The Business of Psychology

Hosted by Dr Rosie Gilderthorp

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Oct 2026

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Are you a mental health professional with a feeling in the pit of your stomach that the system is BROKEN? Did you start your training full of ideas about changing the landscape of mental health for the better but now you find you are so busy seeing people in crisis that you don't have time to do any of it? Do you KNOW that we need to get out of our therapy rooms and start reaching people in other ways? Do you KNOW that the key to better mental health is prevention not crisis management? If you do then join me for a mix practical skills, strategies and inspirational interviews with psychologists and therapists just like you who are using their skills to do BIG things way beyond the therapy room. Prepare to get your "trainee spirit" back.

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October 30, 202623 min

Finding an agent and letting someone read my book

Finding an agent and letting someone read my book Welcome to The Business of Psychology. This is a short series to let you behind the curtain on my journey to publishing my first book, You Are Doing Enough. I'm not doing this as a polished, look how easy this was, success type story. I'm doing it because I know so many of you listening are therapists and psychologists who have your own book idea sitting somewhere, and I really want you to hear what the process has actually been like, and my tips for getting that book out of your head and onto the page. This is part three of our miniseries about writing and publishing my first book, You Are Doing Enough, which is open for pre-orders at the moment. I have felt really self-indulgent doing this series, because it's kind of like interviewing myself when I quite like interviewing other people about their books and their achievements. I really hope that it's been useful for you to hear some of the internal processes that go on leading up to publication, and I just wanted to reiterate that I'm really sharing this because there was such a big part of me before I actually wrote the book that didn't believe that somebody like me could write a book that would be traditionally published. I didn't think I had it in me to write something this long and this complete. And I also wasn't sure I had it in me to be as vulnerable as writing a book made me feel. I'm going to talk a bit more about that today, because if you've been following along with this journey, we're at the point where I decided that the book might be interesting enough to be traditionally published, and that meant that I had to go about seeking representation for the book. Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology Rosie on Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp @drrosiegilderthorp Pre Order You Are Doing Enough and get access to Get Your Book Published with Louise Buckley Click here to pre-order You Are Doing Enough Pre-ordering now gets you a ticket to Get Your Book Published with Louise Buckley (literary agent) live on 6th November at 11:30 (replay available); just fill in this form after purchasing: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/offers/rGsNE9iF Why you should get a literary agent if you want your book published by a traditional publisher If you want a book to be published by a traditional publisher in the UK, like Penguin, Little Brown, Routledge etc, it is highly recommended to reach out to literary agents and gain representation from an agent to broker your relationship with that publisher. We will be holding a webinar with my literary agent, Louise Buckley from Hannah Shepherd Literary Agency, where she will tell you much more about how this relationship works. But what I do know is that an agent collaborates with you to make sure that the book is in the best shape possible before they do what's called going out on submission; submitting it to editors at the publishers, to try and get a publishing deal for you. The reason it's a good idea to have an agent rather than doing it yourself, is that agents are skilled at understanding the market, knowing what's selling, and what publishers are excited about. They can help you put together a pitch for your book that is likely to be really enticing to the publisher, knowing what they know about the market. It'd be very difficult for you to get that expertise yourself. I know some people have done it, but I think that would be a real challenge. You're much more likely to get a better deal (or get a deal at all) through an agent than you would be going directly to a publisher. Most publishers don't accept submissions that don't come from agents anyway. Some agents, and Louise is one of them, will also work with you developmentally on the manuscript for your book. They'll make it a better book with you before you go out on submission to give you that best chance, which was something that was really important to me, and that's one of the reasons I chose Louise. If you want that kind of support, finding an agent who offers that is really helpful. The other reason is financial. Louise and agents like her know the industry really well, and they're skilled negotiators. They will negotiate the contract for you with the publisher and make sure that you get the best advance that you can get, but also the best rates for things like royalties. Louise is going to talk more about that in our webinar, but those are the reasons that you should look for an agent and why I was thinking I should start looking for an agent when I got to the end of writing the first draft of the manuscript for You Are Doing Enough. Finding an agent It was early November, and I was putting the finishing touches to what I called my first draft of You Are Doing Enough. I had rewritten every chapter many times in the process of writing it. I'd finished a manuscript that I was reasonably happy with, which I was calling a first draft, but in reality was probably more like draft four or five. I was starting to think, "Ok, I understand that I need an agent." So I got out a book called 'The Writers' and Artists' Yearbook', and I started going through it to see what agents potentially represent the kind of nonfiction that I was writing, which is more narrative nonfiction rather than a textbook, because it's important to find an agent who is excited about the kind of book that you're writing and is looking for books like yours already. Because agents receive so many submissions, it really frightened me. Louise said they can receive 1000 a week. Good agents like Louise will read all their submissions, but they have to apply quite a quick filter to whether it looks like a good fit for them. I knew that if you were sending in letters to agents who weren't looking for the kind of book that you were writing, that you would never hear back from them, because they don't have the ability to get back to 1000 people a week. So I knew it was important to find the right person for the book, and I was also terrified about sharing the work with somebody that might not understand the story or wouldn't understand why it was important. If you've ever poured your heart and soul into something that you've worked on for a long time, which I know most of you will have, you know how vulnerable it feels submitting it for feedback. I'd never written a book before, there's going to be loads of feedback, some of it will probably be really difficult for me to hear. I want to be hearing it from somebody that I know has the same values as me, so I can put my trust in that person to help me shape this into the kind of book that I want it to be in the world. I was looking in the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, because that's what I'd been told was the right thing to do to find an agent. I was also doing a bit of Googling, and to be honest, I just felt lost. I didn't understand a lot of the terminology that was being used, I couldn't work out what genre I was really writing in. Was it nonfiction, narrative nonfiction? I didn't really get it, and I couldn't work out whether I would connect with any of these agents, so I was starting to get into that overwhelmed place that I know is familiar to many of us when we're jumping into something that feels uncertain and unknown. I'd planned to procrastinate until January, because I felt like it was a decision I wasn't going to be able to make that side of Christmas, and I didn't want to push myself to do it. Then I logged on to my Substack, where I'd started writing a bit about SEND parenting, almost as an experiment, to see whether I really was okay with putting this stuff out there. I was just having a scroll through the feed on there, and I saw a post from a literary agent called Louise Buckley, who was demystifying publishing. Louise does Q&As on there, and she’d written a really helpful article about what an agent needs to see from you. And I was like, "Oh, that's brilliant" because I have felt completely mystified by the world of publishing. So I gave her a follow. And then I clicked through to her website on the Hannah Shephard site and noticed that in her section where she describes what books she's looking to represent, it was like she was literally describing my book. I think it was something like, she was looking for nonfiction from psychologists and had a particular interest in neurodiversity, something like that. And I felt like the universe might be giving me a sign. So I decided to send in my manuscript to Louise, and very helpfully, because Louise is quite passionate about helping people who might not naturally understand how publishing works, she has loads of really helpful resources on her website that explain what you need to submit and exactly how to do it; templates, the letter you need to send (a query letter), your proposal for a nonfiction book, and your sample chapters. What exactly you need to send, what needs to be in it, and how to make it good. I followed all of her...

October 23, 202616 min

How did I write a book with no time?

How did I write a book with no time? Welcome to The Business of Psychology. This is a short series to let you behind the curtain on my journey to publishing my first book, You Are Doing Enough. I'm not doing this as a polished, look how easy this was, success type story. I'm doing it because I know so many of you listening are therapists and psychologists who have your own book idea sitting somewhere, and I really want you to hear what the process has actually been like, and my tips for getting that book out of your head and onto the page. In this episode I talk about how I actually got the book written. If you listened to the first episode, then you'll know that my book, You Are Doing Enough, came to me at a moment of crisis for my family, and that a lot of what motivated me to write it were also obstacles to actually having the time to write it. So the questions that I get asked a lot, especially from coaching clients that want to write books, are around the practicalities like, yes, you're really motivated, but how on earth do you actually find the time to write a book? So I'll share what worked for me. It may not necessarily work for you in your circumstances, and in different seasons of life, different strategies will be more effective, but I'll share what worked for me and a couple of other ways of approaching it that I've heard from other authors that I know have been helpful. Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology Rosie on Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp @drrosiegilderthorp Pre Order You Are Doing Enough and get access to Get Your Book Published with Louise Buckley Click here to pre-order You Are Doing Enough Pre-ordering now gets you a ticket to Get Your Book Published with Louise Buckley (literary agent) live on 6th November at 11:30 (replay available); just fill in this form after purchasing: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/offers/rGsNE9iF How I actually got the book written I found writing at the same time in the early morning every day really helpful, but I never ever wrote for more than an hour. For the entire time I was writing the book, I think maybe I did two sessions that were more than one hour long, and those were when I was lucky enough to have a bit of extra childcare at the weekends, and because writing's really cathartic for me, I used them for that. But most of the time, it was very time limited, one hour between 6:00 and 7:00 every morning. That works really well for my brain because I wake up with the most focus I'm ever going to have through the day, and it was the only time I could take that wouldn't have felt like I was snatching it from somebody else, it was just my time. But I know that isn't going to be the correct timing for other people. Don't sacrifice sleep for anything. Sleep is so important for wellbeing. I really hate the idea of people getting up super early to be productive. I naturally was waking up at that time, and I was lucky that at that time, my husband was at home in the mornings, so it was safe for me to go to the garden office and write for an hour, which felt like a real luxury to not have to do the very early morning stuff with the children. I'm not in that position anymore, so if I was writing a book now, it wouldn't be six o'clock in the morning. That wouldn't work. I would have to look for other times that worked. But I think the important thing is to have a consistent time that works for you. So I'm doing edits for this book and another project at the moment, and my editing time is between 8:00 and 9:00 PM, which, as you can imagine, slides a bit sometimes when I don't manage to get all three kids in bed at the time I would like them to be, but I know I'm only going to do one hour, and it's at a time where nobody else is going to be asking anything of me. So I would recommend having that kind of structure if you've got a brain like mine that it works for really well. Carry a physical notebook Another thing which I think is really helpful, is to always carry a physical notebook with you, because we had times during this writing period where I didn't get to go to my laptop at 6:00 in the morning. We had hospital visits, we had Christmas, we had all the stuff that happens with a full and busy life. On those days where I wasn't going to make it to a computer to type, I still wrote in my notebook, so I was still doing the action of being a psychologist writing a book, even if I wasn't at the computer to do it, or it couldn't happen at the time that I would like it to. I guess that's a little bit of rigidity combined with flexibility, but that's what I found really helpful. The other thing that I found useful about having a notebook on me is that those moments when an idea strikes or a metaphor hits you that would work really well to illustrate a point, or if you see something in the real world that you're like, "I've gotta work that into the book because that's so meaningful," which I do all the time when I go to support groups for other SEND parents, or when I go to talks and things, all the time I'm seeing stuff that inspires me. So that's a habit I've stuck to, even though I'm not yet writing another nonfiction book, I still carry around that notebook for inspiration, so I found that really helpful. Say ‘no’ to things The other thing I did was say no to things. As I shared in the last episode, this was really hard. I had to close my clinic, which I made that decision quickly but painfully, but I also found that a lot of opportunity came my way in that time because of all the work that I've put into the business over the years and being quite visible in my community, I was getting asked to do lots of stuff that would've paid well, but also would've been really exciting for me, and I had to say no to most of it. Most of that was not because of the book, it was mostly because of my family life. But I think if your diary is really crowded and you're not holding your boundaries well, then the space for creativity just isn't there. It's not necessarily about, do you have one hour a day to write a book? It's also about, do you have any thinking space? Because most of when the book gets written is not when you're physically typing into the page, it's actually when you're just thinking about stuff, while you're living the rest of your life. And I think there have definitely been times in my life where I've been so busy that actually there hasn't been any thinking space, when I've been doing 10 other things at once, and that wouldn't have worked very well. So that's something to be mindful of as well. Using AI for research Another thing I wanted to mention was AI. So I didn't use any AI in the writing of the book at all, and I'd really advise you against it. Firstly, because I don't want to read a book that's been written by AI. When I read a book, I connect with the author. Part of what I love about writing and reading is that we get to connect with people that we might never meet in real life. It is so sad to me that AI might be getting in the way of that. So I wasn't tempted to use AI to help me with writing, but I did find AI really helpful in research. I used perplexity.ai to help me to find the most recent texts that have been written about particular topics which I wanted to be up to speed on. I would never just take the AI summary as read, but Perplexity's amazing at giving you the references to follow so that you can then click through and find the actual text that you were thinking of. For example, I was thinking of a point about why we are prone to labeling people and why I don't think it's realistic that we would ever get rid of diagnostic labels, even though many of us have a lot of concerns about what they might do in terms of identity for people, and I was saying the reason I don't think that's realistic is because of the way the brain works, and I wanted to reference Danny Kahneman's ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’. But for the life of me, I couldn't remember what section of the book that was in, and it is a tome, it's a very, very big book. And Perplexity was able to tell me exactly what chapter I was referring to when I put my point in, and that was really helpful. And there are other kinds of key seminal psychology studies that I mention, but I was like, "Ah, I don't remember who did this study." So I could put it into Perplexity, and it would find the actual paper, which I thought was amazing. And other things like, I can ask it what are the most recent papers that have been produced on, say, the impact of masking on mental health of autistic people. And it will come up with a list of the most recent studies in that area. So I think I couldn't have gotten through all the research that I did for the book without it helping me to do that. I think that's a really great use of AI. Of course, you always have to check everything. Perplexity will give you a pretty accurate reference, but the DOI will probably be wrong, so every...

October 16, 202628 min

When my clinic dies and the idea for a book was born

When my clinic dies and the idea for a book was born Welcome to The Business of Psychology. This is a short series to let you behind the curtain on my journey to publishing my first book, You Are Doing Enough. I'm not doing this as a polished, look how easy this was, success type story. I'm doing it because I know so many of you listening are therapists and psychologists who have your own book idea sitting somewhere, and I really want you to hear what the process has actually been like, and my tips for getting that book out of your head and onto the page. I talk about what got me motivated and into the zone for writing the book, because I have wanted to write a book for a very long time, and have started many books that I never finished. I've written 30,000 words and thrown them away time and time again, but this felt different from the very beginning. I want to talk about why I think this was different from ideas that haven't gone anywhere before, then in the next episode, I'll talk about what I did to enable myself to write the book, and then I'll talk about the steps I took to get an agent because this book will be traditionally published. Later in the year, we'll do a few more episodes about the nuts and bolts of publishing and selling a book, and hopefully that will coincide with the book's release date. It’s due to be published in May 2027, and is already open for pre-orders. Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology Rosie on Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp @drrosiegilderthorp Pre Order You Are Doing Enough and get access to Get Your Book Published with Louise Buckley Click here to pre-order You Are Doing Enough Pre-ordering now gets you a ticket to Get Your Book Published with Louise Buckley (literary agent) live on 6th November at 11:30 (replay available); just fill in this form after purchasing: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/offers/rGsNE9iF The moment I knew this had to be a book I have written the beginnings of many books before. I write a lot. I write for my Substack, I write for other organizations' blogs. I write materials for Psychology Business School. I write materials for my clients. I really love writing. It's always been a passion of mine. But the idea of writing a book always intimidated me, partly because I don't know that I have the kind of brain that finds it easy to structure something as long as a book. I have lots of ideas, I’m quite good at the actual putting of words on the page in a way that is engaging for people. But I've never been sure that I could hold somebody's attention for an entire book, because that seems like a real art of pacing, and knowing where to put the major learning points. I think that's why I'd started lots of books and then been like, "I don't know how to bring this home as a complete book that somebody would actually want to read from start to finish." Then I’d lose my enthusiasm because I couldn't imagine it being successful. As you're probably thinking to yourselves, that is a form of imposter syndrome, and it's exactly the same as the imposter syndrome that I coach people through all the time when they're starting their businesses. Because actually writing a book is a skill, and if you put your mind to it, you can learn a new skill, and I just hadn't been allowing myself the time or the opportunity to invest in learning that skill, probably because deep in my heart I was worried I didn't have it in me to do it. Those were all the reasons I hadn't written a book before, but this one felt different, and I think that's because it came in a moment of my life which felt a bit like a crisis. As some of you may be aware, I quite suddenly lost the childcare that I'd been relying on to run my clinical practice, and it was really difficult. It's a moment I talk about in the book because as other parents of autistic, otherwise neurodivergent, or children with learning disabilities will know, finding childcare for a child whose needs are unusual is really difficult. For a couple of years, I'd thought it was impossible for us, and that meant that my working time had to be very limited. That meant my clinical time was extremely limited, because for good reasons we need to have very protected and secure childcare for clinical hours, slightly less so for coaching and writing work. I'd always managed a few clinical hours a week, but I really wanted to scale that up. We'd moved back to Kent, where I've got much more of a support network, and I was really excited about having an in-person practice again. I had a lovely premises in town, and I really put my back into filling up the books. We had found some childcare to support that, and she was brilliant. My son, who was the person who most needed that individualized support from her, formed a really close relationship with her. She was great. But unfortunately, for valid and important reasons, she needed to leave us. She gave in her notice at about six months and left us after nine. As you can imagine, having put all of that work into building up my practice, to then need to wind it down again so quickly when I knew there wasn't going to be somebody else around the corner was devastating. But what was really interesting to me was there was no part of me that wanted to start looking for a replacement. I knew as soon as she gave me her resignation that I would not replace her. I knew that I was ready to embrace a new chapter in our lives, and that would involve a different way of working. Rather than just trying to plug gaps in childcare to make my old model work again, which is what I'd been doing for the past five years or so, I was ready to recognize that what my children need from me is different, and that actually I want to be the one that is around for the unpredictable pickup times, the reduced timetables, the meetings, and that I could not bear to bring in a conveyor belt of people who my kids would attach to and would then leave them. I knew that I wasn't going to put them through that. I tend to make big decisions quite instinctively, and I knew immediately that my clinic was going to close and this time there was not going to be a plan to reopen the doors. But that didn't make it any easier. I was certain, but I was really sad, and the grief hit me quite hard because it felt like a final acknowledgement that the career that I'd imagined for myself, which was already looking pretty different to the one that I'd been sitting in training at Salomon's imagining, but this was the moment where I accepted that I probably wasn't going to return to that path, and that seeing lots of clients wasn't going to be in my future, at least for a long while. So that was really difficult. Something I know about myself is that I tend not to sit for very long with the way that I feel about things, and that's something I often work on with my clinical clients. A lot of the clients that I was supporting at the time were also parents of neurodivergent children and children with learning disabilities, many of whom had come to me because they'd also been through traumatic experiences. I noticed that something that I work with regularly with my clients was this idea of allowing the grief to be there, and that we all had different ways that we needed to sit with that. My clients tend to be a bit like me and very often dive into action. I noticed that because I wasn't doing what I've always done when we've had a big shock or a big change in the family, which is immediately think of a resilience plan, I wasn't doing that. I was like, "It's not going to work, my plan is not to replace this part of my income straight away. My plan is to allow this to go for the time being." So I felt like I needed an outlet to help me process what that meant for my identity, so I started writing. When I started, I wasn't writing a book. I thought it might be a Substack series or something I didn't publish. I was really writing to consolidate my thoughts about what we'd been through, what my children have been through, what myself and my husband have been through as parents, what I've been through as a professional. I was trying to make sense of it; it was my attempt to make sense, made ink. We've got lots of question marks over the labels that we use for neurodivergence, the diagnostic process, I had so many questions about all of that. What it meant for my children, what it meant for me, what it meant for the future. All of that uncertainty pinging around in my head, combined with not knowing how we're going to make this family life work, how I'm going to make my professional life work. I just thought, this is too much for one mind, I need to put this on paper in order to process it. So I started doing that. It was taking the form of shorter form articles because that's what I'm used to writing, but they weren't really designed to be read by anybody or go anywhere. I started doing that, and I set it up as a practice for myself that I was going...

October 9, 202656 min

Fear in the Therapy Room with Michael Guilding

Fear in the Therapy Room with Michael Guilding Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. My guest today is Michael Guilding, a retired psychotherapist with 30 years of clinical experience, including over a decade working within NHS psychological therapies as head of counseling. Michael spent the past 10 years studying the human fear system, building on attachment theory and polyvagal theory to understand complex trauma and depression. He teaches workshops for the Complex Trauma Institute and has just released his book, Fear in the Therapy Room. Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology Links for Michael: https://michaelguilding.com/ Book: Fear in the Therapy Room: https://michaelguilding.com/book/ Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/00rg0AWB Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/fear-in-the-therapy-room/michael-guilding/9781781612903 Links for Rosie: Substack: substack.com/@drrosie Rosie on Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp @drrosiegilderthorp The highlights Michael tells us about who his book, Fear in the Therapy Room, is written for 01:37 Michael talks about the fear system draining Energy 5:45 We discuss burnout and our awareness 9:44 I ask Michael about fear alert, fear arousal, and fear collapse 13:33 Michael explains about the link between fear collapse and depression 20:59 We look at the role of cognition 28:28 Michael talks about rethinking therapeutic touch 32:20 Michael looks at resistance to change 37:08 I ask about supporting clients through chronic stress 43:15 We discuss how to support therapists 50:35 Michael tells us where we can buy his book 52:19 Start Up Your Psychology Practice If you're fitting private practice clients around an employed role that doesn't give you the flexibility that you need, this is for you. Start Up Your Psychology Practice helps you build a practice that can replace your income with fees that work, a clear specialism and marketing that fits your daily life so you can finally let go of the juggle. Right now it includes a two-hour one-to-one intensive with me to plan it all out together. Follow the link to find out more and book a call with me to see if Start Up might be right for you: https://psychologybusinessschool.com/lp/start-up-private-practice-bundle/

October 2, 202646 min

Safeguarding for psychologists in independent practice with Dr Rebekah Eglinton

Safeguarding for psychologists in independent practice with Dr Rebekah Eglinton Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. Today, we're tackling a topic that strikes a chord of pure anxiety for almost every independent practitioner; safeguarding. In institutional settings like the NHS, we're used to having an embedded safeguarding lead, clear-cut multidisciplinary pathways, and a collective safety net. But when you step out into independent practice, that ultimate accountability falls squarely on our shoulders, often leaving us feeling isolated and really anxious when risk comes into the therapy room. So to help us move from a place of paralyzing fear and towards a place where we can feel more kind of realistic, grounded, and confident, I am joined today by the brilliant Dr Rebekah Eglinton. Bekah is a consultant clinical psychologist and the clinical director of Eglinton Consultancy. She has a really deep background in high-stakes safeguarding governance, having previously served as the chief psychologist and head of support, safeguarding, and police referrals at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, where she oversaw thousands of sensitive national-scale referrals. She's also a registrant council member and non-executive director at the Health and Care Professions Council and an associate non-executive director and wellbeing guardian at Devon Partnership NHS Trust. So I have got a brilliant person today to help you deal with your anxiety around safeguarding, and we're going to be talking with Bekah about the things we really need to watch out for in independent practice and also about some training she's developed to help us all feel much more confident as we step into the therapy room, possibly for the first time with clients that might have some risk in their background. Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology Links for Rebekah: Eglinton Consultancy: Safeguarding Training for Psychologists & Therapists: https://www.eglintonconsultancy.com/eventtickets/p/traumainformedtrainingtickets-2cdzs-2adsl www.eglintonconsultancy.com Instagram: @dr.rebekaheglinton Links for Rosie: Substack: substack.com/@drrosie Rosie on Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp @drrosiegilderthorp The highlights Rebekah tells us what she sees as the most common safeguarding blind spots or oversights in independent practice 03:25 Rebekah talk about GDPR 10:30 I ask Rebekah about what ‘defensible documentation’ might actually look like for an independent clinician 19:55 We discuss templates and AI as ways to help with compliance and note taking 24:16 Rebakah tells us what motivated her to develop a training for psychologists in independent practice 33:08 I ask Rebekah how she’s marketed the training 40:23 Rebakah tells us where we can find out more about the training 44:15 Start Up Your Psychology Practice If you're fitting private practice clients around an employed role that doesn't give you the flexibility that you need, this is for you. Start Up Your Psychology Practice helps you build a practice that can replace your income with fees that work, a clear specialism and marketing that fits your daily life so you can finally let go of the juggle. Right now it includes a two-hour one-to-one intensive with me to plan it all out together. Follow the link to find out more and book a call with me to see if Start Up might be right for you: https://psychologybusinessschool.com/lp/start-up-private-practice-bundle/

September 25, 202645 min

AI is changing therapy with Dr Aisha Tariq

AI is changing therapy with Dr Aisha Tariq Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. Almost every psychologist and therapist I speak to right now has some version of the same feeling about AI. A mix of curiosity, a strange sense of guilt, and a worry that they're either being left behind or they're about to do something unethical without realizing it. There is a lot of noise, a lot of hype, and very little practical talk about what actually helps in a real practice, and where the genuine risks of AI might be. My guest today has been doing AI since 2022, long before most of this conversation started. Dr Aisha Tariq is a clinical psychologist and the clinical director of Illuminated Thinking, a Glasgow practice of 25 clinicians. She's built AI into how that practice runs and how her team work clinically, so she can be really specific about what saves real time across her team, and also where the pitfalls are. She's also built her own AI clinical documentation tool, Cogent, and she's the co-founder of the AI in Psychology Summit, which is happening on the 5th of October in 2026. Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology Links: AI in Psychology Summit - 5th October Esther and Aisha are offering listeners 20% off the summit tickets! Follow this link for the discount: https://aipsychology.co.uk/?ref=DRROSIE&discount=PODCAST20 Episode 162: Using AI in therapy and other legal questions with Clare Veal from Aubergine Legal Links for Aisha: Cogent Clinic Links for Rosie: Substack: substack.com/@drrosie Rosie on Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp @drrosiegilderthorp The highlights Aisha tells us about her independent practice and she ended up with a practice of 25 clinicians 02:23 I ask Aisha what it was that made her take an interest in AI 04:22 We discuss the feeling of shame associated with using AI 10:29 Aisha talks about rolling out AI to her team 13:42 Aisha tells us what steps to take if we'd like to explore having these tools in our practices19:50 Aisha talks about the development of Cogent 24:13 I ask Aisha what common mistakes she sees psychologists and therapists making with AI 32:35 We discuss the AI in Psychology Summit 33:54 Start Up Your Psychology Practice If you're fitting private practice clients around an employed role that doesn't give you the flexibility that you need, this is for you. Start Up Your Psychology Practice helps you build a practice that can replace your income with fees that work, a clear specialism and marketing that fits your daily life so you can finally let go of the juggle. Right now it includes a two-hour one-to-one intensive with me to plan it all out together. Follow the link to find out more and book a call with me to see if Start Up might be right for you: https://psychologybusinessschool.com/lp/start-up-private-practice-bundle/

August 28, 202613 min

Fear of Judgement - Colleagues, Clients and the Internet

Fear of Judgement - Colleagues, Clients and the Internet Welcome to the Business of Psychology Podcast, and welcome back to our miniseries on the beliefs that can make it really difficult for us to get started in independent practice or to grow our practice if we already have one. In this series, I'm reflecting on the beliefs that I hear most commonly from my coaching clients and the ones that have been pinging around in my head for years as well, and thinking about where they come from, but also what we can do to try and move through when we want to act against some of these beliefs and how uncomfortable that that can make us. Full show notes for this episode available at The Business of Psychology Links: Episode 182: Neurodivergence: Having the big conversations and living your values with Dr Naomi Fisher Episode 68: How to launch an online course as a psychologist with Dr Marianne Trent Substack: substack.com/@drrosie Rosie on Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp @drrosiegilderthorp The Magnetic Profile In my new mini course, The Magnetic Profile, I walk you through one specific business task. Over five short lessons, we use my Values, Voice, Impact framework to help you choose who your profile is for, say what they most need to hear, and plug it all into a simple template that you can use on directory sites, your website, and as a business asset that I'm going to show you how to repurpose in 100 different ways to help the right clients to find you. Most importantly, you'll come out of the course with a finished profile and proof that you can do this business thing in a way that feels ethical and manageable. You can find all the details here: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/the-magnetic-profile Fear of Judgement The thing that I want to talk about today is the fear of judgment. This sounds different in different people's heads, but I hear a lot of, "Oh, I'm really scared about what my ex-colleagues are going to think," or "Will people think I've sold out? Will people accuse me of being a charlatan, or not good enough, or not experienced enough to offer this thing?" And that really drives a lot of people's reluctance to be visible, especially online. And as you'll know if you've listened to previous series’ of The Business of Psychology, I've recorded episodes recently with people like Naomi Fisher and Marianne Trent, where we've talked about this because it's a very big deal in our community; this is not in people's heads. I think psychology and psychotherapy can both be quite judgmental professional communities, and the way that we're interacting online at the moment is often not very compassionate and very judgmental. So this fear doesn't come from nowhere. Even the stuff we talked about in the first episode of this miniseries about the belief that ‘I'm not good at business’, and how often that can come from this massive pit of shame that people feel about needing money and needing to be paid for their work, and choosing that narrative as a way of keeping themselves safe from being seen as somebody that is money motivated, all of that actually comes from this feeling of being judged by our peers. I'm not going to get into too much the reality of that and the reason that happens, because I know we've talked about that a lot in other episodes. But what I want to bring to your attention is the impact that might be having on the way that you're running your business, because sometimes it's so ingrained within us that it can fly under the radar, and we don't really realize how much our behavior is impacted by this concern about what our peers might be thinking of us. Ultra-Genericism The first thing that I see is ultra-genericism. This might be directory site profiles, website copy, social media content; incredibly generic, vanilla, safe content that doesn't really say anything at all. It's so bland it's pointless, and I always say to my clients, if your voice is not in it, if it isn't something which you're desperate to share with the world, don't share it at all. Because the world is so saturated and full of boring, generic mental health content, there is no point spending your valuable time creating more boring, vanilla mental health content. It's just not going to stand out enough to have any benefit to you or reach any potential clients. But I totally get it. I get why that feels safe, because you can't criticize something that's super generic. That's the first way that I see this showing up, and people really don't realize they're doing that most of the time. It's just what feels natural for them to share. Sharing Photos Or Personal Details. People might avoid sharing any photos or any personal details. I did this. I started my practice and tried to hide behind a brand. I shared a logo, I had a quite good name for the practice, and I hid myself behind all of that because I didn't want anybody to see me at all. It didn't work, spoiler alert! You might find yourself, if this is a big problem for you, over-editing, trying to sound like someone that you're not in everything that you write, everything that you say if you're in a visible setting. If you go to networking, for example, and find yourself talking in a really unnatural way, it may be that this fear of judgment is governing your behavior. Real Risk vs Imagined Risk Something I often talk about with my coaching clients, and this is often most useful in our group coaching sessions, is to assess the real risk versus the imagined risk, because there is real risk, and so we do need to deal with that. We can't just pretend that nobody's ever going to judge you. They probably will, but we need to think about the reality of that and whether that reality matters, and the reality of not doing the things that you're avoiding because of your fear of judgment, and whether that matters. So balancing that up, the consideration of what it's costing you to keep yourself small and invisible and generic, and weighing that against the potential that some colleagues may make judgmental statements. Who Are You Writing For? The other thing I always encourage people to think about when this is a big problem is who they're writing for, and to be really clear on the benefits for the client of everything they're putting out there. This is something that I teach through all of my coaching, that the client's need comes first. So we're not putting out a social media post unless we're really clear on what the benefit is to the potential client. We think about how what I'm saying here is going to leave them feeling? What is it going to give them? If we don't have a strong reason that it's going to be beneficial to the client, whether they come on and pay for our services, or whether they're just passively absorbing this content, we want to always be leaving those people with a benefit. So if we know that, if we're really clear on, "Okay, I'm worried that my colleague might read this and judge me, but I'm also really confident that somebody in this client group reading this is going to get a real benefit from it," very often we can move through the discomfort of what our colleague thinks because we know what we're trying to do for the client, and we're really confident and happy that that is aligned with our values. So it's a good example of how we can use our values like a North Star to guide us through the swamp of a fear of judgment, which never feels nice really. Locus Of Control The other thing I always encourage people to think about is the concept of locus of control, and specifically that you cannot control what your colleagues think or why they're going to think that about you. It's classic, isn't it? People have their own psychological reasons for judging other people. We can't control any of those. And so you can be really careful about what you say, you can be really careful about what you put out there, but the reality is, if you do anything, there are going to be people that don't like you and that judge you for it, especially if you're successful and you get in front of lots of people, then it's absolutely inevitable that you're going to face judgment and that you're going to annoy some people. What you have to be clear on is what makes that worth it for you. There are some battles that I choose not to fight. There are some things that I see happening, and I don't put my head above the parapet and I don't fight for every cause that I believe in because I'm a human being and there's a threshold for what conflict I can take, but there are certain things that I will speak up about and I am willing to be visible talking about even when not everybody will agree with me, and that's a lesson I really had to learn writing my book about being a parent to autistic and ADHD children and putting...

August 21, 202619 min

Procrastination, Overwhelm and the Illusion of “I’ll Start When…”

Procrastination, Overwhelm and the Illusion of "I’ll Start When…" Welcome to The Business of Psychology podcast and our special miniseries on the beliefs that keep people stuck in either a private practice that doesn't really work for them or that stop them getting started in private practice at all. These are mini episodes where I'm sharing the things that I've learned from coaching hundreds of other psychologists and therapists and also going through my own mental struggles with the rollercoaster that is business. Today I want to talk about procrastination and overwhelm, and specifically how frequently I hear people saying that they're just not the kind of person that can overcome their procrastination or overwhelm. Full show notes for this episode available at The Business of Psychology Links: Episode 179: Why every therapist needs to use social media to improve their SEO Substack: substack.com/@drrosie Rosie on Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp @drrosiegilderthorp The Magnetic Profile In my new mini course, The Magnetic Profile, I walk you through one specific business task. Over five short lessons, we use my Values, Voice, Impact framework to help you choose who your profile is for, say what they most need to hear, and plug it all into a simple template that you can use on directory sites, your website, and as a business asset that I'm going to show you how to repurpose in 100 different ways to help the right clients to find you. Most importantly, you'll come out of the course with a finished profile and proof that you can do this business thing in a way that feels ethical and manageable. You can find all the details here: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/the-magnetic-profile Procrastination And Overwhelm I think most psychologists and therapists acknowledge that all human beings use procrastination as a technique sometimes, and that it is part of a normal human experience to get overwhelmed sometimes. But I think a lot of people do have this story about themselves that they are a procrastinator, or they are someone who becomes overwhelmed easily, and as a result, the world of successful business is not available to them. And this really troubles me, and I have to say that something I think is unhelpful about the way that some people's late diagnosis of neurodivergence is framed, is that some people will receive that diagnostic label and then think that writes them off from being able to ever achieve success in business. Or they'll heavily criticize themselves because their assessment has illuminated perhaps things that they're not so brilliant at and they will feel like they're going to have to push a boulder up a hill to be successful in business. When actually, if we think psychologically about what procrastination and overwhelm actually are, then there are so many ways that we can use the strengths that lie behind those tendencies to supercharge our businesses. Some of the most successful clients that I have worked with would identify themselves as procrastinators and people who struggle with overwhelm, because those come from places of deep care and passion for the people that they want to support with their businesses. I think it's really important that, while it's helpful to identify in yourself if you do have tendencies towards procrastination or becoming overwhelmed, we shouldn't allow that kind of story to become a way that we define ourselves that then blocks us from looking for the ways we can play to our strengths to implement good business advice that we might be given. I want to share today, how we can move through the blocking belief that we might have about ourselves, often by accepting a bit of support where we might need it. Something I hear all the time from clients that come to me for coaching is that they've signed up for coaching because they're really annoyed with themselves. They've usually done loads of work, but they feel like they've got about 20 tabs open on their browser and nothing is actually getting completed. They can never tick anything off their list because it's never good enough. Some people will talk about this as procrastination. Other people will talk about the emotional experience. They'll talk about feeling completely overwhelmed. So they open all the tabs, but then they never feel like they engage properly with anything that they start because they become overwhelmed, and they just run away from it. If we think about where this comes from psychologically, you would not feel that way if you didn't care about your potential clients, if you didn't really want this business to be successful. So although this is classic avoidance behavior, there's motivation behind it, and where there's motivation, we can work with that. I never feel despondent if I have a client who is a procrastinator, who's becoming overwhelmed, because it actually tells me that they want to do this, that deep down, this is important to them, or this wouldn't be procrastination, it would just be something that they decided they weren't going to pursue. We know the brain likes to procrastinate because it allows us to avoid the potential for shame, rejection, or failure. An excellent short-term strategy. It gives us the illusion of safety because we get to stay safe in our research mode, which a lot of us really enjoy. But the trouble is procrastination and perfectionism go hand in hand. It is so likely that the reason that you feel like you need to avoid these tasks is that the bar you've set for yourself is super high, that you want this to be the best, the most perfect independent practice that your community has ever seen. That can make every task feel too big to start. It's also true that if you set the bar for yourself that you need to have a complete understanding of something, it can become overwhelming really quickly. This often happens when people talk to me about overwhelm rather than procrastination. Often it's because they're expecting themselves to become a lawyer, because it tends to be that people get really stuck in the overwhelm around the legal aspects of setting up their practice. This can be because they look at the legal templates and think that they need to be able to understand why every comma is in the place that it is. We do provide training with our legal documents because I want you to understand the principles behind them, but the fact is, unless you're going to train in commercial law like Clare Veal from Aubergine Legal, our lovely lawyer, has done, then you're not going to understand every minute detail of your contracts and policies. We can understand the broad brush principles, but we're not lawyers and we don't need to become lawyers. We have our own expertise and that's why we pay Clare Veal to draft those templates for us, because you don't need to become a lawyer. And if you think that you do because you believe everything needs to be perfect and you need to be in full control of every minute detail of your practice, then of course that's going to be overwhelming. A Need To Do Everything At Once The other thing that I think contributes to overwhelm and procrastination is a sense that people need to do everything at once, like getting their practice up and running and fully competent tomorrow. That's not possible. I am a big believer that we can make a lot of progress, my core coaching program is called Start Up in 90 Days, because you absolutely can, over 90 days, get a practice up and running and clients coming in. That is possible. One week is not possible, not to do it to the standard that you're going to want. I think often people have a really unrealistic expectation of themselves, that they're going to be able to learn everything they need to learn and implement it all in a very short period of time. And of course, that is massively overwhelming. Overconsuming Advice The other thing I see is people over-consuming advice. Sometimes people do this with this podcast or with my coaching programs. I'll see in the backend of my coaching website that they've watched every single one of my lessons, and that's a red flag, because if you watch them all in the first week that you're in the coaching platform, that tells me you're taking on board a lot of information, but you're not taking the action. When I coach people, I give very short, 10 or 15 minutes of information, and then I give something practical for you to do to move it forward in your business. The reason I do that is that we are really prone to overwhelming ourselves by thinking about the whole picture. And actually, we tend to get much more success if I give people a template of the business plan that they're going to have fully created by the end of the program, because I do want people to know what we're going to cover and how everything fits together, but then I encourage you to go step by step. Because if you think about the whole big thing, of course that's overwhelming. But if you just take the next step, the next thing we need to do,...

August 14, 202626 min

"I’m Not Good at Business" – The Stories That Keep You Small

“I’m Not Good at Business” - The Stories That Keep You Small In this miniseries I'm going to talk about some of the beliefs that I see most commonly in psychologists and therapists that keep people small, safe, and not really getting the most benefit out of being in independent practice. I'm going to share how if we can become aware of them, there are practical steps we can take that most of the time will get us through the discomfort that comes along with these beliefs. If that can give you a little bit more confidence to step forward in your business, I will be extremely happy. Today we're going to talk about the 'I'm not good at business' story. This is the one I told myself so relentlessly at the beginning of my practice, and I hear in around 50% of calls that I have with coaching clients. We're going to talk about the belief, where it comes up, how it sabotages your attempts to start or grow in independent practice, and look at some ways we can build new evidence to counteract the belief and move through the discomfort that it causes. Full show notes for this episode available at The Business of Psychology Links for Rosie: Substack: substack.com/@drrosie Rosie on Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp @drrosiegilderthorp The Magnetic Profile In my new mini course, The Magnetic Profile, I walk you through one specific business task. Over five short lessons, we use my Values, Voice, Impact framework to help you choose who your profile is for, say what they most need to hear, and plug it all into a simple template that you can use on directory sites, your website, and as a business asset that I'm going to show you how to repurpose in 100 different ways to help the right clients to find you. Most importantly, you'll come out of the course with a finished profile and proof that you can do this business thing in a way that feels ethical and manageable. You can find all the details here: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/the-magnetic-profile The 'I'm not good at business' Belief At the beginning of my practice, I didn't think that I had the kind of personality that would make a good business owner. I'd been told throughout my life that I was quite soft, that I was quite gentle, that people would walk all over me. Elements of that were true. In my personal life, I don't particularly like to be the boss. I don't like telling people what to do. It's certainly true that in a negotiation, I will not do what they do on The Apprentice and be proud of having a laser-focused obsession with profit, and I'm not single-minded. We consume a lot of media about what good business looks like, and it's this very shark-ish, profit-focused, screw you, I'm going to take what I want attitude. I'd grown up watching The Apprentice and Dragon's Den and absorbing those narratives that don't fit my personality at all. So I think I'd bought the idea that if you weren't like that, you weren't good at business. Obviously that is not true at all, because when you get out into the business community and meet people who are really successful, you discover quickly that the people that make it to the top are warm, they are empathic, they're really good at working out what people need from them and finding creative ways to meet that need. There are some exceptions, but in the industries that we're interested in, in mental health or education, or industries adjacent to wellbeing, if you lack that empathy and you lack any compassion, it's very difficult for you to come up with the kind of ideas that are going to take off. I also learned that building relationships and being a trustworthy person to be in a business relationship with is a real accelerant to business growth. That's something, that if you're completely single-minded and out for the profit margin, and have no passion for helping people or your local business community, is incredibly hard to fake. Establishing meaningful relationships where people will give you a leg up, I think would be impossible if you had that kind of personality type. What I discovered quite quickly in my business journey was that leaning into the skills that I have as a psychologist, the fact that I am much more interested in helping people solve their problems than I am making a profit, the fact that I genuinely care about the people that I meet at business networking, and I really get quite invested and excited in their business problems and want to try and help, those were superpowers that made me stand out, that helped me build the relationship network, which accelerated my business to being quite successful reasonably quickly. What I do in coaching is try and encourage other people to really recognise the strengths that you have in your personality, that can be rocket fuel for your business, and to deal with what might be the limitations. I know that because I'm not naturally 100% focused on the profit margin, I won't make a deal with somebody on the spot because I know if I do, it's very likely that I'll undercharge or do something that compromises the health of my business, because I'm excited to work with them, and I'm not very good at doing the mental maths on the spot. I know that about myself, so I changed my sales process so that I'm sending the proposal after the call. I am never talking about the exact solution that I'm going to offer on a call. You'll notice if you ever do a coaching discovery call with me, that most of the time I'll talk about what you think about whether StartUp might be right for you. I might give you my opinion about whether one of my coaching programs is likely to be a good fit, but I won't make the offer and send you through all the details until after our call, because I don't always make brilliant decisions for my business in the heat of the moment. Rather than criticizing myself and saying, "I'm not good at business, so I shouldn't do it," I take an approach where I allow myself to play to my strengths, and then I mitigate the bits that I'm not so good at by getting in support or just switching up my processes so that I have more time for the bits that I know I'm going to struggle with. That's the kind of thing that you can do if this ‘I'm not good at business’ story isn't dominating your psychology. While it's front and center, you don't see any of that. In those early days where I thought I was just bad at business, it felt very existential. It was like, either I make this really successful really quickly, or I've got no business being in business, and I should get out and get back into an employed role, which wasn't even possible for me. I think it's really important to try and move past this belief, otherwise you can make a decision which is based on very black and white thinking, defining yourself either as good or bad at business, when in reality there are so many ways that all different personalities can be good at business if we understand ourselves well and we're willing to structure our work around that. The Culture It's really interesting to consider where this ‘I'm not good at business’ belief that is so pervasive in our community actually comes from, because most people going into independent practice actually don't have any business experience. We by definition don't have evidence for this belief, and yet it is so common. I think the answer is that it's something that's really baked into the culture, in the NHS, but also in our training pathways. There's so many deep reasons that might be baked into our culture, and I think one that needs talking about is the relationship between psychology, psychotherapy, and privilege. I think we have a strange cultural problem with the concept of earning money and a deeply ingrained belief that people that want money are less pure, less compassionate, less caring than people who don't even think about money. I could give you direct quotes of people saying that to me in training, so I don't think it's that much of a stretch. As with almost everything, I think that is uncomfortably linked with the class system that we have here in the UK, and that potentially psychology and psychotherapy came from this kind of upper class tradition where it wasn't polite to talk about money or think about money, but that's because you didn't have to talk or think about money. It's our job to challenge that and to think about whether we really believe in this way of thinking, or whether we want to start thinking a bit differently. If this is the culture that you've been trained in, then the ‘I'm not good at business’ story is actually an affirmative one. It's one that began as positive; people telling themselves, "I'm doing this low-paid work because I'm a good person, because I really care about people, and that means that I must be rejecting all things that are about money and acquisition of money, and business falls under that category.” I think it's a classic example of stories that were once positive for us becoming toxic and holding us back as we develop through our lives and they start to become more problematic. If you are plagued by this, then getting together in your peer supervision group and chatting about it and thinking through where did this story come from for

May 15, 202653 min

Neurodivergence: Having the big conversations and living your values with Dr Naomi Fisher

Neurodivergence: Having the big conversations and living your values with Dr Naomi Fisher Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. Today we're joined by a guest I recommend often. When I'm talking to clients and other parents, I very frequently find myself recommending her books and accessible webinars on supporting children who are struggling through alternative education and reducing demand. And when I'm talking to other psychologists and therapists, I use her as an excellent example of somebody who's able to combine two specialisms and pull off a psychology based portfolio career beautifully. Dr Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist specialising in autism and trauma. She's an EMDR consultant and trainer, and a prolific author who's cultivated her expertise through research, public sector work, and in her independent practice. Today we're exploring how her experiences doing her PhD in autism and NHS practice has shaped the impactful work that she does today. And we're also going to dive into the politics of neurodiversity and why Naomi is concerned that current social pressures are making it really hard for clinicians to have those nuanced conversations about diagnosis and education, and why she's launched her new podcast, Let's Talk Neurosense alongside Dr Danielle Drinkwater. Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology Links for Naomi: Website: naomifisher.co.uk Podcast: Let's Talk Neurosense: The Psychology of Neurodiversity Sunstack: Think Again: Making Childhood Fit For Children Links for Rosie: Substack: substack.com/@drrosie Rosie on Instagram: @rosiegilderthorp @drrosiegilderthorp The highlights Naomi tells us about her unusual route into clinical psychology, doing her PhD first 01:57 I ask Naomi about the central question of her PhD 06:38 Naomi talks about what drew her into clinical work 08:45 We discuss the breadth of experience our clinical training gave us 12:07 Naomi describes what she typically does in her practice at the moment 15:54 Naomi talks about her drive get good information out there and the backlash she’s received 20:21 I ask Naomi how she deals with being recognised 26:48 Naomi tells us about her podcast, Let’s Talk Neurosense 37:33 Naomi tells us where we can find her 51:48 Start Up Your Psychology Practice Are you tired of just talking about starting your practice but never quite committing? If you’re ready to stop dancing with burnout and finally go 'all in', my 90-day program, 'Start Up Your Psychology Practice,' was made for you. This is a group coaching experience designed to help you ethically replace your full-time salary in part-time hours. We handle everything: from legal compliance and GDPR to attracting your first consistent stream of self-funding clients. No more piecing it together alone. And here is the best part: sign up before the end of May to get £200 off your investment. Let’s build a practice that gives you the freedom you deserve. Apply today: https://psychologybusinessschool.com/lp/start-up-private-practice-bundle/