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Hey folks. Welcome back to The Testing Psychologist. [00:01:00] Glad to be here with you and glad to be talking about some business stuff today.
Today, I am presenting a slightly different version of a talk that I gave at Crafted Practice 2024 back in early August. This is the in-person business retreat for testing psychologists. Just completed our 2nd year. It was incredible. I’m going to do an episode soon to recap that event, everything that happened there, and how fantastic it was.
For today, I am sharing, like I said, a slightly different version of the talk that I gave there that focused on the concept of Essentialism which is largely based on the book of the same name by Greg McKeown. This episode is aimed at helping folks get clear on the most important, meaningful, and fun parts of your businesses. If that sounds like something that you could use, then stay [00:02:00] tuned and we’ll talk about how to identify the most essential elements of your practice.
All right, everybody. I want to dive right into it. In the spirit of keeping things essential, we’re going to just get right to it.
Like I said, we are exploring some ideas from the book Essentialism. I am curious if anyone out there has read this book. If not, I would highly recommend it. It came out back in, I want to say 2016, maybe 2017. I didn’t personally read it until about 2020. Back then I was doing a pretty deep dive into time management, efficiency, systems, and streamlining. This book was part of that research, [00:03:00] but to be honest, I didn’t do anything with it for a few years and it didn’t become more relevant for me until the last year or so.
I’m going to start with a quote from the book and see how this resonates with you. The quote is, “Success can be a catalyst for failure.” I’ll give you just a second to think about that quote, “Success can be a catalyst for failure.”
You might be thinking about what this means. At first glance, it seems like an oxymoron, but if we think about it, it’s a little deeper and there’s a lot to explore here. So we’re going to do that over the next few minutes, and I’ll tell you what it meant for me.
Last year, when I came back from Crafted Practice, this was in again, August of 2023. This was right after the first year that I’d hosted Crafted Practice. [00:04:00] I had dreamed of hosting an in-person event for a long time, but I think like a lot of dreams that many of us have, I didn’t do it because I was scared. I was worried nobody would register. I worried if they did that they would come and it would suck. I was worried that the hotel wouldn’t work out or the food was going to be terrible that I was not going to be able to deliver any kind of meaningful or helpful content. Anyway, long story short, I pushed through largely with the help of my small group of psychologist friends, that’s Stephanie, Laura, Chris, and Andres. They said, just do it. So I did it. Last summer we had the first event. It was amazing.
I came back from Crafted Practice last year so fired up and full of joy. The only problem though was then I went back to my “regular life” [00:05:00] which was largely occupied by running my practice, which at that time, was quite large and remains a fairly large practice, but I went back to my practice and it was just being frank, not joyful.
I looked at how I was spending my time in the practice and a quick look through my schedule showed that I was spending the vast majority of my time in meetings, straight-up meetings. This is not clinical appointments or podcasts or consulting or anything like that. These are administrative meetings involved in running the practice.
So when I went and looked, I want to give you a quick rundown of how many hours per week I was spending for the first four weeks after last year’s event. This would be like mid-August to mid-September of 2023. This is how many hours I was in meetings each [00:06:00] week. The first week was 16.8 hours. The next one was 11.2 hours. The next one was 15.3 hours. And then the 4th week after the event, I was in 19 hours of meetings over the course of a week that were involved in running my practice.
I asked myself, “How did that even happen?”
And this is where I’ll call back to the quote from before. “Success can be a catalyst for failure.” Our practice was fortunate enough to be very busy. We diversified into counseling, therapy groups, and workshops. We dabbled in med management for 2 years. We started doing lifespan neuropsych in addition to pediatric and neurodevelopmental evaluations. We hired a lot of folks over the years. We peaked at over 40 clinicians and staff. Part of that was that the leadership [00:07:00] team had grown as well. I think many of you are familiar with the series that I’ve done on the Entrepreneurial Operating System or EOS. Our leadership team had grown to include all the directors. So we had 4 or 5 directors. We had an assistant director, me as the visionary. We had coordinators and supervisors. So our leadership team was also quite large.
All in all, that resulted in a lot of meetings, and most of them were spent solving “people problems,” writing policies, rewriting those policies, thinking we’d solved the policy, and then coming back to it. There’s a lot of policy stuff and a lot of just administrative stuff. For the first time in a long time, I recognized at that time that I was burning out.
[00:08:00] Now, let’s leave that behind. Let’s fast forward to the most recent four weeks. These are the four weeks leading up to this year’s Crafted Practice retreat. So this is July of 2024. This is how many hours I spent in meetings. 4 weeks back, it was 6 hours. The next week it was 5 hours. The next week it was 3 hours. And then the final week that I looked at was zero hours. This was a holiday week, but still, usually, I’d be working on a holiday week. So this is great. So much fewer hours in meetings.The question is what happened in between?
This is where I allowed myself to consider the possibility of something different.
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All right, let’s get back to the podcast.
Over the years of running the practice, I had gotten sucked into the idea that it was just this huge machine that couldn’t be stopped without incredible effort or hardship. I cannot count how many times I use the phrase, “. It’s like Turning the Titanic.” [00:11:00] I make myself sick, honestly, just thinking about how many times I use that phrase. It’s got to be kind of a meme of sorts. I bought into this idea that running a practice that large and complex was not very nimble, and was not very agile. It really got me stuck into letting it roll along and keep turning.
And like I said, I ended up enduring or white-knuckling through a lot of situations in the practice, but I commit to things and I stick to them and that’s my emo I think for better, for worse, sometimes for worse. I will stick things out for a long time because I like routine and predictability and I am scared of changing things. And so I stuck with it and don’t think I recognized for a long time that it was actually not super fulfilling.
So what did I do? I tapped into the inherent but [00:12:00] easily forgotten element of choice that is built into running our own businesses.
I just want to let that sink in for a second. If there’s anybody out there who’s nodding along that a huge element of running our own businesses is the element of choice. We do not technically have to do anything, right? You’re the boss. You can do whatever you want, but many of us get wrapped up in the machine, like I said, and others expectations and what we think we should do. It can be really tough to make changes. But I let myself finally consider the possibility that things didn’t have to keep being hard and arduous.
A big part of this process was asking some really hard questions. I’m going to present some of those questions to you all during this episode to get you thinking about [00:13:00] different things in your practice and if there’s anything that might need to change.
Essentialism is about “Discerning the vital few from the trivial many.” It’s basically about learning to identify the truly important work and say no to the rest, even though that very process is very challenging. To do that, I’m going to present some questions to you all.
Now, if you are doing any of the things that I am typically doing when I listen to podcasts, which is running, walking, cleaning, driving, exercising, any of those things this might be a little bit tough, but if you’re engaged in those activities, I would encourage you to bookmark this one and come back to these questions because there is a lot of value in [00:14:00] actually spending 5-10 minutes writing down the answers to these questions and thinking through some of the answers.
So here are two of the essentialist questions that I want to present you with. The first one is what would my work look like if it were easy? On the flip side, what are you enduring that you don’t have to endure in your work? Is there anything that you’re enduring that you don’t have to?
There are plenty more essentialist questions. I would encourage you if you like the flavor of this, the general message of this, of paring down, [00:15:00] identifying what’s important, what’s most meaningful, what’s most fun, I would encourage you to read the entire book. It’s a great book. It’s all about saying no and figuring out what is most important in your work and in your life. But for today, let’s stick with these questions. What would your work look like if it were easy? And to help you identify some of those things, what are you enduring that you don’t have to endure?
Answering these two questions created some very powerful realizations that led to some huge changes in my practice that I will talk about in great detail in the next business episode. In the meantime, I would love for you to ask yourself these questions and write me an email with the answers. I would love to hear your answers. I would love to hear what work would look like if it were easy for you. My email is [00:16:00] jeremy@thetestingpsychologist.com and like I said, you can tune in next time to hear what some of your work would look like if it were easy and to hear the full story of my practice’s transition.
All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes, so make sure to check those out.
If you like what you hear on the podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast.
If you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out The Testing Psychologist mastermind groups. I have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We have homework, we have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are [00:17:00] amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. You can sign up for a pre-group phone call and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
The information contained in this podcast and on The Testing Psychologist website is intended for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast or on the website is intended to be a substitute for professional, psychological, psychiatric, or medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please note that no doctor-patient relationship is formed here, and [00:18:00] similarly, no supervisory or consultative relationship is formed between the host or guests of this podcast and listeners of this podcast. If you need the qualified advice of any mental health practitioner or medical provider, please seek one in your area. Similarly, if you need supervision on clinical matters, please find a supervisor with expertise that fits your needs.