[WHITNEY]:
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Welcome to the Faith in Practice podcast. I’m your host, Whitney Owens, recording live from Savannah, Georgia. I’m a licensed professional counselor, group practice owner and private practice consultant. In each week, through a personal story or amazing interviews, I will help you learn how to start, grow, and scale your private practice from a faith-based perspective. I’m going to show you how to have an awesome, faith-based practice without being cheesy or fake. You too can have a successful practice, make lots of money, and be true to yourself.

So, I’m happy about this episode today because I have my good friend, Joe Sanok, here with me. And we’ve got some really exciting stuff we’re going to talk about. So, Joe is also a podcaster, productivity researcher and author. His book, Thursday is the new Friday is being published by HarperCollins in 2021. Joe has his first podcast for counselors, which is called the Practice of the Practice podcast. Hey, Joe, how are you?

[JOE]:
I’m doing great. How are you, Whitney?

[WHITNEY]:
I’m good. I’m good. You had said you’ve been doing a lot of podcasting today.

[JOE]:
Yeah, I did a bunch of recordings for my podcast, the intro and outro where we do a lot of batch recording. So yeah, it’s been a fun, busy day.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah. So why don’t you share with people, if they don’t know you already, kind of your practice journey and how you got to where you are today and some of the work you do?

[JOE]:
Yeah, I took a really kind of traditional journey when it comes to counseling, where I did master’s degrees in counseling psychology and community counseling. So, I’m dual licensed here in Michigan. I worked in a lot of nonprofits in the foster care world, and for a long time thought that I was going to work with teenagers in an experiential setting for kind of my lifelong work and did some therapeutic sailing programs and adventure based counseling. But then eventually got a job at a community college and really enjoyed that work, but my private practice was slowly growing on the side. And there was a moment when that kind of flipped where the private practice was making more money than my full-time job. And so, I started to move away from that job, and eventually left, and started a podcast on the side that really was just a way for me to talk about private practice issues. And that was continuing to grow, and we can go super deep into that if you want to, but eventually sold my counseling practice about a year ago, in mid 2019, and now I do consulting and podcasting full time.

[WHITNEY]:
That’s exciting. So, when you think about your practice journey, what were some of the times that you were really scared, like, really scared to take a step of faith in something?

[JOE]:
Yeah, I remember in Kalamazoo when I was a 10-99 contractor and I kind of stepped into that as a side gig. It was really tough because I couldn’t figure out how to attract clients that would either private pay to see me, or I could only get on a couple insurance companies because I was newly licensed. And it was like, I do all this marketing, and then people would get referred to me, but I didn’t take their insurance. And I just felt like there was so much hustle. And every day I’d go to the office after my other job, and I’d meet other clinicians, because there was probably 20 clinicians that worked there, so I’d just walk around the office and meet people. And finally, this one lady, Monica, she was seeing a couple and she said, you know, the man from this couple, I think could really use some individual work, would you see him? And that was my very first paying client. It was like, oh, finally I have a client. But then, you know, client number two and three and four got easier and easier. I remember just being like, is this private practice thing even for me? I can’t even get my first client.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah, yeah, it’s fun how you remember that first client at each of your places, like, I’m sitting here thinking about the first person I saw, actually, in my office. I had gotten the building, but evidently I had not turned the heat on appropriately or they didn’t come when they were supposed to come. So, I go in there to see my first client and the heat was not on. And I was like, oh, my gosh, it was in January. Of course, I know I’m in the South, but it was still freezing. But it’s just funny how you remember that very first person and that impact it had on you to move forward and [unclear]?

[JOE]:
Yeah, I mean, I remember this one. I was office sharing to save money when I first started my practice as sort of a side gig private practice on my own. And when whenever we were done with our session, we would leave the door open as sort of the sign that we weren’t in session, the door would be shut with the lights on when you’re doing a session. Well, there was a new guy that started renting and someone hadn’t told him that you had to leave the door open and he left all of the lights on and had the door closed. I didn’t want to knock but I was supposed to be in there. And so, I had this family. And so, we did a therapy session in the file room. And I still remember all of our knees were touching each other. It was like the most awkward counseling session. But it was awesome. I later found out the guy wasn’t even in there.

[WHITNEY]:
The counseling world has like so many great stories. I definitely have walked into offices where I forget which office I was in each day. You know, when I was working at a great practice, I walked into the office and someone’s like, in the middle of their session, I’m like, oh, wait, I’m in the other office.

[JOE]:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, when I first started, they didn’t give me an office at all. And so, I would always have to check in just to see which office was available. So, it changed every single time I did sessions. So, I would always start with the same lame joke with people and say the tour of offices continues. Who knows where we’ll be today?

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah, so were you kind of scared when you started out your own practice?

[JOE]:
You know, I mean, I had landed a foster care supervisor job and when we had moved back to our hometown of Traverse City, I really thought I was gonna have to start from the bottom, just maybe do foster care work, or even work in a coffee shop just to kind of get to know people. And so, when I got hired as a supervisor, when I had applied as just a foster care worker, I was over the moon. So, it felt like, if I only get a handful of clients through this side gig, it’ll be fine. And so, I think, for me, when people say, should I leave my full-time job? A lot of times I say no, because you can take much bigger risks, because I had negotiated my rent to be a percentage of what I brought in. And so, if I didn’t see anybody, I didn’t pay anything. And if I did, then I paid a certain amount, but the maximum of that per month was above market rate. And so, it worked in the landlord’s favor for a while when I really got going with it. But it was structured in a way that if I, quote, failed, I had very few costs. And so I actually took really big risks in raising my rates as a new clinician, being entirely private pay, to be able to try something new because I didn’t need that money in the same way as if I was just starting a practice and that was my only income.

[WHITNEY]:
So, you do very good, calculated risks then?

[JOE]:
I guess so. My wife would say that I calculate too much when it comes to risk. I mean, it took me forever to leave the community college and I don’t know why it was when she said, you know what, if you don’t make enough money, I’ll just go back to work. I didn’t even think that that was an option. And when she said that it was like, okay, this isn’t all on my shoulders. So yeah, I can leave this job.

[WHITNEY]:
That funny because when I think of you, I think of you as taking lots of risks.

[JOE]:
Well, compared to you, I do take lots of risks.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah. So any other like stories that you can think of times you kind of had to jump into something and you were feeling overwhelmed or unsure and it ended up working out in your favor, in private practice or in podcasting?

[JOE]:
Yeah, you know, I remember when I was still at the college and I hired my fourth clinician over at my side gig private practice, and it became clear very quickly that the office sharing of one office for four people wasn’t really going to work. And so I went from paying probably $600 a month in rent to having a budget of around $2,000 a month which, mind you, my counseling job over at the community college was paying me probably $3,000 a month, maybe a little more than that, of what I was actually taking home. And so, the idea of having an office space that was more than my mortgage, it was more than what I was really making over there. I mean, that was a huge risk. And I remember that person that I had hired, she was the most vocal for wanting to upgrade offices. So, I finally upgraded to this four office, view of the water, like, corner office. Amazing place, I had it for five years. It was this big jump, big stretch for me. I mean, I remember signing the contract and they say the total amount I would pay over five years and it was just like, oh my gosh, this is like the cost of my house and I’m not even owning anything at the end of it. And within a month that lady who had been kind of pushing me to upgrade, she quit. And it was like, ah, I learned an important lesson there in business though, that I’m the one that’s taking the risk. So even though I have team members that can give feedback, and I want them to be happy, I still have to make sure that my percentage makes sense for me, I have to make sure that those that are invested, I try to protect myself from getting burned. And, you know, if I onboard someone, I do my best to make sure that they’re committed. But you know, it is always a risk. And I think really realizing that I’m the one that stuck with a five-year lease at two grand a month, not her, she could just pick up and leave. And so sometimes when you jump, you learn important lessons, but I don’t necessarily see it as pass fail as much as it’s giving me good information to be able to make different decisions in the future.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah, it’s totally about learning. And when I think about when I hired my first people, I hire very different people now. I kind of messed up at the beginning, wasn’t really sure what I wanted. And the only way you’re going to figure out what you want is if you take a couple of risks and see what happens.

[JOE]:
Yeah, yeah. I think that as I dig into the research around really moving on things, and that’s one of the chapters in my book is, there’s this idea that I’ve developed of internal inclinations, that there’s these three inclinations that either come naturally or you need to work on to be really successful in the business world. The first one is curiosity. The second one is an outsider approach. And the third one is moving on it. And so, I really dug into the research on why people kind of move on things and why people don’t. So, when you think about kind of a spectrum, on one side we have people that are very high in the thought area, and very low in the action. And so, these are folks that really value accuracy. Oftentimes, they might say that they’re paralyzed by perfection, they have feelings of imposter syndrome. They feel like they don’t fit. They feel like it’s a fluke that they became successful and they’re always second guessing that. And so, these people that are really high thought, low action, tend to have accuracy be their number one thing. And as a result, they’re very slow to move, they need a lot of feedback, they don’t trust their own skills to be able to move forward. At the other end, we have people that are frequently very impulsive. They’re very low thought and high action. And so, they see an idea and they go after it.

A lot of the emerging research is showing that ADHD is actually really helpful in the entrepreneur world. Because people that have ADHD, oftentimes, their environment affects them differently in regards to their risk tolerance. And so we would often say, you know, someone who’s impulsive, you know, that’s gonna be really hard for them in adulting, but really, what we’re seeing in the emerging research is it’s really the context and the setting of it. But if we think of either end of that spectrum, we really don’t want to be overthinking and paralyzed by perfection, nor do we want to be over action where we’re so impulsive that we aren’t accurate at all. So that kind of middle ground is the move on it, that the ‘it’ is defined by our thoughts and the ‘moving’, the action, is primary. And so, we’re high in action, but we’re higher in thought, but not where thought is taking over the action, that the action is still number one, and then we’re having the thought process be a part of it.

[WHITNEY]:
That’s great. I’m thinking through this. I’m also, of course, thinking about the enneagram, of different personalities and different numbers and how you can be in a healthy place on your enneagram number, or an unhealthy place. And so, I’m thinking about how, when you get to that healthy place, you do have that balance that you’re talking about, in a way. I was also thinking about the pandemic. And I wonder if people, and I was wondering if you thought about this, like, less risky or less willing to jump into things, jump into business because of the pandemic?

[JOE]:
You know, I’m actually seeing the opposite, that a lot more people are willing to jump into new things than in the past. The idea of having, for example, just an online counseling business, that feels very risky to just have one stream of income. And so, in April, we actually launched, to our first access people, Podcast Launch School, and we had, I think, 75 people sign up for it. And I was gonna be happy if we sold 20 spots into it. But I think part of it is people realize, wow, I have these skills that have been locked inside of a counseling office, that one person at a time, or a family at a time, gets to hear and there are so many people in the world that need to hear this. I was actually just interviewing someone on my podcast, and they said that some of the most popular Tiktoks right now, are therapists doing dances, like there’s these dances on Tiktok people do, but then they’re giving good information while they dance. So, they do like the viral dance, but then they’re talking about trauma or they’re talking about anxiety or loving yourself, like, with the text that’s going over their faces or that they’re pointing to. I think there’s a lot of room right now for actual professionals to get out there and be influencers because people are so sick of someone that’s just you know, a “life coach” that’s out there and is talking about trauma but they have nothing other than their own maybe experience to talk about it.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah, well, Tiktok. That’s like, the new social media for therapists, huh?

[JOE]:
I’m not sure I’d go that far. It’s an emerging social media that… I mean, we see this with everything where, you know, Instagram used to be a very young population and then now so many people are on it. Then we saw Snapchat now a lot of people are on Snapchat, and now Tiktok. So, the younger crowd is always looking for the place that their parents aren’t, and then it takes off and gets to the masses. And then the parents go there and then they find a new spot.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah, so I’m gonna go back to… I’m probably gonna butcher this, you said the three steps within kind of jumping into something, or the creativity…?

[JOE]:
Oh, yeah. Internal inclinations.

[WHITNEY]:
Okay, okay, can you kind of go through those for me?

[JOE]:
Yeah. So, the first one is curiosity. And so, it’s interesting because there was a huge kind of uptick in research around curiosity and where it came from between the 1920s up until the 90s. And there’s kind of three major camps there in why does curiosity do what it does? And where does it come from? And one camp was really looking at is curiosity like hunger where, after a certain period of time, we just need to have more? And there was this really interesting study in the 60s where they took college students, they put them in a sensory deprivation room, so no light, no sound. They weren’t even allowed to get out of the bed that was in there, except to go to the bathroom and to eat and they stay in that for 12 hours, four days in a row. And they wanted to see if this button that was next to the bed, that they told them they could push as much as they wanted, if they would push this button. And when they’d push this button, this really colorful light on the ceiling started to emerge. And they saw that, later on in the week, as people were more and more sick of this, that they were pushing that button more and more, just to have something to do, to be curious. And so, there’s all these really interesting and, frankly, weird studies that were done to just prove different points. And so, there was the idea of curiosity coming as sort of a drive like hunger. There is another idea of curiosity really coming out of boredom, that when we’re bored, we just want to entertain ourselves. But then the one that to me really stands out is when we have a belief set that is challenged – so I believe this – then I experienced maybe another person that, you know, doesn’t fit my belief, the larger that gap is, the more curious we get if we allow ourselves to observe it and then take action on learning from it. And so, when I look at that inclination, the idea is that we first have to understand that we have certain beliefs that we feel are concrete, but actually probably aren’t. That if challenged, and we got curious about them, we might learn something different about ourselves and about society or about how to do life. So that curiosity, it’s really based on having an open mind to allow yourself to be challenged. And so, the assessment that I’m doing around curiosity for the inclination walks people through whether or not that comes naturally for them, or if it’s something that needs to be developed. And then we also, through that assessment, look at do you have habits that help you learn and support that curiosity? And then do you have actions that then kind of manifest that habit?

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah, so what would be some like activities to help increase curiosity?

[JOE]:
I mean, anything that’s gonna challenge your point of view, new experiences, exposing yourself to podcasts that you may think aren’t your jam, that oh, this is interesting. This is something different than what I’m used to. We want to be able to kind of get the wheels turning to say, I’ve believed this thing and is that true? Because if you have a certain point of view, and you surround yourself in a bubble of people that reinforce that point of view, you’re most likely going to be less curious. You’re not going to have as many people or ideas challenging your point of view, and thus, that’s going to reduce the amount of curiosity that you have.

[WHITNEY]:
I love that you’re talking about this because I’m thinking about faith, right? And I was just talking to my husband about this and some girlfriends in a very safe social distancing situation, where we were enjoying ourselves, but we were talking about faith and like, I am in the South, and it is just told a certain way. I mean, you’re kind of in a different kind of Bible belt, I guess, but like, you just grow up being told that faith is a certain way, and then all of a sudden, you start growing up and you realize that it ain’t really the way you were told. And you do become curious and so I started looking at Bible verses in a different way. Or I meet other people that are believers that have a different kind of lifestyle or do different kind of things than what I was told was okay as a kid. And so that curiosity has brought me to greater levels of faith, honestly, than where I was before. And so, I love that your kind of bringing up that point. I think it’s so applicable to faith.

[JOE]:
Well, yeah, I mean, I remember this one moment when I was at Mars Hill and this pastor Rob Bell was talking about the verse about turn the other cheek, and he was talking about how a Roman soldier was allowed to hit someone that was equal to him with the palm of their hand, and they could hit a slave with the knuckle side of their hand. And so if someone, say a Jewish person, had crossed a Roman soldier, and he hit that person with the knuckle side of their hand, if they then turned the other cheek, then the palm side of the hand was the next side of the hand. And so, it’s a way of saying, I am an equal to you. You know, I mean, in my mind, turn the other cheek was always either be super passive or, you know, you’re just gonna like put up with it. There wasn’t as much nuance to it. And then the verse that follows that is all about kind of going the extra mile, which we hear like, yeah, go the extra mile. Like, work harder, this Protestant work ethic, which actually, that belief of the Protestant work ethic is only about 100 years old. So, I don’t know how Protestant it could be if it’s only that young. Anyway, um, but a Roman soldier was allowed to ask any person to carry their backpack, which was usually around 80 pounds or so. So imagine you’re a Jew that’s walking to the market in one direction and then, you know, this Roman soldier says, I want you to carry my backpack a mile in the opposite direction, then you have to turn around, walk back that mile again, and then you were kind of stuck for the day, your day was ruined. Now imagine if you then are given this backpack and at the one-mile mark, that Roman soldier says to you, hey, I’d like my backpack back and you’re like, no, it’s cool. I’m gonna just keep walking. At mile two, no, seriously, I need my backpack. Mile three, honestly, my general is gonna be so mad at me. He sees that you keep carrying it, I’m not making you… So, the power just flipped. And so for me when I started learning these nuances of the first century Hebrew experience, it brought to life the Bible in a much different way than things ever were before that because there’s so much more nuance than what we typically would hear about kind of those types of verses.

[WHITNEY]:
I appreciate you bringing that up. I like how you said, Rob Bell, he’s a pastor, like I… or I guess he was like, I really admire Rob Bell a lot. And he was kind of a person that changed some of my ways of thinking too like, I was very conservative, started listening to his sermons at Mars Hill, which is now funny to think, you might have heard the same sermons, but I used to listen to them. He’d have a podcast of just the sermons and when I was in Colorado, kind of in a dark phase of my life, honestly, I couldn’t find a job and was kind of questioning a lot of things. I started listening to his podcast and the way he took the sermon and, you know, understood scripture in a different kind of way and spun it around in a really historic way, of the way it was written. I even listened to him this morning, actually. He’s just so great, anyway, but yeah, so I love that curiosity and the way that we read scripture and the way we think of people, we have to be thinking about that in a different kind of way, or we’re gonna get really stuck.

[JOE]:
Yeah, I mean, to me, that’s something that, even when I was more of a practicing Christian, it was more, like, I still valued it. I mean, I took a comparative religion major as part of my undergrad. And one of my ethics teachers, he was a former Nazi guard. I mean, talk about having someone that teaches ethics, and to say, okay, what about if you’re in a community and you know that it’s bad, but you don’t want your family to be bombed? And so, you then work with the Nazis out of survival. And then I mean, just these perspectives that were so challenging to say, okay, I see how that would be a hard decision to say, okay, do we flee? Do we hide people? Do we join in? I mean, and there was another lady that taught our Indian Traditions class who had converted to Hinduism when she was 18 or something. She was probably 75 years old at that point. And it was just a very interesting way to learn about religion. And, you know, the year between my undergrad and grad school, I went to New Orleans and spent some time down there volunteering at a shelter for people with AIDS. I went to Nepal and I stayed in a Buddhist monastery. I went to Haiti and got to know a voodoo priest. I went to France and you know, went over to Notre Dame. And so, I really exposed myself to a lot of ways of thinking to say, I probably don’t have it all figured out as a 22-year-old; I should get out into the world and see some things.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah, I still don’t have it all figured out. The next inclination you said, outsider approach?

[JOE]:
Yeah. So, when we look at the outsider approach, what frequently happens in any organization or even any group, for that matter, is some certain norms start to be kind of unwritten rules. And what the downside of that is, is that we don’t have diversity in ways of thinking. The benefit of that is you get kind of these mental shortcuts where we know that there’s certain assumptions that we all kind of naturally follow. But even just thinking about when I joined the Community College… so when I joined there, and this was 2010, it’s not like technology wasn’t around in 2010. But they were still doing handwritten counseling notes. They were doing a handwritten calendar. If you wanted to see whether or not somebody came to the office, the front desk person had to look through the handwritten calendar because all of the progress notes were chronologically put into binders instead of by people’s names and so they had to go back to pull each progress note, it was just crazy. And to them it was completely normal. So, me coming in as an outsider saying, hey, we could have a business associates agreement with Google and do Google forums and Google Calendar and keep all of this confidential, and we could search for it super easy. That outsider approach wasn’t something that they even thought of. And when you look at whether it’s immigrants or minority groups or other groups, having an outsider approach actually has distinct advantages and privileges, the research supports, that you actually can have more influence over people than the percentage of the minority.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah, this is making me think about consulting, actually.

[JOE]:
In what way?

[WHITNEY]:
Like, the importance of having somebody outside of your practice look at your practice. You get so consumed in it and you’re not really thinking about different ways. Just like you walked up in there and you’re like, hey, dude, you’re doing this way wrong. Let’s do all this other stuff. You know, you get so set into the way you run your practice, you don’t realize the things that you could be doing to make it way more efficient.

[JOE]:
100%. And I think that that outsider approach, like when you look at, I mean, my daughters have this book, it’s Bedtime Stories for Rebel Girls, I think is what it’s called. It’s this awesome book of all these great women of history. And when you read a lot of these women’s stories, it often starts with, they were really sick, or their parent died, or like, they didn’t fit in in some way. And so often, I think we think back on our elementary or high school years, and oh, I didn’t fit in, but that’s actually probably a pretty good thing because you then can empathize in a way that’s very different from the average person, that you can kind of see things from a different perspective. And it’s just interesting how often these great leaders of the world oftentimes were outsiders that saw things in a completely different manner.

[WHITNEY]:
Yes, so if you’re struggling in life, you’re probably gonna be a great leader one day. Do something amazing.

[JOE]:
Yeah. Like that. adversity you know, gives you a perspective and an angle that you approach things that’s different than what maybe the established norms are.

[WHITNEY]:
All right. So, the third one you have here is moving on it.

[JOE]:
Yeah. So that’s the one that we covered in the beginning, where you really want to have action be leading while having some thought in it. Because on one side, you’ve got those people that value the accuracy and then on the other side, you’ve got the impulsivity, and we want to find where action and thought are mixing together more than just one end or the other.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah. So, I am actually gonna be starting a mastermind group. Of course, you know that.

[JOE]:
I do.

[WHITNEY]:
And you’ve run many a mastermind groups. And so, when you think about people that are considering mastermind groups, and they’re really nervous about jumping in it and doing something different, I guess, like, do you have any advice or thoughts to speak to those people?

[JOE]:
You know, I heard something once, I don’t remember who said it, but they said that really, you’re gonna top out in regards to your salary and your income based on the people you surround yourself with. And so you think about in a typical community, like I remember going to the LPCs of Northern Michigan Barbecue, it was probably five or six years ago, so quite a few years ago, before I left the Community College and the people there, they were saying, yeah, most counselors, they live just above the poverty line. You know, it’s so hard. I mean, they really had this like martyr mentality about being a therapist. And I remember sitting there and just being like, I don’t buy that. I don’t buy that you have to be a martyr in order to be a good person or that if you make money somehow you’re using people. And so, I had to surround myself with people that thought differently, and I hired a coach that was $2,000 an hour down in Austin, Texas, and she really helped me change my mindset. I’ve joined mastermind groups with people that are multimillionaires, because when I surround myself with those people, the way they talk about time, the way they talk about boundaries, the way they talk about opportunities is way different than the people that are even at the level that I’m at. So, I think when you start to surround yourself with a consultant, with other people that are, in an aspirational way, trying to get to that next level, it’s like, all those ships rise with the tide.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah, I mean, you are talking about the martyr syndrome, even more so in like the faith in practice community. Christian counselors, it’s almost expected sometimes from the community that you should do your work and not get paid.

[JOE]:
Yeah. I mean, and that comes out of that pastors for a really long time were doing counseling without hardly any training and doing it for free for their congregation. And then why wouldn’t counselors do that? So, of course, the churches then have been trained in this way to undervalue counselors and so I think that’s why it’s even more important to talk about the value of counseling and to make sure that you’re charging.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah, and I’m finding, as I kind of consult in this area, that a lot of people who grew up in the Christian counseling world, or especially if they went to school specifically for the business side is not really there. Or they don’t really know how to make a business decision and everything’s based on helping people and not based on investment, or not based on money, or thinking about the way you want to live your life as if you have to sacrifice everything, like a missionary type idea, to be able to go far when really that’s not going to take you very far at all. It’s really gonna cause you to be unsuccessful and do less good work in your community.

[JOE]:
Yeah, absolutely. And so, I think it’s important to surround yourself with other people that are kind of on the journey. And I think we experienced this when we were at Killin’It Camp last year, when so many people were aligned in wanting to have a successful practice and going after big ideas. And when you get people together, either physically or online, that have that direction they’re headed, everybody gets there faster.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah, Killin’It Camp was amazing. And for those of you that don’t know, it’s a few days… I guess it was three or four days out in Colorado, at Estes Park, where we get together and build our practices, and I don’t know, what did we have, 100 people there? 120?

[JOE]:
I think it was 132.

[WHITNEY]:
Okay. Yeah. And it was like now that I met these people, even though it was only for a few days, when I get into the online Facebook groups and stuff like that, we have this amazing connection that never would have happened if we hadn’t met in person. So, this cool community is formed in a really unique way.

[JOE]:
Yeah. Well, I think that even when you think about the friends that you surround yourself with, you know, I’ve heard that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And so, if you’re around people that are pushing you to be healthier, pushing you to think differently about spirituality, or pushing you to open yourself up to the world differently, you’re going to probably do that. Whereas if you’re surrounding yourself with people that have different value sets, you’re probably going to do that. Because we’re social creatures. We want to be around other people that will kind of reinforce where we’re at. But if we have people that will disrupt that and challenge that, and then we allow ourselves to get curious, we can just develop in a deeper way than maybe we would if we just kind of stayed in our bubble.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah. So if somebody’s listening to the podcast and they want to know how to get in touch with you, or they want to get involved in what’s going on with Practice of the Practice, can you kind of tell them a little bit about that?

[JOE]:
Yeah, I would say that the best place to go is practiceofthepractice.com. If you’re just starting a practice, then you can go over to practiceofthepractice.com/new and you’re going to get our 28-step checklist for starting a practice to help you out with that. If you want to work with any of our consultants, you can go to practiceofthepractice.com/apply and I, or someone from our team, will jump on a phone call with you to see where you’ll get the best return on investment for your time and money.

[WHITNEY]:
Great, great. And so, your books coming out in… do we know yet?

[JOE]:
Spring 2021 is the plan.

[WHITNEY]:
Okay, and how is that coming?

[JOE]:
It’s good. I have 39,452 words written which is 65.75% of the total words I have to have, done ahead of schedule.

[WHITNEY]:
You’re not calculated at all.

[JOE]:
I have it up on my whiteboard so that I can kind of see my progress of where I was at on May 14, compared to May 20, compared to May 26.

[WHITNEY]:
Well, hey, it makes you feel good, like you see the progress and that’s important.

[JOE]:
Yeah. So just know I’m ahead of schedule in the writing. And then, you know, I want to be able to get that feedback from the editors and make sure it’s the best quality book out there.

[WHITNEY]:
Yeah, well, I’m excited about it. And so, I ask every person that comes on the podcast, my last question is, what do you believe every Christian counselor needs to know?

[JOE]:
I think they need to know that idea of curiosity, of giving yourself experiences to be open to just different thoughts, different ways of thinking, different ways of believing, is so important for not just your clients, but also for your own development. I think that when we feel like we are locked into exactly our version of Christianity, and that that’s unchangeable, to me, that’s really dangerous ground. And I think that allowing yourself to be curious and to find that path and continue to grow is one of the most important and fulfilling ways to live a spiritual life.

[WHITNEY]:
Well, thank you I appreciate that. I appreciate you coming on the podcast today.

[JOE]:
Thanks so much for having me, Whitney.

[WHITNEY]:
Thank you for listening to the Faith in Practice podcast. If you love this podcast, please rate and review on iTunes or your favorite podcast player. If you liked this episode and want to know more, check out the Practice of the Practice website. Also, there you can learn more about me, options for working together such as individual and group consulting, or just shoot me an e-mail [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

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 Practice of the Practice, or the guests, are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one.