What is holding us back in private practice?

So what’s holding you back?

The question is often, “what will other people think of me if I do things differently?”

If you start to talk about your practice differently.

If you show up differently online.

If you show up differently for clients.

What will other psychologists think about me? And will I receive criticism for doing things differently?

Then there’s questions around, “is it really possible to do that differently? I’ve been told that there’s an expectation of a certain prescribed path maybe that I should be using or should be following.”

What I think happens is that there are certain areas of practice where there are prescribed methods for a reason, but I think this belief in ‘the way to do something’ that starts to leach out into other areas of our practice until it settles into how we operate. It becomes more of a generalised belief.

This element of developing a different mindset around our practices means that we need to also think about how we challenge ourselves to practice psychology differently in certain areas.

Finally, there is the belief that, “it’s too complicated right now”. It feels difficult when we’re trying to square all of those competing values. It can feel really complicated to then start thinking about how you can do something differently, especially if we’re in that mode of delivering in order to meet our money requirements. We need to live and we need to pay the mortgage, so it can feel really overwhelming to say let’s take a step back and look at working differently. So those are three elements that personally may be holding us back in private practice. What are your thoughts on this? Share your experience in the comments below and we can get the conversation started!