Finding Real Fulfillment and Flourishing in Your Work with Erin Gibb | POP 876

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Finding Real Fulfillment and Flourishing in Your Work with Erin Gibb | POP 876

What are the common problems that many therapists have to overcome? Do you struggle with often self-sacrificing even though you try to teach your clients self-empowerment? How can therapists experience real, true fulfillment in the work that they do?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks about finding real fulfillment and flourishing in your work with Erin Gibb.

Podcast Sponsor: Blueprint

A photo of the Blueprint podcast sponsor is captured. Blueprint sponsor the Practice of the Practice podcast.

Providing great therapy day after day can be challenging – even for the best of us!

At Blueprint, they believe that nothing should get in the way of you doing your best work, which is why they created a platform that provides therapists with an array of clinical tools – things like therapy worksheets, intervention ideas, and digital assessments – that are designed to help you and your clients can stay connected and confident throughout the care journey. Even better, Blueprint helps streamline your documentation so that you can spend less time on your notes and more time on the things that matter.

To learn more and request a free 30-day trial, visit blueprint-health.com

Meet Erin Gibb

A photo of Erin Gibb is captured. She is a therapist, podcast host, and group practice owner. Erin is featured on the Practice of the Practice, a therapist podcast.

Erin Gibb is a therapist, clinical supervisor, group practice owner, podcast host, Therapist Fulfillment coach, and early adopter of the weird and wonderful that accelerates expansion.

She created Therapist Expanded (her podcast and coaching business), after years of mentoring therapists and seeing how deeply the industry conditioning goes, and how courageously living from the source of our dreams incites mental health revolution.

Visit Erin’s website and connect on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Freebie: What’s Your Therapist Fulfillment Flavor?

In This Podcast

  • Macro problems in therapists’ lives
  • The underbelly of empowerment
  • How to make positive progress for therapists
  • How therapists can experience fulfillment
  • Erin’s advice to private practitioners

Macro problems in therapists’ lives

The earliest experiences of most therapists are often the same.

Somewhere in childhood we learned that having needs wasn’t as good as looking after other people’s needs. That is a common story for therapists in the making.

Erin Gibb

As many therapists continue on their working journey, they come to discover that they used the empathetic response to survive when they were young children in a potentially difficult or lacking household.

Unfortunately, many places in the world struggle with systemic problems that impact almost every family.

When we fast forward to higher education, we start getting the message that [we] need to comply … to be obedient to these systems.

Erin Gibb

This combination often leads most therapists to be overly compliant in every aspect, from checking the boxes in a hierarchical manner to moving through grad school.

There’s a disconnect where therapists are taught that they are only guides in their client’s recovery, but that if a client dies in their care, then they are held liable in some way.

Due to this, so many graduate students receive their qualifications with a deep sense of fear.

The underbelly of empowerment

Therapists are smart, quick-thinking, and resourceful problem-solvers that know what to do and when to do it.

They have a powerful wealth of knowledge and skills that equip them to handle some of the toughest situations. However, there is an underbelly that can cause therapists to undervalue themselves.

Then there’s the moment where we need to choose to prioritize ourselves over others, and that comes up many times in our careers. It can come up when you’re fee-setting it can come up when you need to make a change in practice, [and] it can come up in the micro level all the time in the therapy room.

Erin Gibb

The only sustainable way forward is for therapists to first look after themselves completely before opening the door to someone else.

How to make positive progress for therapists

There can be real, genuine fulfillment for therapists in the work that they do without requiring them to undervalue or sacrifice themselves along the way.

The first step is to find and reconnect with the center of yourself. What inspired you to do the work that you are currently doing? What were you like as a child, before you were conditioned to self-sacrifice or over-empathize for survival or safety?

Secondly, when therapists live fully and freely, they can take everyone that they support much farther.

[When] we stop accepting broken systems [that] starts to revolutionize mental health, not by going after the system directly … [but when] we change ourselves, we change the world.

Erin Gibb

How therapists can experience fulfillment  

Sure, therapists do need money to live comfortably which affords them the chance to focus well on their clients instead of worrying about their own finances. However, true fulfillment goes deeper than that.

There’s such a difference between success and fulfillment, and success may or may not have anything to do with fulfillment. It might be what we thought we needed to do from our conditioning.

Erin Gibb

Fulfillment is not about money. It’s about finding the state of being within yourself that feels like fulfillment, and then reversing the strategy to find the process of how to get there.

So, rather than focusing on what to do from the get-go, let yourself explore what fulfillment feels like for you by being aware of when you feel that moment of joy and peace, and excitement, and then notice how you ended up getting there.

Erin’s advice to private practitioners

Fundamentally, we will take clients as far as we’ve gone. By you investing in your own fulfillment, you can watch how that will unlock that ability and sanctify that same behavior for your clients.

Books mentioned in this episode:

Dr. Gloria Mark – Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity

Sponsors mentioned in this episode:

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Check out these additional resources:

Meet Joe Sanok

A photo of Joe Sanok is displayed. Joe, private practice consultant, offers helpful advice for group practice owners to grow their private practice. His therapist podcast, Practice of the Practice, offers this advice.

Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners that are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.

Thanks For Listening!

Podcast Transcription

[JOE SANOK] You’re someone with a vision for your practice, for your side hustle, and for your personal journey, but when it comes to establishing your path and how to get to where you want to be with your practice, things get a little messy. You’re also someone who’d prefer to go in-person instead of to groups and listening to everyone else’s story. To me, it sounds like you could benefit from one-on-one consulting with our experienced Practice of the Practice consultants. From $595 a month and up, you can work with a consultant that will give you more direction and practical tried and tested tips matched to you and your goals. For more information, visit practiceofthepractice.com/apply. Again, that’s practiceofthepractice.com/apply. This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 876. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. I am so glad that you are hanging out with us today. We have had a busy couple of months. We have been covering, in April and May specialty month, which ended up becoming specialty months. We covered things like grief and trauma, we covered EMDR, we talked about LGBTQ care, we talked about financial stress, all of it was clinical stuff that oftentimes we haven’t covered on the Practice of the Practice podcast nearly as much. We just thought it’s time to just hear what people are doing outside of their businesses and it was really amazing. So if you missed any of that, go back, check out our episodes. Those all started, let me just scroll. It was episode 862 when we kicked off with Dr. Gloria Mark, who has a new book about attention span and screen time, this researcher from Southern California. You’ll just have to check those out if you missed them at all. [JOE] Well, I am so excited today I have Erin Gibb with me. Erin is a therapist, clinical supervisor, group practice owner and podcast hope, hope, hope, yeah, we do give hope as podcasters as well as being podcast hosts. So Erin is the therapist fulfillment coach, and early adopter of the weird and wonderful that accelerates expansion. Erin, I am so excited to have you today on the Practice of the Practice Podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome. [ERIN GIBB] I’m thrilled, Joe. Thank you so much for having me. [JOE] Yeah, well I feel like I hardly know you and I already feel like we’re cut from the same cloth. Before we started talking here, we’re talking about revolution in mental health, wanting to push the boundaries, wanting to not necessarily follow the script. Would love to hear a little bit about you and how you got to this point. So tell us a little bit about your professionalism in mental health and that journey and was not following the script something that was always there or is that something newer for you? [ERIN] I would say not following the script has always been there an inborn trait for me. I wanted to start by saying I’m a swim fan, Joe, so thank you so much. I’ve been following you and you’ve been an integral part of my journey. So if I go back to how I got here, like why am I so interested in therapist fulfillment and mental health revolution, I do think I’ve always had that vein of being a rebel and it’s been advantageous because I forgot it for a while. That’s how I got educated. Like so many therapists, I followed the what you’re supposed to do, check all the boxes, do all the higher education and I forgot that rebel spirit. So what I do now is about helping people stand back and look at is what you’re doing in this field after being an amazing student of our culture and an amazing student as a therapist, is it actually fulfilling you because when I asked myself that, it wasn’t fulfilling me. So I went into agency work in the Arctic in Canada. That was amazing because it started me in my niche of complex trauma, but also it was an agency with all of the toxic agency problems. So I burnt out, yeah, pretty fast. It was epic. I’m grateful for it now and that started me on wanting to, like, actually not wanting, I just, it reignited the rebellious spirit in me because as I was looking around at what was happening in this agency, I wasn’t okay with it. I was not cool with the way services were being delivered and it felt very disempowering to me and certain others through no fault of any individual. It was just the system was really broken. [JOE] Well, when you think about macro, systemic things that reinforce not being fulfilled in our field, what comes to mind for you as systemic things in graduate school, in nonprofits, in the way we do our work that is a macro problem. [ERIN] Ooh, that gets me jazzed. I have goosebumps with this question. Well, I would say if we go the biggest macro, I would say we go back to the earliest experiences of most therapists. I’ve talked to a lot of therapists now and somewhere in childhood we learned that having needs wasn’t as good as looking after other people’s needs. That is a common story for therapists in the making. That doesn’t mean it aligned with actually who we were. I was actually on, having someone on my podcast yesterday and they said if they knew themselves, like they know themselves now, they never would’ve become a therapist. They used the empathy response to survive as I did as well. So if we go all the way back to childhood, there’s a lot of systemic indoctrination and being in a codependent society but then when we fast forward to higher education, we start getting the message that you need to comply, you need to really be obedient to these systems of like, here’s when stuff is due. You have these parameters. And there’s nothing really wrong with that, but it’s what Julie Harris, another podcaster calls therapists are actually really compliant. That’s how she named us when I was recently talking to her. I thought, that’s beautiful. We’re compliant and so that, we go through checking the boxes, being good students and then we get to grad school and there, there is even more of this like do as we say in a hierarchical manner, that school, but there’s this extra layer that starts developing around liability fear. And I think, yeah, so being told you’re both there to empower people so you can’t make decisions for them, but you’re also responsible that if they die in your care, then you’re on the line in some way. [JOE] Where do you think, I mean, I have my hypotheses of why that is perpetuated. So maybe I’ll start with those where, I mean, a system that’s educating people has to prove its worth. So a lot of times it seems like it’s this like self-feeding system where if researchers want to keep doing academic research, will they have to have funding for that? They have to have people coming through grad school and that fear driven liability response, I’m almost wondering if the schools then also feel that. If we then graduate people that aren’t over the top with worrying about liability or aren’t over the top in just following what’s been research based and if they start pushing the envelope, then that’s somehow on them, almost like in the same way someone that’s in your care as a clinician. I mean, do you agree with that? Do you have other thoughts on that? Where else do you think this comes from? [ERIN] I think that’s a beautiful way to look at another macro layer there. Yeah, I actually agree with you and the reason I really agree with you is that I take on interns in the group practice that I co-own and it’s quite incredible what I get sent from the schools. The amount of liability, fear that’s just coming from that little section of it, the graduate students that are being educated, how much fear and just how when the interns arrive, this is part of how I’ve seen this from working with so many interns. When they arrive, they are so filled with fear and so dedicated to doing what their school says because they don’t want to be kicked out and all these different things. I was there too, but they come in and I see the emails that come to me and the paperwork that comes to me and it’s all of this. They must listen to you at this cost. So going back to your question, yeah, I really believe that it is the higher educational system, again, through no individual’s fault, this just isn’t questioned that we all need to be afraid and that there’s so many boxes to check. When these interns come to me, Joe, we want to pay them. Part of what I believe is this systemic, self-sacrificing set of therapists up later to not be fulfilled. So I want to pay them to pay them. We have to do workarounds because the system isn’t even built for that. It frowned upon that [JOE] Which is crazy. I mean, in what other types of jobs? I mean, we see it in the medical field, we see it all across the board. So it’s not like it’s just therapist, but when you really think about it, like my friend, his son is an MD and is out west doing his residency and I think when he broke down how much he gets paid per hour, it’s like $15 an hour during that residency. Now, other than, so fear, liability, what are other macro things that like we need to talk about before we talk about solutions? [ERIN] Great question. Self-sacrifice and over responsibility. They are, so when I was saying those two sides of the mouth talking at two sides of the mouth that I experienced and have seen with therapists is the, you have to empower people. That’s what you’re doing here. And of course, but you can’t take responsibility for their, for them and their choices and you are responsible if you screw up. So it’s this over responsibility. That’s one layer. And I can talk about how that actually tends to show up in real time. And then there’s self-sacrifice and they, they’re interwoven. There’s also power dynamics that we’ve been taught these mixed messages and how these play out I think would be the best way to like give an example. Is that cool? [JOE] Yeah, absolutely. [ERIN] Okay, an example would be therapists are pretty focused on empowerment. We are actually a really smart, empowered, capable, amazing group of people. That’s all gravy and we’re doing great work with ourselves and others. Then there’s the moment where we need to choose to prioritize ourselves over others. That comes up many times in our career. It can come up when you’re fee setting, it can come up when you’ve, you need to make a change in practice, it can come up on the micro level all the time in the therapy room. It can come up anywhere. But in our minds, in logical minds, I haven’t met a therapist that doesn’t know that looking after ourselves first is the only sustainable way. We all know that fill your tank, but your oxygen mask on whatever you want to say, it’s what we do is advocate that for people. But in that moment that we are asked to choose if we really need to thrive, we need to raise our rates. Let’s say that happens, in that moment, something comes up for therapists and it’s like, this feels like I’m hurting the client. This feels like I’m hurting the other person by changing my availability, my hours, even if I want to change out of one-to-one work. There’s this something that comes up in us and I believe it’s this conditioning that we are there to sacrifice ourselves and be overly responsible for the experience of the other person. [JOE] When I hear you say that, I am thinking also about how, I wonder how much of this is a generational shift. Like when you think about how much the industrialists impacted spending so much time studying the 40-hour work week and Henry Ford and all of that, how they basically said we can turn anything into a mechanical way of viewing the world. When you’ve been surrounded by that in a post-World War II generation that really turned everything into a process even down to the food we eat that’s just the lens that I think then the baby boomers who are slowly exiting a lot of like the graduate school leadership over retirement and stuff like that. But that’s who they were raised by, people that thought like industrialists. So then when you really think about that fear centered mindset driving processes compared to what I would argue Gen X and beyond with like the rise of the internet or the rise of AI. That’s more of like an organic type of thinking where things are growing and changing over time and less of a process. What do you think about that approach to thinking about the generational difference? [ERIN] I think you’re absolutely right and I think it’s why this is so up right now. Like why is this so prevalent? Like, I’ve been thinking about these things for years, but it was like a switch flipped for me and I was like, now’s the time to bring this to the world. As I look out and I’m on social media and all these places, revolution, mental health revolution is like, it’s the topic, does your underneath the undercurrent of some of what people are talking about, this freedom, this choice and absolutely the factory mindset, the time driven mindset is shifting. Like I think we’re at this plateau now where enough people are maybe aging into grad school that it’s like people are starting to think differently. I’m meeting, I mean, even what I’m doing, which is taking in interns at private practice, the amount of new interns who want to be in private practice instead of feel like they have to go into agency immediately has skyrocketed. Something has changed. So I’m feeling you about what you’re saying, but there’s still that mindset in their, we’re sort of straddling because when they come to see me as the supervisor, they’re still like a manualized, I want to do all the things right and I need to follow a manual, which is something that’s tough as a therapist as you know. So I do see that we’re sort of straddling the line between can we let go of what isn’t working about that old system and try something new? [JOE] I wonder, that seems like something that in psychotherapy has always been a push and pull between the art and the science of it, where some people like Skinner were really turning everything into behavioral things whereas there’s other camps that were very open-ended in how they did therapy. So in some ways it’s like our own modern version of an age old debate within psychology, not age old, I mean the field of psychology, some could argue proceeded the last 200 years, but in this way. So what do you think the solution is? Like how do we change things? How do we revolutionize things? [ERIN] Oh, I love this question because that’s the meat here. For me this backstory is so people can just sort of look inwards and maybe let themselves off the hook because if you’re on your second burnout or you’ve ever been burnt out or you’re hating agency work and all these other things, therapists are pretty good at we’re taught to look like everything’s going pretty well, but a lot of therapists are really struggling. So that’s to set the stage. But the, what I love to actually talk about is about fulfillment and that part of this system of checking boxes external to ourselves, like following all the stuff we’re supposed to do, is that it ends up being a movement towards something. We get that achievement and then we go, yeah, that lasted for a few minutes, I felt good, or a week, two weeks, a month. But then we’re back at this place of kind of, well what do, what will really fulfill me? So to me the answer is therapists living our dreams, our desires fully and freely and for several reasons, number one is like we have a blueprint inside of us. It isn’t really easy to find because of this conditioning. So my work, what I like to do is different experiential methods to actually unlock what we were born with. I mean, look at a little kid, look at us when we were little before we got this conditioning. We had traits that were there and we also wanted to love and be curious. So unlocking some of that, that’s number one, is finding what would actually fulfill us, where to create from instead of two. But the other piece is why this is so important is when therapists live fully and freely, we take every one that we support way further. There is something about a free therapist, and then we stop accepting some of these broken systems. I mean, I’ve seen this in myself and others now over years, we stop accepting broken systems and that starts to revolutionize mental health, not by going after the systems directly, which is a bit of a fantasy of mine, but we don’t actually have to topple insurance companies and higher education, any of that. We change ourselves and we know this, we change the world. [BLUEPRINT] Providing great therapy day after day can be challenging even for the best of us. At Blueprint, they believe that nothing should get in the way of you doing your best work, which is why they created a platform that provides therapists with an array of clinical tools, things like therapy worksheets, intervention ideas, and digital assessments that are designed to help you and your clients stay connected and confident throughout the care journey. Even better, Blueprint helps streamline your documentation so you can spend less time on your notes and more time on the things that matter. To learn more and request a 30-day free trial, visit blueprint-health.com. [JOE SANOK] Now, when you think about your own personal work of what’s helped free you, help you find fulfillment, for me, things outside of just raising my rates, like sure, that helps me have the financial freedom, but to me, I know lots of people that are making tons more money and still aren’t fulfilled and they aren’t doing their own work outside of it on the way they were raised, their own mindset, how open they are to the world. Like what habits for you or experiences for you have helped unlock some of that? [ERIN] What a good question. By the way, I’m loving your questions. You’re really leading me into a place that’s very helpful. Thank you, Joe. Really, you’re great interviewer. I think you might have known that. To answer your question clearly, you are right, there’s such a difference between success and fulfillment and success may or may not have anything to do with fulfillment. It might be the what we thought we needed to do from our conditioning. We’ve been shown money will fulfill us things, but that’s different. That’s success. Fulfillment to me, the process that I do with people, I’ve done, I’ve battle-tested it myself and it’s about finding the state in me that feels like fulfillment. Then what’s the story and what’s the strategy? It’s reversing the equation. So I love to meditate. When I meditate, I shift my state profoundly, I shift outside of conditioning and there is a lot of science to talk about why is that? Why can I suddenly stand outside of my conditioning between the rational mind and the vast subconscious and all these different things? Well, then I have a totally different story that opens up in me and a completely different strategy. I run my entire life based on where I’m creating everything from, not towards. My launch manager has, she now gets it, but it took a while for her to be like, okay, but you don’t want to do all this stuff that’s written in this book. I’m like, no, because it is not coming from the place. So I’ll give an example. My place is this resounding feeling of truth. Like I need to feel that in my body. I know that moves me towards fulfillment, love, freedom, these are the things I need to feel. Then I shift my state different stories and different strategies arise. But when I’m working with coaching clients, sometimes it’s joy. So it’s not even about what they want to create. It’s first go inside of what does fulfillment feel like. What opens up for people is shocking. They genuinely are shocked by what happens when they ask themselves what does fulfillment feel like? It has nothing to do with achievement, it has nothing to do with the stuff they’ll be doing in their business, but that’s cool. You first start from there, maybe it’s joy, maybe it is freedom, maybe it’s stillness. Then in that state, what starts to download from the inner human is the stories and the strategies you need to do it. Otherwise from conditioning what downloads is stuff we’re supposed to do and then we get really afraid when we go to take new steps. [JOE] It’s sort of like we have to be able to be content with just what our life is or even just see the joy in the pain or the difficulties. Even over the last couple years, going through uncoupling and becoming an unexpected single parent where 85% custody and having all sorts of things hit the fan, a meditation practice, and for me Daoism and all sorts of other Eastern thought has been super helpful for me to really be able to just say like, I get to have a front row seat to this crazy movie that is Joe’s life. Like, wow. And to really actually have appreciation for just how interesting life can be in the negative, but then to also be able to appreciate it. Like I get the front row seat of this interesting movie. With that said, I think this discussion, and I’m not saying that you’re missing this, but sometimes part of this discussion that I think gets overlooked is like, how privileged plays into this. Like how would you say privilege being from certain communities, serving certain communities, skin color, sexual orientation, any of those things, how would you say privilege plays into what we’re talking about? [ERIN] Well, if we rewind, I would say privilege first comes in at the internship level because how does a person go and do an unpaid internship if they don’t have some sort of privilege? I’m not saying everyone who’s become a therapist and is an intern didn’t have, did have privilege. Definitely like for myself, I came out with loads of debt and these different things, but the fact that I could access that debt was a privilege. So right there, therapy excludes a whole bunch of people. I don’t know if you’re following what I mean, but to have an unpaid internship right there we’re already really discouraging people of certain socioeconomic status, skin color regions, whatever you, wherever you look. We’re going to be excluding people right there. So systemically that’s a big problem if you asked me. [JOE] I think even in summer of 2020 we really did a evaluation when we were doing our Black Leaders Matter series to really say like, what are we doing to exclude people as a inadvertent way of doing business? But even just looking at our consultants of saying, well, how do people usually become consultants with me? Well, they’ve usually done consulting with me, so I know them really well. Well, who affords to do consulting? People that can pay a thousand dollars a month? Like who can do that? Then as we work backwards, it was like, we need to offer opportunities at every level for more diverse voices, more challenging voices. It’s amazing because now two years later when I look at Next Level Practice or look at who’s involved it’s more representative of society than it used to be. And to me it’s like when we have these discussions to be able to say, well, yeah, who can afford this? I think it’s great that we’re thinking through that [ERIN] 100%. It’s interesting hearing you say this because you and I talked a little bit before we recorded about like, how do I monetize this? What do I do with this business? I have different ways, but because I really believe in mental health revolution and therapists leading the way by our own fulfillment, one of the first things I’m offering soon is a free activation. Now by the time this goes live, that will have ended, but that’s a part of my philosophy is to offer like a hundred percent promo code to people galore for the activation of this, for the first step, which is like flipping the script, learning to do that inward journey I was describing to find where fulfillment for you comes from. I knew that needed to be free. Like I just feel that in me, that has to be free. I want to reach as many people because the burnout is so rampant. But yeah, it really feels aligned with what you’re saying. Like, I believe in this so deeply. [JOE] Well, Erin, the last question I always ask is, if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know? [ERIN] I’d want them to know that fundamentally we will take our clients as far as we’ve gone. I mean, that’s a youngian statement, but if people need a reason to invest in themselves, even just time, it doesn’t even mean money although that’s great, if they need a reason to invest in their fulfillment and they can’t yet just make it about themselves, we’ve been deeply conditioned to not necessarily do that as helpers and healers, just know that by you investing in your own fulfillment, you will watch what that does inside of your clients. You’ll see what you end toleration for in your life. I’ve seen this time and time again, it is shocking how just investing in our fulfillment really moves our clients further faster without us ever even needing to share what we’re doing. They just feel it. Something happens, and I’ve seen it time and time again. So if anyone needs a reason to do this, it’s upleveling the world when therapists really become fulfilled. [JOE] So awesome. Erin, if people want to follow your work, follow your podcast, what’s the best place to send them? [ERIN] Two things, I think if people are listening or obviously, they like podcasts, so going to the show notes and finding the link for my podcast is one great way. Another way is I’ll provide Joe with a link to my quiz. My quiz is called What’s your Therapist Fulfillment Flavor. It’s sort of taking a big topic, like we’re talking about making it more fun. It’s akin to ice cream and why that’s important is it’s fun to fill out and you learn about yourself and what would actually be more likely to fulfill you. But then I send like a curated, here are some podcasts and different things that are actually for you. That would probably be another way and that will be in the show notes as well. [JOE] Okay, awesome. Well, Erin, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice Podcast. [ERIN] Oh, it’s been my absolute pleasure. Thank you, Joe. [JOE] When I think about fulfillment and like finding things that help you develop, for me personally, being in Improv for almost four years now has absolutely been one of those things, to just play with other adults. How often do you make up plays? I mean, we might sit around the dining room table and tell stories over a glass of wine or something, but to act out ridiculous scenes just makes me laugh so hard. But also if I think about, if I was still practicing therapy, many, most of you know that I sold my practice in 2019, how the principles I’ve learned in improv, I would totally bring to my clients. Like I even think about this one couple that was my longest with me couple and the idea of just yes and of like, yes, I’m joining you and I’m elevating what we’re doing to a new level or the idea of super agreement. So in Improv, if Erin and I were in the scene and Erin said I’m going to build a spaceship, I’m supposed to super agree like that is the best idea in the world so that it looks like Erin is the smartest person in the whole world. So that’s a technique that the idea of super agreement, like let’s not just agree with people that were around but be like, hell yeah, let’s do that. So even just thinking about how that’s just helped me subconsciously in my own life, it is just such a fun way to think about my own fulfillment. And Tuesday nights it’s a non-negotiable, I guess I say non-negotiable, but then in two weeks I have to miss it because a bunch of people are flying into Traverse City to work with me. But, so I guess it’s mostly non-negotiable. But just finding those things that you can really commit to and have fun with. And now we have a regular show we’re doing and it’s just fun to do. So whatever your fulfillment is, dip your toes in. It doesn’t have to be something huge. It can be just adding one little thing on the weekend, like drinking green tea and reading a book for an hour and telling your kids to just not talk to you unless they’re bleeding. It could be that small. So take some small steps this week to find that fulfillment. Go take Erin’s quiz. Also we could not do this show without sponsors like Blueprint. Blueprint is amazing. They have therapy, worksheets, intervention ideas, digital assessments. They are designed to help you and your clients to stay connected and to be confident throughout their care journey. You can go try Blueprint totally free for 30 days over at blueprint-health.com. Again, that’s blueprint-health.com. You can try it totally free, like go give it a whirl see what clinical tools you like there. Your clients are going to love it. You’re going to love it. It’s going to make your life so much easier. Thank you for letting me in your ears and into your brain. Have such an amazing day and I’ll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.

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