Read Time: 1.5 minutes
Big thanks to our sponsors and affiliate partners who keep the Weekly Read free for subscribers! If you’d like to have your work showcased in front of 15k+ therapists, click here.
The Productive Practice Book:
– Grow your group practice while working 10 hours less every week
– Become super productive and organized and delegate like a boss
– Free up time to work on your next big idea
Grab your copy today!
Clini-Coach® Academy is the premier coaching certification + business incubator exclusively for mental health therapists. If you’re ready to grow beyond your office, you deserve the support of the best in the business. Learn more at this link.
Wanna know the craziest thing that tends to happen to our clients when they start OUTgrowing the therapy office?
Their practices explode!
It’s true, it’s weird, and we’ve seen it happen 100++ times at this point! Just when you want more time to grow your bigger dreams beyond your therapy office, suddenly you’ve got clients coming through the woodwork!
So what the heck do you do? How do you serve your current clients well while still making time to pursue your big goals?
Well, this technique comes straight from James Wilde, master therapist + coach and our Director of Client Success here at Team Katie Read!
In growing her own coaching business while still FT with therapy clients, James developed a technique she called Pause and Practice to create more time-freedom in her schedule AND help her clients get the maximum benefit from therapy.
Now we teach this technique to our super-full-practice clients–and they FREAKING LOVE IT.
First, run down through your client list and identify those clients who are super-stable.
You know the ones: they’ve mostly met their goals but they still come in for that bit of support each week. It’s time to empower them even more!
For these clients, you’re going to offer the option of Pause and Practice.
Your speech to them might go a little something like this:
You know, you have made so much progress on X and Y and Z since we started working together that I wanted to offer you an option I call Pause and Practice.
If you’re interested, what we would do is space your sessions out a bit more. (You can decide what’s best–every other week? Every three weeks?)
During those in-between weeks, you can practice all the tools and techniques we’ve talked about here, then come report to me on how they’re working. We can even make a plan for exactly which things you’re going to practice on those break weeks, if you’d like, or we can make it more free-form depending on what comes up. How would that feel for you?
Then, of course, you process and explore as you normally would. And you see how it goes! Some clients might not be interested, but some will love the option and it’ll buy you back some of your time to pursue your other goals. Plus, if it doesn’t work, they can always simply return to sessions as normal!
The Pause and Practice technique can work well in a variety of situations, such as:
- Nearing termination/ goal completion with a client
- A client struggling with a fee increase
- A client whose insurance you might no longer accept
- A client who is travels a great deal
…and more!
The therapists we serve report that using Pause and Practice has several benefits, including:
- Therapy clients feeling more empowered (and less like they’ll be dependent on therapy forever and ever).
- A deepening of the therapeutic relationship even for clients who do NOT want to try Pause and Practice, as it lets them explore their fears around less-frequent therapy.
- Therapists with full lives and practices buying back time so they can pursue coaching, consulting, book-writing, networking, and more!
Give it a try, if you feel called to do so, and let us know how it goes!
Thanks for being a Weekly Read subscriber! We’ll bring you more simple, effective techniques like this to create the LIFE–and career–you most love.
Thanks for all you do, fellow therapist. We know it can be a thankless job at times, and we want you to know that you are seen, cared about, and appreciated. 💛
-Katie
Need help finding YOUR niche? We help clients every day in our Clini-Coach® Academy program!
