Fear of Judgement – Colleagues, Clients and the Internet

Welcome to the Business of Psychology Podcast, and welcome back to our miniseries on the beliefs that can make it really difficult for us to get started in independent practice or to grow our practice if we already have one. In this series, I’m reflecting on the beliefs that I hear most commonly from my coaching clients and the ones that have been pinging around in my head for years as well, and thinking about where they come from, but also what we can do to try and move through when we want to act against some of these beliefs and how uncomfortable that that can make us.

Full show notes for this episode available at The Business of Psychology

Links:

Episode 182: Neurodivergence: Having the big conversations and living your values with Dr Naomi Fisher

Episode 68: How to launch an online course as a psychologist with Dr Marianne Trent

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@drrosiegilderthorp

The Magnetic Profile

In my new mini course, The Magnetic Profile, I walk you through one specific business task. Over five short lessons, we use my Values, Voice, Impact framework to help you choose who your profile is for, say what they most need to hear, and plug it all into a simple template that you can use on directory sites, your website, and as a business asset that I’m going to show you how to repurpose in 100 different ways to help the right clients to find you. Most importantly, you’ll come out of the course with a finished profile and proof that you can do this business thing in a way that feels ethical and manageable. You can find all the details here: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/the-magnetic-profile

Fear of Judgement

The thing that I want to talk about today is the fear of judgment. This sounds different in different people’s heads, but I hear a lot of, “Oh, I’m really scared about what my ex-colleagues are going to think,” or “Will people think I’ve sold out? Will people accuse me of being a charlatan, or not good enough, or not experienced enough to offer this thing?” And that really drives a lot of people’s reluctance to be visible, especially online. And as you’ll know if you’ve listened to previous series’ of The Business of Psychology, I’ve recorded episodes recently with people like Naomi Fisher and Marianne Trent, where we’ve talked about this because it’s a very big deal in our community; this is not in people’s heads. I think psychology and psychotherapy can both be quite judgmental professional communities, and the way that we’re interacting online at the moment is often not very compassionate and very judgmental. So this fear doesn’t come from nowhere. Even the stuff we talked about in the first episode of this miniseries about the belief that ‘I’m not good at business’, and how often that can come from this massive pit of shame that people feel about needing money and needing to be paid for their work, and choosing that narrative as a way of keeping themselves safe from being seen as somebody that is money motivated, all of that actually comes from this feeling of being judged by our peers.

I’m not going to get into too much the reality of that and the reason that happens, because I know we’ve talked about that a lot in other episodes. But what I want to bring to your attention is the impact that might be having on the way that you’re running your business, because sometimes it’s so ingrained within us that it can fly under the radar, and we don’t really realize how much our behavior is impacted by this concern about what our peers might be thinking of us.

Ultra-Genericism

The first thing that I see is ultra-genericism. This might be directory site profiles, website copy, social media content; incredibly generic, vanilla, safe content that doesn’t really say anything at all. It’s so bland it’s pointless, and I always say to my clients, if your voice is not in it, if it isn’t something which you’re desperate to share with the world, don’t share it at all. Because the world is so saturated and full of boring, generic mental health content, there is no point spending your valuable time creating more boring, vanilla mental health content. It’s just not going to stand out enough to have any benefit to you or reach any potential clients. But I totally get it. I get why that feels safe, because you can’t criticize something that’s super generic. That’s the first way that I see this showing up, and people really don’t realize they’re doing that most of the time. It’s just what feels natural for them to share.

Sharing Photos Or Personal Details.

People might avoid sharing any photos or any personal details. I did this. I started my practice and tried to hide behind a brand. I shared a logo, I had a quite good name for the practice, and I hid myself behind all of that because I didn’t want anybody to see me at all. It didn’t work, spoiler alert! You might find yourself, if this is a big problem for you, over-editing, trying to sound like someone that you’re not in everything that you write, everything that you say if you’re in a visible setting. If you go to networking, for example, and find yourself talking in a really unnatural way, it may be that this fear of judgment is governing your behavior.

Real Risk vs Imagined Risk

Something I often talk about with my coaching clients, and this is often most useful in our group coaching sessions, is to assess the real risk versus the imagined risk, because there is real risk, and so we do need to deal with that. We can’t just pretend that nobody’s ever going to judge you. They probably will, but we need to think about the reality of that and whether that reality matters, and the reality of not doing the things that you’re avoiding because of your fear of judgment, and whether that matters. So balancing that up, the consideration of what it’s costing you to keep yourself small and invisible and generic, and weighing that against the potential that some colleagues may make judgmental statements.

Who Are You Writing For?

The other thing I always encourage people to think about when this is a big problem is who they’re writing for, and to be really clear on the benefits for the client of everything they’re putting out there. This is something that I teach through all of my coaching, that the client’s need comes first. So we’re not putting out a social media post unless we’re really clear on what the benefit is to the potential client. We think about how what I’m saying here is going to leave them feeling? What is it going to give them? If we don’t have a strong reason that it’s going to be beneficial to the client, whether they come on and pay for our services, or whether they’re just passively absorbing this content, we want to always be leaving those people with a benefit. So if we know that, if we’re really clear on, “Okay, I’m worried that my colleague might read this and judge me, but I’m also really confident that somebody in this client group reading this is going to get a real benefit from it,” very often we can move through the discomfort of what our colleague thinks because we know what we’re trying to do for the client, and we’re really confident and happy that that is aligned with our values. So it’s a good example of how we can use our values like a North Star to guide us through the swamp of a fear of judgment, which never feels nice really.

Locus Of Control

The other thing I always encourage people to think about is the concept of locus of control, and specifically that you cannot control what your colleagues think or why they’re going to think that about you. It’s classic, isn’t it? People have their own psychological reasons for judging other people. We can’t control any of those. And so you can be really careful about what you say, you can be really careful about what you put out there, but the reality is, if you do anything, there are going to be people that don’t like you and that judge you for it, especially if you’re successful and you get in front of lots of people, then it’s absolutely inevitable that you’re going to face judgment and that you’re going to annoy some people. What you have to be clear on is what makes that worth it for you. There are some battles that I choose not to fight. There are some things that I see happening, and I don’t put my head above the parapet and I don’t fight for every cause that I believe in because I’m a human being and there’s a threshold for what conflict I can take, but there are certain things that I will speak up about and I am willing to be visible talking about even when not everybody will agree with me, and that’s a lesson I really had to learn writing my book about being a parent to autistic and ADHD children and putting out my content on my Dr Rosie Gilderthorp Instagram profile, which felt so much more vulnerable than stuff I share in other places because I know not everyone will agree with me. We don’t all agree on issues surrounding neurodivergence and labels and all of that stuff, and so it feels scary to me, and it will never stop feeling scary because I like to be liked, like we all do, and I don’t like it when people get in touch to say that they hated something that I said, and it devastates me if somebody’s upset by something that I said. But I know who I’m doing it for, I know that I’m sharing messages that there is a big group of people that need to hear, and I get lots of positive feedback too from people that have been helped by those more controversial things that I’ve put out there, and that’s what I hold onto and that’s what gets me through this worry about judgment from my peers. And I’d encourage you to think in the same way. Be really clear on why you’re doing this, and then it’s much easier to see that the people that might judge you for it have got their own stuff going on. You can’t control it, and it’s not worth sacrificing your mission and your values to try and make them comfortable because you can’t control it anyway, and you might never be able to make them comfortable.

Find Ways of Being Visible That Align With Your Values

I know that this has been a short one from me today, but I hope that it’s been helpful if you’re somebody that feels maybe that fear of judgment has been running the show in your practice so far. I hope it’s helped you to see that you’re not alone, that we all struggle with it, even those of us that are quite visible, and you might see us popping up a lot online. It never actually feels comfortable, it’s just that we know why we’re doing it, and we have a strong enough reason to want to do it, to move through that discomfort.

So now you need to find those ways of being visible that feel aligned with your values, and that feel ethical and helpful for your client group as well. This isn’t about forcing yourself to do stuff that feels shouty or performative or marketing that isn’t aligned with who you are and who your ideal client group is. Often the first step is about having a really clear message about who you are, who you help, and the reasons that you’re a really good person to support your client group, because that’s something we can really struggle with when we’re fearful of judgment. And if you don’t have that underpinning everything else you do, all of your marketing efforts are likely to be thwarted by it.

This is something that I can help you do in my new mini-course, The Magnetic Profile. Over just five short lessons, we work together to decide who you’re writing for, who those people are that you really want to help and support. We get really clear on what they’re struggling with and how they would talk about that in their own words, and then we talk about your experience in a way that feels honest and helpful to the client, putting their needs first, matching your experience with what they need to hear from you. By the end, you’ll have a profile that you feel comfortable with and that makes it much easier to take the other steps you need to take to be visible. If you’d like that kind of guided support, you can find all the details and join The Magnetic Profile mini-course at the link that’s in the show notes, I would love to see you in there.