1:1 coaching for emerging, established and evolving therapists who want to steward their practices as vehicles for justice, innovation, and leadership…
…without sacrificing values, work satisfaction, or a savings account.
ANy of this sound familiar?
suddenly you’re a business owner when you only know how to be a therapist:
I created and use the Care Leadership Framework, a dynamic model of entrepreneurship and leadership based in what therapists already instinctively know- care, relationships, attunement, community, and agency- that is trauma-informed, ethical, intuitive, and anti-oppressive.
you’re a therapist in the 2020s (eek!):
You’re damn right, because it is a STRUGGLE. Creating your practice and body of work is a way for therapists to give good therapy while also being agents of change in a field that often weaponizes and gatekeeps care, so that both you and the clients you serve can be bold, held, and very well-resourced.
you don’t know Whether it’s ok to infuse your business with your personality, values, and spirit:
You will learn how being in private practice allows you- your story, your expertise, your spirit, your vision- to be the throughline of your work, and encourages you to bring a megaphone to it instead of hiding or muffling it. Blank slate, my ass.
you have no idea how much money you need to make or how much you’re bringing in, or wait, what are quartely taxes???
I will lead you through a fearless and searching financial inventory so that you can find where your values and financial realities intersect and create a business model that provides you with the time, money, and energy you require.
you’re having difficulty setting boundaries and business practices that allow not just the business, but the person running the business to thrive:
Let’s be real: therapists are notorious for leaving exploitative, extractive work situations run by other people…and then immediately doubling down on replicating those environments when they work for themselves. So instead, let’s build secure attachment, safety, and trust in your business, so that you don’t have to live in an anxious-avoidant cycle for the rest of your career.
you’re social justice-oriented in your work, so you feel sleazy about marketing and selling:
We will break down messaging, marketing, and networking to what it really is: attunement, relationship-building, and knowing what you stand for. And hey- you’re already great at that as a therapist! So that you can get that good work to the people who need it most (and get paid for it) without feeling gross.
YOU want to do more than see 1:1 clients all day, all week:
Going “beyond the couch” can be an excellent way to sustain your practice (and yourself), and make your body of work louder, more visible, and therefore harder to ignore. Together, we can explore other options for leveraging your license and your expertise- groups, workshops, professional development, podcasts, etc- to make a bigger impact and be a care leader.
you have a website and lots of directory profiles, but they aren’t translating to clients:
Chances are, your best-fit clients don’t see themselves in what you’re writing. Maybe you’re using too much therapist and diagnostic jargon, or being too vague, or not speaking to what THEY think the problem is. So let’s use my Client-Attunement Copywriting Model to really bear witness to them and write copy that makes them stop scrolling and email you.
1:1 Coaching for therapists
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6-month package- $1750 USD
This package includes 12 one-hour coaching sessions to use over six months from date of purchase, as well as between-session email or voice note support, and audits of client-facing copy.
Monthly payment plans available at no additional cost.
help is on the way, whether you’re:
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If your practice is still a twinkle in your eye or in it’s first year of life, I will help you build the DNA of your practice from the ground up.
We start by getting crystal clear about why you do the work you do and what your vision is for your practice, for your clients, and for the change you want to make in the world, as well as defining the markers of success and impact (financial and otherwise).
Once that's nailed down, we combine that with the relational and attunement skills you already have, and work on getting your message to the right people in the least stressful ways and building intentional community of other providers (in your profession and outside of it).
And as we move through this, we weave in business and lifestyle structures and practices that not only allow you and your practice to sustain, but also position you to grow, iterate, and build out a tangible body of work (and supporting those emotional pleasures and pains that come with entrepreneurship).
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This is the point at which many practice owners feel a bit more comfortable and steadied to start to tweak things.
Maybe you have a decent stream of clients, but want to find more of the "I was born to do this work" ones. Maybe you want to explore how to be more visible and build your community. Maybe you need to take a look at your financials. And maybe you want to be more bold about what you stand for (because there's nothing like being in private practice to really highlight all the things wrong with this field).
Together, we'll work to nail down your vision, values, and voice, be more specific in your marketing and calling in clients, feel safer to put yourself out there, take a trauma-informed approach to any mindset alarm bells, and start thinking about the longer-term plan and impact of your practice.
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Although a practice can certainly be "set-it-and-forget-it" for some folks, if you were some folks, you wouldn't be here.
Since your practice has been around for a while, it's likely had relative success, but what you need from your practice and what you define as "success" changes over time.
Let's work together to birth the next generation of your body of work- whether it’s starting to scale to group, diversify your services, or even start to transition yourself out of practice ownership.
Just like at other stages, we will start with the vision, values, and voice that are the foundation of your work, and use that to determine how you want your expertise and body of work to be out in the world, who you want to be working with and how, what growth and iteration mean to you, and what structures (business, lifestyle, and emotional) need to be in place to make it happen.
psst- got something on your mind?
I can help!
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Clinician Chat- $200 USD
A one-off, 90-minute lightning session, designed to dig into one specific concern or question, so that you can leave our call with an action plan and the support to carry it through.
Some examples of what we can do:
-Surface your core values
-Develop a simple marketing plan
-Audit your Psychology Today profile
-Figure out how much money you need to make, and how to get there
The cost of your Clinician Chat can be applied to future purchase of a coaching package.
Your business is my business.
I’m Allison Staiger, and I’m a therapist, private practice owner, and care-based business and leadership coach in Chicago. I want care-based service providers (like you, therapists!) to create their own rebellious, substantial, and justice-oriented small businesses in order to take a stand and care for themselves and their communities.
My credentials: I am a licensed clinical social worker, certified in perinatal mental health and extensively trained in treating trauma, and I am currently pursuing a dual certification in Coaching and Leadership from the Institute for Equity-Centered Coaching. I am also a parent and the owner of two successful care-based small businesses (both of which started as side dreams), and I have seen time and time again how the oppressive messages we internalize as care providers seep into our business practices. We weaponize the same outdated and oppressive narratives of what a “good therapist” is against ourselves, and let them run through our bodies of work, our business practices, and our marketing.
This is the water in which we swim, and we are drowning.
I firmly believe that what sees you through the pain of unfurling and meeting your edges when you start a private practice is not stepping over other people, accumulating a million haphazard skills and certifications, or crafting language that embeds in people’s brains and stomps on all their pain points (yiiiiiikes). Instead, what nurtures you is a lush business ecosystem tended by co-creators, your own rhythms, attunement, and a fierce protective instinct.
Working with me for 1:1 coaching helps you assess and refine your own business practices and foundations through a lens of care leadership, whether you are still in the dreaming phase or navigating your next iteration. Where will it take you?
my approach
care as a leadership practice
The central thesis of my work! We all know the value we provide to our clients, one-on-one, and behind closed doors, but what if we used our skills to name and fight injustice more visibly and loudly with our work? When care is legitimized and valued in the way it should be, the people who provide it can be seen as the leaders of a new world, and be resourced as such.
political
I don’t know how else to say it except that everything in our lives is political, and therapy is no exception. The nature and spirit of therapy is radical and liberatory, but our institutions, systems, and structures have made it medicalized, patriarchal, and deficit-based. To be a therapist is to be on the frontlines of human suffering in an incredibly intimate way, and we have an obligation and duty to stand for social justice and understand the politics that affect our clients on an individual level.
matriarchal
Matriarchal values are those that center care, community, resourcefulness, intuition, relationships, and cycles of regeneration. While so much of therapy and business has been co-opted by patriarchy and capitalism, we do not have to keep practicing or building our bodies of work in this way.
trauma-informed
The model of trauma-informed care that I have developed in my time as a trauma therapist extends to my coaching and business practices. To me, being trauma-informed means establishing safety, consenting to trust, having a right relationship to power, normalizing rupture and repair, honoring the brilliance of adaptive behaviors, and understanding the full context of a person’s identity.
disruptive
I’m over the blank slate, I’m over the idea that we should be quiet and stay in our lanes, keeping our heads down despite seeing pattern after pattern of how the world (and our field) causes harm. It’s insulting to therapists and our humanity to think that we can’t be ethical and in our integrity while also pushing back on the injustice, oppression, and policing that impact our clients and our ability to do our jobs.
liberatory
In the words of one of my teachers, Shawna Murray-Browne, “Freedom is individual, but liberation is for the collective.” If my work stops at helping other white women of privilege get comfy in leadership and entrepreneurship, what really changes? And why should the comfort of others like me be prioritized when it is the resourcing of the most under-resourced and under-recognized that will benefit us all? While “burning it all down” isn’t necessarily the answer (and I sure as shit don’t have all the answers), what I do know is that we need a new paradigm for what care is an who gives it.
