The most valuable lesson from Evolve and Thrive: The real reason psychologists and therapists burnout and procrastinate

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Business of Psychology podcast. Today you've just got me, it's a solo show and it's going to be a short and sweet one.

Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

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Evolve Your Practice: The map to more income, impact and flexibility

Are you craving more flexibility in your practice?

Maybe you've built something amazing and you're proud of your business, but it's also bringing you to the brink of burnout.

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Whether your priority is financial stability or flexibility, or both, adding recurring revenue streams into your business is essential.

If you want time, freedom, more income, and to make a bigger impact for your client group, join me for a free masterclass on Monday, the 17th of November at 11:00 AM and I'll show you how I use my values, voice and impact framework to create income, impact, and flexibility in my own business, and for the hundreds of psychologists and therapists I've supported over the last five years.

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Shownotes

The most valuable lesson from Evolve and Thrive: The real reason psychologists and therapists burnout and procrastinate

I wanted to talk about something which has been really troubling me for the past few months, maybe even longer. It's the most valuable lesson that I've learned from my group coaching program, Evolve and Thrive, which is a coaching program designed for people ready to take the next step in their practice. Maybe they've already built something successful and they're ready to move beyond the therapy room or start bringing in different income sources. These are all people that I respect hugely. There is not a single person in Evolve and Thrive that I'm not slightly intimidated by because of their amazing careers and the expertise that they're bringing for their clients. But there has been something really striking that is holding most of the people in Evolve and Thrive back, and what we've spent most of our time on together as a group. I wanted to bring it into the light because I've noticed that almost everybody thinks that they're alone with this, and if you're struggling, you are absolutely not alone with this.

I want to start by saying that all the knowledge that we need to be successful in business is already out there. This was not the case when I started this podcast back in 2020, but it very much is the case now. You've got AI at your fingertips to search the web for you. You've got YouTube, podcasts, good old-fashioned books, any question you have, you can find the answer to all of them. And psychologists and therapists are always intelligent people who can find the things that they need if they're looking for them. Despite this, I keep hearing the same things over and over again, the things which are getting people stuck are burnout and a tendency to overwork even when they can feel that that burnout is close, and paralysis or procrastination, often both. I've been coaching other mental health professionals for over five years now, and I've realised that although it kicks in at different moments, for different people, there are two things that hold people back in growing their practices, there are two things that lead to that procrastination pattern and that continuous dance on the edge of burnout, and neither of those is being bad at tech.

Sometimes it's that their bodies and minds have acclimatised to a punishing and relentless workload, so a more relaxed working week, the thing they often tell me that they want more than anything, actually it doesn't feel safe, so they avoid it by breaking boundaries, saying yes when they know it should be a no, or never making the time to think about changing their practice.

Or maybe they've absorbed stories and identities that they'd have to give up if they created a more comfortable working life for themselves. That ‘suffering public servant’ narrative, the ‘selfless helping professional’, even the ‘on the brink of burnout professional’, they're all identities that we worked hard to wear and giving them up can feel like a rejection of the more positive aspects of those identities. You know, I remember thinking to myself, if I'm not burning out in the NHS, maybe I don't get to feel like the selfless helping professional anymore. Maybe that makes me a selfish helping professional and that doesn't feel comfortable and it's something I wrestled with a lot and continue to; you know, this is not something that you work through once and get to the other side of, and for many of us, that leads to paralysis that looks a lot like procrastination. Because you're torn in two different directions, so staying uncomfortably on the fence instead is safer than pulling yourself apart.

For others, it leads to undercharging and often that very real financial fear. When you are riding that rollercoaster of never quite feeling secure financially in your practice, maybe on a good month, it's great, but then the next month is a bit slower and suddenly you are panicking again. That fear then leads to the breaking boundaries, saying yes to everything, ironically, avoiding and never looking at the numbers in the business, or you know, never allowing yourself the luxury of looking for new ways of doing things, or reviewing your financial plan. And so instead, you're maintaining this constant state of near burnout, which is kind of what you got used to.

There are other stories too that stop people from building the lives that they want to live. Things like, ‘I'm too old’, or ‘I'm not the kind of person who…’, ‘I'm not confident enough’, ‘I'm not good enough with tech’, ‘I hate marketing’. All of these stories just shut down the things that we think are possible for ourselves. And what I love about coaching is that once these patterns and stories are brought to light, my clients are all really well equipped to tackle them and to support each other as they move through the discomfort of making those changes. It is such a pleasure to work with psychologists and therapists because as a group, we are just as susceptible as anyone else to blind spots and avoidance, but it is absolutely awesome to get to work with people who already have amazing skills and full up toolkits to make that change once they've recognised it and decided to make it.

Something I have noticed though, which again is maybe a bit unique to mental health professionals, is that the stories that stick with us, the trickiest ones to move past, are the ones that we've absorbed from our professional culture. The ones that lead to that dreaded peer fear that comes up in at least 80% of my coaching conversations. What are other people, other professionals, usually going to think if we try something new? Am I going to be labelled as money grabbing or a sellout? And the fact is, I can't reassure people that they're never going to face judgment from other psychologists and therapists. Instead, we have to get into our compassionate selves and think about what that judgment and our reaction to it does and does not mean.

Together we think about whether the feelings we have about it might be useful because sometimes they are, they can encourage us to seek peer debate over some ethical concerns we have. And you know, I think that peer debate is the only way to resolve ethical concerns when we're working at the frontier and we're trying out new things where there's not an obvious precedent for us to follow. But we also think about what that judgment is most likely to mean in the context it was given. And often when we do that, we recognise that there are many factors well outside of our new product or our new service, or even ourselves, that might have led somebody to make those judgemental comments that they've made. It's so much easier to accept and move through the anxiety that inevitably comes up around judgment from our peers when we can look at it in its full context and think about its true meaning.

I hope that gives you some food for thought. If you feel like it's time to make a change in your business, but something keeps holding you back, maybe you've been blaming yourself for continuously burning out, or maybe you've had advice before and are beating yourself up all the time because you haven't felt able to take it. Maybe you've called yourself names like procrastinator, or got frustrated over your paralysis. I just want you to know that it's not unusual, it's not about your knowledge, it's not about your skills, it's not about who you are as a person. It's that you are working through something that is really difficult and that many of us have to work through, over and over and over again, and it's part of the vulnerability of being in business and you deserve support with tha...