I was fortunate to have this experience in the past week in a Facebook group of all places.  Curt Widhalm of Therapy Reimagined and Modern Therapist Survival Guide, afforded me another opportunity to think about the concept of how we value the time we have when we are not seeing a client, or not doing something that directly results in revenue being created. His question has been rolling around in my head this past week and is especially poignant when I find myself dealing with ill health that has reduced the amount of time I can actually spend “at work”.

If you have been a part of my community for a while you will know that I’m very passionate about health professionals being appropriately paid for the work we do.  It’s easy for us to have conservation about valuing our time when we have a client directly in front of us, when that direct interaction results in an exchange of money from our client for our time (and education, and skills and experience).

If you charge yourself at $220 per session, then you have placed a $220 price tag on a session.    If you deliver 15 of these sessions a week than you have a price tag of $3,300 per week.   Do this for 4 weeks in a month and you have a monthly price tag of $13,200.

However, if you are like me, it will take a lot more than 15 hours of “work” to get me to the point of delivering those 15 sessions.  Does that mean that every hour (if a session was for an hour), is then valued at $220?  Or does it mean that the true value of that session is say $55, when I consider the administration, the marketing, the report writing and the fixed costs, of providing that session.

Hmmmmm thinking, thinking, thinking…

It is also quite easy for us to value out time we spend in managing others.  If you have a team of 10 clinicians, each of whom have the ability to see 15 client’s a week at $220 per session, then each of those clinicians is able to produce $3,300.  10 clinicians each producing $3,300 means you are managing a team that has the capacity to generate $33, 000.00 per week.   This is exponentially more than $220 per “hour” or “session” right? Even if you spent 30 hours a week directly managing your 10 team members, the direct value of your “time” has now gone up to $1,100 per hour.

Its easier still to see direct sales for products and services that you have created say a Book or a course, that no longer requires any of your time. However, you have quite possibly forgotten and did not account for all of the time, energy and money it took to create that produce or course.  In completing my Book in 2018, I spent $23K on getting that thing to print, this did NOT include my time.  Have I made $23K back in book sales – bwahahahahahahaha and nope.  Do I expect to, ahhh nope. Does that mean the book is not valuable?

 Hmmmmm thinking, thinking, thinking…

How then do we value such activities as self-care or continuing education?   I know from years and years of working with health professionals that true self care and effective professional development tend to get the left overs of our budget, our energy and our thinking.  Many of us who are employed expect our employers to fund this.  Many of us who are self employed do not even think about this.

With the lenses of hindsight, it becomes easier to justify paying for professional development, as well the cost of taking the time out of your direct clinical work to enable you to participate in the training.  We are in such a rush to bill the next client that we have lost sight of the fact that to be sustainable as a health professional means we need to have a long game in sight.

Without effective continuing professional development, we are at risk of being left behind our peers and becoming irrelevant. If we become irrelevant then no one is going to buy our services.  If we had planned for our professional development to keep us engaged and relevant, then we will have 1 part of the puzzle that will allow us to have sustainability in our profession.  If we knew that spending $3,300 on professional development activities would result  in a direct increase in our earning capacity, I think more clinicians would be doing more useful professional development and not chasing the cheap, free and easy right before the CPD or CEU cut off period for  our professional associations.

I have a testimonial from a client I received this weekend.  He attended my 2-day Success Mindset Masterclass back in 2016.  At that time, he was struggling to visualise making $20K to be able to fund his family a trip to Europe.  He paid close to $2K to spend 2 days with me (and had to spend money on accommodation and travel), and in the last month he has generated over $80K in revenue.  In a month.  That’s playing the long game.

Those numbers are really nice, aren’t they?  

However, without effective self-care our sustainability as health professionals is time and energy limited.  We will get used up like the engine in a coffee grinder.  Without effective self-care we will burn out; we will disengage, we will get sick… you don’t need me to tell you this or give you a gazillion statistics, you know this.  We talk about this amongst ourselves ALL THE TIME.

What if the true cost benefit of the $2,000 conference actually enabled you to create $100,000 in the next 5 years?  Would you find the $2,000?  I think so.

What if the true cost of seeing client’s 3 days a week ONLY and having very strong boundaries on your time enabling you to be able to get all of your work activities done in a “normal” working week that created a sense of contentment , peace and calm, meant that you were still doing this work at age 70, what would that mean for you?

I am serious about asking this question because I have spoken to several health professionals l in their 70’s who cannot stop working on account of a lack of retirement savings, yet are so burnt out that they can no longer continue with the work they know so well.  This is a very real situation for many, many people.  

We lose a LOT when we only think of the value of our time in monetary terms.  Our value can be measured by other things, I’ve mentioned sustainability here, in my book The Entrepreneurial Clinician I talk about fulfillment,  other writers have included satisfaction.

As health professionals we are most often other focused, our sustainability means that we can make meaningful contributions to the growing body of knowledge that we contribute to.  I can’t tell you how much it continues to sadden me that people leave the health professions after 3-5 years.  It worries me as a consumer of health services that the only experienced people left are going to be 5 years post graduation.

It’s time to get serious about what we value, before we ask others to value us!