Swell AI Transcript: 368: What I Learned After My First Two Talks
Melvin :
Hey there, it's Melvin. Today's podcast is supported by the American Psychological Association. If you are a psychology professional, which I think is most of us that are listening to this podcast, maybe you're considering your next career move. Well, the American Psychological Association's PsyCareers service actually has a listing of over 400 available positions in psychology. You can check it out over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash APA. And you can create a free account, upload your resume, set up job alerts, and submit all your applications. Again, that's over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash APA. So we'll jump right into today's session. Hello, hello. Welcome to today's session of Selling the Couch. Before we jump into today's session, just wanted to let you know that this will be the last session for a little while. I'm going to be taking the summer off, so June, July, and August, because our little one is out of school. And one of my big goals with both private practice and with SDC is to design my business around my family and just the pace of life that I want so but don't worry the STC podcast is not going anywhere we are running replays of the episodes for the summer some of the best episodes from this past season and from the past seasons And so I think you're going to really enjoy these. I'm also excited because we have some amazing partnerships coming up, including with the American Psychological Association, which is an incredible opportunity. And so we're going to be doing some partnerships here over the summer and then again in November as well. But today I wanted to share kind of in real time stuff that's been happening on my end as I jump back into private practice. I anticipate being ready to see clients by early June. I've still got a couple of logistical things to figure out, EHRs and stuff like that, but it's just about there. And the title of this episode is what I learned from doing my first two talks. These two talks were specifically related to mental health. And so my goal with private practice was to work mainly with founders and CEOs of brick and mortar stores, as well as companies and and SAS products and stuff like that, who are specifically struggling with depression, anxiety and burnout. But in April, a childhood friend reached out to me to connect me with a nonprofit organization in a affluent suburb of Dallas, which is where I was raised, spent most of my childhood, and to talk about the intersection of high achievement and mental health. I just even give you a little bit more of a background. I recently watched a ABC report that was done by an ABC affiliate and they said in 2024, so from January to May, 10 Indian students across the country have ended their lives. So either through completed suicide or through an accidental overdose or they were found, they went missing and there was a missing persons report out. and then their bodies were found several days later. And so this area of particularly South Asian mental health is something that is very personal to me. I have alluded to this and shared, but I was that high-achieving kid growing up. Literally my parents told my brother and I that part of the reason why we're immigrating from India to the U.S. is that is to provide a better educational opportunity for you guys. And I took that and was just felt the privilege of that and the honor of that, but that also brought a tremendous amount of pressure, particularly because I didn't speak the English language. English is actually my second language. In fact, all of second grade, I was in English as a second language classes. And there were a lot of things I had to figure out from being the first to go to college, graduating high school here in the US, go to college in the US, all of that kind of stuff. And I struggled with bouts of anxiety in eighth grade, anxiety and depression in high school. And it all came to a head in college where I had an academic scholarship to a small liberal arts school in in Texas, Austin College, which is in Sherman. And this Austin College is a feeder school for a lot of the med schools in Texas and Oklahoma. My initial plan was actually to become a pediatrician and go to med school and just become a pediatrician because I love kids and I love working with kids and all of that kind of stuff. But the first year and into the second year of my college experience, I went on academic probation. I had a 2.9 GPA. And for someone, I graduated in the top 2% of my high school class. I did AP classes, took on leadership positions, all of that stuff, despite struggling with depression and anxiety in high school. But it all came to a head when I went on academic probation. I struggled with really intense depression. had very intense thoughts of suicide, and I finally had the courage to tell my parents. And my parents had the foresight for me to go see a psychologist. And it was those sessions that prompted for me a love of psychology and prompted me to shift out of the pre-med track and go and decide that I wanted to become a psychologist. And I share all of that because a childhood friend reached out to because this nonprofit organization was looking for a speaker. And this nonprofit organization is primarily caters to South Asian students in this one school district and within this school district. Two kids in the past year and a half have ended their life, and they were both high-achieving students, and they wanted to see if there was somebody who would be able to talk and share their experience at the intersection of mental health and high achievement, and being from an Indian culture and all of the nuances that come with that. And I just thought it was an interesting full circle moment because at the age of 19 and 20, I was in a very different place and I'm 42 now. And to be able to do this almost like twice double the age where I am now, right where I was at 19. And it was one of the most amazing experiences that I've had. So that first talk, just to give you a little bit of a background on this, the first talk that I did, pretty much like 67 parents showed up. It was a pro bono talk. So 67 parents showed up in the first minute and not a single parent left at the end of the first hour, the one hour that I did the talk. And I spent about 15 to 20 minutes just sharing my story, sharing some of the ways that parents who are raising high achievers can think about some of these things, and kids who are high achievers, some of the things that they can do. And then I fielded 40 straight minutes of questions, and I just thought to myself, and I honestly think I could have probably gone another hour with questions. But out of that, and this organization I think has a couple of hundred members in it, and one of the members that was attending that session was connected to a national organization, TANA, which is a, so in India there are various different states, and the state that TANA is connected to is a state called Andhra Pradesh. and they speak the language Telugu. And I'm from Kerala, which is also in South India, and we speak primarily Malayalam. But there was a lot of overlap. And one of the board members of this national organization that TANA has 60,000 active members, and they reached out about three weeks or two and a half weeks after this first talk to do a second talk for TANA. And so I've had the incredible opportunity to do two of these talks. The second one ended up being two hours. I did talk some and did more Q&A as well. And it was basically on this intersection of high-achieving parents raising high-achieving kids, not exactly about founders and CEOs. I'm sure I will have opportunities down in the future to think about that. But it piggybacks on an interesting development that happened in 2019. So most of us know about what the ACES scale, the adverse childhood effects scale. So these are basically a list of things that when kids are exposed to. So for example, a parent that uses substances or if there is exposure to domestic violence in the home. Those kind of are risk factors for a child having mental health concerns or substance use issues. But in around 2019, there was actually a new group that was added as part of the most high risk in our country. and that's basically kids and teens who are growing up in hyper-competitive public or private schools. It completely goes against everything that we think of when it comes to ACEs, but it's because I heard the phrase called the gilded pressure cooker and it's basically these kids who are feeling Like in order to get into a prestigious college, they have to do what the equivalent of what like two or three or even four people would do. So Kumon and music classes and sports and being presidents or in leadership positions at clubs, but not even just being a part of clubs, almost like forming clubs and creating them from the ground up. and all of these different things. And it's been an interesting foray into all of this. And in today's session, honestly, I just wanted to share three of the things that I learned after these two talks, because I am trying to navigate and think through where's all of this going? And what do I do when these unexpected opportunities and these passions and callings sort of intersect? especially they intersect with this tension that I often feel. And I talk about here with STC, which is finding and being content with enough, and yet at the same time, having a heart to serve and thinking strategically about business and diversification and all of those kinds of things. So the first point that I wanted to share that I learned from this talk is podcasting and doing the teaching workshops for our online course Mastermind for the past, well podcasting since 2015 and then running our online course Mastermind for Therapists since 2021 has definitely been helping me a little background. I grew up, I'm identified as Christian, and I grew up in an Indian Christian church. And we used to have these things, we used to have these competitions, and one of them, what they called them, elocution competitions. So these are basically like sermon competitions, and I would prep like out of a passage out of the Bible, and then give a talk. And these talks would sometimes, depending on the scale, would be for just a couple of people, like judges, Other times it would be for like in front of a couple of hundred people. So I, when I first started doing these, this was particularly terrifying because I am an introvert. I do not like really like attention on myself, but I realized that over time I really enjoyed public speaking, even though I get nervous every time that I do it. And so I did all of, I did a lot of those competitions. through middle school and high school. I actually don't know why I never did speech and debate in high school. It's one of the things that are a more public formal public speaking. I think it's because I was just kind of strapped with time and just didn't have the time. That's one of the things I wish I did. But in undergrad, I got to do model United Nations and So this was basically the opportunity to represent a country on the United Nations and then to be able to give talks about policy and all of those kind of things. And it really owned my public speaking chops. And so when I started the STC podcast, And getting to now do this for 360 some odd episodes, it's been, I feel like it's further refined my love of public speaking and storytelling and all of that. And yet, I still get nervous every single time I do a podcast episode, whether it's a solo one or an interview one, or I get to do any sort of talks like this. And I used to focus a lot on my inner critic when I would do these talks. Like, even in the moment, I used to hear myself saying things, but then I could feel the inner critic judging the words that were coming out. And what I notice is the more that I've done this podcast and the more I've done these teaching workshops, the less that critic seems to be present, which is just, I'm so incredibly grateful for. And I've also done a ton of work in therapy in learning to navigate and quiet that inner critic as well. I wanted to share just an ancillary point related to this bigger point of realizing this podcasting and these teaching workshops have been incredible opportunities to work on public speaking. A lot of colleagues will reach out to me and they'll say, hey Mel, I want to start on social media or I want to start a podcast or I want to start on YouTube, but I don't know where to get started. Do you have any tips on it? And one of the things that I've just been telling is think about the skills that you want to acquire 5 or 10 or 15 years down the road, and then use social media platforms to work on that skill. Hey there, it's Melvin. Before we jump into the rest of today's session, just wanted to take a moment to thank the team over at Thryser for supporting this month's podcast sessions. Thryser can help private paid therapists transform out-of-network therapy into an in- network therapy experience. It'll help you attract and retain private pay clients. So first, Thryzr can help you verify your clients out of network benefits prior to the first session using Thryzr's free instant benefits calculator. And then just by charging clients via Thryzr's payment platform, you can automatically submit claims for your clients and even let your clients just pay for their co-insurance for the first sessions. So similar to like in-network co-pays to help them afford therapy up front and skip the reimbursement wait post-deductible. Thrizer covers the rest of your fees up front and waits for reimbursement on behalf of the clients. They also have this like really cool super bills upload feature if you'd like to offer that to your clients as a resource to manage if the clients want to manage their own super bills as well. Thryser helps manage all the claims end-to-end so we as clinicians and our clients don't have to deal with any of the insurance stress. You can learn more about Thryzr and the awesome work that they're doing over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash Thryzr. Sellingthecouch.com forward slash Thryzr. And Thryzr is spelled T-H-R-I-Z-E-R. And enter the promo code S-T-C upon sign up and received waived fees for the first $2,500 in charges. Again, that's over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash Thryzr. And enter the promo code S-T-C. So, for example, I'm writing on LinkedIn and part of what I'm writing on LinkedIn is I'm sharing my journey as an entrepreneur, sharing the mental health side of entrepreneurship in order to attract private practice clients. but I'm also talking about my journey as a podcaster and a course creator. But the bigger thing beyond that is I am, in writing these posts, I'm actually working on my writing skills because I would love to write one book in the future, potentially two, one related to STC and one related to this sort of high-achieving, high-achieving parents kind of niche that I'm thinking about. So think about it on that level. And an example is podcasting as well, right? Because I love to be able to speak more at conferences or do online webinars, all that kind of stuff. I've also integrated YouTube recently because, again, there's a business strategy behind YouTube. But I also want to just get comfortable in front of the camera because the first many episodes of the Selling the Couch podcast, I was so terrified to see somebody's face because I would freeze up and wouldn't know what questions asked, so I would just turn the camera off. And now turning on this camera is just an incredible opportunity for me to be brave and just to practice that skill. So think of it, short version, think of social media not just as like growing an audience, but think of it as skills that you can practice and refine over time. The second thing that I learned about doing these talks is both of these, again, talks were pro bono, but this stuff takes a lot of work. And I'm going to charge going forward with these talks. With my most recent talk, as I shared, it was two hours long. but I, and I was like so happy and so grateful to do the talk, but I ended up prepping just to shade under nine hours in order to do this talk. So this was planning of how am I going to structure it so that I keep engagement, all of that kind of stuff, taking wisdom that I've learned from doing our own advanced teaching workshops, creating the actual slides on Canva, reading a ton of stuff, and then figuring out how to integrate that stuff without overwhelming others, and then distilling all of that information into kind of essential pieces, doing a lot of rehearsing in front of the camera, and just seeing how I could improve how I'm presenting things, particularly focused on things like filler words, like ums and ahs and all of those kind of things. And well, one thing I realize is I'm realizing with each of these talks, it's probably going to take that amount of time just to prep, even if it is a talk that I've done, because I always want to do a good job on these talks. I want to make sure they're valuable and helpful and all of these things. If you're watching on YouTube, I'll share, I'll include a screen capture of what this looked like. But one of the things that I learned over the past couple of years is when we do our teaching workshops, it looks on paper like all I'm doing is, hey, we're going from this activity to this activity. But literally, I have a script that is like down to the minute. It'll say zero to five minutes, we're doing this zero, 10 minutes to 25 minutes, we're doing a small group breakout. 25 to 30 minutes, I'm teaching on this, right? So it's basically like almost like the script of a movie that's that's broken down like this. And there's a one of our colleagues, Janetta, if you're listening, thank you so much for sharing this in our in our Facebook community, which if you are not part of our Facebook community, definitely join. It's only for therapists, but there are 9700 therapists in there. So we're selling the couch comm forward slash community, but Janetta shared this fee speaking, speaking, fee calculator. I believe the website is Speaker Lab and it's a cool calculator. So it basically allows you to put in a whole bunch of parameters if you're thinking about doing paid speaking for anything. So you can do parameters like the length of your talk, whether it's for a foundation, a school, or a nonprofit, or it's for a conference, whether you're going to be the keynote speaker, or whether you're leading like a secondary workshop, how many talks that you've done in the past, your social media following, all of these parameters. And based on that, it will give you a suggested rate that you should charge for your talk. So my rate for this one hour talk was somewhere around $5,231. And this now their speaker lab is saying this, the rates that they're sharing is based on the thousands of students that they've helped. And they've kind of taken the composite of like, based on my talk, this is what they've noticed all of that kind of stuff. right now I am taking that number with a grain of salt because I'm sure there's an incentive to show like big numbers like the first time I saw that number and I was like, Oh my gosh, I could charge like $5,000 for a one hour talk. It's it's almost like I'm sure there's an incentive for them to be like, Oh, I want to go join speaker lab or whatever. Right. So again, take that with a grain of salt. But I do think When I've talked to a couple of colleagues who do public speaking and do paid talks as part of their income generation, they've all shared like where I am with STC, I can easily charge between five and 10,000. And then if I'm doing extended workshops and things like that, it could be into the 20 to $30,000 range. Now, again, I want to just give a shout out to Adia, Lorraine, and Annie for being just wonderful friends and giving me some of this information. But they all shared that fees are one thing, but it's also good to not be super rigid with them as well. A few of my friends also just shared that they were so stuck on like getting a certain fee that they missed other opportunities that could have come out of that talk. So for example, that talk could have been recorded and distributed to an email list or something like that, right? Even if they took less of a fee because it's getting distributed in a certain way, it ends up being beneficial. So the big thing that I took away from just some of the wisdom that they shared is, instead of just focusing on revenue, see if there are other opportunities for reach. So for example, if it's an online thing or even if it's an in-person thing, would they be able to have a videographer or would they be able to record the video so that it can be placed on YouTube? So that's what I had both of these organizations do for the first two talks that I did. They're both available on YouTube. I'll link to it. I'll link to both of them here in the show notes so you can just get an understanding of like how I structured and designed them. But the benefit of that is because it lives on YouTube, I can now link back to it from my private practice website. I can create content around it as well. And then it can be a great asset that I can use to market my private practice going forward. One of my plans is I'm going to basically take those two videos and create like a each for each of them create like a blog post around it and then embed the video and kind of go from there. And then I'm also including and linking out to both of those videos. I basically have a section that says like in the media on my private practice website which is over at melvinbarguisphd.com. but on it I have it in the media section and anytime I've done, I'm going to do it like a podcast or one of these talks, I'll always backlink it back to that just to just improve the SEO and all that kind of stuff. And then with the second talk, they're going to actually also, once we get it up on YouTube, they're going to send the YouTube video to their email list of 60,000, right? So, which is an incredible opportunity. So because now we have this asset that can be deployed, I think it's such a wise play on it. The third and final thing I just wanted to share is one of the things I realized I didn't because I just didn't have a huge amount of time to turn it around for the first talk. I had more time between the first and the second talk. I wasn't able to capture emails. But one of the things that I'm going to do with every one of the talks that I do is to capture emails going forward. So with STC, one of the hard lessons that I learned is to not build your online presence with just social media followers. I've shared this before, but our Facebook group, the Selling the Couch community, in the early days when I started it, I started it concurrently with the STC podcast in 2015. And when we started it initially, the reach of Facebook groups was outstanding. Like literally, if you created a post in a Facebook group, everybody in that Facebook group would end up seeing that post. But over time, Facebook started limiting the reach of certain posts. Basically, if a post was starting to trend, then it would get emphasized to the members. But if it wasn't, it would not be showing up on members' feeds. And then over time, the reach of Facebook groups really, really started to decrease. And especially if you included like external links out, they would not even like push that post out to very many people at all. All of this to say I learned a really hard lesson, which is if you end up building a all your entire audience on a social media platform, whether it's a Facebook group or LinkedIn, or Instagram or whatever it is, you're too much at the mercy of the algorithm. So instead, what I would do is create an email opt-in that directs your most loyal fans that are interested or listening to your podcast or reading your blog posts or watching your YouTube videos or whatever it is or watching your talks. take them to your email list. So I created an email list, or I created an email opt-in called The Habits of Successful High Achievers or something like that. And you can find it over at melvinbergiesphd.com forward slash high achievers if you want to check it out or you want to be on that that newsletter as well. But the main reason that I wanted to take it from social media to email is, again, I wanted to bring them from rented audience to owned audience. So I wanted them to go on a platform and connect on a platform that I actually own. I can readily communicate with them, that I'm not at the mercy of some sort of algorithm. Now, my goal with the newsletter, I don't know that I'll send it as frequently as the STC newsletter, which gets sent out weekly. But all of this is news, so I'm sort of just figuring it out in the moment. But I know with the newsletter, I want to be helpful. I also want to stay in touch with some of those folks that are on the email list, because I know that not everybody's ready to, like, buy something that I may offer or seek me out for therapy or any of those kind of things. But the cadence and all of that In an ideal scenario, I think once a week or once a month would be or once every other week would be a nice cadence, but I'm not at a point where I can do like once a month even. But I'm just trying to figure that out. And the whole intent is to kind of be helpful and be valuable, but to stay top of mind as well. The other reason that I'm building an email list is I'm thinking like way, way, way beyond these talks. I'm thinking like, what other opportunities could there be that are coming up to be able to serve and work with high achieving parents raising high achieving kids? I know that a lot of parents are looking for a safe and honest place to talk about basically the pressure of high achievement, right? The high achievement pressure being in this like pressure cooker. And what would it look like for me to create products and services around that? And then the other side of it is, is that a path I really want to go down with? Also now with STC, am I trying to do too much? So again, I sort of acknowledge that fear and that concern, but I'm also at the same time trying to be intentional and be paced with it. So again, the final three points of I learned from my three talks are leaning into social media channels. So particularly realizing podcasting and doing these teaching workshops for our mastermind have definitely been helpful. So particularly leaning into social media platforms as a way to develop a skill that your five or 10 or 15 year old self from now will thank you for developing that skill. The second point is doing these talks takes a ton ton of time and effort. And I'm going to charge going forward with these. And then the third and final thing is just capturing emails going forward with my talk. So even if I do live talks, it could be as simple as a one page sheet that gets passed around where folks can opt in as well. The final thing I just wanted to share is doing these talks are so brand new to me. So if you know any schools, public, private schools, any non-profits, if you're on boards of any of this stuff or any foundations that are looking for speakers who can speak at the intersection of high achieving parents raising high achieving kids, particularly from an immigrant or a person of color perspective, I would love to be connected. I would so appreciate it. I am, again, so new and I'm learning this on the fly and I realized just asking for help might be the best thing. The best way to email is hello at melvinbarghesephd.com. Barghese is spelled V-A-R-G-H-E-S-E.com. Hello at melvinbarghesephd.com and I'll be in touch. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you again for listening to this season of the podcast. Again, tune in to during the summer as we continue to have some of our most favorite replays. I'll be taking a lot of time away, just resting, rejuvenating, taking a couple of trips, going back to daddy daughter adventures on Fridays. And then I will also be working on a big project, which is working on the how to start a podcast, the ultimate guide for therapists. which I'm hoping will be available and ready by the time we come out of summer. And I'll keep you updated on all of that. And also by then the SDC website should be getting a nice refresh and excited to share that with you going forward. Have a great rest of your day and so appreciate you tuning in. Bye.
undefined: Thanks for listening to the Selling the Couch podcast. For more great content and to stay up to date, visit www.sellingthecouch.com.
Melvin : Hey there, it's Melvin. I hope that you enjoyed today's podcast session. Just wanted to take a moment again to thank the team over at the American Psychological Association for supporting today's podcast session. If you're a psychology professional that is looking for your next job in psychology, definitely check out PsyCareers, the American Psychological Association services, career centers. CyCareers now has over 400 job postings posted specifically for psychology professionals. You can connect with leading employers and explore roles that match your skills and your professional and personal goals. You can check all of that out over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash APA, sellingthecouch.com forward slash APA. Create a free account and get started.