The Practice of Therapy

Gordon Brewer:
Well. Hello everyone and welcome again to the practice of therapy podcast and I'm so thrilled to have with me today, John Clarke from the private practice workshop podcast and John and I have really been able to kind of reconnect through this whole thing that's going on here in April. We, we said we weren't going to talk too much about it, but it's real, the COVID-19 crisis. Hopefully by the time this episode comes out we'll be getting into the tail end of it and life will somehow or another be kind of normal again. But welcome John. Thanks for having me, Gordon. Yeah. So John is as a really start with everyone, tell folks a little bit about your story and how you've landed where you've landed and what you did now.
John Clarke:
Yes, sure. I'll give you like the short, medium version, but I grew up in Virginia from Roanoke, Virginia, Southwest Virginia. Not too far from where, from where you're from, which is probably why we're kindred spirits, Southern gentlemen. I actually, I lost most of my accent when I moved out to California to be with my now wife who's from San Francisco. So spent all my life in Virginia until I finished graduate school and then went out to San Francisco to be with her. Started my first practice there. My roots really are in agency work nonprofits, worked with teenagers in the foster care system for a long time juvenile justice system. I really love that work. That kind of a social justice piece is really a big part of how I got here. I just found that I also really liked the business of building a practice when I got to San Francisco and was building in what remains a difficult climate or a competitive climate, I should say. And what's funny about that is I was just on the phone yesterday with someone in Seattle and they said, well, as you know, it's a very saturated market up here. There's too many therapists. And I said, you know what's interesting about that we had that same problem in San Francisco, but what I, well, it's also interesting is that whenever there's a lot of therapists, guess what that also means there's a lot of clients.
Gordon Brewer:
Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. People pay. I think it helps kind of get rid of the stigma to some degree when,
John Clarke:
So that's, I started this business kind of loosely in 2013 just helping friends with their practices and in San Francisco. And then I would charge them a beer and then I would charge them a little more than, than a beer. And then fast forward to now I do this full time. I, I sold my group practice. I went back to the East coast for a couple of years, built a group practice in Charlotte that I sold back in April 20, 19 and then I moved to Paris, France with my wife for her job, her startup job and have been there ever since. So I've been really in France for a year and a half, although in this moment I'm back in California and who knows where we're all going to be here. I am still doing this work
Gordon Brewer:
From wherever I am. Yeah. Well, John, John has always been a really an inspiration to me. I follow him and a lot of the work that he does and, and just in one of the things I've gotten to know about John is that we have so many things where they're just so many parallels with what we're doing. And John brings a lot of wisdom and a lot of insight and compassion to what he knew. I had to have my back on here. So yeah, so one of the things that we were talking at and what's funny is I just recorded on John's podcast, so you'll get to hear me on the private practice workshop podcast, which is a great, great podcast. I'll listen to it pretty much every week. And one of the things that we were talking about is just the, something about mindset and just about, you know, knowing your why and knowing your purpose, really thinking about the direction you want to go in your practice. So John, you know, one of the things that you had mentioned on your podcast, and if you don't mind, I'll get you to repeat it. It's just talking about the difference between having a mission and having a vision of course. Practice. Yeah,
John Clarke:
Of course. Yeah. And you know, what's interesting is well I see a lot of therapists creating what I call an accidental business or doing kind of like accidental marketing or accidental branding. I've used those lightheartedly when therapists are just kind of stringing things along without, without real purpose or thought. And so I really, so this my, my brand and even my tagline, one of my taglines is business made human and I didn't create that. It was a few years ago when I was doing kind of a rebrand or a brand refresh that I was working with these branding experts. And designers and they were asking me, who are you? How are you different? You know, what makes you different from other private practice? You know, experts and whatnot. And we just talked, I just talked about how I think the tactics, the strategies, the SEO, the, you know, the scaling everything that goes into building a practice is one piece of it, but we often forget the human part.
John Clarke:
And also what I find in my, my business makes human mastermind groups is that most of the time when therapists are not achieving what they want to achieve, it has to do with something internal versus external. Because let's face it, a lot of our answers are out there in Google somewhere. If we just go look for them. The parallel is, you know, as a therapist, when you have a client for nine and a half months of weekly therapy, they're still banging their head against the wall, right? Or they're still, they, they are having a hard time leaving a relationship or changing behavior, right. Or going, going after a job. They keep saying they're going to go after or having a difficult conversation with a family member. Right. I see some of you know, our therapist challenges as very similar, right? In terms of why they haven't done the next thing yet.
John Clarke:
Right. And sometimes that comes down to either a mindset block, a feelings of worth or issues around worth issues around power or money or what would it mean if I made more money or was it became different that way or they really lack a compass right when in, and that's how we got to talk and get to talking about things like mission, vision, values crafting that stuff even just on a loose piece of paper right now because people don't understand that that's how unofficial this stuff can be. It'll just start there and put something on paper because this, this, these, these elements of your business can and should evolve with you because it changes all the time. My vision for my business changes all the time. The mission stays pretty stable cause it kinda needs to, you know, for, for, for a business.
John Clarke:
But the vision as to how many get there, right? The values that are important to me and to my team and, and, and a company that helps therapists are pretty stable. Right. But we have to just try, we have to, we have to try to put some of this stuff down. So I have basically six steps to what I call building a business made human. I can go through them loosely if you'd like. Sure. Great. That'd be great. Yeah. Step one is, is, is start with why. So really crafting what I would say is your purpose statement. So all, a lot of times, you know, and I, there's a therapist recently, I've, I I've mentioned this who was really struggling with motivation. I don't know what to focus on. I, when I get up in the morning, I don't feel like working on my practice.
John Clarke:
I want him, you can address the behavior, right? And go, well, you need to wake up earlier or you know, you need to use Trello or whatever it is. It's kind of like addressing the behavior or the symptom versus the root. The question for him is really, why do any of this in the first place? Why does this matter? What will happen if you don't do this and work on your business and you know, reach, get more clients for your practice, right? Or hit that income goal. And so you do have to kind of start with why your purpose statement, right? I know for my own purpose statement is really to to, to reduce suffering in the world. That's kind of my personal you know, purpose statement always has been how I do that has shifted over the years. At first it was, it was being a therapist, seeing 20 clients a week in San Francisco doing agency work, et cetera.
John Clarke:
Now part of my vision for how I accomplish that is, is through helping therapists run a better business. I helped reduce suffering in the world by doing that, both in terms of the therapist's ability to man it, to build a great business that they love, that feeds their life rather than takes away from it. And that by way of doing that also helps their clients. So there's this trickle down effect. I started to realize the more I do this and the more my own business coach really pushed me to say this stuff out loud, which is scary. Right,
Gordon Brewer:
Right. Yeah. I think I, one of the things that it brings to mind for me is that I think what happens is we can tend to get overly preoccupied with how we're going to do something, but not really thinking much about why. And you're exactly right. You have to start with why before you do any of them.
John Clarke:
The, the Y is also going to be your fuel source. So especially on those days where it's really hard to get out of bed in the morning where, well, we're in a crisis like we're in right now. You have to have enough fuel in the tank to really make this worth it because I'll be honest, there are more risks associated with being a business owner than being an employee. There's more risks, there's more stress. You're going to take work home more than often, you're liable to different things that you're not as liable for if you're the employee of a company. So for me, it has to be worth that. It has to, your why has to keep that scale tipped in one direction of like, I'm so fired up about my purpose, right. That the bumps in the road are worth it. There is the liability, the dips in income, the spikes and encount. Right. You know what I mean? Dealing with competition, all these things, we have to do it with criticisms, whatever crises within my practice that at all has to be worth it because if at some point it's not your practice is going to start going downhill and you, and you may start going to it a dark place or a place of depression, you know?
Gordon Brewer:
Right. Yeah. When it gets gets that overwhelming. Yeah. Yeah.
John Clarke:
Yeah. So I, I think many therapists feel like I was born to do this, right. I was born to help people. I've always been a good listener riot. I'm in Pat, naturally empathic. Take that one step further and if you're listening right now, pull out that piece of paper and write down. So like then why private practice, right? So if your purpose in life is to help people, then why private practice, right? It's not the most effective place for you to help people, or is that, do you have other, you know, ideas behind your purpose? Whether it's like owning my schedule or my time or hitting income, so a certain income goal so that I can do X, Y, and Z in my life. So keep following it down. Right. And really try to get honest with yourself. And revisit this often.
Gordon Brewer:
Right, right. I remember, I remember several years ago I was working with a business consultant and she was helping me. I mean, I would, I had gone in to talk with her and it was that at that phase when I was building my practice where I was really trying to decide whether to, to, you know, whether to take my practice and, and build a nonprofit agency with it, or just maintain a solo practice. And, and or, you know, do to go into group practice on a really, you know, she really helped me hone in on what sort of lifestyle that I wanted to create for myself. You know, I gave her a figure, you know, of, Oh, I'd like to make X amount of money. And she, she really pushed me to say, okay, why do you, why that amount and why, you know, why do any of this? Why not just keep seeing clients like you're seeing your Mina in a solo practice and you could make that much money, but why are these other directions? And so that really, really helped me kind of you know, at that time I didn't know that I would start the practice of therapy or any of that. But once I had clarity about, okay, this is where I want to end up the rest of it kind of fell in place. Exactly.
John Clarke:
Yeah. Yeah. And, and have, and this is also why it's important to work with the business coach or consultant or someone who can help you look at this stuff, right? Cause people often go and I, I asked their APIs this as part of our screening process if they're joining fully booked or business made human, my two programs is what's your income goal and why? Right. In other words, how would that money actually changed your life or would it? Right. And how'd you come up with that number? Because a lot of times it's just pretty random or it's what I heard some other therapists is making or it's just, it's just more, right? I just want to make more. Yeah,
John Clarke:
That's, that's number one. Number two is establish that end point. So like you're saying, you're basically your mission statement. Any good, you know, any trip you're going to take, you need to know the end point, right. Otherwise you're not going to know where to turn, how fast to go. That, that end point is really a mission statement. You should think big. You should think of the ripple effects of your work. So a lot of times therapists go, well, my mission statement is, you know be a fair, you know, I do CBT and DBT for teens and adolescents with anxiety or whatever. That's just really what you do. That's how you kind of actualize your vision, right? Your mission statement is really this high level impact that you did, that your business could have on the world. I mentioned this on my podcast, but it's the best mission statement I've heard is, is this company Appalachia service project that I've worked with for years and their mission statement is to eradicate all substandard housing in central Appalachia.
John Clarke:
It sounds like an impossible goal. Good. Because it probably is and that's kind of the point in such a big goal and it's so infused into the culture of that company that everyone is constantly fired up by it because it's so big. Right? It's also so clear, right, that if ASP has accomplished their mission and end of the day, meaning, let's say you've accomplished your mission and you can close up shop, well, how would you, how would you know? Right, right. Huge mission for them right now. How they get there is where we start to talk about number three your vision statement, really your vision, how you're going to get there, how you're going to eradicate all that substandard housing. So for ASP, you know you know, hosting hundreds of volunteers over 30 counties throughout central Appalachia repairing, you know, a thousand homes every summer, right?
John Clarke:
Whatever it is. So then you start to really sketch out how are we going to get there? And this is, this part is kind of where I think therapists probably spend the most time thinking and maybe maybe even over-analyzing, right? Kind of like, how am I going to get there? What should my website say? What should I, you know, should I do Google ads or not? Should I subleased my office or not? And it's, we, we face a tremendous amount of decisions big and small as, as business owners and therapists. And these things I'm talking through right now are, they're just their guide, their guiding principles to help you make those decisions, right? Right. Otherwise, it's going to feel like every decision is is huge. I'm just kind of making it up. Right. And I'm just kind of dealing with a very limited set of information or the versus having some of this stuff in place.
John Clarke:
Yeah. If you don't know where, where you're going than any place will do. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The way I'm, the way I do my vision, and this is I, I stole this on abashedly from my friend Kelly Higdon who, I don't know if she's still up with someone, but she uses this kind of four quadrants tools. So if you take a piece of paper, put it in four quadrants the four quadrants starting at top left are, and going clockwise would be five years, one year, and then the bottom, it's this week and the next one to three months. So in that five years, you know, you need to, you need to start to sketch out where you need to be as part of your vision. And I put everything in there from like, I mean my, well some of my one year goals and I, I look at my four quadrants every day when I log in for work to try to understand what the heck am I doing today?
John Clarke:
What is my job here again? But in, in my one year goals in 2018, one was to to practice French every day and to be fluent in French in a year. It doesn't have anything to do with my business, but but it does in that I needed to carve out that time and money to invest in learning French, you know, for that year. Now I have other things on there too in terms of I need X amount of fully book students, X amount of business made human students. We're going to put out X amount of videos this year on YouTube. I'm going to make X amount of money. Those things are on there as well. Right. But the lifestyle part is really infused into my vision. So I have a bunch of other things on there too that are really lifestyle oriented.
Gordon Brewer:
Right, right. I remember I, I still use that as well. I remember John was was part of a mastermind group I was involved with, with Joe Sanok a few years ago. And, and I learned that from, from John the, the four quadrants and, and I still use that to this day and it's a, it's a wonderful tool as far as helping you really kind of think about, you know, how to connect all the dots.
John Clarke:
Yeah. The other thing that helps you do is, and again, I take no credit for this tool is it helps you reverse engineer, you know, your, your big tasks. So if I want to get, you know, 50 fully booked students in this launch, I can start to work my way backwards and go, then what do I need to do in these next one to three months to let's say, build my email list for that? What do I need to do this week to, you know, maybe create more lead magnets to build my email list. So it helps me really trace back like what actions I'm taking today and, and what they, what they should lead to, you know, in a year, five years from now. And that's a really powerful thing to do.
John Clarke:
So that's a, that's kind of your vision. Again, the vision is really how you're going to get there, how you're going to accomplish the mission, right? This is where the rubber really hits the road, right?
John Clarke:
Number four is we establish company values are kind of your brand values. This is really just kind of like what you believe in order to help make decisions, right? And even if you're a sole practitioner, I think are highly recommend doing this. You know, my, my wife worked at Facebook when we first lived in California and they have really good company culture, some of the best in the world, some of the strongest company values. All the employees can recite the values like by heart, cause they learned them in onboarding and they're infused into the culture and they're constantly behaving based on this values. One value is be bold and take action or take risks, be bold and take risks, something like that. So if a team is sitting there, even a single employee is sitting there and going, Oh, this seems kind of risky. I don't know if I should try this new product or you know pitch this new thing to my team. Well, they think about the values of the company. That's just one of them. And value is transparency. So they also value transparency in their interactions with each other, with their managers, right? Things like that. So you, you think about basically Waco, what do we believe and in this practice, in this business, and let's use those as really a filtering device for making decisions.
Gordon Brewer:
Right? It's really, yeah, I think I meant like a, it's almost like a template of what, what you aspire to be and, and it's then you do make sure that all of the things that you're doing live into that. Yeah,
John Clarke:
I think there's like a Mo, you know, in, in motivational interviewing there was like a deck of cards you can get and work use with clients that are, that help them identify their values. You just spread these cards out on the floor and you help them pick, you know, six values or something like that. It can be that simple. You could probably Google that set of cards and you know, sheriffs, I'll share business.
Gordon Brewer:
Yeah. Well, yeah, and I think it's you know, all of this I think comes back to what we were had talked about earlier was just, you know, creating the kind of practice that you want to have for yourself. And I think if you really, really put some thought into that and like John said, get out a piece of paper and start this stuff down because that's where you're going to, that's where you're going to get clarity. That's where you're going to get, be able to, to kind of look at the big picture of things. Yeah.
John Clarke:
Even if you're after today, your practice is just a little less accidental. That's a real one. Yeah. You know, and, and when I started doing business and in 2013 I wasn't doing any of this stuff. Most of my stuff was accidental, right. I was just, I was focused for nine months on just my website. Right. And getting it to rank on Google, I wasn't focused on anything else, any of this other stuff. So it always feels like extra, like looping background, like I've already been in business for seven years, why would I do this stuff now? Right. You know, but it's never too late to do it or start sketching it out, you know? And it really helps. It also helps if you're, if you have any employee or team member of any kind, even a contractor to have this stuff sketched out somewhere. Or if you have clinicians as part of your onboarding process, show them this stuff, you're the only one that can create it. And who's going to create a setup, sketch it out and make it official enough, you know, put your, you're pretty brand colors on it, your logo on it, and boom, it's official.
Gordon Brewer:
Right, right. Yeah, that's a, that's a great problem. I know I've done that with my team, with my, my group and we do, we w every year now for the last two or three years as we've done just a staff retreat at the beginning of the year and come again talk about these things, which is just time well spent.
John Clarke:
That's a great time to infuse some of this stuff. And just to be, you know, be the kind of leader you want to be.
Gordon Brewer:
Right, right. Well, John, I want to be respectful of your time and I want you to also to, to be able to for you to tell folks more about business made human and of course sports, the courses you've got available and that sort of thing. Yeah. I'll say the last two, if Nora's five and six really quick. Oh yeah. The event. Thanks for stopping me all that. Yeah.
John Clarke:
These next two are not too hard to do, but five is just set your ideal income. Six is set your ideal schedule around your ideal income. So really just get in there create, you know, set that income target and make it sure it's based on something and what, what you actually need in one and how are going to use that money. And then you kind of reverse engineer that around your schedule and go, okay, like again, if I want to make 130 grand what kind of schedule do I need? Right? Or if I'm seeing 20 clients, what should that fee be in order to hit that 130 grand. And is that doable? Is that 35 clients a week? Is that 15 clients a week? So that's the last part, right, is really start sketching out your days, weeks, months and years and make sure when you're looking at your calendar that it looks right to you. It looks good. It looks like, yes, this is worth it. This is why I did this in the first place. It became this, you know, a business owner.
Gordon Brewer:
Yeah. Yeah. It's and that's the same kind of technique that I, you know, as spouses well, is that you work backwards. You start with, you start with, okay, here's the end point. Okay. Now working backwards from that where, how do I get, how do I get there? Exactly. Yeah.
John Clarke:
Yeah. Those are the six, six steps, right? So it's if it's still April. Yeah. When this is out the doors to both of my programs right now, they just open once a year. Fully booked is a, a five step system for getting new clients consistently. It's the same method I used in 2013 in San Francisco. Use it again in North Carolina to build my group practice. We've had over 170 therapists around the road go through this program with really, really good results to set up systems to, to get clients consistently online for their practice. So that's fully booked and the doors are open now. We got to really make some really amazing bonuses right now too, for people depending on when they sign up. The second program is business made human. My mastermind community that is all about the stuff I just talked about.
John Clarke:
It's a weekly mastermind. You meet in a small group with me every single week for an hour. We also include a live event. We just did our first live event in Nashville, Tennessee, which was a real success and really enriching to be in 3d for a change. So that's all about really crafting that business and making it fit into your life. It's also about building other income streams, online courses, membership sites. I teach a lot of that stuff in those groups. So there's, my two programs is pretty simple. And if you're interested at all had to private practice, workshop.com or maybe I can shoot you some links to throw into the the show notes here. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, you can follow along your current practice workshop, podcasts, wherever you listen. We're also on YouTube private practice workshop. We've got a great following there that's really growing and yeah. Let me know how you're doing. I always love to connect with new people.
Gordon Brewer:
John is a great one to connect with. He's just got it. Just a wealth of knowledge and you know, I'm, I'm real, I'm real thankful that we've been able to reconnect as it's been, it's been a good journey here and yeah, and so be sure and check out private practice workshop like John mentioned and, and subscribe to his podcast too, like you do this one and, and be sure to take a listen because it's, I think it's, it's great to get the multiple perspectives and I don't know at all. And I like for other people to learn from new folks as well. So, well, John, thanks for joining this episode and it's, it's going to be a great, it's a great one.
Gordon Brewer:
So, yeah.