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A question that keeps coming up in Amanda’s mastermind is whether it’s easier to sell to other therapists than to sell directly to consumers. The short answer is no, and this episode is about why. She gets into why it only looks easier from the outside, what the algorithm is actually showing you when you scroll through Instagram, and what really determines whether any offer succeeds regardless of who you’re selling to. She also makes the case that the differentiating factor in any market, B2B or B2C, is never the product itself. It’s you, and whether you actually know your ideal client’s pain points well enough to make them feel seen.
Proof of concept is one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot in business spaces without a lot of clarity on what it actually means or when you actually have it. Amanda gets into why most people misread their own data, what it actually means when a launch goes quiet, and why changing your price or restructuring your offer means you’re running a completely new experiment, not a continuation of the last one. If you’ve ever had something work, then changed one thing and watched it stop working, and concluded the whole idea was dead, this episode is going to push back on that.
The advice to “charge your worth” is everywhere in therapist spaces, and Amanda has some real problems with it. Not because the intent is wrong, but because for most therapists with complex trauma and a complicated relationship with self-worth, it’s not actually useful guidance. She makes the case for a different frame: charging what you need, and not just for right now. That means thinking beyond your current bills and debts and actually accounting for future you, including retirement, which most therapists are either ignoring or treating as a nice-to-have. She also gets personal about her own numbers, what her accountant told her about her projected 2026 tax liability, and why she finally started maxing out her retirement contributions this year.
Amanda gets into what time off actually looks like when you run two businesses, and why it looks nothing like the social media version of passive income and unplugging for weeks at a time. She breaks down how premium fees and a smaller caseload changed what taking time off even felt like, why she still chooses to take some calls while traveling, and how she thinks through which commitments to keep and which ones to move when she’s out. If you’ve been telling yourself you can’t take time off because you can’t afford to stop seeing clients, this episode is worth a listen.
At some point, if you add therapy intensives and they actually start working, you hit a decision point nobody prepares you for. Your intensive calendar is filling up, your weekly caseload is still full of people you genuinely care about, and a new consult request just landed in your inbox. What do you do? Amanda gets into the three separate decisions most therapists are trying to answer all at once, why a weekly wait list is not always the compassionate move it feels like, and how to know whether a hybrid practice is your actual destination or just a holding pattern you never examined. The through line in all of it: stop letting a full calendar make the decision for you.
Amanda makes the case that comparing your intensive rate to what everyone else charges is the easy question dressed up as the hard one. The real question, the one most therapists skip right past, is what are you actually trying to buy back with that money? Time, peace, the ability to say no without panic, evenings that belong to you instead of your notes? That answer looks different for every therapist, and none of it gets solved by copying someone else’s rate. She gets concrete about how to actually figure out your number, why therapy intensives change the math in a way that weekly sessions alone can’t, and why the structure of your practice has to serve your actual life rather than the other way around.
Amanda makes an argument that might be uncomfortable to sit with: the thing most therapists think is holding them back from premium fees, whether that’s a missing certification, not enough years of experience, or a niche that isn’t narrow enough, is almost never actually the thing. She walks through what really happens when clients book a therapy intensive, how the modality is usually the hook but the relationship is what keeps them, and why that distinction matters a lot for how you market your practice.
Most therapists change their fee, go out of network, maybe build out a specialized offer, and then wonder why inquiries aren’t converting the way they should. Amanda’s argument in this episode is that the clinical work changed, the business model changed, but the marketing never got the memo. She breaks down what clients paying premium fees out of pocket are actually looking for, why warm and generic doesn’t answer any of their real questions, and what has to shift before the marketing and the fee start working together.
Amanda makes the case that premium therapy fees in 2026 have almost nothing to do with certifications, credentials, or years of experience. What’s actually driving higher rates is positioning and access, and most therapists are missing both. She walks through how therapy intensives work as a catalyst not just for adding income, but for raising your weekly rate, rebuilding confidence in your clinical work, and shifting the way your entire practice reads to potential clients.
Amanda gets into her own fee history, from her very first client at $85 a session to charging $400 to $500 an hour for therapy intensives, and what actually made each increase possible. This isn’t a pep talk about charging your worth. It’s an honest look at the two myths keeping most therapists underpriced, how to know when you’re actually ready to raise your rates, and why staying too low for too long costs your clients something too.
Whether you're building a private practice or expanding into intensives, coaching, workshops, or retreats, this podcast will help you do work that lights you up, get paid well for it, and build a happy, healthy, and wealthy life.
In this free 1-hour masterclass, you’ll learn the nitty gritty details of how to market, price, and launch intensives in your practice - including the mindset work you may need to tackle first!
Listen to me on The All Things Private Practice Podcast as I join host Patrick Casale as we dive into the real challenges and transformative practices for mental health professionals transitioning to private practice.
Listen to me on The Entrepreneurial Therapist Podcast as I join host Danielle Swimm and talk about adding Intensives to scale your Private Practice.
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In this podcast episode, Kelly and I chat about these private practice non-negotiables and how you can implement them into your practice, too!