Private Practice Success Newsletter

June 2005, by Lynn Grodzki, LCSW, PCC (Professional Certified Coach)
www.privatepracticesuccess.com

One Minute Summary:
In response to our newsletter poll earlier this year, many of you asked for some advice in regards to developing your emotional intelligence in business. Specifically, you asked how to handle the high anxiety you contend with. In this newsletter we look at the bad news / good news of anxiety. I also offer 2 strategies that can help you to recognize the value in anxiety as a signal that points you in the direction of building a stronger practice.

The Bad News/Good News of Entrepreneurial Anxiety

From your responses earlier this year, I know that many of you are contending with a lot of anxiety as you work to build your ideal private practices.

One therapist in full-time private practice likened his anxiety to having a large pebble in his shoe, one that he can’t ignore or remove. He says: “I have constant anxiety about the state of my practice. I admit I am a worrier by nature, but I do OK financially as a therapist. I have had a pretty stable practice of over 24 clients a week for years now. But I can’t relax. I don’t think I have had one day in the past 10 years where I haven’t had some anxiety about the long-term viability of my practice. Does this fear ever go away? Help!”

An executive coach in business for herself writes that she can never allow herself to take a day off, even when she has no clients scheduled, because she always feels that something is left undone if she leaves her phone and her computer. “I compulsively check my email, voice mail, and just get uneasy straying too far from my office, just in case. I’m not sure just in case of what, but there it is. I feel like I am tied to my business by some kind of invisible umbilical cord, and I can’t go too far. What is this about?”

Let me spell out both the bad news and (fortunately) the good news of experiencing anxiety in business.

The Bad News

In my experience as the daughter and grandaughter of entrepreneurs, a business owner for twenty years, and a business coach for a decade, I observe that even successful entrepreneurs live with a moderate to high degree of business anxiety much of the time. The anxiety quotient of a business owner is especially acute when the product your sell is you.

You embody the business. You are the heart, the brains, and even the feet of your business as you take on various roles of service provider, CEO, marketer, and general handyman for your practice. As the owner of a therapy, coaching, healing, or consulting business, the success or failure of your private practice depends on a combination of your skills, knowledge, energy, savvy, willingness, reputation, and timing, for starters.

Handling all of this can bring up feelings, including a dose of fear. For example, many of my clients voice feelings of fear of not being enough, not knowing enough, not being able to accomplish all they wish, and on and on.

Fear is one aspect of a business owner’s anxiety. Being an entrepreneur also means that you live with risk. Statistics say that a third of all small businesses fail. So owning a business of your own is a gamble. If your business is not doing well, your anxiety may be quite intense as you feel one step away from financial failure. But even when you have a profitable business, your sense of risk can increase when you want to expand into a new market, change your fees or services, or extend your reach. The result is, of course, more anxiety.

The Good News

If you stay alive in private practice over time, you will eventually learn to tolerate the feelings of anxiety and in effect, live with it. But you can also learn to use your anxiety as a springboard for success.

Anxiety signals a need for constructive action. It can function as an important motivator, pointing you in the direction of what you need to do to create a viable, vital business. Here are two strategies I ask my business coaching clients to adopt in order to use anxiety as a motivator for business success:

1) Improve your structure: Anxiety often signals the need for a stronger business foundation. Look at all the structural elements of your practice: How are you doing regarding organization, administration, staffing, and peer support? Do you need more brain power or outside consultation? Think: What could make my business simpler or easier right now? What can I let go of to attend to the business structure? Then bring in additional resources, make needed organizational or administrative changes, just do it!

2) Increase your pragmatic self-talk: Anxiety lessens in response to calm, rational self-talk. To help calm the anxiety of my coaching clients, we talk things out. Sometimes I try to think out of the box with them, but often I just state the obvious and that alone is enough to relax a business owner and help him or her to take the next constructive step. To do this for yourself, make lists, think best-case/worst-case scenario, and above all, try to talk to that anxious voice in your most objective, clear, kind, non-judgmental voice. Need help with this? Ask the most entrepreneurial colleagues you have to advise you from time to time, of form a circle of advisors for just this purpose.

Upcoming Teleclasses

Watch this space for new teleclasses for fall! (I am taking the summer off, but will be back in the fall with more ways to help you build your ideal private practice.)

Books by Lynn Grodzki, published by WW Norton. To order, click on each book.

	The Business and Practice of Coaching By Lynn Grodzki and Wendy Allen (Summer 2005) An estimated 30,000 coaches have entered the coaching profession in the past five years, but unfortunately, the majority report they are unable to earn a living wage from their coaching services. This book shows you how, using a coaching approach to the business of coaching.
	Building Your Ideal Private Practice By Lynn Grodzki (2000) The best-selling guide to what you need to do and who you need to be in order to have a highly profitable, personally satisfying private practice. Often called the "private practice bible" this book has become a resource for tens of thousands of your colleagues.
	The New Private Practice:Therapist-Coaches Share Stories, Strategies and Advice Edited by Lynn Grodzki (2002) A groundbreaking look at the profession of coaching through the eyes of 16 successful therapist-coaches who tell you how to become a coach, what to charge, and show you how they coach their clients.
	12 Months to Your Ideal Private Practice: A Workbook By Lynn Grodzki (2003) This planned, motivational workbook will help you build the practice you desire. The workbook incorporates fresh ideas, new exercises, further skill sets and much more to give you a direct experience of being carefully coached by Lynn, month-by-month, for a full year.

More next time,

lynn@privatepracticesuccess.com