Image: ‘Swimmy’ – Children’s book about collaboration by Leo Leonni. Used here for educational purposes, illustrating that we are stronger together if we learn to swim in a co-ordinated swarm.
ALL EVENTS ONLINE
Monthly Salon for developing ethical business skills and products: Salon-style meeting with a check-in and one or two presentation slots for colleagues to present ideas for new or existing products (private practice, CPD they are offering, any type of non-profit or for-profit venture) – please see Calendar.
Sessions and Speakers for the first round of this Program – sessions are 1.5 – 2 hours each:
- Marketing for Therapists – Friday, 5th of December – ONLINE Speaker: Silvia Del Corso – Owner of PINK SEO Marketing, specialising in marketing for independent medical doctors and health professionals. We will cover: market analysis, product development, product/market fit, web-presence, product placement from an SEO perspective. Q&A, exercise on individual marketing plan, outlook on next steps and tailored marketing services on offer. Small workshop on collaborative product development and marketing – how we get further together. https://pinkseo.marketing/seo-therapists/
- Management in the Mental Health sector – February 2026 date tbc – ONLINE – Speakers Marta Banet, Head of Psychological Services at riverside.org.uk and Kelly McMinn, former Head of Mental Health at One Housing Group. We will cover: how do therapists step up to become a mental health service manager – skills needed to manage a mental health service with both clinical and operational responsibilities; recruiting and managing a team, working towards commissioned targets, achieving key performance indicators, collaborating with stakeholders. Q&A, specialist mentoring opportunities.
- Non-profit business – April 2026 date tbc – ONLINE – Speakers: Dorothee Bonnigal-Katz on founding and running the famous Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP – Psychosis Therapy Project – PTP-USEMI) for over 12 years and Dr Phoenix-Rises Tabot-Ojong on starting her charity Voice of the Child 17 years ago – we will cover: start and development of non-profit projects, skills needed, running of the projects, funding successes and nightmares, general success and pitfalls. Q&A, mentoring opportunities for colleagues.
- Organisational Consulting and Executive Coaching – Saturday, May 2026 date tbc – ONLINE – Speakers David Arrell, organisational consultant and executive coach. Presentation of his experience with organisational consulting implementing his model based on Robert Kegan’s stages of adult ego-development and the Deliberately Developmental Organisation (DDO). We will cover: models of adult ego-stage development, and general skills needed for therapists to step into organisational consultancy and executive coaching. Q&A. Mentoring opportunities and networking. 2nd Speaker: Roman Angerer, psychometrics of stages of ego development – introducing one method of measuring adult ego-development according to the theories of Susanne Cook-Greuter and Michael Commons Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC).
- Therapists Start-up and for-profit business- March 2026 date tbc – ONLINE – Anna: short overview of Barclays grassroots entrepreneurship courses – everything from project idea to implementation. Speakers: Dima Syrotkin, CEO of Pandatron: Reinvent Change with AI | Angel Investor | ACMP Board Member. Presentation on his work in start-up development and ethical investing, how to find ethical investors and what these are looking for. Second Speaker: Berlin Hub for Regenerative Business? Karma Kapital? Startups for Tomorrow? How to pursue an idea for a start-up/business in an ethical way – where to find ethical business partners, investors, consultants, marketers etc. Political dimensions and importance of ethical change in business. Q&A. Colleagues’ mentoring offers, colleagues seeking business partners.
- Therapists writing skills – May 2026 date tbc – ONLINE – for anyone curious to pursue any type of writing, whether creative/screen/blog/newspaper/books etc. First Speaker: Dr Jeffrey Rubin, www.drjeffreyrubin.com, NY psychoanalyst and author of several clinical books. Presentation on content development, writing process, editing, finding a publisher and promotion rounds via radio, TV and social media. Second Speaker: Stephen Gyllenhaal – how to write/conceptualise a documentary, scripts for movies/TV shows, where to get mentoring, how to get it accepted. Q&A. Opportunities for therapists present to briefly introduce their own writing projects, seek and offer mentoring/collaboration.
- Therapists Be Bold – June 2026 date tbc – ONLINE – Personal process – do you have ideas and dreams but something holds you back? We explore key themes of this from a psychodynamic angle, such as Fear of success, fear of envy, self-sabotage, and ‘impostor syndrome’. Also, we will talk about competition versus collaboration – healthy versus destructive forms of competition, resolution of ‘oedipal issues’ and ‘pathological narcissism’. Speakers: e.g. Dr Susann Kavaler-Adler? (https://kavaleradler.com/) and UK-based psychoanalytic speaker.
Sessions: 1.5 – 2hours, CPD certificate available. Recording of presentations will be available excluding Q&As for participant privacy reasons.
Cost: £40 per session. Registered therapists only.
If interested, please email therapists.cafe@protonmail.com
Therapists Business Skills Course
The course is inspired by the government-funded Barclays Academy/Eagle Labs products for grassroots entrepreneurship (https://labs.uk.barclays/what-we-offer/) – they’re brilliant, do try them!
It will be one of our special projects following the feedback that many therapists want to improve their business skills but currently don’t have a coherent platform to turn to. I.e. there are many products out there but nothing that brings us together in a meta-forum to share experiences and pool together for important projects. Also, many offers are for-profit, so the quality and intention behind them is often not clear.
Our plan is to start an 8-session, open-source, recurring course covering all basics, with a LinkedIn group for colleagues to join – the spirit is collaborative development supported by experts. We hope that all kinds of further projects can come from this, developed by colleagues.
We will have expert speakers on all topics related to therapists in the world of business, as well as representatives from relevant industries to offer mentoring and opportunities. Q&A and feedback at the events can inform further product development by colleagues and partners.
Then, in each module, we also invite colleagues to present what they already know and offer mentoring to colleagues. We think that mentoring colleagues is an under-used resource in our field – in addition to formal supervision, why not offer your skills and expertise on an ad-hoc basis? (Paid, of course – they are hard earned skills after all!).
Strategic collaboration: we also think that, as a community, we could improve ways to collaborate strategically on therapeutic product development and product placement. For example, we could use this platform to deliberately find colleagues from different modalities to work together on creating a comprehensive therapeutic product on a particular subject – such as, for example, ‘dementia prevention and conscious ageing’ – which could then be delivered and marketed collaboratively as well. We could include input from medical professionals (e.g. neuroscience/psychiatry) and specialised coaches (e.g. brain trainings, nutrition, exercise) and then market an overall product (such as 8 sessions covering all aspects broadly), with individual ‘spin-off’ products that deepen each module.
This way, we could offer better-quality interventions for clients, market these in more targeted ways, and thereby also improve practice outcomes for therapists. We will therefore include a module on the process of collaboration and constructive versus destructive kinds of competition.
Political mission: this course also has a secondary political mission, namely to facilitate more therapists into business and entrepreneurship in general. We are a community of people with complex education and skills and high ethical standards who could make a much bigger contribution than we currently are. We therefore include speakers on subjects of business and ethics and invite constructive thinking about business structures (not just products) that serve all of society.