Building Confidence Intentionally-An Exercise

As therapists and helping professionals, we often provide advice to clients that we fail to implement ourselves!  Today, we are going to discuss confidence and the role it plays in your journey as a therapist entrepreneur.

If you look at your life right now, you can likely identify areas where you are very confident both in your practice and in your everyday life.  Subsequently, if you are honest with yourself, you will also notice areas of your life where you could use a confidence boost!

Why Confidence is Important

As therapist entrepreneurs, building confidence in ourselves as clinicians and business owners is essential to success. The more we discuss and practice confidence, the easier it is to muster in those moments we need it most!

If I were being real and upfront, all the developments occurring in our society today felt HEAVY including the impact of the COVID pandemic, humanitarian crises, contention over anti-racism efforts, and adjusting to a new normal caused a blip in my confidence levels!

When Imposter Syndrome Shows Up You Have a Choice to Make

Everyone experiences moments of uncertainty or that sneaky feeling of imposter syndrome at one point or another.  Given all the adjustments society has made over the past two years,  I wanted to remind you that lacking confidence is normal and a fixable barrier to personal growth and development.

For example, when I first started my private practice, I was learning and felt like a total impostor.  I lacked confidence in myself and my value as a therapist.  I was certain my clients would call me out as a complete fraud!   It would’ve been much easier to return to the safety of an agency job rather than continue blazing my own path in private practice.

However, I pressed on.  I faced the fears head on, and challenged them.  Whenever I would hit a growth spurt in my practice and add a new group, retreat, or offering for clients new feelings of imposter syndrome would pop up and I’d feel like the process of rebuilding confidence was always on repeat.

It would’ve been much easier to return to the safety of an agency job rather than continue fight that continued lack of confidence in myself.

But I didn’t. I found Facebook communities, engaged with business coaches, and kept working towards my goals. I slowly but deliberately became more confident and comfortable with who I was as a therapist and business owner.  My practice and my coaching business kept growing exponentially as a result!

The Transformation of Increased Confidence

The feelings of embarrassment and inferiority had disappeared. I had finally realized that there is no magic bullet or quick trick to developing confidence.  Sometimes you need to fake it until you make it and that is ok too!

However, what many fail to realize is that the development of confidence is a predictable process that any of us can implement for virtually any action or habit in our lives.  This means you are in control!

Have you recognized this and applied this in your life and private practice?

Have you mistakenly accused yourself of not having to ability to do something due to a lack of confidence?

Build Confidence with this Exercise

I want you to take a moment right now and mentally review your dominant thought patterns.

We all have at least one area in our lives where they lack confidence. Let’s zero in on one of your personal pain points and work through a confidence building exercise.

Let’s get started: 

1. Identify a major goal you’d like to achieve in your life or private practice where confidence has been an issue or barrier.
2. Determine specifically why a lack of confidence holds you back in terms of the obtainment of this goal. The following are a few examples:
   • Avoiding networking and marketing your services because you secretly feel like an imposter
   • Not raising your rates or not charging your full value for fear that clients will stop coming to see you
   • Trouble enforcing boundaries with clients around attendance at sessions or not charging no-show or late cancel fees with consistency
3. Write at least one paragraph that describes your confidence block and your current state of mind. When you imagine yourself in this situation of low confidence, what comes up for you? Are you anxious, nervous, upset, etc… Describe your state of mind as accurately as possible.
4. Now that you are aware of your confidence block, you can begin to intentionally address it. Define one major activity that you can implement immediately that will move you towards the goal you identified earlier in this exercise. Here are a few examples:
   • If you avoid marketing and networking, you could reach out to three potential referral sources or partners and offer information on your services.
   • Drafting a letter to current clients about your rates and confidently share that message with clients and discuss it at their next scheduled session.
   • Addressing a client’s lack of attendance or cancellation by sending reminders about your practice policy and actually following through on charging the fee next time.
5. Write a commitment to yourself to practice this new activity whenever the opportunity arises. If you struggle with sticking to your commitments, find an accountability partner and perform the activity with them.
6. After 30 days of working on your commitment, repeat step 3 again and analyze where you are at in terms of confidence. Rate yourself on a scale of 1-10.

You can continue repeating this exercise until you reach a level that you are satisfied with when it comes to your confidence in this area of your life!

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