STP 70 Using Technology in Your Business
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Hello and welcome to the scaling therapy practice. This is the show from course creation studio, where we empower mission-driven helpers and leaders to launch life-changing online courses. I'm your host James Marland and on we're on a journey to harness. Your potential and expand your impact through online educational courses. Today.
I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome our very special guest Amna T Cooper. Amnesty is a trailblazer in the field of mental health. She supports therapists to turn their experience into thriving businesses. Through her professional development company, C3 the clinical care collective. She's also the visionary behind the do this first bootcamp, which equips therapists, not only to manage their businesses effectively, but also embrace cutting edge technologies in our ever evolving post pandemic world.
Listen to the show to find out how amnesty helps therapists. Embrace their entrepreneur hat to become therapy owners in the changing world of technology and business.
[00:01:20] James Marland: Welcome to the scaling therapy practice. This is James Marland, your host. I am thrilled today to have my guest,
[00:01:26] James Marland: Amnity Cooper, a therapist who helps other therapists launch their own businesses through her professional development company called C3 or the Clinical Care Collective. She also has her do this first. Bootcamp that not only helps, uh, their penures that I love that word, not only helps teach their penures how to run their own business, but also how to embrace new and emerging technology, which I think is really useful in this post pandemic world. So amnesty, welcome to the show.
[00:01:58] Amity Cooper: Thank you so much, James, for having me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
[00:02:03] James Marland: So I was reading over it when we were talking about your, you know, your history and your bio, and you have a wealth of information. You do a lot of things. Uh, can you
[00:02:13] Amity Cooper: A lot of things. Yes.
[00:02:15] James Marland: Tell us, tell us all the things you're involved in. No,
[00:02:19] Amity Cooper: Okay. Well, um, to start with, um, I am a trained mental health professional. I got my counseling degree back in 2018, but before I did that, I have a long history of working as an entrepreneur. have started multiple businesses in different fields, anywhere from fashion to chocolate. And that is a whole other conversation.
[00:02:49] Amity Cooper: But, um, after my last business closed, I really felt a call to do something more internally driven. And therefore, I went back to school for counseling and Um, since then I have dipped my toe into a number of other facets of the mental health industry. But what really excites me these days is how to help other clinicians launch.
[00:03:18] Amity Cooper: and grow and become the best and virtually unlimited really in their lives and their practices. And I do that through my professional development company, C3 or Clinical Career Collective. So um, we can get into it that way or what direction do you want to start? Yes.
[00:03:39] James Marland: me you, uh, you work with horses. You call it equine
[00:03:42] James Marland: therapy.
[00:03:43] Amity Cooper: Yeah.
[00:03:44] James Marland: you own a horse?
[00:03:45] Amity Cooper: Yes, I do. In fact, I have two.
[00:03:48] James Marland: Okay.
[00:03:49] Amity Cooper: Yeah. Uh,
[00:03:50] Amity Cooper: but
[00:03:51] James Marland: come true probably.
[00:03:53] Amity Cooper: is, it is. And, um, I love that work that I do. It's so powerful and almost magical, um, with the effect that transformation happens when people come in contact with these beautiful horses. Uh, but a lot of that can't be done because we don't There isn't a lot of access to nature, and it's, it has a lot of issues, a lot of barriers for people to come and experience that powerful therapy.
[00:04:25] Amity Cooper: So, a lot of my work has been becoming an advocate and a builder of creating a, uh, Um, a digital bridge, at least for clinicians and this new technology, all these new technologies that are coming out and intersecting with mental health and business and, and just what we can do, the power that we have in our hands now to really not serve just a few hundred, but maybe thousands, millions of people.
[00:04:55] Amity Cooper: Um, With these new technologies. So this is really my driving force right now about getting this message out and helping others launch their businesses.
[00:05:06] James Marland: when you talk about new technologies, are you talking about like video conferencing or what, like what, what are you, what are you referencing there?
[00:05:15] Amity Cooper: Actually, I believe that there are four sort of new tech tools that we're really seeing coming online right now. And so you have, of course, um, the, the elephant in the room is AI, big data, uh, big data computing and thinking through. Um, having an extended arm, if you will, extended hand to help us, uh, facilitate and get our thoughts out there.
[00:05:43] Amity Cooper: And we can communicate faster with our potential clients and our current clients using that computing skill. And then we have wearables. We have, um. Digital therapeutics. We have virtual reality, which I'm really excited about. And then I'm trying to think of the last one. Oh my gosh. I just, well, video just in general, just video and what we can do with that.
[00:06:10] Amity Cooper: Um, so like today, I mean, this is amazing that we're having this
[00:06:14] Amity Cooper: conversation crystal clear and it feels intimate and it's powerful stuff that we can all incorporate into our practices.
[00:06:25] James Marland: And I remember maybe 15, 20 years ago, the mental health company I worked for was a hospital system. They put up a nice bet. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, I don't know, on video equipment, you know, just, just big TVs and cameras and like, like, uh, trying to figure out HIPAA compliance stuff and.
[00:06:46] Amity Cooper: Yeah.
[00:06:47] James Marland: And now, now there's, there's like a 999 app and a phone and you know, just it's in your pocket. The tools are, they're right there, but I do. And maybe, maybe some of the people you've worked with feel this way. Like I do feel like sometimes it's moving so fast. I don't, I don't know where to start or where to begin.
[00:07:09] James Marland: And I'm kind of like, Throw my hands up sometimes and I'm in the space. Like I, I do course creation and I work with video and I use AI every day. Yet sometimes even I feel like it's moving so fast and like, Oh, I, I didn't, I didn't think about that. I didn't know about that. Are you seeing that in your, uh, consulting business?
[00:07:29] Amity Cooper: All the time, all the time. And I think it's, it hits, I think it hits the in service professional really hard because, okay, so if we separate out just our everyday lives, I mean, technology, we're a tapestry of an integration. We, we use technology in ways that we are just, um, It's a foregone conclusion. It's a natural process, right?
[00:07:56] Amity Cooper: But when we step into the therapeutic space, it becomes, um, an impediment. It actually becomes, we feel as clinicians, I think you can probably agree to this. It's that it's, it's not offered in our training. We're not introduced to it. It's, it's not utilized. It's seen as a threat. And we clearly don't have the bandwidth.
[00:08:24] Amity Cooper: We're afraid that it's going to take over our practices. You know, that technology is, is moving fast. It is, it's moving at a speed that we've never seen before in, in humanity's history. But at the same time, we can harness that and we can control it. And we can utilize it to our benefit and we just need to get educated and we need to tech up.
[00:08:46] Amity Cooper: So I think there's a lot of ways that we can embrace it and learn from it and be curious about it.
[00:08:56] James Marland: What do you, what do you think about this? Like when I think of the technology, One of my thoughts is like, I don't have to be the master of everything, but I should know one or two tools that helped me the best.
[00:09:12] Amity Cooper: Yes, I would agree with that. Um, and in my course that I've created called Do This First, which essentially helps new clinicians or people or, or practitioners who are looking to open up their private practices, how to incorporate all of this technology and get them running in about seven days. Okay. So it's a bootcamp process,
[00:09:37] Amity Cooper: but the things that I focus on, the two things that I focus on are video production.
[00:09:44] Amity Cooper: Learning how to do telehealth efficiently and, and with purpose and intimacy, because this is how we're most clients are coming to us these days. And then I'm also adding on the value of what's coming down the pipeline and that's virtual reality. So. I talk about those issues, but for to back to your point and your question about what would you pick as tools to incorporate into your everyday
[00:10:15] Amity Cooper: business life or therapeutic life?
[00:10:17] Amity Cooper: I, like you, I use AI at chat. GBT, AKA Kevin is my friend
[00:10:25] Amity Cooper: and
[00:10:26] James Marland: Did you name it? Kevin?
[00:10:27] Amity Cooper: yeah, actually I didn't, but a colleague of mine did
[00:10:31] Amity Cooper: who he said.
[00:10:33] James Marland: to Kevin when it talks to you? I gotta look that up because that would
[00:10:37] James Marland: be I always say please and thank you just in case they take over the world
[00:10:41] Amity Cooper: Yeah. Like I just, I just like to refer to, I, I try to personalize
[00:10:46] Amity Cooper: it because, you know, learning how to dialogue and create prompts. Okay.
[00:10:51] Amity Cooper: So we learned in, in clinical training and practice, we learned how to. research papers. Okay.
[00:10:59] Amity Cooper: Well, it's the same sort of process in that you have to have these prompts and these plug ins that you educate the system, you educate the computer
[00:11:09] Amity Cooper: about you, about your brand, about your clientele, and you can do this in a way that Instead of painstakingly over months of building out a business plan, you can do it in a matter of hours.
[00:11:23] Amity Cooper: And I think you can attest to that, right? I
[00:11:25] Amity Cooper: mean, what do you do? How do you, how do you use kevin. Yeah.
[00:11:35] James Marland: recently um redid my web page to, uh, when I first started this podcast, it was more like scaling therapy practice. And we talked about hiring people and buying buildings and I don't know, just, uh, virtual assistants, uh, EHR programs, stuff like that, like things to scale your business. And then my, my co host, uh, started another podcast. You ran out of time. And so it was just me. And now I, while I've worked in mental health for 18 years, uh, and I ran a virtual assistant company for mental health, I've not, I'm not a therapist and I don't have a therapy practice, but sort of like I'm in this transition stage.
[00:12:20] James Marland: Season three is about creating online courses. Anyways, I say that too. I was redoing my web page. And I had about 10 or 15 podcast episodes talking about creating courses. I created a PDF document. I uploaded it to chat GPT. And then I said, tell me about myself. Like I said, you know, like what, what is my, what is my tone of voice?
[00:12:45] James Marland: What is my vocabulary? What is my mission? What comes up over and over? You know, if you're doing a business plan or a webpage, What, what would you pull out? And then it would pull out stuff and I'd refine it. And, uh, you know, instead of, instead of like reading my, you know, hours of transcript, I was able to just ask questions of my own content. And find out things like that. And I will, I will, I will also do this for, um, if I have a problem or some questions, or maybe it's a question from a worksheet I'm going through, I will say, here's the questions of the worksheet. Ask me them 1 at a time on windows. I hit. I think it's uh, Windows H for the voice recorder,
[00:13:29] Amity Cooper: Okay.
[00:13:29] James Marland: talk, I'll talk into it, and, and then when it, when I'm done, it, I'll have paragraphs and paragraphs of thoughts that aren't, you know, you wouldn't publish these, but they're your thoughts in the moment. And then I, then I ask it questions. You know, what, what was my, what's my content? Help me find my vision. What are, what are some principles or questions from this? My own content instead of saying, give me all the content from chat. G. B. T. I feed it my myself and then I ask it to help me refine my own thoughts.
[00:14:02] James Marland: I think that's a more personal way to use the A. I.
[00:14:05] Amity Cooper: love that process and I think that it's organic, you know, it's, it's it's kind of, um, a juxtaposition to this, this process because you think that the computer itself, this, this This massive machine is sort of sterile and it doesn't have, it's true. It's based off of almost like a, it's a learn, it's an ongoing learning process, right?
[00:14:37] Amity Cooper: It's learning how you think, it's learning how you speak. It's the nuances that you keep inputting and it refines itself. And then it regurgitates it back. Like it's an amazing system and It's easy. You just have to put that upfront time into educating it about you and your brand. And then it's, it's like, you just have this continual ongoing conversation that's growing and, um, evolving with you as you are discovering more about what you want to be.
[00:15:13] Amity Cooper: And that's what I think is so beautiful about it.
[00:15:15] James Marland: and it it it was scary. You know, it's scary at first. What is this AI thing? I hear it. But then when you get into it, it's a wonderful tool. And recently, uh, within the last week or 2, it's chat. GPT. Anyways, is doing something called memories. I don't know if you've seen that yet
[00:15:35] Amity Cooper: We haven't yet.
[00:15:36] Amity Cooper: Oh,
[00:15:37] James Marland: will remember it. I, I did this section on like, tone, like, this is my tones and these are the words I use and I had to ask me questions about it. And then it, it say, it said memory saved and so it's going to remember if I say, use the tone of James Marland when he's talking to entrepreneurs or whatever. It will remember that memory.
[00:16:02] James Marland: That's what I'm, I'm believing it is because now I used to have to put in a prompt every time, like a pair, I had a paragraph of like, When I do marketing, I use 6th to 8th grade vocabulary because
[00:16:15] Amity Cooper: Yeah,
[00:16:16] James Marland: Just, it's easier to read and remove jargon and do talk in my, you know, in a first person voice, I would always say these, the same things over and over again, and now I can just, you know, use the tone of James Marlin for this audience or for my core audience, which I've already defined, and I don't have to define it over and over and over again.
[00:16:38] James Marland: So it's,
[00:16:39] Amity Cooper: well, it's kind of like, I mean, I'm saying he
[00:16:43] Amity Cooper: chats in is your personal assistant.
[00:16:49] Amity Cooper: I mean, yes, he is an extended, uh, arm. You have delegated these tasks to Kevin, um, that you normally would have delegated or relegated to an assistant or maybe a team.
[00:17:08] Amity Cooper: So this is, this is a way to maximize and optimize your back office system in a way.
[00:17:16] Amity Cooper: It builds the foundational structure of your business
[00:17:20] Amity Cooper: in a way that you can save time, money and ease and practicality. I mean, it's, it's. It's really, it's a game changer for so many people. And we're just talking about our small little, you know, pocket of
[00:17:35] Amity Cooper: focus here of, of clinicians. but, but, um, you just, I mean, you look at the world and you see how much it's, it's, it's changing us.
[00:17:47] Amity Cooper: We're growing together. I feel like.
[00:17:49] James Marland: And it's like, has, it's, we're like, in the first year of this.
[00:17:55] Amity Cooper: I know.
[00:17:55] Amity Cooper: I know.
[00:17:57] James Marland: in the first year. Um,
[00:18:00] Amity Cooper: It's mind blowing,
[00:18:00] James Marland: can help with, with so much. If you're, if you want to create a worksheet, you just talk about what you want to create. And it can, it, yeah, it can help with, with so much. If you're, if you want to And then say, okay, my audience is, you know, uh, a child who has test anxiety, uh, I need five questions to help them journal about this.
[00:18:18] James Marland: And this is the goal. And
[00:18:21] James Marland: I don't know. And then it'll ask questions. It'll do it for you. It's, it's
[00:18:24] Amity Cooper: It will do, it will do a lot of different
[00:18:27] Amity Cooper: things for you.
[00:18:28] James Marland: shift, really. Okay. So we've talked about chat GPT. Uh, we'll probably come back or Kevin. We've talked about Kevin quite a bit. Um, let's talk about, uh, if you were gonna talk to the entrepreneur in the audience, the person who's trying to juggle all these roles, uh, how, how do you balance, how do you put balance into your life so that you're, you're being excellent in what you do, but you're also not burning out as a mental health professional, which is a really, really hard job.
[00:19:00] James Marland: So
[00:19:00] Amity Cooper: It's a really
[00:19:01] James Marland: how would you balance some of these roles? Mm hmm. Mm
[00:19:05] Amity Cooper: Well, first off, I think if we're all trying to find some seminal balance of work and life and We can't do everything. So I think it's, it's addressing the reality that we are, there's a lot of outside external information that's bombarding us and telling us which direction to go in and how to do it and who to be when the reality is this is an internal.
[00:19:39] Amity Cooper: Discovery process. And this is a lot of the work that I do with other executives and professionals. You know, this is something it is discovering what your first principles are, what your values are, who do you want to be when you, how, how do you want to show up in the world? And What is driving you? What kind of impact do you want to make now?
[00:20:03] Amity Cooper: These are big questions, but this is something that anybody should be doing when starting out on a new endeavor, new phase in their lives. And, and taking stock of what's important and across all life domains, you know, it, because they all. Affect your worldview and your work view. You know, they intercede, they intertwine together, they converge together.
[00:20:29] Amity Cooper: And so you've got to get really clear about who and what you are and what you value. So in that response, and in that way, I feel like that unto itself, you're setting up clear boundaries, clear lines about. So, I think I'd start there and then, and then it start, and then I'd start peeling the onion and working on figuring out, well, if I do this, I know that my work and my purpose or my drive to help other people.
[00:21:12] Amity Cooper: Is, but is is going to be the driving force for all of my communication of
[00:21:18] Amity Cooper: all of my efforts. To reach those people. So then you got to figure out who those people are. And so it starts this ongoing discovery process of building a business, building, building out the sweet spot of intersection of your skills, your gifts, and how you, how you show up and make money.
[00:21:42] Amity Cooper: In the world.
[00:21:44] James Marland: Yeah, I agree. Cause uh, just like building a course or building a business, it starts with you. Like if you started with what other people want you to do, that's not very sustainable. But if you start with your values, your mission, your purpose, what, what you're good at, you mentioned that, like what are your skills are, It's a much more sustainable business than just like, Oh, I have to do this type of therapy.
[00:22:05] James Marland: I run this type of business because that's where the money is. Guess what?
[00:22:10] Amity Cooper: Yeah.
[00:22:10] James Marland: that's burnout. That's,
[00:22:12] Amity Cooper: What is, what's a recipe for burnout and disaster?
[00:22:16] Amity Cooper: And you'll be disappointed and you will feel defeated it because you're setting your course according to other people's rules, not your own.
[00:22:27] James Marland: Yes. You are the most important person in your business.
[00:22:30] Amity Cooper: Yes.
[00:22:31] Amity Cooper: Yes.
[00:22:33] James Marland: and, uh, yeah, the, the more you take care of yourself, the better you can take care of your, the other people who depend on you, the stakeholders, the employees, the clients, the community. But if you don't take care of yourself, you can't take care of anybody.
[00:22:46] Amity Cooper: Yeah, I mean, it's that old adage of putting on the, you know, the oxygen mask before you help the other person next to you. I, I, I truly find that, I mean, it's just kind of simple, stupid, really, of just doing those things that protect you first,
[00:23:04] Amity Cooper: because you're no good to anybody else if you can't, if you can't be clear about who you are.
[00:23:10] James Marland: absolutely. So you talked about, uh, in your, uh, you use the word, uh, in your bio anyways, therapeutic, because I really like that word. Because often people there, there's a blurred line there, like you blurred the line together between therapist and entrepreneur. Because in some of the other, uh, podcasts or shows I listen to, there's this sense of, um, uh, noble poverty.
[00:23:35] James Marland: That's what it was called. Noble, noble
[00:23:37] Amity Cooper: Yeah.
[00:23:37] James Marland: Like I, I'm helping people, which means I gotta be poor.
[00:23:41] Amity Cooper: Oh, oh,
[00:23:42] Amity Cooper: that message, that message needs to die. I, I want to give it, um,
[00:23:49] Amity Cooper: a backyard burial actually.
[00:23:51] Amity Cooper: I find it incredibly, um, it does a disservice to us and to the world because, well, let me, let me backtrack a little bit. Um, so as I mentioned in the beginning of our call, um, you know, I, I come from a long line of entrepreneurs and hustlers and people who had wonderful, amazing ideas, and this is, this was my environment.
[00:24:22] Amity Cooper: Like I, My parents were both entrepreneurs. And so I learned by watching and I was out there, you know, trying to figure out the next, the next big deal, maybe it's a, you could call it a scheme or whatever it is, but I learned by doing and working and coming up and solving problems and to make somebody's lives or my life better.
[00:24:48] Amity Cooper: And so I look. At being in business as the best way to be in service.
[00:24:57] James Marland: Mm
[00:24:58] Amity Cooper: And I want to stress that, that just because. You feel a call to serve doesn't mean that you're a martyr and it doesn't mean you, you need that mission. You need that North star pointing you in the right direction to make the biggest impact you can, but there is no reason to sacrifice yourself for the greater whole here.
[00:25:32] Amity Cooper: And this starts. And if I, if I, if I go on a diatribe, stop me, but I feel like is, it is oddly enough. And this is something that I hope that I can change over time through advocacy and awareness and education, but our institutions are not set up right now to to teach us. These skills, they've, they've, they've taught us well about becoming good clinicians, right?
[00:26:04] Amity Cooper: And going out into the world and working in community mental health. But the reality is, is that over 60 percent of us are looking to open up some sort of private practice and be in business for ourselves. And the fact that they are denying that is a problem for me. And they're not, they're not helping us or engage with the reality of the world is and what's needed.
[00:26:32] Amity Cooper: Like we're the front liners to the soul and we need to be able to go out there confidently in our, in our skills. I mean, we're some of the most educated people in the world and we're underpaid. We're
[00:26:49] Amity Cooper: some of the most underpaid people in the world. And that is, that is horrible. And that is not right. And that needs to change.
[00:26:57] Amity Cooper: So I
[00:26:58] Amity Cooper: hope it didn't go too much,
[00:26:59] James Marland: No, you're, you're good. I loved your passion and I think we should be passionate about this because as you pointed, just pointed out, you've got 4, 8, 12 years of high priced education yet, you know, you're, you're on the, near the bottom end of people with a master's degree.
[00:27:19] Amity Cooper: yes,
[00:27:20] James Marland: for earning, but the good you do in the world is up there with like teachers and, uh, who else does good in a social, so people in the social work field, like you, you do so much good and you help one, one of the doctors I worked with, uh, We had a good appointment or something, and the guy made a good decision.
[00:27:40] James Marland: I'm like, wow, we really changed that guy's life. And he's like, no, we didn't. We actually changed his wife's life and his kid's life and his family's life and his community's life and his neighborhood, like his whole neighborhood, because he's making better choices. It's changed the ripple impact
[00:27:56] Amity Cooper: the ripple effect is huge. Hmm.
[00:28:01] Amity Cooper: Hmm.
[00:28:01] James Marland: it's a crime, the noble poverty, like, Oh, I have to help people. I have to be poor to help people. I have to not earn a living wage or just earn enough to like pay my bills. It's just, yeah, that, that does need to go to the backyard and like be buried.
[00:28:21] Amity Cooper: Hmm.
[00:28:22] James Marland: but I think it also be, it, uh, it speaks to the fact that people. Almost see themselves as therapists first and not entrepreneurs or business owners, because as a business owner, you're an agent of the business. Like it was one of the things I learned in my master's classes, a business, uh, MBA classes, like agency is a real deal. And if you're serving you as a manager, there was managers stuff. You, you serve the agent, the, the company, you're not serving yourself. You make decisions based on what is good for the company.
[00:28:56] James Marland: You know, and, and charging, you know, if you're charging 75 an hour for an appointment, that might be good for some people, but you will, you'll go out of business. Like that is no good for the company.
[00:29:09] James Marland: So how do you help therapists wear the dual hats? Like I feel like you got
[00:29:14] Amity Cooper: yes, yes. And there's a fundamental construct to every business. It's like, you need to be able to produce a product or a service that people are willing to pay for based on a, an, uh, an arranged, uh, agreement of exchange so that you can continue to deliver those services to keep the business in motion and moving forward so that it pays you.
[00:29:43] Amity Cooper: And it serves the people that you're and the widget that you're making. So you are, you are an agent both for the business, but also for the perpetuation. Of growth and for that business to live otherwise, what's the point of doing it? You know, it's, it is, it's, um, it's something that, I mean, this is, this is a whole other topic, uh, that we could, a rabbit hole that we could go down.
[00:30:13] Amity Cooper: But I mean, I think, um, it is again, sort of a representation of this, these
[00:30:24] Amity Cooper: I'm at last for words for a moment, but like this, this sort of schism between having it be capitalism or being, you know, entrepreneurship, a business is somehow evil and set up to be, it's taking advantage of people. But the reality is that this is, this is a way to totally transform the world and and do good in the world.
[00:30:48] Amity Cooper: And not all businesses are out there to, to take advantage of you. They're, they're there to. So I think you, if you look at yourself as that entity of service, then it's automatically like you're automatically a lot in alignment. With that, uh, purpose and passion that you have.
[00:31:11] James Marland: And knowing your, knowing your value, you know, just you, you're, you have a value, you have a service that you're giving that is. Like, if people tried to do it themselves, you know, they almost couldn't because you have that education. You have the skill. You have the experience working with people that sharpens you to help you get further faster. Um, so let's, let's transition to, uh, your, your, your course,
[00:31:41] James Marland: uh, it looks like you, you have a bootcamp and what do you do in the bootcamp and, uh, your course? Yeah. Yeah. Mm
[00:31:48] Amity Cooper: Okay, so I'd like to give you sort of, um, some reference to why this course exists
[00:31:55] Amity Cooper: today. Um, so back in 2020, when we were all floundering around and we were struggling to move from knee to knee to screen to screen,
[00:32:06] Amity Cooper: um, I felt compelled to talk about these issues, this, this, this, convergence of the mental health industry with entrepreneurship and all this new tech.
[00:32:17] Amity Cooper: I mean, I have been online for 10, 12 years prior to going back to school, as I mentioned before. And so. Using zoom and other sort of
[00:32:29] Amity Cooper: software tools or whatever were sort of
[00:32:32] James Marland: hmm.
[00:32:33] Amity Cooper: second nature to me, but I realized as I watched my colleagues and peers struggling and just completely overwhelmed that they had no idea what this technology and what was going on in the real world outside of their training and and their clinical spaces.
[00:32:52] Amity Cooper: And I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to make light of that. I mean, it's. It's difficult. Uh, and so anyway, um, I created a, in 90 days, I made a pop up virtual summit that's called healing entrepreneurship summit that really talked about these three main issues affecting our industry and us as clinicians and how giving some guidance and some parameters on how to think about this and apply all of this new tech to our lives.
[00:33:26] Amity Cooper: And. It was amazing because the outpouring, I had over a thousand attendees. over that seven day period. And it really told me something told me it was my own market study that this people needed this information and they needed the skills to figure out how to take the next step. Now, most. I think you can attest to this, but most, uh, entrepreneurs or mental health practitioners who have sort of stepped over into this new space of e learning, setting up e courses and, and programs or, or running, um, running, um, groups or things like that, any way to monetize their knowledge base.
[00:34:17] Amity Cooper: They really sort of come in and they're the experts in their field for sure. But they come in and they really talk about the marketing and how to, how to do the back office stuff, which is important. But like, they kind of are a few steps ahead along the process where a lot of these people are entering in the workforce and into and opening up a private practice, right?
[00:34:38] Amity Cooper: They don't know the first thing, the biology of business. They don't understand what, A business entity looks like, is it an LLC? Is it a PLLC? They don't understand the nuts and bolts, right? The guts of what it means to, okay. It's one thing to have a, uh, your business is a, is a, is a service oriented business.
[00:34:58] Amity Cooper: It's not a, it's not a product based business, even though we're seeing the hybrids exist. So I felt that it was imperative for me to take all of that business experience and knowledge and apply it to create. A one-stop shop one week program that literally walks people through, you do this first, you do this second, you do this third.
[00:35:21] Amity Cooper: So hence it's do this first. And I literally take people through and I give them a bootstrap,
[00:35:28] Amity Cooper: MBA startup, uh, accounting of how to walk through and open up your private practice. So at the end of that week, you will have. You will have your domain name. You will have all of your proper filings for your business.
[00:35:45] Amity Cooper: You will have an understanding of a loose understanding of a broad brushstroke of the kind of business you want to have, the people that you want to serve, and you will be able to set up yourself with some software tools that will help run your back office. So that is it in a nutshell, but it's so needed because it's just not offered.
[00:36:09] James Marland: Yeah, awesome. I think, uh, I can think of several group conversations I've been in where people would ask for something like this. How do you get started? Or what do you do? What's the forms you need? Or what is, what is, how do you set up your business? Do I need a web page? Yes, you do.
[00:36:25] James Marland: Uh,
[00:36:26] Amity Cooper: Yeah,
[00:36:27] James Marland: Yeah, you do. You do, uh, like all those things, um, would be very helpful for them. And I, I like your passion because it comes out of your heart. You know, you want to serve people. You're on a mission to make them, their lives easier, uh, and take some of the frustrations out that people, people who grew up, you went through the college, you taught them how to help people with their anxiety or the depression or like diagnose, you know, study the DSM. But, uh, when it comes to these, this other business stuff, you're, it's all, you're kind of lost,
[00:37:03] Amity Cooper: You're, you're out of pasture. You really don't
[00:37:06] Amity Cooper: have any of that. And, and within our community. Um, you can't, I might get flack for this, but you know, when you look around to your, your supervisors or your teachers, they're, they're not, they may have private practices, but they, their advice is really, uh, it's not helpful because they want you to fit into a paradigm that.
[00:37:34] Amity Cooper: They've practiced. And so there's a lot of, in addition to this, uh, business mindset, uh, building, I'm also tackling and addressing the financial money mindset issues that we're shackled with. And so sort of stripping that apart, looking at it differently, figuring out what that story is that you tell yourself about your right.
[00:38:02] Amity Cooper: To earn money, to earn your way in the world and how do you, how do you do that? So it's, it's, it's deep and direct. Let's put it that way.
[00:38:15] James Marland: Yeah. Well in intense, it sounds like, but it, you know, I, I, I think I'd rather get it, get it done and not, not done and out of the way rather than like, Do it over a long period of time, just like get
[00:38:29] James Marland: it, get it done and have somebody walk you through it. So as we wrap up, uh, uh, before you tell us where we can find you on the internet, I want to know if you had two hours and a book, what, what book would you be reading? You know, if you could recommend one to me and what snack would you have with your, with your book? So you, you got a book, you're reading it. What's a book and a snack that you can recommend to the, uh,
[00:38:54] Amity Cooper: snack. Oh, okay. Well, first off, I'm a voracious reader and I happen to love business books. Go figure.
[00:39:03] James Marland: way. Shocker.
[00:39:08] Amity Cooper: So, the one that I'm really into right now, I have it, I can do a
[00:39:14] James Marland: Oh, you got it. Show it.
[00:39:16] Amity Cooper: and you've
[00:39:17] Amity Cooper: seen it flipped, but it is by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Designing Your Life. How to build a well lived, joyful life. And, um, they are professors at Stanford and they teach, uh, they teach this process. It's a design build product development process that you can apply to your life and it's fabulous and it's a quick read.
[00:39:45] Amity Cooper: That's why I like business books because you can really get the soap notes, you can get the, the, the, the nuts and bolts of everything pretty. Rapidly. And then as for a snack, I would say that I am a coffee lover extraordinaire. So, like, It's a liquid
[00:40:03] James Marland: a liquid snack. Yeah.
[00:40:05] Amity Cooper: Yeah.
[00:40:06] James Marland: Excellent. Excellent choice. Uh, Amnity, I've enjoyed our conversation. If people want to find out more about you or your course or the Clinical Career Collective,
[00:40:17] James Marland: give us all the details on where people can find out more.
[00:40:21] Amity Cooper: Okay. Well, I would love for you to reach out to me at [email protected], and also I have my personal, uh, webpage at Amity A ITY, Cooper C-O-O-P-E r.com. You can find me there.
[00:40:42] James Marland: Excellent. And I will have all this in the show notes as well as a link to your webpage and the boot camp.
[00:40:48] James Marland: And your email address. This has been delightful. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
[00:40:54] Amity Cooper: Thank you so much.
โThanks again for listening to the show, make sure you check out the resources in the show notes for everything we talked about today. Including, uh, Amitiza, web page and bootcamp. The information presented in the show is for information and entertainment purposes only. Uh, we encourage you to consult with a professional before making any major decisions based on the content of this podcast. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.
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