My rate will be $100

Why it works:

• Fits somewhere between a masters level math tutor and an experienced psychotherapist.
• Clients who wish to use SMS, Email and/or phone, will be charged $25 per 15 min segment.
• The mobility aspect of my service will be an additional charge of $25 per 15 min of travel.
• Provides clients with options for crafting a therapy that is flexible, collaborative and customized.

Gosh that feels good. The indecision was driving me mad. And “going mad” isn’t the best way to promote your new business.

Thanks to Lynn and the Ideal Practice gang for support and feedback during this process.

Affirmation… prayers for secular folk?

As promised, I tried doing/saying affirmations as instructed in 12 Months To Your Ideal Private Practice. I did this every weekday, for 3 full weeks. On the fourth week, my affirmation commitment fell to 3-4 days. By the fifth week, my inner cynic was screaming:

AFFIRMATIONS ARE PRAYERS DRESSED-DOWN TO APPEAL TO SECULAR FOLK

As a practicing Jew, I wondered if my time would be better spent praying. You may ask, why not do both? Two reasons:

1. There’s only 24 hours in a day, and only so many of those hours, IMHO, should/could be spent on contemplative exercises.
2. Prayer informs every part of my life, not just my business… a “kill two birds…” scenario.

So for the time being, I’m dropping the affirmations from my daily rituals. In it’s place, I’ll say this**:

I gratefully thank You O living and eternal King, for You have returned my soul within me with compassion – abundant is Your faithfulness.

My AM ritual will continue as follows:

• meditate mindfully for 15 minutes.
• 100 push ups (every 2nd day)
• Check my GTD-esque system for “things to do”
• 5 minutes of gesture drawing.

If all goes well, the above should help my body/mind/soul toward focusing on, and helping to grow, my private practice.

I’ll post the results in 3 weeks time.

** The Modeh Ani is a Jewish prayer that observant Jews recite daily upon waking, while still in bed.

Month 8: Profit

If you work(ed) for non-profits, you’ve experienced the “knot in your stomach” reaction to threats of budget cuts.  If funding is approved, you breathe a sigh of relief, and slink back to your cubicle thanking God it wasn’t you… this time. Not very glamours, but it pays the bills, though this “security” comes at a price. Too many years of agency work, and we have trouble quantifying our worth. Worse, we begin to believe that people don’t pay for service. Hell, due to our meager salaries, we don’t pay for service.

Which is why Chapter 8 is a real humdinger, and raising all sorts of issues I’d rather not think about. For example, how do you make the psychological leap from earning $25-$36 per hour to $125-$160 per hour?

Isolation is a Dream Killer – B. Sher

I received a lot of good advice today. Yet I can’t remember any of it. What I do remember is the support, encouragement and subsequent mood shift – from skeptical to eager – that occurred as soon as my teleclass came to an end.

The moral is quite clear:  details aren’t important, the support is.

Muchos gracias…

Month 2: The Evolution of an Affirmation

1st Attempt
My practice fulfils a real need. People enthusiastically recommend my service.
I don’t have a flyer, nevermind a practice. This message was hard to take seriously.

2nd Attempt
My fares represent the value I provide, they allow me to live off my practice.
Fares? What fares? I’m still avoiding strategizing around this idea, hence this affirmation didn’t speak to me.

3rd Time’s a Charm
I’m developing a practice that I’m excited about, I am an entrepreneur.
I like this one. It creates a nice balance of discomfort and realism.

I just downloaded Michael Gerber’s “The E-Myth Revisited” off iTunes. As well, he has an E-Myth book aimed at physicians. I took a gamble and went with the original. Have any of you read his material? Any thoughts you’d like to share?

Do what you say (to yourself)

It’s enough to make a self-help fan weep into his Cheerios. You’ve purchased your n-th goal setting book a la Covey/Sher/Allan/Robbins/Godin, and the advice is, well, the same.

Step 1: Choose a goal
Step 2: Break it down into sizable chunks, something that you can DO today

Lynn has her own take on this process (Monthly Prep Form), yet without some degree of accountability, my motivation to DO the above waxes and wanes.

And so (cue snare roll), until the end of this course, I will publicly declare my weekly goals on this blog.

For the week of May 12, 2008, I commit to:

1. Doing my affirmations in the AM
2. Reviewing PR material & approve next stage of design process (website)

Anybody else wanna share?

Regrets, I’ve had a few…

Kathy wrote:

“I’ve been in practice for 20 years. I probably undercharged for 5 of these years. So first rule of thumb, don’t do what I did!!!”

Oh, this could be fun. Are there any other private practitioners willing to share a “don’t do what I did” story?

Literature for Entrepreneurs-in-the-Making

If you’re going to read one business book this year, read Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith.

Do you have any indispensable reads for the budding entrepreneur?

Smiling and Pricing

If you’ve worked with teens, it becomes head-slapping obvious that the context of traditional therapy is ill suited for adolescents. So based on my clinical experience and ability to connect with teens, I’m developing a coaching and therapy service specifically catered to youth and their families. Some features will include:

• mobility i.e. service provided at clients home, coffee shop, park, etc
• electronic communication i.e. text messaging, email, electronic geneograms
• coaching and/or psychotherapy
• evening and weekend hours

I’ve made a decision to abandon the traditional “hourly charge” and instead create a 5 tiered pricing system. My problem is I’m not sure how to charge for this service. My colleagues charge by the hour, so their advice isn’t applicable to my practice. Executive coaches employ tiered pricing, but their fees are, IMHO, astronomical, and hence unrealistic for my target market.

I, too, want to “smile” while discussing my fees. But I want to do so without provoking hysterical laughter and/or tears from a prospective client.

If you have a suggestion, please leave a comment.

Month 2: Affirmations and Meditations

I’ll admit it, they make me queasy. Affirmations and meditations seems to be popular tools among self-help authors. At best, they’re promoted as tools to help center and ground the participants, at worst they promise you the moon and the sky.

However, in light of Lynn’s request to “let me be the coach” and “be willing to take risks and try new things”, I’m trying my best to hush the nagging, critical inner-voice (a.k.a the gremlin).  So voila… here’s my affirmation:

My practice fulfils a real need. People enthusiastically recommend my service.

How about yourself? Have you created an affirmation that triggers “negative beliefs (to) quickly surface”? If so, have you attempted the charting exercise on page 55? Is it working?