Welcome to the Freedom Therapist Podcast. Your safe space to learn and unlearn all the things about scaling your business without losing yourself in the process. I'm your host, Maya Poklapovich, a previously burnt mental health occupational therapist and business owner who found her way to fall back in love with business and life all over again. Because success doesn't have to come at the cost of your freedom. You're going to get so much chat, a lot of energy, and of course, a little bit of chaos because it comes with the territory. I can't wait. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Freedom of Therapist podcast.
SPEAKER_01I'm your host, Mia, and today's episode, Why You're Exhausted by Social Media as a Therapist in Private Practice, and the fix that has nothing to do with posting more is one that is so close to my heart because I know how frustrated we can get with social media, with posting, with showing up online and all the things. But before we dive in today, I actually have something coming next week that I am so excited about, and it is directly related to everything we are talking about today. Now, I'm not spilling the details on here today. I'm just gonna breadcrumb it, I know, but I want my email community to get first access. So if you are not on the list, the link is in the show notes. You know what to do, and you want to be on there before next week because the access that you are getting is absolutely incredible and it is going to be such a limited time only. All right, let's get into it today. We all know the feeling. If you've ever closed your laptop after spending two hours on one Instagram post, felt absolutely nothing, felt exhausted, frustrated, and wondered why you've spent all this time doing this. This episode is absolutely for you. The exhaustion you're feeling around social media, it is not because you're not good at Instagram, it's not because you're not motivated enough or you're not doing enough or you necessarily even need to post more, but it is something so much more specific. So, what I see happening is every time when we sit down to create content as therapists, we open a blank page. I see this in the hundreds of conversations I have all the time around Instagram and social media with therapists in the space. Every single time we sit down to create content, we're staring at a blank page and we are starting from scratch every single time because there is no foundation underneath your content. We don't have a filter to run our ideas through. We don't have that anchor that tells you, yes, this is mine, yes, this feels right, and this is what I stand for. And so instead, we go to the next best thing, right? Instead, we scroll, we go to Instagram for inspiration, we look at what other therapists are posting, we save things, we screenshot captions, you try to reverse engineer what is working for someone else, and then you sit back down, look at a blank page, try to write something and feel even worse. We compare, we try and write something that feels like us and it doesn't because it was never really ours to begin with. And I get it, because when we don't have a foundation, the only reference point that we actually have at this point in regards to messaging and social media is what we see online, and so is everybody else's. So we might borrow, we might tweak. And the frustrating part is we can spend hours looking on Instagram, saving inspiration, trying to reverse engineer a post, and it's still not gonna feel right. And the worst thing is it's not necessarily not just gonna not feel right, but it's also not gonna connect or land. And so maybe we're getting like seven likes, maybe one of our friends is commenting on it, and we're just like, that time could have been spent so much better doing billable clinical work in my practice. And I really want to validate this because I know this feeling too well. We've all been there at some point, right? I know so many clients who've been there at some point. I have conversations around this every single day. And what happens is it starts to get exhausting. And so Instagram, social media, LinkedIn, it starts to become something that we avoid and we avoid it so, so much. Now, the reason that we are always starting from a blank page, that we are always starting from that ground zero, and not only are we trying to figure out what we want to say, are we trying to come up with all these ideas, but often when we don't have these foundations, what else is happening is that showing up online is beginning to feel really exhausting on our nervous system. It's starting to feel a bit like a performance, like we need to be on, we need to be energized. We're looking at social media for inspiration and we're seeing all these people maybe with amazing edits or with a really good hot taker, we're starting to compare ourselves to them online. We're realizing that we need to be on, we need to be articulated, we need to feel inspired, and we're starting to give ourselves all these conditions that we need to show up online. Like every single post needs you to be at your absolute and most best. And the problem with this, that when and the problem with this, when we work as therapists and allied health practitioners is that every single day we're working in real life situations with real life emotions and often real life grief, trauma, and other really big things that our clients might be navigating. And if it's been a really long clinic day, if your nervous system is absolutely cooked, if you're between sessions and you only have 20 minutes, that post just doesn't happen because we have started to believe that if we can't show up perfectly, we shouldn't show up at all. We're comparing ourselves to all these videos online where people know their shit, they've got everything, they've got everything together, they look really polished, they're edited really well. And so when we don't fit that criteria, we tend to just hide and avoid and decide not to show up online at all. And then our visibility and our marketing and our messaging and our content becomes so tied to our emotional energy, which is incredibly taxing on our nervous system and also incredibly taxing for our business strategy as well. And our content is going to always be the last thing left and the first thing to go. And that is why we get so exhausted. It's not actually the posting, but it is the perfecting, the performing, the comparison, and the starting from nothing every single time. And so we add in these fixes usually. We try a new app, we try a new edit, we try a new content calendar, we try more time. But what happens is we're not still getting anywhere because we're still trying to create content that actually isn't aligned and isn't authentic to us. And why that happens is because we don't have clarity around our personal brand. We haven't got that clarity around who we are, what we stand for, and the values that deeply encompass our brand. And so I want to give you two things to sit with today and a way to turn each one into a post that you can literally use each week to start to think about your personal brand. Because your personal brand is the thing that is going to set you aside in this place, in this space. Your personal brand is the thing that is going to allow you to not start from nothing every time you sit down to create content. You're already going to have a framework to build on. You're already going to have those ideas and those content pillars there. And you're also going to show up as your most authentic and true self, and you're going to feel less of that perfectionism, less of that performing because your personal brand is so connected and aligned to you showing up as you. And that is where your content is going to perform at its most best, especially in a world where AI is so prevalent at the moment. And so I want to give you two things to sit with today and a way to turn one of these into a content post that you can literally use this week. The first reflection that I want you to sit with is what is something you believe about your area of practice, the space that you work in, that maybe not everyone in your space would agree with. Think about maybe it's something that you have changed your perspective on based on your experience. Maybe it's something that you do a little bit differently. Think about your area of practice, your approach, maybe an intervention or a strategy. That is your unique point of view. And then what we are going to do with this unique point of view is we are going to write out this unique point of view. We're going to talk about why we deeply believe in it and what our perspective is on it here. And then we're going to turn it into a content piece for this week. And you are going to start that piece of content as a hot take or a thought leadership piece. And you're going to start that post with the words unpopular opinion and finish the sentence that you've written out. Then you're going to explain the reasoning behind your perspective on this. And that is going to be one of your content pieces for this week. That's a post that is deeply authentically you and deeply in line with your personal brand. The second one that we're going to work on this week is a reflection. And this one is a really, really important one. I want you to think about if someone followed you on Instagram for the next 30 days, what three words would you want them to use to describe you and your profile? Write them down. And then I want you to ask yourself honestly, does your current content actually show that? The gap between what you want them to see and what you're currently putting out, that's where we need to do that deep personal brand work. Because when we can close that gap, that's when our community starts to see us really consistently and recognize you as well. And that familiarity is what is going to build trust, build brand consistency. And that trust is what is going to bring clients into your community and bring in those beautiful dream fit aligned referrals. It's not going to require you to post more, no more frequency, not showing up on Instagram every day, but a consistency of who you are and what you stand for. And so I hope this episode has given you something to think about and maybe helps you to think about personal brand and why it's so important in a little bit of a different perspective that is outside the box today. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. If you love this episode, please, please, please let me know. You can find me over on Instagram at meapoco at M I A P O K O. I would love to hear your thoughts. I love getting DMs from you guys after these episodes. I had so many last week and it was so beautiful. And also, just to reiterate and circle back to what we were talking about at the start, next week I am releasing something that I have been building specifically for therapists and healthcare workers in the space, and I cannot wait for you to see it. It is going to be so, so supportive for the space that we are in at the moment. It is also one of the very first new things that we have brought out in a very long time. I am going to be releasing this to my email list. My email list is going to get first tips and first access. So if you want to be the first to know, the link is in the show notes. You are not going to want to miss this one. I am so incredibly excited about it, and I can't wait to be back in your ears next week.