Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 22: Why More Trainings Won’t Fix Burnout or Client Outcomes

Released: 04/03/2026

Show Notes:

In this episode, Amanda challenges the belief that more certifications are the key to becoming a better and more successful therapist. She breaks down why burnout, slow client progress, and feeling stuck are often not a knowledge problem, but a time and structure problem, especially within the traditional 50 minute session model. Amanda explores how limited time impacts depth, presence, and the therapeutic relationship, and why that relationship, not additional modalities, is the biggest driver of client outcomes. She also shares a powerful reframe that can help therapists stop chasing more training and start creating a more sustainable and effective way of working.

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3 Key Takeaways:

1. More certifications don’t automatically lead to better client outcomes—the real driver of transformation is the therapeutic relationship, which requires time, presence, and depth.
2. Therapist burnout and slow client progress are often time constraint problems, not skill deficits, especially when working within high-volume, 50-minute session models.
3. Shifting the structure of how you work—not just what you know—can create deeper client results, greater sustainability, and a more aligned, effective practice.

Connect with Amanda:

• Follow on Instagram: @amandakbcoaching
• Check out the Amanda KB Coaching website

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Just a quick heads up, everything I share in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, financial advice, or tax advice. Every practice and every state has its own rules. So if you’re wondering how something applies to your situation, make sure to check in with an attorney, accountant, or another qualified professional who can give you guidance based on your specific circumstances.

Transcript:

Amanda (00:01)
Hello everyone, thanks so much for tuning in today. ⁓ Quick heads up, I don’t know what is going on with my cats today, but they are in a mood. So as much as I’m using a microphone to try to just pick up my audio, if you hear a little meow or a scuffle in the background, note that I’m just embracing the messiness of it’s not gonna be perfect. When I lock my cats out of the room, sometimes it just becomes more of an ordeal. So it’s just not worth it today, so.

Bear with me if there’s something that happens in the background here. But when it comes to the topic for today, this is something I’m really excited to talk about because it’s come up in so many different spaces. It’s come up for myself. When I started my therapy practice, it comes up for so many therapists I talk to, whether they are brand new to therapy, having their own private practice or whether they’ve been in it for a decade or more and they’re just frustrated because they’re not seeing the private practice success that they want.

So wanna start with a question that might feel a little uncomfortable. What if you didn’t actually need another certification? What if the thing that’s been feeling off in your therapy work, the burnout, the slower progress with clients, the something’s not clicking feeling, what if it’s not because what you don’t know? What if it’s not because you don’t know enough? Because I see this pattern all the time with therapists and again,

I have felt it myself at times and both at the beginning and today. So we see, okay, our client isn’t progressing the way we hoped. So maybe I need EMDR training, maybe I need IFS training, maybe I need another training on working with polycules, because I’m seeing couples who have other partners as a part of their system. And listen, I am not anti-training. I’ve invested a lot of money.

in trainings myself, I value it deeply outside of just getting our continuing education credits. Like obviously we want to be good therapists. For those of us who charge a premium fee, we want to feel like we know a lot, we are confident in what we’re able to offer, we can communicate that. But I think sometimes we stand a little bit too much behind the certifications and the trainings, right? We think clearly if I only had

The thing if I were able to do more, if I was able to say, not only am I EMDR trained, but I’m EMDR certified, like that would finally be the thing that clicked and brought in more clients and made me feel like the confident and financially successful therapist that I want to be. But again, what if the issue isn’t knowledge? What if the issue is time? That’s really what I want to talk about today. So let’s talk about what’s actually happening for a lot of therapists right now.

you probably got into this field because you care deeply about people and you want to help and you find this work meaningful and maybe you do love your work but at the same time you’re exhausted you’re seeing 20 plus clients a week i’ve met with therapists who are seeing like 35 clients a week and that just sounds intense you’re seeing back-to-back sessions i’ve seen so many therapists who like skip lunch and they just don’t eat

I know there are times where I’ve certainly been there, especially when I was working at the agency I was before moving into private practice. And ultimately we start to create this problem where we have minimal time to think or process or reset. And there becomes this weird tension between like, love this work, but I don’t know if I can keep doing it like this. And I think a lot of therapists don’t even let themselves say that out loud. Like a lot of times,

It’s been in my one-on-one coaching sessions with therapists where that finally starts to come out, where they finally feel like they have permission to say, I love this, but, right? Even as therapists, we know we’re supposed to embrace the and component, right? Of like, not but, but and, but no, I think a lot of us truly do feel like it’s not both, right? We love the work, but we don’t see a way through. And so we’re only looking for a way out.

because truly it starts to feel like maybe I’m in the wrong field if I can’t make this work, or maybe I’m just not cut out for this, or why does this feel harder than I thought it would? But again, what if the problem is not you and your lack of training? What if the problem is actually the structure you’re working within? So when your clients aren’t transforming in the way that you want.

They come in for this goal. Maybe you actually feel fairly confident you can help them with this goal. But then they keep coming to sessions and they’re feeling frustrated. They’re feeling like, haven’t seen any movement. I haven’t seen any change. I’m starting to feel disappointed and maybe even hopeless. So we’re layering this on top of all these problems. We’re burnt out. We’re working back to back sessions. We have no time to feel creative. We definitely don’t feel like we have time to market. And now we have clients who are making

but slowly, or they feel stuck in certain patterns. They might understand things cognitively, but they’re not shifting emotionally. And the default thought for the therapist becomes, well, I just must not know enough, right? Like other therapists are better than me, other therapists who have more trainings, more certifications, that is clearly the answer. Like they seem like they know their shit. So you start to look for another modality, another framework, another certification.

because that feels like the responsible thing to do. But here is the question I really want you to sit with. Are your clients not transforming because you lack skill or because there isn’t enough time and space to actually do the work deeply? Because those are two very different problems. And I’ve talked about this before. In order to solve a problem, we need to know that we’re solving the right problem.

Otherwise, we are problem solving and we solved a problem, but it wasn’t actually the right problem. And so we still have a problem, right? You’re still not getting clients. Your clients are still stuck, whatever it is. So let’s talk about one of the biggest misconceptions in therapy. The thing that therapists get wrong over and over again. We tend to think the more trained I am, the better outcomes my clients will have.

Right. And I think there’s something to be said for that. Like, I know every training I go to, whether I say, now I’m going to incorporate this with every single client that I have or, you know, regardless of how helpful or transformative is for me, like I do gain something. I try out a new skill. I see how much it matches my personality, my therapeutic style. And sometimes it shifts something for clients. Right. Everyone is different and some people do respond better to more.

cognitive things or more emotional things or more behavioral things. But it’s not that black or white. Just because you have more training, just because you learn a new skill, that doesn’t actually mean your clients are guaranteed to have better outcomes. Nowhere does the research actually support that. You all probably remember this from grad school, but then again, we forget it in practice.

But the number one predictor of client outcomes is not the method that you use. It is not the modality. It’s not the approach. It’s not your case conceptualization. It’s the therapeutic relationship. So it does not matter what modalities you are strictly adhering to. It doesn’t matter what certification you recently earned. It doesn’t matter how many alphabet soup letters you have after your name.

What matters is the relationship. And so here is the part that we don’t talk about enough. Obviously, relationships take time to develop. We know that a client might come to us for a couple of sessions and already, like, there’s not a great fit, whether it’s just off the bat or maybe it’s someone’s first time in therapy, or maybe they had a really poor experience with therapy and it took them a decade to even reach out and try again. But relationships take

They take time for the client to trust us. It takes time for us to feel comfortable trying either our current or some new skills. And that might even be, I’m not talking about skills from like the EMDR, IFS, whatever perspective, but skills in the sense of like confronting clients or using more present process oriented experiential skills. Like the skills that you use with everyone, you’re probably not just bandaid.

applying them with every client that you see, you are seeing like, okay, well, what resonates with this client and what doesn’t? And so relationships take presence, right? We need to actually be attuned or in attunement to the person in front of us. We need some amount of depth. If everything’s kind of surface level, I don’t know about you, but when I have sessions where we’re kind of just talking about like stuff all the time, like I don’t feel as invested.

invested as I can be, but I don’t love talking through like logistics of the how was your week and stuff like that. And that might be because I’m autistic. I hate small talk. I need the depth in order to feel connected with someone. And so with that too, relatedly, relationships need emotional safety. If there’s not emotional safety for one reason or another, can we truly form that therapeutic relationship? Probably not.

Relationships also need a space to unfold, right? Whether that is week by week, whether that’s with therapy intensives, we need that space to feel like we can let go. And for clients, again, not only does that take time, but there’s lots of different points of consideration, like is it virtual versus in person? Are they doing it in the middle of their workday or at the beginning of a school day? There’s lots of factors in terms of feeling like there’s actually space.

to unfold and to let go and get vulnerable. I know I had to work with my therapist to change our time when my time was like after a coaching call and before a therapy call. like, I can’t be vulnerable. Thursdays at 10 a.m. I need to, we need to move to the end of a day or I’m always gonna stay in my head. And so in order to really build those quality relationships with our clients, again, we need presence, depth, emotional safety, and a space to unfold.

And when you are working primarily in a therapy model where you have 45 to 50 minutes once a week with 20 plus clients, that is not a lack of skill problem. That is a time constraint problem. So let me give you an analogy here. Imagine you are going to a doctor and they spend five minutes with you. They ask a couple of questions, maybe run a quick test.

and then they send you on your way. Even if they are the most qualified doctor in the world, there is only so much they can do in five minutes. Now imagine instead, they spend hours with you. They understand your full history. They have time to really assess and connect and respond. This is a completely different experience, which is gonna lead to a completely different outcome.

And that’s exactly what’s happening in therapy too. It’s not that you don’t know what to do. It’s that the container you’re working in doesn’t always give you time to do it, right? How many times and how many tropes out there exist of doorknob confessions of, well, we should start wrapping up for today, but before I go, or, you know, times where someone just starts to feel an aha moment or

I literally just had this happen in my practice earlier this week where I was meeting with a client for the standard 50-ish minute session because I still do a handful of those with some long-term clients and a lot of stuff was coming up and they were like, wow, I really wish we had more time this week. Can we have another session this week? And because I have flexibility to do that, I was able to offer that. But really and truly this time constraint that is artificial and ultimately

A lot of us follow because of insurance models, whether you are in network or out of network or completely cash pay. That’s just kind of how we’ve always been taught to think about therapy is that it happens in our increments at a time. And ultimately it happens at clinical our increments. So the 45 to 50 minutes, because ideally you have time to write your note, go pee, have a snack, whatever it is. But if you’re like me, you have a hard time adhering to just 50 minutes.

Sometimes my clients are better at maintaining that boundary than I am because I do want to keep talking. And that’s why I love the therapy intensive model where I get more time. So again, when we are only working in the 50 minute model, when that is our primary way of working and this goes like unchecked, unexamined of like, well, this is just status quo. I guess this is what therapy looks like. A few things start to happen. So we start to

doubt ourselves, right? Like, do I just suck? Like, I literally at some point, back before I started my private practice, I was working at a college counseling center, and I was just cranking through, like that was the expectation. One of my friends joked, kind of feels like a sausage factory, right? Like you just crank through and you produce as much as you can. What matters is output. And I really started to doubt, am I a good therapist?

Right? Like I thought I was, I thought that’s what I went through all this training for and I always got good feedback. I’m passionate about this. I’ve been basically, you know, the therapist role for all my friends since I was a child, probably like you have been. But we started to doubt like, am I actually good at what I’m doing? We start to question our competence of like, do I like do, did I forget how to do a case conceptualization? Am I right about this? Am I totally off? Is there something I’m missing?

And again, our brain goes back to, well, clearly I must keep investing in training. I, PESI is one of the most dangerous things I’ve seen out there because how many emails and flyers do you get where it’s like, here’s this $99 certification. Here’s this $1,000 certification. Here’s this, like it just promotes, promotes, promotes. And again, I’m all for.

when it’s helpful and it’s relevant and we’re trying to deepen or expand our skillset because we generally do not feel confident in something. But there’s a difference between, know, I realized couples work is a passion of mine and I never got training in it. Let me get training in it. And, you know, I’ve got a year worth of couples training, but I should keep investing in more or let me learn this style or this approach or this thing. That’s very different. Investing to do

good, competent clinical work is different between this perceived notion of like I have to specialize in and get certified in everything. Because while we’re doing that, while you’re seeing 20 plus clients a week, while you’re feeling completely burnt out, you’re behind on notes, you’ve heated a frozen meal for the seventh time this week, you’re stressed out about your ability to pay rent or mortgage next month, if we are burning out,

If our income is capped by our time, if your clients are taking longer to get the results than they might need to, like, this is why all of this really matters because it is not just about you. You are so important in this. I truly believe in therapist welfare, right? Because if we are burnt out, we’re not doing good work for our clients. We’re not feeling like the well-rounded and

holistically rested and taken care of individual. But it’s not just about us as therapists, it is about our clients too. And when we talk about ethical care, yes, part of that is training and feeling competent in our training, but it’s also about how we show up for our clients. What we do with the training we have, what we do with the time that we have. And so this is a really important conversation because I know

I will be the first to admit, again, when I did not feel like a good therapist, it wasn’t just about my confidence. It was about my clients deserve better than this, right? They are really struggling, but all I can offer them is this 50 minute session because that’s all I made time for in my schedule or times when I was overpacked. And for me, overpacked was like 22 clients a week. If someone wanted to get in for an additional session that week, I didn’t have time to offer them.

Or if I did, was like, well, guess I can skip lunch or guess I’ll stay later. I mean, I was working from homes, but working in my home office, I guess I’ll stay later working later than I want to. Right? Like these whole reasons, a lot of us move into private practice. We end up just recreating the same problems. We are working in a way we don’t love. Sometimes we work with clients who aren’t like perfect fit and we’re, you know, having a hard time setting boundaries for ourselves in terms of you definitely get a lunch break.

you definitely get to work the hours that you need to and that you want to in terms of number of hours and when you start and when you end your day. And so this is a, it’s a therapist problem and it’s a client problem, but this problem is not necessarily solved by let me get another certification, let me get another training. And so if you are listening to this and thinking like, okay, well, if it’s not training, if it’s not,

you know, another certification that I should get, then like, what’s the problem? Right? And that’s what I said earlier is you have to know what is the right problem to solve because we can’t fix the wrong problem and therefore expect, you know, the new solution. We can’t try and fix this hole over here when really it’s this bigger hole. You can, but your boat is still going to sink in that way. So if the answer is not training and certifications, then what is it?

This is exactly what I’m going to be breaking down in my upcoming live webinar this month in April, because there is a different way to structure your work. There is a way that doesn’t rely on you seeing more and more clients. It doesn’t require endless certifications and actually it creates more space for deeper transformation. Here’s the part that I really love. It’s deeper transformation, not just for your clients, but also for you.

because I think we matter just as much as our clients. And if you are one of those therapists who right now is having a hard time putting yourself first and taking up space, this webinar is gonna be a fantastic way for you to start taking up some space for yourself and seeing if you changed around other things in your practice that didn’t start with go down this six month rabbit hole of certifications.

If you started just by shifting how you work with your clients, that’s gonna transform your life, it’s gonna transform your business, and it’s gonna transform your clients’ lives, right? This can be a win-win scenario. No one has to lose here. So in my live webinar, we’re gonna talk about why time is such a critical factor in your therapeutic outcomes. We’re gonna talk about what changes when you shift the structure of your work and how other private practice therapists are creating

more sustainable, effective practices without burning out. So you can sign up using the link that is in the show notes. And even if this episode just gave you one thing to really think about, I hope that it’s this message. You’re probably not under trained, right? I have met so many therapists. I have seen so many letters behind y’all’s name. I’ve got a lot of letters behind my name, even when it’s like PhD licensed psychologist and I currently have.

Technically two certifications. I’m certified in the safe and sound protocol, but that feels a little bit different because that’s like watching a course There’s no like hours you need to complete or supervision you need to complete or things like that But I don’t even put that behind my signature. I use Amanda Bedura’s PhD licensed psychologist I’ve seen so many therapists who have like at least five sets of like three or four letter Acronyms, ⁓ know there’s another word for those. It’s not actually acronym all the time but so much

There are so many of us that have so much training. And so we are probably not under trained. That is highly likely not the problem here. You just might not have enough time to do your best work. And that’s something to really pay attention to. It’s something really worth paying attention to. And if that’s something that you want to learn more about, again, register for my free training that’s coming up. It is always such an exciting event. People always leave feeling so.

inspired, feeling like they’re ready to make some changes. So I would love to see you there live. There’s going to be some live show up bonuses. So I hope that was helpful just to hear today in terms of before you invest thousands of dollars and dozens or hundreds of hours in your next pursuit of training or certification, really just stop and think about is that the right problem to solve or is there a different problem I can solve?

So let’s chat more soon and tell me if you’re coming to the webinar what you’re most excited to learn. I always take questions beforehand if there’s things people want me to cover. So just reach out and I look forward to seeing you there.