To niche or not to niche

 I keep on hearing from absolutely everyone, from people on the street to business coaches to other psychologists, saying that apparently I need to niche and that if I haven't niched already, what am I doing?

"Just go niche". Even the general public, they will say, "what kinds of clients do you see"? Or "Who do you see"? Or, "we have to put this information in letters to GPs ". And I'm thinking to myself: "Ah, I see people who have mental health concerns? . As a result, I've felt a lot of pressure to niche. I really just wanna take it apart.

I really wanna start with, what is niching? Why is everyone going on about it, discuss my personal experiences with trying to find a niche before wrapping up with some practical takeaways.

What is niching? Niching is narrowing down who you see, but it's not just saying that "I see clients with anxiety" to really have a niche.

I believe the business coaches say that you need to be saying, "I see anxiety in two-year-olds who live with leukemia." I believe that's how niche your niche needs to be. Or "I see mothers in the third trimester who are experiencing psychosis", so it needs to be like condition X in population Y with a specific condition that they're experiencing.

And for me, this has been so overwhelming. I can understand. On one hand there are benefits to niching. I've read all about it. I've done an extensive Google search, so of course I'm the expert. But from what I understand from the Google literature, the benefits to niching are that it narrows your caseload, which can prevent burnout.

So if you are just seeing a particular subset of people, then you don't have to dredge up multiple therapeutic approaches or knowledge of multiple conditions. You can simply adapt. One type of psychotherapy to one type of condition and then tailor it for that individual, but it's less mental load. Other benefits to niching are, it can increase your referrals because people come to know you as "the person who sees mothers in the third trimester for anxiety".

And so you'll get all those referrals in the future and people will say, oh, is somebody able to do this? And you'll be like, yep, that's my jam. That's my niche. That's what I specialize in. It also conveys sense of expertise. So if you're like, I have this niche, other people are like, "Ooh, they know a thing".

And so that can increase your credibility. And according to the business coaches, they say that if you niche and you've got that credibility, then you can also charge more. Those are the three main benefits of niching that have been proposed.

One, it can reduce your mental load. Two, it can increase your referrals. And three, it can increase your income because you'll be able to raise your price.

So my experiences with niching, I remember my first business coaching session when niching was actually the first thing that was brought up. I just about had a heart attack. I was so not ready to discuss niching after finishing up eight years, niching in my PhD area of research, which is anxiety related, insomnia.

Technically I knew in the back of my mind, oh, I already had a niche. I already knew lots about anxiety related insomnia, but I also didn't realize that perhaps the trauma of having focused on something for eight years, I was like, "Nope, I am so not ready to specialize in a particular area".

I guess when you read hundreds and hundreds of papers on a particular topic, I was just burnt out and exhausted from reading about anxiety related insomnia. Despite knowing that this would be a brilliant niche because not many other psychologists know about anxiety related insomnia. The business coach also noticed that I was very hesitant to talk about niching, and she was like, "you just looked like you spun around in your chair when we brought up niching".

So I knew that this was an area that was bringing up a lot of feelings for me. Over the first year of my own private practice, I let the idea of niching go. When people would say to me, what kind of clients do you see? I would say depression, anxiety, trauma. I'd say where the need is, and that's absolutely true because in Australia there's a high demand for mental health professionals.

I didn't need to niche in order to get clients. I simply needed to say that my doors were open and clients were coming in and they were mostly of the anxiety, depression, and trauma variety. I was content with this. It was only now in my second year of private practice that I somehow developed this really high expectation on myself, and I was like, second year, this is my year. I'm gonna niche.

And suddenly I put an overwhelming amount of pressure on myself to niche. I was doing a lot of Google researching, I was looking at everything and being like, okay, I need to niche, need to revamp the website, need to rebrand, was thinking of alternative clinic names, and I was putting an inordinate amount of stress and pressure on myself.

I just thought that this was the next natural thing and who could blame me? Literally, there are so many courses available online for how to niche. Anybody in any Facebook group for mental health professionals is saying, I know how to help you niche - niching is where you need to go. So I kind of just ate this up and I was just, I guess, buying into the marketing here.

But the next thing that happened is I became skeptical of this marketing. I didn't know whether I actually needed to niche. So what I did was, what all good people do is they post in a Facebook group ,and I diligently followed the same thing. So I posted in a large Facebook group just being like, can anybody give me the 411 or niching? It's driving me bananas. Do I need to niche? How did you find your niche? What is your niche?

And some of the posters were querying, "why do you feel you need to niche?". And I was like, ah, have you not seen everything? And others were like really balanced and they were saying that, no man, you don't have to niche,  you'll find your niche, just follow your heart's destiny kind of thing.

And I was like, "Hmm, this is nice. I like that". Other people said that they had a kind of natural interest and that's what led them to their niche. So for example, they had lived experience during a particular time of their life, for example, had gone through an addiction. And then their recovery from that addiction is what led them to be like, this is really important to me and I will niche in this area.

So I was really relieved by hearing these variety of experiences. And the other experience I was really relieved to say was that some people were happy to be generalists. They were like, I could niche, but I don't have to niche. I actually enjoy being a generalist who's interested in multiple things. Other people said, "it took me 15 years to discover my niche." Oh. And that was a lovely feeling for me when I heard that. So suddenly this put some seeds of doubt in my head.

Maybe the marketing wasn't true. Maybe in my second year of private practice, I didn't have to niche straight away. Whew. What a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. So this brings me to the alternative idea that the marketers aren't telling us, which is that maybe we don't have to niche and maybe the excess pressure that we've put on ourselves to niche is what's actually going to lead to burnout rather than alleviate it.

In answer to the question then should you niche? Well, I think the broad answer is it depends. If you've got an area that you feel you could niche in, then I'd say go for it. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the diversity of your caseload, in my opinion, I think at least consider narrowing down who you see as opposed to strictly niching.

This is how I've handled it for the time being. So I only see clients who are aged 18 plus, and I generally don't see people who have severe eating disorders and obsessive compulsive disorder. I rule out a few conditions and I try and focus my caseload on anxiety, trauma, and depression.

 If you're putting pressure on yourself to niche like I was, and quite honestly, still a bit am and that's causing you stress though, this is more for myself as well as for you, but we just need to allow ourselves to focus on doing good work with our clients and treat the whole niching thing as something will do when the opportunity presents itself. I know for me from now I'm going to keep on noting down my inclinations and what I'm interested in.

I'm interested in about six major areas. I frustrate myself, but I'm interested in everything from sex therapy to hormone disorders in women to domestic violence. So not even similar areas that I could niche in. It's like they're all opposed and perhaps you're experiencing the same thing. We just keep on going and maybe something will open up and we'll get there.

Even if we don't, we can continue being generalists. I guess that's the good thing about being a mental health professional in Australia right now is that there is no dire great need to niche in order to increase our income and in order to get more clients.

That's lovely. It's a good thing to take advantage of as an early career mental health professional. And if the situation changes, which, you know, the future is always uncertain in terms of mental health, but if the situation changes and we all need to niche and we're overwhelmed by mental health professionals in the field, A great, but B, we'll change our strategy. But for now, I just don't think we need that extra pressure.

Another thing to consider when we're thinking about niches is to not compare yourself. This is something that I'm very guilty of and I fall in the trap of doing quite regularly, but I'll see somebody with an amazing website and I'll be like, they've got an amazing niche. Maybe that could be my niche? Maybe I should niche in this area, or damn, like I could have had that niche and now they've got that niche.

I would just say don't compare yourself where you're at to somebody else's highlight reels, and that's the same with social media, but I think it's applicable to niching as well. That person has spent hundreds of hours on their website or paid somebody else to do it, and they've thought about their niche for a long time. You're still at the beginning of your journey, and it's okay to not know. We don't have to know.

I think an answer to the question that people inevitably ask us and GPs ask us and our friends and family ask us, "what kind of clients do we see"? Just come up with some general kind of statements. Like for me, I do the anxiety, depression, trauma. If you can come up with something that you're broadly interested, like I see people mainly with depression or life transitions, I think it's enough to get a spy for now. I also do say I'm still figuring it out and people don't actually realize that it actually is a process to find out what your niche is.

I think this actually opens up a good conversation for, people aren't familiar with psychology in the field and the field more broadly of mental health. It's good to actually just be yourself rather than putting yourself under that excessive pressure to niche.