01 Counselling Private Practice - Charging for therapy

Running a business isn’t something necessarily taught during core training, but through the ‘Practice Partner’ section, Rory and Ken will share some of their thoughts and tips when it comes to setting up and running a private practice.

The main points of this section are:

• Putting a monetary value on your skills can be very challenging; especially considering counselling is very much a helping profession.
• It can feel like you are exploiting people by charging for your services, but there will always be people who choose to pay, there is no exploitation in the exchange.
• It’s important to value yourself – you have worked hard for your training (and paid for it.)
• Everyone who chooses to pay for private practice, is making the waiting list shorter for those who can’t afford it.
• You may need to look at, and confront, your relationship with money – if you often say you're bad or irresponsible with money, why is that? Who first introduced this idea to you? This is something you can take to supervision.
• Paying household bills such as gas and electricity – is you running your home business. You're already most of the way there in terms of having that mindset, and being capable of running your practice.