About this time last year, I decided to name my counseling practice "Pursue Growth Counseling." Although I wish I could tell you that the name was divinely inspired, in all reality the process looked more like me sitting on my couch for a couple of hours typing in name after name into the domain search engine trying to find something that hadn't already been taken. It was much more difficult than I thought it would be, this naming of my business that I have never really wanted to think about as a business, per se.
Yes, I'm a counselor who has my own private practice (which sounds much more glamorous than it really is, by the way), but the reason I'm a counselor is not to be a business person. Ever since adolescence, I have viewed the profession of counseling as a calling, a vocation, a ministry. "Business" was never a part of the vocabulary. I did not go through 4 years of undergraduate education and 3 years of graduate school, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology (plus a minor in Sociology) and a Master of Science in Marriage and Family Therapy, with an emphasis in Community Counseling to be a business owner, but to be a counselor.
However, the last 29 months of establishing a private practice have made it abundantly clear that, like it or not, I need to be willing to examine who I am and what I hope to accomplish as a counselor through the lens of business if I want to grow. In a recent webinar I purchased and watched through Psychotherapy Networker entitled "The Future of Private Practice," I finally found the verbiage to express what it is I have become, aside from a licensed associate counselor. Lynn Grodzki, LCSW, explained that counselors who are in private practice often find that they become "reluctant entrepreneurs." I felt so validated knowing that, firstly, there is language to describe how I feel about this and secondly, that I am not alone in this awkward space of figuring out how to operate as both a counselor and a business owner.
The work of counseling can be challenging, of course, but I have extensive training, a natural gifting and a deep passion for doing the work and because of that it often doesn't feel like "work." It feels like a privilege and a gift and it's what I wake up excited to do in the morning. The business side of things (networking, marketing, web design and maintenance, setting and collecting fees, finding referral sources, being vulnerable online by writing posts like this) are far beyond my knowledge level, skill set and comfort zone. That's the part that feels like work.
I am realizing, more now than ever before, that the name I arrived at for my counseling practice is just as much for me as it is for my clients. Pursue Growth. It's what I'm here to help my clients do, and it's also what I am called to do on a daily basis. It also looks differently for each one of us. I am being called to Pursue Growth in learning how to better put myself out there as a counselor in private practice, not to make my name great (as an introverted and private individual, that is the absolute last thing that I want!), but in order to be accessible and to be found by the people that I have been equipped and called to serve through counseling.
So whether you are a fellow counselor trying to figure out private practice or an individual who is considering seeking counseling, I hope you will know that you are not alone in this uncomfortable, but so richly rewarding, process of pursuing growth. I'm right there with you. I wouldn't ask you to do the work, whatever that may look like for you, if I wasn't willing to do the same. We're in this together. We both have work to do. We both have so much to learn. We will both be better because of it.