Overwhelmed or Stuck? Why Slowing Down Matters When Building Your Therapy Practice

In this follow-up episode of the Incubator Podcast, we step back from a recent conversation on marketing and visibility to look at what it reveals about how therapists are making decisions in their private practices. 

Because the challenge isn’t just where to show up. It’s how to decide. 

With so many platforms, directories, and opinions about what you “should” be doing, it’s easy to fall into one of two patterns:
 – trying to be everywhere at once
 – or freezing and not starting at all 

Different reactions… same outcome. Frustration. 

In this episode, we explore what it looks like to slow down, understand what you’re actually looking at, and make more deliberate decisions about where and how you show up in your business. 

And if you’re listening from the outside, you’re not behind. You’re stepping into the same thinking process in real time. 

About the Therapist Incubator

The Therapist Incubator is a professional learning space where clinicians explore the real operational challenges of building and sustaining a private practice. Through collaborative dialogue and systems thinking, participants examine the business, structural, and relational aspects of practice ownership.

Learn more about the incubator at:
www.thelizdavidcollective.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Incubator Podcast. Hi everyone, this is Liz with the Therapist Incubator, which is part of the Liz David Collective. If you're new here, just a reminder: this podcast is a window into real conversations happening inside of a space where clinicians are building and growing in their private practices. In the last episode, I walked through a recent session where we were talking about marketing, visibility, directories, and social media. This episode is a step back from that conversation. Less about what we talked about and more about what it reflects. Because underneath that conversation, there were some patterns that are worth paying attention to, whether you're in the room or not. Before we get too far into this, I want to offer a quick frame for how you might listen to this episode, especially if you're not part of the incubator. You don't need to be in the room to benefit from how these conversations unfold, because this isn't meant to be something you follow step by step. It's not homework and it's not a checklist. But you might consider using this conversation as a point of focus for your week. As you listen, you might pause and ask yourself, where does this show up in my own practice? Am I making decisions intentionally or am I reacting to what I'm seeing around me? Is there something I've taken on or avoided that might need to be revisited? Think of this less as something you need to keep up with and more as an invitation to look at what you already have in place. Not to change everything, but to notice what might need to be adjusted, simplified, or approached a little bit more deliberately. What really stood out to me in the session that we just had was how much confusion people are navigating. For those of you who listened last week, we had started a discussion on this marketing pillar and we had talked through a lot of these platforms and their usefulness in our work, but the discussion was incomplete, which is what actually brought it back in this session. We created space to allow ourselves to further dig into something we talked about already. This is evidence that sometimes a checklist is just not enough. We process, we digest, and we come back with more thoughts. And I'm thankful this is a space where we can further dig into what we just don't know. There's a lot out there right now, a lot of platforms, a lot of tools, a lot of opinions about what you should be doing. And when you're in the middle of that, it's not always clear what actually applies to you. And what I noticed is that people tend to respond to that confusion in two different ways. On one end, there's a lot of trying. We're signing up for everything that we hear about, we're putting ourselves on multiple platforms, we're trying to cover as much ground as possible in hopes of finding our clients. But then we get frustrated when it doesn't translate into results. And on the other end, there's the opposite reaction: freezing, not even knowing where to start, not wanting to make the wrong decision. So nothing really gets started at all. Different reactions, same outcome, frustration. Because in both cases, there isn't a clear way of deciding what actually makes sense for your practice. And if I'm being honest, this is where something I have to remind myself comes in. Slowing down. I said slowing down, not stopping, not avoiding, but slowing down enough to actually understand what we're looking at. Because most of us weren't trained for this side of the work. We're trained to assess, to understand, to break things down. But when it comes to business, we're often just trying to figure it out as we go. So we see something, we hear about something, and it's very easy to assume, hey, I should start doing this. But sometimes we don't actually know what we're looking at yet, and that matters. What I see happen and what showed up in our session is that overwhelm doesn't always lead to doing nothing. It often leads to doing too much. We're trying multiple platforms, we're incorporating multiple strategies, we're taking multiple directions all at once. And when that happens, everything starts to get just a fraction of your attention. Your time is divided, your energy is divided, your focus is divided. And when everything gets just a fraction of your attention, everything tends to perform like a fraction. So instead of gaining traction, things are feeling scattered. There's a trade-off here that's easy to miss. The more places you try to show up without clarity, the harder it is to show up well anywhere. And that's not about discipline. That's just about our decision making. What felt really important in this session was a shift. We managed to move from I need to be doing more to I need to be more deliberate. Being reactive looks like responding to what you hear, reacting to a post that you have seen that you need to be trying, trying to keep up, adding more and more and more. But being deliberate looks like choosing where you show up, understanding the why of why you're there, and having the capacity to maintain it well. It also means accepting that you're not going to be everywhere. And this is where I think something important gets overlooked. As therapists, we are trained to be reflective. We are used to slowing things down, paying attention to patterns, noticing what's happening beneath the surface, setting boundaries, and honoring the capacity of our clients. We do this work with our clients all the time. But when it comes to the business side of what we're building, it's almost like we forget that we have those same skills available to us because where we need to apply it feels unfamiliar. And we all know when something feels unfamiliar, it's very easy to default into either overextending or avoiding instead of using the tools we already have. Listen, we don't lose our skill set just because we're in an unfamiliar space. So part of what this kind of reflection offers is a way to back into that, not by learning something completely new, but by applying what we already know how to do to a space where we don't always feel as confident. And that also means giving ourselves a certain amount of grace in the process. It's okay to recognize we're not going to get it right immediately. We're going to have limits. And we're allowed to be selective about where we put our time and energy. Because being more limited, more intentional, it doesn't reduce what we're building. It usually strengthens it. If you're listening to this and you're not part of the incubator, I want to say this clearly. This isn't a conversation you missed. This is just a way of thinking you can step into at any point. So if you're listening to this and wondering what to actually take away from it, I want to leave you with something really simple. Not a checklist, but a way to orient yourself this week. First, where might you be overextending right now? Where have you said yes to multiple things without really having the capacity to sustain them? Second, where might you be avoiding? What's something you've been putting off because it feels unclear or overwhelming? And third, where do you need to slow down enough to actually understand what you're looking at before deciding what to do? Not everything, just one area. Because the goal isn't to do more, it's to make one clearer, more deliberate decision. These decisions don't happen once. They're going to happen over and over again as your practice grows. But how you approach them, whether you're reacting or being deliberate, that tends to shape everything that follows. And that's really the work. I'll see you in the next one.