Hello, and welcome to the Business of Psychology Podcast. Over the summer, I decided to do something a little bit different this year. We've got episodes for you in this miniseries, and in these episodes, I'm gonna talk about some of the beliefs that I see most commonly in psychologists and therapists that I coach that keep people small, safe, and not really getting the most benefit out of being in independent practice. I'm gonna share how if we can become aware of them, there are practical steps that we can take that most of the time will get us through the discomfort that comes along with these beliefs. And, you know, if that can give you a little bit more confidence to step forward in your business, maybe going into September with a spring in your step, then I will be extremely happy.

So the one we're gonna talk about today is the 'I'm not good at business' story, and this is one which I told myself so relentlessly at the beginning of my practice, and I hear, I would say, in 50% of calls that I have with coaching clients. So that's why I wanted to address it first. So we're gonna talk about the I'm not good at business belief, where it comes up, how it sabotages your attempts to start or grow in independent practice, and then I'm gonna talk about some ways that we can build new evidence to counteract the belief and kind of move through the discomfort that it causes us. So I guess I'll start by talking about the belief itself and, you know, where I've felt that come up for me, and I guess it's come up loads of times.

At the beginning of my practice, I really didn't think that I had the kind of personality that would make a good business owner. I'd been told kind of throughout my life that I was quite soft, that I was quite gentle, that people would walk all over me. And there were elements of that that were true. I think in my personal life, I don't particularly like to be the boss. I don't like telling people what to do. It's certainly true that in a negotiation I will not do what they do on The Apprentice and be proud of having a laser-focused, obsession with profit and, you know, I'm not single-minded. Like all these things that, you know, we consume a lot of media about what good business looks like, and it's this very shark-ish, profit-focused, screw you, I'm gonna take what I want attitude. And I'd really grown up watching The Apprentice, and Dragon's Den and absorbing those narratives, and it... Obviously, that doesn't fit my personality at all. So I think I'd bought the idea that if you weren't like that, you weren't good at business. And obviously that is not true. That is not true at all. Because when you get out into the business community and you meet people who are really successful, you discover so quickly that the people that make it to the top are warm, they are empathic, they're really good at working out what people need from them and finding creative ways to meet that need. Obviously, not always. There are some exceptions to that, but in the kind of industries that we're interested in, in, mental health or education, or, industries adjacent to wellbeing, if you lack that empathy and you lack any compassion, it's very difficult for you to come up with the kind of ideas that are gonna take off. And also, I learned that building relationships and being a trustworthy person to be in a business relationship with is a real accelerant to business growth. And that's something that if you're completely single-minded and out for the profit margin and have no passion for helping people or your local business community, yeah, that's incredibly hard to, to fake. So establishing meaningful relationships where people will give you a leg up, I think would be impossible actually if you had that kind of personality type.

So what I discovered quite quickly, I suppose, in my business journey, although not as quickly as I wish it had been, was that leaning into the skills that I do have as a psychologist, the fact that I am much more interested in helping people solve their problems than I am making a profit, the fact that I genuinely care about the people that I meet at business networking, and I really get quite invested and excited in their business problems and want to try and help, those were superpowers that made me stand out, that helped me build the relationship network, which accelerated my business to being quite successful reasonably quickly, and denying those things and trying to force myself to be somebody that I'm not would never have got me anywhere. So what I do in coaching now is try and encourage other people to really recognise the strengths that you will have in your personality, that if you lean into those, can be rocket fuel for your business, and to deal with what might be the limitations. You know, so I know that because I'm not naturally 100% focused on the profit margin, I won't make a deal with somebody on the spot because I know if I do, it's very likely that I'll undercharge or be overgenerous or do something that compromises the health of my business in some way because I'm excited, and I really want to work with them, and I'm not very good at doing the mental maths on the spot. So I know that about myself, so I change my sales process so that I'm making the offer, I'm sending the proposal after the call. I am never talking about the exact solution that I'm gonna offer on a call. And you'll notice if you ever come and do a coaching discovery call with me, that most of the time I'll talk about, you know, what you think about whether StartUp might be right for you. I might give you my opinion about whether one of my coaching programs is likely to be a good fit. But I won't, you know, make the offer and send you through all the details until after our call, and that's for the exact same reason, just because I don't always make brilliant decisions for my business in the heat of the moment. So rather than criticizing myself and saying, "Well, I'm not good at business, so I shouldn't do it," I take an approach where I allow myself to play to my strengths, and then I mitigate the bits that I'm not so good at by getting in support in some cases or just switching up my processes so that I have more time for the bits that I know I'm gonna struggle with.

And that's the kind of thing that you can do if this I'm not good at business story isn't dominating your psychology. While it's front and center, you don't see any of that. In those early days where I thought I was just bad at business, it felt very existential. It was like, either I make this really successful really quickly, or I've got no, you know, I've got no business being in business, and I should get out and get back into an employed role, which wasn't even possible for me. So I think it's really important to try and move past this belief. Otherwise, you can make a decision which is based on some very black and white thinking, defining yourself either as good or bad at business, when in reality there are so many ways that all different personalities can be good at business if we understand ourselves well and we're willing to structure our work around that. I think it's really interesting to consider where this I'm not good at business belief that is so pervasive in our community actually comes from, because most people going into independent practice, myself included, actually don't have any business experience. So we by definition don't have evidence for this belief, and yet it is so common. And I think the answer is that it's something that's really baked into the culture, in the NHS, but also in our training pathways, whether that's an NHS training pathway as it is for me as a clinical psychologist, or actually for psychotherapists too. My psychotherapist clients have really similar cultural beliefs about charging for your time and having to think about things like profit, cash flow forecasts, being kind of grubby and disgusting.

And I think there's so many deep reasons that that might be baked into our culture, and I think one that needs talking about is the relationship between psychology, psychotherapy, and privilege. So I think we do have a strange cultural problem with the concept of earning money and a sort of deeply ingrained belief that people that want money are less pure, less compassionate, less caring than people who don't even think about money. I could give you direct quotes of people saying that to me in training, so I don't think it's that much of a stretch. And as with almost everything, I think that is uncomfortably linked with the kind of class system that we have here in the UK, and that potentially psychology and psychotherapy came from this kind of upper class tradition where, you know, it wasn't polite to talk about money or think about money, but that's because you didn't have to talk or think about money. And it's our job, I think, to challenge that and to think about whether we really believe in this way of thinking, or whether we want to start thinking a bit differently

So in a way, if this is the culture that you've been trained in, Then the I'm not good at business story is actually an affirmative one. It's one that began as positive, people telling themselves, you know, "I'm doing this low-paid work because I'm a good person, because I really care about people, and that means that I must be rejecting of all things that are about money and acquisition of money," and business falls under that category. So I think it's a classic example of stories that were once positive for us becoming toxic and holding us back as we develop through our lives, and they start to become more problematic. So a really interesting one, and I'm sure we could talk about it for a lot longer, but I'd need somebody to be talking back to me. I don't wanna soliloquize on the subject for too long. But I think if you are plagued by this, then, you know, getting together in your peer supervision group and chatting about it and thinking through, you know, where did this story come from for us, and is it satisfactory for the lives that we're living now, I think is really, really helpful.

I think also we, we develop stories based on the things that we're rewarded for, and I don't remember anything in my undergraduate or in my doctorate where you were kind of praised for coming up with ideas that would have commercial application. It just wasn't part of the way that we thought about making an impact in mental health, and obviously that's quite different now. Now I spend loads of my time thinking about how we can use the commercial world to, you know, really start to change beliefs around mental health. That's something I'm really, really passionate about, because in my mind, while it sits in this kind of health silo, we're not gonna have the cultural impact that I would like us to have. So I think about it now, but I can't think of any time in any of my training that we were encouraged to think in that way or would've been praised for thinking in that way. Whereas, you know, you were heavily praised if you did do stuff like, you know, voluntary work or internships, that kind of thing. Those were, like, heavily praised and competed for and seen as a really positive thing. So I think, you know, what we're rewarded for also really contributes to how these beliefs develop.

And then finally, I think we have to consider that we haven't had many visible role models who are both ethical and entrepreneurial because it doesn't really make the press. The people that do operate in that way are, you know, not likely to be on a show like The Apprentice, for example, because we don't make great television. We're very steady and boring and kind and nice, and occasionally somebody like that will break through onto, you know, a media platform, like I like Deborah Meaden, but you have to... it's taken a long time for people to take notice of those people often, and they get a lot less airtime than their more controversial, usually more shark-ish counterparts. So we're just not seeing the reality that many, many people who are very good at business are very, you know, ethical and compassionate and have a real passion for helping people. I've been really fortunate to meet people in, you know, all kinds of different contexts as part of my MBA, and I can tell you, there are people in the most, like, high-powered corporate jobs that you would expect to have completely different beliefs and value system to a psychologist or a therapist who spent most of their life in the public sector, and they don't. Actually, they're, they do their jobs for really similar reasons to us often. You know, they, they might enjoy the money, but they're not always 100% obsessed with personal gain, in the way that they're portrayed in the media. So I think to sum up, the media does not help us, with these beliefs. It kind of sets us up to think in this binary way that I'm either a good person who doesn't do business very well, or I'm a bad person who's amazing at business, and that's just not the reality.

So how does the I'm not good at business belief show up in the way that we behave and become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy? Well, you know, if you already think that you're not very good at business, you're very likely to avoid the stuff that you need to be good at in order to have a good, solid business. So maybe you'll avoid learning about finances. If you're telling yourself you're not good at business, it's very difficult to learn all the terminology you need to have an informed conversation with your accountant or understand what Xero or FreeAgent, whatever software you use, is showing you. And that means that you won't make an effective business plan because you won't be able to model out what would happen if I take this decision or that decision, because you've avoided understanding your financial position properly. You might also avoid raising your fees to the level they actually need to be at to sustain your business. You know, maybe you feel like because you're not very good at business, you need to compensate by being extra kind all the time, or because you've been avoiding your financial position, you don't realise that you know, you're slowly eroding the money in the business rather than adding to it by undercharging and spending too much on things like CPD or supervision, for the amount that you're charging your clients. If you're thinking all the time that you're not good at business, you're very likely to just keep repeating those patterns and not really challenging them because actually you're playing into the script you've already written for yourself, and I see that all the time.

The other thing that you're quite likely to struggle with is actually hitting publish on the stuff that would bring the right kind of clients to you. So it might be that you keep drafting a directory site profile, but you never hit publish, that you never get that website written or good enough to hit publish, or that you forget to follow up with people that inquire with you. All of that comes from a mind that is utterly convinced that you're a failure already, so why would it take the dangerous step of putting itself out there and being vulnerable if it's already pretty sure that you're gonna fail at this?

The other thing that you might do is overinvest in courses and then never actually take the action. So this is really common in people that have a really strong I'm not good at business belief. 'Cause if you think about it, if you think you're bad at business, maybe you think someone else is good at it, so you hire them in some capacity to try and do the thing for you. But then they can't do the thing completely for you. You're still you. And so it still comes down to you needing to implement whatever they've taught you or shown you or framework they've given you. And by the time you get to the point of the course where they're trying to get you to implement, your mind is screaming at you, "Oh, this is all very well for them, but it won't work for me because I know I'm gonna fail because I'm not good at business." And so you made the investment because you believed in them, not because you believed in you. And when it gets to the point of doing, it's belief in yourself that is gonna get you to hit that publish button or do the thing that you've paid the money to learn how to do. So if that piece of the puzzle is missing, it just sabotages you at every stage, even if you are willing to invest in help. And it makes me really sad because I see a lot of people staying stuck as a result of this belief and the power that it can have. You know, I see a lot of people who, maybe they got through it at the beginning, but they set up a business which isn't really working for them, so they're undercharging. Maybe they're relying on one referral stream that doesn't pay particularly well, and they feel like they're always kind of stressed and on the edge, and it's that self-fulfilling prophecy. They've got a bad business because they believe that's what they deserve at the end of the day.

The other type of person I see, you know, the other place that people get stuck, is stuck in like a burnout adjacent role. So maybe they set up a private practice on the side of a role that was kind of slowly sapping their life force, but they won't jump in with two feet because they don't believe that they've got the ability to make it work, to make their private practice flourish or to succeed in any other kind of role. So they keep punishing themselves by staying stuck in a job which is harmful to them and might be harmful to their family as well, because that fits so well with the, the belief that they already have about themselves. And this is so frustrating because I think what I've learned over the years in my business, doing the MBA, coaching other psychologists and therapists, is that I promise you, business is just a set of learnable skills like anything else. It isn't a personality type. There are so many different personalities that can be really good at business. In fact, I think any personality can be successful. And what really frustrates me is that psychologists and therapists are already doing business skills in their clinical work all the time. The kind of assessment, complex understanding of problems, the holding boundaries, the explaining complex things simply, the getting people to, you know, invest their emotion and motivation in therapy when that might not have been the thing that they thought would solve their problem at the beginning of their journey. All of those skills, empathy, relationship building, they are so crucial to business, and they're the things which people that come from other industries often have to spend loads of time learning and developing, and you've already got them. Like, yes, there are other skills that you might need to work on, but you've already got these superpowers that I promise you from my MBA, I found that there were people coming up from all different industries who would, you know, give their right arm to just be able to sit and listen and do active listening and seem sincere because they really struggled with it, and if you can't do that, you're not gonna do very well in any kind of business negotiations.

So I guess my message to everybody listening to this is that you're not going to be your idea of what a perfect entrepreneur should be, because that doesn't exist. It's something that the media have created in two dimensions, and you are a complex human being, and there is no definitional perfect entrepreneur anyway. What you are going to be is good enough. You're gonna be flawed. There's ... You're gonna make bad decisions. You're gonna take risks that you shouldn't have taken, that you will regret, and you're gonna make some really good decisions too, and you're gonna help lots of people along the way. It is a bit of a rollercoaster. You are never going to tick every box and say, "Oh, I had a perfect week in business." That won't happen. But if you can learn to ride that rollercoaster and be okay with the fact that, you know, you're playing to your strengths, that you're leading your business according to your values, and that will have ups and downs and pros and cons to it, if you can be all right with all of that, then you are gonna bring so much to your business community, and it would be so sad if you let any kind of belief that, you know, you're not business-y enough or not good enough at business stop you from getting started.

So my, my way of dealing with this, the way that I help my clients to overcome it, yes, we do do some psychological work. Obviously, I'm a psychologist, how could I resist? But what I find often makes the biggest difference, and what I'd encourage you to get started on, is to choose one small part of your business to really invest your time in understanding and developing so that you get that sense of achievement that gives you a little bit of a practical foothold in your business. something tangible that you can use to say, "Hey, actually, I did a pretty good job of that, and it's working, and that must mean that I'm not entirely terrible at business."

So if you've recognised yourself in this episode, firstly, I'd really love you to notice that your brain has probably been using "I'm not good at business" as a way to keep you safe over the years. And it, it might have worked at one time, but now it's probably holding you back. And if you would like to accept my challenge and pick something to start building to give yourself that practical foothold that shows you that there are things in business that you can be really good at and play to your strengths with, then I'd invite you to make that thing your directory site profile. And actually, I've come up with a mini course to help you to do that, to get that quick win so that you can show yourself that you can really use the skills that you have already to create something really powerful for your business. So 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. So you can find all the details and join us at the link in the show notes.