Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links for Frankie:

Instagram: @miraclemoonuk

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

The highlights

• Frankie tells us about who she is and her professional background 01:27
• Frankie talks about what Miracle Moon does and who it exists to help 04:45
• I ask Frankie how it has been getting Miracle Moon off the ground, and we discuss online workshops and building a community 14:13
• Frankie reflects on difficult moments in the journey with Miracle Moon 25:06
• Frankie shares how she and her business partner built a working relationship that's been successful 28:54
• Frankie tells us her hopes for Miracle Moon and where she sees it going 34:07
• Frankie tells us how we can connect with her 37:16

The Business Growth Pack

Ready to grow your practice beyond one person and a laptop? 

We are here to support you to build a thriving, impactful and profitable business. 

Invest in our growth pack to confidently grow your service with associates, organisational work or passive income.

Our unique package includes strategy and marketing training from Dr Rosie Gilderthorp, Founder of Psychology Business School, and legal contracts from Clare Veal, Commercial Lawyer from Aubergine Legal.

Together, we will ensure that you have the strategy and documents you need for growth so you can expand your impact and income while maintaining your work-life balance.

Sign up now: The Business Growth Pack

Thank you so much for listening to the Business of Psychology podcast. I'd really appreciate it if you could take the time to subscribe, rate and review the show. It helps more mental health professionals just like you to find us, and it also means a lot to me personally when I read the reviews. Thank you in advance and we'll see you next week for another episode of practical strategy and inspiration to move your independent practice forward.

Welcome to The Business of Psychology Podcast. I'm back with another episode of Books That Make You Think, where I'm sharing with you a book that I found really inspirational; ‘Can You See Me?' By Libby Scott and Rebecca Westcott. 

Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links/references:

‘Can You See Me?' By Libby Scott and Rebecca Westcott

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

The Business Growth Pack

Ready to grow your practice beyond one person and a laptop? 

We are here to support you to build a thriving, impactful and profitable business. 

Invest in our growth pack to confidently grow your service with associates, organisational work or passive income.

Our unique package includes strategy and marketing training from Dr Rosie Gilderthorp, Founder of Psychology Business School, and legal contracts from Clare Veal, Commercial Lawyer from Aubergine Legal.

Together, we will ensure that you have the strategy and documents you need for growth so you can expand your impact and income while maintaining your work-life balance.

Sign up now: The Business Growth Pack

Thank you so much for listening to the Business of Psychology podcast. I'd really appreciate it if you could take the time to subscribe, rate and review the show. It helps more mental health professionals just like you to find us, and it also means a lot to me personally when I read the reviews. Thank you in advance and we'll see you next week for another episode of practical strategy and inspiration to move your independent practice forward.

Shownotes

I was attracted to this book because one of the authors, Libby, is an autistic 11 year old and that felt like a voice I needed to listen to. The book tells the story of Tally, an 11 year old autistic girl as she navigates the transition to secondary school. Interspersed with the narrative are short autsim fact sheets from Tally explaining concepts like "pathological demand avoidance" and the reasons autistic people might engage in certain behaviours from her point of view.

I was thrilled to read a realistic depiction of autism in a girl with a pathological demand avoidance profile. I find this is a term that is not generally well understood, even amongst psychologists and the warm, engaging and, at times, heart-shaking writing encouraged the kind of empathy that autistic people do not always receive. I particularly valued the insight into what it feels like for a child who looks like they are being defiant or furious but is actually feeling terrified.

As a mum and as a professional I know this is a book that has helped me to connect more deeply and engage more fully with the autistic experience. I'd recommend it to any of you regardless of specialty. Check it out here.

PS. If you want to know more about PDA I very highly recommend Dr Naiomi Fisher's work, she explains it with exactly the straightforward human empathy people deserve.

Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links for Rachael:

LinkedIn: Rachael Skews

Website: www.cognuscoach.com

Other Links:

Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry by Daniel Barron

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

The highlights

• Rachael tells us about who she is and her professional background 01:56
• We discuss human interaction and the role of technology in mental health 05:48
• I ask Rachael about working with other people from different backgrounds to psychology 19:23
• Rachael tells us about the opportunities she sees on the horizon for mental health professionals and AI 25:50
• We discuss wearable tech and using technology to get data that we wouldn't be able to get otherwise 30:43
• Rachael talks about managing sensitive data and GDPR 43:16
• We talk about the ethical considerations of using technology and AI 47:17
• Rachael tells us how we can find out more from her 54:12

The Business Growth Pack

Ready to grow your practice beyond one person and a laptop? 

We are here to support you to build a thriving, impactful and profitable business. 

Invest in our growth pack to confidently grow your service with associates, organisational work or passive income.

Our unique package includes strategy and marketing training from Dr Rosie Gilderthorp, Founder of Psychology Business School, and legal contracts from Clare Veal, Commercial Lawyer from Aubergine Legal.

Together, we will ensure that you have the strategy and documents you need for growth so you can expand your impact and income while maintaining your work-life balance.

Sign up now: The Business Growth Pack

Thank you so much for listening to the Business of Psychology podcast. I'd really appreciate it if you could take the time to subscribe, rate and review the show. It helps more mental health professionals just like you to find us, and it also means a lot to me personally when I read the reviews. Thank you in advance and we'll see you next week for another episode of practical strategy and inspiration to move your independent practice forward.

Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links:

The Value Proposition Canvas - Strategyzer Template

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

The Business Growth Pack

Ready to grow your practice beyond one person and a laptop? 

We are here to support you to build a thriving, impactful and profitable business. 

Invest in our growth pack to confidently grow your service with associates, organisational work or passive income.

Our unique package includes strategy and marketing training from Dr Rosie Gilderthorp, Founder of Psychology Business School, and legal contracts from Clare Veal, Commercial Lawyer from Aubergine Legal.

Together, we will ensure that you have the strategy and documents you need for growth so you can expand your impact and income while maintaining your work-life balance.

Sign up now: The Business Growth Pack

Thank you so much for listening to the Business of Psychology podcast. I'd really appreciate it if you could take the time to subscribe, rate and review the show. It helps more mental health professionals just like you to find us, and it also means a lot to me personally when I read the reviews. Thank you in advance and we'll see you next week for another episode of practical strategy and inspiration to move your independent practice forward.

Shownotes

In this episode I wanted to share how we can use a value proposition to help us plan service that meets the needs of our clients.

This is a great follow on from my episode talking about creating a customer persona and why that is so important. Essentially, once you deeply understand your customer, what their barriers are to engaging with support, and their real priorities then you need to move on to thinking about what your proposed product or service needs to do for them. In other words, how you add value.

There is a tool available from Strategyzer called The Value Proposition Canvas that is designed to help you do exactly that. You complete a canvas for each client group or customer segment that you are working with.

You start with the section on the right that asks you to define the pain the client is experiencing, what is keeping them up at night with worry, what are they doing that they regret, or not doing that they wish they were doing? What are they unhappy about? Then you move on to think about what they want to gain from their time with you. What are they hoping they will be able to do? What do they want to be different? How do they think their life will be enriched? Remember this is all from their perspective not yours! Then you move on to the "jobs to be done", again from the client's perspective, what does your service need to achieve for them? This can include practical things like "easy booking system" and "appointments that fit around work" to bigger things like "get me back to work."

Then we move to the left side of the canvas and start thinking about our product or service. Using the identified client pains we map out what we are putting into our product or service that alleviates those pains. Then using the client gains section we map out what we are including that will get those gains for the client. Finally, we check that the jobs to be done are all covered and give a brief description of the product or service itself. Whenever I work through one of these I always change something about my offer because I realise I'm not quite hitting one of the jobs to be done (or sometimes more). Also completing these has sometimes made me completely rethink a business model. For example, filling out one of these recently for my therapy service made me think an intensive model might actually be what my clients need from me more than a weekly therapy model. Definitely food for thought there!

I've linked to the Strategyzer template in the show notes so you can download a copy and start using it to check what you are offering fully meets the identified needs of the client group or to design something new.

Let me know how you get on with it over on Instagram. I'm @rosiegilderthorp and I'd love to hear from you. Also if you could spare a moment to rate and review the podcast I'd be so grateful, the reviews mean a lot to me and also help this podcast get found.

See you next Friday!

Welcome to The Business of Psychology Podcast. Today we're talking about the book ‘The Immune Mind’ by Dr Monty Lyman. He has done really interesting work all around the idea of the mind-body-gut-immune connection, which are all things that I'm really interested in, in my practice, and increasingly I think that we need to incorporate into the way that we work, otherwise we're ignoring a lot of really good science. 

Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links/references:

The Immune Mind by Monty Lyman

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

The Business Growth Pack

Ready to grow your practice beyond one person and a laptop? 

We are here to support you to build a thriving, impactful and profitable business. 

Invest in our growth pack to confidently grow your service with associates, organisational work or passive income.

Our unique package includes strategy and marketing training from Dr Rosie Gilderthorp, Founder of Psychology Business School, and legal contracts from Clare Veal, Commercial Lawyer from Aubergine Legal.

Together, we will ensure that you have the strategy and documents you need for growth so you can expand your impact and income while maintaining your work-life balance.

Sign up now: The Business Growth Pack

Thank you so much for listening to the Business of Psychology podcast. I'd really appreciate it if you could take the time to subscribe, rate and review the show. It helps more mental health professionals just like you to find us, and it also means a lot to me personally when I read the reviews. Thank you in advance and we'll see you next week for another episode of practical strategy and inspiration to move your independent practice forward.

Shownotes

It has been ages since I've recorded a Books That Make You Think episode, but I absolutely had to revive the format for the book I'm talking about this week because it has completely changed the way that I think about my work fundamentally. Or rather, I would say it's actually given me more confidence to express opinions that I previously held, but didn't fully understand the evidence base for. 

So today we're talking about ‘The Immune Mind’, which is a book by Dr Monty Lyman. Some of you might have seen a documentary that he made previously, he's also written a book about chronic pain. There's a whole heap of really interesting work that he's done, and it's all around the idea of the mind-body-gut-immune connection. And as you know, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, these are all things that I'm really interested in, in my practice, and increasingly I think that we need to incorporate into the way that we work, otherwise we're ignoring a lot of really good science. 

So, I'll give you a quick summary of the book, and then we'll dive into my thoughts and what I think it might mean for my practice, and hopefully it might give you some food for thought for your own work too.

The book's subtitle is ‘The New Science of Health’, and it begins by explaining the link between the immune system and behaviour in a way that I've not come across before. For example, in an extraordinary experiment, the author actually makes himself sick under lab conditions, and monitors the impact on his motivation, his concentration and his mood, in order to land the point that sickness behaviour looks a lot like mental illness, which it really does. There's also an explanation of the mechanisms behind that, which as a non medic, I found particularly helpful. I think many of us have known the distinction between body and mind is a really unhelpful dualism for a long time, and he spends a lot of time talking about that. I think about books like ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ by Bessel van der Kolk, for example, and that's been highly influential in my work, however, if I'm honest, beyond the word ‘psychoneuroimmunology’, I didn't really have the best grasp of how that works. And while I'm still not going to be able to explain it very well to you, Dr Lyman does do a fantastic job of outlining how the body's defence mechanisms of inflammation, microbes and the gut influence the way that we think, feel and behave. So it's given me a little bit more insight into the nuts and bolts of that mechanism, which just gives me more confidence to bring it up with clients. 

The midsection of the book also shows us some quite alarming case studies of situations where the body's defence systems have caused really extreme psychological responses, and often catastrophic psychiatric misdiagnoses. I don't want to give any spoilers away here because I was gripped by this aspect of the book to the point actually where I was exclaiming in public, and I really wouldn't want to take that away from you because it's rare, isn't it, when you're reading a book for professional interest that you can't put it down and you're literally on the edge of your seat. But if you've ever had curiosity about why we're seeing an increase in certain difficulties and diagnoses, or if you've ever experienced a client that just doesn't seem to benefit from any of the usually effective therapies - those people where the drugs certainly didn't work, and the talking therapies aren't really working and even EMDR isn't working - if you've experienced that, I think you'd have to be dead inside not to have curiosity about what could be going on for those people, what might be missing from our formulations, and this provides an additional lens for that formulation. So I'm going to restrain myself and leave it there, but you really do have to read this book if you haven't already. 

The final chapters of the book are the practical ones, suggesting how we can reset our defence systems to protect against unnecessary psychological and physical distress. I found these chapters reassuringly similar to what we would have suggested anyway. Basically reducing the amount of processed stuff we eat, taking exercise, being mindful and practising compassion. So if you're an ACT or a CFT informed therapist, it's really the same stuff that you're already saying to your clients and probably to yourself. The only thing that I don't usually talk to clients about is the processed food. I don't really talk about diet at all with my clients, and I think it does raise an interesting debate for those of us that are trained in mental health, but not physical health, because I wouldn't comment on diet with a client. I talk about activity and movement because I do have some background in those things, but I don't give advice very much, and I certainly wouldn't feel competent or qualified to give advice about nutrition or anything along those lines, because although I used to be a fitness instructor, it wasn't a particularly in depth qualification, and I just don't feel like that's what my clients want to hear from me either. So for me, this book does raise the question of whether the knowledge silos that we've created are helpful, and perhaps the future of mental health care should involve practitioners trained more holistically. Maybe the rise of AI might make that possible, as we're able to augment our own cognitive capacities, and perhaps extend our knowledge in more different directions, and get qualified and competent in different things. So I found that exciting, and also quite daunting and scary. I'd love to know what you think about that? Whether you would embrace the idea of getting some training in the physical side of stuff under your belt, or whether you feel like we should stick to what we're good at already. I think it's a really interesting debate and one that I would really love to have more often. 

Returning to the book, one thing I would like to see more of in the book is attention to how the mind influences the body's defence mechanisms. This is talked about a bit, but the case studies focus much more on the other direction. And I understand this, as I suspect part of the drive behind the book is to provide support for those who have been dismissed as medically unexplained for so long, and I'm really on board with that mission. However, having witnessed a few extraordinary cases of physical recovery following trauma therapy, I would really like to see a deep dive on that with this new layer of understanding, possibly extending the work from The Body Keeps the Score. 

So that is my review of The Immune Mind by Dr Monty Lyman. You should absolutely read it, or you should do what I did and half read it and half listen to it on audible. He's a really engaging speaker, so it's one of those books which is a pleasure to listen to. Not every book works on audible, this one really does. I love to split it so that I've got the physical copy because there are bits I need to reread and go back to, and I think I'll be sharing bits of this book with clients as well. So I like to have the physical copy, but Audible is so much more practical for my life, because I can do that while doing all the other stuff that I do. So I'd really recommend, if you're feeling tight for time, Audible plus physical book; I have found that to be optimal.

Please let me know what you think of this book and this episode by leaving a review. I know it's a bit of a faff, but it really helps more people find this podcast, and to be honest, every review really means the world to me. I'm going to do another book review, maybe a couple in this series, because something that I've noticed is that when I make the time to read, I feel like all of my creativity expands and my work is just so much better. So although I know it's tricky to find the time to read new stuff, I really encourage it, and it's something that's really valuable for me. I don't have tons of other mental health professionals around me to talk about these things with, so it's really lovely to have the opportunity to talk to you guys about these books, and I'd love to get some feedback from you on whether you feel the same way as me, or whether you read it and have some completely different takeaways. So do review this podcast, let me know what you think, and come and find me over on Instagram as well. I'm @rosiegilderthorp over there and let me know what you think of The Immune Mind by Dr Monty Lyman.

I'll see you next week.