Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 5: From Seeing 30 Clients A Week To Hosting International Retreats with Megan Gunnel Smith
149 Plays1 year ago
Click here to join the From Intern To Entrepreneur Facebook community!
From Intern to Entrepreneur is the podcast for counseling graduate students (and other grad students in mental health fields) to start planning their journey to private practice while they're still in graduate school! Host, Cori White, started planning her journey while she was still in her graduate program and it paid off BIG to start planning EARLY.
In this episode of From Intern to Entrepreneur, Cori interviews Megan Gunnell Smith - a therapist, retreat leader, and head of a 18,000 therapist facebook community! Oh, and she wrote a book! Say what?! She is an INSPIRATION for grad students to hear about all the possibilities you have using your master's degree.
More about Megan:
Founder & Director of the Thriving Well Institute, psychotherapist, speaker, bestselling author of “Thriving as a Therapist” and international retreat leader with 24 years experience. She’s also a coach to therapists who want to learn how to build and scale their business and admin of the Thriving Therapists FB group with 18,000 members across the globe. Megan was selected as one of only 33 FB community admins in all of North America for the Meta Community Accelerator Award for 2022-2023. She has presented and facilitated workshops and retreats globally and nationwide. She manages a private practice, a group practice, her coaching and consulting business and loves to help others learn how to thrive at work and at home! A recovering perfectionist and recklessly brave, she's not afraid of most challenges.
Connect with her through her websites:
https://www.thrivingwellinstitute.com
Want to connect with Cori? Visit her website and reach out! www.frominterntoentrepreneur.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'From Intern to Entrepreneur' Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
This is from intern to entrepreneur, the podcast for counseling and therapy graduate students who want to start planning their journey to private practice while they're still in grad school. I'm your host Corey White. And within three years of graduating from my master's program, I had a six figure thriving private practice in large part because I started planning my path while I was still in grad school.
00:00:21
Speaker
This podcast is full of stories and information meant to give you ideas about how you can carve your own path to the therapy career that you want. Please note that when you're listening to this podcast, licensure laws and requirements vary from state to state. So check with your state board about what you can and can't do on your journey. And without further ado, enjoy this episode of From Intern to Entrepreneur.
Celebrating Milestones and Support
00:00:46
Speaker
Oh, hey there grad students and future entrepreneurs. This is episode five of From Intern to Entrepreneur. And five feels like a milestone number to me. So I know it's a really small milestone, but I'm going to celebrate it anyway. And I just want to thank everybody who has been supportive of me and who has had kind words for me about this podcast so far. You're awesome. And I love creating this content for grad students. So thanks for that.
Introducing Megan Gunnell-Smith and Her Contributions
00:01:10
Speaker
But today's episode is real inspirational. It is with Megan Gunnell-Smith and here's a couple of the things that she does. She hosts a Facebook group called Thriving Therapist Facebook Group for
00:01:24
Speaker
18,000 therapists are in that group. That's amazing. She hosts international and national retreats on pretty large scales. That's pretty cool. And she owns the Thriving Well Institute. So she does a lot of cool things that are in alignment and meant to, with her, and are meant to help therapists learn how to thrive in their lives and in their careers.
00:01:48
Speaker
I know that when I was in grad school, I would listen to podcasts while I was cleaning or while I was driving to grad school or while I was walking.
Finding Inspiration and Creating a Path
00:01:58
Speaker
that were inspiration stories to me. I wanted to hear stories about therapists who were doing really cool things so that I could get through grad school. That is what got me through grad school. But then also after I graduated grad school, it's what gave me the inspiration to start my practice and to dream bigger than just working for someone, which is fine if that's what you wanted to do, but I just knew I wanted to do more. And so listening to stories from people like Megan helped me do that. And so that's what I'm hoping this interview does for you.
00:02:27
Speaker
Now Megan has a lot of big things that she does and she's been doing this for a lot of years. So I don't want you to listen to this and think, oh my god, like the second I get out of grad school, I've got to be building an 18,000 person community. You don't need to do that and you're not going to do that. You're going to be focused on one-to-one client work when you get out of grad school.
00:02:44
Speaker
But you can start planting seeds to do things that are bigger in the future. And Megan's story and the way she tells the story of how she built what she built is really that of like brick by brick, planting seeds. That's what I want you to hear from her story.
00:03:02
Speaker
along with whatever else you hear from her story that you think is important. And I'd love to hear more about what you do think is important from her story. So you can share that in my Facebook group from an entrepreneur or, you know, with me even in an email. So I'm going to stop talking about this. I'm going to shut up for a second so we can get right to the interview. I hope that you're as inspired by Megan as I am.
Megan's Current Work and Retreats for Therapists
00:03:25
Speaker
Listeners, meet Megan.
00:03:30
Speaker
Hi, Megan. Welcome to the podcast. I'm so happy to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. I can't wait to have this conversation. Yeah. Well, let's jump right into it because I know that you have a really unique kind of situation where you are now and you have a really interesting story about how you got to where you are now. So tell everybody who is listening or watching a bit about the snapshot of where you are right now and what you do.
00:03:55
Speaker
So that's a great way to open. It's always good to give people a little bit of a 30,000 foot view. And right now I would say it's a totally different picture from where I started 20 years ago. Currently I'm in the process of planning five retreats. Four of those are international locations within the next calendar year. So that's something I never thought I would say out loud is like I have
00:04:23
Speaker
for International One National Retreat Plan. Some of these are for up to 130 guests. I run the Thriving Therapist Facebook community with 18,000 members in that community, and I teach them how to build and scale their private practice. And I am now an Amazon number one bestselling author for my book, Thriving as a Therapist.
00:04:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. And regarding your retreats, can you tell people a little bit about what your retreats are, who they're for and why you do them? Sure. I started out as a solo private practice therapist and I started building retreats for my clients. So I heard a lot of people in my practice asking for opportunities to have wellness and self care and meditation and mindfulness and beautiful locations. And I decided to start building those for my clients.
00:05:15
Speaker
And then fast forward, you know, to this point in my career, I would say in the last three to four years, I started building retreats for the thriving therapist community because so many therapists were saying we're burned out. We need a reset. We're looking for a retreat for ourselves. So I started creating small retreats and then those sold out so quickly that I created larger summits and they're really designed to be opportunities, both for learning.
00:05:42
Speaker
and inspiration. And the retreats that I design are always addressing sort of the mind body and spirit components for people so that they get a chance to reset and relax their bodies, clear their head and kind of think about what their own highest potential is and reconnect to that passion and purpose.
00:06:04
Speaker
and then do something soulful and creative and kind of challenge themselves with maybe an adventure or an excursion that really stretches them beyond what they thought was possible. So they're really built to be transformative experiences for people, whether they're a weekend or a week long.
00:06:22
Speaker
Yeah. I think that's really wonderful that just for people to really understand that, okay, so you were a therapist and now you've sort of transformed this into helping people, helping therapists take care of themselves, which who better to do that than a therapist? Right. So I love that kind of trajectory. So, all right, let's go all the way back to the beginning though. How did you even get into the therapy world? Tell me about that journey to you becoming a therapist.
Journey from Music Therapy to Private Practice
00:06:50
Speaker
It was a very rocky road. I got my wonderful graduate degree from the University of Michigan. I felt super confident when I graduated and I was ready to just bust out into the world and open a private practice. And I thought that my goal was to literally secure office space somewhere in a town related to where I was located.
00:07:13
Speaker
And that I would just somehow magically, if I rented office space, I was going to build a practice, but I had no idea what that really meant. I had no experience or education in building the business and doing the marketing and building the referral network. I had no idea how to find my niche or how to even serve capacity. And I was completely disillusioned when I started that journey. And so I remember.
00:07:42
Speaker
distinctly going into this private practice near my home that was a group practice. And I asked the director if I could sublease an office there. And within a matter of minutes, I like had a contract in my hands and I went home and I was like, I did it. I started a practice and my husband looked at me and was like, you just secured rent. That's like, you have no clients. Like how are you going to do this? So it was a really scary start.
00:08:09
Speaker
But slowly, over time, I started to learn all the missing pieces. And with the help of a couple veteran therapists at the group practice and just a lot of sort of blood, sweat and tears and a lot of sweat equity, I really kind of dove in deep to understand a little bit more about marketing, about providing impeccable service to my clients, about building a mutually beneficial referral network. And once I did that, my caseload was full.
00:08:38
Speaker
But then there lies another problem. And we can maybe get to that later. But once you fill your caseload, that's also not the end. Yeah. So you live in a state then where once you graduate from a master's program, you can start a practice right away.
00:08:54
Speaker
Yes. Okay. That's correct. That too. And as I'm learning, as I talk to more and more people, a lot of states are not like that. And you're in Michigan. Is that right? That's right. That's what I thought. So help me understand how you, or how you even conceptualize this. Like, how did you have the guts or how did you even know that you could start a practice or like, how was that part of your mindset going into your graduate program or, or did it, did it happen along the way?
00:09:18
Speaker
It started before that. So I actually was a music therapist and I worked in the hospital setting for about a decade with my bachelor's degree in music therapy. And I worked at the bedside with patients literally from labor and delivery to hospice. I did inpatient psychiatry, cancer, pain management, rehab. I did all kinds of different work in the hospital setting providing music therapy.
00:09:45
Speaker
And after many years of doing that, I realized something was missing. I really wanted to take my work a little deeper. I wanted to, I always kind of envisioned having a private practice. And I thought maybe one day I could do that, but I wasn't sure how to get there. And I didn't know even what degree to pursue. So I remember asking a couple of mentors who I did some extra training and certification with who were LMSWs and LCSWs.
00:10:13
Speaker
I was asking them about their degree. And if I wanted to go to grad school, what should I do? Should I do a full PhD in psychology? Should I get a counseling degree? Should I do a social work degree? I was actually opposed to the social work degree at first because I thought that's not really going to be what I want. I don't want to be a social worker. But I didn't really understand that social work was actually one of the best and easiest
Mentorship and Business Navigation
00:10:36
Speaker
and fastest paths for me to pursue private practice because it didn't require
00:10:42
Speaker
the never-ending supervision that some degrees require. It didn't require a PhD in order to build a practice. And it provided me with the ecological lens of really seeing my clients as a whole person in their environment, which was already very familiar to me being a music therapist and kind of working in the context of integrative medicine, for example. So it was kind of an easy and natural segue for me.
00:11:11
Speaker
Um, but it wasn't easy when I went through the degree and then I had zero training on how to build a practice, which is what most people who were in that degree program wanted to do. Not a lot of them were begging for macro level positions. Not a lot of them wanted to work for nonprofits. Not a lot of them were hungry for community mental health jobs. Like, you know, they really wanted to build a private practice, but that was really missing from our wonderful yet not totally comprehensive degree.
00:11:39
Speaker
This is something that is standing out to me about your story is I've heard you kind of say twice that you relied on the information from mentors who help you make a decision about how to move through where you were. And there's something that's really standing out to me about that in thinking about your ability to create success for yourself.
00:12:04
Speaker
but also for you to be kind of having guidance along the way? Mm-hmm, for sure. Because remember, I'm older than you are. And so when I graduated, there were no coaches, no courses, and no guidance. So there was nobody out there. There were no therapist influencers at all in the space of there was no thriving therapist. There was no community for people to learn how to build a practice.
00:12:33
Speaker
And I literally didn't even know I had to open a business bank account. I didn't understand what an LLC was. I didn't know what a tax ID was. I had no idea how to pay quarterly taxes. I had no idea, you know, how to build a business or even make a business card. I mean, I didn't even understand how to network. So I was completely in the dark when it came to not only just the business side of it, but also all the other things that go with private practice that were just not taught in school, you know, like what kind of forms are we supposed to have?
00:13:03
Speaker
How do you move a client from an inquiry through an intake and then through working with them and scheduling them? And how do you handle no shows and late fees? And none of that was covered for us. Because our degree, and probably very similar to your own education, was really focused on the clinical work, the theory, the methodology, all of the important pieces of becoming a social worker. But it really didn't help me with practical applications. So this was, again,
00:13:33
Speaker
This was like so long before any of these people were out in this space doing the work of sort of guiding therapists through the process of the missing pieces of their education. Had I had that knowledge, had I even had a fraction of what I'm teaching now in my own community or what I put in my book, had I had just a little tiny piece of that, my journey would have been so much easier, so much less painful, and I would have been able to serve the clients who needed me the most so much faster.
00:14:03
Speaker
That's a really good point that the more support we get in our career outside of the clinical piece, the more bandwidth we have to show up in sessions with our clients. And I think that, yeah, that's something that I think grad programs overlook, maybe not intentionally, because they have a lot to do, right? They have a lot of they need to cover.
00:14:28
Speaker
But they do a bit of a disservice, I think, to helping people actually come out and be thriving therapists. It's like we come out and we are very good clinicians. And there's not really a way of, well, how do I make my life work like this and in this career and in this job? So yeah, I do also love that there is so much support for therapists, especially new therapists, to be able to integrate
00:14:52
Speaker
some of, oh, how do I make a life that I want to live with? How do I also serve the people that I want to serve? I am curious to know from you a little bit more about how you create
00:15:09
Speaker
things outside of one-to-one therapy.
Diversifying Work to Prevent Burnout
00:15:11
Speaker
Because I know that a lot of new therapists that I talk to have a hard time conceptualizing what they can do besides see clients in a one-on-one setting, a couple setting, or a group setting. So how would that happen for you?
00:15:25
Speaker
Well, I think I got to the point where honestly, I wanted more variety in my work. I was really chugging along with the one-on-one clients. My practice was full. I really figured out how to fill my caseload. I was doing great with that. But then I really kind of missed the things that I used to do as a music therapist. I missed groups. I missed connection. I missed community. I missed the exchanges that happen when you have more than one person in the room.
00:15:54
Speaker
I missed creativity in terms of art and music and meditation and all different kinds of creative things that I used to do on a regular basis with all the people that I worked with on my integrative medicine teams and hospitals. I was really missing that. I mean, don't forget, I was bringing drum circles to inpatient psych units. I was bringing the harp to the bedside for hospice patients. I was assisting through labor and deliveries. I was doing very creative work and I was working with art therapists, doing mask making in mandalas.
00:16:23
Speaker
And that stuff really filled me up. And so here I was postgraduate degree, built the practice of my dreams, really busy with one-on-one cases. But then I also thought, what's next? I got to this point where I filled my caseload, but I still wanted to increase my income, but I didn't want to do it by adding more hourly sessions. Because that's, in my opinion and my experience, one of the fastest ways for therapists to achieve burnout
00:16:53
Speaker
is to continue to grow their income by adding one-on-one hourly sessions. So when I got to that point myself, I also at the same time was hearing a similar echo from several people in my practice that were asking for things beyond the one-on-one session. So I heard a lot of busy working women that I was working with, mostly busy working moms that were my clients, say over and over to me
00:17:23
Speaker
what I wouldn't give for a day to myself that I could just have like a one day retreat where I didn't have to think about making any food and somebody would give me a massage or I would get some yoga in there and I would learn something cool and I would be able to connect with people and do some meditation. So when I heard them saying these things, I was like, Oh my gosh, you're giving me permission to build it. And that's how groups, one day workshops and retreats were born.
00:17:51
Speaker
And from there, I built really creative things, community kind of groups. I built women's groups. I built meditation groups. I built harp music groups with muscle relaxations and guided imagery. And then I built retreats because one thing will lead to another. So what I find is when you're thinking about scaling your business as a therapist and you want to trade that sort of one-on-one hourly office schedule
00:18:19
Speaker
to reduce that hourly one-on-one, but increase your income and increase your impact. There are so many ways to do that. And it can be as simple as just starting a group. I mean, let's do the math really fast. If you're seeing 20, 30 clients a week, which sometimes we do, right? I saw 35 clients a week for 10 years. It was like crazy. I don't know how I did that. It was too many. But when I got to the point where I wanted to change that metric,
00:18:48
Speaker
I thought to myself, I'm going to build a weekend or a weeknight group for women and I'm going to have 10 women in it and they're going to pay 40 bucks a pop. And we're going to do a six week session and it's going to be meditation and goal setting and sharing and community. And it will be really great. And we're just going to do it for six weeks. I'm going to see if I can do it. And with that $400 a session, I'm going to remove my Wednesday morning client case load of one-on-one clients.
00:19:17
Speaker
So I would do two days of long client days, have Wednesday morning free, see a couple of people in the afternoon, run home for dinner, you know, flip into my second shift a little bit and run back to my office and do my evening group. And then I had Thursday, Friday clients. And after a while of doing that, I decided, Oh my gosh, now I can move from the group thing to maybe they want to retreat. And so I built a retreat for these women. And then I was like, wow, with that money, now I can like remove several days out of my month.
00:19:46
Speaker
And then it just continued to grow and grow and grow. And now with larger offerings and even passive income like my online courses or whatever else I have going on, the book, retreats and things like that, it's a much different metric for me than it was when I was just focused on serving clients one hour at a time. Yeah. Something I want to highlight about what you're saying is this is really an entrepreneurial mindset.
00:20:12
Speaker
this podcast is from intern to entrepreneur. And I think that teaching people how to think entrepreneurially is really important. And what you're saying is that you had the aspect of creativity. So you could think about how could I make more money? But then you also combine that with how do I create the strategy to make that realistic?
00:20:31
Speaker
So I think that that's something I really want people who are listening right now to hear is, all right, if you're not, if you're burned out, or if you're not liking the way something is going, you can put your thinking cap on and go, what do people want for me? How do I give it to them in a way that works in my life better and creates more financial opportunity for me, so that I can drop some of the things that are burning me out or taking up some space. So yeah, that's a perfect example of that.
00:20:57
Speaker
And all of that that you just shared is absolutely true, but I would add one other key component.
Identifying Service Gaps and Audience Engagement
00:21:04
Speaker
So the other part that I think is so critical is to make sure you're filling a gap, that you're actually filling a need, that you're hearing people ask for something that is, doesn't currently exist and that you're building it because then you're more guaranteed to know that whatever you're creating will sell.
00:21:25
Speaker
So what I often see from therapists that I do coaching with these days is that they come to me with these brilliant ideas and they're like, I've been a therapist for 10 years. I know everything there is to know about X, Y, and Z subjects. So therefore I'm going to build this cool online course and I'm going to launch it into the world, or I'm going to build this really great retreat and I'm going to launch it into the world. But what they're missing is either the platform, the audience, or that their audience hasn't asked them for that.
00:21:53
Speaker
And so I seem to often sometimes, sometimes people will build something really great, but they have a really hard time selling it or filling it because people aren't asking for it. So what worked for me was to keep my ear to the ground and listen carefully for the gaps in service. And so if you can hear that there's a need that your audience is asking for, and you probably have to kind of like listen between the lines, you know, for those kinds of things.
00:22:20
Speaker
but entrepreneurs who are very savvy can pivot quickly and they can hear that and create a product, a service, or an offer that will meet that need.
00:22:32
Speaker
Hey, grad students. Real quick, before we get back to this interview, if you are loving the idea of being a part of a community of like-minded graduate students who want to own their own private practice one day, then you need to head to Facebook and join my Facebook group from intern to entrepreneur. There's already a community set up of graduate students who one day want to own their own private practices and be entrepreneurs just like you.
00:22:59
Speaker
So head over to Facebook, join that group and stay in the loop and get connected with people who are doing things that you want to do. Back to the interview.
00:23:10
Speaker
So let's do a little definition here because the people that are listening to this probably might not exactly understand what you're saying and how that translates to where they are. So when you're saying audience, if we translate that to them, that's their initial clients. That's the clients that they get. That's the one-to-one clients. You were listening to your audience who were your 35 people a week on your caseload, right? And that's what you listened to to create the thing that you could offer them that was filling that need. Correct.
00:23:39
Speaker
help people understand how you grew that audience, grew your caseload in a way that you were hearing similar echoes. Because when all of the newer therapists that I talk to, they go, I go, what do you do? And they go, oh, I see people with depression, anxiety, grief, trauma, everything. And they just say everything because they're not told to niche in their grad programs because they get a broad experience of things.
00:24:08
Speaker
How would you suggest they build their audience or client list in a way that will allow them to have continuity? That's a great question. And I can give you a concrete example. So on your intake form, you can add a line that says, would you like us to add you to our email newsletter or email list? And they can say yes or no. And if they say yes, you can reassure them that they can unsubscribe at any time.
00:24:36
Speaker
They can, it's never sold or shared, it remains confidential. And then you build an email list. And so I started doing this when I first built a practice. And I asked my clients on the intake form if they would like to be added to my email list. Some of them said no, some of them said yes, some of them unsubscribed, it's no big deal. But I added them into an email listserv, like a software program for email newsletters.
00:25:03
Speaker
And I created a really great value added newsletter for my clients. And I only sent it out like twice a month and I blog consistently. So I was giving a lot of value and I was sharing some good insight, great tips and strategies. My blogs were born out of themes that I heard in my practice. So I would hear a lot of people talking about something and I would say, Oh my gosh, this would be a great blog. Like I'm hearing people say it over and over, you know how you have that like sort of a,
00:25:32
Speaker
subconscious theme or something running through like the weeks that you're working with people and you're like, gosh, everybody's talking about that this weekend. It's like, is it in the water? Is it in the weather? What's going on? But there is that feeling of like, there's something that you need to convey. And I did that through my blog. And then every once in a while when I had an offer like a women's retreat or a group or something I was offering a program on meditation or guided imagery, I would then put that in the email.
00:26:02
Speaker
And so I built my email list over time and also invited people to share. So I put a very clear call to action in the email. And I would say, if you found this blog or this newsletter helpful, please feel free to share this or have other people sign up for the list. And it was just a wonderful way to generate a really highly engaged, warm audience. And then when I had something to sell, it was easy to fill it.
00:26:28
Speaker
because I had a lot of clients who were interested in these retreats and the retreats that I originally ran for clients were relatively small. They were never over 20 people. Most of them were 10 or 12 people at a weekend Airbnb in Northern Michigan or something, but many of them were in Costa Rica and they were for 20 or 24 people or something, but they were not huge events. And so my list was large enough
00:26:53
Speaker
that I knew if I built these annual events, they would fill really quickly. And I even created a wait list for it. So once one of them would sell out, I'd have a wait list for the next one. So that really helped too. But you're right. You have to start thinking about some of these things early because if you're not building your list or your audience, then it does become a little tricky. And even clients that were past clients who I completed working with or I terminated,
00:27:22
Speaker
they were still on my email list. And sometimes they would come back for a retreat or something else. So it was great to have that network to draw from for sure. Yeah, yeah, that's wonderful.
Advantages of a Group Practice
00:27:35
Speaker
And then skipping ahead a bit, what are the advantages to the way that you have transitioned your life now? Well, I can tell you that there's a lot of advantages.
00:27:49
Speaker
I feel really energized because I'm not doing 35 clients a week. My caseload has significantly been able to be a lot smaller. I've lessened it because I also built a group practice a few years ago. So any new referral coming my way, uh, that I couldn't serve personally was able to be, um, you know, given over to someone else on my team. If that person who called wanted to work with them.
00:28:14
Speaker
So I built a group practice. I now have five therapists working with me on my team. They're amazing clinicians and they're filling their caseloads, but not to the point of burnout. I'm always really careful to tell them, don't keep taking your clients because you really don't want to do more than like 20, 22 hours a week. I feel like, you know, if you're getting closer to 25, 30, 35 clients a week, 40, even I've heard people take 40.
00:28:37
Speaker
it's really dangerous. I mean, you can really get compassion fatigue, you can get secondary trauma, you can definitely burn out. It becomes difficult for you to have the space and energy in your life to do the things that you really want to do and to be present for the people that you love the most. So what I noticed in my own experience, and you may have felt this too, that when you have a really burgeoning caseload for years, that I just felt like I couldn't even hear my family anymore. I was like, I can't even listen to like,
00:29:08
Speaker
the needs of my kids or my husband or whatever, I was like, I don't even have the capacity or bandwidth to like be present to the needs of my own family. And when I felt that and realized that was true, I thought I have to make a shift. So you asked me, what are the advantages of how I've designed my life now? I mean, it's a whole different world. I'm in a totally different space. I'm hosting this community online.
00:29:34
Speaker
with thousands of therapists who are asking questions about how to build and scale their practice. I've written a book for them. I've written six online courses for them. I've hosted summits internationally for 150 of them in Costa Rica and beyond. And it's just been an amazing, amazing experience for me to be able to translate the things that I love doing and inspire an entire audience of people to do the same. I just, my passion is two things.
00:30:04
Speaker
I want to increase access to outpatient mental health care, number one. And number two, I want to protect the therapist who served those clients and truly teach them how to thrive so that they're not going to burn out and not leave the field. We need them. Yeah, I don't know the exact statistic, but my business partner actually recently said that she had found some statistic that said
00:30:28
Speaker
You know, these are the number of people that after two years two years just two You know, so this is people that aren't that aren't you don't even make it to licensure are out of the field And I can't remember what the number was but I remember being like, oh my god, that's high And to think of what we invest in our education that's tragic, you know, so tragic. Yeah Yeah, and and part of what I love about what you do is that you create community for people to be able to talk about these things and
00:30:56
Speaker
for people to be able to gravitate toward one another in a way where they're in alignment and you're getting to pick like, right. I have this local area. I'm in Berks County and there's some people that I really love and I don't dislike anybody, but it's really hard for me to find people that are doing what I'm doing or, or who I want to learn from.
00:31:14
Speaker
in this little pocket of the world, right? Sure. And so I had come to your Utah retreat. And that was a that was a way for me to first of all, because my business was doing well, I paid for it through my business. So it was a vacation from Pennsylvania to Utah that I took that I didn't pay a cent for out of my personal account, which is that cool. But then I got to connect with people who
00:31:37
Speaker
I just had a lot of synchronicity with and people who I still talk to and people that I've traveled with to do other things. And it definitely enhances my career because I am able to take from them, give to them.
00:31:54
Speaker
in a way that if I stay small and if I'm not connecting and thinking about my career outside of what I'm doing right here in Reading, Pennsylvania, Berks County, I wouldn't be able to get that in that way. And so I think it's important for therapists to be thinking long-term about how do I stay fulfilled in my career in a way where I'm taking care of myself, where I'm not burnout, and where my career is a thing
Community and Mentorship in Therapy Careers
00:32:18
Speaker
I like.
00:32:18
Speaker
Not that I'm, you know, Sunday scaries don't want to go to work tomorrow. Exactly. And I think you're touching on one of the most important aspects of our jobs as therapists. And that's like the human connection component. We love human connection. That's why we're in this field, you know, for, for one of the reasons we're in this field. We love relationships. We find them fascinating. We love human interest stories. Like we, we love connection with other people.
00:32:47
Speaker
But oftentimes this field is very isolating. And so what I found with the Thriving Therapist that you just described is not only in our digital kind of online space community that we have on Facebook, that we find each other and connect with each other and feel seen and heard, but when we do gather for in-person events and retreats and summits and, you know, CE learning opportunities and all kinds of things, workshops,
00:33:12
Speaker
It is so enriching because you just feel so validated. You feel so seen and so heard. And we need that. We need that sense of community. And we need to look to our peers to say, what are you doing that I'm not doing? How can I learn from you? I'm doing that too. I'm not at the top of this community hosting it like somebody that knows everything. I'm learning with you. I'm also learning with the community.
00:33:40
Speaker
I find it to be really energizing. It's a really rich experience for me to be able to have these kinds of connections. I don't know where I would be without this community today. It's changed me as much as it's changed other people who are part of it.
00:33:58
Speaker
Yeah, and it seems like it's offered you a lot of really cool opportunities to do things that are really fulfilling to you in a way that is in alignment with who you are and the way that you work.
Reflections on a 20-Year Journey
00:34:13
Speaker
Okay, because people that are listening to this podcast are at the very beginning of their journey
00:34:21
Speaker
Give me a timeline of, okay, so you graduate from your master's program to now. How long has that been so that they can kind of gauge? And I think that oftentimes people like, I'll never get there, right? Thinking that, oh, it's just going to be overnight. What kind of timeline are we talking right now between you graduate and where you are today? I mean, it's almost been 20 years that I've had my MSW. And prior to that, I was 10 years in as a music therapist. So I've been doing this for a hot minute. So it has been a little while, but
00:34:50
Speaker
Not everybody is going to be on this trajectory. So, you know, I don't think everybody wants to do exactly what I'm doing now, but I do think there's opportunities for therapists to not only thrive in just their private practice building, but also thrive in the scaling. And that can even be small efforts like we talked about. You could build a one day workshop for people. You could build a group or a series of workshops for your clients. You could build community events.
00:35:20
Speaker
you could build, you know, I've heard people build like, you know, healthy 5k runs or something like that for their community. So there's retreats you can create, there's courses you can create, but it doesn't have to look like this. It doesn't have to be, you know, kind of therapist, influencer, 18,000 people or whatever in a, in a Facebook community that, that was never part of my initial vision. I never thought I would be in this place.
00:35:46
Speaker
But here I am doing this. But it's not for everybody. Yes. And I think my question's more geared toward just you thriving now in the way that is unique to you. And people to really understand that for your journey, based on what I'm hearing, is it's been planting little seeds along the way that have built on
00:36:05
Speaker
Okay, so, you know, you, you, well, first of all, even before you get your, your degree, right, you're already doing creative, therapeutic work. And so then you incorporate that into some of your work, it sounds like, and then you do a one day retreat. And then there's a maybe a local two day retreat. And then there's a right. So this idea that I want young therapists, new therapists to be thinking about what seeds they're planning, even if they don't know what their crop looks like at the end.
00:36:32
Speaker
Exactly. So that they're getting somewhere where they can say, I'm flourishing, I'm taken care of, I am where I want to be in this moment. Exactly. And I think that's the key is to start small and to build with what's right in front of you. So, you know, just starting really in a small way does not have to be a huge effort. I do see therapists sometimes that have
00:36:56
Speaker
big dreams of hosting big, week-long international retreats. But that didn't happen overnight for me. So you're right. When you think about one-day workshops leading to a two-night stay at a local place that's a couple hours away, to a little further away, to a four-night thing, to something that we have to take a plane to, still within the continental US, but a little further to a week-long experience somewhere where I was
00:37:22
Speaker
my original Costa Rica retreats that were for clients that were seven days in Costa Rica, I didn't fill those myself. I did it with a colleague. So I had a therapist friend who was also hosting some local retreats. And I was like, we shouldn't, you know, kind of band together and create an international one together. So don't forget that your colleagues are not your competitors. They are your cohorts, right? So they are people who can cross promote something with you. They can,
00:37:51
Speaker
definitely co-elevated. They can definitely fill it with you. I mean, they can definitely be an asset to you. And I think that's another piece that we have to think about is that we're not in competition with other therapists. We're really working with them. We can work with them. And that can be very advantageous for our careers. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. So let's get to our final two questions here. One is, what is one piece of practical advice
00:38:19
Speaker
that you would offer to graduate students who are interested in an entrepreneurial journey?
Staying True to Unique Skills
00:38:26
Speaker
The most important thing I think is to stay connected to what's true for you as a provider. And what I mean by that is for me, I was originally a creative arts therapist, and I couldn't really separate that from my talk therapy career. And so if I wanted to bring in elements of my creative history, whether that was
00:38:49
Speaker
art or, you know, music or meditation or whatever it was, that worked well for me. And when I highlighted that that was part of my skill set, more clients were interested in working with me that were really my perfect clients, my ideal clients, because I was kind of afraid of sharing that on my website. And I was afraid of talking about it. I kind of felt like, Oh, people are gonna think that's a little crazy, or you know, they're gonna think that's woo woo or weird.
00:39:15
Speaker
But when I embraced it and thought it's not actually woo woo or weird, it's not new age, it's really comprehensive and very beneficial, then I just leaned into it a little harder in like the blogs that I was writing and what I put out there in terms of my website. And suddenly I noticed that everybody that was writing to work with me with a client inquiry said, I was drawn to work with you because of what I saw on your website.
00:39:42
Speaker
about drum circles and heart music and guided imagery and mandala making and mask making and all this other cool stuff. So I would say in terms of practical advice, really stay in tune with what makes you unique as an individual practitioner. And that's going to serve you well over time. Your perfect clients will resonate with that. Yes.
00:40:07
Speaker
That is, I'm hearing how you built your audience or your client list in a way that led to you being able to do some of the really cool stuff that you did. That's great practical advice. What's one piece of mindset advice that you would like to offer to graduate students interested in an entrepreneurial journey?
Maintaining an Abundance Mindset
00:40:30
Speaker
It boils down to one word, abundance.
00:40:34
Speaker
And I constantly thought when I was building a practice, even when I had no one calling that I was abundantly full. I had this like vision that I held on to a mindset vision that I was well provided for that money flowed easily into my bank account that I was abundant with clients. I was abundant with energy. I had plenty of time to do everything I wanted to do.
00:41:01
Speaker
And I was never for want. And so I always, anytime I got into fear and scarcity, I would just pause myself and move back into abundance. I even use part of the word abundance in my own password so that I would have to see it every time I like did anything on my phone or my computer or anything. I was like, I'm going to put that in front of me all the time. So I just, I constantly was moving myself back to an abundant mindset. And I would even tell people when they asked me, how's your practice going? I'm like, it is just,
00:41:31
Speaker
gangbusters, I was like, it's totally full. I'm like, it's, it's abundant. I can't believe it. Even when I didn't have enough clients, I was feeling that sense of it's totally full. It's going exactly the way I want it to. And I leaned into that hard, almost a fake it till you make it feeling, but it really helped me with mindset. And so anytime I started to get a little scarcity and fear based, I just moved back over to that abundant mindset. And it really, really helped me. And before I knew it, it was true.
00:42:00
Speaker
That's wonderful. And I think that that's such a great way to reframe mindset in a way of
00:42:07
Speaker
Yeah, because when we're in fear mindset, when we're in scarcity mindset, we don't make decisions that are in alignment with what we actually want. We make decisions that are in alignment with being afraid. Exactly. Move yourself back into that abundant mindset means that you are constantly challenging yourself to make decisions from a place of alignment with yourself and what you actually wanted. That's very cool. Yes, it really helped me a lot. Awesome.
00:42:35
Speaker
If people want to connect with you, contact you, where would you like to direct
Connecting with Megan Gunnell-Smith
00:42:40
Speaker
them? What can they do? Anyone can find me on the Thriving Therapist Facebook community.
00:42:46
Speaker
or you can go to my website thrivingwellinstitute.com. Awesome. And I will link that in our show notes. Megan, thank you so much for being here with me today and offering all of your knowledge and wisdom to graduate students in our counseling related fields. And yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Oh, thank you so much for having me. And what you're providing here is truly important to new people entering our field. So thanks for what you're doing.
00:43:18
Speaker
I hope that you loved this episode of From Intern to Entrepreneur, and if you want to learn more about what we talked about, check out the show notes. If you love this podcast and you want to support me in continuing to create content for entrepreneurs, then please share this with a friend, a grad student who you think might want their own private practice one day, and also like, subscribe, and review this podcast wherever you're listening to it.