If Psychotherapists Are to Survive, Do They Have to Become Coaches?
As I have already mentioned, psychotherapists are becoming an endangered species as a consequence of the explosion of “life (and other) coaches.” So what is a psychotherapist, therapist, psychologist, social worker, or psychiatrist to do?
Obviously, if you want to stay as a “medical-model” business, you will have to start marketing like crazy to make prospects see there is an advantage of going to you rather than to a coach. But that sounds like a hard row to hoe considering your obligations to insurers with whom you contract and your dependence on them for their payments. This is especially true when you consider for-profit managed-care restrictions on fees, conditions, and clients.
What many coach training facilities are encouraging is that psychotherapists not necessarily abandon their therapy practice altogether but add coaching to it. This, they say, can add the opportunity to expand your therapy practice, to provide “motivational, balancing, and integrating” help as we, as coach Martha Beck puts it.
For example, when someone with anxiety comes to you, if you are a therapist as well as a coach, you can address the anxiety directly and the lurking social problem contributing to it. The action-oriented, solution- focused direction of coaching could help the client create the efficacy and greater self-confidence needed to work on their anxiety problem.
Disengaging from insurance or for-profit managed care companies does offer you the benefits of doing away with the slews of paperwork and having to religiously follow their dictates.
Another benefit is not receiving only a percentage of the fee. While some may think talking about money for mental health workers is crass, the reality is psychotherapy is a business. For the business to survive, thrive, and help people therapists have to receive necessary and sufficient compensation – which is too often not the case right now.
Were you to take the training to become a life coach (or any other variation of coach) to become a coach-therapist, you would put yourself in a more viable business situation. Being a life coach would make you stan-out from your therapist colleagues and make your practice more desirable.
But there is one potentially negative consequence to this business change. Before you were primarily in competition with other therapists and only secondarily with life coaches. Now you would be primarily in competition with the multitudinous life coaches and only secondarily with therapists.
Because life coaches are so “smokin” at this time,” this means that you have to have a really good marketing plan in place to differentiate yourself from all the other life coaches as well as all the other therapists.
You have to be able to demonstrate that you now present the best of both worlds for your clients – making you the obvious choice for them. No matter what you choose to do to survive now and thrive in the future, it must include solid education-based marketing.
Are you a private practice professional trying to grow your business? Signe Dayhoff, Ph.D., can show you how to magnetically attract clients & increase your business 20% in only 3 months – and do in 5 simple steps with professionalism and integrity… without selling.
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