Being Chosen as a Counsellor Can Feel Like a Beauty Contest

There’s also something quietly strange about being a man in counselling training. In many courses, you might only make up twenty percent of the room. Sometimes when you first arrive, you naturally drift towards the other men, not because you necessarily have anything in common, but because being male is the only visible thing you immediately share. Different ages, backgrounds, politics, life experiences, yet somehow you end up sat together because it feels familiar in an unfamiliar space. Maybe more on that another time.

You qualify. You survive placement. You spend years learning how to sit with other people’s pain. Friends and family ask when you’re finally going to “go private.” Training organisations talk about building your practice. Somewhere in the background sits the growing awareness that jobs want experience you do not yet have, qualifications longer than your arm, and confidence you are not entirely sure you feel.

And somewhere, somebody is always selling a shortcut.

“Fill your practice in six weeks.”
“Five clients a day.”
“Your website is why nobody is contacting you.”

Somewhere, somebody is always offering to fix the thing you have only just started doubting about yourself.

So eventually you do what most newly qualified counsellors do. You cautiously build a website. Join a directory. Upload a smiling photo that feels slightly less awkward than the other smiling photos. Then you sit there quietly hoping somebody, somewhere, chooses you.

Then comes LinkedIn. Suddenly your feed fills with people promising quick wins, marketing formulas, and guaranteed visibility. You start questioning whether you should be posting more, networking more, niching harder, smiling wider, writing better. Quietly refreshing your inbox while pretending you are not really bothered either way.

Then there are the directories.

Rows of therapists line the screen. Warm taglines. Calm colours. Carefully chosen words. Everyone trying to sound approachable, experienced, trustworthy, human. All hoping somebody reads their profile and thinks:

“You feel like the person I could talk to.”

For many men entering private practice, there is something particularly uncomfortable about this process.

Most of us were not raised to sell ourselves emotionally. We were taught to be capable, useful, reliable, practical. Suddenly the profession asks something completely different:

Describe yourself.
Talk about your warmth.
Explain why somebody should choose you.
Convince strangers you are safe enough to trust with their grief, shame, trauma, or fear.

You find yourself trying to stay authentic while also somehow standing out from hundreds of other counsellors doing exactly the same thing. It is around this point you start wishing you had kept up the yodelling lessons or mastered the bassoon, just so you had something obviously distinctive to put on the homepage.

It is a strange contradiction really. Counselling is meant to be about authenticity and depth, yet the way we are often found depends on presentation, promises, and SEO, three things that can feel very far away from what therapy is actually about.

Trying to translate empathy into keywords or sincerity into search visibility never fully sits right. You start wondering whether genuine human connection can really be captured by an algorithm quietly pushing some people to page one while others disappear into the digital wilderness.

At the same time, clients are not really searching for keywords. They are searching for a feeling.

A sense of:

“Maybe I could talk to this person.”

The photo, the wording, the tone, they all become quiet signals of safety. And that is what most people are actually looking for when searching for a counsellor. Not perfection. Not polished marketing. Someone who feels real enough to trust with what hurts.

Meanwhile, the therapist is doing their own version of searching in reverse. Wondering what to add, what to remove, what words might make someone pause long enough to stay on the page. Trying to sound professional but human, experienced but not detached, knowledgeable but still local and relatable.

Wanting to be found, while not wanting to perform.

Maybe that is the real irony of private practice. Therapy itself is not really about standing out. It is about showing up. But the world around therapy often rewards visibility, polish, confidence, certainty. The louder version of who we are.

Real therapy usually begins somewhere much quieter.

It starts when somebody reads a few lines and feels something honest.

And perhaps that is the part worth holding onto. Never trying to become somebody you are not just to compete with the crowd. The counsellors who tend to stay grounded are often the ones who slowly lean further into what genuinely matters to them, the clients they naturally connect with, the conversations that feel meaningful, the parts of life they truly understand.

Because if somebody reads your words and decides you are not the right fit, that is okay too. Not every therapist is meant for every person. The right connection is usually built on recognition, not performance.

Choosing a counsellor is vulnerable. But what often goes unsaid is that being chosen can feel vulnerable too.