2 Ways Therapist Training Sabotages Your Marketing

I have a lot of psychotherapists for coaching clients, and I'm seeing an interesting pattern of learned self-sabotage in how counselors tend to approach marketing. It's ironic that we gain a deep knowledge of mental disorders in graduate school, but nothing about the psychology of what motivates people to seek help.

Most therapists are trained to resist providing answers when clients ask for advice. Unfortunately, that carries over into how therapists try to market, and it doesn't work for getting clients.

When people are in emotional distress, they want to stop feeling bad, sad, mad, out of control, incapable, scared, or hopeless. Our marketing needs to acknowledge how they feel and provide a belief that there is a solution that will help them end, overcome, lighten, or otherwise change their felt distress.

This is what motivates them to seek help. This is what our marketing must say.

Secondly, almost all therapists are schooled to keep their personal lives separate and secret from clients. Sometimes that's wise, if you work with dangerously unstable populations. But most of the time that non-disclosure rule prevents the essential know you / like you / trust you factor in marketing that brings people to you door.

Recitation of credentials is not the same as self-disclosure. Especially when given in the impersonal and pseudo-professional 3rd person style of talking about ourselves as if we were someone else, our credentials can come across as cold and distancing. A listing of degrees, awards, and continuing education with trainers no client has heard of is more intimidating than connecting.

Instead, self-disclosure for marketing tells the story of why you are interested in working with a particular type of client with a specific type of problem. It presents you as having your own life touched in some way by something similar. It creates rapport and trust.

Feeling rapport and trust motivates prospective clients to select YOU out of the five dozen other therapists in your zip code.

Projecting Expertise

Last week I spoke to two groups of naturopathic medical students about marketing their practices after graduation. As expected, there was some resistance to the concept of marketing themselves as an expert when just out of school. This is a normal and appropriate concern.

And it's not just my ND clients who have trouble with this claim. My counselor clients also feel inhibited about calling themselves a specialist. Naturopathic doctors and psychotherapists alike are trained to be generalists, and marketing as a specialist rubs uncomfortably against that.

Plus, let's face it, a lot of us in the healing arts are recovering from poor self-esteem and low confidence. It stretches our own belief in ourselves to say out loud that we have expertise in anything. If I could give us all a pill for that, the magic med would erase all the early life programming we've experienced that damaged our self-concept as relates to the joyful quality we naturally have in childhood when we KNOW we can do anything.

But I digress. One way around this marketing need to project expertise, while still staying in integrity with the truth, is a very simple language shift. In the examples here, do you spot the difference?

• I'm an expert anxiety counselor. Or, My expertise is in eliminating anxiety and depression.
  
• I specialize in helping women with anxiety gain confidence and freedom from debilitating worry.

In the first example, the claim implies a high level of experience, extra rigorous training, or something beyond the average accumulation of education and years in business. (It also is rather egocentric, and just begs to be proven with statistics or some other quantifiable method).

The second example defines a narrow scope of interest and merely says this is where I put most of my attention -- it's what I like doing best. The focus remains on the client type, their problem, and the result they want, rather than staking a claim about myself. It directly states that my role is facilitation of the client's work.

The second example is much different in that it doesn't claim to know everything about anything. It simply states what is true from day one after graduation -- I'm a helper.

If you are graduating this spring as an ND or a therapist and you can't say you're a helper -- well, why did you choose this profession?