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[00:00:02] Wendy Kendall: Hello, and welcome to episode 12, from consumers to citizens, healing as the 3rd pillar of liberation in our practices. So what is all this about? Well, I wanted to share with you in this season finale, this final episode, some of my emerging thoughts and perspectives having had these conversations, the subsequent conversations that I've had with people who've been in touch, you know, after the episodes have been released, and who have shared some of their stories. And how it's making me think about what it means to have a private practice. And so I want to start by going back to episode 1.
[00:01:03] Wendy Kendall: I was very clear at the start of episode 1 that one of the things that happens I mean, I see this all the time in Practice Accelerator in our, in the program that we run where practitioners have this need to or for a healing process through their private practices. So, you know, as we've as we've seen so many of us come into private practice because we want to create a space where we can find some healing for ourselves, where we can have autonomy, where we can have freedom, where we can have flexibility, where we can set our practices up in ways that provide a healing environment. And some of that healing is necessary because of things that have gone on in our past, but also, and meaning, you know, childhood experiences and and experiences we had growing up. But also, a lot of people talking about experiences, harmful experiences that they've had in their working environment or through their career with career trauma and so on. And so we come to this place of private practice.
[00:02:25] Wendy Kendall: And what I see is that healing through practice ultimately leads to courageous leadership, a desire to create change, desire for things to be different from for other people. And I guess the premise that I see in terms of empowering psychologists to create practices that help them to feel like they're living again is that if we want more peace and safety and community out there in the world, we can also start within our practices. But I I wanted to go back to another story, which got me thinking. Just a couple of years ago. So I was running the psychology practice accelerator from 20 January 2018, we started the first program.
[00:03:35] Wendy Kendall: And the idea was to offer a development program for psychologists in private practice. I was working a lot with global corporates at the time. We spent a lot of time and energy and effort growing people so that they could grow the business. And it really made me think that when we're in our own businesses, in our own practices as psychologists, that we don't have access to high quality development programs. And so because that was my specialism, talent development was my specialism then, that's what I created for psychologists in private practice, how you can come and experience a developmental process and develop your practice at the same time.
[00:04:23] Wendy Kendall: So the psychology practice accelerator, and then we had, and that was growing as a program, and then we had the pandemic, and a lot of people came into Practice Accelerator and it became a much bigger part of what I do, on a day to day basis. And by about 2022, we'd all been through the pandemic and I thought to myself, people had said in fact, acceleration. I'm I think I'm I feel a bit tired. I'm I'm exhausted. I'm not sure about the whole acceleration topic.
[00:05:02] Wendy Kendall: I think it might be a bit overwhelming. And that got me really thinking about what are we accelerating towards, because what I didn't want to do is to give people the sense that they were just accelerating towards burnout and overwhelm. And so for a year, we had, a different name for the program, which was the INSPIRED practice because it felt like what we needed is more inspiration back in our practices to take a breath. You know, inspire is about breathing in, so to take a breath and to connect back with the things that inspired us. And then that transition year made me think, you know, there's something else that we're accelerating towards, and it's not the whole 10 times your program, 10 times your business, etcetera.
[00:05:59] Wendy Kendall: It's about accelerating the transition in our practices from them being places that extract the life out of us to places that give life back to us, and that resource us and resource our clients and give life back to our clients. So we went through a whole process of exploring what it meant to be a regenerative psychology practice. How could we look at, you know, some of the work that was being done in regenerative businesses and what it meant to adapt and incorporate and bring those principles, like what did those principles look like when we integrated them into a psychology practice. And then, you know, that process has carried on, that process of reflection, and recently I've been reading the book Citizens by John Alexander because he, has been speaking to one of the biggest challenges that we have, which is that we have been raised within a system of consumption and of seeing ourselves as consumers. And his proposition in this book is how do we change that story where we don't just see ourselves as consumers anymore, but we see ourselves as citizens, and we connect with one another as citizens.
[00:07:42] Wendy Kendall: And I thought that was a super interesting perspective to bring to private practice as well, Because the very idea of private practice, and in fact what often can happen in in discussions in our professional community is that private practice is seen as a place where we bring we extract value and keep it for ourselves, where we go to make a bunch of money, and that we're not giving back to society anymore. So, I mean, this is particularly in the UK context where a lot of psychologists maybe have started their career in public sector, especially NHS, but me as an occupational psychologist, I also started within, public sector working, with the with the British army. So, thinking about this notion that or this, idea we have that private practices are places where value is extracted and directed into our pockets. And and so in that sense when we go into private practice, if we were to be following those kinds of business models, what we would be doing is treating mental health as a commodity, treating it and treating our clients as consumers of mental health services. And this also made me think about a recent post that I saw on LinkedIn.
[00:09:27] Wendy Kendall: And I will put something in the show notes actually about this, about this post because I I reposted it on LinkedIn, and it it seemed to really resonate with a lot of people. And I was kind of bowled over by that. I was a little bit surprised that it had people thinking. And so this was, a post, which was looking at and I'm sorry. I'm going to probably pronounce someone's name incorrectly here, but this was by Casper Benjamin Reimer Bjergskov, I hope I've got that right, who was one of the leaders of the rebiz tipping points program that I did a few months ago.
[00:10:25] Wendy Kendall: Again, I'll put links in show notes, but he talked about in this, post about the concept of efficiency and how, different concepts that we brought into business have commoditized time itself. And he says when time becomes commodified, we begin to optimize it. That's why our efforts to increase efficiency never actually grant us more time to pursue our desires. Instead, they accelerate our consumption of time, making it impossible for us to relax and unwind. And then it's he says, in this way our relentless pursuit of efficiency creates a paradox.
[00:11:14] Wendy Kendall: Despite our ability to produce and consume more than ever before, we find ourselves emptier and more exhausted, perpetually chasing an elusive sense of fulfillment. The more we quantify and optimize, the less time and space we leave for the immeasurable qualities that truly enrich our lives. And this really struck me because it captured so well the experience a lot of psychologists have coming into private practice where their time becomes inherently commoditized, so they start to sell their time in or in exchange for money. And it becomes exhausting and and then it becomes really hard to get off that treadmill. And the reason our business exists is because people, because psychologists are getting exhausted and overwhelmed and burnt out even in their own private practices.
[00:12:20] Wendy Kendall: So so this kind of was making all of the story, you know, it's filling in parts of the story. Why just copying business models into our practices was still leading to a situation where psychologists were maxed out, couldn't serve more people, this is why we talk about topics like how to diversify, but also fundamentally it was why we cannot continue to build meaningful, sustainable practices that resource us, that are life giving for us, that are life giving for our clients, whilst we continue to run on this treadmill of consumption, these kind of consumer stories as opposed to stories of being citizens and how we have reciprocal relationships with one another. So this this was all kind of forming in my head as a a kind of hypothesis, if you like, of how we transition from consumption led private practices based on extractive consumption led business models and how we accelerate towards regenerative practices where we build in, reciprocal, life giving, restorative principles in order to flourish as practitioners. So I wanted to think about then why therefore within that new system, within a you know, moving towards a future where we have more regenerative private practices or more regenerative practices, the private bit kind of gets it kinda sticks in my throat a little bit now because I feel like the the privatization is is a bit like the commoditization of our services.
[00:14:29] Wendy Kendall: So, you know, if we want to accelerate towards regenerative practices, why is healing so foundational? And I think the reason why, it's so foundational is there can be a temptation in so much of the literature, in so much practice, to address overwhelm and burnout as an individual problem, as an individual practitioner issue. And, you know, I'm not I don't want to do I don't want to do injustice to topics like self care, but I think what we also and so many of us are highlighting this in different areas. We need to address systems, including our practice as a system, and context. In, you know, when I think about why healing is so foundational.
[00:15:34] Wendy Kendall: So here are 5 things that I learned from, or 5 things that I really took from the conversations that I've had with practitioners through this, The first is that, you know, coming back to this topic, burnout and overwhelm are driven by the system and the context, but we've tended to focus on the individual. So when I think about what Lara Villa, doctor Lara Villa shared with us in episode 2, which was around city living, just just actually what does it mean to have an overwhelmed nervous system, and and what do we do about that when we live in the middle of a city? You know, we spoke in episode 11 about the very the reality of how systems of oppression that require people to mask, split off parts of themselves, to only show up, you know, as certain parts of themselves in order to be acceptable, in order to be, you know, the acceptable face of whatever. And and about exploitation as well, you know, the experiences of being burnt out in organizations, of even organizations that have, you know, humanitarian principles can actually be exploitative if, if we're thinking about, you know, trying to maximize well, if we treat people like machines, we end up with systems that are exploitative because they don't recognize that people are not components in a machine.
[00:17:31] Wendy Kendall: They you know? And we we focus on this whole kind of time and optimization and so on and don't resource people correctly and don't think about how people are living systems, not machine systems. So for me, what that says to me is I I need to integrate what it takes to live well and to to flourish as a as a living being, and I need to think about that, think about that within my context. What does that look like for me in this context? Are there, you know, the what reciprocal relationships do I need to get into?
[00:18:19] Wendy Kendall: Not what individual changes do I need to make, but, yeah, consider that it's not just an individual failing or an individual problem or an individual development, but actually reconnecting with relationships and, yeah, considering all of those contexts, what can I do to sustain my ability and to regenerate and restore myself within this context? The second thing I learned is that and this is I keep coming back to this principle, and I keep being surprised by it, but it's still here. And that is the body is central to our practice. We never talk about this. You know, we we have these working environments where we're sat in front of screens and, you know, I recently put a post up on LinkedIn where I talked about the fact that I had started to prioritize my ability to do a big walk in the morning.
[00:19:30] Wendy Kendall: And I walk my dog, but, it's it's also because I need to walk, and to get a really good workout in, you know, for my well for for my wellness. And and that means that we need to design healthy practices and healthy products and services that nourish bodies to heal and flourish. So body is central to our practice. Now really think about the conversations we had with Bianca, and with Rebecca Tennyson, where and Bianca has this beautiful practice called the autoimmune therapist, and she had to integrate those into her practice to support her physical healing. And, you know, Rebecca as well, that that meant structuring her practice differently.
[00:20:44] Wendy Kendall: So it wasn't work all the hours God sends in the machine and then try and tack on some self care. It was in order to make this practice work, it has to be healing and restorative to health and body as well. I think I think that needs to be central. I'm I'm I'm glad that I've been able to do that for my practice too, and I feel like we need to think about how we structure our practices so that we can so that we can continue to prioritize that. 3rd thing that I really learned is that healing includes relationships.
[00:21:39] Wendy Kendall: Like, you know, when you think about or when we come back to this topic of ourselves or this story of ourselves as consumers, it often gets called the story of separation. So this is something that's really central to thinking about how we create, or how we move towards supporting living systems and supporting regeneration. And it's that, you know, we got stuck in this story of separation that somehow we are separate and apart from the living world, and that therefore we can, you know, mine and exploit and exploit and do all those other things. And the destruction of the living world won't have an impact on us because somehow we're separate from it and some of that thinking is still pervasive. And what these conversations have really shown is that in so many ways this story of separation has pervaded private practice.
[00:22:39] Wendy Kendall: You know it's it is a story of leaving sometimes. It's a story of only feeling safe if we're on our own in our practices, meaning only, you know, not feeling safe to outsource, not feeling as though we can trust other people to care about our practices as much as we do, being concerned about being visible, being worried about being seen. I also see this story of separation in, you know, this time for money paradigm where we're often selling individual services. And I even have conversations with people when we are opening the doors for Practice Accelerator, which is a hybrid program. It includes group and community and as well as some individual, but very often people people express concern about being part of a group, being part of a community.
[00:23:41] Wendy Kendall: They say things like I think I'll just stay with the individual coaching. I think, you know, I don't really like other, people so much, and I mean I chuckle because I know how they feel, you know, sometimes we feel really peopled out in our program in our profession. But, what I and what I'm kind of really taking on board is that the healing process in our practices includes healing our ability or repairing our ability to build relationships in our practices, to trust other people, to come into our practice and be part of this community and this this system, this life giving system, to trust them to do what they can to and and, you know, maybe they make mistakes and maybe we learn, just as with all relationships, we have rupture and repair, To trust ourselves or to trust that we will be okay even if we're visible and even if there is there are questions that are raised, you know, it's really this this coming into community is fundamental to what it means to heal as a human being, and we know this in our practices, right, a lot of the stuff that a lot of my, a lot of my clinical and counseling colleagues will see people who have experienced, you know, attachment and relational traumas growing up.
[00:25:32] Wendy Kendall: But even for me as an organizational psychologist, when I'm thinking about the dynamics that happen in teams and organizations and leadership and so on, we see a lot of those relational challenges that come up there as well. So point 3 is that healing includes moving into relationships and community as well. The 4th thing that I've learned is that healing includes a kind of shedding or letting go. So letting go of expectations of what it means to be successful. I often we've received a lot of advertising, this story of being a consumer and what success means.
[00:26:25] Wendy Kendall: Success is equated with how much can you consume, how much product do you sell, you know, this transactional stuff about, about, about what business is is. You know, letting go of some of those expectations, letting go of shame that might be associated with some of those messages. Maybe even letting go of an idea of what we want to do in our careers as psychologists and how we do that. So if we're thinking about differently about, you know, moving away from consumers, moving towards being citizens that are in a reciprocal relationship where we resource one another, that often will mean rethinking how we practice and how we support and resource communities and how they are involved in that process. We also talked in several episodes about deinstitutionalization.
[00:27:37] Wendy Kendall: So I remember when we talked about, with oh, I'm having a a blank moment. Hang on a minute. I don't know if you know this, but when you get to a certain age, you suddenly don't remember certain words or names. And so I'm just popping in because I can see that person's face, and I can see the podcast episode, and I know the discussions we had, and now it's completely gone out of my mind. We were talking about how private practices shape our personal development.
[00:28:23] Wendy Kendall: Louise, I was thinking about the conversation that I had with doctor Louise Hall, doctor Kate Jenkins, and Jeanette Fegan, where Louise was talking about the unlearning, the deinstitutionalization that happens in schools. So she'd had this experience of having a kind of nomad practice and living and working in different countries, and that had also meant some homeschooling or she and I think I don't under I don't remember the details, and we didn't go into the the detailed story of that, but Louise's point was she'd integrated homeschooling and part of the homeschooling process was the unlearning of all of the bureaucracies and institutionalized ways of learning. And so shedding that was really important. And I think that I've seen that, and I've experienced that myself where we gradually start to let go of what we thought were the unwritten rules of what life looks like in private practice. And we have to almost deinstitutionalize.
[00:29:49] Wendy Kendall: So number 5, the 5th thing that I really took on board in this experience of these conversations was that healing leads to valuing ourselves and others. And, you know, again in the conversation that we had with Jeanette Fegan, for example, who really focuses on self worth in her practice, No. Valuing ourselves is really fundamental to our practice because if we don't value ourselves and our services, it's really hard to express that value to people, you know, in a reciprocal value exchange relationship. So another very key element is healing our relationship with money. We talked, with, with Matt and with, apologies, with, of course, with Andrea, with Andrea Rotundo.
[00:31:01] Wendy Kendall: So we you know, in when it comes to healing our relationship with money, just thinking about getting comfortable with financial flows in our practice and not necessarily seeing that as representative of our identity, but being able to have conversations with a professional about the financial safety of our practice. Also thinking, you know, when it comes to valuing ourselves and our services and being able to express that value, as Matt said, you know, even for some of the graduates that he works with, that he feels as though that wasn't being fully expressed, even in their training. And so this ability to earn on the one hand in an extractive and, you know, in the in the story of consumption, our ability to earn and buy gives us an identity as a consumer, you know, where do we rank in this consumer index? When we think about reciprocal value exchange, and how we resource communities, that's a different relationship, a more, you know, a a relationship that is, more about exchange than consumption. And so it's not about our identity as consumers, or, you know, where we rank.
[00:32:49] Wendy Kendall: So for me, this is all about a fundamental shift in what private practice is about. So rather than being private practice being part of a race to commoditize mental health, which is happening at the moment. You know, we see VC firms, venture capital firms buying up practices. We can see that in the US already. You know, we have a saying in the UK, anything that's happening in the US is going to end up across here sooner or later.
[00:33:31] Wendy Kendall: And what's been happening there is practices being bought up and then rates being challenged and local practices who've stayed independent being undercut, and that that becomes then a mechanism to commoditize therapist hours and to drive down price and to drive down earnings and to maximize shareholder return. And in the UK, we see that a little bit with insurance companies where there's been a bit of a fight over, can we get reimbursed what we're worth? And insurance company is saying, well, other people in your local area will accept a Ā£100 per session, and, you know, all of these other conditions that you have to meet and all these this other admin that you now have to do and, you know, where more cost is being put on the business and more value is being extracted out of our businesses and put into, into, shareholder pockets. If we position ourselves in that consumer story when it comes to mental health, we're going to be competing against VC and insurance companies, and we'll lose because they have more buying power. They have the more power to commoditize our services, and they also have more power to buy up social media space and to buy up ad space on Google.
[00:35:12] Wendy Kendall: So all of our efforts in terms of SEO and ads and all the rest of it, you know, our budgets are up against those guys' budgets. So take some comfort though from a different way of being in practice where we're moving away from consumption and commoditization of mental health and towards this more citizen led, relationship led, community led way of being in practice. And just to encapsulate that, there's this wonderful saying by the futurist R Bookminster Fuller, who has the best name going, you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And I think that's what we're seeing with the shift in practices, where we're thinking more about how do we resource our clients differently, how do we diversify the ways in which we meet our clients so we're not just offering 1 to 1 which is this extractive treadmill.
[00:36:25] Wendy Kendall: Carol Sanford, who is a regenerative practitioner, whose seed community we were part of, refers to this as non displaceability in the marketplace. So when we get really clear about our place, the story of, connection and the story of community that we are, you know, the the offer of connection community that we're giving to people through our practices, where we are, as John Alexander in Citizens described it as creating shared value across stakeholder groups. So when we're approaching how we deliver products and services and support and resources to people and communities, we move from being profit orientated towards being more purposeful in our practices. And, certainly, that's what I see with all of the practices that we work with, that they're much more focused on being getting orientated towards what's their unique purpose. And as Carol said, that's nondisplace bull in the market because no one else can do that as you do.
[00:37:51] Wendy Kendall: This isn't a commoditizable way of being. It's a very authentic and unique way of being. In the final chapters of the book Citizens, John Alexander describes 2 particular ways in which businesses can be more can can represent this citizen, citizenship way of being as opposed to offering consumer relationships. So how can businesses be citizens not, consumers or not selling this, consumer story? And, first of all, he talks about how moving towards being purpose driven is very important.
[00:38:48] Wendy Kendall: It's a necessary but not sufficient condition. And he says when when businesses, become more purpose orientated, The second thing that they need to do to be to become better citizens in this world is to become platforms that enable people to undertake purposeful action together. And I love that description, thinking about how our practices can become better citizens, which is that we're both purposeful and, that we're able to be platforms for collective action, collective action to restore well-being, to restore living systems, to restore what has been taken from people in terms of their natural vitality and the relational, you know, restoring all those things that have been lost because of life and resources being extracted from them. I think the unique contribution of these stories from practitioners through this series has been underlying underlining this third pillar this third pillar of of regenerative citizen led way of being in practice, which is we can't be purposeful platforms as John Alexander describes. We can't be purposeful platforms if we don't address our own wounds along the way.
[00:40:48] Wendy Kendall: But I feel as though this is a third pillar if we're going to accelerate towards having thriving practices, thriving psychology practices, inspiring psychology practices that are life restoring. You know, this bit, as I mentioned in the very first episode, this bit of healing through our practices has been shamed, has been overlooked, has been hidden, was a source of, you know, vulnerability. Oh, wounded healer, you can't do that. Oh, no. Don't talk about that.
[00:41:30] Wendy Kendall: We know we know it happens, but we don't talk about it. But it's actually the 3rd pillar, this restoration, this healing that has to happen is, in my opinion, the 3rd pillar of a regenerative practice. So we have from my perspective, I feel like we have the courageous leadership, and it's based on a foundation of healing through practice. And then we think about how our practices, how how our practices are better citizens in in this world. And it's because they become platforms that enable people to undertake purposeful action together.
[00:42:26] Wendy Kendall: So those are just my thoughts, my emerging ideas about what this journey has kind of got me thinking about. I'd love to hear what you think. I'd love to hear what has come up for you. I think continuing these conversations this is just my perspective. You know, continuing these these conversations, continuing to evolve this story, to accelerate this story is super important.
[00:42:58] Wendy Kendall: We'll be accelerating the story in the 3rd series of inspiring psychologists breaking the mold of private practice, and keep an eye out for that. And until, I see you in the 3rd series, thank you so much for being citizens in this part of this story as well.
