Clay: Hello and welcome to the Online Counselling Podcast. So glad you could join us as we explore the world of online therapy and learn about it together. Sorry we didn’t get the chance to put out a podcast last week. Things just got away from me quite frankly. Sometimes, it’s difficult to juggle having a full practice and starting up something new. It’s exciting but sometimes, it’s a little overwhelming. Thank you for all your support. Exciting things are happening on the Directory that we are developing at onlinecounselling.com, lots of new signups, really interesting therapists. California in particular as I’ve said before is booming. Lots of clinicians from California are signing up. I love my Cali counselors. Thank you. Shout out to them and note to North Dakota, call me please. If anybody knows a therapist who is working online in North Dakota, slip in my number. We’ve got an empty state and I would love it fill it.
Anyway, I’ve got something really special for listeners today. If you are a regular listener, you will know the name of Jo Miurhead. She was one of the first people I interviewed when we launched the podcast several months ago. She is an Aussie from down under in Australia and she is just a powerhouse of energy. I remember finishing the interview and thinking, “What just happened to me?” She just has so much energy and knowledge. Jo is a consultant to private practitioners. I’m assuming that the listeners of this podcast are primarily other therapists, people who want to grow their practice by taking it to a new level, taking it online, either wholly or part time. My hope is that I will be able to help bring you some resources, not just oriented to online counseling although of course primarily, but information on how to grow your practice as a whole. Jo is one of those people you need to know about.
Now, I hear from clinicians all the time about how they are working so hard but they hit a glass ceiling. We all hustle as hard as we can, long hours, tiring research, big investments of time, energy, and money, and it works – to a point. It gets us to a certain level, but then you get to a point where you say, “I can’t work any harder,” and you’re right. You can’t. That’s where Jo comes in? I’ve watched her take mediocre practices or even somewhat successful practices and completely turn them around. She’s just good at this.
Now, we need to stop here and say this is not a sponsored ad. We aren’t a sponsored podcast. I’m not getting any money from Jo. We might have some sponsors in the future, but right now, it’s just me and my Visa card. What I’m talking about is I heard that Jo was doing this thing. I wrote her and said, “Send me some information. I’ll put it up on the podcast. Maybe some listeners will come.” So, here’s what’s happening. Jo is coming to San Francisco. She’s doing a two-day master class on October 14th and 15th. The whole point will be to turn your intention into action, and you will walk away with specific tools to grow your practice, and if I know Jo, you’ll walk away with a whole bag of tools.
She has created a special invitation for listeners of the podcast. Not only will you receive registration to the two-day event plus a whole host of bonuses, Online Counselling Podcast listeners can also access for free a bonus of three months of private practice consulting with Jo. That’s included in the registration price. Here, she will teach you her signature business development activity called Five Favorite People, strategy she used to grow her own practice exponentially in her first four years.
That’s a two-day mastermind event that will get you thinking and acting in the ways to support your success plus three months of private practice coaching with Jo. This is a pretty good deal. Go to jomuirhead.com/sanfran2016 and register before August 30th using the promo code “THANKSCLAY.” when you get to the checkout, there will be a little promo code and you put that in. There you go. I hope this brings you some great people, Jo. Maybe you can swing by New York on your way home and buy me a cup of coffee.
Okay, on to today’s interview. I reached out to Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby a few weeks ago as I was looking for some therapists in Colorado to join the directory, and her site blew me away. She is the founder of Growing Self Counselling and Coaching in Denver, Colorado. I’ll say that again because I messed up that word. What is it about me and states? Sometimes, my tongue just gets messed up – Denver, Colorado. She has two locations, multiple therapists that works for her, and she has a thriving online practice as well. She is a psychologist and a life coach. Today, we get to talk about how working online has changed her practice, and really, her life. It’s a really great interview. I’m thrilled that she agreed to come on and someone of this caliber has joined us. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Bobby.
Hello and welcome to the Online Counselling Podcast. I am incredibly excited to have our guest today, Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby, who is the founder of Growing Self Counselling and Life Coaching in Denver, Colorado. She has a podcast out there which is phenomenal. It’s called Love, Happiness, and Success and she’s the author of Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to Your Ex Love. I can’t wait to hear about that one. She has a multi-therapist practice in Denver, Colorado, with two locations. I’m just thrilled. Dr. Lisa Bobby, thank you so much for joining us.
Lisa: Thank you, Clay. I’m really excited to be here with you today.
Clay: Yeah. Tell me a little bit about your journey becoming a therapist and then how you grew that practice to an online practice.
Lisa: Sure. Well, it’s funny that you ask that question. I’m based in Denver, but I was just recently on the East Coast visiting my family and in doing so, reconnected with my origin story, believe it or not, of how I became a counselor. In short, after I graduated from college, my bachelor’s degree, I kind of drifted for a few years. I wasn’t really sure yet what I wanted to do when I grew up, and so I did a variety of things that felt really unfulfilling to me. I didn’t have that clarity about what I wanted to do, what my mission was, what my purpose was. One of the things that we did just a few weeks ago when I was on the East Coast is we visited the 9/11 memorial site, where sadly, regrettably, my cousin, Jim Sans, was killed that day. He worked at a company called the Cantor Fitzgerald, which was…
Clay: Certainly, yeah.
Lisa: Yes, just devastated, right, by that tragedy and so on that day, September 11th, learning about his untimely death and just how shocking it was, it also really put me into contact with the fact that my time here is short and that we can’t take anything for granted and that things can end just shockingly, which it sounds very dark, but what wound up happening though is that it really pushed me into contact with asking some hard questions, like if I were going to die tomorrow, what would have made my life worth living, what would have given me purpose and value and meaning? The answer to that was that, if I could help other people, if I could have been an instrument of positive change in the lives of others, that would make it worthwhile, that I could die and feel like “Okay. That’s good. I did something important”.
That led me to explore more around what does that look like, how can I touch other people’s lives. With my particular blend of interest and abilities, what I came to is counseling and so then I embarked in a master’s program that I absolutely loved. I felt like I was a sponge and just soaking up everything, and it was amazing to me and then after that, I went into practice, but there was still this question of “No, I can do more and I can help people at a higher level”. So then I went into a PhD program. I was thinking, “If I’m going to do this, I’m going to be able to help people in all the ways I can and learn as much as I can.”
That degree trained me as a psychologist and then after I finished that, I felt like there was still more, and I’m like, “I can expand this.” So then I did a coaching program which trained me as a life coach and I’m now a board-certified coach in addition to all these other things. Now, I feel like I’m good. Now, I feel like I have kind of internally and educationally acquired what I need to to really feel confident in my ability to help other people. Now, my mission is to spread that and make contact with as many people as I can. I do that through my writing. I do that through books. I do that through my podcast and obviously, I do that through my counseling practice too. I have a number of people on my team. I supervise them. I cultivate emerging new talent as counselors are kind of coming into the field and helping them support their clients, which is incredibly meaningful to me.
I think that’s another reason why I gravitated towards working with people online, so that I can comfortably work with people not just in Denver or outside in other areas of Colorado, but nationally and around the world. I feel like my work doesn’t have any boundaries anymore. I mean, it still does have boundaries and we can talk about that, but in terms of my reach. It really felt like what I was just put here to do.
Clay: What a phenomenal origin story. Thank you so much for sharing that. It really speaks, I think, to your and many of our hunger for knowledge, for training, to expand. It just reminds me of, I read somewhere about the three keys of happiness being creativity, autonomy, and impact, being able to say that I’ve impacted my world in some way. It seems like that’s a real core value for you.
Lisa: It really is. Yes, it is. It’s one thing to be sort of pleased with yourself and what you can do, but when you’re able to use that in service to help other people and touch other people’s lives in a meaningful way, that’s when it just becomes incredibly important and incredibly meaningful in my opinion.
Clay: Tell me about your – let’s just kind of go through this – your podcast. How long have you been podcasting and what’s that been like for you? What kind of impact does that have for your practice?
Lisa: Yeah. Oh my goodness. You know what? I didn’t know what I was doing. I dabbled with podcasting kind of on and off, but I think I got more serious about it about two years ago. Since then, I’ve been posting podcasts regularly. In terms of the impact, what is most meaningful to me is when I have people get in touch with me, people that I would never see in my practice necessarily, but tell me that they learned something that was meaningful to them, that they applied something.
I love it when people write in with questions, like, “Hey, I haven’t heard you talk about this. Let’s do a podcast on this topic,” because I really solicit those kinds of questions from my listeners because, really, again, it goes back to that core principle of service, making it meaningful and important to other people. That really moves my needle. The purpose of the podcast isn’t even to grow my business or to have it be self-serving. It’s the fact that, you know, one of the things that happened to me along my journey towards where I am now is that I did, so part of my PhD program is to do an internship that was a year long. I did that at a community mental health center here in Denver, working with a population of people whose needs were very serious.
I mean, they were dealing with trauma and addiction and just awful stuff. It was so hard. Through that experience, what I learned is that there are people walking around this world in so much pain and in so much need of support and guidance and a vast majority of them, Clay, will never show up for counseling or coaching.
Clay: Right.
Lisa: Or even if they wanted to, to be totally transparent, I mean, it’s expensive for people to come and see therapists like me and you. Again, it goes back to that idea of “what can I do to make it meaningful and accessible in a way that it touches somebody’s life?” I mean like, for me, if somebody who is struggling with something was able to take even one idea from a podcast and apply it to their lives in a meaningful way that could help them not just change their lives, like maybe they feel happier or maybe they get better results, but maybe they can be a better parent or have a better relationship that is a more stable family for their child or their children and that gets passed on. I mean to me, I could not imagine a better use of my time or of my energy. I love it.
Clay: Absolutely.
Lisa: I love doing it.
Clay: I totally agree. The word that keeps coming to mind when I think about the change that is coming about in our field is “leverage”, in that it used to be that a therapist in their progression of being a business owner is that they realize their time, they can only impact so many people, and then they go, used to be, to a group sessions. It’s like “okay, now I can help more people,” and then that leap to “I’m going to write a book” or “I’m going to have an article or a column in the local paper,” and that changes your ability to reach out to people. But now with the advent of podcasting, it’s just exponentially a huge audience that you can reach and with online counseling, now, you’re no longer locked into your local area. Using the tools that have upended other industries, we are kind of broadening our outreach as well.
Lisa: Yeah.
Clay: Tell me then, because it’s the Online Counselling Podcast, what’s your journey been to online counseling, the ups, the downs, the challenges? How long have you been doing this?
Lisa: Yeah. Okay. I started seeing clients online in 2010.
Clay: Okay.
Lisa: It was really for a couple of different reasons. First of all, it was wanting to – well, backing up a little bit, you know I’m married. I’ve been married for a long time and one of the things that is important to my husband and I is being able to travel.
Clay: Yes.
Lisa: He’s a photographer and that’s sort of his mission, is to observe the Earth and document things, and so it’s important to me, obviously, to be able to support him in that and do that. I think one of the limitations for both counselors and their clients through conventional meet-in-the-office kinds of counsellng and coaching is that you’re so locked into a geographical location. My husband kind of had that motivation to go on an extended trip, but I was of course like, “I have relationships with these people. I can’t say, ‘Thanks anyway, but you know, I’m going to be gone for three months. So, good luck with that.”
Talking with my clients and saying, “Hey, what would you think about this?” People surprised me in how, oftentimes, enthusiastic they were, like, “Oh yeah, that would actually be better for me too,” because I think going back to this idea of service and how can we make this easy and accessible for people. I know for my appointments. I mean by the time you find a clean shirt, put on mascara—maybe not for you, Clay—get in the car, drive somewhere, park, walk into a building, sit in the waiting room, have your appointment, and then do it all again in reverse, it’s like a three-hour time commitment out of your day.
Clay: Certainly, yeah.
Lisa: I mean, who can do that? Most people, they’re busy. They have a lot going on. They have kids and jobs. I know for me, like my own appointments, if I can meet somebody by phone or by Skype, I’m like, “Oh, thank you,” because otherwise, the time itself becomes such a burden. That’s how it was to be able to maintain those relationships, but then once I started doing it, I noticed a few things. First of all, it was so much more convenient for my clients. If they were at work, they can go into a conference room, talk to me, and leave again. I think what was really special was when I could meet with them in their home environment because there’s just something different about that. I think when people feel really comfortable. They feel really at ease, even if…
Clay: Absolutely.
Lisa: Yeah. They feel comfortable with you in the office, they’re still in an office. They’re not sitting in their living room or sitting on their bed, or something like that, where they feel really able, I think, to enter into these very introspective and emotionally rich experiences without having to worry about their face looking like a tomato when they walk out of the office, like they don’t have to hold it altogether. They can stay in that space, and they can do some journaling or somewhere thinking like after our session. It’s really a much more, I think, meaningful experience for a lot of people.
Certainly, like, my specialty is couple’s counseling. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist and that’s what I love doing. With couples sometimes, it was so challenging just to get two people in the same place at the same time. Person A is driving from over here, and person B, and there’s childcare, and it’s like “Waah!” One of the things that make couples counseling most effective is when we can meet consistently. People to be able to consistently meet, they set the kids up with the video in the other room so they don’t have to worry about babysitting, or it’s after their children are asleep because they’re very young kids. It’s just so much easier because they’re sitting in their kitchen.
Clay: Right. Now, I hear so many times, how in the world could you possibly do marriage counseling online? I think that that’s a mental leap that people are having a difficult time. It seems so simple to me that even the convenience when the husband and wife are no longer living together or if the husband is deployed in the military or traveling for business, there is the possibility of a three-way conference call where everybody has their individual screens. Do you set that up to where everybody’s at a different location?
Lisa: No. Sometimes, certainly, people are in different locations and we have three screens because that’s what they need. At other times, people are sitting together on a couch on one end and then I’m sitting on the other end, but I think that we’re also bumping up against something that is important, is that with all of this—and particularly couple’s counseling—I think that ethical and responsible counselors need to be very careful about who they see online because not everybody is a good fit to work online.
One of the things that I am concerned about is that, with the advent of online counseling, I think that it has made it easier for people who do not have great qualifications or a lot of experience to also be able to offer services to vulnerable people in a way that can be inappropriate, and I think that with couple’s counseling, that’s one of those. As you know, I’m sure everybody listening to your program knows, is that we, generally speaking, cannot actually offer therapy to people who are outside of the state where we’re licensed.
Clay: Right.
Lisa: Yeah. So if somebody wants to come in for therapy, they need to be in Colorado or primarily living in Colorado. It’s also the case that I work with many people who travel a lot so they don’t have to be sitting in Colorado when I work with them, but they have to live in Colorado most of the time because there are, I think, important reasons for that that we do have the capacity to be able to see somebody in the office, if they do have higher needs or if they are dealing with more serious things. What I think is okay for people outside of the state or outside of the country even is really more along the lines of coaching.
When couples get in touch and somebody has just left because there’s an affair or there’s some kind of very serious thing going on or something like substance abuse, that would be like a marriage counseling issue. What I tell people, and again it just comes back to this genuine desire to want nothing but the best for my clients, I will tell people, “You know what, I’m so glad you reached out to me and I really think it would be best if you found somebody who could work with you locally,” because there’s this huge feelings and very reactive couples, and to be physically in a room with them gives you the ability to say, “Okay, stop,” and manage the situation in a much more active way.
However, a lot of couples come in and they’re dealing with what I consider to be more relationship coaching issues – we can’t communicate. She doesn’t follow through with things. We’re not on the same page with regards to parenting or house work, or we’re just feeling disconnected – like those kinds of things, premarital counseling, any of those, game on. That’s what I think can be not just helpful for clients but also it does no harm to clients and it’s also incredibly effective. The same is true for counseling, individuals with things like major depressive disorder or like clinical diagnoses that require therapy to treat. That isn’t really okay whereas coaching, we’re like, “What do I want to do with my life?” “You know I’ve been feeling kind of down lately,” or, “I lost touch with myself,” that again is just totally appropriate.
Again, I try to be very, very careful about… One of the reasons why we offer a free consultation in my practice is not just for people to check us out and make sure that they feel good with us although that’s still important, but also to really assess, do I feel comfortable seeing this person? Do I really ethically feel like this is the best fit for them? A lot of times, the case is they’re not and so then I work with people to provide referrals and to help them find more appropriate avenues to get the help that they need within their own community.
I think the risk is that, especially with life coaching, we have many, many, many people filling this gap and stepping into a space where, historically, counselors and therapists who have spent many, many years in graduate programs learning and practicing under supervision and internships really know what they’re doing. We now have life coaching. I’m not trying to like talk badly about life coaches because I’m sure that a lot of them are very effective with coaching clients.
Clay: Absolutely.
Lisa: But what happens is that you have somebody who reads a book or takes a weekend seminar and says, “Okay, I’m a life coach now,” and creates a website and starts seeing people online. Regrettably, they don’t know enough about what they don’t know to understand “Oh, this person is actually depressed or has an anxiety disorder.” They don’t know that. They then kind of go forward with coaching online in a way that is, at best, simply unhelpful, but at worst, it has the opportunity to create adverse consequences for somebody or at the very least not allow them to get the help that they really need.
To me, that is very concerning. That’s why everybody on my team who does coaching and who does online therapy has a background in a traditional mental health field from an accredited university. They are either licensed or on their way towards licensure, and they have the knowledge and experience to understand what’s okay and what’s not okay. I think the one thing that’s different can be career coaching. That is such a specialty thing.
Clay: Yeah.
Lisa: Although we still have people who show up for career coaching and turn out to have a substance-abuse problem or some other kind of thing that’s getting in their way that is best addressed by intervention.
Clay: Absolutely. One of the great things I love doing is that there are several institutes, life coaching institutes, that invite me to come in and say, “What are the differences between counseling and coaching?” and to come and go through and break that down to their students so they walk out with kind of a toolbox of what to look for, what you’re not going to be, what you don’t want to do, what’s going to get in your way as a great coach because this person is somebody that needs more psychotherapy. I think that the more institutes that do that, the better.
Let’s talk a little bit about because you’re bringing such great quality information here. It seems you do have an entrepreneurial spirit. You’ve got two locations there in Colorado and you’ve got several therapists that work for you. So many therapists talk about “I went to graduate program. I learned to be a great therapist. I didn’t necessarily learn how to be a business person.” What was your journey like on this?
Lisa: Oh, goodness. It’s still evolving. I have always just had an independent flair. I started my very first business when I was 15 years old with my best friend, Debbie. Yup, we were house cleaners. We created little flyers and we walked around and we put them in mailboxes, and we offered “We’ll clean your house” and it was like ridiculously cheap. Unfortunately, we never got any repeat business because we were 15 years old at the time, but that has always, I think, been alive inside of me.
Like all therapists, I haven’t had any real business training, but what I have had, which I think is available to all therapists, is the ability to experiment. From the time I first entered practice, okay, let’s try a few things and see what works, and just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Over time, you begin to identify what things work for your business. What I think is, just like with therapy itself, there is not a one answer for what is going to work for everybody or what it should look like. I think the most important thing for emerging therapists is to really get clear around their voice and who it is that they feel most drawn to work with, and then figuring out how to connect with those people but really making it about them as opposed to trying to emulate or copy what somebody else is doing. That never works for people.
Clay: Right, absolutely.
Lisa: I think that’s why traditional business education isn’t that helpful for therapists anyway a lot of the time. It’s because it’s such a personal thing.
Clay: Absolutely. Many people are saying that coming to online counseling, there’s a lot of fear, there’s a lot of concern. I’ve been really open on my podcast. I just jumped in the deep and did everything wrong. I saw clients on Skype, saw them all over the country, even states I wasn’t licensed in. We all make mistakes when we jump in. What kind of resources and how did you get – first of all, how did you get past that fear or did you have any fear about jumping in and then how did you educate yourself on how to do this correctly?
Lisa: Well, I guess it goes back to having sort of a risk-taking personality. I tend to lean towards optimism and I thought it just sounded like a great idea, but again, I think talking to people that I value. I love supervision. I think so much of the people that help support me through supervision and teachers and things. Again, I think learning from them that it’s not okay to do it with everybody, and I think that that was another one of the reasons why I wanted to do the coaching program that I attended is because really to learn more about coaching and the difference between coaching and counseling. I felt more comfortable with primarily providing coaching online, although obviously to my clients that I see in the office in Denver, if we do Skype sessions sometimes, that’s completely fine too.
So I think being, I don’t know, just thinking it through and trying to educate yourself and talking to people that you trust around, “Do you think this is a good idea or not,” but I think also just being willing to try and see what works and what doesn’t. Yeah. Also, there is some information and it’s really state by state. You have to take a look at the state where you’re licensed, states where your clients reside. Again, this is for therapy, but there are different rules around telehealth in different states that I think you have to contact your state licensing board just to see what their rules are.
In Colorado, they’re pretty open. I think it’s because we have a big rural population in Colorado. So really, somebody living in Bennett, Colorado, where there isn’t a counselor for 50 miles, I think they can also just provide access to services that they wouldn’t have otherwise, so I think that in Colorado, they are fairly liberal with that. I would check with your state if you’re a therapist thinking about this just to see what the rules are so that you’re making sure that you’re staying within those ethical guidelines of your profession.
Clay: Absolutely. If you’re listening and you want to know how to do that here on onlinecounselling.com, there’s a page called the Therapist Toolbox. In there, there’s a page about how you can find your state licensing board, what their email is, what their phone number is, how you can reach out and just ask them. We’ve set our goal here on the podcast, Lisa, is to go to each state and interview somebody in the state licensing board and say, “What’s the deal? What’s the deal in Alabama all the way through Wyoming?” It’s going to take a while, but we’ll get there. What platform do you use when you meet online? Because people say that Skype is not HIPAA compliant for therapy. Do you use Skype for coaching?
Lisa: Yes, Skype isn’t HIPAA compliant. We’re just talking on the phone though. What I have in my disclosure statement that I provide to clients and kind of talk through in that first free consultation, just so that they know everything that they’re getting into with this and can make informed decisions about whether or not this fits. I tell them, “Skype is not a HIPAA compliant way to meet. Do you have any concerns about that?” Allowing people to make their own decisions and again, with coaching, I think there’s more leeway there.
I also think that there is no factual basis that I have seen for any transmission of confidential information leaking out of Skype. I mean nothing is recorded. Nothing is kept or anything like that. Very rarely have I had anybody say, “I am actually worried.” I think that there’s a self-selecting population, is that people who are really worried about confidentiality wouldn’t pony up to do this in the first place.
Clay: That’s an interesting approach I hadn’t heard yet. You’re going to use Skype, but you are really open and transparent with the client saying, “This is not compliant with HIPAA. Do you have any concerns?” and let them make that choice, but then they’re fully informed.
Lisa: They need to be fully informed. I personally have no concerns about Skype. I have researched it. I have a number of colleagues that are very like down on online counseling and that’s totally fine. I think that they have more traditional practices and they probably see more therapy clients for whom online meetings would not be appropriate, and so I think that they are justified, these concerns. I had one of them say, “Skype records information.” I actually researched this to see and there is no basis to those rumors. I contacted Skype.
Clay: Yeah. It really comes down to them not offering what’s called a Business Associate Agreement, which is just a paperwork, but they are incredibly encrypted.
Lisa: Right. Yes.
Clay: That’s the choice that you’ve made with your practice. I want to jump to one other thing and I want to be sure to mention this is you have an online class called the Happiness Class, which just puts a smile on my face. Tell us about the Happiness Class.
Lisa: Sure. Thank you for bringing that up. It really all goes back to this main idea of how can I be of service to as many people as possible and that has always been an instrumental part of my practice. For example, a huge barrier to people getting involved in coaching or counseling is finances. For that reason, myself, everybody on the team offers sliding scale rates. Our rates are very low. I have people on my team who have more experience and who are justified and charging more, but I also have people on my team that I’m supervising who are really career therapists who charge lower rates and I also have interns on our team. Interns do not do online counseling or coaching because they are interns. They may start as low as $40 a session.
Clay: Wow.
Lisa: And so really to make this as easy and accessible for people as possible. My hope for my online class is really borne off that. How can somebody who maybe can’t even see a therapist once a week for $50 a session because of the constraints of their reality, but to be able to provide them with something that would still offer meaningful and effective help but be extremely affordable. In my online Happiness class, what I’ve done is really walk through a lot of the tools and techniques that I teach my private clients, but then be able to package it in a way that I’m able to offer it.
The individual modules can be as little as like $29 and that’s something that people can watch over and over again. It’s much more robust, I think, than a book. How many of us have slurped down a self help book and okay, forget about it. I think that this class is experiential. It walks you through and I’ve had people tell me that they get so much out of just the class. That, again, makes me feel so happy. These are people that I might not ever meet or get to know personally, but they still benefitted in a way that makes sense for them and their reality. It could be a 20-year-old kid who is working at a Burger King but they can still do this, and that just makes me so excited.
Clay: Incredible. I always tell people that I interview, this is going to be free flowing. This thing is a free flowing thing. You mentioned about fees and somebody asked the other day and it had not occurred to me about the difference of fees for face to face and online counseling. They thought, “Maybe I should have a reduced fee for online counseling,” and I thought, “What about maybe an increased fee for online counseling because it’s so much more inconvenient?” What are your thoughts on that?
Lisa: There is a difference in fee for in person or online. You’re paying for the time of extremely well educated, compassionate expert and whether or not that time is in the office or online is irrelevant.
Clay: Okay. Just to wrap up, any final thoughts that maybe there’s a therapist out there listening and they are thinking, “This sounds great.” I completely connect with you on the travel issue. My wife and I travel all the time and I take my little clients with me and I’m able to work. That has just really changed our life. Let’s say there’s a therapist out there listening and they are thinking, “Okay, I want to do this.” Any things that come to mind that maybe they should consider, final thoughts? Anything you’d like to say to that person?
Lisa: Yeah. I think to really do some soul searching around whether or not it makes sense for you and your clients. If you specialize in trauma or you have a really psychodynamic or experiential approach, it probably isn’t right for you and I think also the population that you’re seeing, do they have access to the kind of technology that they require to do this? Are they intellectual and more cognitive because again, it works much better with cognitive behavioral and kind of coaching sort of strategies or do you really shine as a therapist in those quiet moments of introspection and really like is your purpose very client centered and insight oriented and going deep with people? Then, you are probably an in person therapist.
Again, I think that the role that this always needs to take is do no harm but really make sure that this is not something that is self focused for you as a therapist. Yes, it would be easier and convenient for you, but is this really what your clients are needing and if the answer to that is no, it would probably be the most ethical and appropriate thing for you to make your in person practice be your home with people that you know well from time to time. Obviously, you can meet with on Skype or is it maybe expanding the options of what you, as a therapist, want to do and the population of people that you want to see just to make sure that it’s congruent because I think that anything that we do that it is not for the highest and best, and with that heart of service and compassion. It’s not going to work anyway. I think that those would be questions that I would be asking myself if I were in those shoes.
Clay: Yeah. Lisa, you’ve been incredibly inspiring. I can’t thank you enough for joining us and everyone, if you want to learn more about her work, it’s growingself.com. We’re going to list all that in the show notes and also how to get in touch with her and her links to her book. Again, Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby, thank you for joining us.
Lisa: Clay, it has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.