Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hey. Hey, Shauna. A. And you're listening to the delightful audiosodes. These are mini episodes designed to spark inspiration and provide practical tips for therapists looking to diversify their professional income and achieve lucrative, fulfilling careers beyond the couch. You're listening to season two, episode two, titled Authentic building your audience as a therapist. Today we're going to explore why you want to build an authentic audience connection, the barriers to building that connection, and the action steps that you can take to building that connection today. So let's jump in.
[00:00:40] So why does authenticity matter when it comes to audience building? Well, I'm sure you've already heard about like know and trust. This is a famous thing that people say to in order to get people to buy from you or engage with you, they have to like, know and trust you. I believe that this is actually a lot more nuanced. But to build that factor of influence, to build the factor of thought leadership, I believe that you do need some engagement from your audience to make that kind of connection to you. Now, I'm not talking about the kind of connection that feels unethical. I'm talking about a connection that makes a person want to continue to hear what you're saying. It's a development of interest and it's a development of buy in. And this is important when it comes to building an audience. You want the people who are following you to have some kind of buy in to the things that you're saying. So it's a matter of positioning yourself as an expert and beginning a funnel to your other works. So usually when we're talking about that, like know and trust, yes, this is a step that people are taking to possibly purchase from you or possibly continue to engage with you. But you're seeing a lot of this on social media. And so when you're building that audience, oftentimes you're having to pull them from one place in into another, funnel them from one place into another. And so if you begin this line of work with authenticity, then you're able to pull them from one place into another and they have a trust that when they arrive at that other place that you're continuing the same thing, the same transparency, the same authenticity that you gave them in the other place, it's the same thing that they're going to get where they are, if not more enhanced. I'm going to tell you about my social media experience and how I built an audience. Right now on TikTok, I have an audience that almost has 6,000 followers on it. And I built that from Scratch. And this audience has become a source of leads as well as a place to share my ideas and my expertise about my work as far as my time in the therapy field and my work as a therapist, business coach. And whenever I'm there, like, what you see is what you get. I am who I am and I really enjoy that because there isn't much to defend when it comes to who I am. I am a seasoned therapist. I've been in practice for over 10 years. At this point, I have my own private practice and I am able to share about the journey that I had in that and just be completely myself, which I really enjoy. So it does pay off. I was able to build this following rather easy just by talking about my experience and my knowledge and my skills. And I was able to again create leads from this. So being authentic can pay off. There's just a way of going about it when you are a clinician. So let's talk about some strategies for that authentic connection. First, a good strategy is to be able to share your personal insights. You want to share your journey or your day to day, which resonate with potential clients. Now, I know this part feels really uncomfortable for therapists because we are told that we're not supposed to disclose and we do not like disclosing. So another thing you can think about is maybe this isn't your personal life, but maybe what you're sharing is the process of things, right? This is how I set up my therapy day. This is how I prepare for clients. This is what I think about when I get potential clients that are experiencing this particular thing. This way, when you're showing your process and things, this is still authentic to who you are as a clinician. It's also really authentic to the process that you take. And you're doing all of this without sharing client information. I think the thing about sharing your personal insights that's really important is that you never want to come at clients. You don't want to blame them or make fun of them or put them down in any kind of way. But what you're sharing in your personal insights is really more of the process. You're giving people a peek into what it may be like when they come to see you as a therapist. Another strategy for authentic connection is engaging. Genuinely. You want to engage with the comments that you receive and the messages and the likes. As long as the likes and the comments and the engagement that you're receiving are appropriate and healthy. I see a lot of times in social media people will give you a nasty Comment or you might notice, like there's discourse on certain applications and those kinds of things. That is probably not something you want to get engaged, especially if you don't have a lot of time or if you find social media to be really exhausting. You do want to engage in comments that are healthy. You do want to engage in comments that create healthy conversations. My tool for not dealing with certain comments is blocking them and filtering them out, so I don't see them at all. And I think that makes things a little bit healthier on your pages. It's especially good to think about, you know, with a lot of these apps saying they're no longer going to do certain censorships or they're no longer going to put in certain filters. Filters and those kinds of things. And then the last thing that I think is really important is consistently delivering value. You want to highlight content that reflects your expertise and your passion, and you want to help utilize those to help you establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche. Now, I've mentioned niche before. This is something that I focus on and something that I coach in. And a lot of times therapists are really afraid of niching down or defining their niche because they are afraid that they will pigeonhole themselves or they'll put themselves in one place place. But really a niche can be very broad. My niche is very broad, in fact, and it can incorporate a lot of things. But one thing that it does is it helps you narrow in and focus on the people that you are attempting to serve. So your niche, again, is the people you help as well as the problem that those people have that you're helping to solve. And so when you have a very specific niche, you can really accept, expand your next expertise on that and share your expertise and your passion about that niche. And that helps to draw people in. As long as you're delivering consistent value, you also have to be engaged enough to understand how content is moving on certain applications, because it's different everywhere. In TikTok, a talking head content, a yapping content that could be really, really easy. In a place like Instagram, that content is really more audience focused and audience driven. So it's less about your thoughts and really more about how your expertise can benefit the audience. So just understanding and noticing those subtle difference can allow for you to create that connection that draws people from one place to another. So let's talk about the barriers. One of the biggest barriers that therapists have when it comes to, to building authenticity is that they are afraid of disclosure. And as I mentioned before, Think of building authentically as a way of showing off your process. It's not necessarily showing your whole life. One thing I don't do on social media is show my daughter's face at all for you. This doesn't necessarily mean that you have to share off your whole family in order to build on social media. What it does mean though, again is we want to focus on your process. How do people imagine what it's like to work with you? Can you show a B roll and explain a particular thing? Can you show something that's really interesting and that's going to draw that audience in and allow them to see what your expertise is and how you perform or provide that particular service? For us as clinicians, we're always going to have to maintain a line between our professionalism, our ethics, and showing up in certain places. So that's always going to have to be on your forefront. I think a lot of times what clinicians do is they hide behind that completely instead of really leaning in and figuring out ways to do this that will continue to be ethical as well as appropriate for the work that you do. You can be authentic to who you are, but also remembering and thinking about how these messages land to the people that you're delivering it, and also asking yourself before you deliver it, are the people who this message is directed to, are they ready to receive this message? Will they be able to handle receiving this message? If not, then you might want to reconsider that. So today I've shared with you a couple of different things and what I want you to do is pick one of the strategies that I discussed in this episode to implement in your interactions over the next week. Whether you're putting together a blog or showing up on social media, this can be used as far as your audience building is concerned. So think up about how you want to share your insights, your day to day processes, or engage genuinely or create consistent value and deliver it that way. Pick one of these over the next week and think about how you would like to offer it. If you are ready to start planning out your practice, moving forward with a thriving side hustle, or just needing an audit of where you're at and building out your social media, it's time for you to schedule a call with me. You can schedule a 15 minute strategy call where we go over where you're at and briefly talk about your next steps. You can also schedule an audit with me where I thoroughly go over your niche, your content, and how that applies to your marketing as well as side hustle. Ideas or the side hustle that you've set up, Go ahead and schedule an audit with me. I'm so excited to see how these strategies play out for you and I invite you to share how you've seen engagement formulate. Please feel free to share your feedback. You can share that by replying to any of the emails or find me on social media and direct message me. You can find me at TheDelightfulClinician on all of the major social medias from TikTok to Instagram. You can even find me on YouTube. Today we explored authenticity and have why that matters in building your audience. We talked strategy to help you create more authentic connections. We talked about barriers and we talked about how you can take action to building authenticity. This week I am so excited to hear more about how this went for you. Don't forget to let me know by replying to an email or finding me on social media and I just want to thank you for listening in. We're going to keep doing these delightful audio sodes and I'm so excited to see how you thrive in 2025. Until next time. I will see you then. Bye for now.
