Your Advantage for Starting a Side Hustle as a Therapist

Your secret skill as a therapist: marketing.

You may not have realized this before, but it’s true.

Marketing is all about highlighting the transformation process, and as a therapist you already have the language and skills to dive in deep on that topic.

Having the skills to market your business is one of the biggest advantages that you have in entrepreneurship. That considered, as a therapist you’re already primed to make an online income.

Discover more unique advantages you have as a therapist in starting a side hustle in the latest podcast episode.

CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!

Show Notes:

Hey Risers, welcome to Empathy Rising. Today I want to brag on my seven-year-old, Sawyer McKenna, my little lovey. Bedtime has been a freaking struggle with this girl since she was born. Literally, we thought she had colic when she was a baby and she didn't. She just never slept, and so she was extremely overtired. I didn't realize, you know, as a new mom, that newborns had to be put to sleep. 

Everyone told me how they sleep all the time, and I thought that just meant that they slept all the time. I didn't know I had to put them to sleep, and for any of you who had newborns that did just go to sleep, I am so jealous because that was not the case with Sawyer and oh, every night, had to be laid down with until she went to sleep and then got through that and then it was coming into our room all the time and all that stuff. 

So the other night she… and she likes to have lullabies and stuff. Yeah, I know she's seven, but she likes to have music on when she goes to sleep. That's fine. But the other night it was so exciting, we were almost finished with one of her books. We're reading this series of books. If you have, like, teen, or I guess tween-ish girls or a little younger, you might be interested in this series. It's called "Whatever After". I think this would be great for boys, this would be great for all children. 

So, they take fairytales, traditional fairytales, and they rewrite them in a more progressive and feminist outcome, like the one with Beauty and the Beast, she actually had to convince Beauty not to marry the Beast because Beauty was only marrying him because she was a people pleaser and, you know, captive and all that stuff. I like that they redo the fairytales. 

We had four chapters left in this book, and she knows her lights go off at 8: 30 and we usually read around 7: 45, and she's like, "Mom, can I take the book light?" Which is this little light that we clip on her book to read, and she was like, "can I take the book light and read until 8: 30, and then do lights off like that?" and I was like, "Absolutely". So she finished the last four chapters of the book and she turned off the light and went to sleep.

Holy crap, it was life changing. Meanwhile, my four-year-old she's like, "Goodnight, Mom", doesn't even want to kiss and just goes to sleep by herself. So at least we don't have two that are terrible sleepers. But it was just really cool. I was like, "oh my god, she's grown up" and then I had like a whole extra hour of my night. I didn't even know what to do with myself. So it's pretty neat. 

In this series—there are 14 books in them, in the series—and they go through… right now, we just finished Beauty and the Beast, so now we're on Frog Prince, and it's not like the Disney version exactly. We did Snow Queen and it wasn't like Elsa and Frozen. It was like the traditional fairytale of Snow Queen. So, they're pretty cool. I like those books, but I'm just really proud of Sawyer. She's amazing. 

Anyway, so today I want to transition into talking about your biggest advantage to starting a side hustle, and the fact that you are a therapist is an advantage. If you go back to very early episodes of the show, I talk about how therapists make better marketers than people with MBAs. Having my undergrad from a top 20 business school, many of my friends continued and went and got their MBAs while I went to grad school in a different direction, in the counseling direction. 

I know what is taught in MBA programs and I know what people come out of MBA programs knowing, and the reason that I say that therapists make better marketers is because people who are trying to create marketing campaigns, marketing is talking about a transformation, talking about how you feel, act, behave, exist, experience the world before a product and by purchasing the said product, how your feelings actions, behaviors, experiences change. 

A state of change, that's what marketing is, and people in MBA programs are often struggling for this. Like, "what's the emotional transformation? What's point A, and what's the point B, and how do we actually paint this in a picture that's transformative?" You ask any clinician, what's the core need here? What's the wound? What's the attachment wound? And they're like, "oh, enoughness, worthiness", whatever. It's so easy for clinicians to just go there, and this is why I always say clinicians make better marketers than MBA graduates. 

This is one of the biggest advantages that you have in any kind of business in any kind of entrepreneurship, and that's why you are so primed to make this transition to online income. But today we're going to talk about a few of the other advantages that being a therapist helps you bring as you make this move.

One thing that I think about a lot is that being a clinician can feel like a burden sometimes. I mean, yes, we have vicarious trauma and the legitimate things that come from being a clinician, but also, you know, your best friend or your partner or your parent, or whatever asks how your day was and you can only give kind of this watered-down version of what happened to your day. So there's just a lot that comes with our profession that we experience differently than a lot of people. Also, there's just so much weight on our shoulders. 

In the last two years, we've only gotten busier when there were other businesses going under or having to close their doors. We are having to make more space and more availability. I know clinicians who had their best year revenue-wise in 2020 or 2021 because of the rise in need. Which from a business standpoint is awesome. However, when that rise in need is emotional and hardship, it's like, "yay, my business is doing great, but holy crap, I'm burned the heck out and I'm like weighed down".

When we go to think about leaving the field, though, there's kind of a huge sense of guilt or maybe even shame because there's a lengthy process to get here. Tens of thousands of dollars on education. Some of you, hundreds of thousands of dollars on education, thousands of clinical hours to get to licensure and then, you know, advanced certifications or at least continuing education like CEUs, and then there's licensure fee is every two years or depending on your state, you know, a couple of things like for Arizona, it's like $300 a year or $300, every renewal, which is two years. 

A lot is invested here, not only like blood, sweat, and tears but money and effort and energy and time and all of that is invested. So to think of just walking away, it's like, oh, I did all of this, you know, for a decade and now I'm just going to leave? So I don't like to paint this transition or this addition of something new as necessarily just saying goodbye to all of what we've put into our therapy.

So, I don't want to see making the transition or the addition of online income as necessarily saying goodbye to our career or our identity as therapists. It's more of making space for, more both/and, this is not an either/or, this is not a binary or a black and white situation. This is a both/and situation.

What I believe is that you don't have to say goodbye to the industry altogether, and you don't have to feel the shame and the guilt of stepping beyond the therapy room, because the truth is the industry is kind of set up to pigeonhole us on a certain path. Grad school, internship, national exam, pre-licensure, licensure, and then we typically become like a community mental health employee or an agency employee, whether that's a 10 99 contractor or a W2 employee. Something like that, and then the goal is to climb the ladder at that agency to become a clinical director. 

At that point, we have the choice to maybe do private practice, but then what we're told is to grow that private practice by becoming a group practice owner, which puts you in the clinical director role all over again, and not only are you the clinical director, but then you're also the business owner. So you've got two levels of stress. 

Moving over to online income blows this wide open because you have so many more choices in the way that you show up. You could be a course creator, you could be a group program facilitator, you could be a membership site owner, you could be a VIP day provider. There are so many more options and so many more directions and paths. 

It sometimes feels scary or like you're turning your back on your field because you're exploring these new things, but what I really want to highlight is it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be a turning the back on, or an abandonment, or a walking away from, it can be an expansion. 

Even if you close down your therapy practice altogether and you move fully into online income and you make a 100% transition, everything that was your experience, your education, your skillset, as a clinician comes with you. It's not like you just turn it off and then, you know, start something new. Your skills inside the therapy room are 100% transferable to online income, and that's what I'm going to show you how, and in what ways we can make the transference today. 

When we stay stuck in the therapist mentality, or when we cling too tightly to our therapist identity, this is where we feel like we might have to repay. If your family put you through school, then it's like, "oh, I have to repay them somehow. They gave me the money for grad school and here I am turning my back on it". Or the student loans, literally you have payments to make on these student loans. And so it can feel like if I leave the field, what did I get all these student loans for?

You also can feel a debt, not a financial debt to student loans or financial debt to your family, but you can almost feel a debt to society because you signed up to be a helper. You signed up to be somebody who took these traumas head-on or who took the people's struggles head-on. You wanted to be the person who guided them through that and help them through that. And so if you leave the field, or if you add something additional onto your role in the field, that sometimes somehow you owe it to society, or it feels bad to be not fulfilling your promise to society.

I also think that therapists, in general, are overworked, and so if we remain stuck in this therapist identity, and we don't see the possibilities beyond the therapy room, we're setting ourselves up for more work, for overworking, for taking on that one more client for not being able to say no to that intake, even if they're not a fit or even if they are a fit and we just don't have room, we still say yes. So we want to make sure that as we branch out and as we look at new things, we're setting ourselves up to reduce our workload.

I also think that something that comes from being stuck with the therapist identity is this idea of upper limiting myself. Oh, "well I have thousands of dollars in this, or I have thousands of hours in this, and so I need to be a therapist and that's all I'm ever going to be is a therapist. And I can be a damn good one, but I'm still going to be a therapist. That's who I am. It's in my blood, and I put so much into becoming this. That's what I am." 

Well, why can't you be that, and a course creator? A therapist and an author? A therapist and a membership site owner? Don't put limits on yourself by being afraid to branch out or being ashamed or embarrassed to branch out. 

You are not obligated to be just one thing. You are a multifaceted person. You are a fully human person and you have every right and every opportunity to be anything you want. I know, I feel like, some motivational speaker or whatever, but I want you to know that you don't need to feel like you're obligated to be one thing.

Broadening your horizons and realizing that your skills are transferable. It's not an either/or it's a both/and helps you start to recognize your worth outside of the therapy room, helps you get to see, "I continue to do great work here and I am doing great work over here", or "I did a great work here and now I'm doing great work over here".

Whether that's going to be both or whether you're going to leave the field, you get to see that you are more than just a therapist. You could just step into new levels of evolution, new states of being new versions of yourself, and that's exciting. You also get to bring more discernment and more pleasure to your work. You may have this kind of therapy niche, but you get to decide to work with somebody totally different or to do something totally different—you don't even have to work with people. 

You could have a course on gardening, like vegetable gardening. I would buy that. We're trying to have our own kind of sustainable vegetable garden. I would so buy a course on that right now. So you don't have to talk about emotions. You can talk about weeds or cucumbers or something like that. You get to bring a level of decision-making to your work and pleasure to your work and purpose to your work beyond your identity as a therapist. And it's really cool because you get to carve out multiple identities. 

Again, a therapist, and... therapists and... therapist...and. That “and” word is so powerful and so freeing. In what ways are your skills transferable now that you see what happens mindset-wise, when you believe in the possibilities, let's talk about these other advantages that your therapy skills bring to you business-wise.  

When you enter the online income space, one thing that's going to be very different about what you do versus other people who don't have your background is your program quality is going to be completely different than somebody who's making a course or a whatever a curriculum for the first time, because you've taken a ton of courses. 

You've taken undergrad courses, you've taken grad courses, maybe doctorate courses, you've taken continuing ed courses. You know what makes a good curriculum and you know what makes a bad curriculum. You have first-hand knowledge. 

You also get to know how people learn. You know, what makes people tick, you understand different learning styles. Some people learn visually, some people learn auditorily. Some people need more of that writing-things-down or that kinesthetic learning style. You get that, you know people, and so you get to make sure that your program serves all kinds of people. You're also somebody who's aware of accessibility, and so you're going to have closed captions or you're going to have transcripts or things that clients who need different deliveries. You're going to be aware of that. 

You likely have experienced building trainings or guidings or curriculum even like projects in grad school, all the way to maybe presentations at your agency, or if you've done some like inservice or lunch and learns, or if you've volunteered with like NAMI to teach something or any of that stuff is going to contribute to the quality of the program that you make and that you bring to the world.

The other place that you have a competitive advantage or a therapeutic advantage is your marketability, your credentials help you stand out in the online industry instantly. Now we have to be careful when we talk credentials, you're likely not going to want to market yourself based on your license. You're going to want to separate this from your license, most likely. There are some times when you might not, but for the most part, you probably do. And so you're going to learn more on your degrees or your certifications or the things that are not regulated and are not governed by certain bodies or certain codes. 

My doctorate degree, my years as a therapist, my advanced training in trauma, my trauma-informed approach, or whatever, none of that has anything to do with your license and so you can certainly lean on that. You automatically get to claim expert status, and I know this is a little hard for clinicians to say "I'm the expert", especially because we're supposed to avoid being the expert in the session, but when you step on a stage and it's all kinds of people, but you're the one with the advanced degree or all kinds of people, but you're the one with 15 years experience or whatever, you automatically get to claim expert status. 

You don't have to earn this. You don't have to earn credibility. You already have your therapeutic experience is your credibility, and you also get to demand higher prices because of that. You get to compete on a more premium price level than people who don't have the certifications or the credibility that you do. There will also be opportunities for more collaborations. If you pitch a podcast or a TV show or whatever, and you lead with your advanced degree your pitch will get accepted more often than somebody who does not have those types of credentials. So more doors will be open to you because of your background. And that makes you more marketable.

The other way or an additional way that your therapist background gives you an advantage in the online space is customer satisfaction. Your students, or membership site members, or group members, or whatever type of program that you make, they are much more likely to have - to be more satisfied with your programs because you understand the emotional transformation behind the knowledge. You're not just going to put out a bunch of random facts and figures. You're going to be able to tie that to the transformation that they're looking for. 

You also know how to hold space. Granted the online income space that you hold the coaching space that you hold, or the group program space that you hold is very different than a therapeutic space, but you understand what it means to create a container and to open a call, and then to be able to make sure that everyone's regulated before you close the call. You know how to hold space. 

You have experienced guiding groups. Yes, the therapy group is different than an online income group, but you still have experience in that, and you also have experienced defining group standards, setting boundaries with the group screening for a group, all of those kinds of things. You know how to do that. You know how to curate a group that's going to be successful. And you know how to guide people to an end result, even though we don't like to make promises or guarantees in therapy, we still often work off of treatment plans. 

Where we're still working towards goals and we're working towards measurable differences, and so you know how to make sure that people are getting to the end result that they're paying you for. So they're going to be satisfied if they buy a course and it doesn't actually provide what it promises, that's going to be a dissatisfied customer, but you understand what the emotional changes, you understand how to get people there, and so your customers are going to be much more satisfied. 

The other thing that you bring as a clinician that might not be prevalent in other aspects of the online space is integrity. What's amazing about the online space is it's not heavily regulated like our industry is, however you understand what it means to act ethically. You understand what the regulation and the framework and the foundation that the regulation from the clinical space has given you. 

So you get to really step out of that stuff out of the red tape and said out of the regular, the rules, you get to make your own rules, but you're going to bring over just a level of professionalism, a level of care about other people that people who don't have the regulated background that you do aren't really even be able to do or be able to execute and probably aren't even going to think about. 

You have a firmer grasp on integrity and on ethics than a lot of people in the online space who may be out to screw others, or just may or may not, that might not be their intention, but they don't understand the things they need to be aware of or protect when it comes to their customers or their clients.

The truth is while the clinical industry is kind of set up to pigeonhole us in terms of career trajectory, our skill sets that we learn within this career are vast, they're varied, and they're totally transferable to the online space. 

And I think, in fact, they make us stronger in the course industry and in the coaching industry and that is so exciting to see how you can expand beyond the therapy rooms, you know, recapture some of this career autonomy, recapture some of this creativity that might be missing from the therapy room, but also using your skills as a therapist, as a springboard, it's not turning your back on them. It's using them as a launchpad to enter the online industry in a more competitive, more marketable, more satisfactory way. 

If you're somebody who wants the springboard and wants to come into the online space, have more play, have more freedom, have more room to wiggle but definitely rely on your therapeutic background to give you that edge and give you that advantage, I want you to check out my free masterclass because we start with the insight and I want you to get some "ahas" and some, some realization of what's possible. Then you can start building things out. 

In this free training, that's what we're going to take a look at the work style that you want to embody, the money that you want to make, the marketing you want to do or not do, and this is going to help you determine your next steps so that when you do start taking action, you're taking action in the right direction. 

So to access this Masterclass head on over to marissalawton.com/masterclass, super easy, it's totally free and it's on-demand. So you can watch it whenever is most convenient for you. Fit in, you know, 20 minutes between sessions or whatever. 

So I hope it's helpful for you. I hope you now have some inspiration on how you are so valuable and how making this transition is going to be easier than you ever thought. Alright. I will be back next week, and until then, keep on rising. 

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