Reduce your exhausting work days now for your mental wellbeing

Are you working long hours and more days than you want to? What is keeping you from decreasing your hours, and days you work? Let me guess, you’re caught up in a scarcity mindset and you have difficulty saying no to new clients. This is a quick road to burnout. I know this, because I’ve been down this road too many of times!

I get it! Right now we are in the mist of a bad economy. In speaking to my fellow Colleagues, I hear their fear on losing clients and in not being able to replace them. This fear is all too real! I too have noticed a decrease in the number of client consultations, than I’m used to. I had the automatic reaction, of wanting to hold onto my clients and keep adding in new clients. I didn’t end up doing this because I didn’t want to become exhausted, resentful or burnt out! But it does feed into our fear of not making enough money to pay our business and personal expenses. This makes us feel scared, so we take on more clients than we can handle, because of our scarcity mindset. A consequence that can happen, is that we can take on clients who are “not quite” our ideal client. This only brings up more stress when we don’t know how to work with these client.  Where’s your boundaries with this? Can you say no? Or do you feel bad if you turn someone down?

I enjoy my work with Clinicians, in supporting them with building their clinical boundaries, so they can protect their mental health and prevent burnout, while maintaining healthy therapeutic relationships.

Here’s 3 tips on how to reduce your work days:

1. Set Boundaries. Figure out the number of hours you want to work per day. If you can avoid “back to back” clients, so you can take breaks.

2. Limit Your Client Load. If you’re already seeing too many clients, see if you can spread out and stop taking on new clients.

3. Start a Waitlist or Refer Out. Instead of accepting new clients, set up a waitlist. If you’re the right fit therapist, people are willing to wait for your next opening. Otherwise, have a running list of Colleagues that you can refer them to.

Let’s work from a positive mindset with boundaries, to avoid getting stuck in a negative pattern, that impacts our mental health and our therapeutic relationships.