Feeling completely overwhelmed by private practice? Whether you’re just getting started or stuck with marketing your existing therapy practice, this episode is your gentle nudge to take action - one tiny step at a time.
Josephine shares her own story of paralysis when starting out, and how the idea of a minimum viable product helped her move forward without needing everything to be perfect. You'll learn how to break down daunting tasks, how to get motivated with small wins, and why starting scrappy is better than not starting at all.
Takeaways:
Why overwhelm happens and what to do about it
The myth of needing a “perfect” website, logo, or strategy
The concept of minimum viable product and how it applies to private practice
How to break down big tasks like updating your directory profile
The power of 15-minute timers and the Pomodoro method
Real-life examples of starting small - from directory entries to social media posts
Why progress, not perfection, is the key to growth
If private practice feels too big or too much, you’re not alone - and it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Want help writing your directory profile? I’ve written a range of blogs to guide you - head to josephinehughes.com/blog
Setting up in private practice? Download my free checklist HERE
Need ideas for how to get clients? Download my free handout 21 Ways for Counsellors to Attract New ClientsHERE
private practice tips, starting private practice, marketing for therapists, motivation for therapists, setting up a therapy practice, private practice marketing strategies, mental health business tips, productivity for therapists, therapy practice management, getting clients in private practice
The information contained in Good Enough Counsellors is provided for information purposes only. The contents of this podcast are not intended to amount to advice and you should not rely on any of the contents of this podcast. Professional advice should be obtained before taking or refraining from taking any action as a result of the contents of this podcast.
Josephine Hughes disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on any of the contents of this podcast.
Transcripts
Speaker A:
Have you been in a similar situation to me?
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You'd like to start a private practice, but you don't know how to get going.
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So much to do, but you've no idea where to begin or you want to market your practice, but it feels like an enormous task and you haven't got much time.
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You might be feeling paralysed by overwhelm and however much you try to motivate yourself, you still feel stuck.
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If so, this episode is for you, to help you to take the action to meet your dreams.
Speaker A:
Hello and welcome to this edition of the Good Enough Counsellors Podcast.
Speaker A:
I'm Josephine Hughes and today I thought we could talk about something that often stops us in our tracks and that's being completely overwhelmed by the size of a task.
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And it means that we don't actually ever get started.
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And just so you know, this is exactly what happened to me when I first thought about setting up in private practice.
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I completed my diploma and I carried on working at my placement for a while so I could continue to get more experience.
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But as the months went by, more and more people began to say to me, are you thinking about setting up in private practice?
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And I'd say, yeah, yeah, I'd like to, I will do.
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But the problem was, is I didn't really know how to get started.
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And eventually what happened to me is I met someone who had a room to hire out, and agreeing to hire the room was what gave me that first step.
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And once I'd committed to renting a room, that meant that I needed to get clients and that got me started on my journey of marketing.
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But before that, I was really stuck about where I should get started.
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I really had no idea what to do first.
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And this is what I thought we could talk about today.
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And it doesn't necessarily apply to just starting out in private practice.
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It could be that you're not quite sure what to do to increase your marketing efforts.
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So I'm going to go through some of the things that might be able to help you feel less stark and help you get to a place where you can actually take some action.
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I actually find it really difficult to get started on stuff.
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And the reason is, is that I tend to see the big picture and I can think about there's so many different aspects to what I need to do.
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It can be difficult to know what to pick first, or it just feels so big, it feels really unwieldy, and I can find it really difficult to break what I'm doing down into smaller tasks.
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So this is what I thought we could talk about today, how to make things doable.
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And to start with, what I'd like to do is share something that I find really, really helpful.
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And anybody who works with me will know that I talk about what is the minimum viable product that you can do.
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And I think what we tend to do is we would maybe look at other people, we'll look at their private practice or we'll look at their marketing, we'll look at their social media feed, we'll look at their website and we' will see a finished product.
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And often what we don't see is the stages where they were setting it up or where they maybe had a minimum viable product website.
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Because if you were to say, look at my website at the moment it's got like loads of blogs, it's got a page about the podcasts, it's got a sales page, it's got an about me page, it's got a home page, it's got a contact me page.
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There's lots of things about my website that are there.
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But what you don't see is the fact that when my website first started it was just a page long.
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And often what we can do is we can get stuck thinking it's got to be something really big and amazing with beautiful graphics and a fantastic logo, etc, etc, and we don't actually think that it might be easiest if we just set off with a one page website.
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I'm using that as an example of minimum viable product.
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So what's the absolute minimum that I can get away with?
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And I think this is really helpful whenever you're looking at a big task like, like setting up in private practice or what do I do about my marketing, what is the minimum necessary?
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So for example, if you're setting up in private practice, the minimum necessary would be somewhere for you to work.
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So that could be your home if you're doing online work.
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Or it could be to find a room.
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Obviously you'll need insurance and you'll need supervision.
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You'll need a way for people to be able to contact you, so an email address or a phone number.
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You'll need a way for people to pay you.
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So that might be bank account details or you might have something set up like PayPal account, for example, just somewhere where the people can pay you.
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You'll notice at this point that I actually haven't said your contract and your paperwork because actually just to get started, that's all you need.
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And then as soon as you get a client that will give you the incentive to get your contracts and paperwork sorted out.
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A lot of people want to do that in advance.
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Don't let me stop you if you want to get that sorted first.
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But I think actually having that deadline of you've got a client and you need to send them through your paperwork can actually mean that you'll get your paperwork done really quickly rather than procrastinating over it for weeks.
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So I would say that's the minimum that you need to get started.
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And then with your marketing, we tend to think, oh, you know, I'm going to need a website, I'm going to need a directory entry, I'm going to need a Google my business page.
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We start thinking about all these things that we're going to need.
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In fact, with marketing, you know, the way you can get started is just by talking to people.
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And if you listen to Katrina's podcast, which is episode 53, Katrina got started on private practice when her supervisor passed her on a client.
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So you don't actually always need to have all those things that we think are absolutely necessary.
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So focus on what matters most, especially at the start.
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And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you several different ways that you can get going.
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Because I think the hardest thing is, is to get started.
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And I think often the problem about getting started is we see this huge task and what we need to do is break it down into much smaller pieces.
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So what you need to do is think about shrinking your task down until it feels doable.
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So you could think to yourself, I need to get going on my marketing.
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Let's break it down.
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What do you mean by that?
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There's so many different aspects of getting started on marketing.
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You need to break it down even more.
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And it might be that you can start breaking it down into different things.
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So you could think, there's a website, there's a directory entry, there's a Google my business page.
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There's lots of different tasks that you could do.
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And again, they're really enormous.
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You could have a really big list of tasks.
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And likewise, if you're setting up in private practice, you could probably think of a whole lot of list of tasks as well.
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Everything from setting up your insurance to finding a directory listing to getting a supervisor, to doing your privacy policy, to registering with the hmrc.
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The list just goes on and on, doesn't it?
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So let's take a breath.
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The first thing to say is to pick one task.
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And actually, if a task looks really difficult, what you can do is you could think, actually, I don't really want to start with that one.
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I'll find something that's a bit easier.
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Can be really good to start with something that's really easy to do because then you get that sense of, I've got started, and then you begin to build up a little bit of momentum.
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So, for example, in your marketing, you could think to yourself, well, I'll make a list of people that I could reach out to.
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That's a doable project, isn't it?
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And what you can do is if you, say, decide that you're going to do that, then put the rest to one side, you can come back to them.
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You don't have to do all of the things all at once.
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We tend to be very keen, obviously, to get clients, and so we want to do everything, but by trying to do everything, our efforts are scattered.
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It's actually much better to focus on one thing and see one thing through from start to finish, then it's done and then you can move on to the next thing.
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And in fact, in therapy growth group, often on a Monday, I'll ask people, what is the one thing you're going to get done this week?
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It might be something like, it could be a bit of a bigger task.
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So it could be, I'm going to fix my Psychology Today profile.
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We'll come back to that.
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But just concentrate on one thing.
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And as I say, if you could make it an easy thing, that's even better.
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Start with the smallest, easiest thing that you can find.
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Now, I've mentioned about updating my Psychology Today profile, but again, that might be the one thing that you decide to do this week, but that again, is quite a big task and you might get to the end of the week and you haven't done it.
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Because updating my Psychology Today profile feels like a really big thing to do.
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And if we were to break it down into smaller tasks, that would probably help you.
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And it's allowing yourself to set the tasks as small as it needs to be for you.
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Don't compare yourself with someone else who can sit down and just update their Psychology Today profile in the process of an hour or so for you.
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If you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed by may be that you need to do other things.
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So it may be that you would have a look and see what other people have done on their Psychology Today profiles.
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It may be that you would go away and read one of my blogs about how to write a directory profile.
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It may be that you really need to think about Oh, I need to think some more about the types of people that I'm trying to write to.
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In my Psychology Today profile, what can sound like quite a simple task can actually consist of quite a lot of different steps.
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So it might be helpful to actually write down those different steps and if they still feel too big, break them down again.
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So, for example, thinking about, you know, what do I need to write on my Psychology Today profile, you might need to break that down into research the ways to write a Psychology Today profile.
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Find out how many words I need to write for my Psychology Today profile.
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See who has got information on how to write it.
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You're literally just writing a little list of what you need to do.
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Keep making those steps as small as possible.
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The smaller you make them, the more likely you are to do them.
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So if it still feels too big and you can't do it, that means you need to break it down even more.
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And it could be something as simple as I'll open my Psychology Today profile up and I'll read the first couple of lines.
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It doesn't have to be big because small steps add up.
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What you want to move away from is the all or nothing thinking.
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I'm going to update my Psychology Today profile.
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Oh, well, I haven't done it this morning, therefore I can't do it.
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No, you need to make it smaller steps so that you do feel that you are having little wins and ticking things off.
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This could be the same.
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Say if you wanted to build a website, you'd need to break it down into small steps.
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And at the start, perhaps building a website is too big an ask for you.
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And you could just start with a directory entry, for example, or a Google my business page.
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And in therapy growth group, I've got more ideas about what to do in my find your next five clients training about, you know, why you don't actually need a website.
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It's really nice to be able to celebrate each of those small steps as you complete them and almost to have a list of things that you'll do to celebrate.
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So I'm quite lucky.
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I've got a coach and I can let her know when I've reached a particular goal and she'll always check in with me and see how I'm doing.
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And at the beginning of each week I'll write down all my wins.
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And it's something also in therapy growth group that I get people to do, what are your wins this week?
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And we'll have people sharing their wins because it's just really a motivational thing, it really helps you to notice when you are actually beginning to meet those goals.
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Another example of tiny wins and not being in that all or nothing mindset would be, say you're deciding that you would like to post on social media.
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You might be put off by the thought of I haven't got time to post every day.
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Well, instead of that all or nothing thing, so I haven't got time to post every day, so therefore I'm not going to do it.
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How about posting once a week and then increasing to twice a week once you've got the hang of it?
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If you don't know what to post, rather than thinking to yourself, I can't post on social media because I've got no ideas.
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You could think to yourself, well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to sit down and see if I can think of the different things that people might be interested in hearing from me about.
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So you create a list of topics.
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So that's an example of creating a small step.
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And then what you can do is you could post one of those topics every week.
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So that would get you going and it would help to create consistency as well.
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And once you've got that consistency, you can start sort of building a habit and you might decide that there's a certain time of the week where you do that one post a week, put some time aside and you might schedule it in advance and you know that that post on then and it comes out once a week.
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And then eventually you might move on to doing it more often than that.
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So it is possible to do these things.
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It's just about making it manageable for you and not overwhelming yourself with really high expectations at the start.
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And this is where I think it would be really useful to bring in this idea of progress, not perfection.
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Because I think we do want to protect ourselves.
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We don't want to go wrong and we think we have to get it completely perfect at the start.
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But often it is a learning process and it can take a while to learn how to do things.
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So it's really good if you could be kind to yourself and tell yourself things like progress, not perfection and that it's okay if it's a little bit messy around the edges.
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People often say to me, oh, you know, your stuff looks so professional.
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And yet if you knew how messy it is around the edges, you might not say that.
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And if you'd seen it at the start, you would have seen that actually it wasn't as streamlined as maybe it looks now.
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I'm not saying it's all brilliant or anything like that.
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You know what, how long have I been in business for?
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een running my practice since:
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It's now:
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In my coaching pract, I still haven't got a logo.
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You might see my Josephine Hughes.
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That was just a basic thing that someone set up for me when I did my website.
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You know, there's still a lot around the edges that I've just never done.
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Does it matter?
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Not really.
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And I think here it helps to remind yourself that the minimum viable product idea is that you do the absolute minimum at the start, but you can come round and improve it and do another iteration and improve it.
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So I've been doing this recently in Therapy growth group.
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At the beginning of the year I started something called the 12 action steps.
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And those are 12 different steps.
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And what I've done is created 12 weeks worth of action for people to take.
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And I've tried to keep it really simple so that people can take maybe just 10 to 15 minutes each week and do something towards their marketing.
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Now I knew I wanted to set it up, but I didn't have a lot of time to do it.
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So what I decided to do was to do it as a first iteration.
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So the first time I did it I wrote it all out and I sent it to members of therapy growth group via email.
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And the second iteration, which is going to be kicking off at the end of of the month, at the end of April, it's going to have videos in it and the videos will be on my dedicated therapy growth hub, which is where all my training is.
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So the second iteration, it's going to be on the hub and it's going to have videos.
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It wasn't like that the first iteration because actually the minimum viable product was just to send people out the information, they got it, they're able to do the work, they.
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But now I'm going to make it look a bit better.
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I think after that I'm not quite sure there'll be a third iteration, but knowing me, I'll probably go back and improve it because what happens is as you go through, you begin to improve things.
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So every time you go through something you get feedback, you learn how to do it better.
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And so it's a sort of process of constant improvement.
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So I think this idea of it's got to be perfect at the start, it's just really unhelpful to us.
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What it does is it's can quite often just stop us in our tracks.
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Because to get it perfect, we can feel completely overwhelmed by the amount of work that needs to be done, or we feel we haven't got the skills to make it that way.
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And what I found over time, like I was saying about the way I look now in terms of what I'm outputting, you know, I've learned Canva skills over the last five to seven years.
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I'm not very quick on the uptake, but every time I use Canva, I quite often am learning to do something a little bit better.
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It takes time to learn all these things.
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And if I'd said to myself at the start, oh, well, I can't use Canva until I've worked out how to do it perfectly, I'd still be waiting to be doing my social media feeds.
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But the fact is I just got going, I did what I could and gradually, over time, it's improved.
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If you're feeling overwhelmed with your marketing, the 12 action steps could really make a difference to you.
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So rather than you having to think through what do I need to do, I've actually done the thinking for you.
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And not only have I done the thinking for you, but I've also got the training for you as well.
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So if you'd like some help with your marketing, how about joining Therapy Growth group?
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The next 12 action steps is starting next week and so now would be a brilliant time for you to join me and the group as we work through the action steps together.
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And if you've been thinking about it, just go along to josephinehughewes.com Therapy Growth Group offer and you'll be able to read all about it and press the Join now button.
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I hope to see you there.
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Something else that can really help, and I find this helps me, is to have a specific amount of time just to get going.
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I was first introduced to this idea by my friend Vanessa, who followed somebody on the Internet called the Flylady, who helps you with getting your house tidy.
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And the first thing she does is she tells you to clean your sink.
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One of the things that she says is when you're going to do a task, just tell yourself you'll do it for 15 minutes.
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And my friend Vanessa used to find it really, really difficult to get going on tasks.
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She said she had a cupboard that was absolutely impossible to clear out.
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And I can really identify with this.
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But she said to herself, I would just spend 15 minutes on it because, you know, however unpleasant the task is, if you just allow yourself 15 minutes, you will actually be able to stop.
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Just do 15 minutes work and then walk away from it.
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And this can be quite a game changer when it comes to your motivation.
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And certainly with Vanessa, she said once she actually set that 15 minutes aside and started on it, she then actually got going and cleared that cupboard out really quickly.
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So why not set a timer for yourself?
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You could set it for five minutes if you can't bear any longer than that, or 15 minutes.
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Or what's called the pomodoro technique, which is based on the pomodoro Tomato egg timers.
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25 minutes.
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And we include a pomodoro section in therapy growth group.
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Every Wednesday morning we'll meet up and some people will go into an accountability room and they'll do their work in 25 minute stints.
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And it can be really helpful, especially if you're someone who perhaps finds it difficult to say, watch some recorded training.
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People in therapy growth group will come in and watch the training in those 25 minute stints that we're doing, or they'll do something that they're struggling with.
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They can get support.
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It might be designing their business card or writing their directory profile, but just the very act that they're in the room with other people and working alongside them can be a real game changer in those 25 minute stretches.
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So why not try that?
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Why not try it and see if you could do a very small task and just set yourself a timer to do it in?
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Let's just have a quick rerun of some of the ideas.
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So when you're faced with a really big task, it's a great idea to break it down into small, doable steps.
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Remember that you only need to have the absolute minimum at the start and you can go back later and tweak it.
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Don't get too perfectionist, especially at the start, because that can paralyze you into inaction.
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Remind yourself that done is better than perfect.
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It doesn't have to be terribly well polished at the start because you can come back later and tweak it.
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Make it easy on yourself.
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Ask yourself, how can I make this simpler?
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Remember to take tiny, tiny little steps and keep going.
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Give yourself a pat on the back whenever you've completed one of those tiny tasks as well, because that will help you to feel more motivated.
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You'll see that you are actually ticking the tasks off and then you can get a sense of achievement.
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Pick one thing to work on at a time and allow the rest to wait.
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Just ignore it.
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And if you need to pick something that is quite easy for you to do, it doesn't have to be hard, especially to start with.
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If it all feels too much for you, remember you actually don't need a perfect plan.
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You just need a starting point.
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Small actions do add up, and they're much easier than you think.
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So ask yourself, what's the smallest step I can take right now?
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And what would make this feel easier?
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Marketing.
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And setting up your private practice doesn't have to be a big, scary thing.
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It's all about just helping people find you.
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And that starts with just one step at a time.
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Thanks for listening.
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Do come and join my Facebook community.
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Good enough counsellors and for more information about how I can help you develop your private practice, please Visit my website JosephineHughes.com if you found this episode helpful, I'd love it if you could share it with a fellow therapist or leave a review on your podcast app.
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And in closing, I'd love to remind you that every single step you make gets you closer to your dream.
