• Visit Guy’s website and listen to his podcast. Connect on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Joe Sanok 00:00:00  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 practice of the Practice apply. Again, that's practice of the practice. Com forward slash apply. This is the practice of the practice podcast with Joe. Session number 1230. I'm Joe and I'm your host. And welcome to the practice of the Practice podcast. You know, we're going to be talking about some really interesting things today. We're going to talk about customer service and how that connects with mindfulness and how our own autopilot and our client's autopilot gets in the way of all the different things that we want to do when it comes to mindfulness.

Joe Sanok 00:01:25  you know, this is something that I'm continuing to grow in, in my own just awareness of the present. And, you know, that's why I'm bringing in some people that know a lot more than I do. And today we have Guy winch, who is an internationally renowned psychologist who advocates for integrating the science of emotional health into our daily lives. His science based self-help books have been translated into 30 languages, and his three Ted talks have garnered over 35 million views. He's the author of Get Wrong, Do Write, Emotional Health newsletter, and the dear Guy column for Ted. He's the co-host of the Emmy nominated Dear Therapist podcast from iHeartRadio. Guy, welcome to the practice of the Practice podcast.

Guy Winch 00:02:07  Thank you very much for having me.

Joe Sanok 00:02:09  I'm so excited to have you here today. I feel like there's so much overlap, but when you said customer service, when we're talking mindfulness, I was like, wait, what? So I want to I want to start there because customer service, mindfulness, helping clients prep.

Joe Sanok 00:02:24  You know, we talked a little bit before we started rolling. But I want to just let you run into that right away.

Guy Winch 00:02:30  This is something I started thinking about when I started my practice decades ago at this point. I was trained kind of psychoanalytic, psychodynamic very strongly, if not psychoanalytic. And the whole point is neutrality. You know, and don't let them. Don't let them see you sweat or let them see you feel or let them see you. Think like it's all about the neutrality. And it was not something that said, well, with me, I felt that when somebody somebody's coming to my office, when a patient is coming to my office, I should receive them in the waiting room. In a way that makes them feel like they're coming to my home. In the sense of I want them to feel like I'm happy to see them. I will come out to the waiting room and rather than go like, hello, come in, I will be like, hey, Joe, it's very nice to see you.

Guy Winch 00:03:16  Let's go. Let's come in. It's so nice to see you. Like I'll smile. I'll make you feel welcome because that's part of my general messaging. And I call it customer service in a sense, because it's part of the customer experience as a, as a, as a patient. But I do that because I want the people I work with to get the feeling and to know that I am seeing the best in them. I am seeing all the good things about them, that those are not hidden from me, and as such, I'm really glad to see them because of all those good things that I can see, which I'll also talk about in in sessions. But I always felt like you're coming to a place to open up to be very, very emotionally vulnerable, more than you might be anywhere else. And that connection. Feeling supported. Feeling cared for. Feeling that that therapist likes you even is important because it really enables the work.

Joe Sanok 00:04:09  Well tell me how did you really get into kind of mindfulness and science based learning.

Joe Sanok 00:04:15  Like was there a moment. Was this something that when you were even a kid you're just like, oh, I'm interested. Or did it kind of creep in later in life?

Guy Winch 00:04:22  Well, look, I mean, this is for therapists. I'll want to throw out some some red meat and say that I'm an identical twin. there are only two of us. That's me and my brother. And we both have PhDs in clinical psychology. So when I say that to other therapists, they always thought they do 1 or 2 things. They go, oh, or they take out their notepad and start making notes, you know, because, oh, let's see where that came from. But there was clearly an interest in our childhood about how things worked and how the mind worked or something. We were both very interested in, remain to this day, are fascinated with. So I always knew I wanted to be a therapist, but I also knew that I wanted to be as natural and authentic as a therapist as I could be.

Guy Winch 00:05:07  I didn't want the person in the room to be like, I have no idea what this person is actually like outside of this room. I wanted to get. I wanted them to get a sense of what I was like outside of this room. I wanted to be authentic and bring that self. I felt that was makes for a much stronger connection and a much stronger therapeutic alliance. And we know that the therapeutic alliance is that working relationship is the active ingredient in, in therapy. So so to me that was an important way to, you know, get the attention it deserved.

Joe Sanok 00:05:38  Yeah. You know, it's interesting even just yesterday, my daughter's therapist, she had a sweater on that went like kind of over her wrists and it kind of crept up a little bit. And I saw, like, a wrist tattoo, and I was like, whoa, that's a sweet wrist tattoo, and she knew that she was among friends, and she pulled it up and has an entire sleeve of tattoos up her arm, like the most intricate, like lotuses and stories from her life.

Joe Sanok 00:06:00  And just, like, beautifully done. And she told us, like after the session, how, you know, she, her tattoo artist did all freehand and these are the themes of it and how it actually creeps onto her back. But she's really scared that, you know, a lot of other clients might not, you know, be up for that in like, summer's coming and, you know, should I cover it? And I was just like, to me, that makes me like her more that like, she's like, you know, she's be yourself. And like, you know, if you're gonna, you know, attract the people you want to attract. If someone hates a therapist because they have a tattoo, they're probably not your ideal client anyway. And so just that idea of being open and, you know, even just like being able to kind of move past that blank slate, I think is so important for that therapeutic alliance. Are there other things you do that build that kind of customer service therapeutic alliance? that maybe the average therapist doesn't even think about that leads into better therapy.

Guy Winch 00:06:53  So, for example, you know, I was taught that if I'm going away on vacation, I need to give the people like a month notice that I'm going away so they don't have any crises about it. And but I shouldn't say where I'm going so that they can then project whatever their thoughts are and we can analyze that. Again, not for that. When people ask when I say I'm going to be away and I travel a lot for work these days, I travel a lot to give talks. I travel a lot to do book promotion so people know when they're coming in that I'm going to and I can see them, you know, remotely these days and which is which is fine. But when people say, where are you going? I just say, I'm going to Denmark because I'm going to Denmark. And the minute I say that, they go, oh, and I go, oh, and it's done. If I say, well, what are your thoughts about where I might be going? I'm making that an issue.

Guy Winch 00:07:40  And it's not for them. They don't really care. You know where I'm going. It's just like, oh, good, have a holiday. Good night. That kind of thing. If I'm going on a work thing, they might see it on my social media anyway. So what am I? At that freedom you know, of and that just like there's a part of this connection that's just to human beings talking, and it's important for them to feel that there's yes, we're doing a certain job here, but here and outside of it, we're just two people. I'm not better. I'm not this I'm not. I'm just regular like you.

Joe Sanok 00:08:10  Yeah. Oh, I love that. Now talk to me a little bit about the emotional first stage and first aid and, you know, emotional hygiene and that model, you know, with therapists and why they should be bringing that up and talking with their clients about it and those that might not be familiar. A lot of people have watched your Ted talks and follow your work, so maybe maybe they already know all this stuff.

Joe Sanok 00:08:32  But, you know, tell us a little bit about that and just how they can start incorporating that into their sessions more.

Guy Winch 00:08:38  So look, I believe that where we are in terms of our sophistication as a, as a country, as a global, community where we are in terms of sophistication of our psychological and emotional life, is 100 years lagging behind where we are in our sophistication of our physical bodies and life. We are. So if somebody gets a cut on their arm, they're mostly able to be able to tell whether it needs a bandage, a stitch or a hurried ride to the ear because there's a gap there, like people, we're familiar with emotional wounds and we know to treat them. Most people can't even define what an emotion. Sorry. With physical wounds, most people can't define what an emotional wound even is. They certainly don't think of it as such. They just think of like, oh yeah, this person didn't respond to me when I swiped right on them. They swipe left on me or whatever the thing is.

Guy Winch 00:09:31  And so I'm just feeling like crap and I'm feeling bad about myself. But it's been three days and I don't even know that person. Why am I still thinking about it? The idea that, oh, because there's a certain emotional wound there and rejection causes a certain injury to our self-esteem. To our moods. To our sense of belonging. All of those things. And we can wait it out in most cases. But there are also things we can do to soothe and to make sure that the wounds don't become infected, which they often do. I hear so many times that somebody will tell me, oh, I, you know, I took the LSATs because I want to go to law school, and I did poorly. So I guess law school is not for me, really. One failure. That's it. We give up. I mean, that is a is a very common experience, but it's a very incorrect one. You didn't get rejected. Your preparation got rejected. You didn't prepare for that exam adequately enough.

Guy Winch 00:10:25  That's what didn't go well. Not that you can't be a lawyer. And the correlation between that exam and actual law that you do later is very small to begin with. So, so again, we we failure can just put people away and see people who went on one date on a dating app got rejected. And like I'm not going to date for six months. I'm like, why? What? How is that going to help your confidence in six months time? Again, there's a wound there. If you alert people, like, of course you feel that way because you're wounded. Let's talk about how you can treat that wound so you can get past that. It makes sense to people. And I think it's a language we should use more often.

Joe Sanok 00:11:03  I love that. And I think that in therapy sessions you know people don't necessarily see it as a wound or you know those microaggressions that happen in the world. But to start saying okay, yeah, there are instinctive clients that language to, to say in the same way that you have a small cut, you need stitches or you need to go to the hospital.

Joe Sanok 00:11:21  You know, where is this on that scale? I think giving someone that metaphor for discussion helps them then say, oh, that actually did hurt me. And that's why I'm still thinking about it.

Guy Winch 00:11:30  And then one other ingredient is very important there. You have to normalize it because they're going to be thinking, well, if it was just one date and I'm hurting for three days, what's wrong with me? Or if I am that upset because this person cut me off in the meeting, you know, and I'm just thinking about the whole night, there must be something wrong with me. No. There's not. We know, for example, from research about rejection, that if the person who rejects you is somebody you are completely not interested in, or even somebody you despise, it's actually still going to hurt, because that's how strongly we are wired to experience. Rejection is painful. If you don't know that, you'll assume I must like that person that you don't like, or they must have more meaning in my life, which they don't have.

Guy Winch 00:12:10  That's just a natural, you know, kind of response. Like, you need to know that. You need to know that when we fail, we tend to do two things. We tend to personalize it and think it's a statement about us rather than, again, the preparation of the specific task. And we generalize it about our competency in general. If you don't know that that's a natural thing to do, you can't counter argue it. You can't counter that. So it's important at the same time to normalize and say, yes, you're going to feel that way, but that doesn't mean what you think it does.

Joe Sanok 00:12:40  I know loneliness and rejection are things that you've, you know, talked a lot about you, you researched what's happening in the world right now around loneliness and rejection. Like what do therapists need to be aware of. And that could be it's whole. We could do a whole mini series on that. but what do you see happening in the world around loneliness and rejection?

Guy Winch 00:12:58  Well, with loneliness, what we've seen happen over the past, you know, 10 or 15 years is that, the cohort that is experiencing more acute loneliness at this time, our younger people, it starts in teenage years and then young and emerging adults.

Guy Winch 00:13:12  You know, up until the age of, you know, 30, 32, depending on, on, on the, on the different surveys. But it's the young people who are feeling profoundly lonely for numerous reasons, which we can get into if you want. But but it's them. We tend to associate loneliness, with the elderly or those kinds of things. But actually happiness in life has a U shaped curve. You know, you start out happier, and then as you become an adult and life becomes difficult and, you know, the happiness goes down. And then later in life, it goes all the way back up again. And so it's not, you know, yes, certainly there's some elderly and some people who are isolated and lonely, but it's really an epidemic among younger people, number one, that people need to know, that people need to know that loneliness is actually dangerous. It will kill you. It's considered the equivalent same risk to your long term health and longevity as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Guy Winch 00:14:04  Most people would be alarmed by the idea of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and cigarette packs come with warnings. For that reason, loneliness does not. So we need people to understand both therapists and their clients that loneliness is functionally dangerous, especially when it's chronic. We also need people to understand that when you're lonely, you become so hurt and your body goes into protective mode, and therefore you're much more likely to withdraw and to isolate, even though that's the worst thing for you. And this is where mindfulness comes in with all these different emotional wounds, because you have to be mindful about the fact that you're experiencing a wound, and you have to be knowledgeable about what is happening around that wound and why your feelings the way why you are feeling the way you are, so that you can then be mindful about how to treat that wound and how to emerge from that state. All of that requires you have to have, you know, be able to take your own pulse and have the knowledge to understand the readings that you're getting.

Joe Sanok 00:15:03  Yeah. I've been following a lot around y you know, especially young men that are lonely are being, you know, really sucked into a lot of these extremist groups and just seeing how there's this very surface level acceptance and then surface level like kind of codes that they use and their inks that they feel and, and it's interesting to just look at, wow, there's like these dangers to us individually when we're lonely, like the cigarette example. But there's also societal things that when people are lonely, they aren't going to critically think about what they're maybe buying into, because they just want to be accepted by somebody. and so it's like, interesting to start to think about. It's bad for society to, you said we could go into some of the reasons why. What are some of the reasons why we're seeing more loneliness in people in their teens up to age 30 or 32?

Guy Winch 00:15:52  Look, when I was a young adult, if I wanted to be rejected, I had to have that happen in person. maybe on the phone with one other person.

Guy Winch 00:16:00  You know, in other words, I actually had to put myself out in a way for the person to say no today. if you have 100 followers on social media, whatever the social media is, and you're liking everyone's thing, and then when you're posting somebody something, only three people like it. Yes, you probably know that the algorithm isn't showing it to 90% of them or more. ET cetera, et cetera. But it feels like 97 rejections. It feels like people aren't responding to you and seeing you and interacting with you. So, so social media does that in that level. It just exposes us to much more rejection. Secondly, we are taking our lives virtually rather than in person. And it's, you know, virtual can be fine, but it's much more effective to meet in person when there's research about what kinds of conversations and interactions are more connected to the in-person ones. That doesn't take a genius to figure out. And if not in person, video is better than voice, and voice is better than text.

Guy Winch 00:16:56  And all of those with, you know, electronic communication, there's misreads all the time. So, you know, that's a problem to begin with. So all of these different things are happening, and people are also going on social media and seeing these highly curated lives of other people, which look fabulous, even if they know that they put out the same fabulousness and they don't put out their misery. But when they're feeling miserable, they just feel like everyone is happy with me. So there's a lot of different dynamics around social media, around interactions becoming more virtual rather than in person that have contributed to that.

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Joe Sanok 00:18:11  If you book today, you're not going to want to miss this. Head on over to session sites again that session sites. Get the website of your dreams today. Session sites. Guy. If you were in charge of graduate schools for therapists and you could, you know, say here, here's the 3 to 5 things I wish every therapist you know was trained in that would help with with mindfulness, learning about loneliness, learning about kind of emotional first aid or any of these things. What do you think are the things that really would be helpful to move therapists guiding their clients that they all should just learn?

Guy Winch 00:18:54  Number one, I think the most important thing I think therapists should learn is how to read and understand and appreciate science, because we are a rapidly evolving field. There are constantly new approaches, new techniques. They're being studied, they're being investigated. If therapists aren't, there aren't out there reading the actual science because it's too difficult or to do this, then they're missing a lot of what's of what's going.

Guy Winch 00:19:21  You can go to conferences and you can hear a person talk about this or that, but there are small little things happening all the time. And I started writing about emotional wounds. I was reading studies about rejections and what was happening, and I was like, wow, you can turn that into an intervention if you think of it that way. And I was just trying to translate those studies into actual practical tools. I think that's something therapists need to be able to do. I think the other thing they need to be able to do is to really translate whatever themes they're talking about into very practical, daily steps. You can talk to someone you know, for example, therapists will often talk about in books and influencers, whatever that one of the reasons, one of the ways to manage loss and grief is to find meaning in the loss and the grief. Most therapists know that's important. How do you actually help your clients do that? What are the steps clients can actually take? Take to discover that? To to find what? We can't all start a nonprofit for that kind of cancer because that's what killed our loved one.

Guy Winch 00:20:20  You know what I mean? We can't. Oh, wait, what are the ways to find meaning? What are the step by step practical tools to implement a lot of the ideas that we have in therapy, and I think that is something that therapists should learn. I think every therapist should learn systems thinking that they when they're working with an individual, you still need to think systemically, that if they change in a relationship and they have a partner, their partner will change because of their change and try and create homeostasis by getting things back to the way they were. Unless you can help the person manage what the interaction, what response they're going to be getting from their partner, it'll be hard for them to change the dynamic in the relationship. So I think systems thinking would be something that would be very useful for all therapists to know. I think mindfulness is something alternative should be able to know and practice in the form that works for them. I don't know if I've said five things, but but those are the kinds of things.

Joe Sanok 00:21:13  That's awesome. I mean, I think that just that idea of like, there's a natural flow in how you answered that, where it's, you know, let's look at the science and not just someone else curating it for you, but go back to the study and and read it. And even just thinking about, man, if you just read, you know, one study every Friday, you know, you know, take the ten pages or so, read the abstract and just say, okay, how does this apply to my clients? And did that for a year to have read 50 studies, you would be so much more well read than the average therapist. And then to say, okay, practically, how do I pair up what's going on in these studies with my clients and then being able to then help them, you know, make some daily decisions? I love that.

Guy Winch 00:21:52  I want to add one more thing, that the.

Joe Sanok 00:21:53  Fact that I.

Guy Winch 00:21:54  Should learn that I was never learned an iota.

Guy Winch 00:21:57  I was never taught an iota of this how to run a business, a practice as a business. I was never told anything about business. It was almost like a dirty word. But I'm sorry, that's our livelihood. So the practicalities of the business. I don't know if they teach that these days much, but they should.

Joe Sanok 00:22:16  Well, that's what we try to do here. Practice with the practice with so much of what we do. So, you know, I always love when there's people that are, you know, researchers, speakers about a certain topic. to find out what this looks like in your personal life, like, do you have daily habits or rituals? Weekly, quarterly, annually, like think how do you embody the things that you teach?

Guy Winch 00:22:37  Okay, so I have many one of the things that I am really, strong on doing is, gratitude that we have a family text where we express gratitude on a daily basis. And it's not like I'm grateful for the sun. It's got to have the meaning.

Guy Winch 00:22:55  You know, if you're not saying what the meaning is like, I'm so grateful for a sunny day. It's been so cloudy. And a sunny day. Always puts me in a better mood. And makes me think spring is coming. ET cetera, et cetera. That mindfulness, I, I'm not great with meditation in terms of mindfulness. I'll do it occasionally. I'm much better with mindfulness as a, walk. For example, I take walks every day, and every day I'll have a different theme of mindfulness that I'll follow. It's very important. As somebody who lives in Manhattan, in New York, to be among nature, because there's not a lot of it around me. So I will take walks where there is greenery, where there's nature, and the work each day will be, noticing the veins in the middle of leaves can be one day noticing the roots as they the patterns on the ground can be another thing. Just being mindful about the cracks in the sidewalk. Like every day, there's a different thing to focus attention on and appreciate and notice more.

Guy Winch 00:23:48  Because I walk there every day and I'm not noticing those things. So I do that kind of mindfulness. I find that, you know, refreshing different things at once. It's exercise, it's nature, it's mindfulness. So to me, that's something that, you know, that, works well. And I'm really strict about things like, rumination or anxiety when I have those thoughts, because we all do. And when there are times of stress, you have them or to catch them really quickly, label them and then, you know, give them the respect or really the disrespect they deserve as a relative thought or as a catastrophic thought. Like that's just catastrophizing. That's just rumination. I will literally say that to myself, but with like, with disrespect. I don't want that. I don't want that in my head. I train myself to catch it. To label it and to develop an antipathy for it. And so it's very useful. I still ruminate, I still get anxiety. I just, you know, I just take care of it rather quickly.

Guy Winch 00:24:43  It doesn't get to ferment.

Joe Sanok 00:24:46  The whole catch label. Let go. I mean, I do, Sam Harris's, it's a daily meditation he puts out. I don't do it daily, but I bet a couple times a week and really just that whole, like, noticing the thoughts, watching it go by and realizing how it pops up just like a sound. You know, just like birds, you know? And it's amazing how when you start to get in that habit and, you know, I obviously have a long way to go, but it's like, it's it's interesting when you catch it that alone, it's like it's squirrely where it wants to get away. And then it's like you label it and then next thing you know, just by noticing it. It's almost like when I notice the behavior in my kids that's inappropriate and it's like, hey, I see that you're acting. You're kind of snotty in the way you're talking to me, and we're just talking about the dishwasher. It's like, as soon as you say, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that I had a bad day at school.

Joe Sanok 00:25:32  Okay, great. But just by noticing it, it often takes the the air out of it.

Guy Winch 00:25:38  And that's a lovely way to point out to anyone, child or adult, that they're doing something offensive. Don't just say, don't talk to me like that. You could say, I'm noticing you're a little sharp in your tone. You know, it's easier to hear and it gives a very clear message of, I don't like that saying. I'm noticing this has the subtext that I don't like it in this context, and it's much easier for the other person to hear. So that's a lovely way to do it.

Joe Sanok 00:25:59  Yeah. And I think it's also like you're not saying I'm rejecting you. It's that behavior I'm rejecting and I'm noticing this that doesn't seem in line with who you are as a person. Yeah, it's.

Guy Winch 00:26:09  Almost a curiosity, right? Like what's going on that you have this tone right now.

Joe Sanok 00:26:12  Yeah. Yeah. It's it's man having kids. It just always, there's always something. You know that actually, I'm wondering, you know, in regards to children.

Joe Sanok 00:26:21  So my daughters at the time of this recording are ten and 13. you know, big tween emotions, big teen emotions happening right now. Totally normal, totally like within what you would expect, especially with the trauma of the last couple of years. what for kids do you think is important for them to to learn within their abilities?

Guy Winch 00:26:41  I think it's important for parents to. I don't know, most parents do try and do this, but I think it's for parents to I think parents need to do a lot of emotional coaching with children and teach them a, emotional literacy and granularity like to distinguish their feelings, to be able to articulate the complexity of their feelings. But how are you feeling? Bear down. Okay. Those are not emotional feeling words, and they don't describe how someone's feeling you might be feeling. I'm a little demoralized. I'm a little unmotivated. I feel a little flat. I'm a little, you know, sad. I'm, you know, anxious about something. Like, all those things have been going on at once and betweens.

Guy Winch 00:27:23  They're all going on in big, you know, tweens and teens. These are big ways. And so you're experiencing emotions so intensely and offer them many of them for the first time. In those ways. You need a parent to help you learn like, hey, first of all, that's entirely normal. That's entirely valid. You get to have all those feelings. Now let's talk about a what you can learn from them. Be how you can identify them. See what you can do with them. The different options in terms of regulating them. Like there's so much we need to teach kids in terms of how to manage emotions in a healthy and productive way that we don't. So every parent has an opportunity to do that. Number one, and the other thing I want to say to parents, which is really hard for them, that I'm going to say it anyway, is that resilience comes from experiencing adversity and surviving it, and being aware of what helped you survive it. Your kids are going to go through hard times in their tween and teen years socially, primarily, and there is very, very little you can do about it because it's happening over there with their friends.

Guy Winch 00:28:25  You're not in charge and or should you be, but you can help them with is understand their feelings, make certain decisions, understand who might seem like a shiny object as a person. That might not be a very shiny object who friends really are. How to find your people that when you're around your people, you don't have to try that hard all the time because they get you and you get them and all those lessons. Parents need to be involved in and help the kids manage because it's very complicated. It's very emotional. And, and, and again, comfort themselves by knowing that if your kid is going through a very hard time, it's kind of useful because they will learn from it. They will gain resilience from it. If you're going to give them a charmed life from here until they leave home. You are setting them up for a really tricky adulthood, because they will have none of the coping skills that they actually need, because you didn't help them develop them, because you kept preventing hardships.

Joe Sanok 00:29:23  Yeah. I mean, even down to like when my 13 year old was having trouble with a teacher to say, what can you do to handle the situation if you don't know how to phrase it? I'm here. But like this is if you're pissed off at this teacher and you feel like it was unfair and you were slighted, what can you do to advocate to them? What can you then do to advocate to the principal? Like who are people in the school that you can take the lead on instead of like lots of parents that charge you and say, how dare you talk to my kid this way? It's like that kid then isn't learning anything.

Guy Winch 00:29:54  And one other thing you can do. What you should do in that situation is perspective taking. What? Why did the teacher respond to you that way? Maybe they're irritable. Maybe they had a bad day. Maybe they're just not a very nice person. Or maybe you did something, but you were the 10th person to do it and they already couldn't deal like it's a relationship.

Guy Winch 00:30:12  You want to put yourself a little bit in the shoes of the other person to understand your impact on them, as well as vice versa. So? So that would be a good thing to add in.

Joe Sanok 00:30:20  Yeah. Well, even recently, my daughter, and I think this is coming out in the summer, so, people will be like, she's in school right now. But, I mean, at the time of recording, she's in school. one of her teachers was talking about our state hospital system and how, you know, during the 50s to 80s, she was saying, oh, this was really good because people got mental health care, and then they got released from the state hospitals. And like, no awareness of kind of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest kind of stuff that was, was happening. and we had just gone to Kalamazoo, where they have this wonderful exhibit all on the state hospital system. They talked about how women could be locked up, basically, if they're missing and that like, you know, overwhelmingly people of color were just locked up.

Joe Sanok 00:31:01  And like once someone was in there, there was no kind of way for them to get out or say, like, I'm not, I don't need this, you know? And so she had learned all this. And so she saw such a difference between what was being taught and what she had just learned from, like, you know, a museum. And so we worked on a letter because she wanted to advocate for it. And she's like, she wrote it. And then I read it and said, well, maybe this seems a little harsh or like this, you know, just to, like, help her with those social skills. And the teacher ended up like bringing it up to the class, apologizing in all three of the classes she had taught, and then said, like, you know, I was wrong. I learned that all these things happened, that women would be locked up for this and people of color. And so it was great because then she saw that her frustration went somewhere.

Joe Sanok 00:31:41  You know, the teacher actually did change. Very empowering advocacy.

Guy Winch 00:31:44  Yeah, absolutely. How empowering to know you have that impact that if you put thought into something and do it well, you can actually have the big impact. Yeah.

Joe Sanok 00:31:51  And you could have stayed quiet and mad. Or you can actually like, make some changes, right? we've started doing this thing recently that is usually used in couples work where it's called, like couples weather report. And it's just a quick like, how are you feeling? Kind of whether as a family, we've done that. And it was interesting because the other day they both gave their weather but didn't want to talk about it, and one was like a thunderstorm and then the other one was like a rainy day. And later we talked about one was feeling really low energy and the other was really mad at the other one. but that's just been a nice way to just kind of approach it a little softer than, you know, and help them learn some of those emotions.

Joe Sanok 00:32:25  Well, guys, this has been awesome. 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?

Guy Winch 00:32:32  I would want them to know that, you know, I think at least that we are in a really important job. We're doing very, very meaningful work. And the thing that I think that we are most at risk of as a, as a profession is, forgetting our own self-care, and being so focused on helping other people that we neglect our own needs in the process, and to just remember to shine the lens inward as well as outward, because you need to. You know you're going to have your periods of being overly stressed. Things are going to be going on in your life that makes the same regular work that you do much more difficult in that week, and that person much more difficult to talk to because there's certain wounds that they're hitting. You need to know that you need to actually be proactive and do things for self-care.

Guy Winch 00:33:22  When you're going through those kinds of times, and don't just be there for everyone else. Be there for yourself.

Joe Sanok 00:33:29  So awesome guys, if people want to follow your dear Guy column or Dear Therapist podcast or other things, where should we send them?

Guy Winch 00:33:36  So Guy Winchcombe is where you can find everything. I do want to say one thing about the Dear Therapist podcast. It's the only place on the internet where you're going to hear live sessions. Now we can't call them therapy sessions for legal reasons, so we call them sessions. But they're sessions in which two therapists kind of do therapy. So anyway, I'm just saying that it's a great place to listen to what that therapy is, and it's myself and a co-host. And every week we choose a letter, we bring the person in. We do a live session with them. We give them homework in multiple parts that they have to do within a week. Then they report back on what happened. And then we have a wrap up at the end in terms of what we think of it as therapy.

Guy Winch 00:34:18  So you get a full arc of a story. You hear live therapy between two very experienced therapists. And, you know, you hear a lot of different issues that that people can benefit from. So I think it's something therapists would enjoy.

Joe Sanok 00:34:30  So awesome guy. Thank you so much for being on the practice of the practice podcast.

Guy Winch 00:34:34  Thank you for having me.

Joe Sanok 00:34:43  You know, it shows like these that just are really exciting and inspirational. You know, as as Josh, our, guy on our team who's been booking so many just amazing guests lately, brings people in, like, I read their bios. I'm like, oh, my gosh. Like, look at Guy. He's got all these views and you know, Ted and, you know, done all this great work. it's interesting how that internal like. Well, what have I done with my life starts, but then to spend some time with the guy and to be like, we're just two people talking through how we've managed life, how we've we've figured some things out.

Joe Sanok 00:35:15  And, you know, people have resonated with some of the work that we do. No matter your phase of your practice, whether you're just getting started, whether you have a mega group practice, whether you have a podcast, we have a community here for you to help you be around other people, for you to feel inspired to, to be able to join in the conversation of like, what could I do with these talents, with these things I'm excited about within my private practice, to to help the folks that I want to help. So if we can help you out, head on over to practice with the practice membership. We have all sorts of communities for you to join to get involved with other therapists. we have over 200 people in our membership community that just want to join you in your process, to come alongside you, whether you're in sustainable solo practice or all the way up through being a group practice boss. We could not do this show without our partners and sessions. Seitz is our newest partner.

Joe Sanok 00:36:06  They help you optimize your website. They help make your website designed for engagement even better. Your site is going to be live in three weeks. So whether you haven't touched in years or you're starting from scratch, they have an awesome deal going on. Just head on over to session sites again, that session sites. To get that website that you absolutely deserve. 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, and this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter cover. 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.