#1: What Is Beyond the Practice?

Find out what to expect from future episodes of Beyond the Practice!

This podcast will explore the idea and reality of building a brand and business beyond the practice as a therapist and/or coach as well as offer in-depth discussion on issues of emotional wellbeing, relationships, creating a vision for your brand, and integration of personal life and a values-based brand. Finally, this podcast is a place to hear and share the experiences of other therapists and coaches who built their brand beyond the practice while striving to achieve and maintain integration between their personal and professional lives. 

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Transcript

You are listening to the Beyond the practice podcast, where we explore ways to intentionally and authentically skill your practice to a brand that aligns with your values, and eliminate overwhelm, exhaustion and burnout. Each week we talk about life, relationship, and business beyond the practice. I'm your host, Brandi Matthew. Thank you so much for joining us for this very first episode of the beyond the practice podcast. This episode is all about what is beyond the practice and what can you expect from future episodes of this podcast. So first of all, who is this podcast for? This podcast is intended for therapists and coaches, including therapists who are considering moving into more of a coaching role with their practice or offering coaching services as part of their practice or as part of a separate practice. Many episodes of this podcast will also have a more general appeal to entrepreneurial professionals such as attorneys, healthcare professionals, and teachers. But the primary intention of this podcast is to serve therapists, and coaches, I want to talk a little bit about the purpose of this podcast. So why create the beyond the practice podcast, there's a few different purposes I hope beyond the practice will serve. The first one is exploring building a business and a brand as a therapist and a coach. So over the past year, I have made the shift primarily into a coaching and consulting role. I have practiced as a therapist for the past 15 years and as an attorney for about 10 years. And over the past year, I have begun doing business coaching and consulting for therapists. And my coaching and consulting with therapists has addressed issues of creating a startup practice from from day one from square one to working with experienced practices and experienced therapists on issues of increasing profitability in their practice, increasing efficiency in their practice, and overall, just trying to get a good gauge of what direction they want to take their practice. This goes hand in hand with the work that I have done as an attorney for the last 10 years, which has been primarily to consult with and represent therapists in issues pertaining to their practice. So issues of subpoenas, court orders, records, requests and other legal issues that have come up in their practice. Through my work with therapists in coaching and consulting, I've noticed that the assumption for therapists who start to build a business or build a brand is that they will be doing private practice, that private practice will be their business, that those two things are one in the same. Unfortunately,

I've also noticed that this assumption creates a lot of disillusionment, burnout, and lack of fulfillment for therapists in private practice. So one purpose of this podcast is to start to challenge and potentially shift that thinking, in shifting that thinking, the question I want to pose is what is creating a successful practice is the first step in your journey. As therapists we all know that we each define our own journey, right? And so that is a very individualized plan for us. And so if we are creating a brand that is based on our personal values and our vision, the question becomes, what is the role of our practice in that vision? So what if your practice is one piece of that vision? Or what if your practice isn't even part of the final vision that you have for what you want to create? Maybe your practice is a stepping stone to the big picture. But it's not even a piece of the big picture of the final product. And when we ask that question, I think it creates this whole new array of possibilities as far as what we can do to build our brand and to impact the clients that we work with. And so when we ask that question, I think a fundamental shift happens for us. It's no longer just an assumption that if we want to in packed people and we want to make a difference. This is how we do it. Private Practice, there becomes a lot of different possibilities there. So that is one primary purpose of this podcast is to really ask that question and explore all of the possible options that could be answers to that question. So as far as what to expect from future episodes of this podcast, you can expect ideas and inspiration for expanding your brand beyond your practice. You can also expect to hear the experiences of others who have expanded beyond the practice, as well as their practical tips and considerations for expanding things that they feel like, well, things that they may want to do differently, things that they would recommend that others do differently. So just hearing that realm of experience. The second purpose of this podcast is to explore life beyond the practice. So looking at the lifestyle that we create, and how we can build our practices to support our lifestyle. So many of the therapists that I work with have built thriving practices. They are full practices, a lot of times they are profitable practices. But they are practices that are essentially running the therapists life, between the administrative burden to scheduling around their clients schedules, they feel like they don't have time for themselves, for their families, and it is very frustrating place to be. Another purpose of this podcast is to consider the lifestyle that you want your brand and your business to support so that we are creating a brand with intentionality, we are creating a practice with intentionality. And we are striving for integration between our professional life and our personal life. And notice that I didn't say balance, we hear a lot about the notion of work life balance, and I have a later episode, specifically on this topic alone. But I don't subscribe to the notion of work life balance, because to me, these aren't two things that should be compartmentalized and separated, if we build a brand that is based on our values, and our vision, then is much easier to integrate our personal life with our professional life. And we can make shifts, small adjustments based on different stages of life that we may be at. And of course, it's going to look very different from professional to professional, even within the same specialty is gonna look very different because we have different values and different visions. So as far as what you can expect from this podcast, you can expect an in depth exploring of various values and various visions that can really help you explore what your values and your vision might be. For your brand. We will also talk extensively about family relationships, and emotional well being as well as alignment between our personal and professional life. Because if we're creating a brand that's based on our values, then alignment should be a lot easier, it's still going to be something that we need to strive for, it's still going to be something that we constantly have to evaluate and potentially readjust. But alignment will come much more naturally when we create a brand that is based on our values. The third purpose of this podcast is support. And there are already so many great forums for us to support one another from social media to professional organization. But as far as I'm concerned, I want this to also be another place that we are able to share our experiences and support one another share lessons we have learned share our personal experiences and our professional experiences in striving to integrate professional and personal lives and support one another because as far as I'm concerned, we can never have too much support. And I wanted to keep this first episode brief. So I'm going to wrap up by posing one question. And that question is What is your vision?

And what role does your practice play in your vision? Is your practice a piece of the vision? Is your practice all of the vision? Or is your practice not even part of it? And just to know, I think all of those answers are okay, if your practice is what you want your brand to be. I think that's fine, as long as it's intentional, and I think you can have a very profitable practice and a very profitable brand. I think you can build a brand that is your practice and do it in a very respectable and profitable way. I don't think you have to go beyond the practice. But I think we need to ask that question. So that if we don't go beyond the practice, it's done with intentionality. And so that if we do go beyond the practice is done with intentionality. So what is your vision and what role does your practice play in that vision? Thank you so much for joining us for this very first episode. Go ahead and subscribe so that you can join us for future episodes as well. Bye, y'all.