Don't Deprive Yourself of the Good Stuff

My last episode was an ode to private practice, and I was highlighting that it really is one of the best business models out there. Even though it's not flashy or new!  

And it's not perfect, because nothing is, but it's really, really great. So if you have questions about why would I say that, just go back and listen to that episode.  

In today's episode, I want to focus on some of the things that make private practice such a great model and how you can make sure that you aren't depriving yourself from benefiting from those things. Set yourself up for success to actually receive the goodness!

Here are some of the things that make private practice a great self employed business model to work within– particularly in the healing arts– because we have a skill set which helps people, and which we are highly trained in, right?   

I'm going to cover each of these things in this episode, as well as the ways that I have seen many practitioners, including myself, depriving themselves of enjoying these benefits.

The big benefits that make private practice such a great model are: 

• Schedule flexibility

• A pace and a rhythm of work that works for you

• You decide what you earn (within reason)  

• No one is pestering you on your time off

• You get to enjoy your coworkers

• You don't have a toxic boss

Let's talk about each one.  

Schedule flexibility: What I mean by that is, you're the one who gets to decide when you work and when you don't.  

You don't have to battle with a boss to set your schedule up in a way that works for your life, or to just abandon the idea that that's even possible because your employer has set your work hours. 

You also don't have to ask for time off when you want to take it. You can plan ahead for the time you're going to take off for holidays, summer vacation, maybe special events, a friend's wedding, a child's graduation. You get to just plan ahead and make it happen by blocking it off on your calendar. 

This is so much easier than figuring out if your boss will let you have the time, and/or if it conflicts with other people’s requests on the team.

For those of us in self-employed private practice, it is just much easier to plan your life and your schedule  in a way where you don't have to miss out on important things. 

What are the ways that we sabotage getting the full benefits of this?  

The main way is that we contort ourselves to make our clients happy, and we therefore put their wants and needs above our own. 

As an aside, all of these things that I'm talking about are within reason, right? I'm not trying to paint a portrait of the one promised land business model where you can wave a magic wand and everything will be perfect. I'm not promising perfection with any of these benefits, but they are great perks!

Back to how we contort ourselves: If you have a client, or if you just decide that most of your clients work regular Monday through Friday nine to five jobs, and so what that means is you have to work weekends… Even though that means you would have to give up some time with your kids or your partner, or that you just don't get to have the downtime day that you know is good for your mental health. 

We do get to set our schedules! 

I was one of those people. I worked weekends every weekend, from age 14. My parents took me on my 14th birthday to fill out a job application!

So from age 14 until 48 I worked weekends. Through college, everything. 

Partially that is a deeply ingrained habit in my case, right?  But it was also a choice based on my reasoning that, well, my clients work weekdays. And so it's just very convenient for people to see me on the weekends. 

That's true, but I also work weekdays and it turns out those days fill up too. Partially with clients who have more flexible schedules themselves, and others who work a regular nine to five schedule, and so they take personal time to come and see me. 

I finally decided to make a change when a regular cold water swim date with dear friends of mine started happening every Sunday.

I really wanted to do that, and it had been so many years that I finally just had to decide that it  was worth an experiment.  

It's been two years now, and my weekday schedule is full. It worked out!  

I was recently speaking with a friend and colleague of mine who is a Pilates teacher and a single mom of two young children. That's a demanding schedule! You're the one that has to do all the things: get them off to school, get them breakfast, pick them up at school, take them to sports… all the things.

But she's also solely responsible for earning  to support those kids. So she teaches one person at 6am and then works from 9am to 2pm. Because that's the only schedule that's going to work! 

When clients inevitably say to her, “Well, I work until five, Don't you have any evening hours or don't you have any weekend hours?” She says no, I don't, because I’m a mom of two young kids, and so my schedule is built around their schedule. 

She works full time, just within the schedule that works for her and her family. And so she's not the right fit for the people who want to see her outside of those time windows. 

Guess what? She's fully booked in the time windows that work for her! That is what it looks like to fully get the advantage of your schedule flexibility.

Related to this is the other perk of having a pace and a rhythm of work that works for you.  

It is related to schedule flexibility, but a little bit different. It is more about the flow of how every week goes. 

So the example I just gave of the Pilates teacher is similar, because she decided the schedule that works for her life.    

But there's also setting up a schedule that works for your energy levels and the capacity you have for time and attention. 

We can't under-work. If you need to see a full week of clients to pay your bills, you can’t decide to only see five people a week, right?

If you're able to do that, obviously do that if that's what you want. But I'm talking to those of us who make our full-time living with our businesses. We need to pay ourselves, so we can't under-work, or work part-time, as I mentioned in the last episode, and expect to make a full-time living. At least not without quite a lot of strategy and planning. 

But what we can do is set up our work schedule in a way that works for our own rhythm.

I know some practitioners  who really do best with a shorter back-to-back client day. That doesn't mean it's a breakneck pace, but they just don't have a lunch break built in, or other breaks like that.

They see a certain number of people, they see them all back-to-back, and that's the end of the workday.  

I know others who like to see a few people, then take a long leisurely lunch break– or a short lunch break– and then see a few more people. 

Or maybe you are a morning person, and there are plenty of people who would be happy to see you before their workday starts, so maybe you start seeing clients at 6 or 7 am. But what that means is that you also finish every workday by 1 or 2 pm. 

Which means you also have more downtime for yourself- for your brain and your energy levels - in the evening time when you're not working. 

You get to decide, that’s the benefit! 

Similarly to our schedule flexibility, the way that we can  sabotage getting the full benefit of this particular perk is that we are contorting ourselves to make our clients happy. 

Just because a client wants to see you at 8 pm–. because they work long hours, or because they're not a morning person, does not mean that you need to see any client at 8 pm. 

As the Pilates teacher in my previous example says to clients who ask, “Well, can't you see me at  8 pm or 6 pm.” 

She says, “No, I'm just not going to be the right teacher for you because our schedules will never match up.”

Another way we sabotage ourselves is that sometimes we can feel funnily guilty for taking advantage of having a sane and humane pace of work, or creating one for ourselves, because it's a day and age where so few people do. 

What I would say is, first of all, the whole theme of this episode is to make sure you can get what's good about being self-employed in private practice. But also, self-employment does have its downsides, right!?

We know that it has its own challenges: We have to make our own work happen, we have to make sure we can pay ourselves. There are quiet periods and busy periods, etc, etc. So take what's good about it!

To give an example,  I have a chronic illness, which means I nap every day. I'm going to proudly say I'm one of those nap-every-day people.

So instead of telling myself that I should just power through, because people who have jobs would have to do that, I set up my schedule to  work for me so that I don't end every day feeling wrung out and exhausted.  

I see a few people, I have a midday break, I eat, I nap. It's my long lunch break, and then I come back and see a couple more people, and I'm finished by 6 pm every day.  Ta da! That's what works for me.  

The next perk is that you get to decide what you earn.  You get to decide, within reason, what you earn via what you charge. 

And I say within reason because there are other factors here: things like how much people in your area can and are willing to pay for your sessions. We can't just pull magical numbers out of the sky and say, “Well, if I get to decide what I want to earn, I want to earn a million dollars a year. So I'm just going to set my rates to make that amount and jack the rates way, way up based on the number of people I’m seeing”.  

However, and particularly if we do the math here and figure out what informed pricing would be for our services– which is something I teach in the Simple Practice Earning Course that's inside of HAPI, the Healing Arts Practice Incubator–  If you really figure out how many people you can see, and how many people on average you actually do see in any given week or month, then instead of just pulling a number out of the air, or doing what your friend who has a practice in the same town does, you can make a plan for what you're going to need to charge.

That rate is going to be based on things like how many weeks in a year you want to work. How many weeks a year do you take off? Do you always take a week off during winter holidays? Do you always take off two weeks in the summer? Three weeks? How many weeks do you want to set aside for spontaneous illness? Do you know that you tend to have about a week a year where you're out sick?

Once you are realistic about what you need, how many weeks you're going to actually work in a year, and how many clients you typically see in a week in a month, then you can set your rates appropriately. 

And you're not  begging a boss for a raise! When you need or want to earn more, you can increase your rates and get your needs met without having to do some song and dance for a boss.

I'm not saying it's completely song and dance free. Well, it is song and dance free, but it's not communication free because you're going to have to communicate with your clients.  

Here are the ways that we sabotage getting the full benefits of being in control of deciding what we earn:

We undercharge. It is very common that we undercharge, or that we sneakily undercharge by filling our schedule with the lowest rate on the sliding scale and not realizing it. We don’t look and see that 80 percent of the people you work with are on the lowest tier.  

Or we fill our schedule with trades. We're always doing freebie trades with other practitioners, maybe even some, and I hear this a lot, where we don't even want to do the trade. We just said yes to be nice and now it's going on and on. And it's taking a spot from a paying client in your work week. 

But our work is not a hobby, right? And unless you're independently wealthy, it's also not a charitable donation to people of your time and your skill. It's how you take care of yourself. It's how you  pay the bills. 

So set your rates appropriately and expect that your right clients will be able to pay you what you need to earn, and will be happy to pay you what you need to earn.

I'm not advocating for, as I said before, magical numbers or a sudden jacking up of your rate. But I would start with getting clear on what would take good care of you, and then taking steps towards that.

Next benefit: No one is pestering you on your time off. 

This has become a huge issue in the employed people's worlds.  It was worsened by the pandemic for sure, but it was an issue even before then. 

Employers now feel that they can message their employees, or the team can message amongst itself, any time of day or night and on the weekends, and they can expect a response. 

I have a family member who works for a large, well known international, very wealthy company, And they get 200 emails a weekend!

This has gotten so bad that some countries have actually created right to rest laws. (I just love the name of that: the right to rest. Take that as a mantra). These laws actually ban employers from contacting employees during off hours, whether that's end of the day or weekend. 

So here are the countries you can move to if you want to, but it's only five: France, Belgium, Australia, Spain, and Portugal. 

The rest of us, if we're self employed, are just going to need to set up the right to rest boundaries for ourselves. 

You don't need to figure out how to expatriate and get a job in one of those five countries. You get to create your own right to rest off time boundaries!

That brings me to the ways we sabotage getting the full benefits of this: We let our clients  contact us and expect a response.  Anytime day or night, and whether it’s on a weekend or not.

But you set the ground rules!  So if you don't want clients texting you about scheduling, because it can pop up on your phone at any time and you're expected to respond immediately, then tell them that! 

When they do text you just say, “I don't text with clients about scheduling.” You have to train new people. And you can redirect them to your online booking or your email.  

If you don't want to be responding to client questions that come in by text or by email at 10pm, or on a Sunday because you don't work Sundays, don't. Do not respond. You don't need to explain. You don't need to give excuses. It is not a work hour and so you're not working.

Then when you do get around to getting back to them on Monday morning, or during whatever your actual work hours are, you can educate new clients so that this doesn't become a repeat offense issue, and also so that they understand why they aren't hearing from you until the next day.

You can take larger steps of setting up auto responders on email on the weekend that say, “I don't respond to emails on the weekend”, but I would start with just the simple things before you feel like you have to put a bunch of tech barriers between you and people 

And of course– if anyone's is dealing with an actual medical emergency it is good to have the CYA blanket statement which informs clients that if it is a medical or mental health emergency, they should call 9 1 1. Because we are not on call for emergencies in that way. 

Next perk: you get to enjoy  your coworkers.  

If you are employed by a company, you might luck out and enjoy your colleagues. And I hope that's the case for most people. But of course it's a gamble, and we spend a lot of time at work. 

If you work for a company as an employee, the odds are good that at least one of your coworkers is going to make you nuts, or grate on you, or have some  quirk or something that drives you bananas.

We are solo self employed people, so what I mean when I say that we can enjoy the perk of having co-workers we like, is that I'm defining co-workers as the people that you spend your workday with. In our case, that's our clients.  

How might we sabotage getting the full benefit of that particular perk?  

I'm not saying that you should want to be best friends with all of your clients because they're all just that in sync with who you are as a person. Or that to work with you clients have to pass some kind of purity test of being super awesome and positive all the time.  

Our clients come to us in need of some kind of help. Sometimes that means that they are in pain or in distress or both. Oftentimes it means that.  

There's a difference between a client who appropriately needs your care and your expertise, and a client who is inappropriately an energy vampire or a very toxic or demanding person. 

I’m talking about the person whose name you see on your schedule and you think, “Uuuuggggghh.”

We've all been there.  I'll dedicate another episode to this, but I do believe that we need to understand when and how to fire toxic clients. And more importantly,  how to repel them before they even schedule that first appointment. 

Which means, yes, sometimes we need to do our own psychological healing work. If we find that our schedule is full. of demanding bullies, something is going on. How did that happen?  What might be internally going on where you accepted– unconsciously and in innocence– but you accepted that as the cost of doing business? 

You don't have to  tolerate being driven crazy by the majority of your clients, or even just  one or two particularly wearing clients.

You get to love your work. And to a large extent what that means is that you're going to have to find ways to attract the kinds of people that you love to work with.  

The final perk I will discuss, which we get to enjoy in the model of solo self-employed private practice, is: We don't have to put up with a toxic boss. 

Similar to the co worker issue, if you work for a company you might wind up being beholden to a toxic or a maddening boss.

It is unfortunately not that rare.  My brother joked with me once that he wants to write a book about corporations titled Tantrum Your Way to the Top because it seems to be the advice everyone's following.

That's a hard thing to get out of if you need to earn a living, and most of us do. You can't just quit when your boss is making you nuts and tantruming their way to the top. 

But you are self employed, so your boss is you! 

It might seem like a no-brainer that we will get the full benefit of this self employment perk.  The boss is me, so the boss is great, right? 

But it's actually surprisingly easy to be a bad boss to ourselves: To demand that you work unmanageable hours for low pay, to hustle around to multiple office locations, to spread yourself too thin, to pay yourself inconsistently or be late with your own paycheck. 

A lot of it comes down to everything I've discussed earlier in this episode: Let yourself have the benefits of a solo self employed private practice.  

Ultimately, the advice is to be a good boss to yourself. 

If your boss were an actual other person, how would you want them to treat you? Do that!  

This means that we actually don't get out of learning some management strategies that work and that make for a happy team.

It's just that the team is you, and the boss is you, but you can't just assume that you're going to always do things in your own best interest. 

We often hit grooves of contorting ourselves for other people, especially those of us in helping and healing fields. We have a higher than average level of codependency tendencies (which rhymes, sorry). I brought that up in the last episode. 

We can easily put ourselves dead last on our list of priorities, and what that means is that we become our own  toxic boss. But we don't have to! 

I hope that this has given you some food for thought and has opened up some pathways on how you can navigate your way to a practice that takes really good care of you.

Because we take really good care of other people, and we deserve to be taken care of too.  

You've heard me say it before and you're gonna hear me say it again. I'm gonna say it over and over.