Season Intro: Resilience and Adaptability: How to thrive in 2025

Hello and welcome to the Business of Psychology. It feels like it has been a long time since I've been here behind the mic and it's lovely to be back. I'm really looking forward to settling into this season but I felt like I needed to talk a bit about why it has taken me a while to get going with this season and to think about what I'm going to bring you, because I'm very excited about what we've got up ahead, but it does feel a little bit different to what we've done before.

Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links/references:

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

This week’s question:

• What trends have you noticed coming down the track in mental health care? Is there anything that's giving you anxiety about the future of independent practice or anything you've noticed that you're really excited about and you think could really change the way that we work?

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

Shownotes

Why has it taken me so long to bring this season to you?

As you know, if you've been following this podcast for a while, I've been working in seasons or series for the past few years because I felt like that's the best way of curating the content and making sure that what I'm putting out there is always the quality and well researched content that I want to create for you. I just don't feel like I want to be on a hamster wheel of having to churn out content on a weekly cadence, which might not feel like my best work. So I've been dedicating time to the curation of this season, really thinking about the questions I get asked and what people need at this moment. I’ve also been spending a bit longer trying to pursue the guests I really wanted to talk to, which takes time. This season is all about resilience and adaptability, and I think these are two things which we really need to consider for our independent practices moving forward.

We've talked on this podcast before about some of the lessons that I've learnt from my MBA. The thing that I have taken away from that, which I just don't think I would have gained the perspective anywhere else, is that we always need to be thinking about the problem that we solve for people, and we have to be accepting of the fact that how we do it, the mediums we use, the methods that we use, will have to change as our customers change and their expectations and the climate that they're living in changes.

The AI Revolution

When I look at the history of independent practice, It has been incredibly static. The way that we do independent practice now… yes, we're using things like video conferencing software to talk to clients that are in a different geographical space to us, but actually, the fundamental, what we are doing day in, day out, and how we do that, hasn't really changed for a very long time, since the beginning of independent practice for mental health professionals. And now I'm not sure that that's going to continue in exactly the way that it has. What I am sure about is that there will always be a space for us and that we will always be needed. But I think we have to open our minds to moving with the next industrial revolution, the AI revolution, and working out what our useful place within quite a different work and social context is going to be. I think we need to embrace that with excitement and curiosity, but also professional certainty. And that is where certainly us as psychologists have got an issue. We are not very clear about the value that we bring as a profession. And when I speak to friends and colleagues who have different core qualifications in therapy and counselling, I notice that problem is there as well, that actually as mental health professionals, we're quite prone to being insecure about the value that we bring. And that is where I see the vulnerability for us. When everybody is having to redesign their jobs, and everybody is having to fight for the bits of their job that shouldn't be done by AI (not that it couldn't, but that it shouldn't), then I think we need to get clearer about what our secret sauce is, what makes us special and valuable, and I think we need to build our vision of what our practice is going to look like in the future, focusing on those components and how we might adaptably apply those going into quite a different landscape.

I think that's exciting. I don't want to scare anybody, so this season is really about how you start to build resilience into your practice and the way that your practice runs. But also how you can begin to adapt to the changes that we see coming down the track. So we're going to be talking about AI directly this season.

Other changes that impact us

But we're also going to talk about things like the insurance models and how the changes that we're seeing in the way health care is delivered in the UK might impact us and how we might change and adapt our practice to work alongside those changes, rather than just digging our heels in and resisting them. Because yes, there are times for resistance, and I am really supportive of some of the resistance movements that are going on at the moment, but we also have to be realistic and understand that economies change, industries change, and we need to adapt to that rather than expecting that we will be able to hold on to the same way of working forevermore.

Substack: Inviting conversation

One important thing which has been on my mind for a while and another reason that this season was slightly delayed Is that I have been craving talking to you guys a lot more and i've been out in the world actually meeting lots of you at networking events and other kinds of social events that i've been to, and i've really enjoyed that and it made me think that I would really like to invite conversation around these topics. So with that in mind, I decided to start experimenting with Substack. And if you're on my newsletter list, you'll have seen me sending you some newsletters from Substack and talking about my experiments with that platform. And I hope to bring you a bit more about that as this season goes on.

One thing that I would really like for this podcast is for a lot of you to come and join me on Substack to talk about the content of the episodes. So while we're not going to move the hosting of the podcast, what I would really like is to have the newsletter that goes with each episode hosted on Substack. So if you want to receive that, you can come and subscribe over on my Substack. I'll put the link in the show notes to make sure that you get those newsletters. And the brilliant thing about having them there, rather than just a normal email, is that you can comment underneath and let me know what you thought of the episode, and at the end of a lot of these episodes I am going to ask you some questions about how this applies to your practice.

So the first one I want to ask you about is what trends you've noticed coming down the track? Is there anything that's giving you anxiety about the future of independent practice or anything you've noticed that you're really excited about and you think could really change the way that we work?

I really want to hear from you so that I can create the content that's going to help you the most and also engage in some discussion which will hopefully help us all see how we can be most useful to our clients as we go deeper into the 2020s.

Please do come and be part of the conversation with me over on Substack, and I will see you for the first proper episode next week.