Badass Therapists Creating Practices That Thrive
Welcome to Badass Therapists Building Practices That Thrive, the ultimate resource for mental health professionals ready to step into their power, grow their practices, and create a career they love. I'm Dr. Kate Walker, a Texas LPC/LMFT Supervisor, author, and business strategist who's here to show you the path to success.
Formerly Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses, we’ve rebranded because, well, we’re way too big for Texas now! This community of badass therapists is growing nationwide, and we’re here to help you create a career and practice you love, no matter where you are.
Every week, you'll get practical advice, proven strategies, and motivation to help you build a thriving practice—one that gives you the freedom to live your life on your terms. From mastering marketing to designing scalable systems and becoming a clinical supervisor, this podcast is your roadmap to leveling up without burnout.
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Badass Therapists Creating Practices That Thrive
121 Discovering the Power of Texas Online Counseling with Eleanor Brown, M.A., LPC
Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.
oh, and we can edit anything, all right. Hey, I'm dr kate walker. Welcome to texas. Counselors creating badass businesses. And I am here with the winner of the 599 practice grant, eleanor brown. Of eleanor brown. Eleanor brown counseling in clean texas, and I get to pick her brain today and find out not only what she plans to do with the money and that's super cool because I already kind of know because we talked about it before but also just more about her business. So you're going to love this interview today because she does a lot she really you do a lot, so let's start with that. So tell us I'm going to actually put my glasses on and look at the questions when are you located and how can listeners refer clients to you? Because this is all about share the love in the month of February. So we want to be able to push clients to you and as counselors, we don't often know how to do that. So how can we therapists refer clients to you?
Speaker 2:Well, I am in the state of Texas, I'm 100% telehealth, so online only, and I also have Florida, but for the Texas counselors, I am online, they can find me. People can find me on my website. I have a contact form and a book a consultation, and clients can ask potential questions like availability and things like that through the contact. Or, if they just are ready to excuse me, do a consultation, they can book a consultation.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So I am actually on your website, which looks beautiful oh my gosh, it is absolutely fabulous. And you actually got your name. You have EleanorBrownCounselingcom, which I love. That, yes, you know. You've listened to me for a while, so you know if you can grab your name. That is awesome, absolutely. You've got up here. It looks like book a free oh my gosh, it's right there where I can see it. So if we told clients just go to EleanorBrownCounselingcom, they would see the blue button book a free, consultation and boom.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I love that. All right, what do you love about your business, and I'm thinking particularly as a business owner what do you love as a business owner?
Speaker 2:One of the things I love most about a business owner and I love it and it's also probably the bane of my existence is I get to set my own schedule. I can pick when I choose clients, I can pick when I don't see clients, I can pick when I'm working on social media and I can pick when I don't work on. What I find myself doing too much of is working too many and not putting a good separation between home and work life and working too many hours.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, I'll get to the struggles in a minute. Tell me more about what you love, because, again, you do a lot of things.
Speaker 2:Oh, I really do. So some of the things that I love doing in-person, things like I have a conference coming up and I absolutely love being in front of people and helping dispel some of the myths that people, especially Christians, believe about therapy. And so, as a therapist, when I started going into this realm of wanting to be a therapist, I had some Christian friends that were like you know therapy, you just trust God and you just give it to God and oh, but if they've got a broke arm, they're going to go to a doctor. But that's different, that's different. And so I love dispelling that myth and I've I've had a person at the last conference that we did you mean I'm not evil, and that right there to for everything that I've done, that right there, that warms my heart, just being able to help people awesome, and you're, you're having a conference again.
Speaker 1:Right, you're doing it again this year.
Speaker 2:I am. We're doing it in May, it's going to be on May 31st, it's going to be an all-day Saturday thing and we're really going to dig into Maslow's hierarchy and we're going to dig into faith and therapy and we're going to talk about boundaries and attachment issues and we're going to have some practical exercises and really dig in.
Speaker 1:Awesome, and so let's go through the names of your things. So the conference what's the name of your conference? What are the names of your books? What is the name of your podcast?
Speaker 2:Okay, absolutely so. My conference is A Better Way, the conference where faith meets therapy, and it really is that combination and the podcast would just, we have a kind of sort of haven't officially announced it yet, so people will get to hear it here, probably, maybe first. Uh, but we've just rebranded it and it was a better way. The podcast, um, but people really didn't know what that meant and my business coach was like what does that mean? So we rebranded it to a better way to heal, where faith meets therapy.
Speaker 1:So still kind of keeping that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes. And then the books I have. I wrote two books and the first one is a better way, integrating faith and psychology to heal inner wounds, and the second book is A Better Way, integrating Faith and Psychology to Heal Inner Wounds. And the second book is A Better Way, the Companion Guide, and it really is kind of meant to go along with the book, but it can also with the first book, but it can also stand on its own because I put so much meat into it. It was really a labor of love and that one, that one, was very little coaching and pretty much all me.
Speaker 1:Nice, and this is one of those things where it's. This is the wonderful part of being a business owner and setting your own schedule, because you can do these labors of love, but they also become streams of income.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yes. And the last thing I didn't mention I also do this brand new thing that I started doing a couple months before the end of the year I think, I don't know, October-ish. I started doing this thing called Shame-Free Sundays, and I love talking about shame. I talk a lot about shame. People find me a lot from my shame quiz because people don't understand what shame is, and so I've got this little bear. He's hiding out back there.
Speaker 2:The purple one and we go on air and we talk and try to dispel some of the myths about what shame is and what it isn't.
Speaker 1:That is so cool, awesome, all right, next question Now you can talk about the struggle. Where do you struggle? And if you had to ask for help, what do you need? And this might also lead to what you're thinking about doing with the practice grant that you won for 2024. So where do you struggle? What do you need?
Speaker 2:One of the things I struggle with most is, of course, setting those boundaries and working too much, but I find myself sometimes working too much on things that may not matter. I mean, they do matter, but they don't help propel what I want to propel out there, and so I spend a lot of time working on practice policies and things like that and legalities and all this kind of stuff and and I don't want to do that, that's boring stuff and I really want to hire somebody to take care of that. So I talked to an attorney and I actually now have my website legal. Now I have my privacy policies and my terms of service and I have my legal considerations, my refund policy. I have all of that on there now.
Speaker 2:Congratulations, yeah, yes, and so another thing I really struggle with is social media and telling people. I don't tell people what I do. I don't tell people what I do. People that are on my mailing list couldn't even tell you what I do, and when I'm like a day or two away from about to do something, I'm like oh yeah, I should tell somebody.
Speaker 2:I'm going to do this. Yeah, a little late for that okay.
Speaker 1:So yeah, you gotta, you gotta fix that.
Speaker 2:I do, I really do, and I one of the one of my goals for this year. Can I talk about goals yet?
Speaker 1:oh yeah, go ahead, go ahead yeah, all right.
Speaker 2:So one of my goals for this year is really figuring out what I can hand off to someone and handing it off I have in the past I've tried to hand things off to people and I the product that I've not got, that I've gotten back, has not been. It's been things I've had to clean up and I've spent more time trying to clean it up than than actually what I could have done, just doing it myself in the first place, and that's what I thought I could do, that I could hand little pieces off in my workup to getting a virtual assistant or something like that, and this just hasn't worked out for me yet.
Speaker 1:That's a huge hard thing and it's so common. And I'll even take the first thing you were talking about, you know, knowing how to spend your time Like it sounds legit when you say, okay, I'm developing policies and procedures and legalities until you look and we've been talking about this in the Step it Up membership Like is it moving the needle toward your income goal, toward your growth goal, toward your retirement goal, and it needs to be done. But you did a great job right, you outsourced it to an attorney and that's her job, and now you have this great product and, yes, it costs you money, but it didn't cost you time, it was money that you had had. So sounds like you're looking for other ways to sort of get those sops right in place so that you can hand things off to a virtual assistant or a real assistant. They're all real, but you know right, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Uh, I don't think we've uh completely outsourced all of that to chat gpt yet no not yet, not yet not yet, but uh, yes, I really want to, um, like, let's say, the podcast editing.
Speaker 2:I love doing the podcast with my co-host and we're finally getting to where we're actually putting something out once a month, and then I'll have the shame-free sundays. I don't want to edit it, I don't want to do that, I really don't want to do that, and so I've been doing that, and so I want someone to help me with that. I want somebody to help me with graphics, because I have some great. My website is beautiful and I want where I'm represented elsewhere. I want that to look just as pretty yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so coming up with that stuff and what I've outsourced so far the quality is not where I would put this Right.
Speaker 1:And it's hard. I mean, it's hard to not, you know, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's like, okay, well, then I'm just going to do it all myself instead of well, no, I just need to hire another person, or I need to test it and figure out another person who might be able to do it. Because I think, as business owners, we go through that we have to fire people, right, yeah, contract, right that we just think, oh, thank you for that logo, and then I hate it and I'm not going to use it. And you get. You know, you feel some shame because you're like, well, there's $500 or whatever I just flushed down the toilet, but at the same time, you, as a business owner, have to spend money in order not to spend time doing things that don't move the needle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And it sounds like you're getting really good at that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, I haven't moved the needle as much as I want to.
Speaker 2:So that's what this year. My word for this year is soak, and I'm really. I've started a lot of new things and I now need to soak in what I've done and really soak it in and set in the policy or set in the systems, so that I can hand some things off and then really perfect what we're doing, so that we're not just adding things to be adding things, we're not just adding things to be adding things, and maybe even find some things that shouldn't, that I added last year that maybe that doesn't really work for me. So I'm just really soaking in and really trying to dig into what I have and see what fits for me and what doesn't.
Speaker 1:I hope people who are listening to this really just caught that message. You know, cause, I mean, entrepreneurs were creative and we love coming up with new ideas and new things. And so I hear you saying you're kind of putting a moratorium on new things, You're just going to see what all of this does. So I've got a question that I'm off script here. So how will you know you want to keep it or toss it?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a really good question, and the thing is is I love everything that I have, that I've started Right, and so it's like this is my baby and and what I really have to see is, is this I, if I can't redo this? You know, like, let's say, I did a workshop last year that it was a complete flop. If I can try doing that in a way that's not a complete flop, maybe maybe I can keep it, maybe it needs to go. It seems like it's something people want. Maybe I can create it in a different manner.
Speaker 1:I love that and I hope again I hope people are hearing that the way you said it was a flop, it was just sort of like, okay, yeah, it was a thing, it was a flop. Moving on, as a business owner, you can't look at something like that and take the shame on and be like, oh well, then, obviously I'm not meant for this and oh well, it's just never, ever going to work. You have to really look at these labors of love, these babies, and think, oh, you know what, this one isn't going to make it into 2025. Or this one I'm not going to repeat in 2026. Or I'm not going to do it live, I'm going to do it virtually, or something's going to change about it. Yeah, yeah, it's hard.
Speaker 2:It really is. It really is. I have people that are very close to me that I can say you know, I'm really struggling here. Help me streamline this. What do I need to let go of and what do I need to keep? And there's some things that I took on in 2025 that I may let go because they don't. They're more of a time suck and it's like I'm struggling and trying to see if this is going to be a good fit for me and it feels like I'm doing all the work and group projects and things like that, and so those things I may have to let go and that's okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and one thing I know about Ellie is she does have a balanced time, a balanced life. I mean you do 5Ks like every weekend. You have a pottery studio, so it's not like she's a workaholic. I mean I'm sure it fills your brain all the time, but I mean you have other things you enjoy doing. Absolutely it's really important that this business thing isn't an alligator, just eating up all your time and resources and energy.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah. Yeah, it really is. So I haven't been in the pottery studio much lately.
Speaker 1:And it hasn't been because of work.
Speaker 2:Although I filled my time with work instead of rest because I've been dealing with some health issues but I will be back in that pottery studio very soon but that is what keeps me going, is that being able to take care of myself. I go on vacations I've got a few planned this year and so having that balance is very important.
Speaker 1:I love that. I love that. All right, I'm looking at my questions. So that brings me to. Well, there are a couple things We've talked about. Your side hustles We've talked about. You know how things you struggle with what you need. Do you, or would you be willing to have anybody reach out to you and just ask you about things like a podcast or putting on a conference or writing a book? I mean, how could people contact you directly, just still through the website, or is there a different way they could contact you?
Speaker 2:I think a good place for people to contact me might be my through my email. They could email me at leelly, at Eleanor brown counselingcom. And I mean, it's just like it is on a website, dot com. And I mean, it's just like it is on a website. Ok, same way.
Speaker 1:I mean because it's not a lot of people that I meet in the practice owning arena do the fun things you do. I mean, except me. I do a ton of fun things, so maybe that's why I noticed you, because I'm like, oh, she's doing another 5K or she's throwing another pot or something Right, or you're on another vacation. I love that and I get that, and I think especially new practice owners. You know they're so fired up about their business they don't want to do anything else, but then they realize, oh crap, I forgot to do other things and now I'm burning out.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's very important to to bring in those fun things that we can do, the creative, and one of the things that I do, even with my pottery, is I really bring that. Everything we do as therapists. We relate it to what we do anyway, but I I created these therapy, these pottery blogs that really deal with what pottery is like, for how that is therapy. You know pottery as therapy and it was so much fun.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love that. Is that on your website too? It is there it is. I just answered my question. If I click blog, I see all of your blogs. I love this. Uh-huh, these are, these are great and they're beautiful.
Speaker 2:If you type in shame cycle or therapy, both of those come up on the first page of any google search. That is awesome, yeah yeah, really excited. I know you're SEO.
Speaker 1:All right, so 2025,. What does 2025 have in store for you?
Speaker 2:Well, I have a lot of personal things. I am going to Italy. I'm super excited about that, yes, and I really, by the end of 2025, I really want to expand the business I plan on starting. I say expand, I really want to dig in this year and soak and get everything settled well, because in 2026, I want to take the supervisor training and I want to become an LPC supervisor.
Speaker 1:Oh, have you thought about it. Of course you want to take that from. I might, I might. Oh, have you thought about? Of course you want to take that from.
Speaker 2:I'm wondering I might, I might, but you know, I feel like there's really some things I want to get done this year that really set me up for success, so that when I bring an intern in here that they're they're not coming into a mess. So I really want to get my system squared away. I want to have, even if I don't have, a virtual. There's no way I'm going to do an LPC without a virtual assistant. So whether or not that virtual assistant is going to be my husband or someone else, I don't know the answer to that question yet, but I really want to have some SOPs in place that will handle the things I'm doing. I want to get more consistent with what I'm doing. So that's the 2025 is the vision is to really get consistent and perfect the things that I did last year. I do that really well. Once I do something one time, I can go back and perfect it really well.
Speaker 1:That's awesome so soak, perfect, establish systems, see what works and then just keep moving in 2026. Take off again. Yeah, absolutely, I love it. Well, thanks for visiting with me again. Your website is EleanorBrownCounselingcom and if you are listening to this and you are a potential client, she is super easy to contact. It's a big blue button in the top right hand corner. You click that and you have a choice. It says I'm a new client or I'm an existing client, and you click that and then you're able to make your consultation appointment. So thanks for making it so easy for us to refer to you and contact you. I appreciate that. Thanks for coming on and talking with me and thanks for participating in the 2024 Practice Grant Giveaway. It couldn't have gone to a greater person. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:All right, I'm going to hit stop the recording. I don't know if I can find it. There we go, and just when my neighbor goes by with the very loud muffler,