Rethinking "Nice": Boundaries That Protect Your Practice (And Systems That Make Them Stick)

[00:00:08] DAMIEN:

Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar. We're broaching a topic which we've wanted to do for a while — rethinking nice — so boundaries that protect your practice and systems that make them stick. My name is Damien Adler. I'm the co-founder of Zanda. Previously, I grew and eventually sold a large private psychology practice, so I have definitely been in the trenches and experienced all the highs and lows of running practices. Now with me today we are very lucky to have Natasha from the Private Practice Alliance. Natasha and I have known each other now for quite a few years, and I'll let you introduce yourself, Tash, but we thought you'd be the perfect person to co-host this webinar.

[00:01:04] NATASHA:

Thank you. I reached out and you were like, I just saw Rethinking Nice and I was like, yes, let me do it. Thanks for having me. I love Zanda. I've loved Power Diary. You know, so I'm a huge advocate of what you and your team are doing, so kudos to you guys. Yes, we've known each other for a while. I've been doing private practice health strategy for a little bit over 20 years. I also owned a private practice, sold that off, and then I really feel like this kind of stuff is my genius zone. I really love thinking about how do we make private practice your passive income, your happy place — how do we align the clients and the work that you're doing and the administration team and the clinicians and community and referral sources, and build that human connection?

[00:02:11] DAMIEN:

Absolutely love that. I know that's what you do as well, which is one of the reasons why we get along so beautifully. And I think one of the things that has stood out over the years is Tash has some really clear views about ways in which you can operate private practices and do them really successfully. And that's why Tash came front of mind to raise this.

Now, we're going to explore this topic of being too nice. There's going to be a range of different views that we present here — we're not presenting a recipe to say this is how you must do it. The idea is to present different ways of thinking about being nice and what impact that can have on your practice, on your patients, and on treatment itself. Tash and I may not always agree on every topic, and that's actually the point — we want to bring different ideas, and the idea then for you is to look at what makes sense for you.

Now, something a little bit funny I wanted to share with everyone. I reached out to Tash and sent an email and said, "Hey, do you want to co-host this webinar with me?" And I immediately got back this email — an autoresponder from Natasha. When I got this email back I immediately knew that we had made the right decision in asking Tash if she would like to co-host this. Tash, what does this email say? What's the key message here?

[00:04:05] NATASHA:

A little bit of a backstory before, and I won't take long, but I felt like society has expectations on us and it hasn't really evolved. Emails have been around for decades, right? And we've gotten to a point where, in reality, we're thinking immediate responses, immediate expectations. And I was really tired of chasing other people's unknown expectations. So my email reply that went up — which does actually offend some people — but a lot of people who know me really appreciate it and they've adopted this themselves.

My email basically says: I do appreciate your email because I love that you were thinking about me. However, I will get back to you when I get back to you, rather than putting a time frame on that. I don't want there to be an expectation that I'm going to respond on weekends or public holidays, but I do want the flexibility of doing that. And if you want my time, you're more than welcome to book in a session with me, and if not then I will do it when I get to it.

[00:06:18] DAMIEN:

Absolutely. And what I liked about this — and I can understand it might upset some people — is I've made a request of you that you're not expecting, and then you're setting the boundary very clearly that, hey, I will look at it, I do appreciate it, but don't expect an immediate response. So I'm no longer wondering — I know where it stands.

This is an example of setting a boundary — and this isn't saying it's right for everyone or that you should adopt it if it doesn't feel right for you. But the thinking is good. What are the things that are outside of your control, that are taking your time, that we sometimes just mindlessly slip into? We don't have any control over who emails us, yet there's an immediate expectation that we've got to get after people quickly.

So we're really going to cover a broad range of this idea of being nice versus being clear, what the implications are, and some of the ways in which you can manage these boundaries and have more control over your own time and practice — whilst importantly achieving better outcomes for clients and for your team. This isn't about being mean at all. This is about looking at what sort of things you can do that actually improve things for everyone — win, win, win.

[00:09:07] NATASHA:

Yeah, so one of the things I think is, we follow systems and conversations and we do things that people say we should be doing. In the health industry, it's a helping industry — so you're always going to be thinking you're helping people, and that's one of the reasons you've got into what you got into. But there's definitely a difference between being nice — which sometimes means you've moved your boundaries — and being clear. And I really see this from the perspective of the administration team, who has to deliver a lot of this.

Something I picked up from someone smarter than me somewhere — clear is kind. If we're thinking about being nice, you're taking away other people's agency sometimes, because you're focusing on what you think they want to hear rather than just saying, here's this information, and then let's talk about what that means. In this day and age of neuroaffirmative thinking and personalization, I think being clear is kind. Here's what we need, and then let's go from there.

[00:10:46] DAMIEN:

Yeah, absolutely. The other way I frame this is: nice is often something that feels like it has an immediate benefit, and usually that tends to be avoidance of something. So often when we're being nice, we're actually trying to avoid an immediate awkward situation. Being clear, in my view, is about being more focused on the long-term best interest, the full picture.

It's really important to distinguish that, with neurodiverse populations where we need to be more sensitive, being nice often becomes synonymous with being inconsistent — because nice can vary day to day. That inconsistency, for a neurodiverse population in particular, is extremely confusing.

So let's jump into what the nice tax looks like. The nice tax is unintended — it's the internal and external impact on your business of being nice, and it shows up in so many ways: the no-shows, cancellations, non-payments, exceptions to rules, admin mistakes, burnout, and overall inconsistency.