Anyone can keep going when the work is paying off. The real test of a practice is the long stretch before it pays off and the dips that happen along the way.
How we handle those sections of road is decided almost entirely by why you are doing this in the first place.
Performance chased for its own sake will inevitably carry you away from the principles and the passion that brought you into this work.
Here we’re coaching a delicate balance between data-driven execution and values-driven entrepreneurship. When they collide or create ambiguity, you need a governing constitution. Your Conscious Evolution Workbook is that constitution.
Vision is the mother of all antecedents.
In the videos that discuss vision and purpose, we invite you to envision a life and practice as far out as you can stretch your imagination. Twenty-five years in the future. What does a more beautiful world look like? How do you contribute to that reality?
Every business move you make is cued by something, and the why is the upstream cue. When it is present and has weight, it governs the smaller ones. When it is missing, the nearest small thing wins by default.
Many of you are there right now. Still building. Eight clients, and you need six more to get your head above water. You’ve sent thirty emails this month, to other therapists, a couple of doctors’ offices, two old supervisors, and that group practice owner from a training. Four replies came back.
Two of them were “thanks, I’ll keep you in mind.”
The thirty-first email is half-written, and a small voice is asking whether this works for someone like you.
What decides whether email thirty-one goes out is the thing you can stand on no matter what response comes back: your why.
A number alone won’t carry you. This might seem to contradict my “let the numbers do the talking” mantra. But try to hold both simultaneously. Achievement chased for its own sake needs the ground of a vision for the world you’re creating. Let your values hold your performance in a context. When you’re not hitting your KPIs, let your vision carry you into the next action.
If there is a why under it, your emails will read differently. A particular person you are building this for or with gets to discover you in a sea of noise and distraction.
Some version of the world gets a little more defined the day your door is open and findable.
With that underneath it, the four replies are just a data point, and the next email goes out, because the vision is bigger than any one result. The initiative is another experiment in a process of getting closer to North Star.
Run the read on yourself at email thirty. The behavior is sending the next one. The antecedent is whatever is actually in your body when you decide what to do next. A why with real weight to it, and the email goes out anyway.
A vision with no calling under it weighs nothing. It loses to an empty inbox every time, because at that moment it does not mean anything to your body.
The mechanics. Write down, in one plain sentence, who you are building this practice for and what gets better in the world once it exists. Under it, write the shape you are building toward: the caseload and the rate that would let you do this work for years. Keep both where you will see them.
This is one piece of the vision work and the weekly rhythm we build with you inside the AIR framework. Come to the next call to refine your vision and align your strategy to that engine.
Before your next hard season hits, define the why strong enough to carry you through it. Enroll at TPA. Click here to get started.