The Practice of Therapy

Stephanie Thrower: Hi everyone. I'm Dr. Stephanie Thrower. I'm a psychologist and I'm a career coach and I also help therapists and coaches learn how to use AI in order to. Make a greater impact in their practice.
Maybe build something outside of traditional one-to-one therapy. And it's been a really cool trip and it sort of changes every day as AI changes every day.
Gordon Brewer: Perfect. Well, hello everyone and welcome again to the podcast, and I'm really happy for you to get to know today, Dr. Stephanie Thrower. Welcome, Stephanie.
Glad you're here.
Stephanie Thrower: I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
Gordon Brewer: Yes. I'm looking forward to our conversation because this is such a hot topic right now, particularly in our fields and that's around AI and how we can use it and different ways that we can. Kind of think outside the box, but as I start with everyone, Stephanie, tell folks a little more about yourself and how you've landed, where you've landed.
Stephanie Thrower: Yeah, I have experienced a lot of different things in my career and I remember being, even in my training years, I would hand my resume over to someone and they'd be like, oh, this is a really interesting resume. Like you have done quite a bit of things. And what I've learned is. Just, I, I'm a vocational psychologist by training.
Fair amount of my training was done at, at the VA and in trauma training as well. And and I love working in the space of career and also in business, right? Like if you're if you're working with people who largely have businesses, which is a nice place to be in, you're thinking about all the different hats they have to wear.
And yes, I've, as someone who wanted to have more hats and continue, wants to have more hats in my career, I started to develop a coaching program and kind of tripped around different niches 'cause I have a lot of different interests and I even built a few courses in the process and was like, oh no, this isn't the right niche for me.
I'm gonna kind of pivot and switch. And and the more I was doing that, the more I was using ai. To help develop really interesting tools and really helpful ways to market myself. And in that process I was like, no, you know what? I think AI is the place where I feel really lit up to, to like both learn how to grow myself, but also teach other people, other therapists, particularly how to use it.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah. Yeah. That's, and, and you know, it's been amazing just all the things that have come. Into fruition with AI in just a short, per period of time. And I know I'm making use of it about every day just with some of my content and getting ideas and just streamlining what I do and that sort of thing.
And so maybe, maybe a place to start is maybe tell folks a little bit about how you're using it and where, where you see the big potential is for. Using ai, maybe outside of helping with session notes, of course that's you know, a big one too, but other, other ways in which you're finding it really helpful.
Stephanie Thrower: Yeah, absolutely. I think, i'm using a couple of different tools pretty much on a regular basis. And those tools might be a bit different in my therapy practice than with my my coaching practice. But in my therapy practice, I'm certainly using AI notes, which I feel like as someone who had a pretty efficient note system, I was like, why would I need that?
Right? I already, it only takes me a couple minutes. And I finally got around to like, exploring and especially having like trained and learned a lot about ai, I've been so impressed with the results. I think it improves my practice often. Mm-hmm. To see the kind of work and the kind of reflections that are being made.
'cause you know, you're so in it sometimes and you don't recognize like, oh yeah, I am doing all of these things. And the notes can often reflect. Those interventions really well, or even sometimes be like, oh, that was an interesting direction to go in. Mm-hmm. It reminds me of, of being in grad school, literally transcribing notes.
I don't know if you remember doing that, but Yeah.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah.
Stephanie Thrower: Like it's just a wild thing. Right. That that's what we did. So yeah. And then the marketing piece is like a huge, you know, and being in private practice, I went to I went to private pay last. Two years ago. And so the marketing game has really needed to step up of mm-hmm.
Making sure that I have regular blog posts, I have really clear writing, I have a sense of who my ideal client is, like, you know, it's just required more for me in that way. And AI has been super helpful to build up that content on a regular basis. And then in the coaching practice, very similarly, I use AI to build.
Well, I should say I do some career coaching too, and so I've always done career assessments. Mm-hmm. But in the past they've mostly been like, I've sent them a PD or a document where they go through and like fill out all the tools that, and they use, I get the results and then I synthesize the results.
Mm-hmm.
Stephanie Thrower: Now I include AI in, in the process of doing a pre-analysis. And that has been so cool because it's like mm-hmm. A working document that then gets stored in their own accounts and they're like looking through to see like, oh, what does like my career profile look like? So doing, building those tools has been one of the coolest pieces of like walking towards like creating innovative tools in our space.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah. Yeah. And I think what I'm learning is just the importance of knowing how to write prompts for AI and creating templates for that and that sort of thing. You wanna say something about that? Because I think that's you know, really training the AI to think like you think. Totally. He's almost, yeah.
Stephanie Thrower: Yeah. I think that, I think that we are in a very fast changing landscape of, of like what's available for us with. Our AI tools. Right. So like when I, when we talk about ai, we usually mean something that's like a large language model, like chat, GBT. Claude is something that's really great to help us write.
People like Gemini, which is Google's and mm-hmm. But I haven't done a ton of work in then, and then we've got a couple other handfuls that are like popular.
Mm-hmm.
Stephanie Thrower: When it comes to, I would say that in the last five months, prompting. Needs have changed so much. Like they keep hearing the feedback, like the people who create these tools, the software, they hear the feedback from users about how to prompt, and then they kind of reprogram and code things in so you don't have to do it so well.
Mm-hmm.
Stephanie Thrower: So before your prompt structure used to be pretty like. Clear, right? Mm-hmm. But I think that, so we do wanna, part of this is us humans learning how to ask what we need
from right Uhhuh,
Stephanie Thrower: and I don't, it's al I always use the example of, I don't know if you've ever done the exercise where.
You're supposed to teach someone how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That's an alien that has no idea. And like, it's like, put the peanut butter on the bread and like someone puts a jar of peanut butter on top of the bread, right?
Gordon Brewer: Yes, yes. I saw, I saw a video on social media of, of like a school teacher doing exactly that, trying to teach their kids how to write more precisely.
And so. Yeah, she was spreading peanut butter on the, the bread bag, on the whole loaf of bread and just all, all kinds of stuff like that. It was pretty funny.
Stephanie Thrower: Exactly. And oftentimes that's what what's happening with AI when with large language models, when they give us really bad input or output. It's 'cause we confused them in the words that we made.
It's like, can you make it really detailed, but really short, right? Like these are mm-hmm. Pretty like competing concepts. Mm-hmm. And so being being a good reader is actually really important when you're thinking about writing your prompts well. Mm-hmm. And being a good reader of the output and giving feedback is so important because.
These large language models are really trained to, they want you to just stay working with them and feel really good about what you're doing. Mm-hmm. And, and so we might be less inclined to be like, no, that's not it. No, do this instead. Right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah. Yeah. So a as I, I think maybe one thing that might be of interest to people is how you're using AI for marketing.
Your practice and particularly going from being, being in a cash-based practice, how that can be helpful?
Stephanie Thrower: Absolutely. I think that when you are trying to market yourself when there's a lot of competition and when many people might feel like, oh, I don't know if I can afford, you know, I can spend that much on therapy, you really need to find your ideal client so that.
So that when you're writing, when you are expressing anything from yourself and your practice out there in the world, it feels like people are like, oh my gosh, you're really talking to me. I think you could really help me. As opposed to just sometimes in therapy it's like, oh, I could just use anyone to hear me listen, talk, right?
Mm-hmm. So when you're in a practice that's a bit more specialized. I think for us therapists, often we are socialized to communicate in a way that does not connect with most clients. Right. Sometimes the more trained we are, the further we are away from connecting with our clients. Like, and I think that's true.
Even if like if you were saying like, oh, I'm really interested in treating trauma and I was really interested in, like certain, like OCD or anxiety, like I think you get, you kind of communicate your interest in the your own training and the models. And the theories. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. When as a client, that is like the last thing they care about.
Right. You know, and I can relate to that too, as a client, right? Mm-hmm. So the way that I use AI often is to help translate that place between my interest and my voice. Somehow keeping my voice, but also making doing some transition, some translating in some ways to connect with what my clients are really struggling with.
What language they would connect with.
Yes, Uhhuh. So it's not
Stephanie Thrower: just about sounding like me, it's also actually sounding like. Good marketing, good copywriting, which I was not trained in.
Gordon Brewer: Right, right. You know? Yeah. And, and, and that's such a good point because I know in the years that I've been doing what I've been doing as far as marketing goes, you really, you really have to like, like we've said is, you know, identify niche.
You know what, okay, what is what, who is my ideal client? And then. How do they think about their own prog problems in a nonclinical way? Because that's what they're gonna relate to, is just using nonclinical language. And you're exactly right. I mean, listing, listing my credentials and how much I've been trained in this or that, that doesn't resonate with any anybody.
They just think, well, I, I, I don't know if they're gonna be able to help me or not. And so being able to should tell, so being able to communicate well how you can help them with a particular problem.
Stephanie Thrower: Yeah, and I think that it's, it's completely awesome that we kind of nerd out on our own professional co like concepts.
Mm-hmm. You know, I don't think it's about getting rid of that. You know, I could sit and talk for hours about someone's results from the career profile, but they don't. But it's, that's not the point. It's not just the results. It's like, how does knowing this help me do mm-hmm. A, B, C, you know, how do, how am I gonna make better decisions in the future?
Yeah. Because of what we know. Right?
Gordon Brewer: Right.
Stephanie Thrower: Yeah. Right.
Gordon Brewer: And I think, I think too the, the other thing is, is, as, as you've already alluded to Stephanie, is the fact that none of us are trained in marketing or kind of the business side of things. And so knowing how to write good marketing emails or to copy and all of that kind of thing is just tough for us because we we're good at empathizing with people and conveying empathy, but that might not always be the best marketing strategy.
Stephanie Thrower: Totally. And I think the more I, what I've noticed has been really interesting is, you know, when you're, when you're working with your ai, it's helpful when you have your own paid accounts, which I generally recommend. You have one or two paid accounts for if you're using it for marketing, right. It should pay for itself.
Mm-hmm. But you, but you want it to have some kind of organized structure to it, because part of. Getting quality results is like you're building a house of like labeled ideas and how they relate to one another. And so I, I have like a pro, a project folder where I would talk a lot about my business or I talk a lot about, or I talk a little bit more about like content that I'm creating for my marketing, my practice, and they're separated out, which I think they should be.
I have I've, I've gotten conversations with my, with Cha GBT to recommend books based on the thing I was struggling with.
Mm-hmm. And
Stephanie Thrower: every book that has been recommended has, has been such the mind shift that I mine the, like both the skills and the mindset shift I needed. Kind of being like, okay, you're telling me all this stuff, Chad, GBT, but like, give me a ref, a reference for like mm-hmm.
How I could expand my knowledge. And I bring that up because in the marketing space I feel like we as therapists think of marketing as like obnoxious ads.
That
Stephanie Thrower: interrupt your time that, you know, it's almost like people who come to the door to sell something at 5:00 PM it's just like,
right,
Stephanie Thrower: I'm just sitting down for dinner.
I don't wanna be, I don't wanna be dealing with this. And I think that that is it. There's some emotional piece as well as actually learning the skill. And so it's kind of, that's something I also help with people is helping them understand like the visibility. You're not, you're not trying to be obnoxious to people.
You're trying to be top of mind and to to be seen for all the cool work you do, you know?
Gordon Brewer: Right, right. Yeah. And, and it's a, it's a way of helping them find you too. I mean excuse me, that there's been a few times I've mentioned on this podcast, just the, that whole concept of the, the movie, the Field of Dreams, build it and they will come, well.
You, you can build it, but you also need to tell them about it. So they will come. Because if they don't know about it, they're not gonna just come automatically. Yeah.
Stephanie Thrower: Yeah. Those ghosts are going to a different field. Right. Or different baseball field. Right, right. You gotta, you gotta shout out to say like, Hey, like this is the spot.
Right,
Gordon Brewer: right, right. Oh boy. So, well, what are some, some of the other things that you're, been working on and, and really developing that people could benefit from,
Stephanie Thrower: I think in the space of creating creating marketing for yourself, that doesn't feel like such a huge lift, right? So we want our craft, our actual skills of working with people to be the focal point of our careers.
But we also need to learn how to market ourselves if we have a practice, right? And so, mm-hmm. I work with people to create a process of turning like 15 minute voice memos into a blog, right? A nice, chunky 2000 word blog that will help to build their SEO and their website. And also they could post it in something like Substack, right?
Mm-hmm. Or, I don't know, I think it would be really cool to do like, like an audio book, but it's like an audio blog. Right? So you read aloud, like I mm-hmm. Just having different spaces to share your voice and part of that process looks like. Training your AI to be able to write, like, 'cause it takes a fair amount of work to create like a quality blog.
But also, you know, you doing your own training to understand like, what are the main questions that my ideal clients want to be that are ask they're asking and they wanna be talking about. Mm-hmm. But I find that that system is just so. Doable. 'cause I have 15 minutes to talk into my phone while I'm walking my baby out.
You know, like while I'm living my life and it doesn't, like I can get a blog written in, in, you know, 30 minutes that feels really quality and still not plagiarizing. Right. It's coming. Mm-hmm. From my jumbled words and the values that my practice, you know, like all those things. Right.
Gordon Brewer: Right, right.
Stephanie Thrower: Yeah.
Yeah.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah. I'd say it's been fascinating to be able to see how AI builds on itself and just you know I've recently been putting to together a course using Claude ai and. You know, I spent a lot of time on the prompt of say, okay, draw from these resources. This is the concept, this is the audience.
All of those kinds of things. And then you put it in and, and just within a few minutes it spits out just this unbelievable amount of content that would've taken me months to, to create to, to type out myself. Yeah. Oh
Stephanie Thrower: yeah. Oh yeah. And I think. I think course development and is one of my like most favorite ways of supporting people, particularly in thinking about how can we have a whole new way of teaching, right?
Mm-hmm. So, mm-hmm. I think when we had prepared courses in the past, it was like your standard video, maybe some worksheets, right? And I think that what we find the statistics of how people complete courses is very sad, right? Mm-hmm.
Right? It's something,
Stephanie Thrower: it's something like 20% of courses are completed and I'm a pretty type A.
Student. And I still have many courses that are just maybe like, you know, 70% done and, and it's, it's just hard to get 'em all done, so. Right. I think that we can, I think because the world is a bit more open book now with ai mm-hmm. I think it's more about creating interactive tools that we can be teaching people.
To gain the skills in the moment. So what that looks like is creating like a custom GPT that people can like, interact with that has both this like big fancy prompt, but also has like embedded knowledge. Yeah. And so those, that sounds all very like obscure, but I, when I think about actually creating those, like in my course we build something called, we work with something called the messaging mentor.
And ask people one question at a time and build the knowledge of like, what should my messaging sound like? Mm-hmm. And that process is it's like working in a lab as opposed to being in a course that is just like so passive, if that makes sense. Right. And it, and they're getting live feedback on mm-hmm.
How they're doing in their. Like how they're creating assets. Right,
Gordon Brewer: right, right. Yeah. Oh, it's, that's fascinating. Yeah, it's just fascinating. All that can be done now and I'm just, i'm, I'm still in the infancy stage and knowing how to, to navigate all that. So, yeah. So Stephanie, I, I've got be aware of your time and, and just thinking about all this, tell folks more about your course and the things that you have and that sort of thing.
Stephanie Thrower: Yeah, so I have a I have a course that is, or a program that has a live component. So we have a group live meeting once a week. But also we have recorded course with access to custom GPTs and a lot of AI tools that I've made. So there's two things I really like to make is, and teach people to make is a custom GBT, which I guess in some ways is a fancy prompt with like knowledge embedded.
And I also make AI journals, which is more, it's like a Google doc that is a series of questions with prompts at the end. Mm-hmm. And
as,
Stephanie Thrower: as basic as that sounds, I think as therapists we have a, like a lot of really cool ideas that we can help people reflect on to grow. Mm-hmm. And then have interactive.
Feedback with these journals. It's like a, like I said, it's a living document that, that we can refeed into our AI and it can be super useful.
Gordon Brewer: Mm-hmm. Right.
Stephanie Thrower: So, so in that process, I help people build something, typically something outside of build and both market something outside of one-to-one therapy.
But I also work with therapists to help them. Maximize optimize their marketing using ai. And that often will look like developing long format content that then can be pieced into smaller pieces. 'cause most of us, if, if people are marketing themselves on social media. It's like they're building their marketing like leaf by leaf as opposed to the roots of the tree, right?
Mm-hmm. So finding a way that's much more sustainable for them to not have to everyday wake up and be like, what am I gonna post about? What am I gonna talk about? Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm.
Gordon Brewer: Right. Oh, that's great. How can, where can people find the course?
Stephanie Thrower: So you, I have two places that people can access. So I have my website, which is coaching with dr thrower.com.
And then and the program is described in that website, but I also have a free Facebook group where people can come in and see live trainings every week. We talk a lot about all the different ways that we can use ai. There's quite a few coaches and therapists in there already who are really excited about the process of
mm-hmm.
Stephanie Thrower: Integrating AI into their into their work. To make things easier, to make things better. Yeah, yeah. Well, good. Sorry, the answer to that was it's the group is called AI Tools for Change, and I'll give you the link so that people can click in. Yeah,
Gordon Brewer: sure. And we'll put those links in the show notes and the show summary for people to access easily.
So, well any Stephanie, any parting thoughts that you have just around this whole new world of ai?
Stephanie Thrower: Yeah, I mean, I think that I feel pretty passionate about making sure that mental health providers and therapists get in on this space. Not in a way that, because I think there's such a story about how this is gonna threaten our work, right?
And sometimes, and, and or sort of feel overwhelmed by the technical pieces to it. And I want I want us to step into. Space because I actually think a lot of tools are being made without our consultation mm-hmm. Of what it's like to work with people day to day and see what, you know, how to promote change really looks like.
Mm-hmm. And so I would love for us to be in the room and be thinking of these innovative ways that we can help people during this time. Which people are gonna need a lot of support during this massive change that we're Right. Yeah,
Gordon Brewer: yeah, yeah. I, I'm, I'm on the optimistic side in that I think it's gonna make our lives easier and, and some, to some degree.
And I, I don't, I don't think AI will ever really replace therapists, but yeah, you're, you're right. I think there's that storyline we're telling ourselves around that. So.
Stephanie Thrower: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, I think, I think that that, I think it's helpful for us to just at least get in and try to practice and learn what it's about and notice our own reactions, because that's what everyone else is doing.
It's sort of like. We might not even understand what someone's experience is of going back and forth with, with a conversation, you know?
Gordon Brewer: Right, right. Yeah. So, well, Stephanie, again, thanks for being on the podcast and as I mentioned earlier to everyone we'll have links to Stephanie's things in the show notes and the show summary, and thanks.
Thanks again Stephanie, for joining me and hope to have another conversation with you here soon.
Stephanie Thrower: That would be awesome.