[JOE SANOK] You’re someone with a vision for your practice, for your side hustle, and for your personal journey, but when it comes to establishing your path and how to get to where you want to be with your practice, things get a little messy. You’re also someone who’d prefer to go in-person instead of to groups and listening to everyone else’s story. To me, it sounds like you could benefit from one-on-one consulting with our experienced Practice of the Practice consultants. From $595 a month and up, you can work with a consultant that will give you more direction and practical, tried and tested tips matched to you and your goals. For more information, visit practiceofthepractice.com/apply. Again, that’s practiceofthepractice.com/apply. This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 880. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. This is the podcast where we cover every phase from starting a practice, growing into a group practice, growing a mega group practice, and oftentimes exiting your practice into things that take your clinical knowledge to the world in some way. So we have support and services throughout that entire journey for you. I just love talking to people about just different aspects of these things. Sometimes we cover things that are specific to one phase of practice, other things like today are applicable to pretty much every phase of practice and even exiting your practice. So we’re talking personal branding today. It’s interesting because for me for a while with Practice of the Practice, those of you who have been around a while, I didn’t have a whole lot of Joe in the Practice of the Practice. I thought, well, for it to feel like a company and this like thing that’s supporting therapists it has to really seem like it’s like a company or corporation. I even remember one podcaster said, instead of giving yourself the title founder or giving yourself the title like president or something like that, you should be like, vice president so it seems like there’s more people, and it was just weird to think about creating this company Practice of the Practice when at the beginning it was just me. But over time people like hearing from people and the more that I insert myself and my own stories and my own just personality and weirdness into what I do, the more people resonate that it’s not just some blank slate corporation that’s trying to help people, but it’s this guy Joe in northern Michigan and Latoya down in Texas and Andrew down in Asheville, Larry and Kalamazoo and Ashley in Canada and our whole support team in South Africa that were all people helping people. [JOE] That’s why it’s so important today to talk personal branding. We’re talking about that with Maegan Megginson, who’s a licensed therapist, a seven-figure entrepreneur and a business coach for therapists that’s ready to, they’re ready to take their careers to that next level. She’s also the founder of the Rest & Success Code, the charity fundraising event that inspires therapists to become deeply rested and wildly successful. Maegan, welcome to the show. I am so glad that you’re here today. [MAEGAN MEGGINSON] Hey, Joe, thank you for having me. I am just delighted to be here. What a great intro. I mean, that whole story about how you started not as a personal brand and then started injecting more of yourself into your business and the positive result that had, ugh, I just was nodding along the whole time. [JOE] Yeah, it’s really interesting. We hired in 2021 this business evaluator to do all these interviews with our customers, with our team to look at the user journey, how people ended up buying and all these different things. It was amazing. His name’s Andy Cole. It was super expensive, but so worth it and the thing that over and over and over came up was the podcast was almost always the entry point, whereas I thought it was our SEO, I thought it was all these other things and that that was what built the know, like, and trust. When we learned that, then we could focus in on the things that were already working. So yeah, I’m so excited to talk personal branding with you. Let’s start with how’d you get into personal branding? As a therapist oftentimes we don’t get any of that training. How’d personal branding become an interest? [MAEGAN] Yeah, you’re right. We don’t get any of this training and I think for me the personal brand path really unfolded in a very organic way as I was exploring my own ambitions as a therapist, what could I do beyond private practice? It first started really when I was exploring the root causes of my own burnout as a therapist in private practice. I was also a group practice owner at the time. I was really struggling with burnout and I kept coming back to why, there were the obvious culprits being overwhelmed, not having enough support, et cetera, et cetera. But there was this other big problem for me, which is that I felt like I was wearing a costume when I went to work. I felt like when I was sitting with my clients that I was trying to be the best blank slate therapist I could possibly be in my group practice. Like you were saying earlier, I felt like I was creating a company that existed to serve everyone else and there was no place for me, no place for self-expression and that really wasn’t working for me. So I started exploring in what ways can I be more self-expressed in my business and my practice and I stumbled into the personal branding space and asked myself, wait, hold on a second. Why aren’t more therapists doing this? [JOE] Now for those that haven’t maybe heard of personal branding before or like, let’s give some definitions around that. What is personal branding? How does that look for therapists? What are the quick cheat sheets around personal branding? [MAEGAN] Yeah, so personal brand, it is a pretty nebulous term. It means a lot of different things to different people. The way I think about personal branding is a personal brand is a business that’s based on you, your personality, your values, and most importantly your subject matter expertise or your specialty area. So a couple of the most famous personal brands in the mental health and wellness space are people like Brené Brown, Esther Perel. These are people who started as clinicians, started with clinical backgrounds and took their subject matter expertise and created a brand where they were able to tell their stories, share their ideas, and share their knowledge, and really out-of-the-box ways. [JOE] Now sometimes when we talk scaling people say don’t have your practice be named after you, because then it’s harder if you want to have a group practice. How do you think through scaling if you build a personal brand with your business? [MAEGAN] Yeah, I think, this is a really great question, and I first want you to ask yourself what direction do you want to head professionally? I am someone who has a group practice and a coaching business, something completely separate from my therapy practice. I do think if you want to go the group practice route, this is perfect for entrepreneurs who love management, love mentorship, love making an impact in their communities, and love being behind-the-scenes for the most part. If you want to go that path it can be a little bit trickier to have a personal brand as a group practice owner. You can do it, but it also is helpful if you have a group practice that really stands on its own that people don’t associate you directly with the group practice. It can make it a little bit easier to move clients to people who aren’t you within the practice as an example. But if you are someone who is like I don’t really want to be responsible for a full team of therapist employees, I don’t love being responsible for employees mentorship, that doesn’t, I don’t want to be behind-the-scenes, I want to be in the spotlight. I want to be on stages. I want to be doing podcast interviews, writing posts. I really want to be the person who is the face of my brand and I want to be able to sell things beyond psychotherapy. If that is the path that is interesting to you, personal branding is the way to go because you are representing yourself. You don’t have to represent yourself and a team of therapists just waiting behind you in the wings. [JOE] Now, when you think about having personal branding help your practice compared to personal branding, helping launch something out in the world that maybe like a Brene Brown or Esther Perel, how should people think through whether they want their personal branding specifically to be for their practice or for something that’s more national? [MAEGAN] Yes. I think it’s always a great idea to start with what you have. I’m a big believer in starting small, taking one baby step at a time on the road to wherever it is you’re heading in your career. So for most therapists, that means starting with the private practice that they have right now. I think that we can all bring more of ourselves into our existing private practices. So ask yourself, how can I turn my private practice into a personal brand? This is what I teach in my signature program, Next Level Therapist, how can I take what I already have and bring more of my authentic self, my authentic personality into the work that I’m already doing? So we start with the private practices that we already have, and you can begin to experiment with some out-of-the-box offerings that you can ethically sell and provide within the parameters of your private practice. Do that for a while and see if you get the bug, see if you get the entrepreneurial bug, and if you do, you’re very soon going to feel the itch for something bigger, something more expansive, something beyond the confines of your traditional psychotherapy private practice. When that day comes, you can step into a second business where you’re doing coaching, consulting, educating, something of that nature, and that’s when you can really expand on a more national level. [JOE] Well, let’s walk through what it looks like to first identify what your personal brand is, because sometimes it’s like, well, I just help couples or I’m just good at trauma and how am I different from anyone else? So how you figure out your personal brand and then how do you amplify that? Like how do you get that out into the world? Walk us through that. [MAEGAN] Well, the first thing we want to do is come back to ourselves. I think that for many psychotherapists, well, first of all, we’re all trained in graduate school that we need to be blank slates. We are literally explicitly taught the most appropriate way for you to show up as a therapist is to be a blank slate with your clients. Don’t self-disclose. Don’t bring too much of yourself into the room. You are in the room for the client. And this is the best way to do the work with the client. Most of us at this point strongly disagree with that sentiment, but that conditioning goes deep. If we go back even further in time, what we know is that many therapists grow up in families that do the same thing to them. We grow up in families where we’re told to be quieter, smaller, not so shiny, not so smart, not so nerdy. If we could just be a little less of ourselves, that would be great. So we have a lifetime of conditioning behind us that tells us to hide who we are. The first step in weaving more of that personality into your private practice is to allow yourself to focus on you. I’m a big believer, Joe, that our businesses should serve us first and our clients second. That can be a hard mind frame shift to get behind but when you really start thinking of your business as something that exists for you, and you give yourself some space to do some deep personal introspection, you are going to begin to discover what is it that wants to be expressed in my business here? What parts of me are really aching to come out and play to be seen? So I want you to start with the personal, what parts of you want to come out? What parts of you want to be seen and we’re going to lead with you first and foremost every single time. Once you get a little bit of clarity about what parts of you want to weave into your personal brand, then we can shift the attention to the clients that you’re working with. Who are the people that you want to serve? Let’s get really specific. Who are they demographically? Who are they psychographically? As we get clearer and clearer about who you’re here to serve, we can start to ask ourselves what do they need? What support do they need? What information and knowledge do they need? At that point, we have all of these ingredients that we can weave together to create a compelling message that we can share via blog post, podcast, interviews, email marketing. There’s lots of ways to be visible, but as we become visible, more people begin to hear the message that we are here to share. [JOE] Now what are some techniques that right now you’re enacting or teaching people to enact with their personal branding, so very tangible, “here’s ways that you can really help yourself stand out differently.” [MAEGAN] Well that is a, it’s a really easy question to answer once you know who you are. Because once you know who you are, once you’ve tapped into your own courageous authenticity, you are completely different from everyone else on the face of the planet. So when it comes to standing out, how do I differentiate myself? It’s true. Let’s just say you’re an expert who specializes in couples therapy for millennial couples. I help millennial couples communicate better or something like that. There are a lot of people who do that, and it’s going to be a little bit tricky to completely differentiate yourself as a couple’s therapist supporting millennial couples if you’re not weaving any of who you are into the mix. But the second we bring you, the second, I’ll just use myself as an example, the second I say, I’m Maegan Megginson and here’s who I am, and here’s what I stand for, and oh, here are the people that I help, I am immediately completely different from everyone else in the space who is helping the same target market work through a similar set of problems. So you are the secret sauce. There is nothing that we need to do to differentiate you around your subject matter expertise. Your subject matter expertise is already solid. It doesn’t need any more finessing. What the world needs more of is your stories, your personality, and your values. That is what is going to differentiate you. [ALMA] Going in network with insurance can be tough. I know when I took insurance there were long wait times and it was so confusing. Filing all the right paperwork is time consuming and tedious, and even after you’re done, it can take months to get credentialed and start seeing clients. That’s why Alma makes it easy and financially rewarding to accept insurance. When you join their insurance program you can get credentialed within 45 days and access enhanced reimbursement rates with major payers. They also handle all of the paperwork from eligibility checks to claim submissions and guarantee payment within two weeks of each appointment. Once you’ve joined Alma’s Insurance Program, you can see clients in your state of licensure regardless of where you’re working from. It’s amazing to know that you can be fully online. Learn more about building a thriving practice with alma at helloalma.com/joe. That’s helloalma.com/joe to get started. [JOE SANOK] Now, when you say your stories or things like that, I know a lot of therapists struggle with, you know one of the first things that we have them do oftentimes in when they join Circle in our membership communities is to do a quick video introduction. They’re like, oh my gosh, I’ve never done a recording of myself and it’s the very first time that they’ve posted anything in social media with video and it’s terrifying. What do you recommend in regards to that fear of being seen and fear of good storytelling and showing up authentically? Because if I’m talking to my friends, it’s really easy to show up authentically, but as soon as you pull out a phone and a ring light people freak out. Like, how do you help people break through that? What did you, what do you suggest in that arena? [MAEGAN] Yeah, I love this question. I mean, this is a huge part of what we worked through in Next Level Therapist, because you’re right, everyone, I have never worked with a client who has not had the “I’m afraid of being seen block” in some shape or form. It is really scary. It is. It’s vulnerable, it’s exposing, and I always say, let’s come back to the basics first. It is really scary to hop on camera if you haven’t thought through, what are my boundaries around what I’m going to share about myself. It’s really scary to hop on camera if you haven’t really clarified, who is my target market? What is my marketing message? How can I talk about what I do in two sentences or less? So if you’re feeling really scared to hop on camera, what that says to me is that you haven’t done enough foundational work yet to really prepare yourself to be visible in this very explicit way. So let’s come back to the basics. Let’s really decide with clarity, what parts of you are you going to show to the world? Let’s decide with clarity what is your message? What is it that you’re here to say? And once we’ve clarified those elements, Joe, the next thing that we have to do is practice. Performance is a skill that anybody can learn. Even if you’ve never stepped on stage, never done an interview, never shown up on camera, even if you think that you are a terrible public speaker or whatever the case may be, I want you to know that performance is a learnable skill. So if you’re struggling, partner with someone who can teach you how to perform, someone who can help guide you through the process, step-by-step of first showing up on Zoom. Let’s start there. Show up on Zoom with your coach, with your best friend, with a colleague. Practice talking about yourself, practice talking about what you do, and then step into a slightly larger room, maybe a Zoom room with 10 people. Practice talking about what you do there. Maybe do a podcast interview, a really small podcast for the tiny audience. See how that goes. There really is an element of exposure therapy here when you think about it. How can we start small and expand our window of tolerance around performance as our message is clarified, as our personal boundaries are clarified around what we’re willing to share, and as we have an opportunity to practice performing more and more often in front of larger and larger audiences. [JOE] Are there books or mindsets or things that you would say if someone wants to start practicing that for you are really pivotal or were pivotal in helping you grow that public speaking side of things? [MAEGAN] There are no books that come to mind. I think my experience has been largely experiential. It’s been working with coaches, it’s been stepping into larger rooms, so I don’t have any books off the top of my head. But I think what’s even more important than a book or a guide is partnering with someone you really trust because I do think that yes, a book or a self-study course around performance or public speaking is a great place to start. But really this work has to be experiential. This is not work that you can do in your mind. This is work that you have to do in the world with other people. So find a safe person that you can have this conversation with, hire a coach, join a program or something of that nature that puts you in a room with people who are safe, who are there to help you practice being seen as who you are, expressing more of your true self and practice, practice, practice. And over time you will get better at it and it will feel a lot less scary than it might feel to you right now. [JOE] That’s awesome. Where do you see people make the biggest jumps? So there’s often that initial like knowledge acquisition of, okay, I’m doing some personal branding and they sprint through it. Oftentimes, people are so excited to just get all this new knowledge and then oftentimes there’s like a plateau and then there’s like a second big jump, which isn’t always as linear as like, oh yeah. Module seven of our program we see people breakthrough. It’s oftentimes there’s some mindset or some sort of thing that just cracks. Where do you see that second jump that comes after knowledge acquisition when it comes to personal branding with the people you work with? [MAEGAN] I would say, I’m going to give you two answers to that, two layers of the second jump. It comes back to what I was saying a moment ago about the personal, the work that you do that’s introspective, that’s really focused on your own inner excavation, and then the work you do around understanding the people you’re here to serve and learning how to talk to them in a more magnetic way. I think it’s that combination. It’s the combination when, thinking about my clients in Next Level Therapists, like when they clarify what parts of their own personality they want to weave into their work, what values they hold that they want to talk about, that they want to share with the world, and then they couple that with clear messaging, because that’s really tricky for therapists. We’re not taught marketing, we’re not taught about branding or messaging, and when they really land on one or two sentences that magnetically attracts the dream clients that they are here to serve, and they couple that with this incredible information and all of these personal ahas that they have discovered about themselves, bam, something really powerful happens when these two pieces of the work come together and suddenly you have more confidence and more excitement to talk about who you are and the work that you want to do than you’ve ever had before. That clarity is such an important element in being able to create and grow a profitable personal brand. [JOE] What are some blind spots that people maybe don’t recognize once they get into this work? [MAEGAN] Well, one blind spot would be jumping too far ahead before you’re ready. I’m thinking now specifically about what it is you’re doing and selling within your business. A lot of people come to me after having joined a program that is a little bit flash in the pan, that they’re in private practice right now and they join this program and they’re like, “Hey, I joined the program to, and I made an online course, I made a signature online course. It’s like a, it’s a six-month online course and it has 72 modules and I paid $10,000 to learn how to do it and nobody’s buying it.” This happens all the time. I just have to say, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I am so sorry that this happened to you and I’m 0% surprised that no one’s buying your thing because you jumped to step 10 when you were still at step two.” That there is so much foundational work that we have to do to create a solid foundation upon which we can build a profitable personal brand. Sometimes I use the metaphor of it’s like hiring the contractor and buying the lumber before the architect has given you the blueprints, go ahead. [JOE] Oh, I mean, I think that’s why like in Audience Building Academy. We’re all trained so much to do it perfect through grad school. You don’t, you write your dissertation 15 times and go through it over and over and check citations but like out in the world if we build a program and we don’t have any audience whatsoever, like we aren’t even going to be able to come close to what they want. It’s so much easier when you have an audience first when you build that and then you launch a program based on what they in particular are asking for. Because I remember when we were looking at doing podcasting support it was right after Slow Down School and a bunch of our higher end clients had recognized that a podcast would be their next step in growing into something beyond their private practice. I did probably 15 calls with people in the week afterwards just digging into what is it that is the pain, what’s the ideal offering that we would give to them, and then what would be the price that they would pay. I thought they were going to want just like an e-course for like $500 or a thousand bucks, walking them through it. All of them said, “Joe how to do this. My time is so valuable, I just want to show up in podcasts and have your team take it over.” So we launched the Done for You program the next day without having the infrastructure, without having the podcast supports like sound engineers, but I knew that once we had cash in hand, we could definitely make that happen. So when we asked them, how much would you pay for it, they were like, I don’t know, $20,000. So I mean, we sold four of those spots within 48 hours and so then it was like, we have this whole arm of our business that it purely was just asking people that already liked our work, what is it that you want compared to just trying to dream it up? [MAEGAN] Yes, exactly. I think the foundation has to be in place. And for me, and the order of operations that we follow in Next Level Therapist is the first thing we want to do is perfect your current private practice. Like, let’s first figure out like what’s not working in the business that you have right now. Let’s finesse, let’s fine-tune so that you’re working fewer hours, you’re increasing your revenue, you’re clearing up some white space in your calendar so that you have the space, the time, the energy and the resources to invest in this next level business building. I think that’s another blind spot, as people jump into these bigger, more ambitious projects out of desperation because they’re just so unhappy with the way things are going in their private practice right now, but that’s putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. Like, let’s first solve the problems that are making you unhappy right now, really dial that in and then let’s explore who you are and then let’s explore who your clients are, and then let’s put the infrastructure in place so that you can begin building that audience. You can begin drawing in the people to you that you’re meant to serve. After that, just like you’re saying Joe, after that, you can start selling things because you will have people who are hungry and ready to give you their credit card in exchange for the service that you’re providing. [JOE] Well, Maegan, the last question I always ask is, if every private practice owner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know? [MAEGAN] I would want them to know that they deserve to be deeply rested and wildly successful. Not only do they deserve it, but they should have that. You do not have to sacrifice rest in order to be wildly successful. You don’t have to sacrifice your ambition in order to be deeply rested. It is possible to have both of these things in balance if you follow the right order of operations, if you follow a roadmap that is set up for sustainable success into the future. That’s what I would say, Joe, you deserve to be deeply rested and wildly successful. [JOE] So awesome. And you’re giving away your personality power pack. Tell us a little bit about that and how people can get that for free. [MAEGAN] Yeah, I would love to. I just think if you’re feeling attracted to this conversation, if you feel a pull within your yourself to this whole idea of being more self-expressed in your business, if you want to take that very first step in the personal branding process of weaving more of your personality into your existing business, I would love to share my Personality Power Pack with you. It is a lesson that I pulled straight out of the Next Level Therapist curriculum. It’s a five-step creative guide to help you discover your authentic personality and become unapologetically self-expressed in your business and you can download that at personalitypowerpack.com. [JOE] So awesome. If people want to follow your podcast or anything else, any other links you want to make sure people have [MAEGAN] Well, you can always find me at meganmegginson.com. I would also say that if you want to get your hands dirty with self-expression, if you want to practice writing using a more personality-based tone and voice, I also host a weekly free writing group anyone can join called Express Yourself. This is where therapists come together in community. I give you a prompt and then I give you 30 minutes to practice saying something that is true for you, something that you can then turn into a blog post or an email in your own business and then we take some time to reflect and connect in community around self-expression. So what we were talking about earlier, you need community, you need a safe space to practice doing this work. If anyone wants to join me there, you can register at expressyourselfstudio.com. [JOE] Oh, so awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice Podcast today. [MAEGAN] Thanks for having me, Joe. This is a really great conversation. [JOE] We could not do our show without amazing sponsors like Alma. Alma are our sponsor today on this show, and they believe in giving tools to clinicians that can help them build thriving private practices. When you join their insurance program. You can get credentialed within 45 days, access enhanced reimbursement rates with major payers, and also they handle all the paperwork and eligibility checks. Also, you’re guaranteed to be paid within two weeks of each appointment. Learn more about building a thriving practice over at helloalma.com/joe. That’s helloalma.com/joe to get started. Well go take some action from what we talked about. The idea of the fear of being seen is, I think in therapy sometimes it just naturally attracts people that want those one-on-one conversations. I mean, that’s what therapy is. We didn’t go to school often for marketing or into careers where we are seen in. And the world is changing. Social media is changing. There’s so many things that, people want to know who you are before they come to counseling, and it can really help you to have that personal brand. So go and enact some of those skills that Maegan taught us today and encouraged us with today. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great day. I’ll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.