Month: December 2013

  • Getting to Know Your Practice

      This is the start of a new year. What better time to look at what you’d like to achieve in your practice for in the future, and what better way to focus yourself than to choose one area of your practice and take some action on that. Today, we’ll look at Knowing Your Therapy…

  • IACP Survey of Members

    The IACP recently published results of a survey of members and it makes interesting reading. You can download the report from the IACP website, here. For me, the questions relating to the business side of running a therapy or counselling practice are particularly interesting. The survey reports that the recession seems to have had a…

  • How to Work Out Therapy Fee Rates?

    In another post, (see here) I outlined the factors that you need to consider in arriving at a fee rate, and also what a budget looks like (see here). Here’s an example of how to work the figures. Start with what you want to earn. Let’s say for this example, you want to earn €500…

  • Learning To Dance

    The old patterns just keep playing don’t they? There was a missed call on my phone from IAHIP, and a message. When I saw it, what was my first thought? You’re right. “What have I done wrong?” I started a mental cataloguing of who I’d been talking to, what I’d been writing about, trying to…

  • Struggling to Earn Enough in your Practice? Check Your Income Set Point

    If you struggle to earn enough in your counselling or therapy practice, there may be many reasons for that. Some of those reasons may be external ones, such as the financial climate, or the location you practice in. However, there may also be internal factors at play. The following exercise can help to identify one…

  • The Challenges of Working In A Rural Practice

    One of the questions that comes up for counsellors and therapists is where to base their practice, and one of the options is to live and work in the countryside rather than the town or city. Being one of few or perhaps the only practitioner in a rural area has its advantages, mainly that there…

  • More About Accounts – Making Sense of the Figures

    Comparison With Previous Period One feature of your typical set of financial statements is that they give comparative figures for the previous accounting period (usually a year, but in larger organisations accounts will be prepared more regularly so the comparative may be the previous month, or quarter.) The benefit of comparative figures is that the…

  • How To Prepare For Meetings With Doctors

    A practitioner asked me recently how to prepare for meetings she had set up with doctors. She was concerned about how to convey to them what her job entailed, and what questions they might ask. It was a bit like asking me what she might be asked in an interview! When I visited our local…

  • Self Care at Christmas

    At a recent workshop, I was surprised to hear so many speak of the desire to step out of the frantic energy that seems to be around this time of year in the run up to Christmas. My surprise was not just that so many named it, but that I too was feeling it, and…

  • What Poetry Taught Me About Therapy Practice

    Yesterday, I went to a poetry workshop. That’s a much bigger deal than it may sound, as poetry isn’t really my thing. I just don’t get it most of the time! However, it felt right to be there, and I was curious. So there I was, no clear idea why I was there, but willing…