Building Your Ideal Private Practice

Do you ever get a good idea and then watch it quickly mature and flourish in your imagination? You are reading from your newly published book to an enthusiastic crowd! You are being interviewed on Fresh Air! You are invited to give a TED talk or, if you're a therapist, you see your schedule full of beloved clients whose evolution and growth feels deeply rewarding while your bank account fills with well-deserved inflow of money. When the fantasy fades, you are back where you were when you started: full of good ideas, and with the glow of fruition still a long way off.

There's where you are now, there's where you want to be, and there's everything in between. It's in the space between the dreaming phase and the successful outcome phase where we spend most of our time, and where we can struggle to stay motivated, inspired, and focused. Lynn Grodzki's book, Building Your Ideal Private Practice: A guide for therapists and other healing professionals, offers a bridge between vision and final product. She guides us through the nuts and bolts of advertising, handling money, building an online presence, keeping clients, and other aspects of running a private practice. What is so magical about the book is how she integrates these practical tools with meditations, positive affirmations, and intuitive exercises that help to clarify vision, develop an abundance mindset and engage our creative, passionate, playful sides so often left out of the day-to-day realities of running a business. When I feel stuck, bored, discouraged, or unclear, I open this book and am reminded of the possibilities inherent in each moment, and the practical tools that will help make those possibilities a reality. I highly recommend this book.

Here's an excerpt:
Send Love to Your Practice
Years ago I developed a meditation to enhance therapists' feelings of goodwill and love toward their businesses. I teach this same meditation in almost every presentation or workshop I lead because it does so much good so quickly providing therapists with a quick antidote to fear-based thinking. In the space of the five minutes it takes to complete the meditation, I see therapists make a shift. As they contemplate sending love to their businesses, their faces change. Furrowed brows become smooth, tense jaws lift up into soft smiles, hunched shoulders relax. Here's a written transcript of the meditation. Ask someone to read it to you or make your own tape. Then sit back, listen, and send love to your practice...

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There are so many areas of our business we don't love. These are usually the ways we feel bound, pushed, or burdened by our practices. This is normal, because a business has many needs and demands, and we must respond to those needs to keep our business viable. But just like any other entity, it does better if we respond to it with love. 

Take these steps to send love to your practice:
​ 1. Close your eyes. Relax your body and your mind. Breathe easily and comfortably.

2. Think about your practice, exactly as it exists today. See it or sense it, in your mind's eye, as a separate entity from you. With your eyes closed, as you think about it, locate it in space. Maybe you see it off to the right of you, or above yourself. Notice exactly where you locate it, in your mind. Notice any emotions you experience as you think about it. Notice any critical thoughts or judgments you carry about it. Notice any body sensations you feel. Pay close attention to areas of tension in your body. 

3. Now put your practice aside, momentarily, and think of a person, place, or thing that you love with your whole heart and feel that pure, unconditional feeling of love in your body. Allow that feeling to expand, so that you have a strong sense of pure, easy, unconditional love in your body, emanating from the area of your heart.

4. Imagine that you are sending or directing that feeling of love to your practice. The love flows from your heart to wherever you have located your practice in space. Sending love unconditionally to your practice, to every neglected, unappreciated, misunderstood, irritating aspect of your business. Imagine that your practice is capable of receiving the love, taking it in like a sponge absorbing water, or a plant absorbing sunlight, easily and naturally, so the more love you send, the more your practice absorbs.

5. Now imagine you are standing inside your practice and feel the love yourself. Send love to yourself and your practice. Think of an affirmation or an image that will help you to hold on to this experience, so you think of your practice with a loving heart every day. What specific actions will you take to hold this love in place? Now open your eyes...