Why Sexologists Are Stronger Together

There’s been a lot written about the scarcity mind set versus the abundance mind set, and how your actions and behaviours are influenced by which of these mind sets you’ve adopted.

The scarcity mind set posits that in the world, there is a limited supply of everything — love, money, food, resources. More for me, in this view, means less for someone else. Conversely, more for someone else means less for me. Looking at life this way, everything can seem like a struggle to get enough, and the fear of lack is always lurking around the corner. In the scarcity mind, ruthless competition is an assumed given. In this view, you must defend your territory from upstarts and intruders.

The abundance mind set, in contrast, instead sees the world as full of more than enough. Even more than that, in the abundance view, love begets more love, money begets more money, and resources are only limited by our capacity to create more. Looking at life this way, everything is a pleasure. Instead of fear, there is an abiding sense of curiosity about what is coming next. Competition is friendly, and is no longer an assumed given. In this view, you reach out and connect, excited about what new things you will bring into the world by working with others.

To a large extent, whether you view our world as a world of scarcity or a world of abundance will have a lot to do with how you grew up and the messages you received in childhood. Unconsciously, we carry this history with us. If you were one of many siblings, and grew up in a household where there wasn’t always enough food for everyone, that experience will have impacted you. If you had to compete with siblings, jobs, and life responsibilities in order to receive love and affection from your parents, that experience will have impacted you.

The good news is that, from our positions today as professionals, we can decide to become conscious, and choose the mind set that will ultimately benefit us most into the future. If you grew up with experiences of hardship and deprivation, these experiences are a hard won, important part of your history, but they do not condemn you to one way or another of seeing the world. You have the power to choose.

Choosing an abundance mind set can add rocket fuel to your career, prosperity to your practice, and a whole lot more fun to your day to day working life.

The Laments of the Sexology Professional

In my role as Executive Director of the World Association of Sex Coaches, I get to work with, support, advise, and guide sexology professionals every day. My mission in this work is that all sexology professionals are able to do the work that they are called to do full time, and earn a healthy living from it. I’m driven by the vision of the cumulative impact this would have on the world.

When I’m not looking into this bright future, I am here in the present, listening every day to the concerns and challenges that face my colleagues, and thinking about what WASC as an organization can do to help empower them as professionals and people.

While these professional sexologists come from all over the world, from many walks of life, and with wildly different ways of structuring their practices and wildly different specialist expertise, the concerns, challenges, and complaints I hear are remarkably similar.

Do any of these resonate with you?

• I feel isolated and alone, sometimes I even feel persecuted in my local community
• I hate marketing — I wish clients would just show up at my door
• I find it easier to talk about other people’s accomplishments than to talk about mine
• I really admire [successful sexologist/sex boutique owner/blogger] and I’m jealous of them
• I’m scared I won’t be able to make this work, and I’ll have to go back to a corporate 9–5

Given the work that sexologists are called to do, it’s not surprising that concerns like these are front of mind. Sexology is a young, still relatively misunderstood field. It’s not uncommon to be the only sexologist in your neighbourhood. We got into this work — sex therapy, sex counselling, sex education, and sex coaching — because we wanted to work with people and change lives. We’ve received extensive training in how to work with clients and address their concerns, while usually we’ve not received the business training needed to support us in our work. Given this, of course we’re worried about having to go back to a corporate 9–5!

As helping professionals, we have cultivated great listening skills, and the ability to see the greatest good in our clients. It’s no wonder, then that we are skilled in noticing the greatest good in others and that we’re comfortable mirroring that to the world, while generally we do not practice these skills on ourselves. And feeling jealous of the successes of others? It’s not that surprising when you consider that we’re practiced in noticing the admirable traits of others, while at the same time holding our own worries about our ability to build a thriving, profitable private practice.

These challenges and concerns are common to most sexology professionals, and they seem to motivate two different sets of behaviours and actions that reflect either a scarcity reaction, or an abundance reaction.

The scarcity response can include reactions like:

• Hesitating to discuss new ideas, lest someone steal them
• Infighting — starting arguments in an attempt to assert oneself as the supreme expert
• Rushing to trademark terms (even quite general ones) in order to legally demarcate territory
• Failing to cite sources and attribute original work to its creator, out of fear of looking less knowledgeable
• Black and white thinking around client work modalities — i.e. “my way or the highway”
• Attempts to discredit other sexologists or areas of sexology, in order to guard territory. While this can be seen in many areas of sexology, one area where there is a stark example of this is the current divide around healing touch in clinical work

The abundance response, on the other hand, can include reactions like:

• Finding and joining a professional association
• Banding together to build institutes, centres, and community spaces
• Networking with colleagues, locally and worldwide, and learning about who is out there
• Joyfully citing soures and recognizing the contributions we all make to each other
• Understanding the varied client work modalities within sexology, meeting different practitioners, and building a robust referral network
• Understanding personal strengths, finding others with complimentary strengths, and reaching out to collaborate

Sexology: The Young Field with the Power to Change the World

How we as professional sexologists — sex therapists, sex educators, sex coaches, bloggers, pleasure product professionals, sexological bodyworkers, tantrikas, speakers, sex researchers — choose to view the world and our professional sphere is hugely important. The stance and approach we take now will mould and shape not only our profession from within, but how the world will view sexology for years to come.

If you are a sexologist in 2016, then you are a pioneer at the forefront of a very young profession with the power to change the world. There is no well-established career ladder to climb here, no fast track to a corner office and guaranteed success. Being a pioneer means creating something where there was nothing before. It means hacking at the bush with a machete to forge a path forward, both for future sexologists, and for our clients. This is part of what makes our work so thrilling and so exciting. It’s also what makes it feel so challenging.

What we must remember as a professional community is that together with the great joys and the rush of being pioneers, we also have a great responsibility. One of those responsibilities is educating the public about our field — what is sexology, why is it important, and what can we do for them. This comes with the territory, and in our work, we all have a role to play to both introduce people to our field for the first time, and to correct some of the historical misunderstandings about sexology. These first impressions and explanations we make and give affect not just us as individual professionals — they, cumulatively, affect our entire field, our whole family of professionals.

If the first exposure a member of the public gains about sexology reflects the scarcity mind set, or exhibits the actions and behaviours that result from that mind set, what will that person carry as their take away from the interaction? Sex is a lightning rod topic — one that draws discussion and interest whenever it is mentioned. People are watching us. This is something that all sexology professionals should keep in mind — our futures are in our hands.

Stronger Together: Where to Begin with Collaboration in 4 Steps

The professional sexology community is stronger together. When we educate the public about who we are and what we do, speaking from that place of passion that motivated us to become sexologists in the first place, we are simultaneously in service to ourselves as individuals, to our professional community, and to our world. When we build robust referral networks and understand how our various professions knit together across client work modality lines, we are in greater service to ourselves, our clients, and our peers.

That said, it can be hard to shift to an abundance mind set, and make those first steps toward collaboration. Where to begin? Here are 4 steps to follow to get started with collaborative, abundance-based action:

Take Care of Yourself — Take Care of Your Business

It’s easy to be generous when your cup runeth over — it is much harder to be generous when your own well has run dry. Your first step should be to take care of yourself, and if you are an individual with a private practice, taking care of yourself means taking care of business.

Take the time to learn the business basics and get your house in order. Make a realistic, achievable business plan. Sort out your taxes. Set up a basic profit and loss ledger, and know where you are in your business today. At the World Association of Sex Coaches, our sole focus in our continuing professional development program and resources for members is on business building. We help members build skills in marketing, sales, business planning, business operations, and business strategy.

Get clear and grounded in yourself — explore your values, attitudes and beliefs. Know your strengths and your vision for what you want for your practice and your life. Think about the value that you could create for others — what are your gifts?

Find Community — Join a Professional Association

As mentioned earlier, one of the most common concerns I hear from sexologists is the stress and worry associated with feeling isolated. In many cases, sexologists may be the only person within their community addressing and working with human sexuality directly. Depending on the local context, these sexologists sometimes face harassment, struggle to access necessary business services, and struggle to get a lease for premises, among a number of other challenging factors. Additionally, many sexologists operate a private practice where they are the only clinician, which can result in a lot of time working alone.

The most effective way to combat professional isolation is to join a professional association. Look for an association where the Code of Ethics is in line with your own values, attitudes, and beliefs. Take a look at how active the association is, and to what extent they encourage the participation and interaction of members. Consider the benefits of membership and whether they appeal to you and what you most need in your private practice and in your professional life. There are many great organizations to choose from.

Network — Joyfully Learn Who’s Who in this Field

Building a professional network is one of the most important things you can do for your career, especially when you are starting out as a sexologist. Through networking, you continue to combat professional isolation. Networking can, and most certainly should, take place within your professional association. Get to know other members, who they are, and what they specialise in. Whenever possible, attend events organized by your professional associations where networking happens in person — face-to-face conferences and summits are the best opportunity to build and strengthen relationships with your peers.

Additionally, networking beyond your professional associations is a further key to success. Building relationships with other sexologists from outside your circle expands your understanding and appreciation for the field. Adding allied professionals, that is, professionals in complimentary fields, to your network allows you to become a better resource for your clients.

Approach networking joyfully — essentially, in this process you will meet others who have a great deal of passion and enthusiasm for the work that they do. You will meet others who are in service, who care deeply about achieving the best possible outcomes for their clients. Joyful networking is easier to accomplish when adopting an abundance mind set. Consider, when reaching out to others, how can I add value to this person? What can we learn from each other?

Collaborate — Reach Out and Create

Collaboration is one of those things that many people say they want to do, and then in the same breath say that they don’t know where to begin. Collaborating with a peer that has complementary strengths, complimentary expertise, or complimentary energy to your own is the definition of abundance. Working together, it is possible to become greater than the sum of your parts and have a greater impact on both your clients’ lives and on your bottom line.

Begin by considering the professionals you know — your peers as well as allied professionals in your network. Who do you really love talking to? Who do you admire and respect? Whose work has inspired and helped you in your own professional development? These are the people you want to be reaching out to.

Next, consider your strengths, and the strengths of your peers. Is there someone that you love talking to, and who also just so happens to have a complimentary strength or complimentary expertise to your own? When you call these people to mind, what do you imagine would be really fun to do with them, to make together with them? Would both of your audiences benefit by what you could make together?

With these people in mind, the next step is to reach out and ask. Contact the people in your network that you would love you collaborate with, and ask if they would be interested in making something together with you. When proposing a collaboration, the most important questions you must ask yourself are “Will my proposal contribute high value to the person I am reaching out to? Is what I am proposing some of high value for both our client bases/audiences?” By adding value for your collaborator and for your collective clients, you are likely to receive a positive response.

Sexology is a young field, and sexologists today are true pioneers. At this pivotal stage in the development of our field, we’ve got a critical decision to make. We can take a scarcity mind set, allowing our field to become more fragmented and divided. Or, we can take an abundance mind set, and work together to support each other and blaze a trail into the future. What we do now will impact the future of sexology for generations to come. I am of the strong opinion that sexologists are stronger together.

Originally published at www.linkedin.com.