Today we're gonna have a very special episode of the Money Sessions in which I reveal to you my internal world and all of its complications and devastation.
OK, that's not true, but it's a little true.
we are gonna be talking today about the solution of being broke.
Being broke as the solution to, a deeper crisis within you.
Oof, Tiffany, don't take me on this ride.
We're going on this ride, folks.
We are going on this ride.
If we had some amazing like, oh, intro music, hey, we do.
Can we put this in now, Andrea?
OK, by the way, my name is Tiffany.
I am the founder of the Lean In Make Bake Academy, where we help therapists in private practice learn to design intentional premium fee cash pay practices, and we're actually starting to talk instead of calling it a premium fee, we're actually talking about your life first fee.
Your life.
First fee is what you actually need to be charging in order to be putting your life first.
That means being able to show up for your kids and pay for their expenses.
Being able to show up for your own life, your own hobbies, your own interests, your own health, gym, doctors, your retirement, and we can think about your life risk for you in terms of just two areas.
one, are you saving for your retirement consistently?
Do you even know what that number is?
0.2 are you truly able to show up for your clinical work fully and presently with excitement and exuberance day to day?
If the answer to either of those or both of those is no, then we know you're not yet charging your life first fee.
And I talk to clinicians every week.
Therapists, I talk to you every week, to understand what's happening on the ground in terms of our profession, in terms of our private practices, what we're struggling with, what we're up against, and what's working.
And one thing I find very interesting.
Is that when we have clinicians, and this is most, most, many clinicians who are struggling for month after month, year after year to actually build a private practice that takes care of them consistently, that takes care of you consistently.
If you have been struggling for years to charge fees that actually work for you, set policies and uphold boundaries in your business that actually allows your business to take care of you because you will hear me say this over and over again, that is the purpose of your business is to take care of you financially.
It's not to help people, it's not to give back.
You can do all of those things in other ways.
You can even do that in your business, but that's not the function of a business.
You go into business and do all that work so that you are able to be taken care of financially.
Which allows you to be taken care of emotionally, creatively, physically in terms of your desires to get back to your community, but it starts with money.
Otherwise you can go work for a group practice, otherwise you can go work for an agency because you can help people there and you can get back there.
You went into your business for a particular reason and if it's not working month after month, year after year, and also I will say this is why the Lean and Mig Bank Academy stands out among programs that therapists work in in order to actually understand how to earn more money in their businesses.
It's because over 8 years of doing this work and working with I think close to if not over 1000 therapists in our program and tens of thousands through other offerings free and lower priced.
I have discovered that often when therapists are struggling to earn the money when you're struggling to earn the money you need to earn in your practice, and it feels like this is such a problem, it's actually a solution.
Oh no, Tiffany, what are you talking about?
When you are stuck up against the same problem, you're not earning enough money in your business.
your, your caseload is filled with clients who don't have the resources to pay, or at least, at least you think they don't have the resources to pay your life first fee.
, you don't have the time to really show up in your family life, be with your spouse, be with your children in the way you want to be.
We, I, I, I encounter therapists often saying like this is a problem I need to solve.
And actually, the deeper problem, man, you're not gonna wanna hear this.
There's something, there's a deeper problem happening within in you, in your internal world, in your psyche.
There's a, a deeper, more painful, reality that you are not wanting to face.
fuck, this is a deep episode.
Why am I doing this?
I don't know, but let's keep going.
, and actually, not earning enough money, not having enough time to turn and do some self-examination in your own therapy in a very deep way.
Look at your own boundaries, look at your own marriage, look at your own relationship with your, your own family of origin, look at your own relationship to boundaries, look at your financial situation.
, keeping your practice in a survival mode is actually a solution to doing the deeper work that is gonna be much more painful, which is getting in touch with the reality about what you have been through.
, the hurt it has caused you and how it's continuing to show up in your day to day life.
Oh, I said it, and here's how I know this.
I mean, I know it's true, kind of like on some level we can know it's true like intellectually, like, yeah, I could see how if I actually had space and freedom and money and time.
Well, I might have to examine some things in my romantic relationship with my spouse.
I might have to have some come to Jesus conversations with my family.
I would probably have to have some conversations with my friends.
I would probably have to say no.
I'd have to have hard conversations with my clients, and I would have to confront some deep grief and loss that I have experienced and have yet to deal with.
And you might on some level, be like, nope, I'm not gonna go there.
Instead of going there, I'm gonna keep myself in a situation of not earning enough money, being stressed out, not having enough time, having physical pain, and struggling because that pain feels more survivable, more tolerable than the deeper pain of really looking inward.
And having to face myself.
Now I'm not gonna, I'm not the kind of person who's like, let me pull open the curtain and reveal my personal life.
My personal life, and this is gonna be, you may not want to hear this, but it's actually pretty phenomenal.
Like my day to day life and I've worked so hard is really fucking good.
I really feel proud of how I'm showing up as a parent.
My relationship is like, what are we doing?
Like just wild and wonderful, hard too, parenting things are hard in my business, like the, the gauge we've made in limb, the students we're working with, the, the wins we're having, the team I've been able to build over these years.
Like I'm like, how did I get so fucking lucky?
Sometimes I stop and ask myself like and not like how do I get lucky.
And also how did I get lucky?
Like, I, I feel like I stumbled into both I'm driven to fucking grow, grow, grow, and do the hard work.
I want to know what's, I wanna know reality even if it's like crushing, and I also got some breaks, right?
I got lucky.
Like even for me discovering psychoanalysis as a mode of thinking, as a theory of thought has just opened doors for me psychically and then from there in every avenue professionally, relationally.
, I feel like, wow, if I hadn't discovered that, I don't know where I'd be.
So there's a fair amount of luck.
But also I'm fucking driven to look at the hard truths.
So here's one thing I've discovered over the past two years.
, last year was really hard financially for Lim.
I really invested in, and we'll, we'll take this back to your practice.
Don't worry.
I really invested in building a team.
Like that was hard for me to learn how to do is like, how do I actually bring in a team, all my own interpersonal dynamics, my difficulty with boundaries, my people pleasing, my wanting people to like me, my not wanting to be the bad object in certain kinds of relationships.
I had to go through.
It took me about 7 years to get to that process, and yes, last year I really just leaned into how do I do that.
And while I leaned into that, I wasn't paying attention to like, you know, bringing in more students into LEM.
That was not my top priority.
So I had the opportunity last year to really get clear about, if I create more spaciousness and ease in my life, what am I confronting then?
And what I discovered was I, I go to, by the way, psychoanalysis twice a week.
I've been going for many years, really deep work.
last year I, I had moments of being stressed.
My partner, by the way, of 17 years was also out of work for almost the entire year of 2024.
So not only was I not bringing in a lot with, the business Lim Lean and make Bank, but my partner, we live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, San Francisco.
So, what I discovered in 2024, while there were some times of having financial fear, real like, how are we gonna make these, how are we gonna do this?
I realized it wasn't about the money.
Now for those of you who are like, I talked to therapists every day who are like, I, not every day but every week who are like I really wanna work on my, I wanna have a cash cash fee life first fee, cash pay practice, but I just can't afford it and I know that that is bullshit personally, In most cases it's not the real reason and I know this because not only of what I have been through where I really am like how are we gonna make ends meet financially and I still found ways to invest time and money and growth, but also because we have therapists come to our program who I'm like, I don't know how you're gonna pay for this.
if somebody really wants to do limb and they're gonna find a way to make it work financially, I'm gonna trust you to make it work.
Also, if you're like, I really don't have the money, fine, OK.
But often that underneath that is a different fear.
There's a and and not not even fear is not bad.
There's a different harder reality we have to look at and often what I see is the real truth under I don't have enough money to afford that right now is I don't actually know that I will be successful.
Either I don't trust your program, Tiffany, or I don't trust myself to actually do what needs to be done.
To make these changes to get that premium fee cash pay practice, that's what it is.
I don't trust the program to help me or I know the program will help me because I see all these therapists having success, but I don't know that I'm gonna do the work to get to the other side because if you invest the money and the and the hope on the other side or the result you're looking for is to be working fewer hours and earning more money, then the money is not an issue it's just delayed.
Why am I talking about this?
Because even under, I don't know that I'm gonna be successful, or I don't know if this program can help me or I don't know if I'm actually gonna do it.
Underneath that, and this is something I just really discovered over the past year and a half, is what if it is successful?
What if I actually am no longer having financial insecurity as like a major ongoing anxiety?
What if I actually have the time to work out consistently?
What if I actually have the time to show up presently in my relationship with my kids and myself and my romantic partner if you have that with my family and friends?
What if finances weren't actually the fear anymore?
What if my physical health was good?
I have the time to invest and change there.
Then what am I left with?
And here's what I have found out over the past couple of years.
If you're in IFS you're gonna love this.
If you're a fan of Bromberg in psychoanalysis, you're gonna love this.
I had to face myself.
What the holy Jesus.
Over the past year and a half, if you look at my life, it's actually very boring and predictable.
OK, Megan Meinson, if you're listening to this, you're like, Tiffany, that's not true.
I made massive changes in my life, gone on phenomenal adventures in certain ways, but in terms of my day to day existence, it looks pretty like, I'm not traveling.
I'm not writing a book about World War 72.
We don't want World War 7.
You know what I mean like I'm just going through my day to day life, but internally, my friend, internally the roller coaster of facing grief and loss and having remorse, disappointment, healing generational trauma, healing early life events facing my internal.
, internalized objects, my committee of Tiffany's and really wrestling with the thoughts I have, the feelings I have, the beliefs I have about myself, not even others.
I was about to say about myself and others, but truly about myself.
It's been a wild fucking ride and it's not been easy and it's certainly not been comfortable and it's been very sad and it's there's been a lot of anger and grief and joy and creativity and aliveness, but it's been hard.
And going through this process helped me realize like, oh, sometimes my therapist has said to me, my analyst, she's like, when I'm like, oh, I'm trying to, you know, why won't this person change?
They can't change like they just can't see and she's like, Tiffany, some people don't want to see.
Some people don't want to change.
It's not that they don't have the resources.
It's not that they don't have access to a different way of thinking or people who are doing things differently, it's that they don't want to.
Because change is fucking, it's it involves loss and it involves grief.
So all of this, we're gonna bring this all the way back around to what are we even talking about today, Tiffany?
It's this.
If you are constantly coming up against a practice that's just not working, I want you to consider the possibility that.
You're actually keeping that in place on some level, consciously or unconsciously or some measure of both because it's more comfortable to even even as uncomfortable as it is and how much you say it's awful and how much you don't want to be in financial scarcity and to have so little time and to be in physical pain and to be like short and stressed as awful as that is, there may be for some of your committee members inside and I'm talking about the different parts of yourself, it may be better to live this way.
Then to actually face the pain.
And heartache and struggle of looking internally and facing what you've been through and what your relationships have been, and the boundaries therein.
, for some of you, you might never have thought about this before, and you might be like me, I'm gonna fucking go.
For me, Tiffany, I was like, what's on the other side of financial insecurity?
What's on the other side where I have spaciousness at ease and room for creativity and relationships that actually feed me.
Like if I get all that in place, what then?
And I have discovered a what then is a looking back, a retrospective, a looking inward and understanding what's inside of me.
, and it's been not what I expected.
And so for you, I wanna encourage you, if you're somebody who's like, I wanna grow, I wanna change, I want financial ease and security because I know there's a different kind of work to do.
The work doesn't end when you have ease and time freedom and financial security.
The work is far from ending.
Boy, you actually have access to a new level of growth, a new level, a new, it's a new playing field.
And it's phenomenal and it's rich and it's nuanced and complex.
So when you're thinking about doing like working with me, for example, in the Lean In make big Academy, I want you to be thinking about how do I earn more while working less.
Like that's great, but why?
To what end?
More vacations, Tiffany.
I wanna be like that's how we think our minds go to more vacations, more time with my kids.
Maybe I could take up hobbies.
All of those things are true, but until you get to the other side, we actually have some ease and freedom.
Until you get there, you have no fucking idea.
Who you are, what you truly want, what you're really gonna start exploring and having access to, and let me tell you, man.
, I wanna know.
For me, I wanna know who that Tiffany is and I'm getting to know her fucking wow.
On the other side of that, and I wanna know who you are on the other side of that.
If you are curious, like, who am I on the other side, if I'm not constantly worried about money, if I'm not constantly stressed out, if I'm not constantly resentful or like stressed about how am I gonna get my next client.
If all that was worked out and you're curious about who am I?
How am I as a friend?
How am I as a parent?
How am I as a spouse?
How am I as a daughter?
How am I as a me?
On the other side of that, then I encourage you to get in my ecosystem.
You can send me an email, he at lean and make bank.
Let me know you wanna work with me.
Let me know you're ready to invest your time and money in finding the fuck out who you are on the other side of that.
I'll ask you some questions to see if you're a good fit to work with us.
If not, I'll give you some alternatives for somewhere else you can go to start.
if you're a great fit, fucking get on in.
I'll tell you how.
Send me an email, he at leanin makebank.com.
And if you leave with nothing, I want you to just consider the fact, the possibility.
It's not a fact. : I want you to consider the possibility that the struggles you're currently facing in your practice are a solution to a deeper fear, a deeper struggle, you're not yet ready or you haven't known is actually there.
And then if you just do the simple steps to solve for your practice, oh, I have, you know, 15 clients at $300 per session.
I solve that.
When you solve for that, you're gonna actually understand or identify, oh, there was something deeper here all along, something more interesting, something more rich, something more meaningful.
A a a real problem or a puzzle that I actually needed to be working on and this whole like money stuff, I can't feel my practice, blah blah blah was just like a covering for the real work that needs to begin.
Don't wait your whole life.
Don't wait until you're 80 to begin your real work.
Let's just solve for this life first fee full case load practice.
Let's just solve for that so we can get to the real work, huh?
OK.