Tiana spoke in French. Each answer has its video, with English subtitles and our translation alongside. Read the original French page.
The work
QWho are you?
Hello, I’m Tiana, a clinical psychologist. I graduated from the University of Angers in 2015. I work with adolescents and adults going through life transitions. It might be a change in their working or personal life; it might concern a person’s status, a role, the course of a life, or simply a time when someone feels the need to understand themselves better and make sense again of what they’re going through.
I’m especially interested in what periods of change stir up in us, emotionally, in our sense of identity and in our relationships. My approach is integrative, with an analytic and psychodynamic orientation, which means I pay close attention to each person’s history, their experience and their inner world, and I also bring mindfulness-based therapies into my practice.
For me, a life transition is also a chance to get to know yourself better, to understand what’s happening inside you, often without your being aware of it, or sometimes things you’d forgotten, and gradually to find your own way forward, a sense of alignment.
QWhat is the hardest part of your work?
For me, right now, one of the hardest parts of private practice is everything to do with growing it: the admin, the communication and the visibility. In private practice you have to learn to talk about what you do, build a website and grow your professional network, and all of that takes a huge amount of time and energy.
People often see trying to build a patient base as a commercial exercise, but for me it has a whole other dimension: it’s about being found by the people who need support. And when you choose this profession, it’s precisely in order to support others.
So spending time on tasks that aren’t the heart of our work can be quite frustrating, and that’s a side of private practice people rarely talk about. You have to be a clinician, a manager and a communicator all at once.
Setting up
QWhat did you discover when you set up in private practice?
I started working on setting up my private practice in January 2026, and I had support with several aspects of starting a business. I quickly realised how much I needed to anticipate. There’s the paperwork, of course, the social security contributions, the obligations that come with your professional status, then accounting and insurance; there’s a lot to think about. But there’s also a whole organisational side that people rarely talk about: building my website, for instance, choosing my practice-management tools, setting up a way for people to book appointments, organising my patient files, and thinking about how I’m going to grow my practice.
What struck me most is that every decision raises new questions. Which tools should I choose? What are my obligations, both legal and ethical? What costs should I plan for? How do I organise my practice so that it’s efficient and secure, and really lasts?
All of this has a cost, in money and in time, at the very moment when your income can be very irregular. You can be very well trained clinically and find yourself having to learn a whole other job on the side. Looking back, I’d say the difficulty isn’t just setting up your practice; it’s building an organisation solid enough that you can then focus calmly on the work itself, the heart of what we do as psychologists.
QHow much of your time does admin take?
As someone just starting out, I feel that a very large share of my working time, more than half at the moment, goes on everything that happens around the sessions themselves. Managing appointments, organising files, writing notes, dealing with admin and invoicing, answering messages and calls, and still working on my visibility.
If I had to give a rough figure from my own experience right now, I’d say it comes to almost 20 hours a week, especially in the launch phase. And that’s with around 16 hours of sessions open at the moment, which aren’t all booked yet.
That’s what’s quite surprising when you start in private practice: your working time is far more than the hours you spend with patients. The challenge is to gradually find a way of working that lightens that load and keeps our time and energy for our patients.
QWhat does good organisation mean to you?
“For me, good organisation isn’t simply a question of productivity or saving time. Above all, it’s about our psychological availability as clinicians.”
In a session, I think we need to be fully present, to give our full attention to the person in front of us. We need to be able to listen to what they say, to be attentive to their emotions, their silences, to what’s happening in the relationship, the countertransference of course, and to everything that may come up in the session. But when we’re constantly preoccupied by a forgotten appointment, badly organised files or admin tasks that have fallen behind, part of our attention stays taken up by those worries, and we’re simply less focused in the session. That doesn’t mean a psychologist needs perfect organisation, of course. We’re all human, and we all go through periods that are harder than others. But I think having the right tools and a well-structured way of working helps to lighten our mental load. The idea is to let the running of the practice take its proper place, so we can give our patients all our attention, the attention they deserve.
So for me, organisation is a way of taking care of the therapeutic frame.
Bloomsline
QWhy did you choose Bloomsline?
At first I was simply looking for a tool to manage my appointments and patient files. I was comparing different solutions and platforms when Sarah introduced me to Bloomsline. What made it click for me, the reason I chose Bloomsline, was when she told me about Moments. Moments in Bloomsline are those times when patients can record an emotion in the app. It can be a thought, a memory, anything at all, but it’s a concrete moment that can really become part of the therapeutic process.
I found it interesting to think of psychological support beyond the session itself, in the time between sessions. In my practice, a lot happens between sessions: thoughts that keep developing, emotions that can surface at any time of day, after we’ve met. Being able to offer a space that supports that continuity, that connection, without of course replacing the therapeutic relationship in the session, I found that really interesting. What I liked was the idea of not reducing the tool to a calendar or a piece of practice-management software, but also thinking about how it can support the patient’s therapeutic journey.
That echoed the way I see my own practice. Working on yourself isn’t limited to an appointment. For me it’s part of daily life, of the everyday experiences we go through, and of the way we gradually learn to understand ourselves and know ourselves better. It’s that dimension that made me choose Bloomsline.
QDid you have doubts?
Yes, I had quite a few doubts. At first I thought Bloomsline would probably be just another practice-management platform, with a calendar, patient files and a few features. Then, as I discovered the platform, I understood there was a philosophy behind it that went beyond simply running a practice. What convinced me was the intention to support patients between sessions too. For me, therapeutic work isn’t limited to the time we spend together in a session.
There’s also everything that keeps unfolding in the patient’s daily life: emotions, thoughts, insights that come here and there, at any hour. It was the possibility of offering resources and materials to support my patients’ clinical work that particularly interested me. And there’s a second thing that matters to me: it’s very important to work in a well-organised environment.
Because when I’m in a session, I need to be fully available for the person in front of me, without constantly thinking about other admin tasks, an invoice or anything else. So in the end, it was these two things together that convinced me to choose Bloomsline: being able to support continuity of care for my patients, while also letting me work in the best possible conditions.
QWhat changed with Bloomsline?
In concrete terms, I’ve been able to bring several parts of my work together. For example, I can write my clinical notes directly in Bloomsline, manage my appointments and create resources that I can then share with my patients. I find that really valuable, because it goes beyond a simple admin tool. I can also design materials around the issues I encounter in my practice, offer reflections and psychoeducation, and even write articles myself to deepen my own knowledge.
And there’s a very concrete aspect that can’t be overlooked: cost. Before, I used Doctolib and paid a very expensive subscription for what were, in the end, very limited features, whereas today Bloomsline gives me several useful tools in one place, which also helps me keep better control of my professional expenses.
When you’re starting out in private practice, every expense counts, both to organise yourself well and to avoid piling up subscriptions. And that’s far from trivial, because it’s exactly what I’ve experienced with Bloomsline.
QWhen do you use Bloomsline?
Personally, I use Bloomsline at different points in my day. To put it in one sentence: as soon as I arrive at my practice, I open Bloomsline. After my sessions, I open Bloomsline. Before my sessions, I open Bloomsline. I use it first to check my calendar, manage my appointments and organise my patients’ care. But it’s also a space where I can keep all the information related to my work. I can work on my notes and session reports, while of course respecting confidentiality and data protection.
And my use doesn’t stop at running the practice. I also use it to write, to think about questions that come up in my practice, and to prepare articles on psychology and life transitions. For me, that reflection is an integral part of my job too. I believe we have to keep learning, keep questioning ourselves, our knowledge and our practice, and explore new subjects throughout our careers.
Bloomsline gives me that time too. Of course, there are other, very practical sides to how I use Bloomsline. But what I also found interesting was this reflective side. It’s this versatility that interests me: having several tools in one working environment rather than constantly switching from one platform to another. That’s the idea that really appealed to me.
QWhich features do you use most?
Today, the features I use most are, unsurprisingly, appointment management, of course, and keeping track of my patients, especially for writing my session reports and clinical reflections. But honestly, what surprises me most about Bloomsline is everything the platform has offered me over time.
At first I was mainly looking for a tool to organise my practice, and now I regularly discover possibilities I hadn’t even thought of. Very recently, for example, invoicing was added. It’s exactly the kind of feature that can seem quite ordinary but saves real time when you’re a psychologist in private practice and have to manage everything yourself.
What I like is seeing that it isn’t limited to a simple calendar: the platform keeps evolving, and it’s really tailored to what I actually need as a psychologist.
QWhat would you tell a psychologist setting up in practice?
If I had to recommend a tool to a psychologist setting up in private practice, I’d tell them to take the time to think about how they’ll organise their own work from the start. When you open your practice, you already have a lot to manage: the paperwork, building your website, appointment booking, patient follow-up, invoicing, growing your practice. You can quickly end up with several tools, a lot of scattered information and a lot of time spent on admin. What interested me about Bloomsline is being able to bring several parts of my work together in one environment, while also being able to think about continuity, support between sessions, and the connection we build with patients between sessions.
For someone starting out, a tool that brings several functions together can be very valuable, provided of course it fits their own practice, their needs and their budget. I think it helps to choose your platform fairly early, your working tool, so you can build your organisation, a coherent way of working, from the beginning, rather than having to reorganise everything a few months later.
That said, no tool will ever replace our clinical thinking, the quality of our therapeutic relationships, or, of course, our ethical framework. Those will always remain at the heart of our work as psychologists or psychotherapists. But I think a well-chosen tool can help us organise our work better and protect time for everything that matters, above all for the people we support.