[WHITNEY OWENS]
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. Each week through personal story or amazing interviews, I will help you learn how to start, grow and scale your practice from a faith-based perspective. I will 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.

Welcome to the 100th episode of the Faith in Practice podcast. I can’t believe that has now been episode 100. It blows my mind. And if it weren’t for each of you taking the time to download the podcast, listen and share, I would not be sitting here right now, recording this introduction. So thank you for all your support and what it has meant to me is beyond words. I just can’t believe I’m at episode 100. There were so many times along the way, and I’m sure you felt this way in your businesses, or even if you do podcasting that I thought about stopping, way back when the first, I don’t know, 20 episodes, 30 episodes, is this worth it? Do people listen? Am I helping people? And over the past, it was really back in November when my Enneagram episodes came out, I just saw a shot up and people listening and people giving me feedback about how they were benefiting from it and it has meant so much to me.

Now this is a special episode. I wanted to make it special since I knew it was going to be 100. So not only have you been my support, but I give a shout out to Joe Sanok, the owner of Practice of the Practice, which this podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, who has really believed in me this entire time. And I think back to when I was a practice owner, not really sure what I was doing, I’m sure you remember that too and I started listening to the Practice of the Practice podcast, and then I got on a call with Joe and joined his mastermind group and worked with him for two years as my consultant made big changes in my business, started a group practice, got a better lifestyle. The first changes I made were raising my rates and hiring an assistant and those were all game changers.

I don’t know if I ever would have done that if I hadn’t had Joe rooting for me, giving me the steps to do that. And then it was at Slow Down School a few years ago that I started thinking more and more about the idea of being a faith-based consultant. I was scared. I did not want to go out on my own, but I also just knew that God was pushing me in this direction. And it was that Slow Down School that I decided I was going to do this. I said to Joe, I’m doing it. I’m going to be a faith-based consultant. Of course, I was also thinking, man, I hope you’re going to keep consulting me and teaching me how to do this. And he said, “Oh, wait, before you go off on your own, you want to consider being a part of the Practice of the Practice? And that was such a gift. I knew that God was calling me to do the faith-based component, but I really did not want to go out on my own and was really humbled and excited to be a part of the Practice of the Practice team.

So that is how that happened. And I wanted to have him as my 100th interview because of the support he has given me along the way. If it hadn’t been for Joe, I wouldn’t even be recording a podcast and speaking to all of you today. So thank you, Joe. And we did an interview on his latest book, Thursday is the New Friday. Now, I wanted to pretend like I was a big time podcaster and so before I told him he could come on the podcast, I said, “Well, I’ve got to read your book before you can come on the show so I can talk about it.” Like, wow, these people who get to read books and talk to authors before they’re released. I wanted to be like that person. So I got to be that person. When he sent it to me, I pretty much started reading it immediately. I remember one, I guess it was like a Sunday afternoon and I had to read the digital copy and I’m reading through it on my phone, which is not the easiest on your phone, so I suggest you get the actual copy of it, but I’m reading it on my phone and then I found my name.

I didn’t actually know I was going to be in the book, but there is a shout out to Whitney Owens and the wonderful times that we spent at Slow Down School, skipping rocks. So thank you for that. So I want to encourage you, obviously listen to the episode. The book is really good. I promise I’m not just saying it. I loved it. It really helped me think through some decisions that I make in my practice. I already make Thursday my Friday, but there were a lot of other things that I’ve been doing that I could change. We talk about that a little bit in the episode, changes I’d already made, but the other thing was really cool about the book is there were these little quizzes at the end of each section. He kind of talks about ways to be creative and getting to be outside the box, taking risks, managing your time.

And there were these little quizzes to help you kind of see where you’re at and ways to change things. I remember the creativity part because I always want to be more creative and he gives some tips for kind of how to be more creative, but really the importance of slowing down and how important that is and the stories that he shares in the book of practice owners is great. He shared some personal stories as well that are really benefited from. In fact, I was talking to him today about something else and was saying, oh, I really remember that story you shared about being in a meeting and realizing why am I in this meeting and pretty much walking out. And that really stuck out to me of how am I spending my time and why am I spending my time doing things that aren’t productive and aren’t helpful.

So I could go on and on about how I love the book, but I have already ordered my copies, even though I’ve read it already. I wanted to get my own copies and of course I’ll have to get a signature and I want to encourage you to do the same. So it’s Thursday is the New Friday, I’m sure there’ll be a link in the show notes, or you can just Google it or go on Amazon honestly, and buy it. I encourage you to buy several copies. If you have clients that are entrepreneurs, they will like it. I’ve already thought of several of my clients that I want to hand the book off to because I think they’ll really benefit from it.

Now, just to give you another bonus to this, if you go and purchase at least five of his books, you get a free ticket to Killin’It Camp. Killin’It Camp is our Practice of the Practice conference located in Estes Park, Colorado. It’s going to be October 14th through the 17th, and there’s several different tracks of classes you can take such as Pillars of Practice, and those are like the foundations, or we have classes on group practice. I’ll probably be teaching, I assume on one of those. And we also have kind of a side hustle podcasting and kind of making money on the side of your practice track as well. So myself, Alison Pidgeon, and Joe, and a lot of other great people will be out there. So if you’re interested in coming out there, go and get Joe’s book and check out, Killin’It Camp online through the Practice of the Practice website, so that you can reserve your rooms at Estes Park. It’s a beautiful place and it will help jumpstart your business.

I could go on and on with stories about people that went to Killin’It Camp a couple of years ago and how it changed their practice. So I’m excited and I would love to meet you. If you live in Colorado, no excuses. Get to Killin’It Camp because I’d love to hang out with you. If you have questions, feel free to shoot me an email, happy to answer any questions that you have about that. And I want to go ahead and get into this interview where Joe’s going to talk to us about how Thursday is the New Friday.
[WHITNEY]
Today on the Faith in Practice podcast I am interviewing Joe Sanok, who is the author of five books, but the most recent book being Thursday is the New Friday with Harper Collins. He also is a productivity researcher. He drove an RV with his kids on the road trip during the pandemic, keynote speaker, TEDx speaker podcaster behind Practice of the Practice, business consultant, writer for Psych Central and featured on Huffington Post, Forbes, Good Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Entrepreneur on Fire, and Yahoo news. Thanks for coming on the show today.
[JOE]
Hey Whitney.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. Well, glad to have you. Well, if there are people listening who haven’t met you, can you just share a little bit about yourself and kind of how you got to where you are now?
[JOE]
Yes, so I took a very traditional approach after graduate school, where I worked at community mental health and a variety of different clinical settings. I started a private practice that really was meant to be a side gig, but it started to take off while I was working at a community college and eventually had 12 people at that group practice entirely private pay. And then in 2019, I sold that practice and I had been building Practice of the Practice since 2012 and started doing more and more consulting over that period of time. Now I get to do great work with clinicians that are starting growing, scaling and exiting private practices. And then I have this new book, Thursday is the New Friday, that’s all about the four-day work week taking a lot of the principles we’ve covered with Practice of the Practice, but then expanding to a broader kind of business audience.
[WHITNEY]
Yes, well, I feel special because I had the opportunity to read the book. I feel like a real podcaster now like interviewing someone who wrote a book and I read it and no one else really has yet. So it was really cool for me. So I’d love to kind of dive into that, but what I love about this book for you, Joe, is I feel like it expresses what your life is about. And a lot of times knowing the author, knowing the person behind the book and it’s actually explaining the way that you’ve been teaching so many through Practice of the Practice. So the book really brings that out and I love that part about you and about your mission to the world. So let’s go ahead and let’s bring in some theology here, because really in the beginning of the book, you kind of bring out some biblical concepts of why the four-day work week, why do we need to rest, and that hustler mindset?
[JOE]
Yes. You know, when we really look at the Torah, when it brought together the first five books of the Bible, and you look at kind of how that came together, when you look at just what it meant to the Jewish people as they were leaving Egypt and slowly becoming their own culture, there’s that tendency in all of us to overwork, to over plan, to get excited about something new. So as they’re building Jerusalem and all of that and their story emerges, I think it’s really interesting how one of the core concepts was taking time to reflect and to have Sabbath into, make sure that there’s all these different things that slow you down. And then you don’t just become this human doing, but you stay core to being a human being.

Even how they did their fields, you know, how to keep the edges of their fields for people that didn’t necessarily have food. I mean, that’s a great practice to help keep people centered around kind of, we’re more than just the work that we do. And when we keep that front and center it’s amazing how brain research thousands of years after that was written down, continues to reinforce these concepts that when we slow down, we do our most creative and most optimized work and that we’re able to see the best use of kind of who we are with the talents we’ve been given.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. Well, I think a lot of people hear people say that and they’re like, no, not really. That’s not really how it works. So could you, or actually I’ll explain a story that I read in the book that I really enjoyed about the professor, or maybe it was, no, it wasn’t, it was an auto man at Kalamazoo College and how he saw the need for decreasing time spent on Fridays because of the air conditioner. You want to kind of share that story? I thought it just such a great example.
[JOE]
Yes. It was an HVAC instructor and guide that kind of oversaw all of Kalamazoo Valley Community Colleges just like heat and cooling. And he and I spent two or three hours really helping me understand just community college HVAC systems. So it actually was. It’s so different than your house. In your house you have your heating and cooling. You can say what’s a warmer day, let’s turn on the air and then it’s a cooler day, let’s turn on the heat. In large buildings you can’t do that. You can’t just go up and down, like in our typical houses. So he realized that the amount that they were cooling the buildings, especially when they were entering into the weekend that there were so few students that were actually on campus. So a year before he presented to the board, he started taking these pictures of cars in the parking lot every Friday and then he looked at cars in the parking lot on a Friday in the fall.

So he was invited to come speak to the board about some ways to save money using the HVAC system and he threw out there, “Here’s the data that I’ve gathered and it really says that a three-day weekend in the summer would save us millions of dollars over several years.” So the entire community college switched over where they worked 36 hours over four days and then HR actually donates four hours on Friday. So what happens is there’s more productivity. It’s also more student centered. I mean, so often students are like, “Why do you close at five? We’re students? We like to stay up till one in the morning. Why aren’t you open later?” So to be open till six or seven, and to have people that, for whatever reason, their family, maybe they want to come in at 10 and work later, to have that flexibility has helped with staff retention, it’s helped with saving money on air conditioning. And it’s an innovative solution in what’s traditionally not an innovative way of doing business. Colleges are pretty stuck in their ways, oftentimes, but at Kalamazoo Valley Community College really kind of showed that this isn’t a principle that’s just for entrepreneurs that can make up their schedule, but it really can be applied across the board to have a four-day work week at very traditional settings.
[WHITNEY]
Well, why don’t you walk us through the book, kind of a little bit of the outline so that people kind of know the good stuff they’re getting into?
[JOE]
Yes. So at the beginning I start talking about internal inclinations and so internal inclinations, the idea is that we’re going to think through what comes naturally for you and what doesn’t come naturally for you. It’s not a pass fail. It’s just saying, where are you at? So we all have inclinations that really point us towards success or that we just need to work on. So the three internal inclinations that really kind of, we’ve seen over and over in the research and with case studies that help people to level up as an entrepreneur, as a business person, even as a, what I call intrepreneur, so someone inside of a business, but that thinks like an entrepreneur, is first curiosity. Second, we have the ability to have an outsider perspective and third, the ability to move on it. So if we look at curiosity, we know that when that’s naturally occurring that you really are entering into a variety of situations to think through just what’s the outcome here?

What am I exploring? It’s not pass fail. It’s wow, that’s interesting. So one of the biggest kind of thoughts is that we’re not looking for Eureka moments where like the light bulb goes off. But instead we’re just saying, “Well, that’s interesting.” I mean, I even think about my daughters, my six- and nine-year-old, and we were on this big road trip and my six-year-old just loves rocks. We were at Petrified Forest and she’s looking at all these petrified rocks and she could’ve stayed there for days. She’s like this little Zen master. And even still, like last night she was having trouble falling asleep and I just said, “Well, what’s something from our trip that really just gave you joy, that you felt safe and happy, and you could have just sat there forever?” And she was like, “Petrified Forest. I just loved looking at those rocks.”

So for her, she’s curious about rocks and to have that childlike wonder to just take it slowly and look at rocks and be curious, entrepreneurs that do that, business people that do that tend to be more successful. Secondly we have the outsider perspective. And so, so often people just go with the flow because it’s what they feel like they’re expected to do. They want to make their private practices like everybody else, they want their website like everyone else, they say, “Hey everybody’s doing it this way. I guess I should do it that way.” But actually statistically, we see the outsiders have more of an influence on a group than insiders from a statistical advantage. So there was a study done where they brought people together where there was colors that they had to determine between like, was this more blue or was this more green?

So first they brought together the group and people are saying blue, green, blue, green, and they’re doing this as a group. Then they brought in, I believe it was a third of the people that were working with the researchers and they would say occasionally the opposite of what it was when it was kind of on the middle, where it was a little, it looks pretty blue, but I guess some people could see it as green. And they found that statistically, those people had more influence over the group than they should have. We see this over and over in lots of different research that I dive into in the book. So having that outsider perspective, and if you feel like naturally, you don’t have it, and that’s what some of the assessments in the book help walk you through is that you then are better able to kind of understand, okay, how do I develop that outsider perspective? How do I put myself in unique situations that helped me to just think differently about things?

So, for example, I took my family on this gigantic road trip across the country and before driving a 37-foot pull-behind camper, I had never driven any sort of trailer, no boats, no, jet-skis, not a lawn mower, nothing. So I had this enormous trailer behind me and the sense of mastering a new skill that literally has life and death consequences if I don’t learn how to drive a trailer down this gigantic highway, there’s just something that happens in your brain that you feel more alive. You feel more engaged with the world. It’s tapping into that evolutionary learning that it, when something’s a bit dangerous and you’re at that edge of where things could go wrong, you pay attention way more. Your brain feels alive. And we just don’t have many of those experiences as adults.

And then the third part of that is that we’re looking at the ability to move on it. And oftentimes there’s this push and pull between speed and accuracy. So speed, getting things done, we want to, for most things be at like 70% speed and 30% accuracy, meaning not that you’re going to be inaccurate, but then you’re going to be moving into just being able to just allow yourself to not have it be perfect. So that’s kind of the first part of the book. I should probably take a breath and let you jump in there, if there’s any other things that you want to ask about that section before I go into kind of the rest of it.
[WHITNEY]
Yes, sure. I would love to comment on this. I loved the interaction within the book that it’s not just reading, hey, here’s some cool ideas and here’s what you could do, but the assessments are there that you’ve created. So within each of those parts that you just talked about, there’s questions and it goes even deeper than that. And then you can read about yourself in the assessment. So I did every one of those and kind of documented and thought through. Okay, well, here’s where I struggle with curiosity. Here’s where I struggle with outsider perspective. So I loved that it was very applicable to the reader and being able to go through those assessments, not, I think you’re going to have those on your website.
[JOE]
Yes. So when you buy the book, you get free access to the assessment we’re going to be selling it for, I think, $55 or something. If you buy the book, you get free access to all of that. And we’re making it more robust than what a book can offer and we’ll eventually have free videos and trainings for people that read the book. So yes, we want it to be that it’s not just you read a book and you’re done, but this really becomes something you think about. If we know that the research supports these are three big things to help you be successful, then we should probably focus on those three things to be successful.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. Okay. What’s the next part of the book?
[JOE]
Yes. So then we dive into slowing down and so slowing down and then kind of the yin yang of that is killing it. So you even look at what we do with Practice of the Practice, our two conferences are Slow Down School and Killin’It Camp. So when you look at the brain research, when you slow down, your brain is better able to come up with creative solutions. So I think about, even at Slow Down School, I talked about this in the book. So Jessica Tappana from her SEO company, she was hanging out at Slow Down School, her Simplified SEO and it was interesting because she had come to Slow Down School with the focus of really working on just being able to run her practice and have better automations. And the first couple of days we spend, we go hiking, we have a massage therapist come in, obviously this was pre-COVID and it’ll be post COVID, bring in a yoga teacher and you have an executive chef, have a great salad bar that local farmers make.

So really for a couple of days, it’s turn off your phone unless you’re taking pictures. People know that ahead of time, we play spike ball on the beach and skip stones. You made it into the book talking about when Michael skipped the unskippable. I just told a story in the book about how we’re slowing down so much that, it was me my daughter, Whitney and Michael, Michael Clavin from Chicago and we each had to pick up a rock that we thought was unskippable and give it to somebody else. And I think was it my daughter, Lucia picked up the piece of concrete and gave it to Michael and Michael skipped the unskippable concrete rock. So there’s all these little things that we do that are just meant to genuinely relax and have that human connection. But then on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, we just run full tilt towards our businesses.

With Jessica in the evenings, she was just helping people with SEO, just here, I’ve learned a couple of things as a clinician and a light bulb went off for her that this could be a service that really actually helps people in their practices. And by the end of the week, when she said, how many of you would want to be some of my first clients for SEO if I was going to start an SEO company, I think she had eight or nine people that wanted to work with her from just this brand new idea. So we see over and over that when you take that time to slow down, it’s sort of like the energy gets pent up and for Slow Down School by Wednesday morning, people are just ready to sprint full tilt towards their businesses rather than how most conferences are.

You know, you’re burned out from the travel there, you can barely pay attention in the sessions, you stay up late talking to people, but then you’re dead tired when it’s actually time to learn and work on things. So we see that that slowing down can also come into our own personal lives. And it doesn’t even have to be that you take four days off a week or something like that. There’s tons of research that emerges that even if you take a one-minute break every 20 minutes to just move your body, move your eyes, that you’ll be more productive in the next 20 minutes than if you just keep powering through over and over.
[WHITNEY]
So much I could say here but I’m thinking about Slow Down School and kind of to bring the religious language, I guess, or whatever we want to call it. When I was at Slow Down School, like I felt closer to God than I had felt in a very long time. And it’s not like Slow Down School is some religious experience necessarily, but it’s when we slow down that we can hear ourselves and hear God and hear what our passions actually are instead of getting so wrapped up in everything going on. And it was on one of those hikes by the water that that Bible verse about Mary and Martha came to me and honestly in a different kind of way that I was so focused on all the details that was missing, the big thing, which was consulting, which I had been running away from because I was so fixated on my practice. So not only is slowing down good for so many ways, but think from a spiritual standpoint where souls come alive and that God really feeds us in those times that we quiet ourselves and listen.
[JOE]
Yes. And I think that having that time to just reflect and just pull back the layers of the film of everyday life, no, we can’t do that all the time. We have responsibilities, but being an adult is really hard. And when you have kids and you have meals to make and dishes and partners and friends and all of those layers are good, but oftentimes we just don’t take the intention to think through, well, what do I actually want? So even starting a few months ago I started going for more walks and probably doing, I don’t know, 15,000 steps a day or so. And just doing it out of just wanting to clear my mind, wanting to have really like accurate headspace, be able to be as grounded as I can be and just taking the time for myself.

And there’s so many extra unintended consequences. I’ve had back problems since I had a bad snowboarding fall when I was 19 and then had surgery at Mayo Clinic. So to do these things for my health has really helped me realize what is the thing that I really want to do on this planet? What are the things that are interesting right now? And I think Slow Down School, I see it as just kind of dipping our toes in where, when people have that experience, it’s hard to go back because if you have these spiritual experiences or you have this clarification and said, well, why wouldn’t I try to live the principles of Slow Down School as much as I can outside of Slow Down School?
[WHITNEY]
Definitely. Well, I definitely want to talk about Jerry. I was literally laughing out loud when I heard his story and like my husband, we were out in the yard and I was like, “Oh my gosh, you got to hear this story about this guy who kicked a kickball and his foot came off.
[JOE]
Yes. Jerry was one of my consulting clients and when he first came to me, his wife was actually on the pre-consulting call also, and it’s really interesting that hasn’t happened very much when a wife is saying Jerry needs some help. She said to me, I said what’s really going on. And one of the biggest things that I ask people in a pre-consulting call before I work with them is kind of like, what’s the why behind the why behind the why? I just keep pushing that why. So they may say something like, I just need to work less. Well, why do you need to work less? Well, I need to spend more time with my family. Well, why, and just kind of pushing into that. And when we kind of got to the call, Jerry’s wife was really worried that he was going to have a heart attack because he was working so hard.

He has a huge practice in orange county was just doing an amazing job but every evening he would be emailing till late and just his systems were rough. It was really interesting that after that pre-consulting call, before we started, he did have a heart attack and ended up in the hospital and then ended up doing consulting. So he really cared about the consulting after that because he realized like this is not sustainable. So Jerry’s story actually, he has had a amputee leg. He for years didn’t know that, the other kids didn’t know that his leg was not the same. So he just, I told this story in there, he said I could share of when kind of all that fell apart and he kicks this kickball and his leg goes flying in front of the whole class, a like a like elementary kid. And I just think about, yes, I thought I had embarrassing moments.

But for him, sports became something that despite his disability or differences, became really important to him. So snowboarding for him was the thing that was our hook in consulting. So oftentimes I’ll ask people in consulting what’s one thing that really represents progress and where you want it? Some people will talk about freeing up time, freeing up money. You know, I remember Clay Cockrell wanted to be able to, you know with onlinecounseling.com to buy a place for his wife to be able to do acting and she would put on a lot of theater in New York. So what does that kind of hook for the person?

So for him, it was if I could just go snowboarding, like every Wednesday, that would be amazing. So everything we did around processes had to do with snowboarding. So for you to go snowboarding and feel like you can snowboard and do that guilt-free, what has to be in place while I have to know that who’s answering the phone will answer like me, that they’ll make decisions like me. And what happened is once you set up those systems and realize I can be gone and go snowboarding. It actually applies to more than just Wednesday. You can actually take Friday off and there’s all these extra unintended consequences but once we get it set up for that person around the thing they care about, just like in therapy it just trickles kind of way past that typical spot.
[WHITNEY]
And then I guess at the end here, you talked about how do we actually implement slowing down and like step by step process.
[JOE]
Yes. So for a lot of us, I think that I view this book very much as a menu. I mean, there are prescriptive things, there are blueprints, but I really view it as here are some options of how people have done this because each of our life situations is so different. I mean, your family situation, Whitney is way different than my family situation, and the same with whether it’s an individual or a business that’s reading this, but at its core, it’s, we need to take more intentional time away from working. The hustle narrative that we’ve been given is that you’re an entrepreneur. You need to always be thinking about it. You always have a to-do list. You never know when enough is enough and you just keep going, going, going, and then you feel guilty because you’re not with your family but then when you’re with your family, you feel guilty. You’re not working in your business.

And to just say, listen, like we created time. Time, if we dive into that on this podcast interview, the Babylonians handed us our workweek and Henry Ford handed us our 40-hour work week. And that’s less than a hundred years old. So humans made up the way that we see time right now and it’s not always been this way. In fact, it’s very, very recent how we view time. So these things that we hold dear actually, aren’t true. So when we undo that and we look at time and we look at how things could actually be, I think there’s a freedom that comes because then we’re able to then dive into our creativity and other things that will help us to unlock our brain in a way that we wouldn’t do if we just stayed stressed out and maxed out.
[WHITNEY]
Yes, that ultimately when you slow down, you actually are more productive than when you work hard. And there’s so many examples in the book of people who kept working, kept going and research that shows that they were not as productive when they didn’t take those breaks.
[JOE]
Yes. Well, it’s like even, I texted you and said, “Hey I’m free early to do the podcast.” And then you were working on another podcast. So I had to then think, okay, what’s the best use of my time as I’m waiting for Whitney? What’s something that I can do and be disrupted from? So I’m in a membership community for entrepreneurs. I also have the book that I should go through and I had emails. So to look at that 45 minutes and say, what can I do that I can stop at any moment if Whitney’s ready early? So knowing that this book is my big thing right now, that 2021, the book is the priority that made it a lot easier to decide where to spend my time. So I sat down with the book and went through, kind of doing some final edits, making sure that there’s nothing that looks funny before the final version of it. All those other things were good, but what’s the thing that I’m really working on now. Well, it’s the book. I want to make sure the book is its best quality and that’s the thing that’s going to open as many doors as possible for my future and my career.
[WHITNEY]
Definitely. Well, let’s talk a little bit about Killin’It Camp and for anyone who, you maybe share a little bit about what it is for people who haven’t heard about it and how can they get access by buying your book.
[JOE]
Yes. So we have a few different deals over at thursdayisthenewfriday.com. And that’s going to outline, there’s a few different levels of if you buy the book, then you get free Killin’It Camp tickets. So Killin’It Camp, we host that every October. This October, it starts on October 13th through 17th of 2021. We host that in Estes Park, Colorado at the YMCA of the Rockies right next to Rocky Mountain National Park. And really the idea for me is to have a conference that’s completely about private practice, to have one that only drills into that. So it’s a combination of large group sessions where it’s usually me or a keynote speaker or a panel or people like you, Whitney that share kind of principles for private practice. And then we have a lot of breakout sessions. So we usually have shorter 20, 25 minute Ted talk style ones, and those go on the half hour, So it’s super fast kind of principles of practice, And then we have some longer sessions that are 50, 55 minutes.

But it’s really, it’s fun when you get the people in the room together. And we all miss that from COVID and we’re doing a lot of safety measures of course, to make sure everyone feels comfortable, But you have to get people in the room together that just get it. You know, I remember at the first Killin’It Camp in fall of 2019, I was doing this exercise where you have the whole room kind of be a spectrum where on one side you have your comfort zone in the middle, you have your growth zone at the other end, you have your panic zone. So I was throwing out things like skydiving and then people would physically move themselves on the spectrum of if they were comfortable, if it was growth zone or panic zone, eating sushi, or kind of start with some light things.

And then I said, making more money than your peers. And I thought that would challenge a lot of people and thinking, you know, because there’s a lot of money issues that are out there and almost everyone went to their comfort zone except for a handful of people that were in their growth zone and maybe one or two people that were a little bit closer to the panic zone. And I just, in that moment, it was like, it clicked like these are my people. Like they’ve already learned that money is just a magnifier, that make you more money than your peers is no reflection on you being a good or bad person and we’re at a starting point together. It’s much different than kind of the typical therapist. And to bring people like that together, I mean the stories I’ve heard of collaborations that have come out of that friendships, just depth across the nation, you know people that never would have met each other. I just get so excited about Killin’It Camp and just the idea of bringing hundreds of therapists together that are doing private practice.
[WHITNEY]
I’m looking forward to it. You know, we just had the LPCA conference here in Savannah. So that was my first big in-person, 350 people, but knock on wood. It actually went really well and seems to be COVID-free and I was really happy with it. It just really brought a lot of my passion back up and excitement for the work and Killin’It Camp is the same way. Just really amps you up about what you’re passionate about and that we Practice of the Practice, so many people do lifestyles they don’t want or ask people to do things they don’t want to, don’t do it just because everyone else is doing it. You know, do it because it’s what you love. And that’s what this book is all about. So I would just say, I love the book. It really challenged me in a lot of ways.

In fact, have already made some changes since I read the book and thought, oh, okay. Oh gosh. Okay. So I went all weekend and did not check my email one time. I know it’s simple, but it’s like so difficult for me because it’s, and I think you talked about this in the book, that idea of, I need to check it because if I don’t, it’s going to be too much on Monday or too much on Tuesday when I’m ready to check it. But I was like, okay, I’m going to keep doing the stuff that’s in the book and just see how this works. So I was very anxious when I opened my email yesterday. It wasn’t that bad. It really wasn’t that bad. And really trying not to do anything when I get home. Now that means some things are slipping through the cracks, but hopefully it’s going to teach me what’s important and what’s not important, because I kind of got into that, okay, I still got to get this done. And COVID really encouraged that because I was working from home and then I got used to working from home. Yes, so trying to really let go of that. So trying to make changes a little at a time and I think that the audience will really appreciate the book and be able to make their changes in their business. But also I think it really helps your spiritual life in these concepts and being able to slow down
[JOE]
So awesome.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. Well, I ask everyone that comes on the show, what do you believe every Christian counselor needs to know?
[JOE]
I would say we were handed this Protestant work ethic. And when you really dive into that that’s a very recent version of theology. I would say a very inaccurate version of theology. Yes, we need to use our talents. Yes, we need to work. We can’t just be lazy, but I believe that’s really gone to the extreme. And when you really look at Sabbath and you really look at slowing down, it’s not only biblical. It’s also very practical, that when you take that time, you’re going to do your best work. And isn’t that what every Christian counselor wants, is to do their best work during the short time we have on this planet. So to feel alive, to feel like you’re using the gifts that you’ve been given to me, I would argue, comes from slowing down first and then doing really amazing work when you have all that energy to put back into the world.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. I’m glad you brought up the Protestant work ethic because I thought about that when I was reading it as well and then you had that kind of there at the end and I appreciated that you brought that up because it is just this crazy mindset that people get drawn into. So thank you.
[JOE]
Yes, absolutely.
[WHITNEY]
All right. Well, we will have links to everything in the show notes, especially with getting the book and on bulk buy and that way you can purchase it for you for your company. If you’re a group practice owner give it to the people that work for you. It would really be helpful really for anybody in any phase of business and their life.
[JOE]
Yes, thanks.
[WHITNEY]
All right. Well, thanks for coming on the show.

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