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 keep coming back to TherapyNotes because they do it all. If you’re interested in an EHR for your practice, you can get 2 free months of TherapyNotes by going to thetestingpsychologist.com/therapynotes and enter the code “testing”.
This podcast is brought to you in part by PAR.
Hey, guess what y’all, the BRIEF-A has been updated. The BRIEF2A is the latest update to the BRIEF2 family. Use the gold standard in executive functioning assessment to assess adult clients. You can preorder it now, visit parinc.com/products/brief2a.
Hello everyone and welcome back [00:01:00] to The Testing Psychologist. Today is a business episode. I’ve got my guest, Carolyn Boldt. Carolyn is personally passionate about holistic health and wellness, and an outspoken advocate that the environment of your space impacts your success. That’s what we’re talking about today.
With over 40 years of experience in the commercial interior industry, she holds a BS in Interior Architectural Design from the University of Texas, Austin, where I did an internship, incidentally. She is NCIDQ Certified, a Registered Designer, a LEED AP, and Professional Member of International Interior Design Association.
In 2004, she and her husband, Scott, co-founded CrossFields as a design-build firm in Atlanta. In 2011, they changed their focus to expand the impact of holistic health by elevating the public’s image of alternative medicine through virtually creating outstanding healing environments nationwide.
She loves to spend her time with her 8 wonderful grandchildren, involvement in church and community activities, traveling, and boating on [00:02:00] the lake with her husband.
I really enjoyed my conversation with Carolyn. We are talking all about design. We’ve talked about design on the podcast before, but this is certainly a different episode because Carolyn engages in a live consultation with me while looking at photos of my personal office and our waiting area at my office so you will get a front-row seat to Carolyn’s thoughts on our space and get to hear some, like I said, live suggestions and ideas about how to improve the space that you can carry over to others, including your own, of course.
This is a heavy visual component, as you can imagine. I think you can take a lot from the audio, but if you want to get the full experience, then I definitely recommend jumping over to the YouTube video on The Testing Psychologist YouTube channel and [00:03:00] watch that as well.
Let’s get to my conversation with Carolyn Boldt.
Carolyn, hey, welcome to the podcast.
Carolyn: Hey, thanks for having me, Jeremy. I appreciate it.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, yeah. I am excited to talk with you. We’re talking about design and how that is important for our businesses. This is a topic that we’ve talked about a little bit in the past, but it continues to be important.
We’ve done a little update of our office space here over the last few months. I know there’s more to be done, but this is always something that needs to be top of mind for us as we grow our practices. So thanks for being here.
Carolyn: Absolutely. Thank you.
Dr. Sharp: Let’s start with the [00:04:00] question that I always start with, which is, why do you do this? Why is this important in your life? Why’d you choose it out of all the other things you could presumably be doing?
Carolyn: You can presumably be doing. I’m an interior designer, interior architect. I think it chose me more than me chose it. And that I chose to do that when I was 14.
My father worked for NASA and he was worked on the advanced preliminary design of the space station. An architect was working with them on the interior design of a zero-gravity earth-orbiting space station. He was younger and he would come over and visit with my father because he’s from Florida, they moved him to Houston for this project.
They would sit and philosophize for hours about the theory of space, the psychology of space, how people react in [00:05:00] space and how space has an environment, it has a thing that happens to you depending on what’s going on around you. They would philosophize about it.
I was interested in art and I was interested in people and I thought, hey, this was a good mix of the two, helping create environments that will help people be what they want to be in the environment. That’s how I got started in that.
And then I went on to graduate, went to the University of Texas, ended up in Atlanta, was doing design and all over design and design build, et cetera, working for myself for years and then started working at Life University in 2003. That’s a chiropractic college here.
Most of my project work was corporate offices and design and stuff but I got very immersed in the students and their aspirations to grow and become and be people in the [00:06:00] world with their visions so I began to learn a lot about the profession of chiropractic, and I was already a holistic patient. I’d already been under chiropractic care and then under functional medicine care, et cetera, more alternative care myself.
As we got into working in the university, and when I say, we, my husband does construction. So we were doing design-build all over campus. In 2010-ish, they asked us to teach a class to the students on why your office environment matters. I got so excited. We did it purely gratis.
I had already done one chiropractic office, an independent chiropractor that I bartered with. He was a student at my chiropractor and he said, hey, go bartered. So I did, and it was because he opened around the corner. So I fell in love with helping the more sole practitioner or the smaller [00:07:00] non-corporate as I’d always worked in corporate.
So a whole bunch of little pieces all came together and it was like, hey, let’s help these doctors have more success in an area that they don’t know anything about and it’s their branding; their office is their branding. Their office is an extension of who they are.
As we talked earlier, in corporate world, interior design, interior architecture is just an expectation. It’s just a piece of getting your office laid out correctly, getting it efficient and maximize the flow and then how you design it to meet your needs of your company, needs of whether it’s retail or hospitality or office and the smaller practitioners just don’t understand that.
So we went on a mission to explain that and to teach that. And then out of that grew us designing offices all over the world because we do it virtually. [00:08:00] And then it went from chiropractic and it kept expanding. So we do all types of, I would call it more alternative medical practices, not straight medical as much as more alternative, but all types of. So that’s how we got into it, in 2010, 2011, somewhere in there.
Dr. Sharp: That’s amazing. What a story. It sounds like a combination of early childhood stuff and then some personal experiences and going where the opportunity presents itself.
Carolyn: It encompasses those three that all got woven together. Yes.
Dr. Sharp: I’m super grateful. I end up talking to a lot of auxiliary professionals that are focused on healthcare professions from money management to design to websites to whatever. I’m so grateful that there are those of y’all out there who have chosen to focus on working with folks like us, because we do not get taught this stuff in graduate school. [00:09:00] I know there are a lot of offices out there that are not probably up to par. We need a lot of help when it comes to non-clinical stuff.
Carolyn: Yeah. Well, it’s not what you study, like you say, you don’t study business when you’re in school, you study what it takes to get your license so you need to learn those other things. If you’re going to be in business for yourself, you’ve got to learn them outside. That’s what it’s all about. So that’s why your listeners are here, right?
Dr. Sharp: I think so. I think that’s part of being a business owner is building these miniature skill sets where we have to know a little bit about design or at least know how to hire the right person. We need to know a little bit about marketing or hire the right person. Owning a business is wild. We can go down that path.
Carolyn: Let’s not do that.
Dr. Sharp: Let’s not do that. We can do that another time. People are excited to hear about the design component.
A part of your [00:10:00] story stuck out to me. This should be a no-brainer, but I didn’t even think about how bigger entities or corporations have design as a matter of course in their business, it’s just a line item that has to be accounted for because it does make such a big difference at that scale. It’s interesting. It got me thinking about this should be integrated more into small business as well.
Carolyn: It’s just like before people had websites. It’s like the only people that had websites a long time ago were the big corporations and they were basically a brochure of who they were. And now it’s become an important piece and they wouldn’t think about not having one. Now the small business owners understand that too. So it’s just a matter of helping them understand and be educated on that.
Dr. Sharp: Great. Let’s dive into some of the [00:11:00] content here. I would love to start with maybe definition around what you call, what is included when you say design, architecture, how are those related? Let’s start there.
Carolyn: Okay. We have to start there. What we start with is the idea of form follows function. What that means is that they’re totally interrelated. For those that can see me, my hands are all connected together.
It’s not, hey, you get the space to function well and then you make it pretty, the form being the aesthetics. It has to think cohesively together but you’ve got to lead with function.
So the very first thing that happens and a lot of practitioners understand this is that space needs to function well. Function well means that you need the right amount of space for what you’re doing. You don’t need to be too small or that impedes your efficiency and operation. If it’s too big, you’re [00:12:00] wasting space on rent. It’s just the right amount of space is a really key.
A lot of practitioners don’t understand how much space they need. So we start there. How much space do you need? And then we start talking about how you practice and how you flow.
Depending on the different types of practices, you might have patients in and out of your office on a regular basis. Chiropractors have high volume of patients in and out of their practice, but a practice like yourself will be more smaller and longer visit time.
So how is that patient coming into the space? What are they experiencing when they first come into the space? How do they process through it? Functionally, everything’s where it needs to be, saves you time, saves you energy, lowers your operation cost.
Dr. Sharp: Can I ask you a question?
Carolyn: Yes.
Dr. Sharp: I had a question about the space and the size specifically, [00:13:00] because people ask about this all the time, how much space do I need?
I wrestle with this in terms of our waiting area, which we will talk about here in just a bit in a little bit of a live consult, which I’m excited for, but with our waiting area, it’s like, how much space do we need based on our practitioners and patient flow? Do you have any guidelines or rules or rubrics or anything like that that are easy for folks to understand if they’re considering just size of a space?
Carolyn: There are. We call them guideline formulas. Let me walk through a lobby real quick; a lobby waiting space.
What you want to think about is how many people do you want to seat in your waiting area? And then that times a certain square footage will tell you how much space you need for the waiting. That certain square footage depends on how you want them to be seated in the space.
[00:14:00] I already have seen your space. You have sofas in your space. So that is more square footage per person. So if you want a sofa, a living room, you need about 35 square feet per person that’s going to be in that space.If you’re going to be in what I’m going to call more of a high density, imagine just rows of chairs, that’s going to be the lowest square footage, the smaller the chair, the lower the square footage. So you can get down to 15 square feet per person, but there is a minimum. You don’t want just 15 square feet for one person, because that’s not really enough. So there’s some guidelines on that.
We start with that; how many people do you want to seat in your lobby? And that usually has to do with how your patient flow is going to be, because if you’re seeing one person, would you see one person an hour or a family an hour so, but your lobby serves more than just you. So that’s a different thing.
So how many people are you going to [00:15:00] serve in an hour is a good rule of thumb for how many people you need, just thinking of them flowing through and where they are going to be. So that’s how most people process through it in operation.
And then it’s how many feet per person and then you’ve got some kind of front desk. It depends on how many people are going to be behind your front desk. A good rule of thumb is 50 square feet per person.
So if you’ve got 1 person, approximately 50 square feet. A 6 by 8 area is a pretty typical work area, that’s that 50 square feet. So that’s a good rule of thumb. A larger practice may have multiple people behind a front desk and that just keeps multiplying out.
So you start there. Let’s just say you have that all figured out. And then you look at, do you have a hospitality area? Do you have a retail area? Do you have a kid’s waiting [00:16:00] area specifically for kids? And then you have so many square feet per child depending on, is it really active play?
If you’re a pediatric therapist, you’re going to have probably a good size playroom while those kids are waiting, or you don’t want to wait too long and you have that in your office. So you just have to work through it. You start with your list of what you’re trying to do and then there are formulas and calculations to do that.
We have some resources on our website called Planning Your Office that we go through square footages. The next thing you do, though, is you add up all those square footages, and you’ve got to have circulation and exit and things like that. So you add about 40% to get your circulation space. You see how that kind of starts to add up there.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, sure.
Carolyn: I don’t know physically how large, I know I looked at your lobby, but I never asked you how big it was. We didn’t focus on that but that’s how [00:17:00] you come up with it. How many square feet you come up with? There is some calculation.
Dr. Sharp: I love this. Our audience is pretty data-driven and metric-driven, and just knowing that there are formulas like this to consider. Personally speaking, I’ve never used anything like that in trying to design any space I’ve rented or put together. So that’s great information to have off the top of your head.
Carolyn: Yeah. Ultimately, it’s how does the furniture and the equipment layout into the space. There’s rules around that too.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. I’m trying to save some of this for our live consult portion of the interview here, but this is good for people to know. We’ll make sure to put the resource in the show notes as well, the link to your website, if folks want to go check that out and try to get a better idea.
Going back to this [00:18:00] form follows function idea, so you’re looking at how the space is laid out first and then doing the design on top of that. Is that right?
Carolyn: Yes, only as a designer where we can’t separate the two. So the design integrates into it, is what I’m saying, more than on top of. That’s hard to explain to people unless you’re in it and doing it but as you think about flowing through a space, as a designer, they think about it three dimensionally and how is that feeling to the person that’s going through it? So it has to both work.
The flow has to work and then the aesthetics and the feeling, because the aesthetics are not just paint on the wall and some art, some pictures, it’s like the ceiling, the lighting, the change of textures and all kinds of elements that as you move through space, create different emotions because it’s all about [00:19:00] creating emotions in your patients. Choosing the emotions you want in your patients is the big thing.
Dr. Sharp: I feel like the example that many of us have probably heard about, whether it’s an urban legend or not, is the casinos in Vegas and how the layout and design are meant to elicit certain behaviors and feelings and things like that. Is there legitimacy to that whole story?
Carolyn: Oh, yeah. Very much so. There’s a psychology of space. Let me give you a psychology of space that a lot of people can relate to. Think about when you first enter a space, we think about retail design, because retail design is your first impression and people buy first with their eyes.
You know that if you’re doing any marketing, that if people are going to find you and they find you on the website, they need to like what they [00:20:00] see right away. They need to find what they want unless they’re coming from a referral and then they’ll dig through everything to figure it out but if they don’t know you from Adam, it’s how you show up initially.
If you’re working and you’re spending money to show up beautifully on a website, when they walk in the door, there needs to be a congruency to that to happen, do you follow me? And the same thing, even if it’s a referral, if you have someone refer you, they’re going to refer you if they feel proud about it.
We’ve seen people that do facelifts that get an amazing increase in referrals from patients that have been with them forever, because all of a sudden the patients are proud of the space. Kind of digress, if we think about spaces, the first thing you want to do is you want to know who is your ideal patient and then secondly, how do you want to show up to them? How do you want to be their solution?
It’s emotional words. It’s like [00:21:00] I want to be a safe place for them. I want to get them to be calm. You’re not trying to be a gym and create all kinds of energy; you want them to be calm. You want them to be focused. So creating that environment for that to happen can support what you’re trying to do. So it can support your whole practice.
Dr. Sharp: Yes.
Carolyn: I think about two retail spaces I’m going to bring to mind. This is no criticism for Walmart because Walmart makes a lot of money, but Walmart is very intentionally designed to be the low-priced leader, everything about it.
When you walk into Walmart, you feel like you’re going to get a deal. The lights are bright. The surfaces are [00:22:00] hard. There’s stuff everywhere. There’s lots of stimulation, lots of words, lots of advertisements, lots of things going on.
It doesn’t matter if the shelves are really neat; you’re still going to dig for a deal. It’s a whole psychology that supports that. I’m in one level up from a garage sale of sorts. It’s not that much, but if Walmart tried to upscale, people would not feel like they’re getting the deal. If they did anything in their spaces, so they support that in everything that they do. It’s bare-bones of sorts.
Now, you go all the way to a high-end designer store, maybe a purse store. You walk in, the light levels different. You don’t see signs. It’s hard to find the price. It’s one item at a time. It’s more like an art gallery. And so it creates a different [00:23:00] expectation of what that client or that patron or whoever it is, who’s going into that store to buy.
If they walked into Walmart and it looked like that, they would not feel like they’re getting a deal but if they walked into the high designer store, and it looked like Walmart, they probably walk out because they’re there for a different reason. So you follow what I’m saying.
I’m not saying you need to be Walmart, I’m not saying you need the high-end designer store, but most practitioners need to be somewhere in the middle and they need to know who their ideal patient is, and that’s the key. And then the design is driven from that.
Dr. Sharp: I got you. So taking that example and applying it to our field, are there equivalents that you found in your work with healthcare folks for maybe not Walmart, nobody wants to say, hey, we’re a commodity-based healthcare business where we’re just trying to give people the best deal, but I’m guessing there is some kind of equivalent agency? [00:24:00] Do you work with healthcare folks who are more who are more like Walmart versus a high-end art gallery?
Carolyn: I don’t work with them, but I’ve had conversations with therapists about them that they don’t want to show up like the state board health examiners’ offices and things of that sort, if you follow what I’m saying, where it’s very institutionalized, do you know what I’m talking about? Inside of a more of a controlled environment. Those spaces feel that way.
I’m not sure how people open up except they don’t have any other choice at that point to open up. I am stereotyping. I know every state health care agency there is out there, but you know what I’m saying, that has come up with therapists.
I think of one in particular, [00:25:00] because I feel like I look like a state healthcare agency. The thing is he did work with people that were coming out of the system and things of that sort, so he couldn’t be too blue flu because he needed to support them but he also worked with some executives that he needed to find a balance between the two and not make it feel, it had to be comfortable for both, which is a little bit hard to do.
You find where your ideal client is, and you try to go there and that allows a little bit on both sides to be okay with it. Do you know what I’m saying?
Dr. Sharp: Sure. That seems like a wide range to accommodate.
Carolyn: Yeah, it was.
Dr. Sharp: I think this is important though, just to spend some time on this because I consult with folks building their practices who will put a lot of energy into their [00:26:00] website, especially these days, it’s easy to build a website that looks pretty good with all the tools out there, but then you get to the pictures of the office and it does not match. It sounds like you’re saying that consumers will pick up on that and it creates a little dissonance that doesn’t work in our favor.
Carolyn: It’s hard to find pictures of offices on websites a lot of times. I know that more people are doing videos of people in their office where it’s focused on the people and not, which is great. You’re seeing people. You’re seeing stuff and that’s probably more important than architectural.
On our portfolio, it’s all architectural pictures like you would see in a magazine. There’s not people in them. It’s what we do, but was saying that when we do an office and we have professional pictures made, our doctors do put those pictures on their website and it does [00:27:00] help people go, wow. That’s something interesting or impressive.
It’s more about when the people walked into the office after they’ve seen this website. They’ve seen this wonderful, well-designed, modern, clean website, and they walk into something that’s totally disconnected.
Especially a new patient, it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have that patient stay or sell or anything like that, but it’s so much harder to sell them because you’re going to go upstream instead of them walking in and going, wow. This is comfortable. This makes me feel like I’m feeling atmosphere.
Dr. Sharp: Absolutely. Maybe we talk about some specific ideas and then we can get into my own office consultation.
Carolyn: Yeah, that’ll be fun.
Dr. Sharp: I’m scared [00:28:00] of, to be honest. Generally speaking, function-wise, let’s lay out function, are there some general principles that you could say, hey, this is best if folks are thinking about how to lay out their office space, or is it truly space-dependent?
Carolyn: It’s practice-dependent more than space-dependent. There are some certain rules though. If you’ve got a lot of people moving through the space, one of the rules that we have is that all of your hallways are 5 feet wide. One of the reasons that is, is because if your hallways are, if they’re 5 feet wide, you’ve met all handicap accessibility codes. You don’t have to worry about it.
You can go down to about 4, 6 and still do that but if they get any less than 5 [00:29:00] feet, we found that 2 people passing in the hallway, 1 has to stop. Think about over time, it could add up to 10 or 15 minutes and say you’re a practitioner, you see patients, you see them in 10 to 15-minute increments, that’s 1 or 2 patients a day that you can add to your practice, just in volume.
That’s a mentality, the higher the volume. A lower volume practice also has to do with, are you escorting the patient through or is the patient escorting themselves? I don’t know how you practice, but do you come out and get your people and have them come back?
Dr. Sharp: We do.
Carolyn: That’s a different thing. The space is important, but I’d say it’s more important in your specific office or all your things that you need easy for you to get [00:30:00] to and that kind of efficiency not as much the size of the room as the way that the furniture inside is laid out. Does that make sense? It’s very specific to the practice.
Dr. Sharp: Yes. Just an observation, you keep coming back to the practice and using words like ideal customer and practice dependent. We have to put some thought into what environment we’re trying to create.
It feels like branding almost more than anything.
Carolyn: Oh, it’s exactly branding. It is branding, 100%. It’s an extension of your branding very much. In fact, if you’ve gone through any kind of branding exercise with any kind of graphics person that really goes into the fullness of your brand, not just, hey, I’m going to give you a [00:31:00] logo, but the fullness of how you’re going to show up, they’re asking the same questions that we ask.
Dr. Sharp: That’s fascinating.
Carolyn: Ideally, when they come to us, they’ve actually gone through both parts. A lot of people that come to us are moving offices or opening offices, and it’s an opportunity to do some rebranding finishes.
Dr. Sharp: So it’s a side question then, is it helpful if people come with a solid brand identity? In an ideal world, would you like someone to come with their brand assets all ready to go?
Carolyn: If they come to us with their brand assets already done, then we can complement it and keep going. So we basically charge by the hour and we charge based on historical data, how big the square footage is, what kind of [00:32:00] project it is, et cetera but we have a range and that range varies more because of the client than it does for anything.
So a client that’s already gone through the branding process, we find is already very decisive and they’re very clear. They already have a vision, but we’re also very gifted at pulling out that vision. So we have clients that come to us and we spend the time pulling out the vision.
For example, people, we ask them to put together a vision board for us that has to do with the space, not their brand, but their space and you’ll see them that they are all consistent. They know their brand. They know what they’re going after. All the pictures are consistent.
And then you’ll see them where they’re all over the place. The spaces go from super modern to country [00:33:00] farmhouse to different styles, different things. And so those are the ones that that’s part of our gifting is to work through and help figure out what is it that you like about these spaces and how does that match with who you want to show up as?
Because the other thing about it, we talked about this earlier, is that commercial design is not a luxury. Residential design is more of a luxury. Residential design is very much about the human being and the person and trying to create a space for them, which is wonderful and lovely, but it’s their favorite stuff. Your office should be your ideal client’s favorite stuff, not yours.
And not that it’s always different, it’s not because it’s who you are and who you show up. I think of an example of someone who really love the color red. He just loves red, but he was trying to create this really soothing environment [00:34:00] and it didn’t work together. So it’s like how do you do that? Let your car be red and let’s go do something different in your environment.
Dr. Sharp: Yes. I’m glad you brought that up. Personally speaking, I feel like that is a problem that I’ve really wrestled with because I’m the owner of our practice. I set the tone for our design and so forth. I know my personal preferences really well, and it’s been hard to be flexible with that.
I just want the office to look exactly like I want it to look and maybe that’s what the client wants, maybe not. Anyway, I’m just thinking out loud and I’m guessing some other practice owners run into that too.
Carolyn: If your clients are very similar to you, then you’re probably right on.
Dr. Sharp: That’s a great question. I’m not sure, we can talk about that as we go along. Yes. [00:35:00] That’s important to point that out, I’m guessing, for other owners.
Carolyn: It is. And being careful what you like.
Dr. Sharp: Sure.
Carolyn: I’ll give you a good example. You’re a therapist. You don’t want an office that looks like it’s space age. You just don’t want to because that’s not familiar. You need to create familiarity in a therapy office. Do you know what I’m saying?
If you are if you’re creating cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, regenerative medicine type stuff, yeah, look like your space age because people will walk in. So do you follow what I’m saying? It’s like what are you offering in your practice?
Dr. Sharp: Yes. That’s fair. I have so many questions. Honestly, I’m just verbalizing. It’s so hard to choose what to talk about because I have so many questions with us. I’ll pick one though, and this may be an obvious question, but I [00:36:00] would love to hear you reflect on any geographical differences that you may have found. Do you see different trends based on city versus rural or Midwest versus Coastal? I’m curious about bigger patterns and design and layout.
Carolyn: All of those things you said, we almost call them as styles. So yes, there’s a big city style. It gets more trendy. It’s keeping up with the Joneses’s feeling. It’s very much more like what’s the next and newest thing that’s out there to be.
It can be trendy. Trendy, meaning that there’s design, they date, things can come and go. So the trendy of something is the faster it dates, the less trendy it is, the longer it dates [00:37:00] but that can be okay in the city because they’re competing with all the retail that are trendy and all the other people that are trendy.
And that’s another thing; how do you want to show up compared to your competition? How do you want to be known for? Yes, there’s a general, it’s not absolute, but there’s a generality of a big city and a generality of a country. As soon as I say that to you, you see different pictures in your head, right?
Dr. Sharp: Yes.
Carolyn: There definitely is a difference in what we would call Florida versus Seattle. Seattle has a coast too, but there’s a difference in it and how it feels. We think about how people dress and what they wear.
I was working with a doctor that we’re building offices around the country and the ones up North, we have to have a vestibule. We have to have a place for people to take off their galoshes and they have to, you know what I’m [00:38:00] saying?
It’s a different but people live that way and that’s what has to be taken care of. It’s very different than having one that you can open up the whole front and have people be part of the experience all the time or a big part of the time. Does that help?
Dr. Sharp: Absolutely. I appreciate you indulging some of these questions. We’ve talked about, are there basic principles to guide the layout. And you said it was practice-dependent, which is great. Are there basic principles to guide the design; the form for a space, or again, is it practice-dependent?
Let’s take a break to hear from our featured partner.
Y’all know that the BRIEF2 has long been established as one of the leading forms for measuring executive functioning in children. Now comes the latest addition to the BRIEF-2 to family, the BRIEF2A. This update will allow you to use the gold [00:39:00] standard in executive functioning to assess adult clients. You don’t have to wait, it’s available for pre-order right now. Learn more at parinc.com/products/brief2a.
Y’all know that I love TherapyNotes, but I am not the only one. They have a 4.9 out of 5-star rating on trustpilot.com and Google, which makes them the number one rated electronic health record system available for mental health folks today. They make billing, scheduling, note-taking, and telehealth all incredibly easy. They also offer custom forms that you can send through the portal.
For all the prescribers out there, TherapyNotes is proudly offering ePrescribe as well. And maybe the most important thing for me is that they have live telephone support 7 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 [00:40:00] 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 TherapyNotes for 2 months, absolutely free. You can go to thetestingpsychologist.com/therapynotes and enter the code “testing”. Again, totally free, no strings attached. Check it out and see why everyone is switching to TherapyNotes.
Let’s get back to the podcast.
Carolyn: In design, you start with what is your end goal? What are you trying to do? What do you gather from all of the intake that you have with your client? And then depending on that, in design, we have what we call principles of design, and then we have elements of design. Principles are what we follow to have good design. We’re going to talk about some of those in [00:41:00] your lobby.
They have to do with things being proportion, things being balanced. To have it be good design, you need to basically meet these principles. So that’s over here, but then the elements are the ones that create different emotions.
I’ll give you an example. We were talking about horizontal lines make people want to be comfortable and sit down, vertical lines make people want to stand up, a perfect curve creates community, like a circle, a much more geometric and then a whimsical curve or whimsical shape creates more melancholy fun laughter. Just the use of lines in the way that things are styled [00:42:00] can change an emotion.
The same thing with the shape, a big psychology is textures and another huge psychology is color. There’s a huge psychology of color. And then the other thing is light. So light levels can change energy immediately. We know that natural light creates an energetic healing feeling and then low dark light creates, it’s your body, it’s how your body reacts to light. You can use it or not.
We talk about quality design is not expensive. It can be really expensive, but it doesn’t have to be expensive at all. It just has to be well-thought through and looking at all the different principles and then the use of the different elements [00:43:00] that are, paint is the cheapest thing you can do and it can create the most impact. We use variations in paint to create drama or to create energy or to create quietness or whatever just throughout an office.
Dr. Sharp: That’s fantastic. I’m going to double-click on two of those things. So color real quick. I think we all have heard don’t do anything with red. You said that, don’t do anything with red.
Carolyn: So when I say don’t do anything with red, red is very intense. Red creates energy. It can raise your heart rate and they can see that. So you have to be intentional about it. So if you are creating an environment that you want, you’re probably not doing this as a therapist, but if you’re creating an environment that you do want a lot of energy, [00:44:00] or if you want a lot of power, the red tie creates just enough red. So what is the image you’re trying to get across?
I do a whole class on color theory, but let me say blue is a very calming color. You take the color wheel, I don’t know how far we want to go with this, but everybody knows the color wheel. We did this. You start with the 3 main colors that you can’t mix, you’ve got red, you’ve got yellow, and you’ve got blue. You can’t mix anything to get that.
Each one of those are the main you, and then you start to mix them together and you get secondary colors and tertiary colors, et cetera. So color is infinite, but the general base color, we call the you, so the base color of yellow is a memory. That’s why you use yellow highlighters and yellow legal pads. It invokes memory.
We’re going to talk about that in your office, [00:45:00] it has warmth to it. So you take the color wheel and you have warm side and you have the cool side. So the yellow is on the warm side, the orange is on the warm side, the red is on the warm side.
And then you go to the other side, the blue and the green are on there. You have purple, and it depends on how much red or blue is in the purple, on how warm or cold it is. It calms you down on the cool sides versus warms you up and gets you energetic on the warm side. That’s as basic as it gets.
Then you go into the intensity of color; how bright it is versus how doled out it is, which is what happens when you mix the opposite colors on a color wheel. So you end up with brown Easter egg color, that everything ends up brown when you mix all things together, Easter egg water.
And then you have what’s called value. So that’s adding white to a color [00:46:00] or adding black to a color. So you can take a color, let’s call it orange and you can add white to it and it becomes peach, it becomes feminine, light and airy. You can add black to it and it becomes a rust. It becomes more masculine. That’s psychology in a moment’s notice.
Dr. Sharp: I love it. The other component I wanted to ask about too, is the lighting. I think a lot of us probably struggle with lighting because we’re in spaces that have overhead fluorescent lighting. Can we say a little bit about that?
And that’s going to pop up as we look at our waiting area, because that’s our situation but is there anything to say on a basic level about how to deal with fluorescent lighting in an office space?
Carolyn: Fluorescent lighting, first off, the newer offices don’t even have fluorescent, [00:47:00] they have LED, but it’s still the idea of a wash of light. So you get into a typical office building, it has 2×2 ceiling, and then it has 2×4 fixtures in there, and that is the cheapest lights you can get to get an overall wash of light.
So that’s just what it is; what you’re trying to do. Understand that you need a certain amount of brightness in your area to clean it well but you don’t want this overall wash of light in a typical therapist office. I know you have other doctors who work with you, but you typically don’t want that wash of light. You want a variation of light.
So the way you get a variation of light is if you’re fortunate to do can lighting, it can create a variation of light. Another way to do lighting overhead is to do track lighting and track lighting creates like the opportunity to have a variation of light, if [00:48:00] you’re following me.
If you can’t change architecturally your lighting, what you do is you turn off your lights and you put lamps. I think you did that in your office. I saw that when we looked at your pictures quickly, which we’re going to talk about in a minute. The lamps create that home comfortable variation of light color. You can do uplighting, you can get enough light in the room, you just don’t want to wash of light unless you want to feel like you’re in Walmart or on offer.
Dr. Sharp: It sounds fair. Okay. Oh, absolutely. This is fantastic. Like I said, I could ask a million questions about this stuff. I’m just fascinated by this material, but I think we’ve probably teased folks long enough. I would love to dive into this little experiment that we’re going to call a live consult.
Just for some background for [00:49:00] the listeners, I sent Carolyn some pictures of our waiting area to check out ahead of time. I’m going to pull those up on a screen share here. So if you’re not watching the video, absolutely go check out the video. We will do our best to describe what we’re seeing, but I think the video is going to bring it to life more than anything.
Carolyn: And you also sent your office. Let’s start with your office because a lot of people have offices and there’s not as much I would say to do there as there is in your lobby, so why would you start there? So we start on a what works beautifully here and go from there.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, that sounds great. So let me get everything set up here and we will start this screen share. All right, hopefully this is showing up. Can you see this okay, Carolyn?
Carolyn: I can.
Dr. Sharp: All right. [00:50:00] What we have here is my personal office. I will let you take it from here and just hold my breath and see what happens.
Carolyn: So what I’m going to comment on is overall, it immediately feels warm and cozy. For those of you that can’t see it, it’s basically neutral colored walls. It’s a topi off whitish color, and then the sofa is gray, a little bit cooler next to the warm wall, which works beautifully, blends nicely.
And then the rug is a little bit grayer, a little bit darker and the carpet is in between the two so it all blends together. The rug has some wonderful texture. It’s a fluffy rug, which feels more homey, not to commercialize.
It’s got two, they don’t slide back or anything, but they’re two comfortable contemporary [00:51:00] chairs that look comfortable, but they’re small and feels like you could want to come in and want to sit in any one of those places. I’m sure that you have people sit in all of them.
In the therapist’s office, where the people come in and sit is obviously extremely important because you need them to be comfortable and you’ve got a nice, comfortable, solid surface. You’ve got all of your textures. All of your colors tend to be more monochromatic and the bookcase and everything and then you have this wonderful little pop of yellow.
We talked about yellow having a softness and a memory and just an energy to it, but it’s just enough. And then the picture above your sofa also has some fun color in it. There is a tiny bit of yellow. It’s got the blues, a little bit of red.
What I commented on is I noticed immediately the height of your picture was what I would consider perfect for what you have in the room, because it’s lower. [00:52:00] I think it’s probably at or lower than most people’s eye level.
What you want to do is when your pictures in your room, anything in your space, if you’ve got a lot of interest up high, people want to stand up; if you lower the interest, you lower the eye level, people want to sit down.
Usually a picture is hung around 60 inches above the floor. If you go above that, it’s great for a lobby, but you don’t want to go too high. And then if you go below that like even down to 54 inches or so, people want to sit down.
I know a lot of it has to do with how tall people are in their eye level, but the average person, let’s call them 5 feet and 6 inches, and so the 5-foot level fits there. So you’ve done that well.
And then the other thing you’ve done is instead of hanging pictures all over the wall, you’ve tilted them, so it creates an artistic look to them where they’re sitting on the case and they’re leaning up against the wall [00:53:00] and you buried them nicely.
The only thing I would say is that probably when you have a series of pictures on the wall, you want them to either have perfectly, they’re all the same size and they have a rhythm or you want to get them closer together and create what we call a composite.
So the only thing I’d probably tell you to do is take the pictures that are against your window and probably get them closer together so they feel a little bit more like they’re one piece instead of three pieces because if you have too many places of interest, it gets too busy for people to pay attention to.
So what I see immediately is the picture above the wall and that little splash of yellow. I bet people come and sit at your sofa first, do they?
Dr. Sharp: Oh, for sure.
Carolyn: Yeah. Even more because it’s just a drawing thing. Then the other thing you have in the corner, you have your desk. I don’t know if [00:54:00] you change it when people come in, but you want to avoid people seeing clutter, if you can do anything. I don’t see a lot of clutter, but maybe you may have just taken it for me and not thought about how it is when people come in.
Then the only other thing is make sure all your blinds are even, you see how uneven your blinds are?
Dr. Sharp: I saw that as we started talking, I’m like, oh no, these blinds.
Carolyn: One of the things you did is you’ve turned off your fluorescent lights. You don’t have those on at all, do you?
Dr. Sharp: No.
Carolyn: Do you just have the one lamp or do you have one on the other side of the sofa too?
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, there’s another one on the other side of the sofa.
Carolyn: That’s probably enough light for you, especially when you have the windows open, maybe it might get dark so you might want to add two up lights in the corners on the other side of the room if you ever needed it, but I’m going to tell you, I wouldn’t do anything different in this office. So I want to say that.
Dr. Sharp: That means a [00:55:00] lot. I’m going to go home and tell my wife that my office is great.
Carolyn: Your office is great. I may have one more thing. Think about when you have lots of little things, how do you create a composite? Instead of just sticking one here, one there, just even pulling them closer together or getting a tray and putting them on makes them feel more unified than just lots of little things.
Dr. Sharp: Sure.
Carolyn: Just a decorator thing. I can’t even exactly tell what’s underneath that. It may be things you use in therapy. Are they?
Dr. Sharp: Oh, yeah, are you looking underneath the table?
Carolyn: Yeah, I’m looking there.
Dr. Sharp: Yes. For those of you who are just listening, I have a glass-top table and then it has a little shelf underneath right above the floor. I have a bunch of toys and fidgets just sitting on the little shelf part. Yeah, you’re totally right, it could easily aggregate all that and [00:56:00] just put it in a tray or a bowl or something like that too.
Carolyn: From a decorator standpoint, I would but then as a practitioner, they may feel inclined to touch it more if they’re not altogether. So you might want to experiment with that to see which one’s more important. It’s not totally like oh, this is horrible, but if I was walking in your office during staging, I’d pull all that together and bring it together.
Dr. Sharp: Nice.
Carolyn: There we go.
Dr. Sharp: Let me ask you one question, this is great, I really appreciate it. My question is, when you say picture height and you said 60 inches, this is a very detailed question, but does that mean the top of the picture should be 60 inches?
Carolyn: I’m sorry, it’s 60 inches to the middle of the picture.
Dr. Sharp: Okay, great.
Carolyn: So from the floor to the middle of the picture, typically at 60 inches.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. That in itself is such a valuable piece of information.
Carolyn: Or if you have a composite of pictures, the middle of that [00:57:00] composite at 60 inches is the most.
Dr. Sharp: Great.
Carolyn: You’ll have to measure it and tell me where it really is. I’m looking at a photo, it has its normal distortions of a photo would have, a wide angle lens type liquid so I’m not exactly sure, but it does not feel too high.
Dr. Sharp: Nice. I’m just looking at the photo myself to see if there’s anything else I wanted to ask about but this is good. If it’s not catching your attention as something to fix, I will let it ride.
Carolyn: No, I think overall, it’s good.
Dr. Sharp: Great. So in that case then, let’s go to our waiting area. This is the first photo of our waiting area. And this is taken from the perspective, it’s not exactly when you walk through the door, but it’s just to the side of our entryway. So this is pretty close to what people see [00:58:00] when they walk into our waiting area. You can maybe describe it based on what you’re seeing.
Carolyn: It’s about 16 feet wide. Is it square? It looks very rectangular in this picture.
Dr. Sharp: It’s deeper than it is wide. So it’s definitely further back. It’s a bit of a rectangle. This is a wide angle, so it’s a little bit distorted, but it’s further back than it is wide.
Carolyn: Overall, it’s a neutral color. It has the same kind of gray color as the floor, a warmer color. The sofas are definitely a cool gray and there’s that touch of yellow in a pillow and a throw. And then it looks like a little table and [00:59:00] a piece of art.
And then there is a, what I’m going to call the front desk, and it looks like a modular piece that’s open and slabs and things like that are happening. And then in the far back straight across looks like a sink hospitality bar type of effect. I’m assuming there’s a hallway on the left that goes down. Is that where you’d go down to your offices and stuff?
Dr. Sharp: Yes.
Carolyn: I would tell you that, when you walk in there is no wall. I’m going to be critical now. I walk in, there is no wall. You walk in, you’re in the middle of a room. You know that there are sofas. There’s two sofas lined up on the right-handed side, then there is a sofa on the left-hand side which happens to be at an angle, which is interesting.
And then there’s a drawing of a, looks like a painting of [01:00:00] a tree on the wall, but the first thing I see is a messy desk. That’s the first thing I see when I walk in, and it’s messy because of all the cords. It’s a low desk. There’s not anything inviting for me to come up to this. In fact, I see the back of a computer first as opposed to somebody’s face.
Just changing that front desk is a possibility to create some more interest. You don’t want to see all that clutter when you first walk in. So whatever you can do to change that desk would probably be a benefit.
The other thing is I would love to see potentially even a screen or something in front of that break room thing, because you’re walking in and all of a sudden you [01:01:00] see like you’re walking into a kitchen, a break room feeling.
I love the art above. The art’s attractive but if you could take the front desk and make it so that you didn’t see the cords in the wall and you had maybe a little bit of angle and then you maybe create some kind of screen behind it or some kind of something so you’re not seeing that messiness, then you immediately walk in and see something inviting, you’d see the person’s face right away and not messy, if you follow what I’m saying.
Dr. Sharp: Absolutely.
Carolyn: If you just did that, and then it looks like you have a table on the far left over there, is that functional or is that for the break room? What’s happening over there?
Dr. Sharp: We use that table as a little workstation for parents who are dropping their kids off and need to stay for a few hours while the kid is in the appointment. So it’s just a little work desk.
[01:02:00] Carolyn: So it’s very functional. I think there’s other pictures so I can see more of it. This first impression, that’s what I see and then all of your art could be rehang.It looks like the art, the two above the front desk are way high, really high. They don’t seem to have a lot to do with each other. They’re pretty all by themselves, but they’re almost like they’re too close together to not match more, and they’re too far apart to be a composite.
What is that? It looks like a telescope.
Dr. Sharp: For the folks who can’t see it, this is our logo. It’s a woodworking piece. So it’s a wood rendition of our logo that’s about 3 feet across and 3.5 feet up and down.
Carolyn: Yeah, if there was a way to have [01:03:00] that wall and that logo right there. A logo typically is higher than the 6 feet but it looks too high because I’m seeing how close it is to your ceiling and even if your ceiling was 8 feet, that piece is a little too high.
Also when your ceilings are low, you can get away with your pictures being lower; when your ceilings are higher, you can get away with your pictures being higher because of that feeling of how close they are to each other.
Dr. Sharp: That makes sense.
Carolyn: It may actually measure at 66 inches to the middle, but it just feels too high. Some things are not rules, they’re intuition-type things.
That yellow piece of art says something; do awesome, be awesome. It’s drawing my attention, but it’s just drawing it [01:04:00] to, they just don’t go together. They’re both good-looking pieces, they just don’t go together.
So if you could put some kind of screen to block that back then that screen and the desk became more solid. So you hid all those wires and hid all of those things. You didn’t see everything and maybe it turned at an angle. Maybe everything comes to an angle. I don’t know. I don’t see the floor plan and then move that picture somewhere else so that my eye just sees what I want to see. Start there. You want to go to the next picture because I can’t see all the …?
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, of course.
Carolyn: You’re recording this so you can, there we go. See those three pictures, those are perfect to pull them close together because they’re all basically the same size. Do you follow me?
If you were to take all three of them and you were to, you have two sofas, you have a lamp and you have a little waiting area and then you have the [01:05:00] side and then the yellow piece of art has a similarity to that make it happen blue piece of art, those could potentially go together.
I don’t see them side by side, but it looks like they’re close to the same size and they both have a similar frame. That could make a larger picture. If you took those three pieces and you pull them together, you lowered them down and you decided to focus them over one of those, maybe the sofa in the middle.
I’m not sure if you could rearrange your sofas at all. Have you tried to turn? I don’t know if you have the room to change your sofas. I don’t think they’re horrible where they are and I get where everything, but if I just look at that wall and you took those three pieces of art, you lowered them and put them [01:06:00] 6 inches or so apart and just right over that sofa, that would make a big difference without moving anything.
Dr. Sharp: I see. My concern with something like that, I would love to get your opinion, when you bring pictures closer together, then I worry about what happens to the rest of the wall. Does the rest of the wall look open; you know what I mean? That’s why I spread them out so much.
Carolyn: Lots of people do that. You want to give a focus so it’s okay if the rest of the wall is open, just giving that focus piece right there. If you feel like you need anything, you’ve got a lamp in the corner so it gives some height, you could put something on the desk to give it some height on the other side, just to anchor it firm as necessary.
I’m looking at two big water bottles. I don’t know if those have to be there. I know that they’re there.
[01:07:00] Dr. Sharp: No, they’re not normally there.Carolyn: Oh, they’re not normally there. So that would be a good thing to put in the storage. If you do put a screen and you walk around the corner, you’re going to have to walk around the corner farther to see the front door. That’s a potential challenge and that’s a functional thing. What you could put there, if it’s not too big, so it’s just a little bit more of a …
Dr. Sharp: Just something to break up that and hide that little kitchen area when people walk around.
Carolyn: Yeah. The main thing is you want to hide the kitchen area and give more of a focused interest on that.
Dr. Sharp: Okay.
Carolyn: You have one more picture somewhere, don’t you?
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, I have one more photo.
Carolyn: This pretty much [01:08:00] shows. This is what I would do with that yellow picture; see where the blue picture is and you’ve got a lamp behind that thing, if you lowered that, however, far the right edge is away from the wall move the yellow picture that far away from the wall so that the two pictures and the lamp become a composite in that corner.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah.
Carolyn: It’d be that easy. And then you’re pulling that yellow picture away from your logo. And so they’re not conflicting with each other any longer, but the two pictures look like a grouping would be another word, composite or a grouping.
Dr. Sharp: Yes, that’s great.
Carolyn: And I can’t tell, is there a window there as you enter the hallway, what is that?
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, to the left of the door.
Carolyn: No. I’m sorry. As you [01:09:00] start to go down to the offices, what’s on the wall?
Dr. Sharp: That’s another framed picture.
Carolyn: Okay. I can’t tell exactly what it is from the picture.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. Gosh, how would I describe it? It’s one of those maps of our city where the background is this mossy green and then all the streets are in white. So it’s just a street map of our city.
Carolyn: So it works. It’s fine. Especially if you ended up with an angled wall right there to block some of that. The other thing is you do have 2×4 light fixtures in your ceiling and it would take a lot of lamps to make it bright enough in there. If you’re going to have 2×4 light fixtures, it’d be nice if [01:10:00] they all were going the same direction because you see how they’re all in different directions.
Dr. Sharp: I do see that.
Carolyn: You can also get filter. You can get lenses or things that cover the lenses that make the light level a little bit lower and not such a wash of light. Do you own the building or are you renting?
Dr. Sharp: No, we’re just leasing.
Carolyn: You’re just leasing and stuff.
Dr. Sharp: We could do that, though, they’re okay if we want to put some filters or covers on there.
Carolyn: Put some filters or covers and add some more floor lamps and just see if you can, if they’re fluorescent, sometimes you can take out bulbs and just lower the light level. So you still have light, but it’s not that bright wash of light.
You could keep the light above your break area because you want it brighter. That is a place you need [01:11:00] light is in your break area. So what do you think?
Dr. Sharp: This is great.
Carolyn: I hope you’re taking notes.
Dr. Sharp: I am lucky we’re recording. I’m going to tell my office manager to go back and listen to the second half of this interview and she’ll get lots of ideas. No, this is great. I think the changes are very doable and totally makes sense to me.
Let me ask you one more question. We have this tree decal thing. It’s not painted on there, this is just a big sticker, essentially. We put it there. We’ve been in this office space for 8 years now, maybe and this waiting room has gone through a lot of different iterations and arrangements.
And so back in the beginning, we had a little sitting area with some toys. It was designating the kids’ area, [01:12:00] so to speak but now it’s just in a random place in our waiting area. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about this tree decal.
For people who are listening, it’s one of those decals. You can get them online, but it’s like a 6-foot-tall branching leafy tree decal that you can put on your wall. It’s got cool, nice little colors. It looks almost cartoony. So I’m curious what you might do, do we take it down?
Carolyn: If not offensive, would you do me a favor and go back to the one that I can see the chair in the corner where I told you to move that yellow picture over?
Dr. Sharp: Yeah.
Carolyn: You know what, if you move the yellow picture over, it’s going to be on top of your tree. So yeah, you need to take the tree down. You’ve had it there for a long time, it’s not going to be a sad thing to take it down.
Dr. Sharp: I think we can say goodbye to the tree.
Carolyn: Yeah, I think if [01:13:00] you took those two pictures and you lowered them and you’ve got that at an angle and I’m sure you put that at an angle. I’m sure you’ve played with how you can arrange the room several different times, but I like the angle. It doesn’t feel stuffy.
Anytime you can do it, especially if you do your desk at an angle, do that at an angle and you can do your desk at an angle, it’d be good. You can find really cool looking front desks on Etsy for fairly inexpensive.
Dr. Sharp: A piece of furniture on Etsy.
Carolyn: Yeah, people make it and they ship it to you. It’s just a place for craftsmen to show their stuff because you don’t need a very big one. They don’t make real big ones, but they make some that are fun but I like [01:14:00] the white. I like the white and the lightness of the space.
But if you could just get a vision. What I would do right now with a client is we’re sitting here talking and then I would go on to the website and Pinterest and start showing them things. We can maybe do that afterward to show you different kinds of ideas. So good things that are in a designer’s head, a picture speaks 1000 words.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, for sure. This is awesome. I appreciate you going through this experiment.
Carolyn: Yeah, this has been fun. Mostly what I’m talking about is not, [01:15:00] you don’t have to be a degreed licensed interior designer to tell you what I’m telling. That’s where a designer knows that they start. They love that kind of, we call it accessorizing, we call it staging, whatever, it just happens. It’s the creative design thought of just moving things around.
In fact, most people that I know that are designers; they move the furniture in their room every 6 months and they move the furniture in their house. It’s just that thing that happens to us.
Dr. Sharp: Sure. Thank you for doing this. I’m going to stop the screen share and go back to our interview here. I would love to ask you two more questions as we start to wrap up and then we’ll say goodbye.
One of the big questions when we get into anything related to design or layout is I don’t have that much money, [01:16:00] what is most important? So if you had to pick biggest bang for your buck choices in the design, primarily the accessorizing or staging or things like that, what would you say?
Carolyn: I’m going to say this, it really depends on, like what we were doing in your office and stuff where we were just moving things around, the only money I spent, as I said, you need a new front desk. So that’s where you would put your money. I don’t even think I’d buy anything else.
Usually, it’s that first thing you see when people walk in. It’s the wow shot, the money shot, the first thing they see. I [01:17:00] want to say, it doesn’t have to be expensive. It just has to be thought through and intentional.
You can probably find a desk on Etsy for $1000 in comparison to these big built-in desks for $10,000, it’s not really that much money if you don’t get too big; the bigger you get, the more it cost. I don’t know what a back wall screen would cost. Something that would look more finished.
I’ve got some different ideas, even pieces of acrylic that are attached on cables, the ceiling, and the floor and stuff. You don’t want to divide your screen; you don’t want that. You need something that’s more fixed, but you don’t want it to have legs to make it stand up. So it’s going to be a search process or you build a wall, something of that sort.
You want the first thing [01:18:00] people see when they walk in to be the, it’s just like the first part of a website; your hero image and your first words and all of that, it’s got to draw them in and fill attention. So that’s where you want to put the most attention.
Money just depends on how bad everything is or how good everything is. If your furniture is really shabby, and we have a free checklist for your listeners called the 5 Point Designer Checklist, it’s what we use as a guide similar to what I was doing with you to walk through the space.
You basically checked off a lot of it. We talked about lighting, but we say, don’t try to do it yourself because you’ve lived in the space so much, you don’t see it anymore. It’s better to have it with some other person that you trust to give that impression of.
[01:19:00] It’s shows you what you need to fix right away, and what’s your first impression? How dirty is it? How cluttered is it? Uncluttering and getting things clean is not expensive. That’s very important to know things about.I know some therapists work in their office and meet with people, your desk was extremely clean compared to some that we’ve seen. I think about the people that go into law offices where the lawyer has stuff everywhere making you to think, can this guy keep up with anything?
It’s an interesting psychology that happens with us. And then we use a judgment that we have, that immediate perception, let me use perception over judgment, of our perception of what we’re seeing, does that help?
Dr. Sharp: Absolutely. This is fantastic. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. I feel like [01:20:00] it’s very complicated and there’s a lot to dig into, but this was great. We covered a lot.
Carolyn: I’m going to say this, there are people that can help you do this; whether you hire us or you hire someone else, especially the staging and the decorator part. It’s just like I can’t be a therapist. I’m not going to be a therapist, that’s not my thing, I hire someone. If I need a therapist, I hire a therapist. So don’t try to do it yourself. If you could do it yourself, it already be done.
Dr. Sharp: Exactly. I’m going to ask one last question just around that idea because I run into folks who will build a website or maybe decorate their office. It seems to come up more with the website, though. They’re like, [01:21:00] I did this myself and let’s just be honest, it does not look good or it could look a lot better, let’s say. So I’m curious, do you run into that with folks and how do you navigate that as the consultant or designer?
Carolyn: When they come to us, they realize they can’t do it.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. So they’re already admitting defeat, so to speak or they admit that they need some support there.
Carolyn: Yeah, most of them. Occasionally, we’ll have them come to us because we’re real experts at office flow, practice flow and stuff. We’ll have them come to us and they don’t want the aesthetic piece at all. You look at it and go, I can make you flow better and it’s going to help increase your efficiency, but it’s not going to add …
So the flow increases in efficiency and helps reduce overhead, I’ll call [01:22:00] it, where the aesthetics increases revenue and increases attraction. So we can work on flow all day long, but it’s not going to help that attraction, if you don’t want to get rid of your chairs that are from the 80s which, by the way, you can still buy chairs that look like they’re from the 80s. So it’s not how old the chairs are, it’s just the style.
I do work with students and teach students as I was telling you earlier, and we say, get the highest style you can get with the least amount of money you can and put it in your budget to replace it in 5 years. So you can put residential furniture in a doctor’s office easily, it’s just going to wear out faster because it’s not intended to be in a commercial space like that.
I hate it when [01:23:00] they buy these chairs, they’ll buy chairs, they’ll find them on some office liquidator and they’re already dated. It’s like okay, yeah, there’s structure. They’re good. I understand but the wood tone is from the 80s and the fabric is from the 80s, what are you doing here? So it’s sad.
So don’t try to do it yourself. The whole purpose is to help you guys be better-educated consumers and to understand what you’re dealing with.
Dr. Sharp: I think we accomplished that mission. I have a lot to think about. I’m going to go to my office manager with a big long list of things to work on.
Carolyn: Not too much. We didn’t think too much.
Dr. Sharp: That’s true. No, I really appreciate it. Thanks for being here, Carolyn. This is fun.
Carolyn: Yeah, I had fun. I haven’t done this on a podcast before. I’m going to remember this. I can’t wait till it comes out. So that’ll be great. Thanks.
Dr. Sharp: Nice. I’m super [01:24:00] grateful and I hope that folks found it helpful as well and hopefully, our paths will cross again soon.
Carolyn: Oh, we’ll plan on it. Thank you, Jeremy. I appreciate it.
Dr. Sharp: 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 amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting.
[01:25:00] 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, 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 are 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 similarly, no supervisory or [01:26:00] 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.