TILT – Therapeutic Innovations in Light of Technology
a few minutes or an hour or even a day find that particularly helpful special report, audio recording, or book and have it delivered instantly to their email inbox. In short, they can be reading or listening to their solutions in the time it would have taken them to leave a message for a therapist. This means that therapists are competing with authors, gurus, and others offering various forms of self-help. Will our traditional model be seen as a viable one amidst these burgeoning alternatives? Another social transformation of our era is the almost universal time crunch—none of us ever has nearly enough of it. Thus, taking a couple of hours from a busy day to get to the therapist’s for a personal session and back again—regardless of whatever else is going on in life—feels to many like a grossly inefficient waste of time. It’s much more convenient to hire a life and relationship coach who is open to spur-of-the-moment telephone and electronic “sessions.” What to do, what to do? In general, we need to think more broadly about what we have to offer the world and how best to communicate it to as many people as possible. In short, we need to share our wisdom and knowledge in ways that both serve the community as it really is and better leverage our own time and energy in the process. It is time to construct a new model that supports us when the economy is booming and doesn’t desert us when the economy is tanking. Some psychotherapists, seeing the writing on the wall, are responding by updating the way they do one-on-one therapy to bring them more in line with what people seem to want. They are adding e-therapy (online via web, chat, text or 46
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email.) They are offering phone sessions in both hour sessions and abbreviated formats—fifteenminute ‘laser’ sessions, for example, helping clients could get back on track after a disturbing interaction at home or at work. Online therapy answers a lot of questions for those who want to continue doing one to one work but want to meet the demands of our culture. For example, our culture is seeking instant gratification. Imagine how helpful you could be to a client with a strategically placed instant message. Say, just before your client goes into a big job interview. Consider how helpful a wellphrased email could be - allowing the client to read it again and again. These are simple ways to leverage one's time and provide important benefits to the client. Some years ago, I too was at a point when I realized I was tired of always hustling to get more clients into my practice—which was feeling more and more like a job than a vocation. This particularly hit home one December. I was feeling very burned out and really needed some time off to rest and re-energize. I thought about the odd contradiction of our profession. We are a helping profession. Yet when we need some time to rest when we need to help ourselves - we do so at the expense of our income. I knew there had to be a better answer. I came upon a business model that had been used successfully in other fields, notably by Andrea Lee (http://www.andreajlee. com/blog/) in the coaching profession, called the Multiple Streams of Income model, found it useful, and decided to modify it for therapists. Simply put, in this model clinicians augment their current in-person practice with information