Build a Leading Practice

Why the rules that helped you become a psychologist can keep you trapped in repetitive work

Date: Thursday 8 October

Time: 6pm UK

Format: Live online via Zoom (recording available)

Price: Free

You can have a busy practice, years of expertise and a steady stream of people seeking you out, while knowing that the work filling your practice is not the work you want to spend the rest of your career delivering.

Perhaps you want to develop a programme, methodology or specialist body of work.

Work with organisations or communities.

Bring together different strands of your expertise.

Build something more strategic, systemic or preventative.

The possibilities are exciting.

Yet the repetitive work keeps winning.

The obvious explanation is usually the lack of time, energy or clarity.

Maybe you need more confidence. Another qualification. A better niche. More business skills. More space before you can properly begin.

Sometimes those things genuinely matter.

But after years of working with experienced psychologists and psychological practitioners, I think there is something else going on too.

We spend our professional lives being socialised into particular ideas about what credible psychological practice looks like.

We learn the recognised pathways. The professional roles. The boundaries. The standards. The ways expertise is demonstrated and legitimacy is earned.

Much of that is essential.

But some of it also becomes a set of unwritten rules about who we are allowed to be and what our practices are allowed to become.

And those rules can start pulling against us when we want to move beyond established forms of delivery and build a more distinctive Leading Practice.

The difficulty is that these rules rarely announce themselves as rules.

Instead, they can show up as hesitation, second-guessing, keeping promising ideas private, or feeling that something else needs to happen before you can really begin.

You may find yourself thinking you need to be clearer about the direction, more confident in the idea, better qualified, or more certain that you can talk about the work credibly.

Or you may simply keep taking the familiar work because it is already established, understood and coming through the door.

And gradually, the practice you already know how to run keeps getting reinforced while the practice you actually want to build stays at the edges.