Your First Love

I'm so tired of the engine that sounds like this:

"Put yourself out there! Sell yourself.
5 easy steps for how to triple your income in just weeks.
If I can do it, you can!
Look at me, walking on the beach, telling you how I hardly work and you can have this too - all at the click of a button.
Join me for free and then I'll rope you into leveling up, masterclass this and that.
For only an exorbitant amount of money, you can have all this value!"

It annoys me. It seems to me that people who transition to business coaching out of therapy are just burnt out by therapy. And they're telling you how you too can not be a therapist. To be fair, I do see great value in diversifying your income and getting creative about how to provide therapeutic services. That's why I started Superpower Alliance. And, also - if you're reading this and don't want to be a therapist anymore - I get it. I'm here for that.

But there are lots of you that love it. It's your first love. Along the way you got disillusioned.

There are so many systemic issues in the business of therapy. With lack of access, we often get clients in extreme distress. That level of distress wears on our nervous system over time. Also, with the increasing demand and our own desire to provide excellent clinical services - we're spending lots of time and money to make sure we can actually help these people.

Everyone's tired and many are burning out.

I do think we need systemic change. This whole thing needs to be more manageable. More preventative care, easier access to trainings and supervision, easier and more affordable access for clients, more community - just more and better!

But, who of us are going to be policy makers or instrumental in actual big system change?

In the meantime, can I remind you of your first love?

If you're getting burnt out by EFT or whatever model you call home - it could be that you're sooo close to actually having it "in your bones." To get to the place where you're not really thinking about it, you're just doing it - that's the sweet spot. You can be yourself. You're not emulating someone else - you're just there and you're really with your clients, moving them through the process. When things take you by surprise, you don't blame yourself - you get more curious. You assume this has to do with the distress in the client - not you.

If you're not there - hang on! Just a little longer, my friend.

I think the solution (within reason) to burnout looks like a combination of these: confidence in an empirically-based model (we all need to experience that we can actually help people), realistic expectations of our limits, community and diversity in how we spend our energy.

I was with a friend recently and we imagined winning the lottery. She said, "If you won the lottery, would you work?" I said, "Yes. But I think I would probably just do therapy. And I would do very little of it. But, I do love it."

I was surprised by my own answer. I love therapy more than group practice ownership, more than developing e-courses, more than training?

Guess so.