One of the questions I hear a lot from therapists is “How does my private counselling practice grow?” I was a curious child. One of my favourite books growing up had a poem called, “How does the aspirin know where to go?” Unfortunately, the book didn’t answer the question and all these years later I have never got an answer.

Similarly, I’ve always been curious about how we grow. It’s kind of magical to me. Take something as simple as cutting my finger. A couple of minutes pass and the bleeding stops, a couple of hours and the pain is gone. A couple of days pass and the skin has grown back. How does that happen?

Even more mysteriously, despite all the theory I’ve learned, I’ve never found the answer to the question, “How do we grow up?” We all know we do it, but how does it happen? What supports growth, and what gets in the way? Why do some people grow up earlier than others? Why do some people find the path smoother while others struggle? The general theory seems to be that we have some innate knowing or design inside of us that prompts us to move forward provided certain supports are present in our environment, and nothing happens to inhibit us.

If you watched my recent video, “It’s a growing up thing!” you’ll know I equate the process of starting a therapy practice to the growing up we need to do when we leave school and go out into the world as (almost) adults. If you missed it you can still watch it here: Click this link.

Time does not heal everything…

While I may still not be able to explain to you how the cells in my body can regenerate themselves in a couple of days, I can tell you from my years of doing this work that unlike my skin, a private practice does not grow itself automatically. We need to be deliberate in our intention, and our past experiences can seriously inhibit us. It may not be clear when we set out how those experiences might restrict our ability to grow our practice.
Some of the unlikely blocks I’ve uncovered for myself are:

• Just how big a role shame and guilt played in restricting the choices I made
• How much anger I was carrying, and how it was holding me back
• Some of my good traits, like working hard and being responsible actually got in my way
• And how being nice and caring for the needs of others was contributing to my difficulties

One of the reasons I found it so difficult to change these things was that I was worried that it would mean I would become (even more) overbearing, pushy or aggressive. Well, you can judge for yourselves!!
In this short video, “How does growth happen,” I explore this theme of how our environment impacts our growth.
If you’d like to learn about the three most important areas of growth we need to develop a healthy private counselling practice, please join us on 19th October 2019 in Navan for my new training, “The Business of Therapy: The Inner Journey.” We’ll be looking at those three keys to growing your practice, we’ll explore what gets in the way, and we’ll begin the journey of releasing those blocks.