Marketing Without "Selling" Yourself: What It Really Looks Like (Episode 54)
Marketing is rarely the love story of a therapist’s business. For many clinicians, it feels awkward at best—and misaligned, salesy, or draining at worst.
In this Valentine’s week episode, I’m not trying to convince you to love marketing. Instead, I’m inviting you to rethink your relationship with it. Because the truth is: marketing isn’t going anywhere. And how you relate to it directly impacts how sustainable your practice feels over time.
We talk about why traditional marketing advice often clashes with therapist values, how that “ick” factor gets created, and what shifts when marketing is reframed as connection, clarity, and invitation rather than persuasion or self-promotion. This episode is about finding a steadier, more grounded way to engage with marketing—one that supports the life and practice you’re building instead of competing with it.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this workshop:
1️⃣ Why marketing feels misaligned for so many therapists—and why that reaction actually makes sense
2️⃣ How reframing marketing as connection (not selling) changes both your experience and your results
3️⃣ Why your clinical skills already translate to strong marketing—and how to apply them earlier in the client journey
4️⃣ How clear marketing supports full-fee work, quicker decisions, and better-fit clients
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Hey hey, , welcome back to this episode of Marketing Therapy. If you didn't know Valentine's Day is this week, you might have strong feelings about Valentine's Day, positive or negative. I personally just love the opportunity to wear pink. It's my favorite color and
my husband always has to travel the week of Valentine's Day for a big trade show, so there's never any big celebration, although we do often, you know, make a little steak dinner after the kids go to bed when he gets home or something like that. But it's not a huge production around here. I do love Valentine's and I do love the candy that goes on sale after, so that's kind of where I fall on the Valentine's Day spectrum.
But I think there's a lot of cultural pressure. To love what you do, to love your work, to love your business, and that's a good thing. I personally love the work that I do. Signing on every day is actually legitimately a joy. Hopefully you feel that about the work that you do for many therapists. However, marketing is very much not the love story in your business, right?
Most therapists would rather do literally. Anything. Then fall in love with marketing. Am I right? Is that you? And it sounds funny, but it's true. There are things in my business that I would rather clean my baseboards than do. Okay. So if marketing feels that way for you, I want you to know you're not alone. It makes a lot of sense and we'll talk about that here today. But I also wanna offer some reframes where maybe you're never gonna fall all the way in love with marketing as a practice owner, but maybe we can shift the way you relate to it and create something that actually feels more natural.
More of an extension of this business that you're building that is hopefully, ultimately serving your life and your family and your goals outside of work. Maybe. Maybe we can make some of those shifts here today. Now, I know that you didn't get into this field to market yourself. You got in it to be with people to do the deep work, to create meaningful change with the people that you are best equipped to serve.
So let me be clear that this episode is not going to convince you to enjoy marketing. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but I wanna change what marketing represents to you, okay? Because how you relate to marketing ultimately determines how sustainable your practice is. 'cause marketing is not going away.
Marketing is the ongoing relationship and rhythm that you must engage in for the life of your business. So how can we change how you relate to it today? Now, lots of clinicians still feel like, I still hear this on a regular basis, marketing feels slimy or salesy or gross. I feel like I'm selling myself.
Ugh. That sentiment is so common. And you know what? Of course, marketing feels slimy when it's framed as. Convincing or chasing or selling yourself, I think a lot of our exposure to marketing includes things like the hustle culture, being told to show up everywhere. Tactics out there that feel completely misaligned with not just your values, but ethics.
I tell the story often of how I got into supporting clinicians with their marketing, and I took over six months just to learn before I actually offered anything because it was so clear to me that marketing for therapists is different than marketing, literally anything else. There is so much nuance to this, and yet as a business owner, you are exposed to lots of messages about marketing that end up feeling incredibly incongruent with how you actually practice, how you actually want to be growing your business, and how you should be putting yourself out there.
Okay? So of course it feels slimy when it's framed that way because you as a clinician are trained to what center your clients de-emphasize yourself. To avoid persuasion or influence, and then all of a sudden you're supposed to turn around and do all of those things to grow your practice. Like of course that feels out of alignment.
That training to de-emphasize yourself and ascent to your client is your strength in the therapy room. But when it collides with traditional marketing advice, that's where we create that tension and we create that ick factor. So I want to, I encourage you to think outside of the binary of either being a good therapist or being good at marketing, what if you can be both?
Because I think that belief sets clinicians up to feel conflicted. No matter what you do, so if you're marketing, you're inauthentic, but if you don't market well, then you're stressed. What if it didn't have to be that way? What if you could operate differently and view this relationship with marketing differently?
To a lot of you, and I know this because I hear this from you, marketing is experienced as this sort of necessary evil, something I have to do, Ugh, right? It's something that you endure and it feels completely separate from the real work. If I had a dime for every time a therapist told me, Anna, I just want to do therapy and not think about this part, I would be on an island in, the Caribbean or something.
But what if marketing isn't something you had to do? But something that served a clear and meaningful purpose. Something that was even an extension of the work that you love to do. When your marketing feels pointless or disconnected, or like drudgery, that it's gonna be easy to avoid. And when you avoid it, your results are gonna show that.
If I could boil down what I have seen be true, especially in the last 24 months or so in the private practice industry, it is that in order to be successful, clinicians have to be more engaged in their marketing than they used to. The pandemic and the immediately post pandemic times lulled a lot of therapists into a sense of complacency.
It was quote unquote, easy to get clients then. The clients right now are still out there, but the way that you get them is different and it requires you to be engaged in ways you maybe didn't have to before. So if your marketing is feeling pointless or disconnected, or like a total pain in your, you know what, you're gonna avoid it.
But if we can tie it instead to something that you care about, it's going to become easier to engage with, and that is going to increase the sustainability of the business that you're creating. What if instead of self-promotion, it was connection? What if instead of persuasion? It was invitation. That's the power of reframing the way you look at marketing.
One of my favorite confident copy testimonials I ever got from someone was not about SEO or getting clients, although she does have a full caseload now, but it was about how. Confident copy supported a reframe for her from selling herself to connecting with people, and how once she started viewing it as connection, everything got easier, both in how she reached clients and also how she connected to networking contacts.
She didn't suddenly love marketing. It wasn't like, oh wow, this is the best thing I've ever done. It's all I wanna do. She didn't become more extroverted. She's actually a pretty introverted person. She didn't compromise her ethics or her values. But all of a sudden she understood her role and marketing's role in creating the practice she wanted.
You as a therapist are a professional connector. It is why you do incredible work in the room. You're already good at connection. So what if marketing was not learning a foreign skill, but instead reapplying that existing skill of connection that you have spent years honing and just applying it in a different context.
When marketing becomes connection, and that's what this testimonial always reminds me of, then it becomes less forced. It becomes more natural. It stops competing with your values or your sense of authenticity, and it leads to better results.
Now, like we talked about, you were trained as a clinician to center your client and to de-emphasize yourself, but you were also taught to listen for what's underneath the words. Isn't that one of the things you're best at? Your client is telling you one thing, and yet you're hearing the story underneath it, the belief, the pattern that maybe they haven't noticed yet.
It's one of the best parts of therapy. You are very good at helping your clients feel seen and understood. You probably have heard that you have helped put words to things that have felt so confusing or overwhelming to your clients for years. What if marketing is that too? What if marketing is listening for what's underneath the words for helping clients feel seen and understood for putting language to experiences that have felt confusing or overwhelming?
Marketing is simply creating those experiences earlier than the therapy room. It's often the first place that someone can feel like, oh, this person gets it. Oh, there might actually be someone who understands. Of course, marketing isn't therapy, but it is the doorway into therapy.
So what if you were applying those skills of listening deeply and reflecting back earlier? And it's one of the reasons that so many of our confident copy students get feedback on consultation calls and things like that, where I read your website and I felt like you knew me or it was really clear to me that you understood what I was going through.
Isn't that awesome that it didn't even have to wait until the therapeutic relationship started to start creating that experience. It's what makes you so compelling. So it's simply about introducing that experience earlier. Than sitting down in session with someone now in this market. It is critical that you are able to communicate your value and to increase your perceived value in the eyes of your client. Many of the clinicians that we are working with are currently full fee or seeking to depa and are therefore realizing that they need to be establishing themselves as the go-to expert in their niche and to command higher premium fees.
The reason people pay higher premium fees for therapy or for anything is because they value it. And so one of the things about your marketing is having to display that value. For many clinicians, they get that confused with selling themself. Those feel in conflict again. So it gets tangled up, right? It gets tangled up in fears of bragging that you're actually really good at what you do, or over promising that they're gonna get results that you can't guarantee, or that whole salesy thing being a used car salesman.
What if displaying your value actually meant being really clear about who you help? So people know if you're the right fit or if they're not. Both attracting and blessing and releasing. What if displaying your value is naming exactly what you are good at so that people immediately know if you are someone who can help solve the problems that they're bringing to therapy.
What if displaying value actually meant letting people understand how you think and how you work? Here's the thing, your RightFit clients, they're already out there looking for therapy. Your marketing is not about convincing them they need it 'cause they're gonna pick someone. Your marketing is simply about whether or not they choose you.
They're already looking. They're already willing to invest. So it's not that they don't value therapy, it's not that your website or your marketing has to share all of the values of therapy, but what it does need to do is establish your value so that the thing that they're looking for, a clinician who deeply understands them and can help them experience that change that they're seeking, that person could be you.
That's what your marketing gets to do. So it's not about creating need. It's not selling something they don't need. Like when you go to the, get your car fixed at the mechanic, and all of a sudden you leave with a $3,000 bill and a bunch of things you didn't know were wrong. That's not what this is about.
This is simply about clarifying fit, making yourself available to the person who already is looking for someone like you, and making sure that they value what you bring to the table. It's why clear marketing so often helps clients decide quicker. Reach out sooner. Feel confident in their choice. Stop the shopping around.
And it's not, of course that shopping around is bad, but that's what good marketing can do. It can make that decision more confident for your clients. Now, I mentioned earlier that marketing is part of running a business, period. End of discussion. If you would like to have a successful practice, guess what?
You have to market yourself. We can't get around that anymore, but. What if you could remind yourself that marketing is supporting the business you're creating? So many of you come from toxic agency settings, community mental health, where you were burnt out and seeing 30, 40 patients a week that you didn't get to choose and weren't necessarily the right fit for you.
Perhaps you're pivoting from a different career and deciding to launch a practice This practice, this business, it means something to you. It's hopefully giving you autonomy. It's hopefully supporting your wellbeing. It's hopefully allowing you to practice in a way that aligns with your values and your strengths.
Isn't it important to remember that and that marketing is making that possible? You are more well now, , hopefully, in private practice than you were in your previous role. And marketing is supporting the sustainability of that decision. It's not separate from your work, but it is allowing you to continue the work in a way that is viable and true to you.
So could you call that a necessary evil? Sure. But could you also call it something that is supporting your ability to be well? Yes, , you absolutely could.
Now one of the last things that I think marketing offers to folks that again, could undergo a really powerful reframe is the idea of networking. Now our state of the industry survey the report for that will be coming out later here in February, but it proved to us yet again how important networking is.
And when I talk about the non-negotiables of building a full fee thriving practice in this market. It's a strong website and a strong network, but the IIC factor most clinicians have around networking is as extreme as any other IIC factor around marketing. They say, I'm an introvert. I hate talking to people.
This feels awkward. What if the networking piece of marketing was actually about getting out of isolation? Building community? Creating support, building a solo private practice, even a group private practice is incredibly isolating. I, of course, am not a clinician, but I do sit in an office by myself day in and day out.
I have an incredible team and I talk to them remotely, but there is something about business ownership as an entrepreneur that is incredibly isolating. You can feel like you're on an island. What if networking was your opportunity to get off that island? It's not transactional referral chasing, or hi, here's my business card. Please send me clients. It doesn't have to be awkward coffee meetings that you cringe at. It can be a place to build relationship. Relationship that will reduce your burnout, create longevity. Make this whole private practice thing feel less lonely, and also build powerful reciprocity where each of you can be sending clients one another's way that are a fantastic fit for the work that each of you does, and that come in already trusting the work that you do because of the trust transfer that happens in networking conversations.
I've offered you some powerful reframes here. And like I said, maybe the goal isn't to just fall in love with marketing. Maybe you're never going to love this, but what if it is about just being in relationship? Every year my husband and I go out for a date night around our oldest daughter's birthday, and it's to celebrate, being a parent for another year.
And so we like to spend time reflecting on, of course, our little girl. What it's like to be parents. But we went on that annual date this past weekend because our oldest turned five in January, and we ended up reflecting not just on our journey as parents, but just the journey of our relationship and talked about how it feels different than it did early on, how we feel different and also the same.
You know how that is. We've been married for almost 12 years. We've undergone a lot of change and those early stages of. Dating and then engagement and even marriage. There's a lot of intensity, right? There's a lot of emotion. For better or for worse, there's certainly less stability, especially before you're, committed to each other in a long-term way.
But now, 12 years in, having been with him for what feels like half my life, it's just safe and steady and life giving. Not dramatic, but real, just grounded. So the relationship isn't better or worse, but it certainly feels more sustainable now. So maybe you're never gonna have that honeymoon phase with marketing.
But maybe you can reach a place where the relationship feels steady and reliable and like it means something to you. Maybe you're not gonna love it every day, maybe you're not even gonna feel particularly excited about it. But that doesn't mean you can't have a steady and healthy relationship with it.
A relationship that serves your values, that supports your work, that doesn't drain you, and that allows you to show up authentically in order to create a practice that serves you, your family, your clients, your community. What if marketing is just the doorway to that? So maybe here in the week of Valentine's Day, we don't have to romanticize marketing.
We can be honest about it. It can be tough, it can be anxiety inducing, but maybe you don't have to be at war with it anymore. Maybe you can start viewing it differently, relating to it differently
when you start to reframe the idea of marketing as connection, as invitation to the right people to do powerful work with you. I've seen time and time again how incredibly transformational that can be, not just for you as a practice owner, but for your results, for the way that you attract clients, who you attract, what caliber of clients you attract, and that's what I want for you.
Marketing doesn't have to be something you love, but it can be something that you relate to differently. Of course, if you are looking for how to relate to it differently, how to get in touch with the right fit clients, how to do that attracting and blessing and releasing, to put yourself out there in a way that doesn't feel salesy or manipulative, confident copy is 100% the best place to start. You're gonna learn not just how to figure out your niche or how to write your website, but how to view the idea of putting yourself out there through a lens of what sets you apart, who your right fit clients are, and.
A sense of knowing that the way that you're doing that is grounded in strategy and a proven framework for what it means to actually stand out in today's market. All the details for Confident Copy Walker strategy co.com/confident-copy if that's something you're interested in jumping into. It's available to enroll in right this minute, and we would love to see what you create as part of that process.
But I hope, like I said, as part of this Valentine's Day week that I've offered you a little nugget or two to walk away with, maybe a little bit of a deep breath or sigh of relief. And a new way of thinking about and approaching marketing that again, serves not just you, but also the business that you're creating and all of the liberation and freedom that it represents.
Wishing you a very happy Valentine's Day to those who celebrate Valentine's Day to the rest of us, and I'll see you next week.
Resources & Links Mentioned:
Join Confident Copy: https://walkerstrategyco.com/cc
The Walker Strategy Co website: https://walkerstrategyco.com
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About Marketing Therapy
Marketing Therapy is the podcast where therapists learn how to market their private practices without burnout, self-doubt, or sleazy tactics. Hosted by Anna Walker—marketing coach, strategist, and founder of Walker Strategy Co—each episode brings you clear, grounded advice to help you attract the right-fit, full-fee clients and grow a practice you feel proud of.
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