exactly where you want it. Welcome back to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm your host, Allison Perier, founder of abundancepracticebuilding.com and today I am with Danielle Keenan Miller of mindsciencecollective.com and we're going to be talking about providing CEUs teaching, like using this skill that not a lot of us private practice therapists are using on a regular basis. So, yeah, Nice to meet you, Danielle.
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Hi, lovely to meet you. Thanks for having me, Allison.
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Yeah. So tell me some about what got you interested in helping therapists provide education for ce.
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Sure. So I started teaching CE classes myself maybe six or seven years ago for a long time, long time. I worked in a university. I was running the training clinic there and I actually wrote a book about binge eating with a colleague of mine, a self help book. And based on that, I had a company reach out to me and say, we would love for you to teach a CE for our platform. And I sort of felt like, oh, gosh, like I had done a lot of teaching at that point, but it was all for graduate students. So I felt uncertain, as I'm sure lots of people do when they move into new spaces. But I had a really fun time doing it. I loved forcing myself really to articulate a lot of the things that otherwise are implicit in how I think and work. And it was also a great way for me to encourage myself to spend time learning more about something I already loved and thought a lot about. So I had a great experience and I really liked the platform that I was working with. They no longer exist, but I loved the ethos there. I loved that it was focused on really helping clinicians understand the science, but without it being intimidating, that they really wanted the presenters there to be other clinicians who understood the ups and downs of being in the room with somebody. I started doing that and I absolutely loved it. And they invited me back for more courses. From there, it just kind of snowballed into teaching for a number of different platforms over time. And I think I hadn't really anticipated that way that it would grow. That's part of what I want other therapists out there to know is that it can sort of keep growing on itself. And then when this platform that I had started with stopped existing, they sold to venture capital and shut it down as. As happens, as you know. But I formed a group with some of my colleagues, and we said, okay, how do we recreate that environment that we loved teaching in together, where there was this focus on science, but also a real focus on good, solid, approachable clinical practice? And that's when we started Mind Science. So now I'm in the position of being on the other side and hiring other therapists to come teach for us, which is super exciting.
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Yeah, that's awesome. And I love that instead of being like, well, I guess that part of my life died, you got together and you all built something in order to keep doing it. That's awesome. And feel the need, because we need CES that are good. Yes. They're just there. There are a lot of boring or not good CES out there.
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So there are a ton of them that are either just, like, so boring they make you want to cry, or just so disconnected from practice. And so I think one of the things that's really important to us and that I think makes therapists so valuable in this space is that they can really speak to, like, what is hard about being in the room with somebody. Right. Like, we've all read textbooks where, like, the patient on the other side is absolutely perfect. Right. They say, like, you're the best therapist ever, and I understand everything. Right. Nobody wants to see that's pitched at that level. Right. You really want someone to understand, oh, I have been in your shoes. Across from somebody thinking, what do I do now?
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Yes. Yes. So, okay, you mentioned that it can grow. Like, it can build on itself. Can you share what that can look like for a therapist in private practice who is wanting to explore this area that they're good at or that they're interested in and how that can continue to build?
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Well, let me first say I think it's important that therapists know that they might be more ready than they realize to throw their hat into the ring. Like, if you are somebody who other colleagues reach out to for consultation, that's a sign that, like, you have recognized clinical expertise in your community, you don't need to be an expert on the world stage to be ready to.
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Yes.
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So, you know, if people are asking you if you're the person that people call about ethics or about a particular diagnosis or presentation or just to get a good clinical consult, then, like, you probably have something that's worth sharing. More broadly, it is important for folks to know that the first time you do this, it's time intensive. It's really very time consuming to do well to do the research, to make the slides, to make the proposal, to make the pitch. Often if you're teaching a recorded class, you need to make quiz questions. So it can be very time intensive the first time. But the part that I didn't realize until I was in it is that people will hire you off of one CE. So some of the recorded CEs I've done, organizations have reached out to me and asked me to do that live for their team, or even live things I've done. Somebody's been in a class that I was teaching, and then they said, oh, like my whole organization would really benefit from having this training. Will you come in and do that? And once you get a little bit of recognized expertise in an area of ce, it really starts to build on itself in a way that you have this portfolio of things that you can pull from. For example, one of the things I teach a lot about is supervision. I teach with my colleague Sarah Thompson, and we have a business that's just supervision teaching called Supervision Science. When we started, we were doing a lot of heavy lifting in terms of the time we were putting into everything. But now when organizations reach out to us, we know, oh, are they looking for something on ethics? We've got two hours on ethics. Are they looking for something that's beginner, intermediate, advanced, how many hours? And we have all the materials and we can pull them together in different ways. So now the lift is very, very easy.
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It really mirrors kind of our. The lift in therapy in general. Right. When we're first learning everything feels like we're learning something brand new all the time. And we kind of are. And then once you've been doing it a while, you're like, oh, yeah, I've run up against this a number of times, and I know how to handle it.
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And there's confidence there. Yes. Yeah.
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And I love what you said earlier. I don't remember the words you use, but essentially, like, we take for granted that we know so much. Some like just real basic to us stuff.
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Absolutely.
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Not everybody else knows.
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Yes, that's exactly right. And. And you need to be able to. To learn from your colleagues about things that are obvious to them and not so obvious to you. Like all of us specialize so much. Even another colleague who you consider a super expert probably doesn't have all the same expertise do. Right. So that's a good way to think about what you could teach if you're someone who supervises. Another way to think about what to teach is just like, what are the things you say over and over again to supervisees, what are the things that, you know, that they need to learn? And is there, you know, potentially an audience for those skills amongst licensed folks?
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Yeah. And I think your point about everybody being so specialized, like as a eating disorder therapist as well, former eating disorder therapist. I've switched niches now, but there is so much in that niche that is not common knowledge, that is not logical necessarily. But we learned the hard way.
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Right.
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And it is so helpful to be able to share that even if people are not going to specialize in eating disorders, just like, so that they can make an appropriate referral or they actually know what's going on with their client. Because if you don't ask a lot of people, a lot of those clients aren't going to let you know.
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Exactly. Right. I love the way you just said that, like, learning the hard way. That's another thing that I think, you know, is a sign for therapists that they might be ready to teach. Like, is there a clinical problem that you've solved in your own practice? Right. So one of the courses I love teaching is about termination, about the end of therapy, how to make that go well.
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Right.
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Because that's a. That's a time that I found hard. Especially, you know, I've worked in some settings where I had really limited number of sessions with folks, and I was doing tons of terminations all the time, and I just disliked them. So I had to find a way for myself to like it more, to feel smoother about it, to make it more transformational for clients rather than feeling punishing. And so that was something that I spent a lot of time thinking about and working on in myself as a therapist. And then I was like, oh, that's probably something other people would benefit from. So it was something I learned the hard way, but then I had something that was valuable at the end.
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Right. And if you hadn't probably had supervisees going through the same thing, you might have missed that. That is, like, you spent a lot of time and energy thinking about it, and they're like, you know, hundreds of thousands of other therapists who are mulling over the same problem and don't have guidance.
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Exactly. Right. Yeah.
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So do you see this as like, adjunctive to private practice work? Do you see it as potentially replacing private practice work for some people? From a income standpoint? Like, what's realistic and what's a foot in the door?
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Yeah, I think it's more likely to be adjunctive than a full replacement. But I will say, you know, I think that there's a couple of significant financial advantages to teaching in this space. One is that if you do recorded courses, often folks are getting paid residuals for each time that that course is watched over time. And that is something that is just really nice in terms of passive income. Right. That you just like open up your bank account and there is like, you know, money in there at the end of each month from the people who have watched your courses. So having that passive income, I think really can take off some of the edge of anxiety that I know we all experience when you're having a slow month and referrals haven't been coming in. And it really just provides a little bit of cushion there. Some of it is. I would say the live courses tend to be more of a significant payment upfront, but they are not going to be recurring payments. So there's a little bit of a trade off in thinking about how much do you want to teach live, how much do you want to teach by recording? I love doing both, but they have sort of different financial structures underneath them.
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Yeah. And so how do people get their foot in the door for something like that?
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Great question. So first decide, you know, what it is that you would want to teach about. And I would say sort of the two most common mistakes people make in that that I've seen as proposals start to come through for us. One, they're trying to be too unique. Like, nobody wants Danielle's personal approach to treating eating disorders because it's not evidence based. I can't be confident it's going to work. And I want the things that we teach to work because I want people to come back to our company. So don't try to be too unique and don't try to be too broad, like really solve a specific problem that you see in the room in front of you. So once you've got your idea, the next step is making a pitch. And it doesn't have to be long. It maybe is about a page and it should describe, you know, what is the idea, what would you be covering in the course, just at an outline level. What are the other courses that exist in the market that are similar to this or not? Like, what's sort of the unique aspect of this course? And then send it to the info email addresses at the places that you already take your ces. Right. All of us already have some companies that we like and that we work with. I hope you check out Mind Science and send us some of your pitches. So these companies need new voices, new ideas, new Instructors all the time. So they are looking for that and you just need to get it in front of them. And then from there, usually you're signed up with somebody before you put in the rest of the effort of doing the research and creating the deck and all of those sort of things. So it's really about finding a partner before you fully develop it.
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Yeah, I love that because it's like you're putting in enough work to know whether or not you want to keep putting in work, like whether you want to shop it, and then you're validating it by finding out if somebody wants to have you do it before you put in hours and hours and hours of putting it together.
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Yeah, exactly right. And sometimes people will say, especially if you're teaching live, they'll say, you know, we're happy to do this, but we're not going to run it unless we get X number of participants. So there are some times that you're taking a little bit of a gamble on yourself. That is a place that if you have a strong professional network in terms of organizations you're a part of or an online presence with, with professional social media, those are places that you also want to lean into, making sure that the events that you are teaching at are a success.
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And so how does that work? I'm thinking about, like, let's say somebody doesn't have a strong professional network right now. Do most of the companies who are interested in hiring therapists for this or having therapists do this is the marketing typically on the company?
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The marketing is typically on the company. And so you want to pick a company that you believe is going to be able to do that for you. You don't want it to be entirely on your shoulders. That would be a lot of expectation. But you want to help however you can. Right. And often when you're talking about running live events, we're not talking about thousands and thousands of people. You know, you're talking about having courses maybe that have 50 people in them. So even if you can bring in like one or two people that, you know, like, that itself can be helpful.
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Yeah.
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But I do think also that teaching these courses can be a way for other people to find you and start to develop that professional network. So that's a hugely important not only for, you know, future teaching opportunities, but it's also a major driver of clients once you become an expert in a given area. I have, you know, other therapists reach out to me all the time who took courses that I've taught, and they say, like Oh, I just got this binge eating case in my practice and I don't really see that, but I know you do. I've had therapists send me their friends and family after they took one of my courses. It's a great way to build a professional network because people get to know you as a clinician so much more than they could at a networking event where you're just hitting business card. Like they see who you are as a person, as a clinician, how do you think, how do you talk? So they just get this super rich experience of what you're like as a human and as a therapist. And so it's a great way to actually build your professional network over time too.
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And would you say that, that that network gets built or those referrals end up coming in more? If you're doing like live in the state or states where you're licensed, do people get appropriate referrals from the right states when they do a big online kind of a thing? How does that typically work?
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That's a really reasonable question. I think it's a mix. I've had people reach out to me after both live events and after recorded courses. So both types, I think are useful for building your network. And sometimes those folks are not going to be in your state just by the nature of how the Internet works.
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Yeah.
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But there are plenty depending on the state that you're in and how populous it is. Like, I think it's fairly frequent that you are going to have some folks who are part of your immediate or extended community. And I'll say, if you're particularly concerned about that piece, a great place to try to do these sort of CE teaching events are through your city or state associations for your mental health discipline, because those are also organizations that need content for their providers. Right. That's usually one of the benefits you get from being in those organizations is you get to go to conferences and go to CES and go to local talks. So if you are really focused on you need to build your local network, those organizations might be an especially valuable place to teach.
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Yeah, yeah. And looking at grad schools, if you're near a therapy grad school that sometimes they put on events for professionals, not just for students.
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Absolutely. Yes.
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Amazing. So what else do people need to consider if they're, if they're thinking of taking this route as an adjunctive part of their career? Yeah.
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I would say if you don't yet know what you'd like to teach about, talk to your colleagues who know you.
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Right.
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And say like what? What do you know that I know? Right. Sometimes I think therapists, on the whole, we. And you know, this comes across all the time in your podcast. Like we tend to undervalue ourselves financially, we undervalue our expertise. So sometimes we need a nudge from the people who know us to say, like, actually, I really love talking to you about this topic. So talk to your colleagues. And there's really very little harm to putting together a pitch and putting it out there and getting feedback from folks. Getting feedback about this seems too specialized or this seems too broad or whatever it is that the companies might come back with that you send it to. So it's a little bit of an iterative process. Be willing to take a risk, bet on yourself. And I think for many people, it turns out to be a really, really joyful expression of their therapeutic identity to do this.
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Yeah.
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So it's also a way that I think when people are feeling super burnt out, can bring in some income and some time in a different non patient facing way, just enables you to think about the things you are most passionate about in yourself as a therapist.
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And I think most of us have a soapbox clinically.
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Right.
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So that could be another thing. Like, what do you feel like people's eyes glaze over because they didn't ask you that at the dinner party?
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You won't stop talking. Yes.
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And that's probably a great place to look too. And you mentioned. How did you say it? Basically, like some imposter syndrome coming up for you of like, okay, well, I've been teaching students, teaching other professionals feels like a step up. And you mentioned, like, yeah, because I'm doing something new. And that is 100% of the time. Time. Y' all are gonna have some imposter syndrome. I'm gonna have imposter syndrome. Like we all do when we're pushing ourselves and trying something new. And to some extent we should. I think of it as like a lens through which to be like, do I have any business teaching this? Honestly and truly. And if you're considering doing it, most likely yes. But all your insecurity is gonna come up and not enoughness. And to expect that and then to remember this is your soapbox thing, or like, this is what almost all your clients come in with, or this is what you get those consultations for, or your supervisors are like, that's brilliant. Thank you. We know what we're doing in so many ways about so many things, and we don't give ourselves credit for it.
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Absolutely. And it's exactly. Right. It's just an expression, a different expression of expertise that we already have and we already put to use in other areas. And it's really nice to have that expression and those soapbox ideas financially rewarded. Right. Like somebody wants to pay you because you have that idea, you have that expertise, so you have that passion for it. So it's. It's worth the risk of putting yourself out there.
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And we've all been to bad ces.
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Oh, yes.
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And, like, just don't do that.
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It's simple.
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Just don't do that.
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Exactly. Right. Yes.
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Yeah. Amazing. So we're definitely going to put Mind Science Collective in the Show Notes. That's the word. The show notes. We're definitely going to put that in there. So I'm assuming y' all are great for people who want to teach and for people who want to learn. Is that accurate?
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Yes, absolutely. I think you know that we are definitely looking to expand our catalog over time with different kinds of expertise, different kinds of presenters. But we also hope that folks who go will find a course that speaks to them. I will say the most common reaction we get when people come to our website is like, oh, I want to take all of these classes. Because we really are right at that nexus of really good science, really good science communication, and, like, really warm, approachable presenters. So we hope that folks will have that experience when they come check us out.
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I love it. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Danielle. I appreciate it.
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Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
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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. If you're listening, you probably need some
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support building your practice.
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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.