Dr. Jeremy Sharp (00:00.568)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Testing Psychologist podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Jeremy Sharp, licensed psychologist, group practice owner and private practice coach.
This episode is brought to you by PAR. Psychologists need assessment tools for a more diverse population these days. PAR is helping by making many of their Spanish print forms available online through PAR iConnect. Learn more at parinc.com backslash Spanish dash language dash products. Many of y’all know that I have been using TherapyNotes as our practice EHR for over 10 years now.
I’ve looked at others and I just keep coming back to therapy notes because they do it all. If you’re interested in an EHR for your practice, you can get two free months of therapy notes by going to the testing psychologist.com / therapy notes and enter the code testing.
Hey folks, welcome back to the Testing Psychologist podcast. Good to be back with you. It has been approximately two months since the last podcast release. So you may have noticed that it’s been a little quiet around here lately. And by quiet, I mean, I took a two month break. This is totally unplanned. I’m not some big strategic hiatus. And today I am talking all about what happened and some lessons to
from this experience. The short story is that I just missed my recording day a couple months in a row. But as usual, when these things happen, there are lessons to be learned and I’m going to be talking through those today and hopefully we can all get some value from this experience. So let’s get to a little conversation about what happens when things do not go exactly according to plan.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (02:08.686)
All right, everybody, we are back. And like I said in the intro, today we’re talking about, what would I call this? Accidental, accidental mistakes, I suppose. Accidental hiatus. So as I said, I accidentally took a two month break over the summer with publishing the podcast. And this is not a grand plan or anything that I did on purpose. I wish that it was, to be honest. I intended to.
purposefully take a couple months off over the summer for a couple years now and just have not made it happen. But this was not the year. This was just an accident. And the reason it’s not huge or complex or even that interesting is just that I missed my recording days two months in a row just by coincidence. The first day, actually let me back up. So bedrock of this whole process is that I batch my podcast recording to essentially one day a month.
I block out one day a month, that’s eight or nine hours, and I go through all of the episodes, I record them, I clean up the interviews, I record the intros, that kind of thing. And in this case, I just happened to miss both of those days, first in June, then in July, and there you have it. Podcasts went off the rails. So once it was because the website was down and myself and my assistant just could not get into…
do anything to publish any podcasts. At the second time, it was because I was traveling and it was one of, I think, many trips this summer and I just didn’t reschedule the recording day. And before I knew it, a few weeks had gone by and I’d missed that month’s batched recording day. So no excuses really. It was just kind of real life and I guess poor planning in some regards. So.
Like I said, I hope to turn this into a little bit of a learning opportunity because if I’m making mistakes, I would love for y’all to at least get some benefit from that as usual. That’s kind of the MO for the podcast. I make mistakes, then I hopefully figure out how to do it better and share some of that with you. So today I’m getting into what this little break taught me about my business and systems and just showing up. Okay, so lesson number one, systems are only as strong as the weakest link.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (04:27.586)
So as I said, I usually batch all my recordings for one day a month, which is a fantastic system. It has worked really well now for, I don’t know, years, three, four years, until it doesn’t, right? If something disrupts that one day, I’m kind of out of luck. I just don’t have episodes for a few weeks. So it made me realize that even really good systems can fail if there’s no backup plan. In our practices, maybe the same thing happens, right? So.
For a long time, was doing a schedule where I would do clinical appointments one week, Monday through Friday, just clinical appointments all day. And then the next week I would do my writing and administrative work all week. So I was quote unquote off for one week. So it was a week on, week off schedule. But again, I had a few instances when I was running that schedule where I would be traveling or
kids would be out of school or sick or whatever and it would totally disrupt one of those weeks and then it threw the whole system off. maybe this is you. Maybe you rely on one admin assistant to send out all of your questionnaires and answer your phones. Or maybe you only have one testing kit that, you know, if you misplace it or lose it or something, you know, it halts the whole testing schedule.
So the reflection here, I think is, you know, are there any systems in your business where you are relying too much on a single point of failure? And so for me, the lesson and the takeaway, the action item is that, you know, from this point forward, I am going to build in kind of an emergency day each month. That’s one day I’m going to block it off and make sure that I have at least a few hours if I need to do some
last minute sort of urgent podcast releasing. Something to think about. Are you relying too much on a single point of failure? Lesson number two, perfectionism can be sneaky. So part of why I didn’t just hop on and record a quick update is because, you know, I got into that thinking pattern of, well, this would not be a real episode. And I didn’t want to publish something that was just totally half-baked, right? So I think
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (06:45.524)
If this had been a little bit more deliberate, I could have coordinated with my assistant and we could have re-released some old episodes that were popular and that would have been an easy way out. It kind of would have been, you know, happy medium. But like I said, this was unplanned and I was traveling a lot and time just flew by and I didn’t have an opportunity to really structure it or make it clear what we should do. And so she was left kind of hanging out, not having anything to do. And I
didn’t want to just record something random just to get episodes out. So in hindsight, I think the silence maybe was worse. I haven’t heard any feedback from anyone, which is interesting, but I think the silence is typically worse, right? There have been other situations in my life where something like this has happened and instead of just explaining it and saying what was going on, just kind of kept quiet and made a plan in my mind and knew that it would get back on track eventually.
But sometimes a short imperfect update I think is better than nothing. To me there is a very, very clear parallel to this in our work. So we delay a report or even a phone call or maybe an email because we are waiting for whatever perfect conditions might arise to get this thing done. And we think that that’s okay. That’s the right course of action, right? Like, hey, we’re going to get this done. It’s going to be great. And then I’ll just send it out. But in the meantime, the person or people who are waiting to hear from us
are just waiting to hear from us. So I think the reality is that moving forward with a good enough effort is totally fine to keep the momentum going and at least build some communication in there. So I’ve been able to translate this into my practice with reports. You know, I typically tell people, hey, it’s gonna be a couple of weeks before your report is ready. And if that changes, and this is actually built into our practice values now, if that changes,
The idea is to communicate that. think people will tolerate a lot as long as communication is clear. And so I’ll send an email and just say like, hey, I know I was going to get your report to you within a couple of weeks. This came up. I haven’t been able to work on it or I’m gathering this information and it’ll be another three days before I can get it finished. I can’t think of a time when someone was upset about that and they often write back and say, thank you so much for being transparent and clear in the communication. So.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (09:12.61)
The lesson here again is rather than get wrapped up in the perfectionism and letting perfect be the enemy of good and going silent. Looking back, I would like to have communicated a bit and just pushed out some kind of episode to say, Hey, this is what’s going on. I’ll see you in a month or two. Let’s take a break to hear from a featured partner. Y’all know that I love therapy notes, but I am not the only one.
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Maybe the most important thing for me is that they have live telephone support seven days a week. So you can actually talk to a real person in a timely manner. If you’re trying to switch from another EHR, the transition is incredibly easy. They’ll import your demographic data free of charge. So you can get going right away. So if you’re curious or you want to switch or you need a new EHR, try therapy notes for two months, absolutely free. You can go to the testing psychologist.com slash.
therapy notes and enter the code testing. Again, totally free, no strings attached. Check it out and see why everyone is switching to therapy notes. As psychologists, we know that the more people we can reach, the more we can help. To do this, we need assessment tools that allow us to assist a more diverse population. PAR is helping by making some of their most popular Spanish language tests available online through PAR iConnect.
giving you more flexibility in serving your clients. Learn more at parinc.com backslash Spanish dash language dash products. All right, let’s get back to the podcast.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (11:19.436)
Okay, lesson three, life happens and being transparent does build a lot of trust. Okay, so this is kind of the thing that I was just talking about. So, know, life happens, travel happens, tech issues happen. What I’ve learned is that most people don’t expect perfectionism, they expect honesty, frankly.
And like I said, the same is true in practice. So if you’re running behind, just tell the client like, I’m sorry, reports are taking an extra week. You can keep their trust, but if you say nothing, they start filling in the gaps with their own story. Okay, so this is me being transparent with all of you. Life got in the way and I simply just fell behind and I’m very grateful that you are still here. So lesson four, the power of restarting. All right.
One of the best things about the work, think, is that we always have permission to restart. It doesn’t matter if you have been inconsistent or absent or even embarrassed about the whole process. The important thing is to start again, frankly. So for me, that means getting back behind the mic and recording these episodes. For you, maybe it’s sending out the overdue reports or emails or invoices or…
reopening a service line that you’ve been meaning to offer, maybe a workshop, or maybe just revisiting your marketing after neglecting it for months. So the lesson here is that it’s always okay to restart and in fact encouraged to restart. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been gone, you can pick things back up and you know, combat that inertia of doing nothing. So a few lessons to take from this. Like I said, in the beginning, systems are only as strong as our weakest link. So
it should reflect and see if there are any single points of failure in your practice. for me, my single day is to batch record once a month. Lesson two, perfectionism can be sneaky. So, you know, rather than wait until the perfect time or the time when we have the perfect message, just get out there and put something out there. Even if it’s not absolutely perfect, there is such a thing as good enough to keep the momentum going. Lesson three, life happens, be transparent.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (13:31.864)
So in the case of our reports, this is just communicating and letting families know when we are delayed, if that happens, and keeping their trust. And then lesson four is that you can restart. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been off. This makes me think of kids that I work with who just stopped doing their homework and then can’t pick it back up. It’s the same with us. I know once we stop doing something, it’s hard to get started again, but you can restart literally any time. Okay, so what is next for the podcast? Episodes are gonna be back on track.
ASAP. have a number of fantastic interviews who’ve that have just been sitting in the hopper while the tech issues were getting figured out. So that’s what’s going to happen. Over the next few days, we’re to be releasing an episode a day, I think for about a week, and they’re all going to be great interviews. So stay tuned and watch your downloads and just know that you will get testing psychologist content for the next week straight. tons of great guests. I’m excited to share them with you.
And then as we get later into September, as we transition into September, episodes are going to spread out a little bit and get back to the normal schedule. And then toward the end of September, I have a, what I think is a pretty fantastic AI series coming up where I talk through lots of different aspects of AI, how it’s being used, how it’s beneficial for our practices, what’s not working, training and supervising interns and post-docs with AI, all kinds of things. So.
There’s lots coming up over the next month or two, in addition to ongoing interviews with fantastic guests. So thanks for hanging in there. I hope that all of you had a fantastic summer. I didn’t really say much about what I was doing during that whole time, but I did travel a lot this summer. I got to take a couple trips to see my kids play their sports, which I love to do. We have a son in soccer and a daughter in gymnastics, and we get to travel to
watch them do those things. That was a blast. I saw a lot of family, which was really important to me. And then I was out for hosting the third annual Crafted Practice Psychologist retreat, which was amazing as always. And, you know, I’ll have some reflections on that coming up over the next month or two. So it was a fantastic summer. I loved it. And I did not like the little bit of guilt that was,
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (15:59.2)
hanging around in the back of my mind knowing that I was not publishing podcasts. So it feels really good to get back and release some episodes and I look forward to connecting with you all regularly over the next several weeks. All right, everyone, happy testing. 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 or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out the testing psychologist mastermind groups. have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development, beginner intermediate and advanced.
We have homework, have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, can check out the details at the testingpsychologist.com slash 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.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (17:38.732)
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