The Business of Psychology

Dr Rosie Gilderthorp
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Are you a mental health professional with a feeling in the pit of your stomach that the system is BROKEN? Did you start your training full of ideas about changing the landscape of mental health for the better but now you find you are so busy seeing people in crisis that you don't have time to do any of it? Do you KNOW that we need to get out of our therapy rooms and start reaching people in other ways? Do you KNOW that the key to better mental health is prevention not crisis management? If you do then join me for a mix practical skills, strategies and inspirational interviews with psychologists and therapists just like you who are using their skills to do BIG things way beyond the therapy room. Prepare to get your "trainee spirit" back.

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  1. Episode 183

    "I’m Not Good at Business" – The Stories That Keep You Small

    “I’m Not Good at Business” - The Stories That Keep You SmallIn this miniseries I'm going to talk about some of the beliefs that I see most commonly in psychologists and therapists that keep people small, safe, and not really getting the most benefit out of being in independent practice. I'm going to share how if we can become aware of them, there are practical steps we can take that most of the time will get us through the discomfort that comes along with these beliefs. If that can give you a little bit more confidence to step forward in your business, I will be extremely happy. Today we're going to talk about the 'I'm not good at business' story. This is the one I told myself so relentlessly at the beginning of my practice, and I hear in around 50% of calls that I have with coaching clients. We're going to talk about the belief, where it comes up, how it sabotages your attempts to start or grow in independent practice, and look at some ways we can build new evidence to counteract the belief and move through the discomfort that it causes. Full show notes for this episode available at The Business of Psychology Links for Rosie: Substack: substack.com/@drrosie Rosie on Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp @drrosiegilderthorp The Magnetic ProfileIn my new mini course, The Magnetic Profile, I walk you through one specific business task. Over five short lessons, we use my Values, Voice, Impact framework to help you choose who your profile is for, say what they most need to hear, and plug it all into a simple template that you can use on directory sites, your website, and as a business asset that I'm going to show you how to repurpose in 100 different ways to help the right clients to find you. Most importantly, you'll come out of the course with a finished profile and proof that you can do this business thing in a way that feels ethical and manageable. You can find all the details here: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/the-magnetic-profile The 'I'm not good at business' BeliefAt the beginning of my practice, I didn't think that I had the kind of personality that would make a good business owner. I'd been told throughout my life that I was quite soft, that I was quite gentle, that people would walk all over me. Elements of that were true. In my personal life, I don't particularly like to be the boss. I don't like telling people what to do. It's certainly true that in a negotiation, I will not do what they do on The Apprentice and be proud of having a laser-focused obsession with profit, and I'm not single-minded. We consume a lot of media about what good business looks like, and it's this very shark-ish, profit-focused, screw you, I'm going to take what I want attitude. I'd grown up watching The Apprentice and Dragon's Den and absorbing those narratives that don't fit my personality at all. So I think I'd bought the idea that if you weren't like that, you weren't good at business. Obviously that is not true at all, because when you get out into the business community and meet people who are really successful, you discover quickly that the people that make it to the top are warm, they are empathic, they're really good at working out what people need from them and finding creative ways to meet that need. There are some exceptions, but in the industries that we're interested in, in mental health or education, or industries adjacent to wellbeing, if you lack that empathy and you lack any compassion, it's very difficult for you to come up with the kind of ideas that are going to take off. I also learned that building relationships and being a trustworthy person to be in a business relationship with is a real accelerant to business growth. That's something, that if you're completely single-minded and out for the profit margin, and have no passion for helping people or your local business community, is incredibly hard to fake. Establishing meaningful relationships where people will give you a leg up, I think would be impossible if you had that kind of personality type. What I discovered quite quickly in my business journey was that leaning into the skills that I have as a psychologist, the fact that I am much more interested in helping people solve their problems than I am making a profit, the fact that I genuinely care about the people that I meet at business networking, and I really get quite invested and excited in their business problems and want to try and help, those were superpowers that made me stand out, that helped me build the relationship network, which accelerated my business to being quite successful reasonably quickly. What I do in coaching is try and encourage other people to really recognise the strengths that you have in your personality, that can be rocket fuel for your business, and to deal with what might be the limitations. I know that because I'm not naturally 100% focused on the profit margin, I won't make a deal with somebody on the spot because I know if I do, it's very likely that I'll undercharge or do something that compromises the health of my business, because I'm excited to work with them, and I'm not very good at doing the mental maths on the spot. I know that about myself, so I changed my sales process so that I'm sending the proposal after the call. I am never talking about the exact solution that I'm going to offer on a call. You'll notice if you ever do a coaching discovery call with me, that most of the time I'll talk about what you think about whether StartUp might be right for you. I might give you my opinion about whether one of my coaching programs is likely to be a good fit, but I won't make the offer and send you through all the details until after our call, because I don't always make brilliant decisions for my business in the heat of the moment. Rather than criticizing myself and saying, "I'm not good at business, so I shouldn't do it," I take an approach where I allow myself to play to my strengths, and then I mitigate the bits that I'm not so good at by getting in support or just switching up my processes so that I have more time for the bits that I know I'm going to struggle with. That's the kind of thing that you can do if this ‘I'm not good at business’ story isn't dominating your psychology. While it's front and center, you don't see any of that. In those early days where I thought I was just bad at business, it felt very existential. It was like, either I make this really successful really quickly, or I've got no business being in business, and I should get out and get back into an employed role, which wasn't even possible for me. I think it's really important to try and move past this belief, otherwise you can make a decision which is based on very black and white thinking, defining yourself either as good or bad at business, when in reality there are so many ways that all different personalities can be good at business if we understand ourselves well and we're willing to structure our work around that. The CultureIt's really interesting to consider where this ‘I'm not good at business’ belief that is so pervasive in our community actually comes from, because most people going into independent practice actually don't have any business experience. We by definition don't have evidence for this belief, and yet it is so common. I think the answer is that it's something that's really baked into the culture, in the NHS, but also in our training pathways. There's so many deep reasons that might be baked into our culture, and I think one that needs talking about is the relationship between psychology, psychotherapy, and privilege. I think we have a strange cultural problem with the concept of earning money and a deeply ingrained belief that people that want money are less pure, less compassionate, less caring than people who don't even think about money. I could give you direct quotes of people saying that to me in training, so I don't think it's that much of a stretch. As with almost everything, I think that is uncomfortably linked with the class system that we have here in the UK, and that potentially psychology and psychotherapy came from this kind of upper class tradition where it wasn't polite to talk about money or think about money, but that's because you didn't have to talk or think about money. It's our job to challenge that and to think about whether we really believe in this way of thinking, or whether we want to start thinking a bit differently. If this is the culture that you've been trained in, then the ‘I'm not good at business’ story is actually an affirmative one. It's one that began as positive; people telling themselves, "I'm doing this low-paid work because I'm a good person, because I really care about people, and that means that I must be rejecting all things that are about money and acquisition of money, and business falls under that category.” I think it's a classic example of stories that were once positive for us becoming toxic and holding us back as we develop through our lives and they start to become more problematic. If you are plagued by this, then getting together in your peer supervision group and chatting about it and thinking through where did this story come from for

  2. Episode 184

    Procrastination, Overwhelm and the Illusion of “I’ll Start When…”

    Procrastination, Overwhelm and the Illusion of "I’ll Start When…"Welcome to The Business of Psychology podcast and our special miniseries on the beliefs that keep people stuck in either a private practice that doesn't really work for them or that stop them getting started in private practice at all. These are mini episodes where I'm sharing the things that I've learned from coaching hundreds of other psychologists and therapists and also going through my own mental struggles with the rollercoaster that is business. Today I want to talk about procrastination and overwhelm, and specifically how frequently I hear people saying that they're just not the kind of person that can overcome their procrastination or overwhelm. Full show notes for this episode available at The Business of Psychology Links: Episode 179: Why every therapist needs to use social media to improve their SEO Substack: substack.com/@drrosie Rosie on Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp @drrosiegilderthorp The Magnetic ProfileIn my new mini course, The Magnetic Profile, I walk you through one specific business task. Over five short lessons, we use my Values, Voice, Impact framework to help you choose who your profile is for, say what they most need to hear, and plug it all into a simple template that you can use on directory sites, your website, and as a business asset that I'm going to show you how to repurpose in 100 different ways to help the right clients to find you. Most importantly, you'll come out of the course with a finished profile and proof that you can do this business thing in a way that feels ethical and manageable. You can find all the details here: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/the-magnetic-profile Procrastination And OverwhelmI think most psychologists and therapists acknowledge that all human beings use procrastination as a technique sometimes, and that it is part of a normal human experience to get overwhelmed sometimes. But I think a lot of people do have this story about themselves that they are a procrastinator, or they are someone who becomes overwhelmed easily, and as a result, the world of successful business is not available to them. And this really troubles me, and I have to say that something I think is unhelpful about the way that some people's late diagnosis of neurodivergence is framed, is that some people will receive that diagnostic label and then think that writes them off from being able to ever achieve success in business. Or they'll heavily criticize themselves because their assessment has illuminated perhaps things that they're not so brilliant at and they will feel like they're going to have to push a boulder up a hill to be successful in business. When actually, if we think psychologically about what procrastination and overwhelm actually are, then there are so many ways that we can use the strengths that lie behind those tendencies to supercharge our businesses. Some of the most successful clients that I have worked with would identify themselves as procrastinators and people who struggle with overwhelm, because those come from places of deep care and passion for the people that they want to support with their businesses. I think it's really important that, while it's helpful to identify in yourself if you do have tendencies towards procrastination or becoming overwhelmed, we shouldn't allow that kind of story to become a way that we define ourselves that then blocks us from looking for the ways we can play to our strengths to implement good business advice that we might be given. I want to share today, how we can move through the blocking belief that we might have about ourselves, often by accepting a bit of support where we might need it. Something I hear all the time from clients that come to me for coaching is that they've signed up for coaching because they're really annoyed with themselves. They've usually done loads of work, but they feel like they've got about 20 tabs open on their browser and nothing is actually getting completed. They can never tick anything off their list because it's never good enough. Some people will talk about this as procrastination. Other people will talk about the emotional experience. They'll talk about feeling completely overwhelmed. So they open all the tabs, but then they never feel like they engage properly with anything that they start because they become overwhelmed, and they just run away from it. If we think about where this comes from psychologically, you would not feel that way if you didn't care about your potential clients, if you didn't really want this business to be successful. So although this is classic avoidance behavior, there's motivation behind it, and where there's motivation, we can work with that. I never feel despondent if I have a client who is a procrastinator, who's becoming overwhelmed, because it actually tells me that they want to do this, that deep down, this is important to them, or this wouldn't be procrastination, it would just be something that they decided they weren't going to pursue. We know the brain likes to procrastinate because it allows us to avoid the potential for shame, rejection, or failure. An excellent short-term strategy. It gives us the illusion of safety because we get to stay safe in our research mode, which a lot of us really enjoy. But the trouble is procrastination and perfectionism go hand in hand. It is so likely that the reason that you feel like you need to avoid these tasks is that the bar you've set for yourself is super high, that you want this to be the best, the most perfect independent practice that your community has ever seen. That can make every task feel too big to start. It's also true that if you set the bar for yourself that you need to have a complete understanding of something, it can become overwhelming really quickly. This often happens when people talk to me about overwhelm rather than procrastination. Often it's because they're expecting themselves to become a lawyer, because it tends to be that people get really stuck in the overwhelm around the legal aspects of setting up their practice. This can be because they look at the legal templates and think that they need to be able to understand why every comma is in the place that it is. We do provide training with our legal documents because I want you to understand the principles behind them, but the fact is, unless you're going to train in commercial law like Clare Veal from Aubergine Legal, our lovely lawyer, has done, then you're not going to understand every minute detail of your contracts and policies. We can understand the broad brush principles, but we're not lawyers and we don't need to become lawyers. We have our own expertise and that's why we pay Clare Veal to draft those templates for us, because you don't need to become a lawyer. And if you think that you do because you believe everything needs to be perfect and you need to be in full control of every minute detail of your practice, then of course that's going to be overwhelming. A Need To Do Everything At OnceThe other thing that I think contributes to overwhelm and procrastination is a sense that people need to do everything at once, like getting their practice up and running and fully competent tomorrow. That's not possible. I am a big believer that we can make a lot of progress, my core coaching program is called Start Up in 90 Days, because you absolutely can, over 90 days, get a practice up and running and clients coming in. That is possible. One week is not possible, not to do it to the standard that you're going to want. I think often people have a really unrealistic expectation of themselves, that they're going to be able to learn everything they need to learn and implement it all in a very short period of time. And of course, that is massively overwhelming. Overconsuming AdviceThe other thing I see is people over-consuming advice. Sometimes people do this with this podcast or with my coaching programs. I'll see in the backend of my coaching website that they've watched every single one of my lessons, and that's a red flag, because if you watch them all in the first week that you're in the coaching platform, that tells me you're taking on board a lot of information, but you're not taking the action. When I coach people, I give very short, 10 or 15 minutes of information, and then I give something practical for you to do to move it forward in your business. The reason I do that is that we are really prone to overwhelming ourselves by thinking about the whole picture. And actually, we tend to get much more success if I give people a template of the business plan that they're going to have fully created by the end of the program, because I do want people to know what we're going to cover and how everything fits together, but then I encourage you to go step by step. Because if you think about the whole big thing, of course that's overwhelming. But if you just take the next step, the next thing we need to do,...

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Are you a mental health professional with a feeling in the pit of your stomach that the system is BROKEN? Did you start your training full of ideas about changing the landscape of mental health for the better but now you find you are so busy seeing people in crisis that you don't have time to do any of it? Do you KNOW that we need to get out of our therapy rooms and start reaching people in other ways? Do you KNOW that the key to better mental health is prevention not crisis management? If you do then join me for a mix practical skills, strategies and inspirational interviews with psychologists and therapists just like you who are using their skills to do BIG things way beyond the therapy room. Prepare to get your "trainee spirit" back.

Information

  • Creator
    Dr Rosie Gilderthorp
  • Episodes
    200
  • Seasons
    14
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Dr Rosie Gilderthorp
  • Show Website
    The Business of Psychology

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