This is gonna be an unpopular opinion alert, isn't that what people are saying on the, on the Instagram.
People be saying, and I have to say it because I'm, I'm always gonna tell you the truth about what I'm seeing, the truth about what's happening on the ground and therapy practices and what it means on a bigger level in terms of systemic issues, personal issues even and Just to be honest, what it means about our integrity as clinicians, as a profession and about us as individuals, your integrity as an individual.
That's what we're talking about today.
And this opinion is that, I don't even think it's an opinion, but here's the fact.
, in most cases, if you are taking insurance or you're charging low fees, any situation in which you are earning less than you need to actually be taking care of yourself financially, taking care of your kids, making sure you're saving for retirement.
, that means your fees, your session fees are out of integrity.
, it's true.
By the way, my name is Tiffany McLean.
I'm the founder of the Lean In Make Bank Academy.
I don't fuck around.
For the past 8 years, I've been helping therapists design premium fee, cash pay practices where you can work 12 to 15.
You can even go 18 if you want to.
Sessions per week, take 6 to 8 weeks vacation and be earning $150 200, $250 per year.
so you can actually show up and do the clinical work you love.
You can have ease and freedom and financial security.
In your day to day life and here's what I mean when I'm talking about you being out of integrity, and actually us as professionals being out of integrity, us modeling a lie for the general public, for our clients when our fees are low.
let's been way around to story time.
I remember it was probably 10 or 15 years ago.
I met this woman.
And she sewed dresses.
Such cute dresses.
I'm like, those are so cute.
She sewed them like one by one in our home.
She's like, I'm gonna start a a service where I'm sewing dresses.
And so I looked at the price of the dresses and I don't remember now, but maybe they were like $300 or $400 and I was like aghast, $400 for a dress.
They were so cute and I'm like, but if my mom sewed growing up, my sister sewed, they would sew our clothes like that's how we got clothes.
I'm not paying $300 for a dress.
And then I had the idea I'm going to.
I'm gonna sew a dress.
These are so cute.
I remember watching this process.
You go to the Joanne's fabrics, you get a pattern, you pick out fabric, it's not that expensive.
Put it together so my mom has a sewing machine.
I'm just gonna sew this thing.
I went online.
I got so far as to go online.
I think I even went to Etsy and I found these old like 1950s patterns.
You remember, I, I don't know, those of you who've sewn or ever seen it.
It's like these thin material with these instructions about how to sew and you have to like pin the paper, what's it called?
I, I don't even remember.
You pin that paper to the fabric and then you cut out the pieces in the right shape and then like you sew them.
I got like.
I got so far as to.
, buy the patterns on Etsy.
I even think I went to a, a fabric store.
I was in San Francisco, so I went to that fabric store.
I'm like, oh, these, you get these big rolls.
Like I remember my mom would even like we'd go to the dots and like roll them out, put chunk, put chunk, put chunk as you like roll the this big like spool of material and you like lay it out and then as you like cut it through z to get your pattern and to get the material for the dress.
So I even went as far as to go to the a fabric store, and I would like to find the cheapest fabric store I could find in San Francisco, and I was like, oh.
These materials are more expensive than I remember.
This fabric, oh gosh, like how do I get the cheapest one?
So I got the fabric.
I got the whatever it's called, right?
The, the, I should have looked this up before recording the podcast, but the Design material little paper thing, that shit sat in my closet.
For a long time.
I might even brought it to my mom and I was like, Mom, I wanna make these dresses.
Help me.
But we, we got to cutting the thing out.
That shit never got made.
And in the process of doing that I realized, oh, to actually buy the material for a dress, buy the whatever that little design piece of paper thin piece of paper is called, I could also learn how to make the dress and then to make the dress is gonna actually literally take me hours.
There is no way this is my takeaway.
There is no way that a woman's gonna be able to only charge $300 for these dresses.
It takes so much time.
By the time this process beginning to end is done with one person trying to do that themselves, they're gonna be making like 25 cents an hour.
You can't do it.
It can't be done.
It can't be done by one person.
Which brings me to today.
When you're thinking about when you have your private practice, when you're setting your fees, you realize that the hourly fee you charge has to cover all of your life expenses, add it up, right?
Not one hourly fee, but over the span of 10 sessions a week or 15, and even like Tiffany, I can do it while working 30, seeing 30 client hours a week.
No, you cannot.
You cannot see 30.
Most of us can't see 30 clinical hours a week and still raise our children, have ease and freedom and peace, really lean in and do depthful clinical work, unless, by the way, if you're seeing 30, if you have 30 sessions a week.
And that's because you're seeing people 4 times a week.
That's a different story.
That I 100% think you could do if you're doing like a psychoanalysis or intensives where you're seeing people the same person for 4 of those hours, that really cuts down on the amount of emotional and psychological bandwidth it takes to do that work.
If you're saying you have 30 separate clinical sessions and you're gonna try to tell me.
That you have the emotional and psychological bandwidth to be getting case consultation from supervisors or groups consultants who are really helping you go in depth.
You're having time to read about your clinical work, write thoughtfully about your clients, dream about them, know their families know their lives, know their history, know the unconscious patterns that have been going on for generations in their family.
Don't even get me started on if you have 50 people active in your case load and you're seeing 20 to 30 of them a week.
I know you're not giving them.
High quality work.
OK, so it's like somewhere along the line, a ball is being dropped.
Someone is something is not working out in the system.
So let's go back to this clothing idea.
I recently bought my, I have two little kids.
I bought them clothes from a company called Sheehan.
Probably terrible that I did.
I don't know much about it.
I go to their website.
It's a disaster of like colors and coupons and just garbage, but my kid, my son really wanted these like leopard prints, bell bottoms and all the pinks and yellows he could find in like this kitty shirt, just like the designs, the patterns are out of.
And it costs like my my daughter got this despite my efforts best efforts to raise very gender neutral children.
She wants to be a princess.
I'm like, where did she even get that?
so she bought this like princess dress with flowers and lace and colors and sequins and it's like $10.
Here's a, that's a lie.
There is someone who is being fucked because I bought that dress for $10.
That's just a fact.
You can't make a dress and then sew those sequins even with machines and then ship it from wherever it came from.
Probably it was made in China all the way over to San Francisco.
Someone had to make that dress.
Someone had to get the materials for the dress.
Someone had to literally that dress had to get into a truck.
Someone had to drive that truck to a ship.
That ship had to drive from there to here and then they had to go.
Someone in San Francisco had to pick.
Up and drive it to my house.
That shit should be hundreds of dollars and I paid $10 plus maybe $299 for shipping.
That doesn't make sense.
That means someone is getting screwed.
That means someone is being taken advantage of.
That means someone in the system is making a lot of money while a whole bunch of other people in the system are burnt out, overwhelmed, stressed.
I'm not here to fix the capitalism, no thank you, but I am here to bring up how this, what this means for us, for you as a clinician, and what this means for our field.
If we are spreading the lie that.
Someone could be paying $35 a month or whatever it is.
I don't know how much BetterHelp costs, $200 a month and have 24/7 access to a therapist or have weekly sessions and that therapist is making $35.
That therapist is getting fucked and we're also spreading the message, the lie, that true change.
, moving from a relationship or marriage that's toxic and dysfunctional.
After you've come from a family where there are toxic and dysfunctional dynamics into a marriage that's toxic and dysfunctional, for you to truly get out of it and find function and ease and peace and freedom.
Be able to relate and set clear boundaries and show up for your kids and model what it really means to be in a relationship.
We're trying to say that costs $35 per session, per hour, that that could even cost $80 per hour, that that could cost a $20 co-pay, that that could even cost $150 an hour.
That is a lie.
It's a lie.
The true change, behavioral change that will have an impact on every aspect of your life, your children for generations, your own peace of mind, your own financial situation as a working person in the world, your marriage, your friendships, engaging with your all of that work costs $150 per session.
That's not true.
Someone is subsidizing that work.
Typically who's subsidizing it is.
A therapist who's burnt out and they're not able to show up for their kids, they're not able to save for their retirement, they're struggling to pay their own medical bills, their bodies broke down, they're stressed, they have chronic fatigue, their back is aching and they can't afford to go to the gym or to the physical therapist or to the right?
it's coming out of the therapist's wallet or the physical therapist's wallet or the therapist's body or the therapist's relationship with their family, their kids and their spouse, right?
It's coming out of there.
There are circumstances where a therapist had a corporate job before they became a therapist.
They have more than enough money to last them for the rest of their lives, and that money can subsidize low fees or perhaps that therapist has a spouse who has a really high salary and that salary is subsidizing that therapist's work with their clients.
It could also be that that therapist, some therapists, yay for them I love it, are fortunate to have maybe family money or inheritance for generational money.
Let's not ask where that money came from.
I want you to have money.
You can see you are still a little conflicted about this.
That being said, You, you have generational wealth that allows you to then care for other people at a subsidized rate.
That's how therapists can have low fees.
Either your spouse is paying it.
Your generational family money is paying a previous job you had is paying it, or you're paying out of your own retirement, your own children's educational fund.
Your own physical health, emotional, psychological bandwidth.
So as long as there are therapists out there who are setting, taking insurance and getting 20, there are clients out in the world are doing $20 co-pays or paying $100 or $150 per session.
By the way, if you live in a a city where the cost of living where you have a house paid off for $200,000 your cost of living is extremely low.
$150 might be very more than you might be if you are in a position where you are.
Live in your house that you want.
You're able to pay for your kids' education.
You have all the retirement savings you need saved up because you live in a really low cost of living area and your fees $150 or and you could see like 15 to 18 people a week, so you have plenty of time to do all the deep work with your clients and with yourself, live your life fully, give back in all the ways you want to.
I'm not talking about that.
How do we know what if your fee is on point?
, or not on point.
If you are not able to hold your clients in mind clinically and really show up with a passion to your work each day.
If you do not have your retirement, paying into your retirement regularly or don't even know what that is, those are two red flags that your fees are too low.
And as long as we as clinicians are going out there keeping our fees low and giving the impression to the general public that that's what fees are, then we're undermining we're doing a disservice to both ourselves as professionals and we're doing a disservice to our clients about what things truly cost.
What things truly cost, what a toll are being under-resourced is actually taking on us, it's a lie and I, I assert that we can't really be in integrity as clinicians if our whole entire business foundation and the work we're doing as clinicians is set up on a lie.
Does this mean you're bad?
No.
You probably didn't have this information or you've been told to ignore it, or you've been fed by everyone around you that you probably shouldn't be looking at your financial situation.
Or like, don't care about that.
We're not, you've been told all around that this is just what you're supposed to do.
Now you know I'm telling you something different and you know it's true in your gut as you're listening to me, you literally cannot poke a hole in what I'm saying.
You cannot poke a hole in what I've been saying because what I'm saying is true.
I've been doing this for 8 years.
I've been working with therapists for 8 years.
I've seen it over and over and over again.
Any therapist who tells me I can see 30 people a week for an insurance, that therapist,, it's not gonna last.
It's never lasts.
That's a short term arrangement that leads to burnout, overwhelm, or by the way, I work with clinicians who are in their 60s and 70s.
I don't just serve 20 year olds.
I don't even think 20-year-olds can go to grad school.
I don't work with like people in the prime of their 30s.
I work with people at every stage of the life cycle, and let me tell you what.
, when you get to 60 or 70, this becomes real serious if you have not been saving for your retirement, right?
Can we help you at that stage?
Yes we can.
Is there hope?
Yes, there is, and I don't want you to get to that point if you don't have to get to that point, which means getting real now about the cost, the true costs of doing our work as therapists, the true cost of 1 to 1 service that allows a human being to change the course of their life.
Are you picking up what I'm putting down?
If you're interested in doing this work.
First I want you to know it's not your fault.
You're in this position, but it is your responsibility to change.
You're not bad.
Is this scary and daunting?
Yes, it is.
Do I have hope?
Absolutely, because I've helped hundreds of therapists, hundreds and tens of thousands over the course of all my other offerings and services, but hundreds, over actually almost 1000 if not 1000 in our program, the Lean and Make Bake Academy to help you one truly get in touch with the reality of the value of the work you're doing.
The value of the transformation you're providing, helping you and your core understand what that looks like and then helping you bring that core truth into your clinical work, into your business practices so you understand how to have those conversations with your clients so that they could get on board with the true cost of what it means for them to invest and change.
If they're paying $20 co-pay, guess what, they're also not in integrity about what change really costs.
They're not really invested in doing the work most of the time.
Because you're not honest about the cost of what change really what what the investment change really requires.
What change really requires the difficulty of true foundational change in one's life is not cheap.
It's not cheap in terms of time, it's not cheap in terms of money.
That shit costs you and the rewards are unfathomable.
If you want to do this work, you can send me an email.
Hey at Leanandmakebank.com that comes to me.
Just say I'm ready.
Just say I'm ready and I'll walk you through the steps to see.
One, if you truly are ready, and 2, where you're at with your practice and whether it makes sense for you to move forward with us in doing this work of 1, getting clear in your gut about the true costs of the work you're doing, the true transformation you're providing, what that really needs to cost in order to provide it to your clients.
Help you understand what you need to be doing, the changes you need to be making in your practice, help you have those conversations in a clinically appropriate and powerful, impactful way, and how to move forward and continue to build demand messaging, build demand for the services you provide so that you could be bringing in 200, 250, 300 plus per session and actually have a life of ease and freedom and integrity in your clinical work.
Send me an email, he at leanin makebank.com.
You don't have to do it alone.
You do have to do a scared because it's scary.
But, but, but the fear is not the thing that's gonna stop you, especially with the community, with a clear roadmap of support, and with 8 years of experience helping therapists do this.
I cannot wait to meet you.
See you on the inside.