I’m in the process of starting therapy.
I am not exactly thrilled about it, but I’ve come to a brief nexus of acceptance of the need, willingness to try, and window to get started. So I’m trying to get the process going before I find a good reason to bail out.
One of the barriers to looking into therapy to help with my stress and anxiety was the not so much the stigma of getting professional help, but the perceived failure of having to pay money to have someone to listen to me bitch and complain. To ‘buy friends’ if you will.
What is helping me get over that now is, oddly enough, empirical evidence to the contrary.
OH YEAH, PEOPLE PAY ME TO TELL THEM WHAT TO DO…
I have been selling my services to people and organizations for over a decade. The various things that people have paid me to assist them with are the exact same things my family will text or direct message me questions about. I help them for free or almost no cost all the time, and I charge other individuals (hopefully) fair market value for similar results.
Why is this? Because I know these people I call family, and they know that I have valuable knowledge and limited time. So what I do for them is based on one-offs and in between gigs that are hopefully paying. If they need more extensive help, they hire me and get on my business project calendar, not my open space calendar.
People who don’t know me don’t get the luxury of picking my brain to test the waters, but if they deem me good enough to do the work for them, they immediately get scheduled as per my business availability, not personal availability.
My time is worth something. My family knows this and those that respect that knows I will do what I can for whom I can. Those that don’t respect that I limit my exposure to and only make myself available in cases I deem as extreme emergencies.
…AND I ALREADY PAY PEOPLE TO DO THINGS FOR ME…
This time last year my wife was wrapping up chemotherapy and preparing for surgery to have a cancerous lump removed from her breast. Months earlier, she re-signed my then 5-year-old daughter for a host of extracurricular activities that the year prior she was routinely shuttling her to and from. That responsibility fell to me, which was an addition to my overly long days at my day job, my overly long stretches of work in the personal business, an attempted job search, regularly scheduled training and education updates,and every so often, eating and sleeping.
With all this going on, our house was starting to fall into disarray. And what little yard we had was not getting even basic care, which was doubly pathetic because I enjoy the peacefulness that comes from yard work. Or at least not be bothered while doing yard work.
One day at church, in a move that was completely out of character for me, I asked a guy who worked a lawn service if he could look at my yard and give me a quote. A week later he called with a number that we more than I wanted to pay, but I agreed. I happened to be home a few days later when his truck and trailer pulled up, his crew got out, and in a third of the time I would have taken had the yard looking twice as nice as I could have left it. He’s had to adjust his price twice since due to conditions in the town affecting all local business, and not only have I happily paid the extra, I started tipping more.
I do sometimes miss the piece of mind I got from just focusing on cutting grass and trimming hedges with barely audio music playing in my headphone. But I don’t miss the stress of seeing that my grass has gotten just a little too long on a Thursday and knowing I don’t have a possible chance to remedy the situation until Tuesday.
By the wife, surgery was fine, recovery was fine, my wife is more than fine.
…AND I PAY FOR MORE SERVICES THAN I NEED ANYWAY…
There is a debate currently raging around the cord cutting community about just how many streaming services a person needs to get their ‘normal TV experience.’
Now that we have gotten over the initial backlash of the first generation of streaming and are used to paying for multiple specialties services, every single entry with enough intellectual property is trying to unbundle our current bundles. The current battle I’m seeing the most pixel burned is for the need to pay for the new DC Universe service just to watch the new Titans show, and the soon to debut Disney service that threatens to hole away all the Disney/Marvel/Star Wars/ESPN programming.
Me personally, I playing for double service from Google because one will eventually die but I still want my music and my TV. I have Netflix and Spotify because…they came with the phone?
And there is a long list of products and services I have purchased to implement in my business. Some of them implemented very nicely. Some I get reminders they exist when I see a subscription renewal. Some I stumble across in random folders on my computer desktop where one time deals got to die (thank you Noah Kagan and AppSumo).
…SO WHAT IS MY BIG DEAL ANYWAY?
If I don’t have a problem paying for three browser-based graphics manipulators that I will never use (that I have currently found so far), and I don’t have a problem paying for services that provide me what I intended to pay for, and I don’t have a problem paying people to do things for me that I don’t have time to do that do them better than me anyway, and I don’t have a problem accepting money fro people looking for coaching, why did I have such a problem with paying someone to coach me out of whatever current funk I had gotten myself into?
The answer: the stigma of the stigma. Not needing help, but asking for help and having to hand over cash to get it.
But the time spent in counselling is worth the counsellor’s time and training. I can’t complain about people lowballing me on rates and not value the service that I will receive to allow me to function properly.
THIS IS WHERE I INSERT THE SALES PITCH
This is the where I insert the sales pitch to ask for help and pay the person fair compensation for the assistance.
If you want to toss some of that compensation my way, great, but the greater message is to not be so stubborn and get some help. Hire a team if you need a team. Hire a consultant if you need some expertise. Hire an accountant if you need to take your mind off the stresses of your money. Hire a counsellor if you need to take your mind off the stresses of anything else.
Pay the fee. Let them work. Reap the benefits.