Clay: Hello and welcome to the Online Counselling Podcast. My name is Clay Cockrell. Thank you for joining us. It’s a hot and steamy day here in New York and a loud one. For those of you that may just be joining the podcast, maybe this is your first listen, I’m in the middle of Manhattan and you’re just going to hear some ambient noise, so I hope that’s not too distracting. Actually for the last week, they are protesting some company across the street from where my office is. In New York when they protest, this is how they do it. They get a giant rat, a blowup, inflatable kind of like the Macy Day Parade balloons.
They get this rat and they blow it. This thing is huge. It’s two stories and they put it in the back of a pickup truck. They blow this thing up to signify that whoever is across the street, maybe they are not using union workers or something, so they stand outside and they chant and they all walk around this rat. It’s supposed to embarrass, I suppose, this company. That’s what my view is when I leave the office is this giant rat butt because it’s facing away from me so I get the backend of the rat. Anyway, I wish them well on their endeavor. It’s just an odd way to end your day.
If you have been following on Facebook, you know that we passed a huge milestone. We now have over 5,000 downloads of this podcast, which just buckles the mind. We started this journey only seven months ago, 5,000 downloads already is incredible. Thank you so much for all of your support. I think it just shows that there is an audience out there of therapists who are working online or thinking of starting to work online and are interested in doing it in an effective, ethical, and legal way. Hopefully, we here are voice of education and encouragement, especially encouragement, that there is a world in need of your gifts, your education, and your talent and this is an excellent way for you to help them.
Also, quick update on the Directory, as many of you know, I run onlinecounselling.com which is a directory, very similar to Psychology Today except that we list only therapists and life coaches who practice online. The update is that it is really starting to take off, lots of new therapists are signing up and it’s so cool to get to know each of you because I’m the one that checks your credentials, but I also go and look at your website and learn about you and your approaches, and wow, there are so many unique therapists out there with such great specialties, people who are specializing in grief or healing from divorce, or families of autism. I don’t know.
I could go on and on, but I just have to say you all are very inspiring and I’m so glad that so many great and talented therapists have decided to support the Directory, so welcome. Wow, California, you guys are rocking. Everybody talks about California being the state with the strictest laws for online counseling and they have been there for a long time. They were one of the first states to put in restrictions around state licensure and who could practice online counseling with California citizens. You all must have figured it out because there are a lot of therapists on the California page.
Now, North Dakota, wide open. Nobody has signed up yet in North Dakota. Somebody send me a therapist from North Dakota. They have to be there, right? I know. Let’s figure out what the reciprocity is for North Dakota or maybe somebody can just go over there and take the test and get licensed in North Dakota. You’d have the whole state to yourself, I’m saying. Seriously, thank you for all of your support. Also, be sure to check out the Online Counseling Facebook group. Like us there and you’ll always know when a new podcast is coming up.
On to today’s guest, now, in the past few podcasts, we’ve gotten back to our roots and talked to therapists who are actually doing online counseling, but today, we’re going to mix it up and talk to someone who is really making an impact on our profession, not necessarily as an online therapist but certainly in a very important way. If you’re in the car and listening to this podcast, know you’re not being pulled over. It’s just a fire truck going by outside. I don’t know. Maybe you are getting pulled over and it’s just two sirens, so look in the mirror. Sorry. Yeah, that’s just here. Welcome to New York.
Okay, so he’s really making an important impact on our field and when you look at the group of people who are really shaking things up and adding value to us, private practitioners, one of the leaders in this group has to be Melvin Varghese. He is the founder of Selling the Couch, which, I can’t imagine any therapist that hasn’t heard of him or listened to one of his podcasts or been involved in his incredibly popular Facebook group. All these are all titled the same, Selling the Couch, so go check it out.
If an introduction is needed, I’ll just say that Melvin has a passion for learning and sharing best practices in the field of mental health with other therapists. He has created a community of supportive learners around him and it just seems we are all in it together, learning with him. He is taking us along and he’s a great guy. I’m so happy that he has agreed to come on my podcast. I had the pleasure to go on his a few weeks ago. It was a great experience, so without taking any further time, ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Melvin Varghese.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I am thrilled to have the one and only Melvin Varghese on the show today. He is the founder of Selling the Couch. Melvin, welcome.
Melvin: Clay, I am truly honored to be here. I’m excited for our conversation. This podcasting medium has allowed us to connect, so it’s just amazing, right? I can’t even think of any other reason why we would have connected, right, being in two different states.
Clay: No, we would have never found each other. The power of the internet and podcasting, I think I may drive through your town on my way home to Kentucky to see my folks, but that may have been the only time I maybe run into you.
Melvin: We would have waved, like, just intuitively known.
Clay: Yeah, we are but I think we should be connected. I’m fascinated. I’m a big fan, a huge follower of Selling the Couch. Tell me a little bit about you, how you got started in this, some of your history, and then how Selling the Couch was born.
Melvin: Yeah, absolutely. I’m a psychologist in Pennsylvania and I’ve been fully licensed for four years, a little over four years now and when I first started out, I knew that I wanted to be in private practice and so I started out in a group practice. I was there for three and half years or actually a little over three years and then also doing, testing an assessment at a clinic and the plan was to transition into solo practice. I quickly realized that I loved being in group practice, but I had no idea how to run my own practice. I just asked.
Some of my colleagues are in the practice and they were like, “Yeah, we’re not really taught a lot of the business and marketing lessons in our training.” I was like, “Wow, this is not just me that has this struggle.” That’s where the idea for the Selling the Couch podcast came from. I basically have conversations with successful private practitioners about the business side of how they built their practices, how they market and build relationships, social media, and all of those things. I also interview social media marketing business entrepreneurs, all of the things that it takes to be a successful business owner. It’s kind of this all in one business podcast.
Clay: It is, but you also do, I think, a really good job of looking at the emotional struggle of being an entrepreneur, being in private practice by yourself. Some of the, like the money shame and emotions around fee setting and all that kind of stuff. As a psychologist yourself, I sure am fascinated and you’re shedding a light on some of that.
Melvin: Yeah, I mean, I think those elements are things that I didn’t actually anticipated, right?
Clay: Yeah.
Melvin: And I think they are things that we just don’t talk about a lot of times like our own struggles with money and our own struggles with self worth. I think that’s the stuff that I think a lot of us don’t fully anticipate when we start small businesses, how all of the yucky stuff, the struggles that we’ve had, all of that kind of rears its ugly head and what do we do with that.
Clay: Absolutely. Kind of how I started my podcast and my journey is I was curious about it myself and there really wasn’t a lot of people out there that I was able to go and talk to. It kind of sounds like the same thing with you, you needed to know this information, how to be a businessman, how to run a private practice, so you just started asking questions and recording the answers, and all of a sudden, this is born.
Melvin: Yeah basically. It actually started out with I reached out to some successful colleagues in private practice and I was, like, invited them for coffee, had lunch with them, and I was like, “Oh wow, I wonder. This would be so helpful if I could record these conversations for others,” and I thought podcasting would be a great medium to do that. I just thought it played to like the strengths that we have as clinicians, right, the ability to ask questions, the ability to deepen conversations, and I knew podcasting was such a new medium and I just thought there was a lot of potential there in being able to reach people in a way that maybe traditional blogging or just having a traditional website, it would be a little different and it would be able to reach a lot more folks.
Clay: Right, right. In then talking to these successful people, how many episodes do you have up now, 77, 76?
Melvin: Yeah. I think we’re going to be releasing episode 78 soon and I think I’ve done about 85, 86 interviews or so.
Clay: Wow. In all that, talking to these successful people, specialists in their field, have you ever been surprised? I was going to say, what are your top tips? We’ll get back to that. I’ll let you think about some of the top tips that you’ve learned, but have you ever been surprised by a conversation going, “Wow, I really wasn’t expecting that.”
Melvin: That probably happens every podcast, like, when we started, like, I was telling you, I just had a podcast interview and I interviewed this practitioner all about their private practice journey and I had some questions, some things that I was thinking about and it totally went in a direction I didn’t expect and we started talking about like the fear of setting fees and how to work through that and navigate that. I think something I’ve just learned is when a conversation goes a certain way and you feel intuitively that there’s something deep there, just sort of follow the path and trust the process.
Clay: Okay. Yeah, sometimes I’m on this and I go, “I didn’t know.” I was talking with Philippa Weitz in the UK about online counseling and she was saying things, I’m sitting there going, “Really?” That’s part of learning. You’re not supposed to know the answer. Lawyers are the only ones that ask questions only when they know the answers. Everybody has asked questions that we don’t the answers.
Melvin: Yeah.
Clay: Okay. I want to do a little thing with you of there are different people that are coming to you and I want to talk about your Facebook group too, but people who are coming to the podcast. There is the seasoned therapist who has a private practice who maybe needs the support or wants to take it to the next level, and then there’s the person who is just starting out or maybe even dreaming of starting out. In fact, I was telling somebody just today, I was coming up in the elevator and somebody said, “I had a goal of starting my private practice at least part time in 2017.” She has not even started yet, but she is part of that community. Let’s talk to her first, that person that’s just starting out. What are some top tips, things that you’ve learned that they need to do to set themselves up for success in private practice?
Melvin: Yes. When I have private practitioners on, I do what I call the hot cash round. It’s like my equivalent of the hot seat and the last question that I always ask folks is, if you had $500 and a laptop, what’s the first step that you would take towards starting your private practice? What I would tell that person is, and this is an answer that comes up a lot is that they would use that $500 to have lunch and have coffee with colleagues that are in the community that they are in.
Clay: Wow.
Melvin: Yeah because that’s something like, I think for me, like if I was honest, I was like, “Oh yeah, probably business cards” or something, I don’t know, but I think in this day and age, I think it’s such a great reminder of the value of relationships, right?
Clay: Right. I thought when I started, “Nobody is going to talk to me. I’m the competition. I’m going to go after the same customer.” People don’t like that word, client whatever that you’re going to. You’re not going to tell me anything, but every call I make, every email I send, I write back, “Let me buy you a cup of coffee. Let me encourage you. Let me help you any way I can” and not just other therapists, I think what you’re saying, but associated professionals, whether it’s personal trainers, attorneys, or someone else to build those relationships in your community.
Melvin: Yeah. Generally, people that are either colleagues, like other therapists, or people that are in front of the clients that you want to see. That’s the way I kind of look at it.
Clay: That’s a good one, just buy a cup of coffee and talk. Alright, any other advice or tips when you’re talking to that young woman just starting up?
Melvin: Yeah. I think the other side is like really start to listen to free resources out there. I think a lot of times, there’s an element where you don’t need to reinvent the wheel and I think there’s a lot of wisdom to learning from the people that have gone before you, what has worked for them. It will save you so much time and money and heartache in the long term if you take that time to plug into some of those free resources, whether Clay, it’s your podcast or Selling the Couch, or whatever it is.
Clay: What’s interesting to me and I was talking to Kat Love.
Melvin: Kat Dawson.
Clay: Wonderful, she’s in Greece now. I saw her on Selling the Couch just kind of giving advice and talking to people. I was like, “I need to meet her,” and so we had a little sit down chat. We talked about the idea that it seems that a community has sprung up recently in the last year or so of private practice consultants, blogs out there helping people to learn the business approach of counseling whether it’s ZynnyMe, Julie Hanks, or Practice of the Practice with Joe Sanok, obviously you. I mean, you go down the list. Before, it was Kasey Truffo and that was about it. Some other guy said that I work with too, which wasn’t a lot of people out there, but now, it’s like there’s this whole community of support. Is that what you’re finding as well?
Melvin: Oh, absolutely. I think like, I don’t know. Maybe this is just my idea of it. I just thought be in private practice, but I always had this fear of like being isolated as a result of that. I think this online space and I feel like maybe it’s also partially related to just the general growth of social media, like, we are more connected than ever in many ways, and I think that’s the reason. I think there’s a lot of our field that’s searching for these answers. I think there are folks that have learned really good lessons. I mean, I think all of those folks that you mentioned are awesome resources. I think there’s a need and I think for me, it’s coming from this place of like wanting to better our field because we do live in this cool time where there are opportunities.
Clay: Absolutely. I think the free information just on your site on any of these, Roy Huggins and Rob Reinhardt, they just have massive graduate level education just on the website. Go look, come learn.
Melvin: Right.
Clay: That’s wonderful resource for those new, young, wannabe starting out therapists. Anything different that you would say to more seasoned therapists who want to take their practice to a new level?
Melvin: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s like, and again, we were talking about this, like I definitely don’t consider myself like a private practice coach. I think that’s not sort of my element and I’m in this whole process, like I was in a group practice. I’m in the process of starting my own private practice. It didn’t feel right for me to call myself that, but I think one thing I’ve learned with the seasoned clinicians is there’s a couple of ways you can go, right, like one is do you want to add more clinicians to your practice? How do you navigate that?
The other common thing that has come up for clinicians that have successful practices is that they want to get their time back because they are realizing that essentially, if I see someone, I get paid. If I don’t, I don’t get paid, but as they get older, as they get closer to retirement or have other priorities, maybe they want to write a book, launch a podcast, or speak or whatever it is, they need to figure out ways to scale their business so that they are not trading time for income all the time.
Clay: Right.
Melvin: That was really important to me because I think we do live in this really cool time where self help and the services that we provide can help so many people and I think we can think about it in an intentional way. We have the ability to serve so many more people.
Clay: And again, talk to someone who has done that. There are a lot of people out there that have gone that route of starting a group practice or having an extra stream of income, a book that’s just sitting on my website and people buy it and make money off that, help people and serve.
Melvin: Right.
Clay: Okay, excellent. Now, I want to go back to that because I was kind of shocked by the fact that you are not a private practice builder, consultant, coach, whatever and that you are in the process of kind of learning and starting eventually your private practice. That was shocking to me.
Melvin: Yeah.
Clay: Tell us about that.
Melvin: Yeah. Well, I think Selling the Couch started with this like genuine curiosity of how can I learn from the wisdom of people that have gone before me, other practitioners and then how can I learn from these other experts in business and marketing? Yeah.
Clay: Did you see yourself going in the direction of the Joe Sanoks and ZynnyMe and coaching other people
Melvin: Not at this point. I mean, I don’t know. I think I just like sharing what I’ve learned and I like hearing people. I love podcasting. I love teaching podcasting, but I don’t know. I’m not sure. Don’t hold me to this but at this season of life, I don’t know if that’s something that really interests me. I think more than anything, I just want the information available and I want to hopefully be that person that connects my colleagues to some of these awesome resources that are out there and then the stuff that I have learned along the way, teaching some of that stuff. I built out an ecourse that’s doing really well. I had a couple of sessions ago, I just did like 45 minutes, I think, worth of just content on everything I learned about building an ecourse – from gear and software to recording to researching to prelaunching and all that kind of stuff.
Clay: Okay. I love that your spirit is like, “I want to help people” and as so many times, people get into this field because they want to help people. This is just a unique way of doing it.
Melvin: Yeah. I mean, I think one thing I’ve learned is that when I cant a hold on to this truth is when you give away great content and you share a lot of your knowledge, like that stuff, you’ll always reap it back.
Clay: Absolutely.
Melvin: Whether it’s financially or in relationships or whatever it is.
Clay: You mentioned resources that there are some great resources out there that helped you. We’ve thrown out some names here that most people know, ZynnyMe, Roy Huggins, Rob, and all of them. Are there some that maybe you could share? I know you’ve got a lot of cool resources on your site, things that you recommend. What should we be aware of out there?
Melvin: Man, that is a tough question.
Clay: Because you don’t want to insult anybody by forgetting them, right?
Melvin: Yes. So forgive me if I’ve unintentionally forgotten you. No, seriously now, I think there are some amazing private practice, like, coaches out there, people that have gone through the journey. Kelly and Miranda, ZynnyMe, like they are awesome. I think like Agnes Wainman is someone that, she’s newer but she’s really good. She has gone through the fire and building a successful and she’s doing really well. I think Allison Puryear at Abundance Practice, she’s also a really good one, I think, to check out as well. Yeah, I mean, that is a very tough question.
Clay: Okay, maybe not just the consultants but beyond that, SEO tools or plugins on WordPress, or something like that.
Melvin: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the thought that actually just came to me, like, I’m a big fan of morning routines because I’ve read a bunch of these random articles. I kind of geek out on this stuff so just the morning routines of like successful people and I’m just very fascinated by it. I had Hal Elrod on the podcast. He created a book that has become like a New York Times bestseller, The Miracle Morning. It’s all about morning routines and how they improve productivity. He’s got a structure that he uses. Don’t ask me off yet what they are but the acronym is S.A.V.E.R.S. It’s a combination of basically journaling, exercising, meditation that you do in the morning to start your day that kind of sets you up for the success of the rest of the day.
Clay: Wow, that’s a good one.
Melvin: Yeah, that’s a good on to check out, The Miracle Morning. I’m a big fan. As much as possible, seven days a week, I wake up at 4:45 and then I have my morning routine from 4:45 to 6 and then I start my day.
Clay: 4:45?
Melvin: Yeah, I know. My wife thinks I’m crazy.
Clay: Yeah, we’re going to have to talk about this offline, Melvin.
Melvin: I just found that, like I read somewhere that our most productive times are the first 3-4 hours of our day and I know that’s true for me, like I can get a lot of work done very efficiently before the rest of the world wakes up and I like that aspect of it.
Clay: Wow, okay. You have to convince me on that one. I tried to do that, I think, in college or something, but yeah, that just wasn’t happening. Maybe I should revisit this as an adult. Okay. This is the Online Counselling Podcast, right? I bring people that are not specifically geared to an online and I always feel like I’m making somebody angry. It’s’ like, “This is a complete waste. I wanted this podcast to be about online counseling and I’m talking to this guy about Selling the Couch,” but obviously, you are bringing credible value. Do you have any comments about how the community is going toward online counseling, telemental health, the people that you’re observing on Facebook, what are you hearing?
Melvin: Yeah. I mean, I’m glad that you created this podcast because the first thing I thought was when I was on internship, part of my internship was at the VA and the VA had a telemental health section. That was the first time that I ever heard of that concept. I was like, “What is this? This makes no sense, like, mental health over a telephone? What’s going on?” What it was was it gave better incentive to more remote areas so they didn’t have to drive, the ability to access mental health care. I’ve personally feel like this is the way that the field is trending because if you look at society in general, we want things quicker.
We want easier access, and there’s like a convenience factor. I think all of those things, it makes perfect sense that that would translate into our space of counseling. We recently talked for Selling the Couch. After our conversation, I didn’t tell you this but I took a step back and I was like, “Oh my gosh. We’re really at the edge of something huge with online counseling.” As a business owner, think about it on a practical level – the much less overhead to start something, the ability to have both schedule flexibility and location flexibility.
Clay: Yeah, right.
Melvin: And the ability to not worry about certain things that you have to think about when you’re having a private practice especially if you live in areas that we do, like the Northeast where you have blizzards and snowstorms and stuff like that we can’t control where it forces our clients to cancel and all of those things. You can take out some of those factors and you can cast, like, I don’t know. After we talked, I just kept thinking. I was like, my license is in Pennsylvania so why am I restricting myself to just Philadelphia?
Clay: Right. Once people begin thinking about it, they start connecting the dots and start seeing the possibility.
Melvin: Yeah. I mean, I think this is assumed, but doing it in an ethical way and making sure all of those safeguards, security, and all that stuff is in place, but yeah, I think just being open to it and seeing what’s out there because I think that was another insight. Most private practitioners, I think we started a small business because we want that freedom, right?
Clay: Yeah, right.
Melvin: We want to be our own boss and we want to maybe to come home and be able to pick up a child or to say goodbye to a child when they go to school or have meals with our family at night.
Clay: Absolutely.
Melvin: I think something like online counseling, it affords us that because it gives us that schedule flexibility if we need it.
Clay: I was talking with somebody the other day and it’s also about niche, right, that we have a certain focus. This person specialized in survivors of borderline personality disorder, like family members – husbands of wives that have borderline and wives of husbands that have borderline, maybe children or parents that have borderline personality disorder. They lived in a small town in Texas and how many borderlines are in this small town of Texas? Probably not a lot, but there are a lot of people out there in need of someone that has expertise of dealing with the trauma of surviving that type of person and that illness.
Melvin: Right.
Clay: To have the ability to connect with those people as a business person but also as, maybe just have a call way to do that is just magnifying.
Melvin: Yeah, absolutely and I like the way that you’re talking about it because I think that’s true. It allows us to share our message and share our expertise on a scale that perhaps we haven’t even thought about.
Clay: Right. Let’s turn for just a minute and I want to talk about the Facebook community. This thing is huge. What are you up to now?
Melvin: Yeah, it has gone quite large. I think 14 months ago, I reached out to about 52 of my friends that were in the field and I was like, “Hey guys, do you want to start a Facebook group around my podcast? I thought we could help each other as professionals and help us. We started our private practices and I think as the podcast has grown, the community has grown. I think we’re over 1,800 members now.
Clay: Wow.
Melvin: Yeah, adding over or less than 100 members a week.
Clay: 100 members a week?
Melvin: Yeah.
Clay: How are they finding you?
Melvin: I need to ask this question because I’m like really curious. I think part of it is word of mouth. I think part of it is people hear the podcast and I’ll mention the community on there. I think that’s definitely it. I think part of it is I’ve gone on some other podcasts and folks have heard about it. I would think probably a combination of those three, yeah, because I have not done any advertising for it and that’s the crazy thing for the podcast or for the Facebook group. It has all kind of been organic.
Clay: This is the first forum/community that I’ve been a part of that really is a community. These people are supporting one another and it’s kind of gotten which is a beautiful thing, all sorts of compliments to you because it’s outgrown you to a certain degree in that somebody will say, “Hey, I’ve got a question about informed consent” or “I’ve got this issue down here. Are there any fellow Californians that could help me with this billing thing?” People are jumping on, they are helping one another. It’s this vibrant discussion. That’s something, isn’t it?
Melvin: Yeah. It’s amazing. I mean, I don’t know what I was thinking when I started. I didn’t have a full vision of what it would look like when I first started it, but I think it speaks to the nature of our field. I think there are a lot of really kindhearted people that really want to give back. I think I never created a Facebook community to say like, “Hey, this is all about me.” I genuinely wanted it to be a platform where we didn’t feel so isolated.
Clay: And platform is a great word. It really has become that. For example, Kat Love, I met her because I saw her posting on Selling the Couch and helping people. I’m like, “I need to know her.” I talk a lot on the podcast about BNI, which is Business Networking International. Are you familiar with that?
Melvin: I’ve heard of it but I’m not a part of it, no.
Clay: It’s where once a week, we sit down and have breakfast with other small business owners. We have a mover, an attorney, an insurance guy, a therapist, and so we all help each other. This is like the BNI for therapists is the Selling the Couch community.
Melvin: Yeah, I know. It’s been neat. I think as the community has grown, I try to come at it from a perspective of like how can I continue to provide and thought more and more about you, so we have daily threads on different things, everything from…
Clay: I love that. It’s like Share Social Saturday or Sunday?
Melvin: Yeah, Social Share Saturday and Free Promo Friday.
Clay: Yes, I love that. That’s really a big hit.
Melvin: Those are fun, like coming up names for them.
Clay: You cycle them, what, every two weeks I think?
Melvin: Yeah. Some of them cycle every week and then some of them are every other week. We have like a Website Feedback Tuesday. That’s every other week. You post your private practice website and the next person who posts it gives honest feedback about how you can improve your website, stuff like that.
Clay: How much is it for you to manage because you do have to manage this. There are rules around this community. When you’re like this gentle overlord, gently reminding us, “No, this is not the place to promo this. We promo over here and let’s all play nice.” How time consuming is that then for you to manage this?
Melvin: Yeah. I mean, I think I’m definitely figuring things out as we talk. I think by and large, the community has been, like, people are awesome, but yeah, you do have to have some structures in place. For example, I have a Free Promo Friday thread, right, but if 1,800 people just posted all of their promotional stuff all over the place, the community would be overwhelmed, right?
Clay: Yes.
Melvin: Sometimes, people will forget and I’ll just send them a gentle private message and they are usually more than happy. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they just forgot or something like that or they are just new. I usually do that. As far as managing it, I can get a little bit nerdy with my schedules. I set aside some time like half an hour in the morning and usually half an hour in the afternoons where I manage that community. I have the Selling the Couch community and then I have a separate community for my podcasting course. I manage both.
Clay: Okay. Do you read pretty much everything that people are commenting?
Melvin: I think it was a little easier when it was 53 members, but sometimes, it’s not. I mean, right now just realistically, it’s not. I mean, there are probably over 100 comments in any given day. It’s too much and so if something comes up, folks are really good, like they will report like a questionable poster, it’s like a spam had got in or something like that. They will report that but generally, I just try to let folks, I mean, I trust in folks and believe that we’re here to support each other.
Clay: You really have created an incredible supportive community. I love going there. I know other therapists that just love going and learning and getting that support because a lot of us are out here alone. I don’t have a water cooler to talk about the game last night or ask the question about billing or whatever.
Melvin: Yeah.
Clay: Good, good, good.
Melvin: I think the next plan is to take more of the online stuff and actually get together and do different meet ups and stuff.
Clay: Like in person Selling the Couch?
Melvin: Yeah, yeah, like Selling the Couch meet ups, like all around the world.
Clay: I love it.
Melvin: I think that’s right because I think when you have so many people, it’s like one thing to be on Facebook and write some comments, but I think the magic and what we were talking about earlier, for a private practitioner, the power really is in building authentic relationships with colleagues and so if I can be that platform that at least creates that ability to connect live, that would be awesome.
Clay: Yeah, really cool. I was going to say what’s on the horizon, so that’s one of the things on the horizon. What’s on the horizon for you, for Selling the Couch? What’s coming up next?
Melvin: Yeah, I mean, lots of things have been constantly changing. This year, I focused and I don’t know if that was intentional, but I think my podcast has grown. I think a lot of our colleagues have reached out wanting to help launch their own podcast, grow it, and monetize it. I teach that and I have a course around that. That’s kind of my focus for the coming year. Next year, I’ve got some very, it’s still like very loose kind of plans about creating an additional resources, almost like Couch University kind of feel.
Clay: Ooh.
Melvin: Yeah. I might have some of these folks that have come on the podcast but do it more where it’s like live. You can ask some question kind of format.
Clay: That would be cool.
Melvin: Yeah, I just thought because I’ve been able to build relationships with these folks and normally, they would charge hundreds of dollars for these consults, if we can leverage the power of community, you know.
Clay: Right, absolutely and reach more and more people, and that’s the thing about these podcasts and courses like that is that they are there. You have created them. They will be there forever if somebody wants to go back and learn something else or they are not ready right at that moment. That’s really cool. That’s exciting. I hope you go in that direction.
Melvin: Yeah. I’m excited for it. I think, I don’t know. I just feel so passionate about, like, I’m so protective of our field. I care so deeply about our field and I just don’t ever want our field to be, like, we feel neglected in some kind of way.
Clay: Absolutely.
Melvin: I surely fight back the tears but I don’t know. I just feel like it’s something that I genuinely believe in. If I can at least be that resource and that means to help our field, I feel like if I can provide the resources to equip our field then the world is going to be a better place because you have better trained clinicians and clinicians that are happier and all those, and they are able to serve the world that really does need our services more than ever.
Clay: My friend, I couldn’t think of a better champion for our field than you. You are doing amazing work. We rely on you. We are thankful. I am thankful for what you are bringing to the table and I think we want to say the world is better off because we were in it. I think that our field is going to be better off because of your contribution.
Melvin: Thank you, Clay. That means a lot to me. Thank you.
Clay: Maybe that’s a good place to wrap things up. I can’t thank you enough. I know we’re going to be hearing great things. I’ve got all sorts of show notes out there for everybody to look for Selling the Couch. Thanks very much, Melvin. Have a great day.
Melvin: Thank you so much, Clay.