[JOE SANOK] This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 770. I’m Joe Sanok, your host and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. Hey, I’m really excited about today’s episode because my friend Chelsea started this thing a number of years ago called. Fulfillment, and it’s sort of like Ted Talks around why you do what you do and what work you do. For a number of years, I had followed what she was doing and the people that she brought in. It’s a lot of these northern Michigan entrepreneurs just talking about how they find fulfillment in the work that they do. She had asked me to do a fulfillment talk for May of 2020 and it was canceled and finally was able to do it in 2022 at the Traverse City Opera House, which was just an awesome venue. It’s this old opera house, it’s where a lot of just great musicians and authors come through our Northern Michigan town. It’s just like this epicenter of so much culture and she put on this event there and I got to speak with some really other amazing guests and people that were doing their fulfillment talks. So today Chelsea has, let me use that podcast episode, that recording here, so it’s sort of a reverse podcast where it’s a recording from the speaking event that I did here in Traverse City, Michigan. Without any further ado, here is my fulfillment talk. [CHELSEA] Welcome to the Fulfillment Stories Podcast. Fulfillment is a storytelling event featuring local community leaders and entrepreneurs who share their journey towards fulfillment through vocation that will challenge you to come alive. You will get the honest inside story of why they do what they do, how they got there, and how it makes them come alive. Ready to be inspired. Joe Sanok is the author of Thursday is the New Friday, which examines the history and implementation of the four-day work week. He’s a writer for the Harvard Business Review and has been featured on Forbes, Money, Entrepreneur and over 200 podcasts. His Practice of the Practice podcast is a top 100 business podcast and helps therapists and coaches to start, grow and scale their private practices because he believes the world needs more mental health access. He loves the creative, engaging and ever-changing nature of what he gets to do. Here’s Joe’s story from the May, 2022 event in Traverse City, Michigan. [JOE SANOK] I went to a Friday night light Catholic school that worshiped football. In first grade I dressed up for Halloween as a ghost buster and one of my friends dressed up as the football coach from high school, full with the hat, the little microphone, a clipboard and the token M&Ms that this football coach always had in his pocket. Everybody loved the football coach costume more than a ghostbuster. So when I was in 8th grade, there was this kid who was like a linebacker or running back or something like that and he decided that he was going to start stealing office supplies from the teachers. He’d steal staplers, he’d steal three-hole punches, highlighters, it was like a full office depot in his locker. The whole 49-person class knew that he was doing this for no apparent reason other than to just steal office supplies. This one day I was in Math class and I’m leaving and I have my Math book and probably a trapper keeper and I walk into the hall and the whole 49-person class is changing classes. Someone had told this kid that I had narced him out and that I had told the teachers that he was stealing all of these office supplies and he hits the books out of my hand. He throws me against a locker, punches me and throws me down in front of the entire class. I don’t even fight back. I was shocked by it. For years I was like, why didn’t I at least like push back or show some sense of like footballness? I didn’t. So by 9th grade I realized contrary to probably what you believe, I don’t have a football player body type. So I was really into nirvana and so I started growing my hair out, which was against the dress code which said no excessively long hair. Being a natural debater, I went toe to toe with the principle about that word excessively because it didn’t, it wasn’t defined. My argument was that if this gigantic picture of Jesus in the gym was looking down on us and his hair was longer than mine, how could I be like Jesus if I didn’t try to look like him? I won. I got to have long hair and I would wear a flannel shirt to school because all good alternative kids did this but I had to tuck it in because there’s a dress code but there wasn’t a rule about putting another flannel shirt around your waist and tying it. So I would wear two flannel shirts to school and I had a chain wallet because on MTV all the cool kids had chain wallets, but the kids at school didn’t watch MTV. They were in their own football bubble. So they called me Janitor Joe because their only frame of reference around a chain wallet in the 90s was janitors. So I continue to be like moving to more punk rock look, I start snowboarding and go to music festivals. In college I start dyeing my hair different colors and I have this Subaru, which is super punk rock. I paint the outside all psychedelic and I apply to work at this runaway shelter and I don’t hear from them. I don’t hear from them and I’m like, there’s this new hairstyle I really want to do and I don’t care if I get this interview or not. So I shave my head to be like an inch long and I dye my hair blonde and I take Q-tips with black and I make leopard print throughout my hair. You see where this is going? Then I wanted to be accurate to the leopards of the world so I then took brown and filled in the middle because that’s how most leopard print is. This was very expensive for me as a 20-year-old. I had this amazing leopard print hair and the next day I get a phone call for an interview. I put on my suit and tie, Eagle Scout Honors College Joe with leopard print hair is prepared with his portfolio and I go into this interview and I feel like I, on a very small level understand the female experience where it’s like my eyes are up here, not down here except it was my eyes are down here, not on my leopard print hair. Because the interviewers the entire time were looking at my leopard print hair. But they gave me the job. They said, we think you might be able to connect with some of our more unique people that come here. Awesome. So I started working at this runaway shelter for kids. They can stay there instead of running away for two to six weeks and I get to know these kids and I get to know their families of origin and their stories and I realized these are the kids that would steal staplers for fun and these would be the kids that would beat up Joe just because someone told them that I had narced them out. I’m working with the very kids that would’ve beat me up in 8th grade. I start to have an empathy for this kid that beat me up in eighth grade where I realized his mom was the youngest mom by a landslide, his uncle was a teacher and the principal and was always stepping in. There were different boyfriends coming in and out and the anger he had towards me had nothing to do with me. I realized that I hadn’t fit in there and I’m working with these kids that don’t fit in and that angry kids really are an exciting group to work with. [LEVEL UP WEEK] I think it’s time that we speak about you and your goals for a minute. Hear me out. For a while now, we’ve been speaking about, about how to market your practice, how to grow your practice, and how to be a better boss and encourage a company culture but isn’t it time to start making it happen? I’m serious, I’m challenging you to just do it. Take that leap of faith, put yourself out there and level up in your practice. Think about it. You’re probably entering that phase where you start to set yourself up for 2023. You’re thinking about what your goals are going to be, what you’re not going to do and what you hope to achieve. But regardless of where you are within your private practice journey, I’m challenging you to make these last few months count to dig deep, to make next year the one for big changes within your business and more importantly within yourself. If you’ve been looking for a sign to either start your own private practice, grow from solo to group, or become a next level group practice boss, this is it. You’re certainly not alone because Practice of the Practice is doing something we’ve never done before. We’re so convinced that now is the time for you to grow, that we’re dedicating all our resources to help you do it. We’re all in every single one of us and we’re inviting you to go all in and level up. From September 12th to September 15th, we’ll be running level up week to help you decide what will work best for you in your private practice journey. There will be webinars, Q&As with experts and a chance for you to meet your accountability partners, facilitators, and community. If you’re ready to make a change and level up register at practiceofthepractice.com/levelup and follow our Facebook and Instagram pages at Practice of the Practice for live updates and event details. Lastly, before I jump back into this episode, I just want to say that I really hope to see you there, even if it’s just online. Remember that leveling up week isn’t about us. It’s not about me or about Practice of the Practice. It’s all about you and growing your practice, whether it be your first solo practice or growing you from group practice boss to reaching a national audience. Make September, 2022, the month that you start your journey and level up. [JOE SANOK] So I move back to Traverse City, I work as a foster care supervisor, get a job at the community college and start this side gig counseling practice, Mental Wellness Counseling. The tagline was, we help angry kids, frustrated parents and distant couples, like everybody. This is going well and at the time I realized I knew nothing about business and so I started a podcast just so I could interview famous people about business principles. I started Practice of the Practice, this podcast and this website to just learn the basics of business that I didn’t learn in grad school. So I have these two small side gigs going on, still working at the college, and then 2012 hits. My mom had just had cancer, she kicked its ass, she’s still with us, she’s right there. My oldest was born and in her first year we knew she had a major heart issue and she had this medication that kept the fluid off her heart. She was waking up every hour and a half or so for a diaper change and she was thirsty but wouldn’t drink much. We had to make these breast milk milkshakes with breast milk and then formula to have more calories just to get her up to weight. Right before her first birthday she has full open-heart surgery down at U of M and for a week we’re in the Ronald McDonald House down there dealing with just a kid in the hospital. Things go well, she’s about to turn 11, she has no restrictions, but they finally said a few weeks later you can take her off of the medication. It was a success. It’s great. Okay, no more medical. Two weeks later I get diagnosed with thyroid cancer. It’s like we’re back in the medical world. I have to fly to Texas to get my thyroid out and get radioactive iodine and all of this. It’s a highly treatable cancer but it was one of those years, my grandma died that year, my best friend’s wife had breast cancer, we had a miscarriage. It was just like, how much more can a family take? I remember during that time as I have this side gig counseling practice and this podcast and then this full-time job that I ran over to do a counseling session on my lunch break. At this point I had hired some extra clinicians, again, side gig thing I’m putting five to 10 hours a week into but I now have a four-office suite with a corner view of the bay. I run over during my lunch hour to do a counseling session and I go back to the college and I’m walking down the steps to my basement office that has no window in it and it was just striking the difference. I, in that moment realized that I could either jump and leave this secure job with a pension that I loved, my boss was amazing, I had autonomy, but I could jump and potentially fail or I could stay and never know if I had it in me. So I decided to leave. I decided to leave when my second child was born and use the Full Family Medical Leave Act to do counseling, to do the podcasting, to see what was potentially working. That first summer I made a decision that changed everything. I decided to take Fridays off as an experiment. For this summer, I’m just going to take Fridays off, I’m going to see how the numbers look in the fall and we’ll just assess them. All summer I worked four days a week and that fall I look at it and I say, we made more money. The staff are happier, I feel better, I was available for the family, so I kept working four days a week. Now, in 2019, I ended up selling Mental Wellness Counseling and in 2020 I pitched this idea of a book about the four-day work week of looking at the history and examining time itself and the neuro feedback and neuropsychology around whether a four-day work week is actually better for society. Harper Collins picks up the book and I start writing Thursday is the New Friday, right at the beginning of the pandemic. Throughout that time we were planning to really take this experimental mindset to a different level and decide to buy a camper instead of putting our kids in Zoom school. So we buy this 37-foot pole behind camper. Now mind you, I have never pulled a trailer in my entire life. No seadoos, no fishing boats, like nothing. There’s very few times in life as an adult that your decisions have the potential to kill a bunch of people if you do it wrong, which is both exciting and terrifying. That first day as we leave for an indefinite period of time to be on the road, driving up through the UP, go through the Badlands, go to the Tetons and Yellowstone, and spend a month with our friends in Fort Collins, then we go down through New Mexico and go to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands and cut through Tucson and hit the Grand Canyon and hit me to your crater and my 10-year-old loves space. For her to see a mile wide crater where NASA trains just blew her mind. I mean, that was education. Then we went to Petrified Forest where my seven-year-old, she’s like a little monk, a guru that could just look at rocks for days. I’m the one that gets antsy. Then we go to California to Joshua Tree, Yosemite all over the place and spend the winter in San Diego. That’s where things break. My daughter’s mom decided that she wanted to stay. She wasn’t sure if the relationship was for her, if being with the family was for her, so we set up with an apartment, get her a new car so she’s safe and I load up the girls. The three of us hit the road. That first day we drive from San Diego to just north of Phoenix to the most amazing campsite of our entire trip. There’s mountains around us, there’s all cacti and we have this enormous campsite in it’s quiet, which was not the case at many of the other camp sites. In the past, their mom had been the one that was on the walkie talkie telling me how to back up this trailer. So Lucia and Laken, my kids are on the walkie talkie and I say, literally all you have to do is say, left, right, or stop. Let’s practice our left, let’s practice our right, stop. If I’m going to hit a picnic table, just say stop. So with all the weight of this situation on my daughter’s shoulders, I’m ready to back up and my 10-year-old just loses it. She just starts crying and I get out and I’m like, “What’s up?” She’s like, ”I don’t want to screw this up. I don’t want the camper to hit something. I can’t do this.” I get down on my knees and I say to her, “Honey, we have all the time in the world. We can do this 50 times. All we have to do is dinner.” She finally is up for it. We eventually, after many tries, get the campers situated. We the next day head East, take two weeks slowly making our way across the US. We get back to our neighborhood and my driveway has, like most driveways, has a 90 degree turn into the driveway. Mind you, the first time I backed up the camper into the driveway, it took two hours. I had invited the neighborhood to watch because I knew it would be hilarious. So I pull in with the camper and my older neighbor across the street comes out. He’s like, “You need some help to back it up?” I said, “No, I think Lucia and Laken got it.” They’ve got the walkie talkies and they’re standing there and we’re backing up. They’re, “A little left, you’re about to hit the mailbox, dad. You’re going to jack knife again.” Just, they know the terms, they got it and we nail it the first time. We get home, we end up getting divorced, I end up being an unexpected single dad but when you look at fitting in in the world so often, we want to be like everybody else. We want to have everything be peaceful at work. We want to match all of our friends on Instagram with their trips but the unexpected magic and superpower is not fitting in. I mean, that could be at a Friday night lights high school where you’re the Janitor Joe with a chain wallet. It could be the leopard print hair at the runway shelter. It could just be that you and your boss don’t get along. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe you don’t fit there or maybe you’re good for that there by not fitting. See, when we don’t fit, that’s where the creativity comes, that’s where the freedom comes and that’s where we make a genuine difference in the world. Thank you. [LEVEL UP WEEK] If you’re like me, sometimes you feel like being a high achiever, you want to just like keep going after things. But it, you want to find that balance between how much you push and how much you slow down and when do you level up, and when do you say, hey, it’s good enough. that’s what Level Up Week is all about. Starting September 12th, we’re doing Level Up Week as a big push to help you find that balance of how can I really be smart? We’re past the information age, we are in the implementation age. We want to help you implement faster so that you can put that extra time into the things that matter most to you. We’re going to be doing tons of webinars that are totally free during Level Up Week. This is something we’re going to try to do twice a year where we just help you level up in as many ways as possible. So we’re going to have a bunch of different events all through that first, September 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th, just a bunch of events during those four days. Head on over to practiceofthepractice.com, eight at the top of the page, you’re going to see Level Up Week. It’s going to be big across the middle. You’re going to get all the details of if you’re starting a practice, growing, scaling, leaving all the different things that we have going on there. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day. 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. This 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.