Niche Burnout, An Interview with Laura Long, LMFT/S
An interview with Laura Long of YourBadAssTherapyPractice.com about creating a niche and identifying your ideal client. Curt and Katie talk with Laura about common myths as well as what happens when you burnout on your niche and how your niche can evolve. Laura also offers practical insight into what you can do to market your new niche.
It’s time to reimagine therapy and what it means to be a therapist. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy talk about how to approach the role of therapist in the modern age.
Interview with Laura Long, LMFT/S
Laura Long, LMFT/S, is a business coach and the lead badass at YourBadAssTherapyPractice.com, where she helps ambitious, driven, Type-A therapists push through their fears and unleash their inner badass.
Laura offers free practice-building tools (and hilariously obscene emails) through her mailing list, and her flagship e-course has successfully graduated over 300 therapists. She also runs small mastermind groups as well as a private online community reserved for her students.
Laura is best known for her off-the-cuff coaching style that includes colorful language, a witty sense of humor, and an uncanny ability to keep it real. Her unique approach to marketing and customer service challenges the status quo and helps therapists to become better business owners. She shows therapists how to grow and scale their practices without losing their minds – because building your private practice should be fun!
You can read Laura’s blog at http://www.YourBadAssTherapyPractice.com and follow her antics at http://www.Facebook.com/YourBadAssTherapyPractice (links no longer work).
In this episode we talk about:
- The mistakes therapists make in niche – myths and fears around narrowing down a niche
- The fear of excluding people when you narrow your niche
- The difference between a niche and an ideal client
- Ideal client is about the way a person shows up on the planet, who they are inside
- Niche – is a focus on the external, like presenting problems
- The reasons why you should exclude people
- Scarcity fears – that there are not enough clients or that there are too many therapists
- Impostor Myth – the deeply held belief that we don’t know what we’re doing
- Being a generalist out of fear when you’d rather be a specialist
- Confinement Myth – I can only serve these type of folks for the rest of my career
- How niches can evolve
- Niche burnout – signs you’re burning out on your niche
- The importance of self-awareness and self-assessment
- What forgetfulness has to do with empathy
- The difference between niche burnout and career burnout
- How to change your niche, especially when you have the same ideal client
- The shifts to make and the story to tell to make sense to your referral sources and ideal clients
Resources mentioned:
We’ve pulled together resources mentioned in this episode and put together some handy-dandy links. Please note that some of the links below may be affiliate links, so if you purchase after clicking below, we may get a little bit of cash in our pockets. We thank you in advance!
YourBadassTherapyPractice.com (link no longer works – you can find out more about Laura Long at her website).
Psychology Today Free E-course (link no longer works)
Facebook: Your Badass Therapy Practice
2 Mini Courses – usually $197, 50% off – use coupon code covidstillsucks (link no longer works)
BOSS Course – onboarding clients through SimplePractice (link no longer works)
Bad Ass Copy Queen (link no longer works)
Relevant Episodes:
Branding for Your Ideal Client
Are You Sure You’re A Specialist?
Connect with us!
Our Facebook Group – The Modern Therapists Group
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Who we are:
Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, the CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com
Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also Past President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com
A Quick Note:
Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.
Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.
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Credits:
Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/
Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano http://www.crystalmangano.com/
SPEAK YOUR MIND