The Impossible Practice is my term for the private practice of your dreams that currently seems completely out of reach. It’s the vision of your work and your lifestyle that keeps you going while navigating a field wrought with trauma, burnout, and for-profit exploitation of your labor. You endure all this while doing your best to care and advocate for clients in a system devoid of much concern for either of you. But your dream of helping people on your own terms while supporting yourself keeps you going. It’s the whole reason you got into this line of work in the first place. 

But while your Impossible Practice can motivate you on tough days, it’s also a vision that discourages you -- because you have no idea how to make it a reality. You went to graduate school to learn how to treat psychological and emotional problems…not run a business! And you certainly didn’t envision yourself with a Master’s degree working a low-paying, dead-end job, saddled with a boat-load of student loan debt, too tired to care for your body or tend to your most important relationships (you know, the things we harp on clients about!). If you ever feel dejected or disheartened, or even think about leaving the field completely, I’m here to tell you that you are not alone! And there is a better way!

I’m also here to tell you this: You can do impossible things. I can say that confidently because…you’ve been doing impossible things your entire life! You had to crawl before you could walk. You went from being unable to hold a fork to confidently operating a motor vehicle. To live as a human is to do the impossible over and over again. And once you renegotiate your relationship with The Impossible, your practice -- indeed your whole life -- begins to transform.

One of the things that drives me crazy about marketing -- not just in this world of business consulting, but everywhere -- is the promise to somehow teleport you to the head of the pack. As a provider of psychological services, you know damn well that outcomes cannot be guaranteed! Similarly, I can’t promise that you’ll have a six-figure practice in three months. It takes a lot of work -- both outer and inner -- to become a successful practice owner. And that’s work that neither I nor anyone can do for you.

But what I hope to offer you is a clear developmental path to becoming the kind of clinician that can do the things you want to do. This is where your relationship with The Impossible comes in. You probably aren’t this person right now. It seems impossible because it is. You haven’t yet developed the skillset or the mindset to set up your business, define your niche, market yourself to your ideal client, attract and retain folks that will pay what you’re worth, work with them effectively, manage your finances, and integrate your practice into your lifestyle. 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t become that person. And depending on how hard you’re willing and able to work, it could happen sooner than you think. All you need is a little guidance.

What I offer is not the shortcut, bypass, or detour around the difficult work this pursuit demands. Even if I could, you wouldn’t want me to! As a therapist, you know as well as I do that there is a ton of growth and wisdom embedded in our struggles! That’s good stuff, and I wouldn’t dare deprive you!

But while we can’t rush your process, we can streamline it. We can catalyze it. This is why I say: Development, Not Detour! I want to shine a light on the precise areas of outer actions and inner psychology that you’ll need to nurture in order to become the clinician you want to be. 

I’m going to say something counter-intuitive in response to this question: You should learn from me because I suck at this stuff. Or rather, I did. I am not someone who naturally has a knack for business, finance, and marketing. I am a clinician, first and foremost. But I learned quickly that if I want to do my work, “my calling,” effectively and sustainably, I need to befriend these other aspects of the gig. I did a lot of cobbling-together, a lot of trial-and-error, and a lot of floundering, flailing, and struggling. And that is the trouble I’d like to save you.

So I could point to my 5 years of successful private practice ownership as evidence for why I’d make a good consultant for you and your budding practice. I could give you bank statements showing how I made $100k+ last year while working an average of three days a week. I could tell you how fulfilled I feel at the end of the workday knowing that I’ve truly made a difference, at least in my humble sphere of influence. I could show you pictures of my travels, and the fun and interesting things I get to do with my partner, friends, and dogs during my leisure time. I could show you videos of the music I play because I get to moonlight as a gigging musician, my other passion in life.

But I’d actually rather tell you about the 5 years before that when I really struggled. I’ll tell you about the time I ran out of gas on the way to my agency job because I was waiting to get paid and didn’t even have enough in my account for a top-off; how I ended up walking 10 miles that day to see clients at two different offices around town. Or how dejected I felt when my first direct care job out of grad school only required a high school diploma, but they kindly bumped me up from $14/hour to $15/hour because of my Master’s degree. I’ll tell you about the group practice I worked for that took 80% of my client fee for “administrative purposes” while generating $1.5 million a year in revenue. I’ll tell you about vicarious trauma, marital distress, substance abuse, and a bout of housing instability as I attempted to cope with what seemed like a hopeless situation.

I’ll tell you how I had to rebuild my first website 3 times because I kept missing payments and losing all my progress. Or how I had to “quit my day job” 4 times before I finally made this private practice thing stick. How, at one point, I had cobbled together 5 jobs totaling 80 hours a week and even THAT was barely enough to stay afloat in this field. How I got into debt with my supervisor because I couldn’t even afford to pay my bills, but I had to remain under supervision in order to keep working. 

All part of the learning? Sure. Have I paid my dues? I think so, with interest. But part of what kept me going during those early years was a staunch belief that there was a better way. A mentor of mine says “One day, your struggles will be someone else’s road map.” So you should learn from me, not because I’m a guru, but because I’ve been where you are, I know how much this means to you, and I am confident I can support you in getting where you want to be.

I'm going to start out this section on marketing my marketing services by, quite ironically, breaking a general rule of marketing: I'm going to be a tad long-winded here! But that's because my assumption is that if you've landed on my page, you're highly motivated to take some serious steps towards private practice success. I hope my writing style isn't too boring, but I'll assume what's really holding your attention is the possibility of making a life dream come true and unlocking the lifestyle you want for yourself!

After reflecting on my own journey, as well as input from dozens of consultees, I’ve honed in on seven broad areas where folks seem to need the most support. I’ll offer them here, as briefly as my excitement for sharing this info will allow, and in the order that makes most sense to my brain. 

My hope is that this can be a useful framework for you right off the bat! I am increasingly interested in offering compelling new ways to *think* about your practice, rather than regurgitating stepwise instructions. That’s not to say I won’t be offering some highly practical, procedural guidance. But I also know that your practice will be as unique as you are, and that the creative application of your special gifts is your real superpower. I’m much more interested in helping you break the mold and unlock your individual potential than providing yet another system to conform to, which would actually keep you thinking small and feeling stuck!

So consider this your blueprint for success, and a taste of what we could do together! You may be able to take this stuff and run with it, and I would love that for you! I truly want to get this info into the hands of as many therapists as possible. But if you're like me and could use some extra support, don't hesitate to reach out.

Hayden’s Seven Pillars of Building Your Dream Practice

1. Envisioning Your Practice

Do you have a solid vision of the practice you want to build? How many clients you want to see each week? What your working hours will be? Virtual, in-person, or hybrid?

How much do you need to charge to earn what is necessary to support your lifestyle? What do you want your leisure time to look like? Do you want to be able to take a week off once a quarter? Do you want to travel?

When I started out, I didn’t have much of a vision. I just knew I wanted to “be my own boss.” I kept thinking that would just sort of naturally happen if I continued accruing my required intern hours, sort of like “working your way up” in the corporate world. Not much intentionality with that approach!

A lot of floundering later, I finally sat down and actually mapped out what my ideal practice would look like…and was shocked to find that it looked nothing like the 5-days-a-week 9-5 model I’d been sold on as “industry standard” throughout my career thus far. That was the beginning of unlocking this whole puzzle for me.

I want to help you flesh out your vision because that will, of course, dictate the steps you take to get there. But there’s another very important reason to not skip this step: It's not what the vision is, it's what the vision does.

This is something most of us are confused about when it comes to tackling any big goal, including building your dream practice. Where you end up is likely going to look very different from your initial conception. In all likelihood, if you stick to it, it will look even better than you can currently conceive of. That’s because you’re going to grow and change and evolve as you journey forward. You’re going to pivot in response to a thousand variables you can’t predict. You’re going to hone your craft, and thus your delivery model (i.e. your practice) in response to your client’s needs. You’ll experiment and fail and refine and succeed beyond what you currently think is possible.

So why bother envisioning in the first place? Again, it’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does. We think the goal is the destination when, in fact, it’s the gasoline. Your practice vision is not where you’re going, it’s the fuel you need to get there. It’s the force of change that aligns your actions with the 1000 unfolding variables you can’t predict at the outset.

The trouble when you’re first starting is that you don’t have a ton of experience on which to base your vision. It’s hard to see the options beyond what is right in front of you. If you’re working in an agency or group practice, you’re probably swimming in burnout and financial scarcity. You may look around your professional circle and not see a ton of people working and living the way you want to. We need more “professional role models” to help us see the endless opportunities and possibilities that are actually available!

I’d love to discuss your vision with you to help you ask the right questions and hone in on what it is you really want out of work and life. The more specific, the better. So if you're like I was and your goal is simply “to be my own boss,” you have some fleshing out to do. Let’s talk through the many options and set you up for success from the get-go.

2. Developing A Practice Owner Mindset

I have come to believe that running a successful practice is one-part skillset and two-parts mindset. When I first started, I received zero instruction, education, or coaching on developing this mindset. I truly think this is where the bulk of your work is going to be. I certainly want to help you with the nuts-and-bolts procedural stuff (discussed below), but it is your mindset that is going to allow you to translate your skillset into tangible results.

Here’s a personal example. When I was first looking for resources on starting a private practice, I wanted the “secrets.” I was in a hurry, and decades of doing well in school had caused me to believe that because I was “smart,” I was deserving of success. (Spoiler alert: the world doesn’t reward you simply for “being smart!”) I remember spending hundreds, even thousands of dollars on private practice courses and resources from some people I really respected, all to leave them untouched for months and years. What gives? Wasn’t this important to me?

The issue, in hindsight, was that these resources immediately jumped into developing the skillset with little to no emphasis placed on mindset. My mindset at the time was one of entitlement and impatience, among other things. So when the presenter started talking about business systems, my eyes glazed over while lamenting “I can’t do this!” Or when they started talking about marketing strategies, my reflexive disdain for advertising kicked in: “Ick!” Finances? Cue three decades of accumulated junk around money. “Being my own boss?” I can barely manage myself as an employee!

I’ll cut all of us some slack. Early on, we’re still getting a handle on the clinical side of the work, and so it can feel very overwhelming to start to develop these other aspects of ourselves. But as a solo practitioner, you are essentially a CEO of one, and need to develop a mindset that goes along with it. Here are just a few examples of mindset shifts I had to make, and I’d love to support you in making:

• Re-negotiating your relationship with THE IMPOSSIBLE (#1!!!)
• Identifying and confronting limiting beliefs about yourself and your competency
• Uncovering, developing, and embracing the unique gifts you have to bring the people you serve
• Recognizing and befriending the parts of the job that don’t come naturally (or at least getting yourself to a place where you can outsource!)
• Getting comfortable with standing out, being authentic, bold, and weird (i.e. the opposite qualities that make a good grad student!)
• Shifting from an “advertising mindset” to a “marketing mindset” (advertising = “casting a wide net;” marketing = “bridging the trust gap” between you and clients)
• Resolving all your junk around spending, receiving, saving, and setting boundaries around money
• Building an attitude of experimentation; renegotiating your relationship with failure
• Prioritizing celebration, gratitude, and rest
• Avoiding complacency
• Building confidence in your own decision-making
• Becoming creative in both your clinical work and your marketing
• Taking initiative, being a self-starter, motivating yourself, holding yourself accountable, and being self-disciplined
• Getting comfortable with being “CEO of Your Own Life” (Fellow IFS practitioners might find this concept eerily reminiscent of “self-leadership!”)

These are some common mindset shifts that most of us, in my opinion, will need to make in order to step into our full potential as private practice clinicians. You may end up identifying some personalized ones that aren’t on this list, in which case I am happy to help you sort through those, too!

3. Defining Your Niche(s)

Defining a niche is one of the most important things that you can do to start attracting a steady stream of ideal clients, fill your practice, and achieve financial sustainability. It has been said “the riches are in the niches!” It’s one of many things that will make you stand out from the sea of Psych Today profiles. Defining your niche sets you up as a relative expert* and ensures your name is at the top of colleagues’ referral lists. Your niche can be summed up as: “[Your name] is the one I call when a client needs [your specific service!].”

***Quick note on “expertise:” I personally don’t love or identify with this term. To me, the notion of “becoming an expert” neutralizes humility and curiosity. Still, clients view us as experts in our role, and so it also feels important to name this and not shirk the responsibility. A balancing act, perhaps!

As important as your niche is, it’s also what makes it challenging when you are first establishing yourself in the field. It’s tough to come straight out of grad school with limited real world experience and declare a niche! Some niches require more specialized training than others. It wouldn’t be ethical (or prudent!) to declare yourself as “niching in murderous psychopaths” in your first year out of school! This is where it helps me to distinguish between a “marketing niche” and a “clinical niche.” The two overlap, of course. But it’s likely that you have a niche that you can start developing right now, with your current level of training. 

As an example, you might consider a broad issue like “depression” or “anxiety.” These are issues that any clinician can ethically deal with straight out of school. It might take you 30 years to become a “depression expert!” But can you niche down? Maybe you like working with new moms struggling with post-partum depression. Or perhaps you have lived experience that helps you identify with college males adjusting to the major life transition. Now you instantly have a marketing niche. The more specific, the better. In a previous version of my practice, I had a niche working with collegiate athletes that had depressive symptoms due to a sports injury. Niches can get as hyper-specific as your imagination and the market will allow!

Want to take it a step further? Once you’ve identified an area of interest, now you can do specific trainings to define a clinical niche that can then become a marketing niche. Perhaps you want to support folks dealing with a specific diagnosis, like borderline or eating disorder. Clinical niche! Maybe you want to help queer couples navigating an infidelity. Clinical niche! Or you decide to get trained in a trauma modality like EMDR that you want to use with first responders. Clinical niche!

In any case, while the niching process can’t be rushed, it’s something you will want to start sooner rather than later. Grad school largely trains us to be generalists, so most of us don’t get much insight into the kinds of questions to consider when defining or pursuing a niche. That’s where I come in!

So how do you find your niche? There are a few words of guidance I can offer off the bat. The first is to consider where your professional interests and curiosities lie. What issues do you enjoy learning about? What populations call to you? I have personally found success “following the shame,” as I call it; that is, specializing in areas (such as grief and sex therapy) that are most difficult for folks to talk about.

You can also find your niche by simply looking at who is already showing up in your work. They’re finding you for a reason! Are there any themes you see across different clients? Any shared characteristics among those you work best with? Any particular approach you’re taking that people are responding to?

There’s a lot to consider when it comes to niching, far more than I can share here! But if you continue to struggle with attracting enough clients to sustain your practice, I’ll bet a big reason is because you haven’t clearly defined your niche and translated it into your marketing. I’d love to support you in asking the right questions to get super-specific about what it is you do well so that you can bring your gifts to the world!

4. Marketing to Your Ideal Clients

The concept of an “Ideal Client” or “Client Avatar” is related to your niche, but merits its own separate attention. If your niche is “what you do,” then your ideal client is “who you do it for.” Some questions to ask:

• How old is your ideal client?
• What phase of life are they in? (childhood, emerging adult, married, divorced, senior, etc.)
• What is their gender?
• Any other identifiers? (race, religion, language, sexuality, occupation, etc.)
• What are they dealing with? What is their story?
• What are their biggest pain points? What problem do they want to solve?
• What have they tried already to manage their pain or solve their problem? What do you see that they don’t?
• What elements of their story do you identify with?

I admit I had my own pushback to defining an ideal client because I like to work with all sorts of different people. But I think the way to think of this is not “I want a whole practice full of this exact person!” That’s not even really possible!

It’s more to help clearly define the pain points so that you can speak to that in your marketing. You want to be able to identify your ideal client so you can answer the question “what keeps them up at night?” This is not metaphorical! I can’t tell you how many inquiries I wake up to because someone finds my website late at night when they are hurting.

As an immediate example, I have written this page as though I am speaking to myself 7 or 8 years ago. The odds of you being in my exact situation are small, but I’m willing to bet if you’ve made it this far down, there are elements of my story that resonate with you. So the ideal client is the person you hone your marketing towards with the expectation that a wide variety of real people will hear and identify with it.

Another way to think about the ideal client is that it’s better to speak to one person and have 20 people respond than to try to speak to everyone and have no one respond. You want your clients to feel as though you have “called their name out in the crowd.” The specificity of the ideal client or client avatar is what allows you to do that.

5. Branding & Messaging

I see a lot of therapists who are new to private practice choose a name and create a logo for their website and consider that their “brand.” In reality, your brand is much more than a name and logo! It encompasses your specialties, your story, your core values, your unique approach to helping, your beautiful peculiarities, your authenticity, your mission, your activism, and more. Even what you wear can be part of your brand! Many years ago, I grew my hair out, ditched the button-ups and started wearing band t-shirts to session. Off-putting to some? Maybe. Disarming, authentic, possibly even "cool" to others? Absolutely! Essentially, if you’re a solo practitioner, your brand is you!

Similarly, your messaging is what you put out into the world that makes your brand resonate deeply with potential clients. It is what lets them know that you “get” them and can help them with the problems they want to solve. Your messaging can be professional, playful, friendly, or some combination, but you essentially want your potential clients to know, like, and trust you before they even pick up the phone.

A massive part of messaging is about doing what I call “bridging the trust gap.” When you secure any kind of service, from auto mechanics to plumbers, you are more likely to use someone recommended to you by a friend. You implicitly trust the service provider more than any old random name from a directory. If you can't find a direct recommendation, you might make a decision based on someone's website that shows they are competent, relatable, and work with integrity.

In our business, the trust gap between providers and the public is absolutely massive. Despite recent cultural shifts to destigmatize mental health services, there is still such a huge need, and there are still so many people who are afraid to reach out, or mistrustful of our services (and justified in their mistrust, in my opinion! But that’s another rant!). So your messaging is a way to reach them, to educate them, to soothe their anxieties enough for them to take the first step.

When you’re first starting out, branding and messaging can feel a little icky! I love Jon Hamm as Don Draper in “Mad Men.” But he’s certainly not a role model for ethical marketing or…life in general! I want to help you develop a brand, message, and voice that feels authentic to you and speaks to your clients. And because your branding and messaging can reach people who don't even secure your services, it's a way to widen your influence and positive impact on the world. Marketing at this level has actually become a secondary calling for me!

6. Marketing Tactics and Sustainable Strategies

Here’s the good news: There are almost endless options for marketing yourself! Between social media, YouTube, search engines, email campaigns, paid ads, lead magnets, in-person networking, speaking events, website copy, blog writing, conferences & trainings, podcasts, listservs & local referral groups, community outreach, schools, churches, mentoring, consult groups, professional book clubs, simply being your badass self, and everything in between, your marketing tactics are really just limited by your imagination!

The flipside of this, of course, is that all these options can feel utterly overwhelming! Deciding which of them are worth your time and energy is no small feat. What's more, it can feel challenging to tie these different tactics together into a cohesive strategy that feels authentic and sustainable.

And that's just at the logistics level! There is all sorts of psychological junk that gets tied up in marketing, too. That's because in our business, we aren't selling a car or a refrigerator. We are marketing our Selves in a way that can feel extremely vulnerable.

A lot of new clinicians get easily discouraged in their marketing. I can understand why! You work through all your nerves and hang ups about putting yourself out there, you film a video, design a flier, or write a thoughtful blog article and...crickets!

I have learned that marketing is a cumulative, sustained effort. It's certainly possible to "go viral" as the kids say, or have something that really takes off. It's happened to me, and it's exciting when it occurs! But in general, we have to train ourselves out of the mindset that we are going to "get clients" by making a couple of isolated posts online or thumb-tacking a business card to a coffee shop bulletin. Marketing is the lifeblood of your practice. It is not a single-shot, one-and-done endeavor. It’s its own separate system to tend to in the context of your practice, a bit like your nervous system, circulatory system, and digestive system, etc. integrates to make your body function. We do have to experiment and find what works, but we have to keep doing it!

So if you struggle with marketing as either a skillset or a mindset, I am here to support you. I can help you select marketing tactics that align with your personality, values, and lifestyle and integrate these approaches into a larger strategy that we can systematize and automate so that it feels authentic and sustainable. I can also help you sort through the mental junk that marketing brings up in you...I personally had all of it! Finally, I want to help make marketing fun. It really can be a creative endeavor, a way to make all sorts of connections, and a powerful way to make a positive impact in and of itself.

7. Streamlining Your Systems For Success

I want you to envision your practice as a set of interlocking systems that can either be gears in a well-oiled machine or wrenches in the cogs, depending. Here is a non-exhaustive list:

• Client acquisition system
• Client scheduling system
• Personal calendar system
• Client screening/consultation system
• Client onboarding system
• Note-taking/administrative system
• Practice management system
• Billing system
• Bookkeeping system
• Retirement-saving system
• Time-management system

There are undoubtedly more, but these are the basics! And each of these likely has its own sub-systems. For example, social media marketing might be part of your “client acquisition system.” But how do you organize your content? How do you write meaningful posts, or create visually-appealing images? Do you post at whim, or do you batch create and schedule it? How does that link with your other systems, like your scheduling system? Probably through your website, itself a set of interconnected pages (aka a system!).

Your bookkeeping will also have sub-systems. How do you save for taxes? Do you set aside funds for continuing education or otherwise reinvesting in your business and professional self? Do you save for holiday weeks and "paid time off" for yourself? You'll likely want those parameters to be clearly defined and systematized, as a percentage of your income, for example, so you don't have to think about it or make a bunch of micro-decisions regarding where your money goes.

Ideally, you want to find the systems that work for you and the flow of your life and then do as much “setting and forgetting” as possible. When you’re a one-person band, automation is your friend! Even the things that do require your personal input (it’s still important to me, for example, to send a personalized, non-automated, non-boiler plate follow-up email to each and every client that books a consult) should feel “systematized" in the sense of “now I do THIS!” Having a set of streamlined systems can make the difference between feeling confident and competent, and overwhelmed and burned out!

It’s also worth noting that your practice/business systems integrate into the overall systems of your larger life! For example, I pay myself out of my business account, and that becomes the link to my personal/partnered finances. We have systems for paying bills, saving, fun money, etc. Because these systems are so intertwined, mucking up one system can have disastrous downstream consequences!

When I started thinking in terms of systems, my life and practice transformed. If you're overwhelemd by everything you need to do for a private practice, I can help you build out your systems in a thoughtful, intentional, and stepwise way that helps you to feel a sense of clarity and control.