As therapists, we enter our careers ready to help and serve.

But sometimes, after working in a heavily regulated industry for so long, there often comes a time where what we really want is the freedom to be able to do it the way that we want to do it.

That’s what’s so great about having a side hustle outside of traditional therapy. A side hustle is your opportunity to reclaim some career autonomy.

You can continue to help and serve but do so in a new, fresh, and expansive way.

Tune in to the latest podcast episode to discover why creating an online income stream is your ticket to increased career freedom.

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Show Notes:

Hey risers, welcome to Empathy Rising. What I wanna talk about today is the flip side of how online income can give you more autonomy and help you take ownership, and reclaim some of your career autonomy.

I think as interesting is if we move into a space and an industry that's not heavily regulated, we're going to have a lot more freedom. We're in this wild, wild west, but sometimes we don't exactly know what to do with that freedom, right? We get kind of lost because that is one thing that is a benefit of the regulation, is it does give us a, a path to follow and we know what the next step is and we know if we're performing well and all of that stuff. So, Autonomy is the concept of that all falling on your shoulders. And sometimes it's stressful, like entrepreneurship is always stressful, but it also has beautiful upsides. And so I wanna talk about, you know, three ways that online income is gonna help you reclaim some of that power, reclaim some of that ownership, reclaimed some of that self-direct around your career with a strong response. It's pretty obvious that clinicians are really craving this sense of autonomy, right? We've played by the rules for so long and we've jumped through the hoops, but every time it seems like something else comes down, right? Something else we have to do, something else we have to change. And it's just frustrating to be doing what we're supposed to do and showing up the way we're supposed to show up. And sometimes it just doesn't feel like it matters. It just feels like it's gonna be another thing.

I know a lot of you are kind of feeling that burden and that restriction, so I think we continue to kind of be boxed in by our profession, by the clinical industry because this conversation is just so prevalent. What I've heard from a lot of you is this freedom of control or this self-direction to be able to make changes, to make choices, and to make shifts without feeling like you're breaking the rules. I wanna be able to feel like I can make choices and do fun things without feeling like I'm breaking all the rules. I think that this shows up in our work as well.

I think also when students come into side Hustle, they feel this very strongly because they're trying to decide if they want to keep their side hustle under their practice or if they want to separate it out. And will I be honest? Yes, separating out is a little bit more work. You gotta file more paperwork, you gotta do this, you gotta do that. And it's probably five extra steps, but by doing those five extra steps, you divorce yourself, you cut ties with the board and the code of ethics and all of that, your therapy practice is still under that umbrella but this new side hustle, this new income stream is not, I know that's what a lot of students are looking for, so they're coming to terms with this as well. Like, how do I do what I wanna do without having to have somebody over my shoulder all the time?

I think the truth about having all of our income coming from a highly regulated industry for, for our, our only career and our only source of income, and our only source of revenue, the only thing that supports our livelihood being highly regulated means we are going to always be answering to those regulatory bodies if we move into a group practice, or we wanna make this change and we wanna take some kind of choice or shift in our career, we've always gotta double check. We've always gotta be like, is this okay? Am I doing this the right way? And so then you're basically at the whim of these regulatory bodies of what they wanna see happen. I've shared this story before.

There was a coaching episode where I was working with a clinician in the state of Kentucky, and she was associate-level licensed at the time and had built a full online practice and then Kentucky came down only fully licensed professionals can practice online. She lost her business overnight. She had to try and figure out how to move all those people in person, even though some of them were across the state. So that wasn't gonna work. So overnight she had to go to this caseload and be like, I can't see you anymore. Like talk about damaging the therapeutic relationship. This regulation comes down cuz it's supposed to be good for the industry, but actually, it was harmful to a handful of people who all of a sudden had to terminate with their therapist overnight. So we're always at the whim. I think that's what contributes to that feeling jerked around. I feel like that's what contributes to the fact that you feel like you're on someone else's timeline. Submitting something for approval and waiting for approval to come back, it can really slow your momentum. You're on someone else's timeline, someone else's timeframe, and you might not be able to act as quickly or as independently as you want to.

I just wanna reiterate some of the points that happen when all of our income is under the house of a regulated industry. What I love about diversifying your income, especially into an online income stream, this is why I'm an advocate for separating it from your practice, even if you don't have to, even if your state doesn't care if you keep it under the same, or even if your code of ethics and your licensure doesn't care if you keep it under the same, which some don't. I'm really an advocate for separating because when you diversify your income and then especially you move some income into an industry that's not regulated so heavily, you get to rely on yourself. This is where that self-direction piece comes in. So there's no one telling you and, and looking over your shoulder are you being ethical? You get to make that choice for yourself and rely on your integrity and your morals and your standards, of being right. I doubt that anybody listening has any intention of going out and screwing people over, right? We are here, most of us to help and to serve, but we just want the freedom to be able to do that in the way that we wanna do it.

Another benefit of having, um, another income source that's regulated is that you're not at the whim of anyone or anything. You get to take inspired action. And you could take it toward whatever end goal you wanna see, and you could take that action whenever you want. You don't have to wait on approval. You don't have to wait to double-check with this and that and see if what you can finagle together to make sense. You just get to move. You just get to do what you wanna do. Whatever intuitive, hit whatever, download, whatever you wanna call it, inspired action that comes your way, you get to own that and be self-directed with.

Hey, risers. The fact that you're listening to this right now means you already know how powerful an online income stream can be, not only for your financial freedom but for your time freedom and your lifestyle freedom as well. There's just a few things that are getting in your way. First, you don't know where to start.

Second, you don't know how to come up with a solid offer concept. And third, you dunno what to do with that concept once you. Well, this is where Space Holder comes in. Space Holder is my six-step system that walks you through the five factors that help you design a solid offer, program type, person problem, promise, and price.

And it also walks you through the practical stuff so you know what to do once your idea is solid. Space holder is not a giant undertaking. In fact, I call it a weekend course. So whether you're out there enjoying the summer fun or you've got kiddos at home just like I do, you can squeeze in at 30 minutes or an hour at a time and really make progress on getting your side hustle started this summer.

But just because it's small doesn't mean it's not effective. Over 150 of your colleagues have gone through this system and have been able to craft solid online offers to help them move beyond the therapy room. So if you're looking for a simple, fast, and effective system to come up with your first, or maybe your next online offer, space Holder is the program for you.

You can go over and grab it at my website, marissalawton.com/space-holder.

The other thing that I love, just about entrepreneurship in general, but also with online income is when you are not seeing clients for your revenue source and you don't have to change or exchange your time for money directly, you get a lot more control over the way your days look, you could be completely lazy one day, watch Netflix all day long. Read on a park bench all day long, right? And then the next day you can hit the pavement hard and you can do tons and tons of work. It becomes an internal locus of control instead of externally being controlled by boards or other things like that. So you get that autonomy back from the regulatory bodies, but you also get the autonomy back because you're not only making a living by direct hours, you're making a living in other ways where it doesn't have to always rely on your time. Okay? Essentially, you become the master of your own fate, as cliche as that sounds. Are there limits to what you can do as an entrepreneur? Are there limits to what you can do in the online income? Yes, but those limits come from you. And those limits come from your mindset, right? Which all of us have the tools and the ability to work on our own mindset. This is an opportunity for you to walk your own talk. Are you doing your own inner work? Are you coming up against your money blocks? Are you coming up against your relationship to hard work, those types of things? So limits happen, but they're limits that we impose on ourselves, not from other people. Therefore, we can bust through them, however, whenever we want with that autonomy and with that independence.

I do wanna make just a statement here about privilege, and I do wanna acknowledge that there are social situations and situational circumstances, all of those things that are in fact, in effect in many people's lives, and that doesn't always blend well with the concept of total autonomy. This is just something that is a beautiful concept to explore and a beautiful concept to work toward embodying. But I acknowledge that each of us brings different circumstances to the table and each of us is operating in our unique social systems and, and how we're seen by others in our country and there is a whole nother episode, but there are privileges here and I wanna shine a light on that.

I also wanna highlight the career choices that you're able to make for yourself. There are more of them when there are no rules. Right. When you're in an industry that's unregulated or less heavily regulated when we step into the online income industry, we do have a little bit more autonomy and we do have a little bit more freedom to operate because the rules, the regulations, the red tape dictating what you do in your job on a daily basis, those go away. Doesn't mean that all the other socially oppressive things go away, but this little tiny piece we can remove and we can operate with less boundaries and with more freedom.

I wanna talk about the three ways that you get more autonomy. I've talked about how not trading time for money, and I've talked about less regulation those are kind of these overarching things, but what kind of autonomy do you find inside the online industry? That you don't find in the therapy industry.

The first that we have to talk about is time freedom. You can create programs that have zero touch. So as you're building an audience, because you need to make sales, you can be building that audience organically through your time, effort, and energy in marketing or you can be building that audience paid and paying for it through ads and all of that stuff. Once that has happened. You can introduce a zero-touch offer an ebook, a course, a journal prompt, a daily planner, an Oracle card deck, or just like a card deck with like self-care phrases or something like that. Any kind of digital asset with no touch. You create it once you have the effort of building the audience, whether you're doing that organically or paid, and that's right, and then you have no other time commitment. There are programs that have low touch, maybe between like five and 10 hours a month and that's it. Compared to, you know, your 20 hours a week of clients, you have five to 10 hours a month. And then of course you have the exchange of marketing and that kind of stuff. But really just talking about those direct hours, cuz the marketing you could do at two in the morning if you wanted to, right? Like the time freedom is there, you're shrinking the time that you're spending with people. And then if there's other tasks to do, You can do 'em, you know, wherever you want and whenever, like you don't have to have double locks on things. You don't have to take notes in the first place. So there's time freedom. Then you don't have to have like two locks protecting the notes and like just these weird rules and these weird regulations.

I mean, I know they're in place for a reason, but. Those are the things that mental clutter, that mental load that we have to constantly maintain in our clinical space. It can all go away, right? So there's not any time freedom. I think it's energy freedom too. You also have programs that are high touch, so you can demand a high price for them, but you're still serving one too many. So while your hours might be weekly hours instead of monthly hours, you're still serving more people at one time, and therefore shrinking the contact you have with individual people. We can talk about how much time, that's part of the time freedom, getting your time back. But the other part of the time, free freedom is when you get to operate and, and also where, and you don't, you can be in a coffee shop, you can be on the beach. You don't have to worry about like, can people hear me right now? Or any of that stuff, you know, I think.

The other type of freedom or autonomy that can come is financial freedom. We have to talk about the scalability factor here. Even if you are doing, you know, couple sessions where there's two people per hour and you can charge a little bit more for a couple session family sessions perhaps, or even therapy groups, right? We want best practice, I don't know if this is a regulation per se, but this is like an industry standard is you don't want your groups to be more than like 10 to 12 people. well, your membership site could have 1200 people and you're doing the same five to 10 hours a month or whatever it is. And you've got 1200 people paying you. Right? So scalability factor, and not only from the financial standpoint, which is what we're talking about but income standpoint. Imagine being able to help a hundred people at one time instead of 10 to 12 people at one time. So just scalability things can be on such a bigger scale from the finances and from the impact. Moving from one to many definitely means more money per hour, but eventually, you get out of the money-per-hour model because as more people join your offers, it, it just becomes less about like measuring what you're making per hour and it's more about what you're making for me on it per year, but sometimes maybe per quarter or even per month. But it, I don't count what I make per hour. I could do the math if I really wanted to, but I don't even think that way anymore because my offers have so many students in them and, and they, I'm serving one too many at that point. We can also think about passive income versus passive business model, which I've talked about several times about on the show but your money can come in at any moment, two in the morning, three in the morning, four 15 in the morning, right? And you can then have a no-touch offer. So you don't do anything for that money in terms of like direct hours exchanged or that money can come in at any time and you show up at your predetermined calls or whatever, however, you have it set up if you have low touch or high touch but the money comes in whenever financially you're not like worried about no-show and cancellations. And do I charge at the beginning of the session? Do I charge at the end of the session? Right? The money just comes and it again, takes a whole layer of stress, a whole layer of worry, or perhaps anxiety just out of the picture. You then have more freedom and more lightness around finances.

In the last category of autonomy that I think is really important to mention is creative autonomy or creative control. Online income gives you back your creative control over your career. It's like, yes, you can certainly go get a new certification. Oh, I'm super interested in parts work, so let me go get an if f s certification or let me learn about if f s Right, you can learn new skill sets. You can learn new modalities. I know clinicians are like every five years they're like, I'm gonna switch my niche because I'm bored. Right. So there's ways to have creative freedom in the therapy room, but ultimately you're always offering the same deliverable. You're always in a room with someone else or on a screen with someone else delivering therapy. So you're still sitting down with someone or a couple or a family or a group, but you're still sitting down with someone for a predetermined amount of time, and the only way you get paid is for that amount of time listening to what the person or the people are sharing and helping them process it. So even if you're talking to different people, or even if you're using a different approach, it's still at the core of it, the same exact work, and that's it. And that can get kind of boring, right? So it's always gonna be the same thing. It's always gonna be the same deliverable at its core but when you move into the online income, There's so many more things that you can offer. Coaching would feel the same as therapy. In a sense though work is lighter, the subject matter is lighter, you have less burden, and you also, instead of being like a backseat driver, as a therapist, you get to be like kind of a front seat ride-along passenger.

So it does feel different, but it's still one-to-one, right? It's still changing times, but you can think about workshops, you can think about digital assets, you can think about courses, and VIP days, which are one of my favorite new ways to work audio-only. You can just be like audio-only coaching. You can be getting your nails done, you can be at the grocery store and people are paying you to talk to them on an audio app. It's really interesting what is possible when we are not, um, regulated, when we don't have the fence, like when we're not boxed in. If you can dream it, you can do it. And I know I'm dropping a lot of cliches today, but there really is no limit to the way that you wanna work. or the way you wanna interact with customers or the way you wanna deliver the time, the location, and then the amount of money, like all of it is possible. I really think that's that creative autonomy, right? Imagine it and make it happen and charge money for it and sell it.

When we look at these three factors, time, autonomy, financial autonomy, and creative autonomy, we know that we can completely determine how much we wanna work, how much we wanna make, and the way in which we want to do it.

This is how I think that online income helps you reclaim your career autonomy, your career independence, your career, and self-direct.

I hope you enjoy it, keep on rising.

Thank you so much for listening to the Empathy Rising Podcast. For show notes, links, and downloads, head over to marissalawton.com/podcast where you'll be able to build a deeper relationship with me and the show, as well as binge on all past episodes.

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