The Rush to Certainty

Why do so many thoughtful therapists rush to fix problems in their private practices?

In this third episode of the Therapist Incubator Summer Series, Liz explores the relationship between uncertainty, anxiety, and decision-making. Drawing from over twenty years of experience in leadership and commercial real estate alongside her work as a marriage and family therapist, she reflects on a pattern she's noticed across organizations, relationships, and private practices alike: when uncertainty increases, our instinct is often to speed up.

But what if the answer isn't to do more?

What if the most productive thing we can do is slow down long enough to ask better questions?

Through personal stories, business examples, and lessons that have shaped her own thinking, Liz invites therapists to examine the difference between activity and progress, certainty and curiosity, and reaction versus thoughtful leadership.

If you've ever found yourself changing your website, questioning your fees, or chasing the next business strategy simply because things felt uncertain, this conversation offers another way to think about it.

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 have been listening over the past couple of weeks, welcome back. And if this is your first episode, I'm really glad you're here. As many of you know, this podcast series is happening while the therapist incubator is taking a little break over the summer. We spent several months together having conversations about building a private practice. And honestly, I missed those conversations more than I expected. Not because we were solving everyone's business problems, but because we were thinking together. Somebody would bring a question into the room, someone else would ask a question that nobody had considered, someone would offer another perspective. The cool thing was, by the end of the conversation, we'd often realize we weren't talking about the same problem we started with. And I've been thinking about why that happened. I think it's because something changes when we allow ourselves to slow down. The quality of our questions change. And when the quality of our questions change, the quality of our decisions usually follows. And that's really what I hope this summer series is becoming. Not another business podcast and not another place to collect strategies or steps or checklists, but a place where we intentionally slow ourselves down long enough to think differently. Because one thing I've learned over the years is that growth doesn't always happen because we learn something new. Sometimes it happens because we finally noticed something that had been there all along. And today I wanted to talk about something I've been wrestling with personally. Not something I've mastered, something I've been noticing. And the more I've noticed it in myself, the more I started seeing it everywhere. One of the things that's given me a unique perspective is that I've spent much of my career living in two different worlds. For over 20 years, I worked in commercial real estate, leadership, acquisitions, operations, and in organizational management. At the same time, I was training as a marriage and family therapist. I was working as a personal assistant to a master therapist. I was building my own therapy practice, and I was learning to understand people from a completely different perspective. People sometimes would ask me how I managed to have those two careers fit together. And honestly, I don't even think of them as separate anymore. Because over time, I started noticing something. Whether I was sitting in a leadership meeting discussing million-dollar projects, or sitting with a couple trying to navigate their marriage, or quite honestly, sitting in my own office trying to figure out a business decision, I keep seeing the same patterns. Yeah, the environment is changing, the titles are changing, the language that we're using is changing. But people who are under pressure behave remarkably similarly. When uncertainty increases, people tend to speed up. Meetings would become more frequent, emails would become more urgent, solutions or suggestions for solutions came more quickly. We all seem to want to do something. And here's what fascinated me. Sometimes all that activity solved the problem, but sometimes it actually just relieved the anxiety of not knowing. And to be honest, that observation has stayed with me for years. Because I don't think therapists are any different. And I don't think I'm any different. So here's what I've been noticing about myself. A few weeks ago, I caught myself doing something that made me laugh. Something in my business wasn't unfolding the way I expected. Nothing catastrophic, just enough uncertainty to make me uncomfortable. Within, I'd say, 15 minutes, I'd already started making a list. Maybe I need to change my website. Maybe I need to update my directories. Maybe I should revisit pricing. Oh, social media. Do I need to post more consistently? My list started getting out of control. And then I stopped because I realized something. I had already built three solutions before I had even asked myself a single thoughtful question. I didn't actually assess what was happening. I was simply uncomfortable not knowing and started moving. And that hit because for the previous several days, I'd been sitting with clients. I'd been encouraging them to tolerate uncertainty long enough to understand themselves more deeply. But here I was trying to eliminate my own uncertainty as quickly as possible. And I started wondering how often do we do this in our businesses? Not because we're careless and not because we're bad business owners, but rather because we're human. One of Salvador Minuchin's famous quotes is that certainty is the enemy of change. When I first heard that, I honestly thought that can't be right. Isn't certainty what we're all trying to find? Isn't confidence a good thing? Don't people want clarity? To be honest, it took me years before I understood what I think he meant. I don't actually think he was encouraging indecision. I don't think he was suggesting we never reach conclusions. I think he was reminding us that the moment we become absolutely certain, we often will stop asking questions and we stop becoming curious. We stop looking for information that doesn't fit our original conclusion. And I've started wondering whether that's just as true in business as it is in therapy. Because uncertainty, if we're being honest, is really uncomfortable. Our brains naturally want to reduce it. Sometimes we reduce it by becoming curious, but other times, let's be honest, we reduce it by becoming really busy. Here's the thing: busy isn't always progress. One thing I noticed in my over 20 years in business is that activity can be incredibly deceptive. When something would go wrong, people wanted to see movement. We would have another meeting, we would meet another vendor, we would have another report, another policy would be written up, we would add another software platform. Everyone would just look super productive, super busy. And everyone felt really productive. And let me be fair, sometimes we actually were, but sometimes, sometimes we were just trying to quiet that discomfort of uncertainty. I'm seeing the same thing in private practice. Referrals slow down, so we update our profiles. A client leaves unexpectedly, so we rethink our niche. We had one difficult consultation, so we start to question our own fees. We have a few cancellations, so we convince ourselves we need to update our website. Do you notice what we're doing? We're moving, we're doing. Doing feels productive. Movement feels productive, but movement and progress aren't the same thing. Sometimes movement is simply anxiety wearing a really convincing disguise. And that has been one of the hardest lessons for me to learn. Because from my corporate experience, I am someone who likes to solve problems. I enjoy creating, I enjoy fixing things. Those are strengths until they become our default and our automatic. Because automatic problem solving can accidentally bypass thoughtful assessment. So, one of the beautiful things about being a therapist is that we spend our careers helping people slow down. Just think about our sessions. How often do we interrupt someone's rush to certainty? A client might say, I know exactly why my spouse did that. And we gently push back and ask, what else might be true? Or a client says, I've always been this way. And we start to wonder with them, where did this story come from? A client, they usually want an answer. And we often give them another question. Not because we're avoiding the answer, but because we are protecting curiosity. Because when we're curious, we're creating options. Certainty often narrows that. And it's changing the way, very slowly, on how I make decisions. And maybe that's what leadership actually looks like. Not having all of the answers, but staying curious just a little longer than your anxiety would prefer. Let me give you a couple of examples of what this has looked like in my own life. Years ago, I was asked to take over a department that wasn't performing well. There was pressure to fix it quickly. Expectations were high. And if I'm honest, my instinct was to just come in with all the answers, to change things, to implement new systems, and to prove that I could turn it around. But something in me paused. And instead of immediately changing things, I decided to get curious. I spent time observing what was already there. I paid attention to how people were working. I noticed what seemed to be functioning well, even if it wasn't obvious at first. And I also took the time to notice what wasn't working. Not in a critical way, but in a curious way. And then over time, I started making small, deliberate changes. Nothing dramatic, nothing reactive, just thoughtful adjustments based on what I was learning. And it's funny because something interesting happened. Because I wasn't rushing to certainty, I was able to see patterns that I would have missed. And because I wasn't trying to fix everything at once, the changes I made, they actually stuck. And because I documented what I was doing along the way, I was able to look back and see the progress, not just the outcomes, but understanding it. And that experience shaped the way I think about leadership. And quite honestly, it's shaped the way I think about private practice. Because I gotta be honest, I've done the opposite there too. When I first started my practice, I signed up for every directory I could find. If it existed, I was probably on it. It felt productive, right? It felt like I was doing something. But I wasn't actually asking whether any of it was working. I wasn't asking what each directory was designed to do. I also wasn't asking whether it aligned with the kind of clients I wanted to work with. I was just trying to reduce the uncertainty of not having enough referrals. Thankfully, eventually, I slowed down. I started researching, I started asking better questions. Like, what is this directory actually for? Who uses it? And what kind of clients do they tend to attract? Then being able to ask, does that align with my practice and my niche? And over time, not instantly, over time, I began removing the directories that weren't serving me. Not all at once, not reactively, but in clarity. I did it deliberately. And again, something shifted. Not just in my referrals, but in how I was seeing things. Because I wasn't just doing more for the sake of being busy, I was understanding more. And I think that's the thread that connects all of this. Whether we're leading a team, building a practice, or sitting with our clients. The question isn't just what should I do? Sometimes the more important question is, what am I noticing? And maybe even what am I avoiding noticing because I want certainty now? As we close today, I want to leave you with a few questions. Please understand, these are not questions you need to answer right now. Just questions you might carry with you this week. Some of the questions include where in your business are you rushing to certainty? Where are you moving quickly because it feels productive? Not because it's actually informed. What might change if you slowed down just enough to become curious? What are you already seeing that you haven't fully named yet? And what would it look like to trust that understanding is going to take time? Because maybe growth isn't always about finding the right answer faster. Maybe, just maybe sometimes, it's about staying with the question just a little bit longer. As always, thanks so much for being here. And I'll see you next time.