Setting Online Therapy Session Rates (And Coping with Your Inner Critic)

Marketing Strategies for Therapists Video Series, Episode 3

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01:00
So, you want to increase your rates, but you have an internal critic who's just yammering in your ear, making it hard for you to take the steps that you need to to increase your rates to start getting some self-paying clients or to fill with self-paying clients and today we're going to work through some of those internal critical thoughts that you might be having so that you can free yourself up to be able to live the life that you want.

01:25
I'm going to teach you the math and the experiments that are going to let you bypass the work on your self-worth that many people will say is required before you can increase your rates and I'm going to tell you that instead, if you can do the math and the experimentation, and you see, "oh my gosh, my clients are paying my full fee rate," all of a sudden, you're gonna start feeling more worthy of that rate. The point is that we don't have to wait until you feel worthy to have rates that support the life that you need to live. So, paying off your loans, being able to fund your retirement, paying down your mortgage, being able to go on vacation, having time to pick your kids up from school, all the things that we would like to have in our lives.

02:49
Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown quote, "daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves even when we risk disappointing others." There will be clients that you disappoint, because you weren't a good fit in some kind of way.

03:58
And I want to share with you a story about my own therapist and how we landed on our rate together. He said to me, "Looks like you had sticker shock and I think maybe what would be helpful, because it feels like we're really good fit in every other kind of way, is to take some time, look at your finances and check it out and see was that just a sticker shock reaction or truly is it not affordable? In which case, you know, I'll help you find somebody else. And I'll also look at my family finances and see if it is realistic for me and my family, for me to lower that rate. And let's see, you know, where we land, see, see what happens."

07:01
Let's talk about math. Let's say you need $100,000 gross. So that's the total amount that you make, we're not taking out taxes, we're not taking out expenses,this is the total amount that you need to cover all the things, right? Then how many weeks do I want to work. So I'm going to divide that $100,000 by 48 weeks, that's how much money I need to make per week, then I'm going to divide that by the number of hours you WANT to work. You're going to go ahead and do that division and that is the fee per hour that you need to charge to live the life you want.

09:25
So the experiment is not, "Am I worth that much?" But does the market tolerate that much. So what that meant for me was I was going to go hard at marketing for six weeks in every way that I could think of and see what was happening.

11:05
So once we figure out where we want your rate to be, we need to think about where do people exist who can pay that rate who are in your niche, or your ideal client, and I talk a lot about ideal client.

13:14
When you see your first client at your full fee rate, you may do the worst therapy you've done in your life. In my very first full fee, private pay private practice client session, I threw every intervention I had ever heard of at that poor client. I felt the need to perform. So, just a little normalizing if that happens to you and also just to remember that the literature is clear, clients want to feel known, heard, understood. Build the relationship, listen with your third year, really get to know your people. And that is going to make the therapy worth it for them.

14:18
And if you want to learn more about how to market to your ideal client, you might want to join me in a course that I have coming up.