(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hi, welcome to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm Allison from Abundance Practice Building. I have a nearly diagnosable obsession with helping therapists build sustainable, joy-filled private practices, just like I've done for tens of thousands of therapists across the world. I'm excited to help you too. If you wanna fill your practice with ideal clients, we have loads of free resources and paid support.
Go to abundancepracticebuilding.com slash links. All right, onto the show. Some of y'all aren't sending HIPAA-compliant email, and it's a problem. Even if you're paying for a business Google Workspace account and have a signed BAA, your emails still aren't 100% compliant. That's where PowerBox comes in. You can connect PowerBox to your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 email one time, and you're completely covered. No one has to sign into portals. It sends and it shows up like any other email.
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With over 100,000 therapists using their platform, they've been able to stay incredibly successful and they don't have to sacrifice your experience to stay there. You can try two months free at therapynotes .com with the coupon code ABUNDANT. Welcome back to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm your host, Alison Puryear. I'm here with my friend, Joe Zanock. Y'all know Joe from Practice of the Practice.
We've been on each other's podcast numerous times and so we're doing it again because I haven't talked to Joe in a while. So we're talking about something that most of y'all are feeling on some level and that's like burnout, some existential, what am I doing with my life? Some things that whether you're new or you're seasoned, whether you're in agency right now or you're in private practice, this is something we're hearing lots of people grappling with. So we figured we'd just talk about it.
So thanks for being here, Joe. Oh, thanks for having me. I always love being on your show and having you on my show. So tell me some of what you're hearing in the burnout realm from the folks that you are consulting with. Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of it just starts personally for me. In fall of 2022, we hosted this event in Cancun called Killing It Camp. And I came back with salmonella, which usually is super treatable.
And through the last two and a half years, I've still been dealing with surgeries around this salmonella that kicked off two years ago. And I think that sort of thing for me forced me to slow down and really examine like, what am I doing in my business? What am I doing in my life? Like, what are the essential things? Like I just talked to Greg McKeown who wrote Essentialism on the podcast. And one of his things is like, distill those essential things.
And the health crises, as you know, with your own family or as we both have dealt with, it's like that forces you to do what you probably should have been doing anyway. So I think some of the elements that we're seeing is just discussions around, and this is with my friend group as well, probably your friend group, of like, how much do we engage politically right now? How much news can I take in? So just personally, I wanna be an aware citizen. I wanna be socially active.
And I also can't take a lot of this. You know? So even just core questions of like, what can my brain take? And I think if we start there instead of like, what are all the tips to be more productive at work or whatever? If we just start with like, what can your brain take right now? Let's be gentle. We're living in a crazy time. There's a lot going on. There's a lot. I mean, even just like looking at the Asheville area with the hurricane, and people don't know up from down in a lot of areas.
So let's just start with that. Let's take a breath and say, what can my brain take? So if I start with that personally and with our community, it's, okay, if I just break down a couple domains, it's like, how much can I work and what kind of work can I do? So what kind of clients can you take on? You may have been super into EMDR for years and spent years training to do that. And you may leave EMDR sessions way more drained than when it's kids. Maybe kids just light you up and something shifted.
There's this thing called the sunk cost fallacy where like, the idea of someone goes through law school, it's the last year, they're about to become an attorney, but they're like, I don't wanna fricking be an attorney. And they're like, but I've done all this work, I should do it. We're allowed to change our minds. So I think looking at how do we work? When do we work? What type of work do we do? I think looking at even just within our own personal lives, where are we spending that time?
So I think those kind of big picture categories is where I'm seeing a lot of conversation right now around burnout. Yeah, it's interesting. So my clients that are currently in agency work, everybody's really clear, it's not the clients, it's the structure and systems, it's the leadership, it's working that many hours and having a family on top of everything else, on top of social media sucking in our time and our energy and our hope.
And for my clients who are in private practice, we have a whole program just for therapists who are full and miserable is kind of our shorthand for it, right? Like they've built the wrong practice and now they need to make some big changes to make it sustainable. And for the people when they're starting in that program, it's this sense of I put in so much work to build this thing that I thought I wanted. And now it is like, it is not what I wanted.
And I'm so scared of the golden handcuffs I have, my financial life falling apart. It's scary to make this big change to either get off insurance or increase your rate significantly or change niches like these kinds of big changes. And it's almost like they are, before they join, they're trying to decide whether or not the burnout is worth it. I think a position many of us have been in in different areas of our lives before getting to that essentialism. And you and I have both had health stuff.
We both have had kids have really significant health stuff. And you're right, it just boils it right down. But then when things get better, it's like you forget and you just go back to it. Yeah. Well, and I think that that idea of like I've built the wrong thing, sometimes we, what I hear, and you probably hear this too, is it's like, I just wanna blow the whole thing up or I wanna leave the industry. And it's like, you can do that.
Or we can also do some experimenting and just say, we don't have to just leave all insurances. We could say like, what if we left Medicaid? That's really stressful for me. I'm gonna leave that for a year. I'm sure they'll take you back if you're like, that was a bad decision. We can experiment with these things to say, like, how can we do this just a little bit different? And I think that's also like a big shift from how the industrialists taught us.
The industrialists taught us, you plug it in, you have an assembly line, the other side of car comes out. Like that mindset is just embedded in business and life and schooling. And we're in a post-industrialist world where we recognize the diversity. We recognize that individuals change their minds in their careers. We recognize like that things shift and that we need a menu, not a prescription. And so something that worked for me one week might not work for me the next week.
And so having that agility in that toolbox that we need to build, I think then helps us address that burnout and move away from that kind of all or nothing thinking that we get sucked into. Yeah, absolutely. I think about your original question of like, what can our brains take? And it just kind of happened naturally that when I became a therapist, I stopped watching dramas. If it was nominated for an Oscar in the last 20 years, I haven't seen it. I don't know.
It's all comedies and superhero flicks and lighter, easier, fantastical things for my entertainment. And same with the books I read. I used to be a big Jodie Picoult fan and it's like all this like ethical heart-wrenching. Do you choose one child over the other if one's going to die? You know, like that kind of thing. And as soon as I became a therapist, I was like, no, give me some fairies. Give me some like. I get enough of that in my regular counseling. Yeah, yeah.
And I think with social media, we don't get a break from it in the same way because at least my feeds are feeding me the things I look at, right? Which is like doom scroll type stuff, activism, things like I also want to be informed and I also can't spend every break at work in between things being reminded that the world is falling apart in some way.
Yeah. Well, and I'm feeling that same thing where it's like my TikTok algorithm, because I am involved with politics and stuff has given me a lot of politics. And I just want to go on there and look at watercolor paintings, but there's not like a mute politics. Right. And so I've had to just say, okay, just there's certain platforms that for right now, I have to say, what are the boundaries around that? Like, when will I look at that?
For me, listening to all things considered or some sort of news roundup that is just, here's the news of what's happening, not just in US politics, but around the world. Like I want to be informed, but also I don't want as much of the like, man, I'm so pissed off because of fill in the blank.
Right. And I think also just setting like hard and soft boundaries for myself around specific things of, you know, I would define a soft boundary as something I'm testing or trying out to see if it resonates and hard boundaries are like, I'm not going to do it. You know, I wrote a book about not working on Friday. So if I have a consulting client that only will meet on Friday, like I'm never going to work with them.
Whereas if some crisis happens in my business on a Friday, I'm not going to let it burn for the weekend. You know? Right. And so even in my own life, just saying, okay, like what are the things that my brain needs? Every Tuesday, I need to be at improv. I have to go to improv. I have to laugh with those people. I need that. I need regular walks. I need, you know, times with my partner, Claire, to like go out and have time away from the kids. And I want to have game nights with my kids.
It's not just screen-based. So it's like, once you start to put those building blocks in of this is the stuff that helps my brain, then there's less time and less energy to put into other BS, you know, because I've already said, here's the things that matter most. And of course we have to recognize that there's a certain affluence. There's privilege that plays into that.
But even like you're talking about people working at agencies, I mean, inflation alone, you know, and the cost of goods is insane. Like the cost of housing for millennials, they may never own homes. Whereas you and I got in when we could have regular jobs and get a regular size home. Like that's just, so there's so many factors there too, that just are societal things that, of course you feel burned out. Right. Right. I feel like everybody is peddling as hard as they can.
Yeah. And there are times we don't have to be peddling. Like we're going downhill. We don't have to pedal, but we're so used to peddling that we continue, which just furthers our burnout. Yeah. I was just interviewing this lady who's, I don't know, written 20 books on like Buddhist meditation. And she was talking about this moment when she was going through a really hard divorce and things were really hitting the fan and there was a lot to think about.
And she was just so overwhelmed that she had taken her trash out to the curb for that. And she sat down between the trash and the recycling and just like sat there and was just like in a terrible spot. But she realized in that moment, anyone that's been in mindfulness, has heard something like this, where there was nothing hurting her in that moment. She's sitting between two trash cans. There's nothing physically hurting her.
It's only her own pain that she's expecting out of the divorce or the financial ruin that she's expecting out of the divorce that was causing the pain. And that for me is like a, okay, right now I am safe. Right now I am, it's a lot in my brain, things that probably will happen, but like I have the skills that when those things happen, I can address them in that moment. And to me, I'm not good at that, but that's a great reminder to go back to of like, okay, right now I'm safe. Yeah, absolutely.
It's interesting. So I think about, like you were asking before we were recording about how are things in Asheville. And I was so proud of the way I was handling the hurricane and the immediate destruction afterwards, right? Because we tell our clients all the time, and I have been told by my therapist all the time, I'll feel your feelings as they're coming. And then like, if you just feel them, they don't last that long if you feel them when they come.
And so I would just be, you know, in my dark house straightening something up and all of a sudden just start crying. And it would be 30 seconds, maybe a minute of crying. And then it would just stop on its own. So I felt like I was really modeling so well for my kids. My kid goes to therapy once everything is back and her therapist tells me, she's like, well, how did your parents do during, you know, what was it like for your family? And she's like, oh, my mom cried a lot.
No, my daughter's in middle school now. So this is par for the course. She's like, oh, you know, what was that like for you? And she's like, I mean, it was kind of annoying. And I just, I love that I felt like I was doing such a good job modeling for them and modeling for myself. I'm like, oh, this works. And then the instant humility of having this information that my daughter found it annoying. Like I feel, look, that's the world right there. Like that's life.
That is the world right there, for sure. I think that there's also these narratives that we think of what we're supposed to do. You know, it's like, you know, after grad school, you're supposed to work at an agency and then a group practice. And then you start a practice, like that there's this like relationship ladder in our professional world, you know, in the same way there's these relationship ladders that are in the romantic world.
And for me, it's been really freeing, you know, for myself and with other people to just identify where does that come from? Why are we working so hard and saying we have to live this type of life? No, we need to know our actual needs. Like I need to know my finances. I need to know for the Sanhok family to survive, this is what I need. But oftentimes that number is much smaller than our perception of what we need.
And so when there's a gap there, that's a great opportunity to say, okay, do I want to work this hard? Or do I want to put that time into my own healing, my own trauma, my own burnout, you know, going to yoga more, like whatever your things are. And that's where I think that like the functional side of our brains and the artistic side, like often don't talk to each other when it's like, I'm an analytical person, but it's like, okay, but like we need some of that art side.
And so when we look at that functional, just like, what is your budget? And do you need to work this hard? And maybe you do. And then that's a different discussion than, oh, I don't. And do we have financial goals for the next five years that we do need to bring an extra 10 grand. Okay, that's a decision then that feels more empowering than like the world is making me work, so I burn out. Right, yeah, I love people have these very round numbers that are their goals, right?
But when you ask them, why that number? Like, where did that number come from? What are you gonna use that money for? What percentage goes where? Most people are kind of like, I don't know, just, I liked the number. It sounded good to me. But if it means you're getting closer to burnout or you are staying stuck in burnout to reach that number, then what's it for? Cause you're not gonna be able to vacation your way out of burnout, it doesn't work.
No, and I think that it's just one of those things where as you dig in and open things up, it gets momentum. We have this plus one minus one exercise that we do with our clients. And it's based on that kind of menu idea. So whether you have half a day weekends or four day weekends, like you can use this during your time off. And the plus one is just building a menu of things you can add in that help you recuperate.
And so, I'm gonna try reading a fairy book this weekend while drinking green tea for half an hour. Kids, like, unless you are dying, leave me alone. So you're communicating with the people, you're trying it out. Okay, that didn't really light me up like I thought it would. Okay, I'm gonna try something else next weekend. So we're building our plus ones over time. And then we're building our minus ones, which are things we're taking off of our plate. And so for me, I don't love grocery shopping.
I do it because I'm usually out running errands and I buy us food, but there are weekends where I'm like, I just do not feel like doing this. So I get groceries delivered. My driveway has a really weird angle. It's not that big, but it takes like over an hour to snowblow, to get all the snow off of it. But it's like not that big. And literally for $30 per plow, maybe $300 a season, I can get back probably 20 hours of time to be with my kids in the evening.
So I'm not in the dark doing this at 4.30 in the afternoon. And so finding those minus one things. And for me, that's personally been just helpful because then it's like, okay, I have a couple things I can go to when I feel off. They're not like, I've got to blow everything up. It's okay, I know I need to drink matcha before I drink espresso every day, or I feel crappy. Yeah. I know I have to move my body a certain amount, right? I also, Tuesday night is my improv night too.
And so like knowing that as I've gotten older, I've had to have things added to my life intentionally for joy and pleasure and fun and just maintenance. Like, no, I don't wanna walk every day, but I know my joints as I'm getting older, they're not happy if I don't move my body. But as our lives get busier, it's really hard to subtract things. So I think a lot of people get caught in that trap of adding all the things they're supposed to do without subtracting. My problem is stubbornness with it.
Like I'm like, I should be able to do it all. So one of my coaches actually had me write down a list of like things that make me feel taken care of that I don't have to do. So like my husband handles Girl Scouts, Joel handles all the Girl Scout stuff. It's cookie season, I don't have to do anything, thank God, right? So that makes me feel taken care of.
And if I can frame it of like, this is how someone I love is taking care of me instead of I should be helping with this, I should be at the cookie stand, I should whatever, I'm able to allow myself to be taken care of because that's another goal I'm working on. I love that. I wanna do that. Yeah. I'm gonna make a list of stuff that makes me feel taken care of. I like that. And it's great to share with your partner.
Like if you both make your list, because there are things on Joel's list that I wouldn't have thought of. And it helped me be able to show my appreciation to him of look, you taking June to Girl Scouts isn't just parenting, it's like you taking care of me while parenting. I really appreciate it. So, yeah. Yeah. And I think that oftentimes it's like people want to help and it's not as big a deal for them to do that thing as often we think it is. Right.
I'm wondering when people are like super stressed out, I'm picturing like you were talking about like agency people that maybe even wanna start a side gig counseling practice and just what are you seeing work in regards to burnout when they're just like in the thick of it?
Scheduling, really holding fidelity to your schedule because what I see makes everything worse is like if you say after work on Thursday, you're gonna do X, Y, and Z for marketing and then you don't cause you're tired, then it's not done. So you haven't moved forward on your goals and now you feel guilty. And so just start stacking up.
So hold it like making a very realistic calendar because somebody who's working full-time is not gonna be able to devote so much time as somebody who is maybe in agency part-time. So being realistic about what you can actually do on the front end, holding fidelity to that and being gentle with yourself if something comes up, your kid's sick, don't do it. God, don't do it. Take care of your kids, sit and watch TV with them.
But always making some sort of patterned amount of time, like a certain frequency of work towards what you're moving towards so that you're always moving forward, even if it's not at the speed any of us would want. We always move slower than we want, right?
Yeah, I think that whole kind of whether it's improv or learning new ways to just think through handing things off to our partner, for me, learning new things or trying new things does something different in my brain to disrupt than just kind of being stuck in the average. And for me, that's been like watercolor recently over the last couple of years, where for me, I love it because it's like you're painting, but then when it dries, you have no idea how it's gonna really look.
And there's just like a letting go of that. And because I'm not trying to be a professional or anything, it's like, okay, that was something I don't like, I'm gonna just recycle it. So I think that to me, just even having five minutes between things where I'm like, I'm gonna just go do a little watercolor and then go into something else that it doesn't have to be this big thing. It's just like a little micro moment instead of being on social media.
Yeah, which is what most people do in those little five minute blocks, which I think is making life worse for all of us ultimately. I'm curious for your people who are, maybe they're in their own practice already and they need to make some changes in order for it to be what they want and need it to be. Like, how are you seeing them balance burnout and fear?
Yeah, I think when they have a solid solo practice, so they're past the startup and they're just have created something that they, I just literally like right before you was talking to a lady that's gonna do consulting that has built that, she's got 30 referrals a month coming in that she can't handle and she has to make a decision. And so first it's like, do I wanna just be a sustainable solo practice?
And if so, we need to make some decisions on leaving certain insurances, increasing your private pay, improving your website to attract higher end clients, positioning yourself in the media differently. If that's the direction you're going, then we need to do some strategy around, you need to make more money and work fewer hours because you can't reach any goals beyond just sustaining. You're gonna be the same as you are if you don't do something else. Or do we want to do a group practice?
And some people think that has to be this huge endeavor. It literally can be one person that sees 10 extra clients a week. I mean, there's ways you can structure it that it doesn't become this big burden. Like when I had my group practice, we had 13 people and I probably worked on it half an hour a week. And it's like, you can do these things if you say, here's how I'm gonna make it so that it fits my lifestyle instead of I should do it all these other ways.
And so I do think that some relief around moving into group practice oftentimes can help assuming it aligns in your lifestyle and that you find good people. Usually your first couple hires are like not great. You hire a friend or someone you knew from CMH or whatever, and then you realize that doesn't maybe align with your niche. But I think that that gives the action side. I don't think that that addresses the fear that you asked about.
To me, that just an ongoing letting go of as many outcomes, but also recognizing that you need to know if you're sinking. You need to know that it's time to plug the holes in the boat. But to say, I have to hire this many people by this date and have them this full, you're creating an expectation for yourself that if it's not just a hope or like, hey, this is where we're headed, we wanna have a direction, but we don't need to have an expectation.
So I would say that fear is best addressed when there's more of that letting go of the outcome. Mm-hmm. It's interesting, because in the business world and the online business world, there's this idea of a BHAG. I'm blanking on- Big, hairy, audacious goal. Yeah, big, hairy, audacious goal. And like, we are encouraged to set goals that are maybe even impossible. Yeah. And I've always had what I call like, an okay, a great, and a shit your pants goal. That's my BHAG name.
And so- I like that better. So I have like all three for any, anything that we're doing launch-wise or goals for the year, things like that. And I had to create these other ones because I kept feeling like a failure when I wasn't hitting my BHAG. And I don't know, a lot of my business friends don't have that problem. They're like, well, you're not supposed to. You get closer to it than you would have otherwise because it was there. You didn't have a ceiling, really. And that's the beauty of it.
And I don't know if it's like personality. I don't know if it's something about the way that we're raised up as therapists that has us just wanting to like hit every goal, be as effective as humanly possible every single moment. I don't know. Are you good at setting goals that you know you might not reach? And then when you don't reach them being like, all right, cool. I've gotten better. I think I'm probably more like you are where it's like, I can see the potential of what this could be.
And it's this huge dream of this could impact people. This could make money. This could do whatever. And that definitely motivates me. But then when it's like, if we have a launch that is good by any standards, like I just met with my accountant and the percentage that were up last year over the year before, people would die for. And it's like throughout the year, I'm like, oh, we're not hitting the goals that I wanted to hit. But it's like, we grew by a massive amount.
And it's like, that should be celebrated. And so that's my own, I think, work to be like, why do I keep moving the goalposts? And instead of saying, okay, here's the thing that is what I'm shooting for. So that's, I'm not gonna add it actually. As I verbally process this, I think I was hoping that I would be like, no, I'm pretty good.
But I do think that, but I think that there's also when people are dreamers and innovators, and then you add on top of that therapist, we see the potential in someone's, say marriage that's falling apart. They had the worst affair you've ever heard of. And like, you've seen people come back together, or you've seen them break up and become the best version of themselves because they broke up. We see change unlike any other career, I might venture to say.
Because of that, we see the potential in all sorts of crap that we probably shouldn't see potential in. It was hard for me. My marriage of 17 years ended and I was a Gottman certified therapist. And it's like, I see people change. I see the potential when people put time into it. And the person I was married to didn't put time into herself. We weren't a good fit from the beginning. And now I'm happier than ever.
And I think that that therapy side also like got in the way of being able to see that I could leave. I love this. I mean, you know, we've talked about that situation. And I hate that situation for you during the painful part. It's quite a situation. But I love that perspective that like we're almost inherently more hopeful because we're therapists. And we see the resilience and the change. Okay. I'm gonna look at life through those eyes for a little while. I appreciate that.
And I think about this with therapists too as they're starting, whether they're starting their practice or they're shifting their practice significantly. There's this sense of, I wanted this to happen yesterday. I needed this to happen yesterday. Like, why am I not full in two weeks? Kind of unrealistic expectations. Because in agencies, they were fed clients. So they were full just as fast as they could be.
Yeah. And perhaps this hope plays into it as well of I know if I work hard, I'll, you know, see the benefits of that. Which is true. It's just not that timeline that we're all wishing. Yeah. Well, I think that's why communities like yours or ours are so important for people to find their people to be able to show up and be like, okay, this just happened. Is this normal or is this insane? Give me some feedback here. I don't know up from down. And so being in community.