How to Become an Entrepreneurial Clinician?

What does it mean to be an Entrepreneurial Clinician? In this episode, Jo shares the 3 key concepts that will enable you to look after yourself while you look after others.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

If you know you need more support, please visit my website at https://jomuirhead.com

TRANSCRIPT:

Well, hello again. Welcome to the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. This is Jo and I’m looking forward to chatting to you again today.

How are you liking the episodes of the podcast so far? Can you do me a favour? Can you make sure that you have taken the time to write a review, given us a rating and shared the podcast with at least one other friend? Maybe you’ve even taken a screenshot of it and you shared it to your social stories. That would be really awesome because the more people who can find this podcast, the more conversations we can be having. The more conversations we can be having, the more we get to look forward to as health professionals in our future. Because this is not just a podcast about making more money. This is a podcast about future-proofing health professionals so that we can stick it out, do the work without it costing us our lives because it’s a very real thing. This work taking people’s lives.

Today we’re gonna be talking about, well, I’m gonna be talking about what are the things that you need to actually practice being an entrepreneurial clinician. So there are three main concepts that we need to think about. Okay? And if they’ve all gotta work together. So you can’t have one without the other two. And you can’t just pick and choose which one of these three you wanna work with. You actually need to do all three and you need to work out how all three fit together. Cause if you can’t do that, you are going to be the sort of person who is chasing tactics and you are going to burn yourself out cause you’ll be chasing the next marketing hack or the next shiny thing. Or you’ll be getting on the next silver bullet bandwagon or you’ll be chasing the next level of certification.

And none of that on its own is going to help you be the type of clinician who looks after themselves while they’re looking after others. So let’s get stuck into it.

The first thing I kid you not, the first place you need to start is you need to know yourself. This might be a fairly unpopular opinion, but I cannot tell you how surprised I am at the lack of social and emotional intelligence I find in health professionals for lack of insight. Now I get why this happens. We are very good at working with pathology. We are very good at working with what’s broken. That is where our neural pathways have been refined and honed that we sometimes forget how to function in a non-pathological environment or a non-clinical environment. That’s cool. But we need to understand who we are and who we are right now and who we wanna be into the future.

Because it is not okay for us to be working with clients that we’re not a great fit for. We might have to do it for a little time. We’ve all cut our teeth on that. But that gets to a point where we can start going. You know what? I, Jo Muirhead, am not a good fit for working with people with drug and alcohol or any addiction. I’m not good at it. I’m not a good fit for it. I am too judgey mc judgey. And I say that with all honesty and all transparency because you put me someone like me with a person with an addiction, that person isn’t gonna feel empathy. That person is gonna feel judgment regardless of how hard I work at not doing that. I’m also not a good fit for working clinically with kids. I’m too parental. They don’t need that in their life. They get enough of that. I’m just not a good fit for working with younger people. I can do kind of young adults like teenage to young adults, but it’s not an easy fit for me.

So knowing what I’m not a good fit for is brilliant. Knowing what I am a good fit for that was harder for me to refine. But that comes down to me knowing myself, knowing what I like, knowing what I don’t like, knowing how I like to work. Knowing the types of clients that push the buttons that they shouldn’t be pushing when they’re the ones needing the clinical treatment. Understanding myself and where I’m at and what my needs are, what my family’s needs are right now. Where am I headed in this thing called career or life? Those questions inform for us as health professionals the type of work we wanna do.

It is rare that you ever meet somebody excelling in this work or looking successful in this work and they can’t tell you who they are. Now this is not to say that our work becomes enmeshed in who we are, right? That is not the conversation I am having here. That is work addiction. That is bad. We can talk about that into the future. What I am talking about right now is what I needed from my work, how I needed to turn up to my work, how I wanted to be rewarded in my work, how I wanted to be fulfilled by my work at the age of 30 is quite different to the needs I have at the age of 50. It was very different when I became a single mum to when my son left home. These are the things I know I talk about with clients when they’re coming to see me all the time.

I will often ask the question, how old are you? And some people look quite affronted and that is why I’m asking that question cause I’m trying to get a construct in my head about your stage of life. And then I’ll ask questions about who else is in your home? Who else do you have responsibility for? Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean little people anymore. That could mean parents or grandparents. Or you might have somebody in your home that is a foster child or foster human. Understanding what you need from yourself and your world and therefore your work goes a long way for you to be creative, for you to then work out what you need from your work. So if we don’t know this about ourselves. It’s not just about who’s your ideal client. We don’t know what we need from our work. We are missing the whole point of being in private practice and probably the whole point of being a health professional, I haven’t thought about that enough.

So we might park that idea for future episodes. So you’ve gotta know who you are and you wanna know what you want from your work and from your business and from your career. You’re gonna be able to answer those questions and they’re gonna change. They should change.

Then we wanna know who we serve because once we know who we’re, we can start talking into who we wanna serve. Because you know the people that light you up, you know the problems that light you up. You know the solutions that light you up. You know the environments that light you up. I could not work inside of corrective services that would terrify me, but some people thrive there. Some people are amazing. I’m working with a client at the moment who’s been there for years and years and years. She’s incredible. She’s one of the most well-adjusted humans I’ve ever met. Me? Holy crap, I’ve been talking to all of you EMDR therapists twice a day every day.

So I know who I serve because I know who I am and I’m comfortable with that. And I don’t feel guilty about it because I know there are other people in the world, other people who are better at working with kids than me. Other people who are better working in with marriages and relationships than me. Other people who are better at working with people in active addiction than me. I know that. And if I can resource them and if I can send these clients to the people who are better at it than me, then gosh, they’re gonna get the better treatment. I am gonna feel better. They’re gonna get what they need. The person doing the work with that client is gonna feel fulfilled. See how this works. It is awesome. This is how we all work together because there’s no need for scarcity, there’s no need for comparison. Cause how I do my work over here. It’s probably very different to how you do your work over there because guess what? We’re different. And that’s what we all us coaches are trying to explain. When we say comparison’s real, we get it. But it’s not necessary. It creates an emotional load that we actually don’t need to carry. And let’s face it, this work is hard enough without us giving ourselves extra things to be worried about.

So when we know who we are and then we know who we’re best able to serve, including those that we are interested in, we can then create a client clinician match. It makes it so much easier for us to engage with clients, to sell clients, to onboard clients, for clients to stick around, for clients to want to stay when they feel that level of connection that we haven’t had to work so hard at because it just comes out of who we’re, that’s kinda the essence of attraction. Just be yourself. So who you are, just as important as who you serve because we wanna get this client clinician match. That is a beautiful synergy that match and that is a wonderful thing for both the clinician and the client to experience.

But the thing we need to do next is we’ve gotta be able to communicate in a way that these clients, well, prospective clients at this point in time, can understand us. Which means letting go of all your jargon, all of it. No, there is nobody out there unless they’re a peer researching how to C B T my P T S D. They’re going help me stop feeling scared or they’re researching, I wanna kill myself. Or they’re researching how, when does therapy help? How do I know? Because I actually checked up on this before I recorded this episode today to see the types of hits that are coming in from a Google search. And it terrified me when I saw the numbers of hits where people actually are talking about ending their own lives. So we need to be able to communicate with prospective clients. And what we’re very good at doing is communicating with prospective clients as though they’re clients. We will use clinical language, clinical phraseology, clinical concepts. We don’t think we’re doing it, but we do.

But they’re not clients yet. You’ve got a lot of education to do before they actually become a client. And it’s not just education about their condition. It’s education about how you are the solution to the problem that they are seeking. So we’ve gotta learn how to communicate with them, aka marketing aka connection. And you can do this without being unethical. You can do this without breaching any of your code of conduct requirements just by becoming informed and educated on who they are. You need to understand that better than they understand it because you need to know that you are the solution to the problem they are seeking. Because when you know who you serve and how to connect and communicate with them, then you have a common language, right? Nobody else really talks in acronyms the way we do. Prospective clients aren’t gonna do that. Well, they might, but they really don’t have the right understanding. And then we get burned because they don’t stick around cause we haven’t taken them through an educative process on what it’s like to work with us. What it’s like to have that problem that they’re seeking a solution for resolved.

Cause when you know exactly who you are and you know how to communicate in a way that your ideal clients or your prospective clients can understand you, then you become the go-to personal, the sought after expert. This is where you can turn up in Facebook local communities and add incredible value, not drive-by, drop a link marketing, add incredible value. So people start seeking you out as somebody to talk about mental health or joint problems or working from homes or working from home or tech or your discord in the family. This is how you do that by knowing who you are, who you serve, and how to communicate in a way that those that you serve can understand you.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to make everything extremely simple. It means you need to understand them well enough to know where they’re using language. How are they using language? What language is attractive to them? The reason why I don’t work with young people, they speak in a language I don’t understand and I end up looking like another parent. I look like an ill-informed parent. They’re not gonna trust me. Yeah. So when you know who you are and who you serve, we have this beautiful client clinician match. When we know who we serve and how to communicate to these people in a way that they can understand us, then we have a common language. And when we know who we are and we know how to communicate with prospective clients, then we can become a go-to person. A sought after expert.

And this people is how we become an entrepreneurial clinician because we stop asking, what am I treating? And we’re always asking, how can I add value? One of the biggest mindset shifts we can make as clinicians who want to actually practice entrepreneurial healthcare, we wanna be able to meet clients where they’re at, which means we need to be in tune with them, which means we need to stop diagnosing them when we’re marketing to them.

It’s a really big issue in health care and health care marketing. We’ve gotta move away from diagnosis. Diagnosis is what happens when they’re given you money, when they’ve given you time, when they’ve said Yes, I wanna come and see you. You can’t diagnose anybody from your marketing content that you can share with them the problems that they’re having and the solution that that you can offer at a really high level that enables them to go, I want that solution, I want it, I want it, I want it, I want it.

So if you wanna know more about how you can know yourself, know who you serve, and learn how to communicate in such a way that people are wanting to work with you, then you need to join You, The Entrepreneurial Clinician. You just do because that’s what I do there and I help you do it. I walk alongside you, we work this stuff out together. I don’t leave you alone. It’s not a self-paced course, it’s a coaching community. There are trainings for you to do. There is feedback for you to get, there is practice for you to have, and I would love to have you as a part of this community.

So check out the show notes because you’ll find a link to it there. Otherwise, I will be in your ears in the next episode of You, The Entrepreneurial Clinician.