HHW Therapists 53 - Weekly Sessions or Intensives? Choose on Purpose.

And I get a version of this question constantly around... what does your schedule look like when you're managing everything? And how many weekly clients should I have versus how many intensives should I have? And usually these questions start coming up either when therapists are at the very beginning of their journey.

They know that they want to add intensives.

They don't want to see 25 to 30 plus clients a week.

But Okay, now they start marketing intensives and their intensive calendar starts filling up faster than they expected.

Meanwhile, their weekly caseload is still full of people that they truly care about, maybe people that they've been working with for years or even decades.

And if you're one of those therapists, essentially you're finding yourself standing at this fork in the road, not really sure what If the answer is, okay, do I start a wait list and I don't really know how to give people a timeline for when I'll get back to them? Do I maintain a hybrid practice where I keep seeing clients weekly and biweekly and as needed as well as do therapy intensives? Or do I go all in on intensives and never take another weekly consult again? There is not one right answer here, but there is a wrong way to make this decision, and that is by accident or guilt or anything that feels related to those.

But it's one exhausted yes at a time.

until all of a sudden you kind of look up at your calendar weeks, months, maybe a year later, and you're still doing the exact thing you built intensives to get away from, right? That overly packed calendar and feeling like you kind of just built a different private practice cage.

So today I want to walk you through the actual decision of waitlist or no waitlist, hybrid or all-in-one intensives, and how to know which one is yours.

So what I want you to think about and notice first is most therapists don't consciously decide to stop taking weekly consults.

That is something that comes up on the coaching calls inside the Therapy Intensives Academy, but usually that decision actually comes from just kind of like default.

It's the gaps of an already full calendar, like You get a consult request and you're super tired.

You say yes anyway, because no still feels like it means something bad is going to happen.

Like all of a sudden you're not going to make money and it's not safe to turn clients away.

Or you kind of go in the opposite direction and just stop replying to those requests for a while.

And I know we all feel bad about that, that voicemail we forgot to respond to, the email that we meant to respond to.

And now it's like two weeks later and should we even do it? It's not really because you decided something.

It's just like you ran out of hours in the week and you only have so much time.

Both of those are the same problem, though.

The decision is happening to you instead of being made by you.

And this is something that I felt in 2023, I added intensives to my website and I was working on the webpage in January.

I think I posted it in February, booked my first console in March, booked that first intensive for April.

And at this point, I was still seeing anywhere between 15 and 20 weekly clients.

So not a ton, but a lot.

to then do intensives on the weekend I I'm not ashamed to admit it because in a lot of ways I was proud of the money I was making I was proud of how hard I was working I was proud of the fact that I could say I had a really freaking successful practice but there were times where I would work like 10 days in a row because I would see my clients Monday through Friday and then do an intensive Saturday and Sunday and then go right back into work Monday Tuesday Wednesday and I was like I got to stop doing this.