Chapter Five
What Happens When They Find Me Out?
Part of Building a Counselling Practice: The Journey Beyond the Classroom
There comes a point when people start finding you.
Your website begins appearing on Google.
Someone leaves a kind review.
An enquiry arrives from somebody you've never met.
Then another.
You'd think that would be reassuring.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it isn't.
Because success has a strange habit of introducing a new question.
"What happens if they realise I'm not as good as they think I am?"
Most counsellors have probably experienced some version of that feeling.
You finish a session wondering whether you asked the right question.
You replay conversations in your head whilst making a cup of tea.
You compare yourself to therapists who've been practising for twenty years and quietly forget that you're comparing your beginning with someone else's middle.
For a long time I assumed confidence would arrive automatically.
Complete the qualification.
Gain experience.
Build the website.
Get the clients.
Surely confidence would catch up.
It doesn't quite work like that.
Confidence isn't something that suddenly appears because your diary becomes busier.
More often it grows quietly through repetition.
One conversation.
One client.
One article.
One mistake.
One lesson.
Then another.
Looking back, I realised something else.
The therapists I admired most didn't seem confident because they knew everything.
They seemed confident because they were comfortable not knowing everything.
Therapy has a way of keeping us humble.
Every client reminds us that no two people arrive with exactly the same story.
No textbook prepares us for every conversation.
No theory removes uncertainty.
And perhaps that's exactly how it should be.
Private practice taught me something I wasn't expecting.
Clients aren't looking for perfection.
They're looking for presence.
They're looking for someone willing to think alongside them rather than someone pretending to have all the answers.
Oddly enough, building a website taught me exactly the same lesson.
People didn't connect with polished marketing.
They connected with honesty.
The more comfortable I became saying, "I don't know yet," the more authentic the whole practice became.
Imposter syndrome hasn't disappeared.
I'm not convinced it ever completely does.
It has simply become quieter.
These days, when it appears, I tend to treat it less like an enemy and more like an old travelling companion who occasionally reminds me that the work still matters.
Eventually another challenge appeared.
Not self-doubt.
The opposite.
The temptation to believe that one more improvement would finally make everything feel finished.
It never did.
And that became the next lesson.
Continue the Journey
← Chapter Four: Finding Your Voice as a Counsellor
Chapter Six → Just One More Tweak
Perhaps One Day...
These chapters began as reflections whilst building Me In Time Counselling & Psychotherapy.
The more I write, the more they feel like chapters of a book that hasn't quite realised it's a book yet.
Get in Touch
Have you ever caught yourself wondering whether everyone else has somehow worked it all out?
You're probably not as alone as you think.