[JOE SANOK] This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 773. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. I am so excited to be doing this series throughout August, all about how I leveled up. It’s all people who have leveled up within their private practices. Maybe they have left their full-time jobs, or they’ve grown their practice in some way, or they’ve leveled up to speak beyond their private practice. In some way they’ve leveled up. This is really in preparation for Level Up Week, which is going to be kicking off on September 12th. We are going to be having probably 10 or 15 different webinars, big week of just leveling up. You want to make sure that you register for all of those events that make sense for you over at practiceofthepractice.com. It’s right on that main page. You don’t even have to scroll down. It’s above the fold, Level Up Week. You just click on that and then you can register for whichever of the different trainings sound good to you. We’ve got trainings about just starting a practice, trainings about how do you know when to add someone to a group practice, all sorts of different things that week, all around leveling up. Again, that’s over at practiceofthepractice.com. I am so excited to have Britt Frank with us today. Britt is a therapist, teacher, speaker, and trauma specialist who’s committed to dismantling the mental health myths that keep us feeling stuck and sick. Her work focuses on empowering people to understand the inner mechanisms in their brains and bodies. When we know how things work, the capacity for choice is restored and life can and does change. Britt, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. [BRITT FRANK] Hi Joe. Thanks so much for having me. [JOE] Oh my gosh. I love having people on, especially ones like yourself that have listened to the podcast for a while and you launched a private practice and you’re rocking it now. Why don’t we kick off, tell us a little bit about your career journey from your internship to start in a private practice right out of grad school. Why don’t we start there? [BRITT] Sure. Well, the step prior to that was me being a hot mess disaster of a human being. Once I got into therapy and got my life together, I actually pivoted out of the advertising world, quit my job in my early thirties, grabbed a waitressing job and went back to grad school. Then I did the agency internship and, in the trenches, seeing all of that and I went right into private practice out of grad school and now 10 years later, I just launched my first book into the world. So it’s pretty cool. I’ve been following your work forever, so, yay. [JOE] Wow. So step one of leveling up, be a hot mess and go to your own therapy. Step two, be become a waitress. Step three, rock it out in the world. All right, there we go. There’s the podcast. Well, I mean, I’d love to hear people’s why. You started with that you were a hot mess. What was going on and why did that lead you into going into the field of therapy? [BRITT] So I think for people who don’t have what looks like overt trauma, it’s very easy to get lost in the cracks of, well, it wasn’t that bad. My family, my parents were married, so why am I so crazy? What’s my problem? But I didn’t even know I had dysfunction or trauma until I was 25. I got into trauma therapy and my therapist looked at me and I had drug addiction, relational addiction, eating disorders, depression, like a whole, my DSM diagnoses list was not short. My therapist looked at me and said, “Guess what, Britt you have trauma. I’m like, “No trauma. No. What? No, I don’t have that.” I was never in the war or anything like that. What I learned about the brain and the body changed my life so profoundly I got really obnoxious about just wanting to talk about it all the time. So I’m like, okay, if all I’m doing is reading about this and studying about this and talking about this, I should probably make this my career and so I jumped and here we are. [JOE] Wow. When you were first starting the practice, what were some of the steps that you took to get things going? [BRITT] Finding all the people that were smarter than I was at the time and going, what did they do, what do they know? It’s really helpful. The most important thing is just be humble. Like, I don’t know how to do this. I knew I wanted a private practice after seeing just a taste of the agency world. I knew that that was not a sustainable option for me. And not everyone has the choice or the resources to make a life change like I did. But I started studying the business side of things. What do I need to know about managed care versus private? Like all the things, people don’t realize it’s so much more than just sitting in a room talking to people. So really understanding what the backend stuff looked like, the making of the sausage, so to speak. I talk to people, I talk to every private practitioner in the city who would sit down with me, how did you do it? What did you do? What do you know? I’m a huge advocate of coaching and listening to people who have done this. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The wheel has been invented, the private practice wheel exists, so tweak it to make it yours, but the information is out there as evidenced by our conversation. [JOE] Yes, yes. Well, so take us through maybe your first six months or year of private practice. What went well? What was tough? Where’d you level up quickly? Where was it a struggle? [BRITT] So I knew very early on I was not going to mess around with managed care and I was going to go private pay and so the first year was me panicking every single day. Oh my God, my phones aren’t ringing. Oh my God, oh my God, what do I do? Do I raise my rates? Do I lower my rates? So really trying to figure out my fee structure and I decided from day one, I’m never going to make a clinical decision based on my financial, like disarray. So take the pressure off the business by getting another job. That’s why I waited tables. I worked PRN part-time at a hospital as an inpatient therapist. Any pressure you can take off the business allows you to go in with your neocortex lit up so you’re making sound decisions and not panicky fear-based ones because that doesn’t usually fare well. [JOE] I love that. I think that oftentimes we see that when someone has a full-time job and they start a private practice on the side, they then can have higher rates. They can just go into it saying, if I get only one client this week, that’s not a big deal. It just allows them to really open up differently where they have a different stress level going into it because they know that their whole livelihood isn’t based on just making sure that they have a full caseload from day one, [BRITT] Which really messes up a therapeutic relationship because if I need my client to pay my rents or whatever, then I’m already skewed in how I’m holding space for that person. And that’s an easy, it’s not an easy fix, but it’s a simple fix. It’s take the financial pressure off the practice by finding another source of income. That way you’re not distorting the therapist’s client relationship. Then simultaneously I got trained in somatic experiencing. So I’m a trauma specialist, I got trained in internal family systems, so having those two sub-specialties meant that I was always learning, always growing, be good at what you do and that will be a very useful thing if you’re growing a business. [JOE] So once you started to establish the business more when did it feel, because I feel like there’s sometimes where you’re really growing rapidly, you’re getting your first couple clients and then there’s usually some sort of plateau where you take a breath and you maybe go more operational and then you have other times that you’re sprinting up again. What was that plateau for you? Or was there a plateau or did it keep growing? Take us through the ups and plateaus or downs of it. [BRITT] I’m like a breath, I don’t think I took a breath for the first five years, even though there were times of lag where nothing was happening, but it’s always, there’s always something that you can do. So I gave a lot of free talks, lunch and learns, any mutual value. I’m going to call up every organization I can find and offer to do a talk on anxiety for their people. Mutual benefit, they get free information for their people, I get my name out there and making calls. It doesn’t have to be a grind and it won’t always be a grind, but I remember just always feeling that impending doom feeling until there wasn’t like and now, I’m done stressing about my caseload. It was like one day I looked around and I went, oh, this is working. This is working now. What I want to do, now I want to write. So it will work if you stay the course. It’s just a lot of, the first few years are just, they’re really tough but the alternative is tough too. So the myth is that there’s an easy way. It’s really hard to launch a private practice. It’s really hard to work in the agencies and not everyone has the privilege of choosing their hard, but if you have the option to choose your hard, I choose the hard of building my world instead of grinding away in service of someone else’s. [JOE] Yes, I remember one of my best friends, Taylor, he and I walk usually once a week. When I was debating whether I should leave my full-time job at the community college, we both worked there and it was a decent salary and I was like, I don’t know, I feel like, what if I fail? He goes, there are people so much dumber than you that have been successful in business. I was like, you’re right. There are a lot of dumb people with successful businesses. It was just like such a flippant statement but it stuck with me. It was like, yes, okay, if things get hard, I’m not going to just become homeless. I’m going to put time into making things better and hustle more if I need to. So it was just a great reminder when he said that. Now what were some of the basic infrastructure things that weren’t maybe as flashy, but for you were essential to helping you continue to grow and to eventually get to that place of freedom where you could say I want to write now and like what were just the basic infrastructure parts of the business that you’d say, “Yes, I’m really glad that I got that going pretty early on.” [BRITT] So I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my path. I don’t have children and I had the luxury of being able to lose a lot very quickly should that have happened. But I took out a loan, I got myself an office, I furnished it and now I have the space, I have signed a five-year lease, I have to make this work. That is a really bad idea. You do not have to do that. That worked for me and my personality but what I suggest most people do when I’m doing private practice consulting is sublet space. Most therapists have dead time in their offices. Many therapists are delighted to rent space out to you on an as-needed-basis while you’re building. I’ve done that for other practitioners. While you’re building your clients, you don’t have to commit to a five-year lease and a giant payment and furnish and do all of the things. The great thing about what we do is that you can launch the business with almost no overhead. You need a couch, you need some place to sit and you need some place quiet. You don’t have to break the bank doing that. I did, but I wouldn’t recommend that for other people. [JOE] Yes, and I would even say that now being post lockdown or post first lockdown, who knows if we’ll have more, people are much more apt to be okay with online therapy too. I have a friend who, he started a private practice right before the pandemic and he was subleasing and then went online during the pandemic and he’s like, “Why would I go back to paying rent? All my clients like being online.” So even just saying, well you could start is just online too If you wanted. [BRIGHTER VISION] When you’re in private practice, it can be tough to find the time to even review your marketing efforts, let alone to make improvements where needed. Whether you are a seasoned clinician with an existing website in need of a refresh or a new therapist, building a website for the first time, Brighter Vision is the perfect solution. By first understanding your practice and what makes it unique, Brighter Vision’s team of developers are then able to create you a beautiful website that will attract your ideal clients and get them to contact you. Better yet, they also provide unlimited tech support to make sure it’s always up to date and professional Search Engine Optimization to make sure you rank high in online searches all at no additional cost. But best of all, we’ve worked with them to create a special offer just for Practice of the Practice listeners. Get your first three months of website service completely free. To take advantage of this amazing deal, head on over to brightervision.com/joe. Again, that’s brightervision.com/joe. [JOE SANOK] Well, I want to talk a little bit about your work, talking about the health myths of mental health and things that keep us feeling stuck and sick and returning choice to people. Tell us a little bit about how you got into that work and I’d love to dig into some of those concepts as well. [BRITT] Sure. This was sort of my like part two level up. Once I got my practice up and running, I’ve always wanted to write a book but nobody would give me the time of day. The whole book writing world is a whole nother thing we could talk about but, so I’m like, okay, no one will let me write a book because I don’t have a platform or an audience fine. So I just started writing my ideas out on Instagram and as I did that work, I sort of accidentally built this community of people that all came saying pretty much the same thing. I’ve been diagnosed, no one has ever talked to trauma, talked about trauma to me and I feel crazy, but I’ve never learned how the brain works or how the central nervous system works. I’m such a procrastinator. I’m unmotivated. All of these myths that with some, again, our pain is complex, our lives are complex but with just a few pieces of information, really, really powerful changes can happen. So my work and the book and everything was subsequently from wow, we don’t need to be deep divers. Drivers allows you to drive a car. You don’t have to be a mechanic to drive a car. You don’t even have to have extensive aviation training to fly a plane. You just need a few pieces of information and then really significant changes can happen from that. So that’s really what my work focuses on now. [JOE] Well tell us about that work. What are you teaching, what are you studying, let us know more about it. [BRITT] I’m a huge fan of polyvagal theory, Dr. Steven Port’s work and this idea that hey, you have a head and it’s attached to a body and there are nerves and they do things and when those nerves do things it can look like mental illness, but it’s not always mental illness. A lot of times what the mental health world calls a disease or a disorder is our brain doing what our brains were designed to do, tat’s fight flight. I’m not saying mental illness is not real. I take psych meds, like do whatever you need to do, but it’s so helpful to know people who are doing the research. Dr. Peter Levine who founded Somatic Experiencing and Understanding like animals in the wild, domestic animals get trauma, but wild animals do not if we leave them alone. Why? How can they be subject to life-threatening experiences and not sustain trauma or PTSD? That’s really important work and it translates. Play therapy was a biggie. I don’t have kids, but I really loved learning play therapy because if you understand how kids see the world, you can sort of distill down almost any adult’s dilemma and it’s a really helpful practice. So I really like dipping into all the, I would say internal family systems, the work of Dick Schwartz, Somatic Experiencing and Polyvagal Theory and Play Therapy. Those are my four groups in how I practice. [JOE] Well, tell us about your book and when you were putting together your own ideas, what did you draw from? What are some of the concepts you cover in the book? [BRITT] This is the book I wish I had had when I was first starting on my recovery process. I love a good deep dive because I’m a therapist, but most people don’t want a deep dive. They just want to feel less bad and they want to get a little bit of momentum wherever they’re stuck, whether it’s career or relationships or finances or whatever. So this book is sort of the Cliffs Notes guide. It’s like, here are all the books that I have read in my 15 plus years in recovery as a human and here are just the bottom lines. Like here’s just what you need to know about anxiety, here’s just what you need to know about how motivation works and how procrastination works. Of course, I snuck in a few of my own theories in between because I could do that. So I wanted people to know what I know and like here are just the five bullet points that will help you to move from, it’s not going to solve your life, but it will get you from A to B and then things compound very quickly. This is true whether you’re building a practice or recovering from drug addiction. Little moves compound rapidly and if you’re willing to take small steps, you get very big returns. [JOE] Well, tell us what writing the book’s done for maybe your relationship with your clients or client acquisition or even having a new client that you give the book to. What has that done for your practice? [BRITT] There are lots of ways to, I have a traditional publisher. I went the traditional route. In this world we live in, you can self-publish, you can do an indie publisher. There’s a lot of ways to get your work out there but I do think that having some offering, whether it’s a book or a video or a downloadable whatever, lends a lot of credibility to your practice. I think people expect to see a solid, if you’re going to choose to invest your resources and your practice making sure your online presence is done well. Invest the extra money in a designer because that’s people’s first introduction to you. I had a really, really crappy website when I started, but what that tells people is that I don’t know how to organize myself and resource to make sure this is done well. [BRITT] So whether it’s a book or whatever, find an offering. For me, I intentionally did not put client anecdotes in it. I did composites because I ethically didn’t feel right. And again, that’s a personal choice, but I did composites of client stories, a lot of my own personal stories and a lot of research. But do what’s authentic to you. That’s the most important thing. If you’re a video person, then do TikTok. If that’s your thing, have at it. If your thing is writing, then start writing a newsletter. But it’s so helpful to know you don’t need permission. Just start doing it today. Like you get to make that decision and it’s incredibly helpful for building social credibility, social proof. [JOE] What’s the book done for you personally? [BRITT] Well I get to check the box of, I wrote a book and it exists in the world, which is so fun. Now I’m like I need to do another one because let’s go, let’s fight, let’s win. But I really, really wanted to get to have the book writing adventure. Fortunately, during lockdown, I had lots of time and so I wrote the book in 2020, in 2021 and it just came out this past March. So it was really fun for me to share beyond the one-to-one. I love direct practice, I love my clients, but I really want people to know these things as therapists that we know because it’s not accessible to everyone. Mental healthcare, even if you can access it isn’t always up to speed on the neuroscience and the research. So I really, really want people to know this stuff and to know just the basics so they can get moving. [JOE] For someone just getting started, what would you say that they should focus on to level up quickly? [BRITT] The self-talk, the whole building of practice, the external things that you build are the result of the internal thinking that you start with. So let’s start with telling yourself this is going to be hard. If we glamorize it or romanticize it or compare my day one to your day 9,000, it’s going to really, really be a lot harder than it needs to be. It’s going to be hard, but we don’t have to add stories of shame and comparison. So I would say stay in your lane. Don’t worry about what other people are doing. Ask yourself how do you want to structure this? For me, group practice doesn’t work because I don’t play well with others. And I do well collaborating but as far as day-to-day, I knew a group practice wouldn’t align with my personality. Now financially it would be more lucrative for me to hire 10 clinicians and send them off and running but I know for me, like therapists know thyself before launching a business and ask yourself what do I want this to look like? Is that in alignment with how I function? If you don’t know the answer to that’s a really important piece of self-inquiry to do before you launch a business. Then number two, make sure your web presence is solid. [JOE] What would you say makes up a solid web presence? [BRITT] Having links that work, make sure your links go to where they link to, typos. I’m not like a visual person but I know when I’m looking at fonts that are not current, I don’t know how or what or why, but spend the extra time and resource consulting with people that do know how to design and how to organize and how to do user experience types of things. Because that’s people’s first introduction to you is how easy is it to navigate your website? Is it easy, is it clean, can you book online? I mean I was a big fan of put it all out there. Don’t make them spend three hours emailing you and messaging you to find out your rates. If you put it all out there, then people have it and then you waste a lot less time fielding inquiries and they waste a lot less time. So if you’re inaccessible to them, they can move on. [JOE] Now what about someone that’s pretty established, maybe they’re an established solo practitioner, maybe they have a small group practice, for them to level up, what advice would you give them at that phase? [BRITT] Leveling up can mean so many things. It’s like, do you want to do what Brené Brown did and give a TED Talk and launch an entire industry and train people in your methods? You can do that if that’s your thing. But let’s start with defining for you, not for your neighbor, not for the person down the hall. What is leveling up look and feel like and spend a lot of time getting clear on that because this is a lot of work to do. If you’re happy and you’re content where you are, you don’t have to level up but if you want to ask yourself what that means and then really, really be careful not to talk yourself out of it. I could have talked myself out of going to grad school or launching the practice or trying to write the book. I mean, I could have talked myself out of anything. Don’t listen to, the critic is trying to help you. We love our inner critics, yay, they’re trying to protect us from failure, but don’t listen to the yes, but. When you hear well, yes, but, immediately counter that with a well what about because this is hard and it’s doable and yes, you can level up and know thyself and don’t talk yourself out of it once you’re clear on what you want. [JOE] That’s so awesome. Well, what about people that are totally rocking out private practice, things are going well, what would you say in regards to leveling up beyond a private practice? What should people think about with that? [BRITT] There’s so many fun things to, so one of my goals was to teach at the university level. I don’t have a Ph.D. so I was told you can’t do that. Guess what? You can do that. If you’re an adjunct instructor, you get to go to a beautiful college campus and walk into the classroom and you get to teach that class. That was really fun. So I did that for a few years, doing community engagements, doing speaking, doing conferences and festivals. So if you’re not a public facing person, then you can do things like write or make videos or do consulting with people that are coming up the pipeline. Once you’re established, remind yourself a lot of things that the people coming up don’t know and that’s valuable and you get to monetize what you know and your experience. Consulting is a really, really fun one. I love doing consulting work. [JOE] What advice would you have for people that are just dipping their toes into consulting but they have the experience? So they’re good at what they do, but they haven’t jumped into consulting. What advice do you have for them? [BRITT] You’re going to get rejected a lot. Whatever the thing is when you’re leveling up, it’s going to suck. I pitched 150 literary agents. Some of them said no outright. Some of them said basically you suck outright. Most of them ghosted me and that took three years to get a lit. That’s not even a book deal, that’s a lit agent. That’s just the first step of that process. So rejection is not fun and I don’t enjoy it, but it’s going to be something to titrate and learn to tolerate because you can’t, it only takes one yes. That was the most helpful advice I was given with my practice and with my book stuff. It only takes one yes. So if it takes you a thousand emails, that’s annoying and it’s disappointing, but you only need one, you don’t need a thousand yeses, you need one. So focus on getting the one which may take many, many, many, many nos. [JOE] Such great advice. So 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? [BRITT] The most important thing to know about private practice is that you are the most important piece of the puzzle. You can be a ninja at business, you can be a ninja at web design, but if you are not solid in who you are, if you don’t understand transference and what to do when your clients trigger you, then even if you succeed, you’re not going to be able to enjoy it. It’s so important not just for us to level up and hit the I did it button, but like I did it and I am integrated enough in my own wellbeing that I can enjoy my success. So success without self-awareness doesn’t feel very good. So really, really make sure you do not sacrifice your own work, your own mental health, your own self-care practices and service of this business. The mental health business is not a business that you can put yourself on the back burner for. You need to be paid first. Your mental health needs to come first and you are number one on that line. So yes, you count, put yourself first. It’s good business to put yourself first. [JOE] Britt, if people want to work with you, talk with you, what’s the best way for them to connect with your work? [BRITT] Well, come find me on Instagram where I have horrible boundaries there, but it’s at Britt Frank and say hello. I love meeting people there. My website is scienceofstuck.com and you can buy the book wherever books are sold. [JOE] Awesome. Well Britt, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast. [BRITT] Thank you so much. [JOE] I am loving doing this series about how I leveled up. If you missed it on the 19th, we had my fulfillment story. So fulfillment is a local event I got to speak at our Traverse City Opera House, which is this really cool old Opera House. I share my story of really how I got into working in mental health, how I got into podcasting and some things that happened in childhood that made me want to do some of that. So if you missed that fulfillment talk that went live that was episode 770, just a couple episodes ago. So we’re going to be doing a whole bunch of these how I leveled up. If you want to join us for Level Up Week, it kicks off September 12th, 2022 and it’s going to be going all week long. We’re going to have a ton of webinars, a ton of experts, a bunch of different topics whether you’re just getting started or starting a group practice or growing a group practice or even exiting your practice into different things outside of it. We’ve got some really amazing guests that are coming up. Make sure you sign up for that over at practiceofthepractice.com. It’s right on the main page. You can register there. Also, we couldn’t do the show without our sponsors. Brighter Vision is our sponsor today. Brighter Vision makes the best websites. They’re so good. For only $59 a month, you can get access to a whole design team with your sorry, I have a cough coming, leaving that in. Mitch, leave that in. Just snuck up on me and punched me in the face. Look at that. So Brighter Vision makes some amazing websites and you get the whole web team, you get hosting, you get the design, all for $59 a month. Head on over to brightervision.com/joe and you can get access to working with them. 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 that 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 guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.