[GROUP PRACTICE BOSS: You know what I learned from grad school about being a group practice boss? Nothing. But I did learn that managing consultants, marketing my group practice accounts and growing a group practice was a full-time job over and above trying to be a good parent, partner, and clinician. That’s why I started Group Practice Boss and called in the experts to help others who have been or who are currently in this overwhelming situation of growing a successful group practice. Group Practice Boss offers ongoing business support and a close-knit community, which gives you access to live webinars, discounts on things like graphic design and software to streamline your business and monthly contests to keep you motivated. For more information, I’m joining our next cohort visit practiceofthepractice.com/grouppacticeboss. Again, that’s practiceofthepractice.com/grouppracticeboss. I look forward to seeing you there. [JOE SANOK] This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 864. I am Joe Sanok, your host and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. We have been covering specialty month where we’ve been talking about people’s specialties, where they’re growing clinically, all sorts of things, where we’re moving a little bit away from some of our work that’s been specifically around all of the things that have to do with the business of a private practice. We did a lot of that. If you missed it we went through every single phase of practice over the last couple months. We interviewed people that are at the startup phase, solo practice, then people launching a group practice and then people that were in group practice. So we really did some amazing work there of just learning all sorts of things just about the business of private practice. We then went into some AI in session 858, and, actually we did that for two in a row. I didn’t even plan it, so 858 and 859 were both about artificial intelligence and chatGPT and how to use that with some SEO. And now we’ve been digging into specialty month. We’re going to be doing this for a bit here and really excited about it. So I am so excited to have with us today, we have Jason Nicholsen. Jason is someone who, when he first meets new folks, he often refers to the pillars of life, what we learn on when life gets challenging, what we lean on when life gets challenging, and using those pillars, including family, friendships, work, school, romantic relationships, partnerships, the last pillar is always the fun stuff, things that really recharge our batteries to which Jason says Star Wars. So Jason, welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. [JASON NICHOLSEN] Thanks for having me on, Joe. [JOE] Yeah, I am so excited. Got to just start with Star Wars. So fellow Star Wars geek here. What do you think of all the multiple spinoffs that have been coming from Disney and Disney+? [JASON] I am loving it. I will take anything that you can throw at me. So I just love being able to explore the universe and see different parts of it so I’m super excited [JOE] Even if there was a Jar Jar Binks spinoff? [JASON] Especially if there’s a Jar Jar spin. [JOE] Oh, have you, we’re not going to talk about this the whole time, but have you heard the theory that Jar Jar Binks was actually one of the like highest Jedis of them all? [JASON] Oh, yeah, and also one of the worst villains. There is another theory that he was a dark side user. [JOE] Oh my gosh. Oh, we could geek out on that for this whole thing, but no, we are in clinical month and so I put this out into my communities and into some connections out there. So you put that one of your specialties you have in private practice is my practice has a specialty in l LGBTQ care and a personal specialization in financial stress behavior. First, just so that people understand your practice, tell us a little bit about your practice and then would love to get into that specialty a little bit more. [JASON] Yeah, sure. So Within Reach Therapy as a virtual group practice, we are expanding, we’re adding some new clinicians with the idea of the core component was I wanted to be able to connect people with care in a way that they get to be seen as they are, so really making space for talking about multiple types of identities particularly sexual and minority identities, but really having a space where people can be who they are, and then be able to talk about the issues and challenges in their own life. Sort of acknowledging the different lenses that we all operate with. [JOE] Now, was that something that from the get-go when you’re going through grad school, you were like, this is what I want to focus on or did that emerge over time? [JASON] No, this was actually from day one. So I went to grad school at NYU and they had this really amazing program that allowed me to focus some of my graduate work on LGBTQ care including clinical internships, specific classroom environments. It was just incredible. But I really, I fully acknowledge, I identify as a gay man and I really want to be able to show up for my clients in a way that 16-year-old Jason really could have benefited from. [JOE] Tell me about that 16-year-old Jason could have benefited from. I feel like when we know someone’s why for their clinical work, it just makes it so much more rich, is there anything you’d like to share on 16-year-old Jason? [JASON] Yeah, I mean certainly I think one of the things that is an experience that I’ve, still stay with me is one of my first therapeutic experiences as a patient. I shared my identity with the clinician and she challenged my identity as being gay. So I really already started with a dismissal and it felt really crummy so I really left that session not feeling seen, not feeling heard, and really even more confused about what to do after the fact. So I really, and that strives, creates a framework for me to show up for my clients in the most authentic way I can. [JOE] Now let’s start with your own practice, so with your group practice. We all have our vision for what it’s going to be, and then the reality of what it actually is and sometimes there’s a gap there. Now when you think about what your vision was or is for specialty care in the LGBTQ community, what was that vision for the practice? Then what is that vision for the practice? Is there a space there that takes some training, some onboarding, some maybe values that you share with your team? Like how have you made sure that your vision for that care gets embedded in the DNA beyond you within that practice? [JASON] Absolutely. I think, million years ago, I used to be a HR recruiter and one of the things that still stuck with me about those experiences was it really is about fit and fit factors, meaning cultural. So when I’m hiring and recruiting for new clinicians, I really want to, I’m attempting to build a culture that allows my clinicians and staff to be who they are as well. I want them to be able to show up, I want them to be able to take care of themselves so that you can continue to show up for your clients. I think that is embedded in almost everything I do from the recruitment to retention pieces. I mean partly from a specialty perspective LGBTQ care is really vital. It’s absolutely needed. But the nuance of working with LGBTQ folks, I can teach someone. I can’t teach someone necessarily to be able to make space for other people. So when I’m engaging and talking to clinicians, I can, we’re really, what we’re really doing is communicating about our values and I value authenticity and transparency and hopefully a little whimsy or fun at some points. And I want to, I make as many spaces as I can for folks to play with those things and show those values through their action and how they care for folks and what we do as a community, as a group, as a practice. [JOE] Now, what, taking that a step farther, what do you wish any general practice would know? If you were doing a masterclass or a training on how to do this type of care really well? What would you say are some of the essential pillars that you would want people to just have embedded within their culture of their practice? [JASON] Yeah, I think the most important thing is actually just acceptance that we don’t know everything and it’s okay for me to ask questions. It’s okay for me to, not to necessarily have a, the exact same experience as the client who’s sitting in front of me. But I think from that perspective, curiosity and that gentleness about the curiosity is really important. The client is there, is the expert in their own lives. I’m no expert in how they want to live their life, but I want to partner with them to figure out what that might look like for them. [JOE] That’s such a great way to think about it. What else would you, if you were doing a masterclass for therapists, what else would you want them to take away? [JASON] I think the bigger piece is if we were doing a masterclass, I think one of the things that is most important that is not just around LGBTQ issues, but really, I use the word epidemic across our country, is really this sense of isolation and loneliness. Every multiple groups have folks that are really struggling to connect, really struggling to find community or build community and that’s really important to acknowledge and figure out ways that we can connect with our, connect our clients with community or give them the sense of autonomy and ability to build their own. We all, we are social creatures. We need, we strive for connection. [JOE] Yeah, I a hundred percent agree and I mean, I don’t think I saw that as something that was like natural for me to create community until I started reading. There’s lately been so many news articles, maybe I’m just getting targeted for them of how hard it is for middle-aged men to make friends and I’m like, wait, what does my Apple News know that I don’t know? But even just, my daughters in school year of 2021 into 2022 entered a new school and they had been on the road, we road schooled them during the pandemic. Even just going to a new school and making new guy friends as we’re doing pickup and then saying, “Hey, how about we all go get beers?” Like that’s a very natural thing for me to do but then recognizing, whoa, that’s not always natural for people. To just hear some of those guys, like, I never like have had a group like this. I’m like, we like literally just met at school pickup. It just, I think that idea of creating community and teaching your clients to do that, or even just giving them small steps is such a great idea because I do think so many people are lonely or maybe stuck in their own friend silos that aren’t a good fit anymore. [JASON] Yeah. And certainly those ebbs and flows are going to happen throughout our life cycle. We have different needs. I’m middle-aged guy myself. I have different needs than I did when I was 20 in college. I will have different needs when I’m 65 and thinking about retirement. So these are developmental pieces that I think are really important to keep on the radar for any client that we’re interacting with. [BLUEPRINT] Providing great therapy day after day can be challenging even for the best of us. At Blueprint, they believe that nothing should get in the way of you doing your best work, which is why they created a platform that provides therapists with an array of clinical tools, things like therapy worksheets, intervention ideas, and digital assessments that are designed to help you and your clients stay connected and confident throughout the care journey. Even better, Blueprint helps streamline your documentation so you can spend less time on your notes and more time on the things that matter. To learn more and request a 30-day free trial, visit blueprint-health.com. Again, that’s www.blueprint-health.com. [JOE SANOK] Now, when you think about formal trainings like grad school or CEU types of things, what would you say, and not to get too controversial, but what would you say that they get wrong when they’re thinking about LGBTQ care, when they’re thinking about clinical issues? Are there things that if you could rewrite the way it’s taught that you would do it differently? [JASON] I come from acceptance and commitment therapy background so I’m really, really grounded in act of being in the present moment and really having our values define what some of our actions might look like. But I think in terms of what they get wrong a little bit is, a lot of what I hear about LGBTQ clinical issues is a big umbrella and it’s so nuanced depending on where your client is from, what their experience is. It becomes more generalized that I think becomes a little diluted. So it’s not as, not nearly as effective in the therapeutic space as I would like it to be [JOE] So like more, there should be more nuance, more regional, like historical, how people were raised, more of that included in the conversation? [JASON] Yeah, and again depending on where my clients are coming from, their religious traditions look really different and intersect with their identities in a really different way. I’m from New York City. I have a very specific experience in growing up and I loved every moment of it. My son, my partner and I just adopted our son who’s from Oklahoma. He has a very different experience than I did as a 12-year-old and I think that’s really important to acknowledge where our clients are coming from keeping in mind these really marginalized identities that some of us have. [JOE] Yeah, absolutely. Well, I want to switch gears into your other specialty around financial stress, financial wellbeing. How did that, was that something that you’d known you were interested in for a while or did that emerge in in a different way? [JASON] So in another life, I would’ve gone to business school. I love finance, I love investment, I love talking about money and I recognize, especially in grad school, no one would talk about it at all, not even from a clinical business perspective. Talking about money with clients was always really uncomfortable for folks. I really, I strive to name the elephant in the room, so I always want to talk about money and get a sense of where my client’s relationship with money, how it was shaped, what their family experience and relationship with money looks like because that really does inform our current relationship with money. What we do with it, what our choices look like, what are, what the feelings that we have after those choices are made, those are all really important balance. I think even as therapists, we tend to avoid talking about it to our detriment to be honest. There’s a lot of really amazing work that can be done through this lens of thinking about financial behavior in a similar way that we do to with any other type of stress that our client is dealing with. [JOE] Well, I mean, I think a lot of therapists, at least based on my experience with one-on-one consulting and in our membership communities, they oftentimes recognize that there’s a lot of money issues there. Like even just today in some of my consulting sessions, people saying, I feel bad charging that much. I feel bad raising my rates. I feel bad making a profit when I’m paying my 1099 70%. It’s like, holy cow, that’s a lot of money for your contractor, 70%. So what work would you say therapists need to do first before we talk about the maybe money management, money stress, things that they could incorporate into their business, like personal work? What should therapists be doing there? [JASON] There’s a few things. So certainly getting really curious about your own relationship with money. I primarily work, I live in Washington DC area. There’s a ton of attorney, ton of attorneys here. I have never once met an attorney that felt bad for what they charged for their sessions. But somehow we as therapists really look at that and hold that in a really different light. So partially exploring your own relationship with money, what you think about it, what you, how you interact with money and also acknowledging there is some discomfort about when you’re showing up to care for someone who’s in real distress. It might feel awkward to just remind them, oh, I need a credit card on file, or we need to charge, I need to charge you for a missed session knowing that they’re battling with depression or anxiety or things that keep them from showing up for themselves. But again, I think we devalue our own time in a really detrimental way. My ability to take care of myself and my family allows me to show up for my clients in a way that could not be done if I were still at an agency job right now. Right now — [JOE] Now when you think — oh, go ahead [JASON] I just, I’m able to create space for myself that I can now hold some of that energy and be able to hold it for my clients and that’s pretty amazing for me. [JOE] Now, when you think about your own personal money management, things that for you have really helped you reduce financial stress, it’s so common, I guess this comes from a place of, as people make more money, there’s this thing called lifestyle creep where, oh, I’ve always wanted to have a nicer car, so I’m going to get that now. Then they find themselves making twice as much as they were making before, but their margin of how much they’re spending compared to the margin of what they’re making is still the same. They feel this financial stress, even though they’re making so much more money. For you personally, what habits have you enacted based on the therapeutic work, clinical work what you’ve seen, what you’ve studied for you personally? [JASON] So I really ascribe to this idea of mindful spending and mindful investment, meaning, I want to be able to use my money in a way that gives me more freedom, not less freedom. One of those pieces is really getting an understanding of the difference between wants and needs, which sounds silly as a trained therapist, like I should very clearly know the difference. But in a day-to-day operating space, like I would certainly love to be able to buy a new Star Wars toy or order some comic books or order even the newest therapy books but really adhering to this idea of what do I want, what do I need and do these choices get me closer to my goals and values or does it take me further away? If it’s further away, then I’m going to actually just pause a little bit before I make some of those decisions and come back to it and be really mindful of why I want something, why I am spending money on something. Really with the idea of really it has to be aligned with our values. Once it’s not aligned, it’s going to feel really crummy. [JOE] It’s interesting, I didn’t even make this connection until you were just saying that wants and needs thing. I was, my daughters are gone for a week on their spring break to visit their mom in California and so I have this week where I can do whatever I want for a week. So I was folding laundry, which is exactly what I wanted to do. I was like organizing my closet and there’s not really many clothes that I need to get rid of. I did that whole does this bring me joy thing four years ago and just the pandemic where I got rid of all the t-shirts that were itchy and over time have said, okay, I like that shirt. I’m going to buy three of them. They’re, so I have that caps that sought-after capsule wardrobe where I have all the pants I need, I have all the shirts I need, all the sweaters I need, like everything is fine and yet I still feel like I want to buy a new sweater. I want to buy a new pair of shoes. It’s really interesting to just observe that and say, okay, you have like, and it’s not just like sloppy stuff, it’s stuff that I feel really good in, and yet there’s this dopamine hit of buying something new from marine layer and getting it. And then going back to my values and saying, I loved living in a camper and having literally three pair of pants and having like, just a handful of stuff that I wore through, and it was so simple and I felt like I valued that minimalism and to now live back in a house and say, okay, when I order more crap, I don’t need. Like, even if I can afford it, that crap takes up mine space, tapes up actual space. So it’s interesting hearing you say that of, okay, there’s other values other than that dopamine hit of buying a new sweatshirt. [JASON] Particularly when, again, I never give financial advice, but one of those things that happened, some of those purchases go on credit cards and now, so not only are we now paying for those items, but now there’s additional stress of making those credit card payments and managing that debt, which becomes burdensome. [JOE] Wow. Well, I just have a couple extra questions. Jason, if you could go out to eat with any Star Wars character, who would you go out to eat with? [JASON] I would actually go out to eat with Kyla Ren. I identify with him the most angsty, but grows into his values. I really like that. [JOE] All right. I like that. That’s good. 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? [JASON] You’re not alone. It’s all, we all have moments where we doubt ourselves and again, just like we’re talking about our folks that are disconnected, connection is the key here. So connect to find a community of therapists, find a bunch of friends that are able to sit with you and be with you. That’s amazing. [JOE] So awesome. If people want to connect with you, read more about your practice, where’s the best place to send them? [JASON] Yeah, absolutely, so our website is withinreachtherapy.com. I look forward to connect, making those connections and building community. [JOE] Well, Jason, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice Podcast today. [JASON] Thanks so much, Joe. [JOE] I am really loving this series, even though we’re right at the beginning of it to just hear about people’s clinical work and how they got into it. It’s funny how often it still ends up being business discussion in a lot of ways where the way that we approach our business, the DNA of it, the way we think through things. It’s all business and it’s all life, and that we get to have that impact on the world. We have lots more exciting interviews coming up with people all about their clinical work and it’s going to be awesome. And we couldn’t do this podcast without our Amazing Sponsors Blueprint is our sponsor for today’s episode. At Blueprint they believe that nothing should get in the way of you doing your best work, which is why they created a platform that provides therapists with an array of clinical tools, things like therapy, worksheets, intervention ideas, and digital assessments. Even better, Blueprint helps streamline your documentation and spend less time on your notes and more time on things that matter. You can learn more and get a 30-day free trial over at blueprint-health.com. Again, that’s blueprint-health.com. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.