How a Side Hustle Can Help You Spring Clean Your Case Load
Okay, I’m going there…
Have you ever had a therapy client you dreaded meeting with?
You know, one that landed on your lap because they either slipped through the cracks, or were assigned to you through no choice of your own?
It’s a really difficult situation to be in. This person needs access to support, and while the two of you may not be the right fit, you can’t terminate the relationship without justification.
The good news? You don’t really have to worry about this in your side hustle because you’re building a different kind of relationship AND you have more control.
If you’re experiencing a similar situation, listen to the latest podcast episode where I discuss how having a side hustle can help you refine the list of people you work with so you’re not dreading ANY therapy appointments anymore
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Show Notes:
Hey risers, welcome to episode 149 of Empathy Rising. I am super excited around here because we are a week away from the girls' spring break. We're actually going to pull them out of school a couple days early because I can't fly on a Wednesday or a Friday, cause those are Side Hustle days. So I need to fly on a Thursday.
So next Thursday, at least as the time at the time of recording, we'll be heading to Arizona as a family. It's going to be really fun. Logan will be turning five. She turns five tomorrow at the time of recording, and we're doing a little tiny thing here for her, with her pre-K friends. There's two girls that she's made like really, really good friends with in her pre-K class. And we're going to do a kind of mommy-daughter brunch and go get our nails painted or at least the girls will go get their nails painted.
She's been asking me to go to the nail salon since she was two and a half. And I've been saying like, when you're five, when you're five, I just threw a random number out there. And then as you know, kids remember, and so she's like, mom, I'm five. That means I get to go to the nail salon. So we'll be doing that.
But also we'll be doing a birthday party for her, with family, which most of you are like, um, why is that significant? But just being military, our girls have never had a birthday party with their actual family except for their first birthdays. Sawyer's first birthday was back here and both sets of grandparents flew for that one and saw her turn one, which is fun. And then Logan's first birthday party was in Texas, which is a drivable distance. So, both grandparents came to that, and then their aunt came. And so I guess the cousins were there on that one.
So aside from the first birthdays for both my girls, they've never been around family. So we're going to do something a little belated. It'll be a... we'll be a week late, but they're going to have my sister's coming up from Tucson. My other sister is in Prescott with my mom, and Josh's family is all in Northern Arizona. So it'll be really, really fun. And then after that, Josh and I are ditching the kids with his parents. My mom is great for a couple of hours, grandma, but if we're going to leave the kids overnight, we're going to leave them with Josh's parents, and we're going to Vegas. So sayonara!
For like four days, we're just kind of kicking the kids to the grandparent curb and we're going to Vegas. Being from, like... it's a four-hour drive from where I'm from to Vegas. So I've been several times. But when I went, when I was younger, it was of course, like, you know, blue man group and you know, those like 80-ounce daiquiris things to just basically get wasted and do stupid shit. And then went with once with my mom, which I was not getting wasted or doing stupid shit then, so we, Josh and I, are going to go as adults.
We wanted to have like a bougie Vegas vacay where we did like the fancy, fancy restaurants, you know, like Giada de Laurentiis has a restaurant there, obviously Wolfgang Puck has restaurants there. Like there is a pretty cool foodie selection, um, there's the Nobu there. I mean, there's tons of places to go. So we're going to just really take advantage of the food scene, and then like the spa scene.
We booked a room, kind of an upscale room, at the Cosmopolitan, just the fancy name of the hotel, kind of connotes, like the theme we were going for our trip. So that'll be fun four days away. And then we'll drive back down, for another two days on that end to come back on the Saturday, and then they'll have Sunday before the school picks back up. So they will miss two days of school, but it's worth it. And I can't wait.
It's going to be a fun trip. I'm checking the weather every day. It's snowing at home. It's like... I think it was 22 degrees when I looked at the weather in Prescott. But by next week, Vegas looks to be a bit warmer and decent— hopefully shorts and t-shirt weather. That would be super nice.
So that's what's going on around here. Springtime, moving into a new season, moving into a new quarter in the business, and that's what we're going to chat about today. We're going to talk about how your side hustle can help you spring clean your caseload. We've talked about shrinking your caseload and we've talked about making changes to your therapy practice once you have a side hustle up and running.
We're just going to explore that topic a little bit more today, especially because a chat that I've been having with Side Hustle students lately is the fact that it's not only about shrinking our caseload. There's a refinement process because we all have clients we don't love working with, right? They trick us. They make us think they're this, like, ideal customer, this ideal client. And then we start working with them and we're like, oh, hell no. Right?
One of the benefits of moving into private practice in the first place is that you know, we can start to market ourselves to an ideal client base. I mean, I remember working in agency work and it was just, you saw anybody who came in the door. My hourly rate was like $14 an hour, but I got paid. Right? And so I'd see like... oh, man. I'd see some like really significant heavy clients.
And then I had this one couple that they just screamed at me and screamed at each other the whole time. Like other therapists came and had to, like, knock on the door and be like, uh, what's going on in here? So you get to make that you have a level of discernment when you enter private practice that you don't have when you're working in other settings as an employee.
But even when you target an ideal customer, that doesn't always account for personalities, right? Or, you know, they do the 20-minute intake phone call with you and you're like, oh, are you a good fit? Or some of us don't even do that. We just have online scheduling. So they find us from a directory and we hope that our profiles are written to deter unideal clients and really draw in ideal clients. But you never know.
We also know that sometimes the client presents for one problem: Anxiety or, you know, postpartum or whatever stuff. And then in the course of working on the presenting problem, other issues come up and we start to be like, oh, I don't love working with this person anymore. So I'd say out of everybody who's listening today, I bet you feel like there are a couple of people on your caseload that could use a little spring cleaning.
The rough part about this as a clinician though is, you know, getting people off of our roster, so to speak, it can be harder said than done. You know, it brings up like I see these posts in the therapy Facebook groups: "This client is hard for me to work with". And then the therapist answer is "well, then you have some exploring to do. You need to discover what it is that they're bringing up in you and work on your countertransference and your transference" and work on all of this stuff as the clinician.
So it becomes less about "I just don't freaking like this person and I don't want to work with this person. They're not a fit for me." and more about "well, now I have to do all this personal growth so I can serve this person that I don't like serving". Professional ethics definitely come into play here because you know, we're not always at liberty to terminate and turn away a client without therapeutic cause.
If the case is just way beyond our scope, if something like, you know, eating disorders or whatever things that we know we don't have the training or the capacity or the competence to work with come up, then by all means, we refer out and we say, you know, this problem has become beyond my scope or whatever. But without that kind of justification, we're not really allowed or we're not encouraged, at least, to just boot somebody out and be like, I don't enjoy you anymore, bye. Right?
We're encouraged to seek consultation. Oh, it's a difficult case. Go get consultation on this case. Or additional supervision or maybe like go expand your skillset with a certification or whatever. The burden always is on us. And I explained this a little bit ago, and a couple of episodes ago, when I talked about regulation and the burden is always on the clinician, it's always on us to figure out the problem. It's always on us to do the work rather than just be like, crap. I don't like this anymore. I don't want to do it.
We don't get an out without jumping through a lot of hoops. On one hand, you know, it serves the client. I said this last a couple of weeks ago too, is that these parameters are all in place to serve the client, but it's sometimes maybe bordering on often at the detriment of the provider at the detriment of the clinician. So this is just another example. We're encouraged to keep working with people that we don't enjoy because of the way our profession is set up.
I think this can be a really great catalyst for professional growth, certainly, and perhaps personal growth, right? Like we do need to be doing our work, and if we're getting triggered by a type of client or a type of scenario, it is absolutely worth looking into. It's absolutely worth exploring and seeing how we can evolve and how we can grow.
But on the other hand, it's just painful and it's frustrating to feel like your hands are tied and that you don't have the freedom of choice or the creative freedom in your career that you might want to you just... I think about things that have come up recently around social justice, around racism, around political concerns about, you know, religion and all of these things, and sometimes we just don't want to be in the room, physically or on the screen, with somebody that we just are having a hard time being with or supporting or talking to.
So there's two sides to the coin. I do think though that if you're with somebody who literally, like, makes you feel like nails on the chalkboard all the time, you're just always in this hyperarousal motor, you're always upset, or hyper-aware—just going through these emotions that are uncomfortable—you're certainly not going to be doing your best work. And you're certainly going to be putting yourself through stress that isn't always necessary in my opinion. So there's a lot of elements that come into play when we're talking about kicking people off our caseload or spring cleaning our caseload.
The one that we do have a little bit more control over is the second point that I want to make. Because another reason we might not be as discerning with the people that we choose to work with is just simply the idea of revenue. Often we're willing to take on a not-so-great-fit client if it means one more hourly fee that comes in on a regular basis, especially those who are new to building practices. And aren't quite "full", yet, there'll be like, oh, you know, that, that client's 80% my ideal customer, or 80% my ideal client, that's good enough. Right? And so we're kind of kicking ourselves.
We end up lowering our standards yet again, just... it's a form of selling out. I feel like I'm going on a rant today, but it is: It's a form of selling out. You're lowering your standards for a dollar or an hourly rate of dollars. So it can be really tempting when times are slow. I don't know if any of us are going through that right now. Most of us are having the opposite, which is going to be my next point, but right when times are slow, it can be tempting to drop our discernment a little bit and take on an unideal client out of just need for money or desire for revenue.
The last point though is this guilt. This is what I feel like most of my people are experiencing right now, and you might be as well, is it's not that you're not full. And so you're taking on revenue because you're worried about, like, making your bills. It's that you're so full and it's hard to even get a therapist to call you back, let alone, you know, make an appointment.
Most, I'd say, most of my students right now are feeling this where they're full and they certainly don't want to take on anyone who's not an ideal client, but then they feel all this guilt for turning them away and being like, sorry, I don't have openings. Knowing that that person is going to have a really hard time even getting someone else to call them back or email them back or have any kind of availability.
So we can end up being like, oh, I can fit one more. I just won't eat. Or if I don't have a morning bathroom break and I save all my bathroom breaks to the afternoon, I can fit one more client in, or whatever. I know I'm being ridiculous, but that's sometimes how it feels. It's like, okay, well, if I shift my lunch here or I cancel my yoga, or I, you know, don't take my walk around the block during the afternoon, then I can fit in another client. And so we have guilt around the lack of support and the lack of help for people. And we ended up taking them on.
The fact of the matter though is that when we feel obligated, either self-imposed or from the outside, to serve clients who aren't the best fit for us, a few things tend to happen. I think the first is it starts to feel like a chore. It feels like an obligation, something that we have to do instead of something that we get to do.
And I know that most of us came to therapy and most of us came to this work as a calling or a need to serve or feeling like you were a helper or that you could make a difference. Right? And so when we are under this obligation, all of that, those hopeful feelings start to be overshadowed by the obligatory feelings and it starts to feel like a chore instead of a choice.
And with those clients, in particular, it's like, you start to dread contact with them. You look at your calendar and you're like, dang it this one again, or whatever. Right? And so you start to have kind of some resentments or just some ill feelings towards working with that person or those people. It also brings up the idea of, like, questioning your decisions and questioning your skills. Why did I make the choice to let this client on? Oh, did I really need the money that bad? Right?
So you start questioning your decisions, but also you start questioning your skills. I must be really bad at this if I can't help this person, or I'm having a difficult case or a difficult session because I don't know what I'm doing. We internalize that.
So you start to feel like shame or as if you've made a mistake, ashamed that you agreed to take on the client in the first place that it was a mistake to take on the client in the first place, or even more so like, ashamed that you've let things get so far, so bad, or, you know, it was a mistake to go into private practice. Yeah, it can get even bigger beyond just the one or two clients that aren't the right fit. It can start to move into your whole career, your whole profession.
I think this leads to two things: putting yourself last right, making decisions for money, making decisions out of guilt, making decisions cause you feel ethically obligated to. And who comes last is you, which ultimately you're you guys know the word that I'm going to use, which ultimately results in burnout. I think serving unideal clients, no matter how we've gotten there is a quick road to burnout, which all of us are feeling right now—all of us are feeling this right now, even if we're serving our ideal clients and our caseloads are perfect.
We wouldn't trade one client, or we wouldn't change a thing. We're still feeling burnt out. So imagine those of us we're working with not right fit people.I think what we can do here though is put a safeguard in place that controls for some of these variables and that safeguard is your side hustle. Your safeguard is another creative outlet that brings you money.
When you have a side hustle, you have, like I said, this creative exploration you get to explore different sides of yourself. You get to explore different ways of being. And so it just brings this zest back into your professional life, and it often brings us back into your personal life that might have been missing. You can get the sense that you are on the right track professionally again, and personally.
You get to prioritize your wants and needs. You get to feel fulfilled and balanced. Most of the time, my students are not trying to leave the field altogether, though I do have several who work with me for that purpose and they're getting their side hustle launched to transition fully out. The majority of mine are looking for a balance. They're looking to spring clean this caseload to get rid of the few bad fit clients or the few people that just are grading on them. And then maybe that shrinks them down three, four, or five people, and then they want a way to maintain a lower level of the caseload. Right? So it's shrinking the caseload and bringing in revenue from another source so that it balances out.
That's usually the bread and butter of the work that I'm doing. But you also get to do your best work for yourself and others. When you feel fulfilled in this new way, when you feel creatively inspired in this new way, it brings so much into session. I can't count how many times when people are, especially right now, it's month two in Side Hustle, especially during this month where we're talking about branding and visuals and copywriting and all of these things.
The deeper work under that, which is brand mission, brand purpose, Dharma, those types of things. How many times do people go back to their practice website and are like oh, I changed the copy on my practice website too. Or I put a new logo on my practice website or whatever. So much of what you do in your side hustle can reinvigorate what you're doing in your practice. I really think that there's a cool symbiotic relationship between the two. What you've done in your practice so far gets to inform your side hustle for sure.
But there becomes this really cool opportunity for your side hustle to also inform your practice. And I think that's when you show up doing the best work for others, for your clients, and for your side hustle, students, members, whatever they end up being, whatever type of program you create, and also the best work for yourself. You have that zest and that zeal again.
So let's dive into this. Let's talk about a few of the ways that having a side hustle can help you kind of spring clean this caseload. I think the first one is that you do end up with a greater power of choice. In your side hustle, at least there's no ethical boundaries except the ones that you placed on yourself. Right? So it's all about living within your integrity. If you work with a coaching client or have a student in one of your programs or something, and they just are not a right fit, you get to decide based on your ethics, your principles, your merit what you want to do about them.
You know, if I had a student that was just massively disruptive and you know, I can't even imagine what the situation would look like. It's—knock on wood—Never happened to me, but I would just kick them out. I wouldn't even refund them. I would just kick them out and be like: This is my space. You're not welcome here. You're messing with me. You're messing with my other students. Go. Bye.
If there was another student and it wasn't, like, toxic or disruptive like that, but it was just, I felt like it wasn't a good fit. I probably would say, you know, here's the refund. I just don't think this is the right program for you. You know, thanks so much. I think we need to part ways or something like that. Right. But it will be up to me to decide, which is really cool.
Now this isn't exactly helping you with your caseload, right? Because we have a different set of rules that we have to operate with our cases. Especially if there's already some clients that you don't love or that are not thrilling you, but what you can do in your caseload is work towards an ethical means of termination and you can examine your own stuff that's coming up. We kind of have a standard operating procedure within our cases.
What it does allow you to do though is it gives you the freedom to know that if you do have a customer or a student in your side hustle who rubbed you the wrong way, who drains you, who's disruptive, who's not a good fit, whatever, you cancel services without needing to be delicate without having to justify your reasons. And so just knowing that there's another space where you get to operate differently can kind of give you the oomph that you need to kind of push through when it comes to the caseload.
Now, the next two are the ones that we do have an impact over that we do have more control over. So when you have a secondary source of revenue, you can stop taking 80% clients, right? 80% fit clients because you can just say this client that would have paid me in my case. I can make up for that and my side hustle. And it increases your level of discernment. You can be so much more picky in your practice when you know that the money isn't the reason that you're making the decision.
When there's a secondary source of revenue, that's going to cover you if you choose not to take that client. You have a much more empowered choice to make, so you're not doing it out of financial necessity. You're doing it really out of is this the type of work I want to do with the type of person I want to work with and all of that.
We also can address the guilt, right? The turning people away. And oh, let me just squeeze them on. They really need my help. They can't get in with anybody else. I can acquiesce. I can make it work. Because we can set up our side hustle to be a place for greater impact. If you want a container for the people who can't get into therapy right now, I think of Jen.
And I think of two or three other students who this... oh, Abby, this is exactly what they're doing with their side hustle. Amorette, she's doing the same thing. All of them are creating a space to address the lack of therapy for people who can't get into sessions, for people who can't access therapy right now. They're creating programs that give a sense of impact to them that provide resources while they're waiting to get in to see a clinician or while they're waiting to find a therapist with openings. Right?
So you don't have to stuff your caseload to full with another client because you feel guilty turning them away. Now I want to caveat this. This doesn't mean that the person who calls you and you say, oh, I don't have fit, but let me put you in my course. It doesn't exactly work that way, and it doesn't... it can, but very rarely does. And should it work that way, it just means that you got another container that is also doing good in the world. And you can rely on that.
You could say, you know what, dang it. I wasn't able to take that client, but you know what? We had five more people join my membership site this month. And that makes me feel good. That makes me feel like I'm still having an impact, or it makes me feel like I'm still doing good in the world and potentially on a bigger scale than the 25 or whatever people that you see on your caseload.
So we can address directly the revenue concern, and we can address directly the impact concern through your side hustle. We can't exactly address the ethical termination, kicking people out kind of thing from a side hustle, but we can know that in another container, in another area of your professional life, you do have a more empowered choice.
These are a few of the ways that your side hustle can help you with that spring cleaning of your caseload can help you refine the concept of your caseload. Refine who you'll take and who you won't, and know that you are still providing an impact in the world beyond just therapy and that you're addressing the revenue concerns. So if you have to tell somebody "no", you don't have to worry about making your bills.
Ultimately, adding a side hustle to your repertoire gives you options. And that to me is a beautiful thing, right? Not being tied down, not being restricted, but having options you'll have new alternatives that fit into the new life that you are building for yourself. Right? It's that choice piece. It's that options piece. Words like alternatives just light me up.
The other thing about these alternatives is that they often feel lighter and looser... I'm just shimmying my shoulders when I say that. They feel lighter and looser than therapeutic work, often. So the opposite of restrictive comes up, I guess, expansive giving yourself loose light, expansive options. That's what Side Hustle does. That's what adding a side hustle does.
If this sounds right up your alley, if you're looking for options, if you're looking for that safeguard that allows you to be more discerning with your caseload and be more discerning in your practice, make sure to sign up for my free masterclass in this training.
You'll explore the work style that you want to, the money you want to make, and the marketing that you want to do, so that will help you determine your next steps in your online income journey. It'll really help you hone in on: What's my offer? Once you have your offer, we can build a business around that.
So head on over to marissalawton.com/masterclass. It's totally free. It's on-demand. You can watch it at your leisure, pause it, go do a session, come back and watch it. However it fits for you. And then you can make headway, you can start taking steps forward and that's what's most important. Alright, guys, I will be back next week and until then, keep on rising.
