People often think “networking” mysterious, alien, and discrete – distinct from living, socializing, interacting with others. To my mind, pretty much everything I do that isn’t solitary is a form of “networking.”
When therapists think about networking as this special professional performance they need to master, they create unnecessary anxiety about an activity that’s actually fundamental to human existence: connecting with other people.
Those who describe themselves as “naturally introverted or socially anxious” often do a fair amount of networking in their lives; they just aren’t aware of it. A good challenge for anyone who needs referrals is to take an inventory of their social interactions over the course of a week. With whom do they speak? About what? For how long? In what contexts? Most introverts have a lot of interactions.
Any attempt to “network” that requires someone to do something they wouldn’t naturally do is almost doomed to fail.
What you’ll discover about yourself
Everyone is different. When people take an inventory of their social interactions, maybe they’ll learn that the bulk of them are with service providers or vendors. Maybe they’ll learn that most of them are with “loose ties” – people whose paths they cross repeatedly, but with whom they don’t have deep conversations. Maybe they’ll realize that the bulk of their conversations are with peers in structured classroom-like settings.
I don’t presume to know what people might discover. What I imagine, though, is that people will discover something about themselves, about the interactions that happen naturally, that feel most natural, that inspire the least anxiety – and that, therefore, provide the most promising venue in which to imagine communicating something about what they’re looking for in the way of patients, what they might have to offer to those with whom they’re interacting.
You’re already doing it
My hunch is that most people already are communicating about their work in those natural contexts without it feeling forced or salesy. Most therapists are probably already talking about therapy in their daily conversations. The question isn’t how do they begin to communicate about it, but rather, how do they do more of it, and how do they “convert” – how do they make sure that the people with whom they’re talking already think of them as resources when it comes to therapy.
They’re not realizing, or communicating, that they represent a potential solution to a problem the people they’re talking with might have – maybe finding a therapist for themselves, maybe helping a friend or family member find a therapist.
It might be as simple as saying, “If you ever need help finding a therapist, I can help,” or, “I know how hard it is to find a therapist if you aren’t a therapist, or don’t know one – I’ve helped people find therapists a lot before.”
In practice: it means listening carefully for clues that someone might find your relationships and background helpful. It means paying attention and speaking authentically about both what you do as a therapist and how therapists get their patients. Basically, it means showing up, authentically, in relationships. No more than that.
Our shame about business
Many therapists have shame about the business side of our practice. We’re very comfortable talking about what we do in session with our patients, about our training, our supervision, our thinking. But we think it unseemly to talk about how hard it is to get patients, about how opaque the referral process is, about how mysterious it is even to many advanced therapists.
It’s almost like we think we’re not supposed to talk about that part of our “business” because it’s “business.” And we don’t think of ourselves as businesspeople. (And isn’t that itself a fascinating commentary on how we’ve internalized certain cultural splits between helping and earning, between care and commerce?)
This shame often prevents us from being genuinely helpful to the people around us who might need exactly the kind of guidance that comes from understanding how this world actually works. When we can talk about the challenges of building a practice with the same authenticity we bring to discussing clinical dilemmas, we become infinitely more useful to the people in our lives who are struggling to navigate mental healthcare – whether for themselves or their loved ones.
The most effective networking happens when we stop trying to network and start recognizing the resource we represent to those with whom we already are interacting.
