Unit 1: Why bother with professional recordings?

Surely if your client can hear you, that’s all that matters –right? I mean you studied to be come a coach or therapist, not a musician!

But wait! Why is it that the celebrity therapists sound so good? You never hear Tony Robbins or Paul McKenna drop their pen in a recording. OK, you might argue that they’ve got money to hire specialists, but we all start somewhere.

People who regularly use media to get their message across, know that sounding good is a part of their brand. They also know that their brand is a means to form trust, to form a connection with their clients and their potential clients. They understand that brand is not about having a logo, but the sum total of how you appear to your clients –your clothing, your body language, your consistency, your written materials etc.

Quality, brand and trust

You want to build a relationship with your clients and your potential clients. Potential clients are people who would find your service useful and can afford to pay for it. Clients are people who are already paying you, or have paid in the past and may find a future service that you provide useful.

Personal ‘brand’ is not a dirty word. It is simply a way to describe the process by which people develop a relationship with you. Before we used the word brand we used the word ‘reputation,’ and it means similar things, however brand expands reputation to include your capacity to represent yourself professionally.

People develop relationships with brands. This is an unfortunate but very important phenomena. We anthropomorphise objects, concepts and things that have no human element. It is possible, for example, to become attached the idea of “Nike,” a brand that we believe makes high quality sports products. However, Nike is not a person and does not have a person’s reputation.

Therefore as you develop your brand, there will be a disconnect between who you are as a therapist and who people think you are as a brand. This is normal and is no different from the disconnect between who you are as a professional in your office or therapy room and who you are in front of your partner when you get home. Our goal is to minimise this person-brand disconnect so that you are able to meet your clients expectations.

While you are not your brand, it is important that you build one. This is done as a service to your clients in order to allow them to build trust. It is important that the trust they build is congruent with the trust that you desire and command as a professional otherwise they will feel let down.

Part of building trust is consistency of behaviour, and consistency in professional approach. This is equally important in all aspects of your business, from CPD, to paperwork, to audio recording.