[00:00:00] Linzy: Hello and welcome back to another Feelings and Finances episode of the Money Skills for Therapists podcast. These are our short and sweet Friday episodes to answer questions from listeners of the podcast like you, the therapists and health practitioners and coaches, who are part of our community.

[00:00:20] So today’s question comes from Cierra, and here is her question.

[00:00:25] Cierra: Hey, Linzy. My name is Cierra, and I’m a group practice owner with a background in the public sector. One of the money related challenges that’s weighing really heavily on my mind is navigating the tension between my own evolving money mindset and the perspectives of some of the clinicians in my practice.

[00:00:44] Coming from the public sector, I’ve had to work really hard to shift my own beliefs that all therapy needs to be free and accessible into recognizing the value of private pay and the sustainability and care that that can offer. I’ve built my practice with fairness and empowerment at its core, and I strive to support both the clinicians and the clients we serve in ways that feel balanced and ethical.

[00:01:08] However, when it comes to clinicians in my practice pushing back on business decisions and suggesting that I’m “just in it for the money,” it really begins to stir up old doubts, and I feel conflicted. On one hand, I’ve worked really hard to create what I feel is a sustainable model that I am proud of, but on the other, I understand the deep seated concerns around accessibility and fairness in mental health care.

[00:01:32] Linzy: So my question for you is how can I continue to support others in their money mindset journeys, especially, you know, when there is a value difference between them and mine, while remaining confident and grounded in my own perspective as a group practice owner. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for this question, Cierra, and it is a tricky one. There’s multiple pieces here that you’re having to navigate leading your group practice, and I’m hearing that you’ve done a lot of work on your own relationship with money, and recognizing the value of therapy, and moving out of a model where it should be free and accessible to everyone, which to be clear, I actually do think that at the end of the day, therapy should be free and accessible for everyone, but somebody needs to pay for it.

[00:02:19] So in the absence of a government actually paying for health care for the folks who live in a country… Like the country of Canada, for instance, does pay doctors for health care. In the absence of that, money has to come from somewhere. Thinking about your question, there’s a couple things that come to mind for me.

[00:02:37] The first is about your role as a group practice leader, as a leader and a boss, and a coach for your own team members. So the first thing that I’m thinking about is, you know, if your team members are really grappling with their own ethical questions around accessibility, and maybe they’re pushing back on you…They’re making this about you, and projecting onto you, in terms of you running the business, that you’re all about money, I would look at how can you explore your team members in digging into their own beliefs and their own internal conflict around money. And take it out of something that, because it’s kind of abstract or not explored, they can project onto you.

[00:03:25] I know in my own team, we have regular one-on-one meetings. You might be meeting with your own team one on one, or they might have a clinical supervisor, depending on the size of your practice. But, this is something that could be actually explored with your team members as an area where they could be supported.

[00:03:42] Because if they are looking to be accessible and charge lower fees, maybe it’s really important that they stay on insurance, or they want to have sliding scale available, or pro bono, depending on how your practice is set up, chances are that is actually going to be impacting their income.

[00:04:00] If you have any kind of split or set wage that is going to be in relation to, you know, the fee that is collected for them, that will be impacting how much they are getting paid. So I would explore with them, or have your clinical supervisor explore with them, what are their financial needs?

[00:04:17] What do they actually need to be well financially? You know, what do they need to be able to send their kiddos to school, to take care of their basic everyday needs, to have financial security, to be able to save for their futures? It doesn’t mean necessarily getting to the numbers, but recognizing that they do have financial needs, and then how do they balance that as a clinician with their desire to be accessible, right?

[00:04:40] Is there actually, for your specific clinicians, a sweet spot there, around them being able to see half folks on insurance, half out of pocket, and that helps them to meet their own accessibility standards, right, but also get their financial needs met? Or is it that when they take time to really look at their own financial needs, their financial needs are actually in conflict with them being able to work on insurance?

[00:05:05] You know, within each of your clinicians, there’s their own relationship with money and their own internal conflict, and their own conflict that they’ll have which would be much like yours and mine and everyone else who has had to sit down and really do this work. It’s just the conflict between our own needs, and our own desires and wants to have a life that is safe and fulfilling and allows us to actually enjoy our lives and take care of the people that we love, and balancing that with being accessible, right?

[00:05:35] And helping other folks, and having them access therapy, right? So that internal conflict that you have worked to overcome, they are also experiencing that internal conflict. And with you being the leader of your practice, you are going to be an easy target to project their own internal conflict and feelings about money onto.

[00:05:55] It’s easy, when you are in a position of leadership, to be made into an object upon which all of those feelings can be projected. That if you are, you know, charging enough that the business is stable and profitable, that you are doing something wrong, but really this is about your clinician’s own relationships with money.

[00:06:12] So that’s the first thing that I would think about is how can you,or your team members, support your clinicians in starting to clarify their own relationship with money and their own needs and making sure that they’re setting up their own caseload and their own schedule so that they’re okay, and yet they’re also able to do the work that they love to do, right?

[00:06:32] What does that look like for each of them? So I would start with that, that’s my first thought. My second thought is that it is common, as the leader of the practice, as I just mentioned, that folks are going to project their stories onto you. Part of that is that you are the one who’s actually running the business side of things, and you’re the one who has to see the numbers and make those tough decisions around, okay, we can provide this, but we can’t provide that, because for everybody to get paid, and for the bills to get paid, and for you to get paid as the financial leader for all your time running the business,

[00:07:06] every dollar that comes into the business has a lot of jobs to do, and you see that because you’re the one who’s sitting down with the numbers, you’re the one who sees when the bank account gets low, you’re the one who is having to make these larger strategic financial decisions, and your team isn’t.

[00:07:21] And in many cases, folks end up working in a group practice, the folks who are going to stick around, they are there because they don’t want to think about those things, and they don’t want to make those hard decisions and be more involved in the business side of things. They want to focus more on the clinical side of the work. I’ve noticed over the years, it took a while for some of my friends and peers in group practice to start to realize like, oh, the folks who want to work with me long term, they’re not actually entrepreneurial. They’re not folks who necessarily are going to be as driven and as ambitious and as willing to do the kind of like, ugh, parts of things, as the person who chooses to lead the practices.

[00:07:57] You often end up with different types of personalities. So for those folks who are working for you, who may be people who never want to run their own practice, who don’t want to have to deal with the unpleasant side of the business and the money, part of it is thinking about, then, how do you support them in having their needs met to make it a positive workplace

[00:08:18] so that they are able to show up and do what they love to do and see their clients, and have their own financial needs met enough, but also so that they understand that there are business things, and there’s bigger decisions being made, that are being taken care of for them, The folks who are going to stick around are working for you because they don’t want to work for themselves, right? So there is a piece there of recognizing maybe a different kind of personality, a different kind of motivation, between you and your team members and thinking about how do you help to meet their needs?

[00:08:47] How do you address the fact that like yep, there are these like bigger pieces to the business. There are these business pieces that we are taking care of, you know, that is one of the great things about you being here with us is we are taking care of these financial pieces. We’re taking care of supplying the toilet paper, doing the advertising, taking care of the administration, and making sure that folks are really feeling cared for in that way so that, they can focus in on their clinical work.

[00:09:14] Because they’re possibly the types of folks who are never going to want to actually have to make these like really hard decisions in the big picture. So there’s a couple of different ideas there that I’m talking about. But to recap, the first is to look at how do you support your team members to, work on their own relationships with money so they start projecting onto you, and then how do you take care of them so that their needs are being met, so that the reason that they’re there, which is that they don’t want to deal with the money, is being taken care of, and they’re able to just show up and be great clinicians, right?

[00:09:42] And that’s about creating a positive workplace as a group practice owner. These are all things that we dig into and explore in Money Skills for Group Practice Owners, because it’s a vast and complex world, as you know, Cierra, and it sounds like you’ve done a great job of building a practice that you are proud of. But I think recognizing that this is your clinician’s own stuff, and then taking care of the needs that you can take care of

[00:10:03] is going to go a long way. The final thing in this equation, of course, is your own groundedness in the decisions that you have made. Right, and how do you keep that kind of, emotion and doubt and noise and internal conflict that belongs to your team members, how do you keep that from undermining you and the decisions that you’ve made?

[00:10:22] And it sounds like you’ve been very thoughtful and intentional in building a practice that is values aligned, and in valuing your own work. And you’ve probably done that work of having to really accept your own financial needs, and the financial reality that we live in. And so my question is, how do you surround yourself then with people who also are in the same place as you?

[00:10:43] Right, who get what you’re going through? Other group practice leaders who’ve made similar choices, and have done that hard work, and have landed in the same place as you. Surrounding yourself with that community of people who love to lead and are happy to do the business side of things, and therefore have also put themselves in the position of being group practice owners.

[00:11:02] That’s one of the things that’s really nice about courses like mine, Money Skills for Group Practice Owners, and other group practice courses, is you do get to be in the company of other folks who can remind you and reassure you, that like, no, you have made these decisions for a reason. We have to do these things for a reason.

[00:11:16] Even if our teams don’t understand, it doesn’t mean that you’re making the wrong decision. So surrounding yourself with a tribe of folks who get you. would be the first thing that I would think about with that. And then the second thing would be just really taking care of yourself, right?

[00:11:30] Making sure that your needs are being met emotionally so that you can ground and center back in yourself, whether that’s giving yourself enough time off, nurturing yourself in other ways, like having time to be out of work, and out ofthe noise, the cacophony of personalities and emotions that come when we have a bigger business, and there’s just a lot of people going on. Just making sure that you’re really taking the time to ground back in yourself, ground in what you know so you can show up and be a leader, because you are bringing something different to the table than your team members are, and recognizing that your personalities and needs are different, is going to be helpful in being able to take care of them without having their questions and their internal conflicts

[00:12:12] undermining you and where you are and what conclusions you’ve come to in your own money work. So thank you so much, Cierra, for your question. It’s a great one. It’s something we could probably talk about for hours, but those are my initial thoughts and keeping yourself grounded in the decisions that you’ve made. If you, like Cierra, have a question that you’d like me to dig into on an episode of Feelings and Finances,

[00:12:36] all you need to do is click on the link in the show notes. It will take you over to our podcast page, you will see a little widget, super simple, that just says, record a question for Linzy, or something very similar to that. All you need to do is press record, share your name, share a little bit of context, and share your question, and I would be happy to answer it on a future episode of Feelings and Finances.

[00:12:57] Thank you so much for joining me today.