When you make any changes to your private practice, your first thought might be, "How will I introduce this change to my current clients?" You start thinking about the resistance you may face, or worse, the misunderstandings it will bring out with the clients.
Ideally, when you're introducing changes to your practice, we suggest you start with new clients. They don't know what to expect, and thus, you get to shape them and help them understand from the beginning of their therapy journey.
When working with a mindset, it takes a while to shift our thinking. It takes even longer to change someone else's thinking. In other posts around this series, we have spoken about teaching the clients the how and assisting with transparency in their journey.
As we move through these final posts, we're going to focus a bit more on the first few sessions. How are you building the foundation of therapy? What expectations are you addressing or not addressing in treatment? How do you help your client move through their phases of treatment? Do you think of therapy as phases?
How do you handle the professional disappointment of a client dropping out of therapy too soon?
Today's exercise is going to focus on your first session conversation.
Over the next four weeks, pay attention to what you say as well as what you don't say to clients in their first session. Is it the same from client to client regardless of their personality or presentation in the first session? Are you offering consistency and continuity to all of your clients?
You are reading part eight of our 11 part series around client engagement. Subscribe to our newsletter to make sure you don't miss any of the series.
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