Consult Monday
Jennifer Blogh of Deep Water Counseling
Jen
nifer Blough is a licensed professional counselor, certified compassion fatigue therapist, certified pet loss grief recovery specialist, and the owner of Deepwater Counseling in southeast Michigan. In addition to counseling individuals and couples, she presents compassion fatigue workshops to animal welfare and veterinary organizations. She is the author of the book To Save a Starfish: A Compassion Fatigue Workbook for the Animal Welfare Warrior, and the host of The Compassion Fatigue Podcast. Jennifer shares her home with her husband and their 10 rescued companion animals.
For Consult Monday, we discuss:
- How to manage caseload/responsibility and caseloads/responsibility of associates
- Taking on what’s not yours
- Creating measurable actions/results
- Self care and working boundaries
- When to outsource and what blocks come up
- Checking in with your expectations
- Are you mentally or financially prepared to outsource with a virtual assistant?
Links
What I Wish I’d Said Wednesday
Joe Sanok of Practice of the Practice
Joe Sanok is a speaker, mental health counselor, business consultant, and
podcaster. Joe has the #1 podcast for counselors, The Practice of the Practice
Podcast. With interviews with Pat Flynn, John Lee Dumas, Chris Ducker, Rob Bell,
Glennon Doyle Melton, and Lewis Howes, Joe is a rising star in the speaking
world!
Joe is a writer for PsychCentral, has been featured on the Huffington
Post, Forbes, GOOD Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Bustle, and Yahoo News. He is
a keynote speaker, author of five books, and is a top-consultant.
KEYNOTE AND PODCAST TOPICS
The DNA of the Human Brain | How every client follows specific mental rules
Slow Down | The three phases of slowing down to spark innovation
7 Practice of the Practice | How to set, achieve, and outsource ideas
Custom Talks Available | Have an idea, if it’s in Joe’s expertise he’ll create a
unique talk for you and your event.
Joe’s approach incorporates story, humor, research, and practical application.
For What I Wish I’d Said Wednesday we discuss:
- Even when you don’t feel you’re being successful, taking those forward steps are so vital.
- Adding clinicians to your practice: adding is a multiplier and not a subtractor. It can expand faster and you can benefit as a team from a new clinician’s connections and know-how.
- Help the fellow practitioners as peers not employees and talk about what’s working for yourselves as individual counselors. Highlight when someone’s doing really well or seen an increase in clients.
- Be aware of burnout and look for people who want evening or weekend hours so you’re not taking on everything.
- It’s okay to recommend someone else in your group practice if you have a schedule conflict with your client.
- Have clinical meetings – not staff meetings – and come together as a group for support, praise, and guidance.
- Look at the duties that you need done around the office and be okay with outsourcing tasks. When you find the right person, go in-depth with helping and training them with duties. If there was a learning curve to you, there’s going to be a learning curve for a virtual or in-house assistant as well.
Links
Follow Through Friday
Allison Puryear, LCSW, CEDS of Abundance Practice-Building
Allison Puryear is an LCSW with a nearly diagnosable obsession with business development. She has started practices in three different cities and wants you to know that building a private practice is shockingly doable when you have a plan and support. You can download a free private practice checklist to make sure you have your ducks in a row, get weekly private practice tips, and join the Abundance Practice-Building Group to gain the confidence and tools you need to succeed.
Being on the cusp of expanding to a group practice myself, I really enjoyed this podcast. Thanks so much to jennifer for bravely sharing her challenges! As I listened I was dying to make one suggestion about how she might address this issue of clients calling her to change appointments, rather than calling therapists directly – it sounded like that was becoming a major time suck and source of stress. One easy way to address this, without spending a lot of money, would be to set up virtual mailboxes using something like allcall technologies or 8×8. you can transfer your existing practice number, so that remains the same, and have extensions for each therapist (which redirect to their cell phones during designated hours). when someone calls the main practice number they can be directed to leave a msg at the therapist’s extension. so then there is a system in place that directs clients where they need to go, without a human being needing to be in the middle. This would also provide a nice set-up for jennifer to transition toan assistant when she’s ready – all she’d need to do is add an “intake” extension that can be directed to the assistant. cost would probably be less than $100/month.