STP 178 | The Small-Step Strategy for Achieving Big Dreams
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[00:00:01] James Marland: So instead of taking that first step, you try to figure out the whole process, all ten steps, and that's what I wanna talk about today because I learned this, oof, I learned this lesson the hard way, the expensive way. Your dream can be big without your first step being big. It's Friday afternoon, one of your favorite times of the day. You only have one session left, and then you're out the door. You got weekend plans, dinner with your family, then you're heading to that special spot Then your phone rings. My car was just broken into. They stole my laptop, and they stole my client notes." I think we have a HIPAA breach. What do we do? Well, the first thing is there goes your dinner plans because now you have a decision to make. Who needs to be notified? Is there a process you're supposed to follow? And where [00:01:00] exactly is that process? You know you have some paperwork somewhere. There's a form here. There's something in your desk drawer. Maybe there's a very impressive binder sitting on your shelf collecting dust. But it-- but Friday, three thirty, you don't need a binder.
[00:01:18] You need to know exactly what to do next
[00:01:22] That's why I want to tell you about a workshop we're hosting on September 18th with D- Dr. Natasha Guess. Natasha is going to take you through the HIPAA compliance toolkit live. And this isn't one of those workshops where you just sit there, take a bunch of notes, and tell yourself, "I really need to do something with this."
[00:01:42] And then you go back to work on Monday, and you forget about it. You bring the toolkit, and Natasha walks you through applying it to your practice. As you go through the workshop, you can ask questions as you go, because the goal is to leave with your policies actually implemented, [00:02:00] not just sitting in a binder.
[00:02:02] So the next time you get that Friday afternoon phone call, you're not starting from, "Oh, no, what do I do?" You're starting from, "Okay, I know what our next step is The registration information will be in the show notes
[00:02:17] Laying a firm foundation in compliance is one of the best ways to scale as a therapist. Another way to scale is to create offers that do not add client hours to your week. You're thinking about creating something outside your therapy practice hours. Today we're gonna talk about how to make the experiment smaller without making the dream smaller. Why small steps help you learn faster, and how taking those steps can help you build the evidence and the confidence you're going to need. Because you don't need to have the whole plan figured out, you just need to know your next step. Let's get into it
[00:02:58] [00:03:00] Hello, this is James Marland, and I wanna talk to the experts out there. You might be really good at what you do. I mean, y- um, you probably are 'cause you've spent years becoming a therapist. You've earned the degrees, you put in the clinical hours, you've done the internships, built a practice, and then you helped many people through some of the hardest moments of their life.
[00:03:23] So people trust you. You're often seen as the expert in the room. You walk into the room and, oh, there's the therapist. There's the person who's the expert, that's one of the most educated and highly qualified people in the room. But maybe lately you've started dreaming about doing something beyond the therapy room.
[00:03:42] You wanna create an additional stream of income without adding more client hours. See, that's the big problem. If you want more income, you have to often either raise rates or see more clients, and there's a ceiling to that. So you think, maybe I'll teach, teach some workshops, or maybe I'll do [00:04:00] some conferences and do some paid public speaking, do some consulting.
[00:04:05] Maybe you wanna do an online course. But whatever it is, you have this bigger dream inside of you that you take what you know, take what you're using in the therapy room, but you, you expand it to help more people outside the therapy room. The problem is suddenly you're a beginner again. You know, you're, you're not the expert anymore and that is super uncomfortable because when you're already an expert at what you do, when you're already seen as the person who knows the answers, going all the way back to the beginning makes it harder to become a beginner again.
[00:04:45] And you start wondering, "Well, what if I waste a bunch of time? What if I spend a bunch of money? What if my return on investment isn't high? And what if, what if I'm seen as a failure?" And what [00:05:00] if, you know, this is the scary one, you know, what if I look foolish? You know, I'm already an expert and I try something, it doesn't work, and now people are gonna be like, "Oh, he doesn't really...
[00:05:08] He or she doesn't really know what they're talking about." So instead of taking that first step, you try to figure out the whole process, all ten steps, and that's what I wanna talk about today because I learned this, oof, I learned this lesson the hard way, the expensive way. Your dream can be big without your first step being big.
[00:05:33] I'm gonna say that again. Your dream can be big without your first step being big. And someti- uh, uh, sometimes, or in fact, sometimes the best thing you can do for a big dream is to take a very small first step. So don't confuse the dream with the first step. Let's, for example, I never dreamed about building online courses.
[00:05:59] or [00:06:00] workshops. That really wasn't the dream. My dream was to increase access to therapists f- to the people-- increase the access to therapists from the people who really wanted to get help from them, from the people who needed them the most. This was during the COVID time where therapy was explo... It seemed like therapy was exploding, and the access to therapists was low.
[00:06:27] But I saw the dream that, well, there are people out there that can help them if they just have access. So I wanted to help provide access to therapists so that they could take what they knew and would reach more people without adding a burden to the therapist.
[00:06:46] So I wanted to increase access to therapists, but I also didn't wanna increase the burden to therapists by adding more and more client-facing hours. I wanted to give them more freedom, more [00:07:00] flexibility, more time with the people they loved, all while allowing them to see more people.
[00:07:07] That was the dream. And the online course was just simply one vehicle I thought we could use to get there it made sense. Online course is, uh, you create it once and you can view it multiple times. You create it once, you sell it. You sell it once. You create it once, you market it, but you have done the heavy lifting.
[00:07:30] So I went all in on this. I spent months building the product. I read a lot of books. I took the best information, followed a lot of influencers, and created a program that I thought would speak to therapists. I made sections, videos, worksheets, talked about technology, talked about lighting, talked about email lists, talked about selling, everything.
[00:07:56] Everything you needed from beginning to end. [00:08:00] And I was excited that finally I could help people see the therapist, but also help therapists increase their income without adding more client-facing hours. So then launch day came, and this was the moment all those months of work were, were...
[00:08:17] it was gonna pay off, right? And I sold approximately four seats. Now, that's not zero. Like, that's not a total failure. People bought it, and this gave me hope. But, but it was also deflating because I had put roughly six months of work into something that generated a couple thousand dollars. That wasn't the fuel I needed to propel the business forward.
[00:08:44] So I did what a lot of people might do when things don't work right, right. You get a signal that says, "Oh, you might be heading in the right direction," but it just didn't work. So I worked harder, and I spent another six months retooling it. I bought coaching. Uh, I, I [00:09:00] just made things better. I changed more, and I did sell more products.
[00:09:06] I earned more money, but it still wasn't enough to justify six months of business, uh, six months of effort, six months of, uh, expenses, six months of giving up on other projects to work on this thing. And then the, the worst part about this was something else, something else happened, and maybe you can relate to this when you've tried to launch something and it didn't work.
[00:09:34] Because every time I launched this took six, six months to launch, every launch started feeling more important. I started thinking, "Oh, the next one I do, it has to work. This has to be right. I can't screw up again. I can't be a failure again." And that pressure made me, hmm, tentative.
[00:09:57] It made me [00:10:00] Uh, overanalyze things. So I launched less because I needed to be perfect. And because I launched less, I got less feedback from the market. I didn't figure out what was working and what was, what wasn't working. I thought I needed maybe a better course or better marketing or better email list.
[00:10:20] But what I really needed, and this is one of the key points here, what I really needed was a faster way to learn. And that's an important distinction, distinction because sometimes when something doesn't work, we assume, "Oh, the dream is wrong. Maybe nobody wants this. Maybe I'm not good at this. Maybe I should just stick with, with what I know.
[00:10:41] Maybe I should just go back to what was working before, even though I know it doesn't feed my soul. Maybe I should give up on my dream and start helping somebody else build their dream." But I want you to think about this. Maybe your dream isn't too big. Maybe it was your first [00:11:00] step that is too big.
[00:11:03] The key point here is make the experiment smaller, not the dream. Because this completely changed the way I think about building things. ~He-here's~ an example. Recently, I partnered with Leo Debrock from Counselor's Choice Award. Leo had an audience. He had content that he was already getting traction. He wanted to help people create CE courses, and people were already asking him questions and telling him where they needed help.
[00:11:33] So we combined and I brought some of the technical know-how. We combined our email lists. We also, were doing an experiment to see if we could also work together. But I looked at this opportunity, and maybe in the beginning, I would have said, "Okay, great. You wanna help people build CE courses?
[00:11:54] Let's build this elaborate six-month course." And [00:12:00] then I would disappear for six months, create all the content, create all the videos, build the worksheets, set up the technology, make everything look beautiful, add in the music, add in the slides, and cross my fingers and hope that somebody would buy it.
[00:12:15] But this time, we asked a different question. What's the smallest step we can take to see if people actually want this? So we created a live workshop. We didn't spend six months. We didn't spend a pile of money. I think we got it done in maybe two months because of marketing. But we had all the content, and we took something that people were already asking about, packaged it up into a workshop that solved a specific problem, and then offered it to them, and the results were pretty good.
[00:12:49] Twenty people registered, and ten people attended live. That was great. That was a big win for us, but that wasn't the only win. The [00:13:00] registrations weren't the only win. The money wasn't the only win. We got data. We heard people's questions. We saw what connected. We saw what needed more explanation. But James is saying, "What if nobody registered?"
[00:13:14] Well, that's data too. We learned something. We learned maybe the topic wasn't right, the timing wasn't right, the problem that we said we were gonna solve wasn't right, or the solution wasn't right. Maybe the message, you know, our email messages wasn't connecting, or maybe we needed better partners, partnerships.
[00:13:34] We could adjust. The big thing, though, was it didn't take six months of back-breaking, expensive work. It just took, "Hey, we're gonna launch this workshop. We're gonna present for an hour or two, and we're gonna learn from it." And it was a small, small step, small investment, and that's the beauty of small steps.
[00:13:58] A small step isn't small [00:14:00] because the outcome doesn't matter. It's small because the question you're trying to answer is small. Instead of asking, "Can I build an entire successful course business from idea to execution?" Ask, "Can I get ten people interested in a workshop?" And that's really a question you can answer with a small step.
[00:14:21] And once you have that answer, you can ask the next question. The last idea here is small steps create evidence, and evidence builds confidence. I struggle with wanting, feeling like I'm a failure or foolish d-doing some of the things I do. And so, as I said in the beginning, that makes me timid, that makes me, um, tentative in my outreach.
[00:14:49] And I say to myself, "Oh, once I feel confident, I'll start." But that's really not how confidence works. Confidence comes from evidence, [00:15:00] and evidence comes from doing things. Think about a staircase. You don't stand at the bottom of the stairs... You don't stand at the bottom staring at step 10 and try to jump all the way up there.
[00:15:16] You take one step, which gets you further. Then you take another step, which gets you further up the staircase. Then you take a third step and a fourth step, and with each step, you learn something. That's what happens with the workshops. It's easier to take the next step because the previous step worked.
[00:15:34] You have more confidence at the top of the stairs than at the bottom because you have the evidence to prove that this-- that you're going to reach the defi-- destination. We have evidence. When you launch a workshop and people attend and sign up and pay for it, y-they've taken their small steps, and you get evidence that people wanted this.
[00:15:57] And remember, that's the great thing about this is [00:16:00] it was a small step. Even if it hadn't worked, we still had evidence. We would have known we were missing the mark somewhere. So that's different from sitting alone for six months wondering whether you're building the right thing, hoping it works, hoping the investment works.
[00:16:16] You don't need certainty to take the first step. You need enough evidence to make the next step easier. So if you're a therapist listening to this and you wanna create income and impact outside the therapy room, you don't start by asking, "Well, how do I build the whole business?" Ask, "What's one small step that I can take right now that's in the ~right direction?"~
[00:16:40] ~Right now, ~right direction. Maybe that's a workshop. You teach something you already know to a small group of people. Maybe it's paid public speaking. You take something you talk about day in and day out in the therapy room, and you start developing a message you can bring to organizations, to conferences, to churches, to [00:17:00] schools, or to businesses.
[00:17:02] Maybe it's eventually a course, but the course could just be a series of workshops you've done that have worked, that people have attended, and they build on each other. But you don't have to start there. You just shrink the step. Don't shrink your dream So what's your next step? Here's what I want you to remember.
[00:17:25] You can have big dreams, really big dreams, more freedom, more flexibility, more financially stable, more income, more, more impact in your, in your niche. You can want to help people beyond the therapy room without adding another 10 clients to your week. But a big dream doesn't require that giant first step.
[00:17:50] You don't have to go from step one to step 10
[00:17:54] Make your experiments smaller so you can learn faster. I think [00:18:00] that should be stated again. Make your experiences smaller so you can learn faster. Finally, about confidence, remember, those small steps give you evidence, and evidence builds confidence that you're going in the right direction. You don't have to know all the steps two through ten.
[00:18:20] You just have to identify that first one. So here's my challenge for you. What's one small step that you could take this week towards creating income or impact outside the therapy room? Not six months from now, maybe 30 days from now, maybe even something this week. Could you outline a one-hour workshop?
[00:18:42] Could you ask five people if they'd be interested in attending it? Could you identify three organizations that might pay you to talk about what you're an expert in? Just take a step, see what happens, learn from it, [00:19:00] build on that evidence, and take the next right step. And if you're sitting there thinking, "Uh, okay, James, a workshop sounds interesting, but I have no idea how to actually create one," well, I can help you with that.
[00:19:13] I have training specifically designed to help you turn what you already know into a workshop you can offer. And if public speaking sounds more like you, I also have a resource to help you explore paid public speaking as another path through creating income outside the therapy room. You don't have to build everything.
[00:19:32] You don't have to risk six months of your life figuring out. You just need one good next steps. I'll put those links in the show notes. Remember, your dream doesn't need to get smaller, but your next step does. Take that step, learn from it, Big dreams need small steps
[00:19:54] Take that next step to put your mission in motion. We'll see you next time
[00:20:02] before we end the show, I wanna thank our pro-level sponsors for sponsoring the show: Humor Speaks, RevKey, The Practice Co-Lab, Arc Integrated, TheraSaaS CRM, Guest Compliance Consulting LLC, Private Practice Elevation, Freedom Business Solutions, Bosco LLC, Profit Comes First, River Street Studios, Wealth and Worth Within, TherapyFlow, and of course, coursecreationstudio.com.
[00:20:29] If you're looking for businesses that can help you break through your, your therapy practice business bottlenecks, go to scalingtherapistservices.com.
[00:20:37] Speaker: Tell them James sent you, And remember to sign up for the compliance workshop so that you can sleep easy and build a solid foundation for your scaling therapy practice.
[00:20:46] We'll see you next time
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