Is your practice going swimmingly? Are you delighted beyond words with everything associated with it? Chances are that at least some one thing is not quite right and is gnawing at you.
Nothing is ever perfect but it is important for you to be aware of what is emotionally amiss so you can address it, eliminate it, and enjoy your practice more.
Sometimes it is not the practice itself but something much more basic.
It might be how you feel about it.
To ascertain if this might be the case, you need to ask yourself "why did I become a practitioner?" That is, what was it that inspired or encouraged you to become one? This is a hard question to answer because we tend to distance ourselves from our deeper reasons.
Perhaps you became a practitioner because you admired someone who was one.
Perhaps you did it for the money or the professional status it provided.
Perhaps you did it because it offered a lifestyle you wanted.
Perhaps you did it because someone expected it of you.
Perhaps you did it to please someone.
Perhaps you did it because of a deep-seated desire to help or contribute to a greater good.
There are no good or bad reasons, but you have to know what yours is.
What about your clients? Are they the ones you really want? Or are they ones you are tolerating and would rather not deal with? You need to look at the demographics, psychographics, and characteristics of the people you help.
Do they match those with whom you'd rather work? With whom do you enjoy working? Are they people who are stressed or in a crisis? Those who require only a problem analysis? Business people? Those in entertainment or the arts? Other professionals? The elderly, young, or middle-aged? The poor or the affluent? Those who are friendly, spiritual, or religious? Activists? Only good communicators? In order to know what needs to be changed in your practice to make it more enjoyable, you have to know what you already have that you want to keep.
Making your practice more comfortable and successful requires that you know what exists that is positive.
Do you currently have the right clients, the right rates, enough free time for other aspects of your life, good staff, effective marketing, or the lifestyle you want? If you had your druthers, what would you prefer doing each day at work that would make your practice more enjoyable? Maybe you'd rather have more time with clients.
Maybe you'd prefer to do more consulting or counseling over the phone than in person.
You need to know how you value your various practice activities so you can focus on doing them while finding ways to do away with others, delegate, or outsource them.
The same holds true for determining what sorts of things you currently have to do that don't add to your practice enjoyment.
Do you do lots of paperwork and the accounting? Do you feel you personally have to pass on every piece of marketing? Do you feel you have to monitor what your competition is doing? Do you have to search for new staff, evaluate, and hire them? While these activities do add to your overall goal achievement and revenue, do they make you as a practitioner truly feel happy, satisfied, or rewarded? You need also to consider what your financial goal is and to what degree are you achieving it for the lifestyle and practice satisfaction you want? What obstacles, if any, exist? How have you been addressing them? Have these methods worked as you wished? If not, why not? As you consider and respond to each of these questions, you need to look not only at your practice per se but also at other aspects of your life.
This can be your personal life, family, social life, health, outside activities, and your relationship to the larger world - from local to international.
For most people, their work is not totally compartmentalized.
This means that other aspects of your life are likely to be dependent, inter-dependent, or otherwise related to your practice.
You need to brainstorm by yourself and/or with others all the possible things you have, don't have, want, don't want, and want to change.
Write down whatever comes to mind but do not judge it yet.
You will evaluate each item later after you have completed your list.
Your evaluation of each item needs to be both analytical and emotional.
That is, you need to make your decisions based on BOTH reason and gut feeling (intuition), looking at probabilities of what would work and acceptable degrees of risk.
Your last step in this practice assessment is to review your answers to see what the implications are for each, keeping what is working, discarding what is not working, and making changes.
Then you need to ask yourself what specifically and concretely you can do to make the necessary adjustments in order to make your practice more effective, efficient, enjoyable, rewarding, and goal achieving.