[JOE SANOK] This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 812. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. I hope you are doing amazing. Is your private practice off to a great start? Is it growing? Are you adding people? Maybe you’re even exiting and starting some new stuff outside of your practice. We cover so much on this podcast around the business and life around private practice. We do these Ask Joes where people submit their questions or oftentimes it’s emails that we are noticing a trend in. So today’s question actually is one that some of my consulting clients have been asking. We talked a ton about it Slow Down School in the summer of 2022 and then just today, I talked to a consulting client about this. It’s all around designing our life in a way that helps us get what we want. So I want to take you through an exercise that starts with the question that people often ask, and that’s ah, I’m not doing what I want. I’m not focusing where I want, I’m not getting the outcomes that I want, what should I do? Oftentimes, here’s what happens, you have some particular goal, you put it in your calendar, you think about it, and then you don’t do it. You don’t work on it, you end up just doing something else. Now I want to start that that gives you valuable information, that gives you information about what your energy is. Just today I was talking with a consulting client and they wanted to look at their, their dashboard for their private practice every single week. They’re doing that on a Friday. It was when they knew they were done for the week, but they kept not doing it so maybe like 30% of the time. When you think about it is Friday afternoon, when you have the best energy to think through that. What’s being revealed there is that the quality of energy that you have for that particular task does not line up with the energy that’s needed for that task. So, when we find ourselves not doing something we know we should do for our practice, we should start thinking through a couple things. First, is this really needed for the practice? Because your lack of working on something might actually be pointing to that. Either it shouldn’t be done at all, or you shouldn’t be the one doing it. Maybe it’s something that you should be outsourcing to a technology or to a person. It could also point to the fact that that time of week, that time of day is not in line with the energy that’s needed for that task or it could be that you just don’t care anymore about that particular task or what the outcomes are. For example, say you, I don’t know, you’ve been working on some side gigs, some, I don’t know, e-course, and then all of a sudden you realize I’m not putting time into that e-course, but your energy and interest in that may have shifted. Maybe you didn’t get the outcomes you wanted. Maybe it didn’t launch like you wanted. Maybe the topic doesn’t matter anymore to you. That’s okay. We want to first look at when we’re not doing things, what information is that giving us? Then we want to step back and say, well, what is it that I really want? I want you to do an exercise, and for part of this, you’re going to need to pause this. You’re going to want to be at a place that you can stop and shut your eyes so if you’re driving, I always say, pause this episode, come back to this moment. if you can’t concentrate for the next, say three to five minutes without someone interrupting you I would wait and come back to this part of the episode. [PoP] Whether you’re starting a solo practice or thriving in solo practice, getting a group going, or thriving in the group, or launching a big idea or thriving with your big idea, we have a consultant that can help you with our team. We continue to grow to have consultants that will help you at every single phase of practice. If you want to apply to have a 30-minute pre-con consulting call with me, I would love to chat through where you’re at. The goal is to just hear where you’re at, where you’re headed, where you want to change things, and then to say, here’s where I’d spend my time and money if I were in your situation. We have enough people applying at every phase of practice. We don’t need to squeeze you into anything. In fact, we would hate that. We would rather say, here’s where we can join you and offer some consulting to help you reach your goals faster. Apply over at practiceofthepractice.com/apply if you want some help with one-on-one consulting today. Again, that’s practiceofthepractice.com/apply. [JOE SANOK] Now that we’re all on the same page you’re in a place that you can sit down, you can shut your eyes maybe even grab a journal for this exercise. So this is an adaptation of an exercise that Kelly Higdon did at the most awesome conference a number of years ago that she said she borrowed from somebody else. It’s often been used. What I want you to do is start by taking three really deep breaths just to be grounded, just to allow your body to just feel sensations and to just be present for this exercise. One more deep breath. All right. Now I want you to think through your ideal week. Your ideal week, let’s start with Sunday. What would Sunday look like? What’s your ideal Sunday? Take some time to walk through Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. What would each of those days look like? Really take the time to walk through those. If I jump back in too soon, feel free to pause it. So just take a half a minute or so to really walk through every single day. Feel free to pause this if you need more time. I want you to now think through what’s your typical week look like, and compare the two of those. Where are there differences? Where are there opportunities? What stands out to you? Maybe even write it down in your journal. What is it that you wish you were doing? Maybe you wish you worked out more. Maybe you wish you ate healthier. Maybe you wish you had more counseling appointments. Maybe you wish you had less. What’s different than your typical schedule? Now, what I want you to do is to actually pull out your computer, look at your calendar in the next, say, four to six weeks, and start to see what you could plug in that you could put on repeat that would help you get closer to that ideal schedule. What would help you get closer to that ideal schedule? For example, if you realize that looking at the dashboard of the numbers that your practice of buttoning up the week if that’s not happening and that’s something you want to have happen, think through when that would be best. Also think about the slowing down that’s in your life. Like, do you have time away from your kids or your partner or your practice in the evenings? Do you need to schedule in a weekly night out with friends or just fun time from 5:30 to 9:00? Take the time right now to text the supports in your life and say, “Hey, would you up be up for watching my kids every Wednesday? I want to for eight weeks, try to do something for myself on Wednesday nights where I can connect with people.” Or do something alone, or go for a hike or take a class. So I want you to put those things into your calendar to start to fill it out with that ideal life, to move you closer towards that ideal life. Now, the benefits of doing this, the benefits of having that on repeat the things that you know are healthy for you and move you closer, is that then when you’re doing that, you can start to test out, like, is this for one moving me towards my ideal life? Is this helping me actually just feel better about life? Is it also helping my practice and my big ideas to move forward? Am I more creative and less stressed out? Am I making fewer mistakes? You can start to think through those things differently because you’re putting in there your ideal life. s you start to do this, your creative side has a little bit more time to work on things so that you can go through the typical cycle of entrepreneurs or visionaries where you first investigate new ideas. You think about them, you ponder them, you ask people about them, you then start to plan, what’s next. Then you launch that new idea or that new approach, and then you hand off the majority of that task, and then you step back into that cycle of investigating the next thing. That’s the cycle of entrepreneurship that you’re investigating, you’re planning, you’re launching, you’re handing off, and you’re just going through that cycle over and over. If you don’t have the time to do that, if you don’t have the space or the best energy to do that, it’s really hard to level up. Because when you add new things to your plate, that plate just gets more and more full compared to when you’re taking things off that plate, when you’re saying, what is the best use of my time socially and in my life outside of work, in my life, in work and my private practice and my big ideas, and I’m going to structure my life in a way that reduces some of that stress/ So something, for example, that I do in my life, I know that mornings with my middle schooler and my elementary schooler has the potential to be stressful. But I realized that if I have specific alarms that just repeat every single day, it makes it way easier to get into a very solid schedule. Every morning at 6:04 AM my first alarm goes off. I take my middle schooler her, she gets her clothes out the night before, so we reduce any of that. I give it to her and she gets her clothes on and snoozes for nine minutes. Then the second alarm goes off. I tell her it’s time to brush her teeth. Tell me when you’re done brushing your teeth. I’m snoozing then, then I go down and get her breakfast and just I’m around her. Then we have about 15 minutes that she can lay on the couch. She can look at the weather, we can snuggle, we can just relax together so that it’s not super rushed. Then if it’s rainy, I drive her down to the bus stop. If it’s not, she walks down and then I come home and I have about an hour until the next alarm goes off. Same sort of thing, take my elementary kid her clothes, and if she gets her clothes on, she likes to come and cuddle for a little bit, then we have a couple snoozes, and then we have an alarm for each of them that goes off when we have to be leaving for the bus stop, either walking or riding the bus. That’s a problem that I know is going to repeat itself. So I’ve created a solution with timers that just says, listen, every single morning it’s the same. So we can do that sort of thing where we say, okay, what’s predictable stress in our business? What’s predictable stress in the way we think through things? Where do I find that I’m frustrated? For example, me knowing my numbers in regards to what’s the profit for Practice of the Practice what are the numbers around the podcast? What are the key areas that we make money and that we help people? I want to know that every single month. So I meet with my chief profitability officer, Rocky, every month we go over the numbers, we look at the trends, we adjust things, we change things. By doing that, it gets me in a rhythm of, okay, I don’t need to be stressed about money and if a bunch of stuff changes, well then we’re going to have to address that differently. When we do that, then we can have that predictable stress that we can say, I’m going to alleviate that in a different way. What are you going to do with this information? How are you going to adjust your schedule and think through it? This is the stuff that I cover all the time in one-on-one consulting. LaToya and Ashley do the same thing where they’re digging into your practice, looking at your operations, looking at how things are working. Andrew also, Andrew’s a newer member to our team, he helps solo practices. So if you’re looking at help with your solo practice, your group practice, or your big idea outside of it, we have four consultants that can help you. If you head it over to practiceofthepractice.com/apply, you can read about each of us and decide if you want to apply to work with one of us, one-on-one. We’ll usually do a three to six month package to help you get to those big goals that you want to work on. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great day. I’ll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. 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