What I Expected vs What Happened: a Guest Post from Lindsay Melka
I am so grateful to have gotten to consult with Lindsay Melka and I’m honored that she is writing for the blog this month. She is brilliant, thoughtful, brave and so honest it sometimes makes my heart ache. You’ll get to hear more about her story (the really hard part...
Giving Others Praise
There’s this house I love that had pigeons living in it. It was a few blocks from my office, this gorgeous, great-bones, hulking house that would be perfect for a bunch of therapists to have practices in. The pigeons had nested inside. The porch was falling apart. I...
High Maintenance: An Unlikely Goal
"High Maintenance" brings up some some interesting images... I’m not talking about insisting upon caviar and peeled grapes, or looking and acting “polished” every day. That’s not necessarily a bad thing - it’s just not what I’m talking about here. Until this month,...
Parenting and Private Practice
I’ve been asked numerous times to write about balancing parenting and starting a practice. I kept nodding my head and put check marks next to it on my “Blog Post Ideas” doc and skipping over it every time it came time to write. I've been avoiding this post hard core....
Where New Businesses Get Stuck
Where New Businesses Get Stuck There’s a theme I see in the folks who get stuck on the struggle side of their business. It’s wholeheartedly a mindset struggle. A space of desperation, fear, resignation, helplessness, scarcity. It usually starts in three ways:...
Sample Private Practice Schedules
Whether you’re on the front end of starting a private practice or you’re managing a busy caseload, your schedule is a make or break situation. It’s not what you think; your schedule is a make or break for your longevity and happiness, not whether or not clients will...
5 Ways to Dance With Your Fear of Online Marketing
Daniel Fava has been a really helpful member of the free Abundance Practice-Builders Facebook Group for a long time. He’s a tech guy with a therapist wife and you can tell from this post that he blends the emotional and technological beautifully. He’s seen how having...
The Benefit of the Doubt
I’ve mentioned being wholly Team Locke so this post shouldn’t be a huge surprise. I’ve noticed a pattern in some folks as they’re in that scary building stage: a propensity to jump headlong into conclusions. I want to create a little structure to protect you from that...
How Long It Takes To Get Full
Want to know the fastest way to tap into shame and/or superiority as a private practitioner? Compare your private practice’s growth to a colleagues’ practices’ growth. Or, ask in a practice-building FB group (hop into ours; it’s awesome!) where people from all over...
Self-care-An Ethical Imperative for Helping Professionals
Jamie Stacks and I have been internet friends for what feels like a long time. Jamie has been a staunch advocate for self care, not just through her awesome Facebook Group REAL Self-Care for Therapists, but also through the way she interacts with people, the example...
Pacing Yourself
It’s so easy to go full throttle when you get excited about something. I’m the last one to tell you to dampen your enthusiasm… if you’ve know me at all you know my excitability and passion are not the most easily containable. But here’s the deal: we only have so much...
I Got Sued (For Something You’ve Done!)
Y’all are gonna have to bear with me on this one as it’s part blog/part journal. As all this was happening I kept soothing myself with “When I share this others will learn and it’ll keep it from happening to them. That’s why this is happening to me.” I even insisted...
An SEO Playbook for Private Practice Websites Using WordPress
I’m lucky to have Matt Milloway of Private Practice Launcher as a sometimes-Ashevillain. He’s one of those cool location-independent types who is a major world traveler in a fascinating, non-snooty way. While catching coffee together one day, I watched him light up...
The Podcast is Here!!
One thing I love about having a blog is that I get to project all my own stuff on you guys and imagine that you’re going through it, too. You may have noticed a theme lately around mindset, getting through the hard, and showing up and being seen. Normally when I’m...
Full Practice, New Problems
When I was in my early 20’s I overheard a strikingly beautiful woman complain about being gorgeous. I had absolutely zero empathy for her (or myself for like, anything). Her statements stuck in my head though and I now feel not just empathy, but awe at her...
You’re On A Spiral Staircase
I don’t think a single Abundance Practice-Building Group gets completed without me referencing the spiral staircase. This usually occurs in the 5th week of the group which is focused solely on money (and thus security and self-worth and all the other things we...
Fear of Being Seen
I got to consult with Wesley Little in June. She’s a total go-getter. Even while talking about places that she needs help, she comes across as confident. Her website comes across as confident. So I was really excited that she pitched this fear of being seen blog post....
Lower The Bar
It was an interesting experience when twice in a 12 hour period I was instructed to “lower the bar.” Those exact words. The first was Nikki Elledge Brown’s new venture Naptime Empires. When I heard those words, tears sprang to my eyes and a sense of being seen and...
You Don’t Need A Consultant
In a facebook group I watched the unfolding of one of variations of the “consultants aren’t helpful and are out for your money” conversation. I watch these with interest and a tinge of fear. Is it me they’re talking about? Do they think I’m one of the money-grubbers...
Turning Work Off
Remember when you were in school and there was this sense that you could never fully relax until you’d either completed all assignments or it was winter or summer break? Yeah, welcome to entrepreneurship. If you’re like me, your “to do” list is like a mogwai sprayed...