Investing in our helping skills education and our business education to succeed in our private practice can be an incredible accelerator of success and growth on the one hand. On the other hand, how do you know in which education to invest, how much, and when? Today I'll share my own process of investing in myself, my business, and growing my helping skills. We'll talk about how to chose education, how much to chose, and when. Over the years I've created all the free resources you'll ever need to grow your private practice. They're all just one click away: https://www.the6figurepractice.com/
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About the 6-Figure Practice Program:
The Six Figure Practice with Sasha Raskin, is an online program and community for helpers such as counselors and coaches, who are building their private practice. If you’re looking for a clear, step-by-step road map for creating and marketing your private practice, you're at the right place!
My name is Sasha Raskin. I’m a Number 1 Best Selling Co-Author in 12 Countries, a Doctoral student in Counseling Education and Supervision, a coach, a psychotherapist and an adjunct faculty at a graduate counseling program at Naropa University.
One of the things I’m enjoying the most is helping other therapists and coaches build their successful private practice so that they could actually help the clients they were taught to help, and thrive themselves. I’m almost always fully booked, so my ability to work with individuals is limited. That is why I’ve created this program to deliver powerful results and create a community where you will feel supported by each other!
This program's primary goal is to help you build a thriving private practice, in a fun and authentic way. Counselors and coaches invest an incredible amount of time, money, and effort into building their helping skills. However, when their training ends, they usually find themselves lacking the business skills that are needed to start and run a successful private practice, feel isolated, discouraged and not knowing where to start.
I believe that to be truly helpful to others, therapists and coaches have to learn to thrive themselves and definitely know how to get clients whom they can help.
This is where this program comes in. If you're willing to learn and work hard, a 6-figure private practice is within your reach in a year - 2 years. This program will give you a clear outline, and detailed instructions on how to get there.
How Much Should You Invest In Education While Growing Your Private Practice As A Therapist Or A Coach
Good morning. I had a good morning so far. I came back from the gym. I had a good workout, sauna, hot tub and I had a great coaching session with one of our team members in the 6 figure practice.
And today I want to talk to you about trainings. And I have a question - did you ever find yourself in the situation where you're thinking about this new exciting training? You want to add more skills, you want to learn something new but you're just not sure if it's the right training or the right time or is it worth the money. Definitely I found myself there many times, still sometimes.
And I think it's important to talk about because as you know knowledge is power and your education as a therapist or as a coach would be a lifelong process. It definitely does not stop with your master's degree if you're a mental health counselor, or if you're a coach, it does not stop with your coaching training.
So how do you on the one hand continue to grow and on the other don't fall into this trap of forever training or spending way too much money on new trainings and not growing your private practice? So I'll be speaking specifically to therapists and coaches in private practice today.
And by the way, hello to everyone from the 6 figure practice program who's watching or listening to it right now. We have a lot of good exciting things coming up this month. I'll tell you more about that later on.
So the problem is that no one actually has a clear budget, how much to invest in your education monthly, in your private practice. Especially at the beginning counselors and coaches are kind of struggling to just get by. You made this effort and took a risk of starting your private practice, and it's either unthinkable to invest in yourself right now or it feels so important and you just can't grow without that, right? Maybe it's that impostor syndrome raising its head and saying, "Hey, are you sure you're good enough to help people?"
So how do you know? I want to share how I do it and then we can kind of brainstorm how you could do it. This month I invested about 9,000 in my education. And it's money definitely well spent. And it's an interesting feedback loop, so investing in myself from the get-go, in my education helped me to grow my private practice faster, and since it's full right now I can continue to invest in my own education and not really worry about should I invest in it or should I not because (a) it's being written off of my taxes, (b) I know it accelerates my growth, and it's one of the benefits of having your private practice, actually allowing yourself to have the lifestyle that you want if you build it correctly and investing in yourself.
And education is such a big value for me for many reasons; one coming from a Russian-Jewish family, education has been a huge value in my family and generally for Jews specifically. It's a big value. So coming from there also with my immigration history, education was one of my main ways to kind of create self-worth I guess while struggling with the immigration from Russia to Israel. And one of the biggest reasons is missing how much it helps me, how much it excites me, brings novelty to my life to learn new things and how I can implement it with my clients or with my business right away and see results right away.
So you might be asking yourself how the hell did I get to 9,000 investment a month in my education. So one is my PhD in counseling education and supervision. It's a great program and that takes care of I guess the becoming a better teacher and with time better supervisor. So that takes care of that part. And two high-end business coaching programs that I'm a part of, again, having a successful private practice allows me to seek out literally the best experts in the world on business development and invest in their coaching programs.
Now, which brings us to the next part - you have to have basically what to choose, what training to choose. You have to have a good balance between investing in your helping skills education, basically becoming a better therapist and a coach, and your business education - how to grow your private practice. Those aren't necessarily separate, right? They will contribute to each other. You just want to make sure that you're actually learning what you don't know instead of just adding more of the same.
If you're a good enough counselor or a coach and you don't have enough clients in your private practice, maybe it's time to invest in business education and just learn from people who know the road ahead so you could just repeat the same process and create a thriving private practice. And if you feel that you're lacking something in your helping skills, it's time to literally purchase them.
I remember this one time, so I did this a two-year certification in marriage and family therapy; I'm a couple's therapist mostly and work with families as well. And I had this session in my private practice with a couple that was highly disregulated and honestly I'm not sure if I was helpful enough. Well, if I'm being honest I know I didn't do my job well; I just kind of let them have their fight. So they didn't feel they're getting anything from the session and they definitely didn't come back.
So what I did? I did a lot of research on what's the best training for me to get to expand on my helping skills in couple's therapy. Who are the best experts? I narrowed it down to three modalities that I had some previous training in but just kind of as an overview in my certification program, and those were Gottman's with Gottman couple's therapy, Susan Johnson with emotionally-focused therapy and Stan Atkin with packed, and I just did and I went and did those trainings one by one. I definitely started with the introductory.
And it's been tremendously helpful, both in my ability to help my clients faster and better and it also affected the way I do my private practice, it brought me more confidence to the fact that I'm able to help more couples. I shifted it my private practice to working mostly with couples and families. And also it just made me a better therapist which kind of helped with the retention, right? I no longer had couples that felt that they were just wasting their time. So that's been incredibly helpful.
By the way, you don't necessarily need to invest more money into growing your skills and pursuing further education. There is more than enough free resources out there. For example, if you go to the6figurepractice.com website I'm adding resources all the time - podcast, videos, articles, trainings and it's all free. You can just pick and choose the one topic that you have challenges with and learn from it.
And even with further education there are so many free resources. For example, you probably haven't heard about it but let's say you want to increase your marketing skills and business skills and you just want to devote a lot of time into it, it wouldn't necessarily be around private practice but if that's your calling, you want to become better at it - University of the People offers free master's program, free MBA, very high quality program. It is demanding, you'll need a lot of time to invest into it but it's just one example of free resources that exist out there.
And you will always need to pay either with time or with money or with both, so just figuring out how much time do you have a week to invest in your education and how much can you invest in terms of money investment monthly or in the next few months, and choosing just one training to focus on until you get really good in (a) learning fast from different trainings and you have a big enough budget since you grew your practice already to invest in more programs.
So I hope it's been helpful. I'm wishing you a wonderful day. And I'll see you on the next podcast.