On Trying To Live Your Values When the Bills Still Need Paying

When I set up my private practice at the end of 2018, and when Niamh and I set up Counsellors Therapy Pot in 2023 /24, it was with a clear intention: to do things ‘properly’. My way and in T-pot’s case ‘our way’.

Having spent years working in Human Resources before I was a counsellor, I joked that working for myself I’d be able to do things properly, without all the needless red tape and without the spreadsheets. Most importantly, anything I would create would have a strong ethical foundation and be values led. Values such as respect, integrity and transparency would be at the forefront. And with both businesses, I wanted to make a difference.

Looking back now, it sounds difficult, but I didn’t think it was at the time. I think that this was partly down to naivety and partly down to putting my head in the sand.

When I started my private practice, I followed procedure to the letter. I wrote a working agreement; eased myself in by working through a couple of counselling centres to begin with, joined the ICO etc etc (you know all the stuff). But there’s just so many values and ethics-based quandaries that nobody quite prepares you for around fees, cancellation policies (and enforcement of cancellation policies), no shows, professional boundary issues you hadn’t worked through in training. The list goes on.

What I didn’t realise then is that, compared to now, private practice was easy. After six months I had a busy practice. During COVID I was worried about attracting online clients, but I didn’t need to worry. There was no furlough for me: I watched everyone baking banana bread and learning Japanese with tired bemusement while I conducted several Zoom calls a day.

But now we’re experiencing a completely different reality that we couldn’t have envisaged seven, six or even five years ago. It’s tough. I feel like I’ve had to learn how to run a private practice all over again. I never thought I’d get so up-close and personal with marketing, social media and the question of what my niche is.

It was in the beginnings of this emerging landscape, in 2023, that Niamh and I decided to set up Counsellors Therapy Pot or T-pot, as we affectionately call her. By this point I’d worked out that looking after yourself as a counsellor is difficult and T-Pot was a genuine answer to this. As many of you will know we thought it was about time that counsellors were able to access their own affordable counselling. ‘Let’s make it easier!’ was our clarion call.

It turns out making things easier isn’t that easy.

Some of the things that were or are difficult are to do with knowledge gaps. After all, we trained to be counsellors, not IT specialists, marketeers or businesspeople. T-pot launched later than it was supposed to because we couldn’t get the subscription platform to integrate fully with our website (I know, probably when of the dullest sentences I’ve ever written, sorry about that.) Niamh handles the operational side and with little expertise in that area myself, all I could do was watch whilst she tore her hair out.

In a less time-consuming but almost equally frustrating vein, I recently spent two hours trying to fix my private practice website because Square Space had, for some reason best known to itself, changed the colour of my font. When you launch a business based on something you’re passionate about, there are so many things that to attend to that are nothing to do with that passion. This is particularly true in the climate we currently operate in where marketing is key, funds are tight and private practice clients are scarce and, understandably, more discerning than ever. 

With both T-Pot and my private practice there’s a feeling of wanting to help everyone and not being able to. We sometimes have people who want to join T-pot who we can’t currently support (student counsellors, those who are based out of the UK or counsellors who are qualified to work with children). The upshot of it is that we can’t help everyone because we are values led. I’m suspect this resonates with those in private practice. Finances are tough for so many of our clients, and we want to help them, but, as the title of this piece suggests, we must pay our bills too. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has had to say that they can’t offer a discount or felt guilty about having a strict cancellation policy.

Out of all the things, what stands out most for me is the tension or friction between how we would like to do things, how the modern world works (‘you’re meant to post on social media how many times a week?’) and what’s possible in terms of time, money and energy. Again, I’m sure many people reading may relate to this. When it comes to private practice, I think I caught the end of what I’ve heard some people call ‘the golden era’, when you could have profiles on a couple of directories (and perhaps occasionally run a workshop) and you’d have enough business. Now, for some of us it feels like we are running several businesses, not just one.

One of the greatest tensions, for me, is what is possible before wellbeing starts to suffer. What makes it sharper still is that we are running businesses devoted to the wellbeing of others, when attending to our own wellbeing becomes increasingly difficult. Last year I took very little time off which wasn’t ideal, I know, and this resulted in burnout. I’ve slowly been recovering by working shorter hours and being more fastidious in my self-care routines, but it isn’t easy. If you’ve been finding self-care difficult in the landscape that we are in, please know you are not alone.

Something I’ve found increasingly important is to remember my ‘why’ and how I am fulfilling it. Like many, I don’t have as many private practice clients as I would like but I can appreciate the journeys and the bravery of those clients I do see. I’m also very proud of what T-pot has achieved and love to think of the counsellors out there who are getting the counselling that they need.

I wish I could offer a neat solution for the competing tensions so many of us are holding right now. I can’t. But I do think that by talking, by connecting, by building communities we can make things easier for ourselves and for others. We can share ideas and information and rant about Squarespace or whatever has irked us today. We can remember our why on the days when the how feels difficult.

Over the coming months, T-pot, will offer more opportunities to connect, share and be heard. We’d love it to be fast, but it won’t be because of the different hats we both wear and because we want to build the community intentionally and authentically. I suspect that many of you will understand that particular tension. 

I like to think that blooms grow on common ground.