If you’re a location independent therapist with a remote practice, there’s a lot to consider if you plan to take maternity leave. When you’re the business owner, you’ll have a lot more flexibility, but with that comes more responsibilities and a lot of decisions you’ll need to take. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through how to prepare for maternity leave as a self-employed therapist. While we can’t answer the questions for you, we hope you’ll feel much more empowered to figure them out for yourself by the end of this blog post.
While this blog post is specifically about how to prepare for maternity leave, much of it applies to other types of extended leave, including paternity/parental leave, sickness, etc.
At the time of writing, our LIT Community co-founder, Melissa Parks, was preparing to take her second maternity leave. Despite having taken maternity leave previously for her first child, she still had a lot of questions she needed to figure out, so we hosted a Community Business Meetup within the LIT Community to explore this topic together and it was a great discussion. Our members had a variety of experiences – some who’d already taken maternity leave, others who were preparing to or who had just come back from maternity leave, and a few who were simply curious about the topic.
We’ve put together this blog post from Melissa’s experiences and the input of our LIT members, and we hope you find it helpful. Feel free to share your experiences, any tips we missed, or questions you have in the comments below.
How to Prepare for Maternity Leave: Questions to Ask Yourself
Every pregnancy is different, but whatever your circumstances are, there is only so much you can control when it comes to pregnancy.
That can be scary if you’re working for yourself as a location independent therapist – but there are things you can prepare. Here are some questions to help you figure out how you’ll approach your pregnancy, maternity leave, and returning to work afterward.
When will your maternity leave start?
As the business owner, you can decide when you’d like to take your maternity leave. For example, if you’ve had a lot of health concerns throughout your pregnancy, you might like to stop working earlier to give yourself time to rest.
But if everything is going smoothly, you might feel prepared to continue working until closer to your due date. If that’s the case, we recommend having a plan in place in case anything changes at short notice.
When deciding when to take your maternity leave, think about how you’ll feel mentally and physically as your due date approaches. If this is not your first pregnancy, you might have an idea of whether you’re likely to deliver your baby early or go beyond your due date (but of course, it might not unfurl in the same way as before).
Ultimately, the decision is up to you and should depend solely on what will work best for you.
Where do you want to have your baby?
As a location independent therapist, this may be a very important question for you – and not necessarily a straightforward one.
Deciding where to have your baby can be complicated if you don’t live in the country where you grew up, if you travel frequently, or if your partner is from a different country, for example.
There are lots of things to consider when deciding where to have your baby:
- Can you legally give birth in the country where you are?
- Do you have access to medical care – either free or via health insurance?
- How long does statutory maternity leave last there? What is the pre-and post-natal care like?
- What about citizenship implications for your child?
- Will you have support – either from family or friends?
- Do you want to stay where you are currently based or, for example, travel to your home country?
- If you travel full-time, where would it be advantageous to give birth?
How much time will you take off?
The next major decision is how much time you will take in total for maternity leave. Some people return to work in as little as three months, while others prefer to take 12+ months off. And, of course, some parents decide to step back from working and take on the role of “full-time parents.”
Again, this decision is personal, and there should be no judgement involved. Instead, you need to figure out what will work best for you and your family.
Different factors may influence your decision, such as whether you can access statutory maternity leave and, if so, how long it lasts. For example, maternity leave in the US tends to be very short, if people can get it at all, and often lasts anywhere from 6 weeks to 3 months. If you’re a self-employed therapist in the U.S., you’ll most likely be planning for an unpaid leave, so you’ll want to budget and save for your leave as soon as possible, maybe even before a positive pregnancy test.
In comparison, in some European countries, maternity leave also covers self-employed people for up to 12 months or longer. The specifics of the duration and how much you can claim as maternity pay varies a lot from country to country, so make sure you know what your situation is.
When choosing how long to take for maternity leave, you should consider the financial side, as well as how soon you’d like to return to work and what kind of childcare is available.
If you take a shorter maternity leave, there may be a higher chance of clients continuing to work with you once you’re back than if you’re off for a longer duration. But there are many factors to consider, and you should consider your needs first of all.
How and when should you tell your clients?
In our opinion, there’s not a right or wrong answer to when you tell your clients.
When you’re working online, your clients will usually only see you from the shoulders up, they won’t realise that you’re pregnant until you tell them. So you have more flexibility and control over this aspect. However, if you do have serious health concerns or severe morning sickness, you may need to tell your clients earlier on in your pregnancy.
Many people will choose to wait until after the 12-week mark when the risk of loss is significantly lower. Others may decide to share the information after the anatomy scan at around 20 weeks. But ultimately, the decision is yours – you need to think about what’s right for you and what makes sense for your clients.
Your decision should be based on finding a balance between your own well-being and mental health and that of your clients.
You’ll need to have enough time to either prepare your client to either finish working with you, find closure, and end their therapy (if that makes sense for their journey) or transition to working with another therapist if they choose to. It may take some time to help them find the right therapist to work with, and they may need extra support through the transition.
What happens with your clients?
Many clients will continue their sessions with you right up until you start your maternity leave, and some may choose to take them up again after you return to work. However, some may decide to stay with their new therapist or decide that it’s a good time to pause or stop their therapy. So, you need to be prepared for all possible situations.
You might also find that some clients would prefer to start looking for a new therapist immediately once they know you will be taking an extended break. That might be challenging and bring up some emotions (and potential financial stress), so make sure to take care of yourself and have someone to talk to about anything that comes up for you in this process.
What should you do if you offer packages?
Many therapists offer packages of 3, 6, or 10 sessions in a specific period of time, and that can get complicated if you plan to take an extended break from work. If you know far in advance when you will need to stop working, the best solution is to stop offering packages at a certain time that you’ve calculated.
For example, if you offer 3-month packages but plan to go on leave from September, you would need to stop offering them by June at the latest. Otherwise, your clients might not be able to use all their sessions before your leave and would be out of pocket.
How to prepare for maternity leave: What about your online presence?
Another thing to consider is what you want to do with your social media and marketing while you’re on maternity leave.
Will you announce that you’re taking a maternity leave on social media or your website? Or would you rather keep that personal and not make it public knowledge?
If you publish content regularly on your social media channels, YouTube, or blog, will you stop that completely for the duration of your maternity leave? Or would you rather create some content in advance and schedule it out?
There are no right or wrong answers here – it’s something you’ll need to decide for yourself. There are positives and negatives to each approach. For example, algorithms love consistency, so if you stop posting completely, you might find that it doesn’t show your content to people when you do come back to work. On the other hand, you probably don’t want to encourage people to reach out to you if you’re not working – so it could go both ways.
So far, we’ve mostly talked about your public online presence – but what about your website? What will happen if prospective clients reach out to you? Let’s cover that next.
What about your website, booking system, and methods of contact?
Before your maternity leave starts, it’s a good time to review your website and client processes. Think about where and how prospective clients contact you so you can create a plan for each of them. You don’t want messages to get missed and people to think you’re unprofessional for not getting back to them!
For this reason, it’s a good idea to turn off any automated booking systems. Instead, you could add a note to the website page letting people know when you will be accepting new clients.
We also recommend setting up an autoresponder for your email address to let people know you are on (maternity) leave until XYZ date. You could also let them know the next steps if they want to work with you once you’re back.
For example, Melissa set up a simple waiting list for prospective clients through a fillable form linked from her autoresponder email. This way, she was able to capture the details of any prospective clients and get in touch with them once she had returned from her maternity leave. While not all of them went on to work with her, it was great to be able to follow up with them once she was ready to.
How to prepare for maternity leave: Your Finances
For some people, pregnancy and maternity leave can be a worrying time financially, and that may be a factor in deciding how long to take off work. If you are worried about your finances, here are a few things you can do to make the situation easier.
First of all, make sure you know what you’re entitled to in the country you’re based in when it comes to maternity leave and maternity pay. You don’t want to miss out on any benefits that may be available to you.
Secondly, if possible, try to build up a savings buffer to help you throughout your maternity leave. If you’re not pregnant yet, you can already start saving up or creating an emergency fund to relieve some of the financial stress.
You can also carefully examine your business expenses to see if there are any savings you can make. For example, are there any tools you’re paying for but not really using? Or any subscriptions you can put on hold – or even cancel – for the duration of your maternity leave? You might be able to switch to an annual plan to save money – or you might prefer to move to paying monthly so you don’t have a large outgoing in one month.
Make sure you know where your money is going so you’re not paying for anything unnecessarily.
Making a Plan for Your Return from Maternity Leave
If you’re preparing for maternity leave, the return to work may seem very distant right now. But having a plan for when you’d like to return to your business and how you’ll go about it will be worth it in the long term. It can help you find your focus and reduce any overwhelm, especially as you don’t know how much sleep you’ll be getting. Your future self is sure to appreciate your past self being so organised and getting a plan in place!
For example, do you want to go back full-time from the beginning or ease into work part-time? It’s possible that your plans might change during your maternity leave (and that’s okay, too!), but thinking about it in advance will help you feel prepared when it comes to it.
You might also like to create a list of essential tasks you’ll need to do when you come back to work. That might include things like:
- Opening up your availability for client sessions
- Replying to emails and messages
- Checking in with clients to let them know you’re back
- Getting in touch with the people on your waiting list
After your maternity leave, you might feel ready to get straight back into seeing clients straight away. But we recommend setting aside a day (or several) to catch up on any admin tasks before you do. This way, you can take it a little easier on your first day/week back, reconnect with your role as a business owner, and get back into the right mindset before you start seeing clients again.
How to Prepare for Maternity Leave – The Wrap Up
Embarking on maternity leave as a therapist and business owner can seem daunting at first, and there are a lot of things you need to figure out. But you can work through it step-by-step – you don’t need to know all the answers right away.
Hopefully, you feel more confident now when faced with the question of how to prepare for maternity (or any extended leave from your business). You know what decisions you need to make and some of the steps you can take to make it go as smoothly as possible.
Being a business owner can be lonely at times, not to mention figuring everything out on your own. Having the support of like-minded colleagues makes a difference, which is why we created the LIT Community in the first place.
If you’ve been looking for more support on your journey, start your 1-week free trial and join us inside the LIT Community here!
