Facebook: a good servant or a bad master?


To Facebook or Not to Facebook?
I was at a family function recently at which an argument was raging about Facebook. The pro-camp was strongly in favour, citing the benefits of keeping in touch with family and friends, and being able to share photos and cute and inspirational sayings. The anti-camp were pushing hard, pointing to undesirable posts, such as videos of ISIS going viral and youngsters being exposed to unsuitable material before they were mature enough to handle it.

fireI found myself wondering if the same arguments raged in the aftermath of the discovery of fire. The pro-camp would be extolling the advantages of heating and cooking, the anti-camp talking about the dangers of burning yourself or your cave! Or perhaps when the wheel was invented there were heated debates on the virtues of being able to move your things about more easily against the demons of motorway accidents and runaway trains.

I’m being a bit facetious really because I don’t believe these are arguments that anyone can win. Progress happens, and it brings both positive and negative consequences with it. Facebook, like fire, the wheel or the internal combustion engine, or indeed like each of us, has its advantages and its disadvantages, its strengths and weaknesses, its beautiful and ugly aspects, its light and its shadow. How we interact with it determines which side of the polarity we engage with.

I’m not saying everyone has to use Facebook or indeed any other form of promotion. As therapy practitioners we have many, many choices about how we promote ourselves and our work, many of which I have written about in this blog. In one of these posts alone, I list 13 Ways to Promote Your Practice without a website. And there are many, many more. Each and every way of promoting your practice has its attractive and unattractive aspects. And in respect of each, we have a choice about whether we focus on the advantages or the disadvantages.

However, in order to allow potential clients to find us, we have to find at least one way of putting ourselves out there that we can live with. We can allow ourselves to get lost in arguments about the negative aspects of Facebook, or having a website, or talking to doctors or distributing brochures. Instead of deciding how we want to move forward, or how we can move forward, we can stay stuck in defining ourselves by what we don’t want to be or do.

And the truth is that each and every one of those ways of promoting your practice does have its negative sides. But advertisementsometimes our objections are not so much about the potential dangers of the particular promotional route we have chosen to focus on, but about a more generalised resistance: to change, to setting appropriate boundaries, to being seen, or to allowing ourselves to receive in a bigger way.

Take this blog for instance. I use it to keep in touch with therapists who have an interest in developing their practices (positive aspect). However, I am mindful of the impact I have on you, the readers, and concerned not to offend people or to be judged for my opinions (negative aspect). So as I write, I find myself moving backwards and forwards between wanting to make my point in a way that is interesting, and not wanting to turn it into a rant! The result is that I can find myself paralysed into writing nothing for fear of getting it wrong. In other words, in resistance to taking action.

Resistance, too, is both positive and negative. It protects us, and tells us where our boundaries are; and it also holds us back. So if we want our practices to grow, we have a choice to make. And in order to make that choice we have to be willing to allow that everything and everyone has positive and negative aspects, whether we’re talking about Facebook, fire, the wheel or people. Do the positives outweigh the negatives? There’s no right answer, just the answer that’s right for you right now.

However you choose to promote your practice, I wish you well with it. If you find it hard to put yourself out there, or to find a means of promoting your practice that’s right for you, perhaps I can help? Contact me here for your free 20 minute consultation.