How did Laura come to be a badass therapist? What are some noticeable patterns between betas and alphas? Why is it so difficult for guys to be more emotionally in tune? In this podcast episode, Billy and Brandy Eldridge speak with Laura Long about her therapy journey as the badass therapist. Meet Laura Long Laura Long is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and the owner of YourBadAssTherapyPractice.com, where she helps ambitious, Type-A therapists push through their fears and unleash their inner badass in private practice. Laura offers free practice-building tools through her email list and her brand new Youtube channel. Her signature 8-week online course has successfully graduated over 200 therapists, and she also runs small mastermind groups and a private online community reserved for her students. Laura is best known for her off-the-cuff coaching style that includes colorful language, a witty sense of humor, and an uncanny ability to keep it real. Her unique approach to marketing and customer service challenges the status quo and helps therapists to become better business owners. She shows therapists how to grow and scale their practices without losing their minds – because building your private practice should be fun! You can read Laura’s blog at www.YourBadAssTherapyPractice.com and follow her antics at www.Facebook.com/YourBadAssTherapyPractice. In This Podcast Summary * From armchair therapy to building a brand * Couples and individuals * Patterns with betas and alphas From armchair therapy to building a brand Laura worked with taking chances and experimenting to see how things progressed. She helped people in her community along the way as a therapist; colleagues, friends, and loved ones and so began to realize that she could transfer all this knowledge onto one online space – a process that happened over time, step by step. Through coaching group sessions and individual people, Laura was able to expand her practice and grow as a therapist. Couples and individuals Laura works with a solution-focused mindset and starting out working with couples. Here, with the solution-based work methods, she combined that with EFT therapy to work with families too. In 2018, she experienced a shift in her therapy from wanting to work with couples to working with individuals. This niche burnout experience happens often with entrepreneurs where you think that you must pivot your business and your work methodologies, or run yourself into the ground. Since this shift in 2018, Laura’s practice has been working mostly with entrepreneurs and assists them with business coaching. Patterns with betas and alphas There are plenty of men out there who need to embrace that – it’s not less masculine at all, in fact I think its actually more masculine to know what emotions you’re feeling and how to express your feelings to people. Not just to puff out your chest at any sign of discomfort. Men are socialized and taught from a very young age ‘not to be a sissy’ and ‘to toughen up’, and that as soon as boys realize they have emotions they are taught to suppress them, and that leads to them growing up into men who are out of touch with their emotions and see them as weak. However, this is not the case. This emotionally suppressive behavior is modeled to boys at a young age, so they grow up internalizing these beliefs that is it emasculating to express emotions. However, beta males are more in touch with their emotions. This does not mean they are any less masculine,