Don’t Let TikTok Fool You – Being a Therapist is Hard Work: An interview with Sandra Kushnir, LMFT and Anita Avedian, LMFT
Curt and Katie interview Sandra Kushner and Anita Avedian about how the therapy business works now. We talk about how the profession and those who are entering it has changed over the years. We look at what new therapists can expect when they join a group practice, pushing back against some of the broadly held misconceptions of what it is like to be a therapist today.
Transcripts for this episode will be available at mtsgpodcast.com!
In this podcast episode, we talk about what new therapists can expect when entering the field
We invited Anita Avedian and Sandra Kushnir to come talk about their latest endeavor: a course called Degree to Practice.
What are the misconceptions new therapists have about what it looks like to work as a therapist?
· There is a difference between desired caseload and the capacity to earn money and hours toward licensure
· Expectations don’t seem to be realistic and seem to be impacted by conversations about burnout
· These expectations are being set by grad school, social media, coaching programs
· There doesn’t seem to be an understanding about what it takes to build a practice and what group practice owners are doing to create these workplaces
· Therapists will need to learn how to work with clients that they are not comfortable with
· Developing expertise is essential for attracting clients – be the best at what you do
· Part of developing expertise is learning how to address higher risk with all clients
What can therapists expect when they join a group private practice?
· The best group practice owners will have transparency and clarity around expectations
· Often there will be a minimum caseload (Sandra and Anita both require a minimum of 20 clients per week)
· There is an overhead for each therapist, so therapists will not earn the full amount they are charging
· Insurance or sliding fee practices will need to pay therapists less than private pay practices due to the income available
· In many private practices, it will take some time to build a caseload, which means that it will take time to gain consistent income
· Some group practices will teach you how to run your own practice, some will just provide a space for doing clinical work
· Looking at practical limits as “task conflict” rather than “relational conflict” – for example, pay is a factor of the business’ needs and capacity, not a personal evaluation of someone’s worth
Stay in Touch with Curt, Katie, and the whole Therapy Reimagined #TherapyMovement:
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Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:
Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/
Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/
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guide i'm Kurt Whithelm with Katie Vernois and this is the podcast for therapists about the things that are going on in our worlds the things that happen in our profession and kind of encompassing a lot of the conversations that we have this is an episode that we're kind of talking about the ways that the therapy field is changing there's a lot that we get taught in graduate schools about things that were relevant 50 60 70 years ago that at least theory wise some of that stuff still holds very much true but as time is wants to do things around that kind of change including the ways that the profession runs as a business the ways that employees come in and sometimes the very wildly differing expectations of what people come to expect when they apply for grad school versus the job market that they run into once they graduate and to help us along on this conversation today we are joined by sander kushner and one of our good friends returning guests and media obedience so thank you so much for joining us today thank you so much for having us we're really excited to be here and have this conversation and hopefully help some new therapists that are entering our field set their expectations we are so excited to have you i know Anita you've been on here before but sandra why don't you tell us who you are and what you're putting out into the world yes my name is sandra kushner i'm the owner and founder of meridian counseling we are a counseling center based in california and utah we do in person and telehealth services as well as med management and iop and we have about 120 therapists now on our platform so we've grown a lot and what i'm putting out there is mind-passing it about mental health and bringing mental health to the masses getting more people help and allowing them to use their insurance if they can't afford it financially and Anita you should introduce yourself too for folks who haven't listened to your past episodes i am the executive director of the veeding counseling center and anger management 818 where we do offer therapy services and anger management groups we have about 15 anger management groups a week in the la and throughout california offering online and in-person therapy sessions and you guys know i also offer the anger management certification training to therapists on a monthly basis which is a nationally approved training on this call we have i don't know 60 to 70 years of license experience between us which makes us sound way older than any of us actually are but i know uh Anita and asandra you've both worked a lot with people very early in their career whether it's being faculty at local universities whether it's supervising people fresh out of grad school on their way to licensure it's a big part of my practice and my professional experience as well so we usually start with a question around like what is therapist get wrong and the natural question in this episode is what a new therapist get wrong about being a therapist that's a really broad question in this so good luck i'm going to to maybe even narrow this down a little bit more of what are some of the misconceptions that therapists have when they're entering into this field that you find yourself correcting or educating about kind of over and over yeah so i'm going to backtrack a little bit and tell you about the work Anita and i are doing together we actually launched a course for new therapists called the degree to practice which helps new therapists at their expectations for what it means to enter our field and be an associate even what they expect post graduation in regards to work environment what they need in the supervisor and to answer your question i think what a lot of therapists in my experience are getting wrong right now is they don't really know what it means to be an employee postgraduate school at a counseling center or out of private practice and the amount of hours and work that it takes in order to get the income that they're expecting so we're seeing a lot of people kind of with expectation hangovers postgraduate school entering the work force and feeling just unfulfilled and job hopping a lot and Anita can speak a little bit more about like her experience with that but an analogy that i like to use is if you hop on a plane and you think you're going to Paris brand and you end up landing in Anchorage, Alaska you feel disappointed you didn't pack right right it's not where you thought you were going and what i think a lot of schools are dropping the ball on is they're not really preparing people for this next stage in their career properly for instance a lot of my friends are doctors and they know what residency looks like right they know they're going to be working 60 to 80 hour weeks for 65 to 80 thousand dollars a year they know they're going to have 24 hour shifts and so they go into that stage of their career with the mindset that that's what their life is going to look like and i do feel like a lot of therapists entering our field just are not prepared mindset wise for what it means to work and i think to piggyback off of what sandra's saying is you know oftentimes in during an interview and i'm sure you guys may have experienced something similar when i ask an interviewee what is your ideal caseload look like and the response is around 15 clients a week and i'm thinking how are they going to build their hours in the time frame they may need it and how is it that 15 clients a week is the like the limit in terms of what they can handle right now so there's almost this tolerance of they don't want to work as much necessarily not because they don't want to but it feels too overwhelming to see more clients a week and there's this expectation of the pay to be decent enough to make a living so i think there's this difference in how realistic is it to work 15 hours a week and get this pay that you want so that's kind of that difference that i'm seeing is when you go into a work field oftentimes it's really going to look potentially closer to 30 hours a week or 20 in terms of clients it's going to be closer to 25 to 30 clients a week so so that's kind of this transition that i have seen and as what sandra was saying is there's this expectation that feels very different and not realistic where do you think these expectations are coming from i think they're coming a lot from school talking about burnout and self-care which is very real very very important but in my opinion it's almost like an over correction in a lot of ways obviously we have a very high burnout career where we need to be aware of that and how it's impacting us but also when somebody needs to make a living wage and survive very especially in an extensive city like los angeles it's unrealistic to work 15 20 hours a week and make enough money to support yourself and so i'm i'm thinking it's coming a lot from the schools and there have been more conversations right about burnout not just in our fields but in a lot of fields in general especially if the as things have moved to being more online and people are experiencing like physical issues from looking at a computer screen all day so these are very valid conversations but i think the problem is they're not setting expectations with what that means in regards to income and earning potential as well and i want to add to that i think also what i've seen and i don't know if you guys have noticed this as well in the last probably six seven eight years there's been a lot more out there with coaching we can help you make six figures with just a few hours so i think there's these workshops and maybe tick-tock videos or instagram videos here's how to make more money and work less so there i've kind of seen this in the younger generation because i'm so old i'm gonna say i'm so the younger generation with this make more work less you know mindset so that i think it's coupled with that as well it's not just the schools but what folks are learning out there as well which is a great idea by the way i'm not against it don't get me wrong but it doesn't work out when you enter you just get hired somewhere with that mindset thinking that's what's going to happen and it's not the case and this i think is why we're seeing so much job hopping going around you know whereas in the past you'd see associates working at one center all the way through their completion of their hours now it's every three four months they're just job hopping because they're not satisfied with where they're at whether it doesn't meet their expectations or they want something more how are you as group practice owners trying to to find this balance or what are you hearing in interviews that you are looking for like okay this makes you more likely to succeed in my practice that you're kind of sensing oh i hear other candidates saying these things i don't necessarily i'm seeing the it might not be red flags but they're definitely orange flags coming down the point well i can speak for myself one of the big things that we look for and therapists that we hire at meridian counseling is the ability to have difficult conversations and receive feedback and so when somebody comes in and they have an expectation to see 10 to 15 clients and make six figures a year in their interview right we have those conversations right we we break things down for them very directly and very honestly and we explain you know yes there are some people that have private practices in Beverly Hills but charge two three hundred dollars an hour and they see very few clients and they make very good money but there's a lot of work that went on in the back end right in order to get those clients in order to build their brand that those types of clients are willing to work with them it doesn't happen overnight and there's a lot of time and energy and effort spent behind the scenes to build your career up to that and we we walk them through right like what is a realistic salary based on how many clients you're expecting to see and for us our minimum is 20 for associates so we expect 20 clients two hours of supervision one hour of individual supervision and then if they want to make more money they can go above 20 but we very clearly like that is our minimum and some associates are like that's too many I can't do that I'm gonna burn out but then you know usually what we see is they either come back a few months later when they try out other jobs where they're not giving enough clients or they're not making enough money and they ask to rejoin the practice and sometimes we'll take them on and sometimes that position has been filled and yeah with our center what we end up doing I think the same thing Sandra as you guys do is we have this expectation of carrying a caseload of 20 or more but Kurt what I've also realized is for some folks that's just not going to happen in terms of where they're at and what worked in life balance so as a supervisor and or the director I will help adjust what we're doing what we're offering them and how much they can give back we just kind of reevaluate to see what is going to work for them so long as it still works for the company so there is a lot of that but what I think what I'm seeing is there's more requests around that because the associates coming through some people are either at 25 28 clients a week others are wanting only 10 clients a week because that's what they can handle realizing they're getting overwhelmed too much with too many clients in their caseload so we work with them therapy notes seamlessly integrates scheduling documentation and billing into one easy to use platform plus enjoy features like secure messaging e prescribe group telehealth and more with 24/7 live customer support you'll get answers to your questions anytime anywhere no matter your field or specialty therapy notes is dedicated to helping you care more and worry less so use the promo code modern today to try it free for two months it seems like a hard balance because I know that there are a lot of practical reasons why someone might need a lower caseload I've certainly seen all the conversations about you know see like two clients and make five thousand five hundred thousand dollars you know so I know that there there are these expectation issues but it also feels like we're in a time in the world where we have a shift to my work is at my life like I work to live I don't live to work and and so there's the cultural shift but I think there's also we're in a time when a lot of therapists are just burnt out on life we just I guess we're still kind of in it but we're mostly out of a pandemic where we were going through things at the same time as our clients so Andra and I were talking before we got on you know there's definitely some perks to doing virtual but you can get a lot more physical issues when that happens and so to me it seems like there's there's a balance that needs to be struck and I think that you know I'm I think I'm the only one on this call that's not a group practice owner I mean I would love to hear how you guys balance that because some of it is actually like legitimate accommodation needs some of it is this is what I'm willing to do and some of it's just kind of misplaced expectations that have been swirled around whether it's social media or school so how do you balance that because to me I don't want to go too far to like oh these young stars they expect too much and they need to you know earn their stripes you know and then I also don't want to go to the other way of like okay well you we're just going to pay you a bazillion dollars and and you don't have to do that much because that's what's fair right totally so how do you do that I think it's a great question that that finding that right balance is really important and here I could set up my expectations and say okay you're you're going to start working for my company this is what I expect from you this is what you should expect from me and and that's discussed and agreed upon and so but there's life and then there may be health issues and there may be adjusting or moving you know so different factors arise that we also have to be flexible with as a group practice owner and how to work with that how to balance that so it definitely is a two-way street we're open we want them to be open but I think there's sometimes like for me as a group practice owner there may be this how was it possible I was seeing 60 clients a week and 15 clients feels overwhelming like you know I can't help but do that little comparison at times and I'm like okay I was on one extreme now it's on the other how do we get that get it to meet somewhere in the middle but that's just my yeah I mean my thoughts on this are that's why we created this course is I believe early expectation setting and early intervention and helping associates you know while they're still in school before they graduate get a little bit of career coaching and understand right what they are getting into where they should work based on their personality and their income goals what the differences are between working let's say at a date the MH agency or a treatment center or a private practice right a lot of schools don't go super in depth in preparing people with of understanding what the options are and so for me like to change this is really like let's educate people right at knowledge is power and have helping people understand what their options are and also make informed decisions right to sit down and be like okay how much money do I actually need in order to feel safe and comfortable do I need five hundred thousand dollars or do I actually need eighty thousand dollars or sixty thousand dollars right what's more important to me being with my kids and being with my family or work right everyone's driven by different values and different priorities and different things which is fine but I do think that those things should inform the decisions that you make as you enter the field right some people need health insurance because their husband or their partner or their loan or they don't have it elsewhere right so that's important to them so maybe for them it's better to work at a DMH agency for other people they might want to be with their kids more or they might want to prioritize their hobbies or a different side hustle that they're doing maybe doing a part-time private practice is what they're needing but they need to be you know prepared to understand okay in a DMH agency you're going to have a lower salary but better benefits and more stability and income and private practice yes you can make more but you're going to be spending a lot of time working for free marketing yourself so all those things I think empower people to make decisions that are more aligned with what is right for them. I want to ask one quick question Sondra because you said in a DMH agency you'll make less but have more financial stability and in private practice you have the potential to make more money but there's other unpaid work my experience and obviously this is a bazillion years ago what's that and what I've heard from people more recently is that it takes a while in private practice before you can even make as much as you normally make an DMH or you know a public mental health organization and so do you have a sense of the timeline for folks because I think that's the other thing they're like oh I'm going into private practice I'm going to make more money and it's like no no you make a lot less for at least probably six months is my understanding of it and so is that reasonable like what is an actual reasonable expectation of income because some public mental health agencies you actually make pretty decent money you make that seventy eighty thousand dollars a year from the beginning without any marketing without any of that stuff and and private practices you're not getting that until at least the first year. So Meridian takes insurance so we're a little bit different we operate like a private practice but we are in network with all the insurance payers so when somebody joins our practice they do build their caseload pretty quickly just because there's such a high demand for clients that want to use their insurance and we take all of the plans so I can answer from that sense if you're joining an insurance based private practice you're going to build your caseload a lot faster just because there's more clients out there that are willing to pay their low copay some people have no copay but if you're joining a private pay practice right where the the fee is two hundred dollars or more it's going to take a lot longer because not very many people can or want to pay that much money for therapy and now that there's more options to use insurance a lot more clients or hesitant to pay privately because they can go to these new platforms that have popped up right so it takes a little bit longer and Anita can speak more to that because I know you mostly do private pay but yeah I got there's a lot of differences in what type of private practice you work at too right if you work in an insurance versus private pay a practice so before we we switch to Anita's experience Sandra what is an earning potential for someone coming into an insurance based private practice like what's the what's a possible salary range yeah so our associates depending on their caseload anywhere from 20 and we have some people that work 40 hour weeks like they see already clients they're their salary ranges everyone at our practice starts out hourly but we have about associates that have made a hundred thousand dollars a year however they are working 38 to 40 hours a week in regards to how many clients they're seeing so yeah it really varies on caseload our requirement is once they reach their 20 to 25 caseload they can switch over to being salaried with us and then they have to maintain that caseload in order to get their salary if they want to they can stay hourly if they don't want to worry about like having to maintain a certain caseload so it's so different for each person but yeah there's earning potential to make six figures but you are working a typical 40 hour week in that situation 30 to 40 to 40 clients is actually more of a 45 to 50 hour week right with all the documentation yeah we do our documentation within the last hours so we created a super easy milk template so we're very like tech forward and we use like AI and stuff like that so our notes aren't as heavy as other practices maybe yeah I think to answer the question for our center it's interesting because we in the last year started accepting atna and sigma and so before that point it was probably a slower build and then now i'm realizing for example the associate we hired a few months ago within a month she was already at a case sort of 18 a week within one month so it's a it's a faster build whereas back at the day it was probably about six months before you saw someone have about 18 clients a week so it's definitely a faster build right now ours is a more cash pay and some insurance versus i know with sondra it's it's all mostly insurance but it's nice it's like it's nice to have that hybrid a little bit of a mix and it's it's been pretty decent so right now we've been trying to hire a new associate every two or three months until we build our case though i used to teach a course on careers in advocacy when i was teaching and part of what i found in trying to do what you're doing is in addressing some of the grad school deficits around this is that develop mentally do you think that grad students are in a place where they can conceptualize what it really looks like to be in private practice like i hear you know some of the the gaps that you're trying to feel here and maybe it was just my style of teaching or maybe it was the couple of groups of students that i taught that i've had them reach out to me four or five years later and be like i just was not in the mindset to be able to receive the information of what it truly means to work in private practice when it comes to this kind of stuff so i'm wondering if there's also just kind of a develop mental factor not just blaming the problems from the grad schools on this yeah yeah from the private practice setting i know back it in the past because i've even switched how i'm doing things of course but earlier on i would have our associates in kurd i know you know this i would have our associates teach them how to do the business aspect i would require them to network i'd have them i'd require them to attend association meetings join the board get involved with our community i wanted them to learn what it takes on the back end to do the things that are needed and so the transition has been i'm as a center covering all of those grounds and they're really doing more of just the clinical work at this point but that's just the that's my transition as as that individual and i'm trying to still learn what is the better approach because they're not learning to be more involved the way i'm doing it right now so and i kind of liked that that was my passion in teaching that so but but now it's a little bit more okay here's the business here's what we're expecting but to answer your question i i don't know i don't know the right answer i just know that i'm trying to navigate through that as well to see what is the need right now how can i best service the associates are coming through today and how can i best guide them and am i missing out on this opportunity of teaching them the leadership and getting involved and the business aspect of it yeah and my my thoughts on that are i think it's something that's very teachable however i do think that there's other factors that play right a lot of people see the success of meridian now right so they see like the results not the back end work behind the scenes right a lot of these career coaches that are coming out and saying you know you can make a million dollars in your private practice well a lot of them don't have clinics i'm like how are you making a million dollars in your private practice right like who are you to speak about this right so i think a lot of it is kind of what's happening with social media right people see their friends on vacations in italy with designer handbags and they think that that person like you know has everything in their life is super easy but people only see the highlights and i think with this it's kind of similar right you see the private practice that really hills therapist or you see me as a young girl with a big practice right but behind that you don't see like the tears the sweat the hours the money the time all of that that's been lost and so i do think that by giving them the information and the opportunity to learn some people will really grasp what it means and other people you know maybe won't but i do think that for those that will grasp it sets them up to be more successful in the in the long run right and my thoughts are when we surveyed the people that were coming through our course and asked them what they want to do in their career about 90 percent of them said that they want to be in private practice and then after they did our course they realized a few of them were like maybe this isn't what i want right but i think it's kind of a glorified thing in a lot of ways like just like again i'm using an instagram analogy where it seems like being an influencer traveling around italy with your designer handbag is is great it might seem like that when you are seeing someone in a private practice that's been successful but it's not what you see in the forward facing sense always i think and i wanted to add something to like even when we're hiring associates right now because i give them the option of becoming full-time which may mean more admin hours i give them a series of options of would you rather be out networking would you want to work on our instagram platform writing blogs so they're trying out different things and pretty quickly they're going to come back and say this was not for me that's not for me and they're realizing whatever's involved in that back end probably half of what we do they're not really interested in doing so they're kind of testing to see what parts of this work do they like and i also wanted to add i have also seen people coming through they get out of grad school they start doing therapy and they realize this is not for them they literally transition out of the field completely so that has been surprising i've seen a few of the associates fully exit the field after grad school so and maybe that was during the pandemic they didn't you know have the experience of in-person i'm not sure whatever happened but so there is some of that too where they're coming they do the clinical work and they realize this is they can't handle it well super bills can 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a super bill uploads feature which is completely free for therapists if you'd like to instead offer your clients a resource to manage their own super bills thrizer manages all claims end-to-end so you and your clients don't need to deal with any of the insurance stress visit join dot thrizer dot com forward slash modern therapist and use our promo code modern therapists to start your free trial and receive waived fees for your first $2,500 in payments can we talk about the influence of the pandemic on I mean because I think that all of us you know we did all of our grad school we got licensed well before that we were established by the pandemic but we're releasing the first wave of people who entered into graduate school during the pandemic or because of the pandemic is that kind of uh cohort showing up differently than even the people who are graduating right before 100% not just in their expectations for employment but I do see less of a drive to even do we offer a lot of internal trainings on different types of clients and different issues and theories and modalities to work with people just don't attend when I was an associate I would like every training I could go to I would go to and I would absorb that they do not attend they only they want will only go if they get paid to go there's like not as much of a drive to learn um I see a lot of in Anita and I have talked about this a lot of um associate who encounter like a really difficult climate that maybe they haven't had exposure to and then they're like I don't want to work with this person I want to transfer them out of my case load and we have to talk to them and be like hey you need to work with this person because this is your opportunity to learn and we will supervise you through it but you're in your training and you need to learn how to deal with these types of clients so that when your license you know what to do but a lot of resistance for that where they're like I don't want to and this isn't what I want to specialize in and we have to explain like it doesn't matter what you want to specialize in you need to know what to do in these situations if you ever encounter them when you're not under supervision right um so we've seen a lot of that just which has been really shocking to me because that in my head I'm like if you want to make a lot of money and you want to be successful in this field like capitalism is still at play here right you need to be the best at what you you need to be the best at what you do right in order for you to be successful you need to be really good at what you do and in leaning into trainings and supervision and prioritizing that with or without being paid for it is how you get there so that's been my experience and I think you just touched on something there there's there's more I think what I will say the what I'm finding is there's a lot more boundary setting they know what they're comfortable with what they're not comfortable with the threshold of the discomfort is different and I guess that's what I'm noticing and I'm not used to but you know you're speaking out we teach people to be assertive they're being assertive they're setting boundaries you know great it doesn't always work so well in terms of from a company perspective but more so if we're helping clinicians be the best they can be this is the time to do it during the associate ship of trying things out and you know being scared but still pushing through and learning through the process because that's that's who we are training and teaching to go out there in the world to be licensed clinicians who can handle a different area of issues that come through their door right that's what we're hoping for them the question I have on this because I I hear you and I was you know hiring I feel like thousands of clinicians when I was working in public mental health as a director and and saw some of this but certainly it was a very different picture you know different cohort of folks coming into community mental health and and also a very different generation this was you know 10 15 years ago and so to me I think about what Kurt and I've talked about a lot on this podcast which is the the industry the profession is in some ways broken and we need to advocate we need to to encourage change and we need to make sure that we're not allowing all of us to get so burned out and be so underpaid that that this continues forward and and clearly that message has been heard right like we've got you know brand new folks coming in and and really setting boundaries around it and so I guess this goes back to that kind of kind of how do you sort through is this a realistic boundary is this a realistic complaint or is this something that is a wrong expectation based on what what you know whether it's the coaches or the grad schools that are saying that this this other type of being a therapist is possible or the tik-tok therapist that act like they're therapists but aren't like how do we sort through how we move forward in the field what people quote unquote should push back against and what is too much of a pendulum swing over into therapists that don't actually do therapy for anything that's difficult and for for for any money less than what they actually want to earn I mean like to me it feels like there's not a good answer here because of actical things and so how do we sort through that it's a great question I think you know part of it is with supervisors trying to really encourage and help challenge folks who have fears like I am always asking tell me what's happening what do you know that I'm noticing this resistance or what is the real concern here because it's it's almost this fear based that's not I'm not going to do well or I'm uncomfortable with that you know you guys know I teach anger management so this they'll get trained on anger management but then there's anchors bringing up a lot like of their trauma from the past or they get scared in the room so like anchors going to exist not even doing anger management it's gonna be couples therapy individual therapy like you if you can't if you can't help being around anger how are you being a therapist so we have to like it's my job as a supervisor to help them see through that and and hopefully create a place where they can start working through their fears and pushing through a little bit because you know for me that's I don't know a lot of therapy is doing with anger yeah and I think it's for us as leaders like people in the fields we've been in the field that are open-minded and you know want to impact change and understand that the field is changing to be able to guide them in what this is and how to navigate it all is really important and I think what's important is to as people who have been in the field for a long time to stay open to like cultural changes when it comes to employment when it comes to graduate school when it comes to technology and be forward thinking in that way I remember when I first started grad school there were some professors that were just like very set in their ways right like it was like this is what it is and this is how it's always going to be and anything different is bad but like the world is always changing and like our field is going to change as it changes right and we need to be aware of that while also creating like an opportunity to balance out like the integrity of the clinical work and protecting our clients and making sure we're staying in scope of quality care right while leaning into a changing world and a changing demographic of people entering the field as well so yeah I wanted to also mention really quickly I was listening to this podcast The Hidden Brain and they talked about different ways of dealing with conflict and how engineers and lawyers and doctors are able to separate tasks conflict from relational conflict and people who go into more caretaking professions like psychologists and teachers and you know all of us nurturing people that we have a hard time separating task conflict from relational conflict right so what I think is really important is that therapists are taught how to have a healthier conflict in schools and how to receive feedback in a way that doesn't make them feel emotional or defensive but rather looking at it as like I'm just trying to help you objectively right because what I see is like when you tell someone hey I don't think you can make that much money things 15 clients a week a lot of times they'll take it as like you don't think I'm good enough right they'll make it as a personal attack on on who they are versus what the research has shown is like if you were having that thing in conversation with someone who has like more of a personality that would go into engineering they would be like oh tell them why like let me problem solve this they wouldn't take it as a personal attack and so I do think that that's important is the help associate early on learn to receive feedback and have these types of conversations in a way that isn't as emotional or triggering but a little bit more just like objective and view it as an opportunity to help them grow and learn versus something that has anything to do with their like competency or any potential or anything personal yeah that really pushes back against the charge or worth right that's BS like charge your worth like that that doesn't mean anything right but it certainly makes how much money you can make a personal evaluation of your worth and so I really like that Sondra I think that that's that's a big takeaway for me is kind of the task conflict versus relational conflict I love that thank you of course where can people find out more about your course our website is degree to practice calm and we are offering the course right now for students postgraduate school are about to graduate that are entering their associate training um portion of their career however we do plan to launch some courses in the future that will be for people looking to get into graduate school so for people in undergrad thinking about becoming a therapist you're doing clinical work and then all the way down to what it means to start a business so we're going to have a few different modules and options for people but yeah you can find us on to degree degree to practice or for me you can find me at meridiancounseling.com and for me it would be avidiancounselingcenter.com and we will include links to all of those in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com follow us on our social media join us in our facebook group the modern therapist group to continue on with the conversation and until next time I'm Kurt Whitham with katie vernois sander Kushner and Anita Vidien. A final thanks again to our partner therapy notes the highest rated practice management solution for behavioral health. Don't forget that you can use promo code modern for two free months when you sign up. Supervilles and reimbursement weights are not a reliable solution for out of network clients with just a click of the button you can offer courtesy claim submission and end-to-end claim management support and even allow them to skip the reimbursement weight altogether with riser. Visit join.thrizer.com forward slash modern therapist and use our code modern therapists to start your free trial today. Thank you for listening to the modern therapist survival guide. Learn more about who we are and what we do at mtsgpodcast.com you can also join us on facebook and twitter and please don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss any of our episodes.
