Stuck in the Scroll? How to Refocus Your Marketing and Escape the Instagram Trap

Ever found yourself endlessly scrolling Instagram, trying to figure out the latest algorithm hack, and wondering why your client list isn’t growing?

Yep, me too.

In this candid episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on my recent detour into the Instagram rabbit hole—how I lost focus on the marketing methods that truly work for me, and how I found my way back.

You’ll hear:

• Why social media isn’t always the smartest marketing move
• The “glass jar” analogy that might just change how you prioritise your time
• How to know whether Instagram is a big rock or just sand in your business jar
• Real examples of therapists shifting their focus and seeing better results
• A pep talk on reconnecting with your values and ditching comparison

This is a love letter to any therapist who’s ever felt stuck, scattered, or like they’re doing marketing “wrong.” (Spoiler: you’re not.)

🎧 Listen now and reclaim your focus.

🔗 Mentioned in this episode:
✨ Register for the Prosper in Private Practice Summit – Free Ticket
🗓️ May 13–15, 2025
🎁 Bonus pre- and post-summit live events included!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and welcome. I'm Clare Feldman, your host and guide on this journey to thriving in private practice without the burnout. Are you a passionate therapist who's struggling with the entrepreneurial side of things? Do you wish you could serve great fit clients at times that suit you? Are you seeking financial stability so you can continue doing what you love? If so, then you're in the right place. I know firsthand the difficulties of navigating the business aspects of therapy, from building a website to managing social media, but I've made all the mistakes so you don't have to. Together we'll explore how you can build and grow your dream practice. So let's get started. Hello everybody and welcome to today's podcast episode. I really need to start with an apology because it's been a little while since I have released a podcast episode. But interestingly enough, I think what I'm going to talk about today in this episode will also explain why it has been a little while. So I had the intention when I'm setting my goals at the start of this year, I had set the intention around really wanting to focus much more on growing this podcast because podcasting for me is sort of the preferred way of marketing myself. That I much prefer the ability to just hit record and sit and talk and chat about what's on my mind and what I'm thinking about. Not having to worry about things like putting makeup on my face or brushing my hair. I'm all about being in my sweatpants and yeah, just recording a podcast. That's much more my vibe. So I'm sitting here now recording this on the 5th of May and feeling a little bit frustrated with myself at the realization you haven't done that. You said you were going to do a podcast every fortnight. You were going to be super consistent with it and you haven't done it. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about why I haven't done it and maybe what learning you might be able to take from it as well. I basically find myself getting into a bit of an anxiety spiral around social media and around feeling the need to be visual and showing up on social media. And so I ended up finding myself in a position where I was spending a lot of time looking at content creation on Instagram, creating reels, trying to upskill myself more around using Instagram more effectively, taking courses, learning more around AI to support with content creation. I really went down a rabbit hole, basically, which is so ironic because my whole marketing and my whole focus and my whole kind of coaching is always based around finding your own way, you know, finding your ways of marketing yourself that really work best for you, that fit your personality, that you feel comfortable with. And I'm all about, there's lots and lots of ways to market yourself and there's lots of ways to fill your practice and it doesn't have to just be on social media. So a big slap on the wrist for me in that I actually find myself in this place of being like, I've got to keep up. I've got to keep up with Instagram. I've got to, you know, Get these algorithms on my side. I want to go viral. All the stuff that is just not me, I find myself in. And if I'm being completely and utterly honest with you, I would say it was probably driven a lot by comparisonitis and that I was maybe spending too much time looking what other people were doing, looking at success stories that people were having around Instagram. And yeah, the little inferiority part of me was feeling like it needed to catch up. in some way, shape or form. And then through a really, really helpful conversation with a peer recently, I kind of had the realization that that was what was going on, that actually the place that I was coming from was maybe from a place of comparisonitis and not really me being in my true authentic space. So that's enabled me to kind of Take a bit of a breath, take a pause, reflect, understand what happened, why it happened and that maybe my time, my energy, my efforts were all going into something that isn't needed quite so much. Now, I must all say from an Instagram perspective, as much as content creation and stuff can take time and it can take energy, it is still a platform that I do quite like to hang out on. much more than Facebook. I'm not really on Facebook much at all, apart from being maybe in some counselling Facebook communities for therapists. But Instagram is the place that I kind of prefer to hang out on because you're able to, you know, really get great kind of conversations, connections with other therapists. I've built connections and had great chats and DMs and voice notes with other therapists. and things as well. So I do still kind of like hanging out on Instagram, but would say that it's a platform that I'm going to continue using, but I'm going to be working on trying to not let it dominate, trying to not let it take over and that it be my primary or my only source of marketing, my services and my mentoring services. Because a lot of the time when I've had people work with me or I've had them join my membership community, A lot of the time what they actually say is that they've really enjoyed listening to my podcast. So why did I let myself lose focus? Why did I let myself get caught in this comparisonitis? Why did I let myself feel like I needed to keep up with something or jump on a trend? So I'm sharing this with you because I think it's so easy to do and I'm sure as therapists trying to grapple with everything there is about marketing yourselves and marketing your private practice, it's that you've maybe got caught into this cycle as well. And I was just recently watching a masterclass from a mentor that I have worked with in the past, and she gave this great analogy around where we spend our time, where our focus goes, and how much time and energy perhaps gets wasted. So she shared an image of a glass jar And what are we filling this glass jar with in terms of where our focus and our energy is going? So she shared an image of like these big rocks and said like these big rocks, they should be like where most of our focus goes. Like these are the really important tasks. These are the things that have the greatest return for us. These are the things that are really going to make a difference. These are things that are going to move a needle in our business. These are the things that we want to be doing most of. And inside the jar, it's going to take up, these big rocks are going to take up most of the space. And then there's pebbles, an image of pebbles. And the pebbles are maybe the less important task, but they're still things that we need to be doing, that we still need to be working on in order to help support our business. And then there's the sand. And the sand is really the stuff that we might be procrastinating around doing things, spending too much time in indecision, maybe trying to get perfection on something that we're doing, but the actual tasks and things that we're doing don't make a huge or significant difference perhaps to the business. So that could be something like you're spending forever in Canva, you know, trying to pick a font for your logo or for your post or, you know, something like that, or you're writing and rewriting. a caption. You know, that could be the sand. And I thought this analogy was so good, like seeing this visual image of this glass jar with the big rocks and then some pebbles and then just a little bit of sand and how much actually might our jar be filled with sand and that there's not really any room or any space left for the big rocks and where that needs to be. And I think this is a good thing, maybe a good image and a good metaphor for you to have and to take a moment maybe and think about your marketing activities and the tasks that you're doing and thinking about where does most of my energy and my attention and my focus go? And if it is like it was with me there, it was like social media is where all my attention and my focus is going. But is that a sound activity for me? Or is social media actually a rocks activity for me? And that very much depends on you and your practice and where your client referrals and inquiries come from. But that's a good thing perhaps for you to reflect on and think, okay, if I'm spending X amount of time each week on social media, trying to grow this account, trying to go viral, trying to do this. But actually, my referrals all come through my website or they come through my directory profiles or they come through somewhere else. Actually, are you spending too much time on social media because you feel like you should be? But maybe that's not the platform for you that's actually going to be most fruitful for you to spend time in. Maybe that's not where inquiries are coming from. Maybe if your website is already working really quite well for you, but there's room for improvement, maybe some of that time would be better spent if I was working on SEO on my website or I was writing blogs or I was doing other things. Like maybe those things might be more beneficial for me. Or alternatively, actually, if your social media has really good engagement and it's working really well, then maybe you prioritizing more of your time on social media, maybe that is a big rock. activity for you. But I think what I see certainly with myself and that what I got caught into that trap with and what I see with other therapists as well is that maybe the big rocks or where they're spending their time, whether they're spending their energy on isn't actually the thing that is giving them the greatest return. And so maybe all this energy might be going into Instagram, but actually that they're missing that there are other rocks where their attention and focus could go that might actually have the greater return. I see an example of this on a coaching call within my community recently and a therapist in the community was sort of sharing her frustrations around social media and Instagram, feeling very stuck around it, feeling this pressure of, I need to be on there, I need to be creating content, but I feel such resistance to it. And actually what she was then just stuck in was this kind of analysis paralysis where she was then doing nothing. But she had this belief, this belief of, I need to be on social media. I need to be creating content. I need to get referrals in. I need to get clients. This is what I need. But when we actually talked about where she is and what she's looking for, she is looking for people, her preference is to work face to face. So when we actually had the conversation and, and where the biggest return was going to come for her. You know, the realization quite quickly was Instagram is not where you need to be putting your big rocks right now because you're looking for people face to face. It's a brand new Instagram account. It's probably going to take months and months and months to grow that Instagram account or to get any kind of traction on it. You want clients right now and you want to see them in person and you want to work locally. We've got to look local. And so we had to just really change that focus around to the greatest opportunities for her would probably lie in connecting with other local therapists in her area, with posting in local community Facebook groups, with looking for perhaps directories that she can be on that have the local listings, like the... with sharing perhaps on her own personal Facebook profile and looking at the ripple effect of potentially her friends and family sharing and that extension of that ripple effect may bring in clients through that way. And so that was a great example of actually she was so lost in the sand. She was essentially stuck in the sand and the activities that she needed to be doing or that were highly likely to be much more fruitful for her were a completely different, completely different strategy. So I hope that might, that kind of little visual and that metaphor might be a good opportunity for you to think about that glass jar, to think about the big rocks, the prioritizing the important tasks. And where might you be? Are you stuck in the sand doing lots of little tasks, maybe trying to make things look pretty on Canva, trying to do things that aren't essential, that aren't going to make the greatest difference in terms of actually bringing clients in. And I think that when we get caught in the sand that we lose the ability to think more creatively and to create opportunities for ourselves. And sometimes the best opportunities that we can do are in networking, in building relationships, in personal reach out, connecting with other therapists, connecting with other professionals, that might serve your ideal client. These are the things that can often be of such high value but that we don't see them because we're too busy being stuck in the sand trying to perfect something that perhaps just doesn't need to be perfected right now. And it's the reason why I created the summit. If you haven't seen any of the posts that I've done or any of the emails that I've done, where have you been? Have you been hiding under a rock? Because I've been talking endlessly and posting endlessly and writing endlessly about the summit. But it's coming up next week on the 13th, from the 13th to the 15th of May is the Prosper in Private Practice Virtual Summit. And I've created it really, again, kind of linking in with the topic of today's podcast episode, is to help therapists see, number one, marketing your private practice is really important. I'm sorry. There is no getting away from it. If you do want a successful private practice, if you do want a sustainable private practice, you're going to have to market yourself. I hate to tell you. You also need to learn how to manage the business side of it and to step into that kind of CEO identity and seeing yourself as both a therapist but also a business owner. And that can mean making some decisions that we can maybe feel are stretching for us around our pricing, around our policies, for example. So that's what the summit is all about, is to really convey that there is no one way for you to build and grow your private practice, that there are many ways in which you can do that. And it is important to find the marketing strategy that really feels aligned and feels right for you. I will pop the link to the free summit in the show notes underneath. The summit is running for three days. So the 13th, 14th and 15th of May. There is, I think, 27 guest speakers, which is just mind blowing. And there's a theme for each day. So Tuesday, the 13th of May, day one. The theme is foundations and future proofing your practice. So in that we're going to look at Stepping into that CEO mindset, we're going to look at your finances, your money mindset, how to set up a practice really that feels aligned and works for you, what policies you need as well. Day two on the 14th of May is then going to focus on visibility and client attraction. So that's where we're going to look at things like what ways might be best for you to market yourself, how to write a great directory, looking at your branding, your website, blogging, all of these different ways in which you can market yourself. And then day three, the final day, is all about sustainability because that's what I'm all about, that you want slow and steady wins the race. We're not into trying to fill your practice in 30 days or anything like that. This is about creating a business that is your long term goal. success and that is going to be around for a long time. So it's going to take time. And day three focuses on things like the opportunities that there are to expand beyond one-to-one therapy, to create new revenue streams, to look at things like insurance, to look at things to automate your business and make it run a bit more smoothly, looking at boundaries, thinking about ethical considerations. There is just so much value. that is packed in there that it is unbelievable. As I say the summit is going to be completely free and each day the videos will get released at nine o'clock in the morning and you'll get 48 hours to try and watch all of the videos that you want to watch so you can kind of pick and choose what content what videos you want to watch and if you don't want to be under any kind of pressure in the 48 hours there are going to be VIP options that you can upgrade and you can get lifetime access to the summit presentations and also in the VIP there is a podcast option as well so you can listen to all of the presentations when you're on the go, when you're out for a walk, walking your dog or something as well. So that option is there. If you register for the free event you'll then be taken to a page which is the VIP option if you do want to upgrade. But if you don't want to, it's absolutely no problem at all. So the summit is going to be, I think, so incredibly helpful for you, particularly if you're at the early stages of your private practice. But I think it would be helpful, to be honest, for anybody in private practice to catch the summit and catch the amazing speakers that are in there and the topics that are being covered in there. There's also going to be a free Facebook group that you can come and join as part of the summit. And it gives you the opportunity to network, connect with other therapists and ask the guest speakers questions. So there is going to be so much fab stuff going on that you really do not want to miss out. So I hope to see you in there and hopefully you will catch this episode, get yourself registered and get involved in it. And it would be absolutely lovely to see you in there. But bye for now and I'll catch you on the next episode. So that's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Now if you found the episode helpful I would really appreciate it if you could share it with other counsellors and therapists in private practice. If you'd like to find out more about me and how I can help you build and grow your private practice hop on over to my website which is www.prosperinprivatepractice.com and you'll also find me on Instagram under the same name. But until next time I will see you soon. Take care there?