[JOE SANOK]
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This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 685.
[JOE]
Well, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. I hope you are doing awesome today. We have been talking and doing some bonus episodes with our Audience Building Academy folks. We talked to Ellen, talked to Laurie, Cordelia, and now today we have Anna with us. Part of this is to show you these Audience Building Academy people’s journey and where they’re starting. I mean, I think about people that I’ve consulted with like Jessica Tappana, who she started Simplified SEO Consulting. I wish I had interviewed her on the day. She thought of this idea back at Slow Down School. I think that was 2018, 2019 because how cool would that be to follow someone’s journey?

So the idea is let’s give these folks that joined Audience Building Academy some free consulting, but then also you’re going to be able to see their journey unfold as we do future podcast episodes with them as well. So it’s super fun and cool for me to be able to show some of this publicly and see how people can continue to grow throughout this process within our Audience Building Academy.
[JOE]
So today we have Anna Saviano. Anna, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. How are you doing today?
[ANNA SAVIANO]
I am doing well. Thank you for having me. I just was saying it’s cold here.
[JOE]
Awesome. Well, welcome. Well, why don’t we just start with tell us about your practice, tell us about your world? Then we’ll dive into what you’re hoping to build with Audience Building Academy.
[ANNA]
Sure. I have been a private practice clinician for 10 years, five years in a group before being solo co-op setup. Then the last couple years have started my own group. So I hired my first clinician right before the pandemic started and have hired three more since then. We are getting some interns started now this year and one admin. So we are growing fairly quickly I think and I love it.
[JOE]
Any part of it scary?
[ANNA]
I mean, if I paid enough attention to that, yes, but that’s not been what I’ve tried to do.
[JOE]
That’s awesome. Well, I know you’ve been a part of the Practice of the Practice community for a while and have taken advantage of a lot of our resources. What are maybe a handful of things that really helped you grow and get the practice going so that you can step away a little bit and start building an audience?
[ANNA]
Sure. I mean, a hundred percent the first Killin’It Camp in person in 2019. I met Whitney and she and I had a long conversation and she said, it sounds like you’re starting a group practice. I said, huh, I wonder if that is what I’m doing. Maybe that is what I’ll do. So then I did some official consulting with her in the spring of 2020 after I had hired my first person and really that accountability and direction, the instruction on how to do it and what to do next, hire an assistant like last week. So do that sooner than you think, like they tell you a hundred times over, all of those things that really set it up so that I was moving forward and not just like dotting.
[JOE]
Yes, totally. I feel like when you have that guidance from someone that knows what they’re doing, it just helps you figure out exactly where to put that extra time and energy.
[ANNA]
Exactly.
[JOE]
So then, you signed up for Audience Building Academy, walk through, I know your story, but walk through for the audience what you’re thinking, what you’re considering in regards to building an audience.
[ANNA]
Well, I have relied primarily on word of mouth and just sort of my presence in the community for so long as how to generate our calls and getting our team full and all of that. But we have people on my team interested in doing some bigger things, some presentations, some training, stuff like that. So trying to figure out how to fill up those programs once we get them going, needing to have an audience for that. I love podcasts a lot and so I would like to do that as well and needing just again, like with the consulting I did before having guidance, accountability, somebody pointing and pushing at the same time probably to move things forward.
[JOE]
When you think about the types of products that right now you’re interested in, and part of the philosophy we teach is you want to build your audience and then see where your audience is rather than build a whole product and then squeeze people into it. But right now, if you were to say, what’s the general direction of where you think you’re headed with maybe the end product, what are you thinking about at this point?
[ANNA]
In terms of who the people are?
[JOE]
Yes, who the people are, maybe what you’re thinking you might want just in regards to your starting point. There may be areas where you’re like, I’m not really sure and that’s totally fine too, but just to, I know you and I have talked throughout the last few months just to know where are you at right now in regards to your specialty, the things that you may want to create for people you may want to have your staff create for people. What sort of things are you brainstorming at this point?
[ANNA]
One of the things that I love is helping new clinicians, all the people that are on my team are provisionally, licensed, or were when they got hired. I love helping people grow in that clinical way and sort of since starting my own group, really focusing on how to have that work for their life as well, so work life balance, et cetera, that thing. Just doing cool things if they’re into presentations or if they’re wanting to start group therapy or that stuff. So wanting to have systems set up for those kinds of opportunities for my team and then also I’ve been working with our university program here for a course on teaching still grad students how to do all of that as well. Because, well, I like working with new therapist a lot. My specialty has always been Borderline Personality Disorder and trauma work, EMDR. So clinically that’s a different sort of path that I want to maybe develop some training around. I’ve got a few things in the works in that department. So there’s sort of a lot of ideas and needing to hone in on some probably is a big piece of this hopeful goal.
[JOE]
When you think about all the different things you’re just personally interested in which ones do you feel like you could talk about for the next two to five years? The ones that you’re not quite burned out on. Like I know for a while I worked with angry kids and I loved that work, but if I still was talking about angry teenagers, I would lose my mind. It’s just not my jam anymore. For a while it was yes. Are there things that that you’re probably going to get sick of talking about or are there things that that you’re like, yes, I am so fired up about this. I would keep being fired up about this.
[ANNA]
I love talking about case conceptualization and doing supervision in that way and helping, I mean, I love talking to new clinicians and helping them see in a bigger context. Trauma is the thing I could talk about forever, borderline personality disorder. I could talk about forever and just sort of the overlap of all of those things. Then on the like backend side is talking to people about how to, I don’t know, curate their life, all the words feel overused, but how to set things up. Your book was part of that and all the podcasts I consume around organizing your time and your space and your priorities so that you can have life be how you want it.
[JOE]
So really that early career therapist is something that you’re really, that’s your jam, more than maybe some of the other things but like having the clinical side be within it. So we’re not talking so much the marketing business, like a Practice of the Practice, but more the clinical side is what you’re interested in.
[ANNA]
Yes.
[JOE]
Okay. So let’s just start there as an idea. We can always shift in, I mean, you’re going to be going through like all the group work and homework and all that with Audience Building Academy, but like dissect that a little bit more for me. When you think about how you supervise, how you teach, how you guide what are the three to five main struggles that you see the average new clinician go through?
[ANNA]
Sure. First of all, just like the confidence piece of, oh my gosh, I just finished school. I don’t have anything useful to tell these people, especially if the clinicians are young and their clients can be older than them. That can create some nerves.
[JOE]
I remember I was teaching a parenting class when I wasn’t a parent as a 25 year old. So I grew a beard out just to look a little bit older.
[ANNA]
That’s a good strategy. So really just reminding clinicians that they have the education and the will to make it feel good for their clients in a way that is valuable, even if they haven’t been practicing for 10 years. So I feel like that that is a big piece of it. Case conceptualization taking a really holistic approach so that they’re considering childhood stuff, as well as current stressors, family of origin, some social political things that might have been going on in their family history that are worth paying attention to so that they’re thinking about their caseload and their clients individually at a really comprehensive level, figuring out to what the physical manifestations are, some of those other treatment approaches like EMDR or somatic experiencing those things.
[JOE]
So I have confidence, case conceptualization. Did I miss one?
[ANNA]
No, there’s that too.
[JOE]
So, I mean, I say three to five, like just to get you thinking through, what’s your method? What’s what do you notice? Because I remember I was interviewing Rob Bell and he’s someone I really have respected, like the way he thinks about problems and writing and things like that. After we were done with that podcast, he and I were just talking for a few minutes and he said to me, if you can figure out the seven questions that your client, and this was when I had at my clinic the seven questions that your average client always asks and then create content around those he’s like, that can be a book, that can be a video, that can be all sorts of things that then you offer.

That really helped me think about like, what do I say all the time that just I’m on repeat? So whether it’s with Practice of the Practice with people, starting a practice with people, launching podcasts, back when I had clients, that idea of what do I just keep going back to and how do I make sure that somebody has that before they work with me? So now I can hand someone on Thursday is the New Friday, before we ever start consulting and they know Joe’s method or Joe’s approach if they read that. So then they’re at a starting point way farther down the line if we do one on one, or if they join one of my groups than someone who hasn’t read that.

So just that idea of how do we pull out of your brain a methodology, or just the way you view the world and we’re the very beginning of that, but just over time saying, like, what’s Anna’s pillars? What are your five pillars? What are your three pillars that just at least give a broad brush strokes on how you approach new clinicians so really we’re just entering into that conversation. So confidence, case conceptualization, what else would you have on there as some of those big struggles early on?
[ANNA]
I think one of the things that comes up in my own clinical work and then also in any supervision is the storytelling aspect of it. What story do clients come in with? What story do clinicians come in with about their experiences, what it means, all of that narrative therapy approach? I use the Enneagram a lot as well on both sides of it, so for clinicians and supervising and for clients as a way to just understand outside of any sort of shame or judgment or all of those hangups, why they’re doing what they’re doing and, or experiencing what they’re experiencing and then how to again, choose a different path or choose a different approach so that they can, everybody can create what they want their life to look like going forward.
[JOE]
So I would say storytelling, what do they come in with? The Enneagram? Those are solutions to a problem. What’s the problem that new clinicians struggle or that they’re dealing with, that storytelling, what they come in with the engram is the solution for?
[ANNA]
They don’t know what they don’t know how to be a therapist. They don’t know what their stuff is that might be interfering with their work or their confidence. I think that, that trying to bring awareness to how they practice so that it doesn’t feel like they just have to show up and figure out what the right answer is, but instead build their own philosophical approach through all of those solutions to help understand and do the work that they really will thrive at.
[JOE]
So it sounds like we might be studying to say like a lack of confidence might be the first thing, a lack of knowledge might be the second thing with case conceptualization and holistic approach being the solution. They don’t know what they, what might interfere and storytelling. What do they come in with? The Enneagram might be the solution. What else would you say are things that, because we’re the theme of lack of confidence, lack of knowledge, lack of knowing what might interfere, what other lacks do typical new clinicians come in with?
[ANNA]
Networks, community connections, a lot of, especially in private practice you operate in silos often. So they might be in a group where they might just be on their own. I feel like that’s a thing I’m seeing more of is new clinicians just hanging their own shingle, because it’s fairly accessible. But the giant loss of generational knowledge from other therapists being in the same office, that thing. So really wanting to have that community built in or help them foster networks and that being connected to other, maybe more seasoned therapists, but also people at the same page because then they can grow together.
[JOE]
How do people overcome that?
[ANNA]
We have a very couple active Facebook groups in our metro area. I think that that’s useful for people. But I don’t know that anybody’s doing a great job at overcoming that.
[JOE]
Okay. I mean, if someone that was new came to you and they’re from across the country, so they’re not local, they’re not in your Facebook community or any of that stuff and they said what should I do? I recognize there’s a lack of generational knowledge. I do want to hang my own shingle out there. I don’t have, I have a lack of network and connections. Give me my 30-day plan. What would you tell them?
[ANNA]
You know, I think a consultation group is huge, whether it’s for official supervision or just other therapists who are doing similar work to be connected to people doing that is really important. One of the barriers to that, of course is that time and money is usually the exchange when you’re in private practice. So doing consultation or supervision, if you don’t have to is just working free. So figuring a way around that for people I think would be a problem I would like to solve because I feel really strongly about people being connected to one another clinically or otherwise so that they have way more resources and ideas to pull from to build their practice how it will be sustaining and sustainable.
[JOE]
The Faith in Practice Conference is right around the corner. It starts on Thursday, April 21st until Sunday, April 24th. It’s going to be at the Courtyard Marriott on Jekyll Island. It’s going to be amazing. The Faith in Practice Conference is a unique space for faith-based counselors of all kinds to develop their clinical skills, boost their business acumen and take time away for quietness and reflection. I can’t wait to be a part of the Faith in Practice Conference. Will you join me? Head on over to practiceofthepractice.com/faithinpracticeconference. Again, that’s Faith in Practice Conference over at practiceofthepractice.com/faithinpracticeconference to learn more, see pictures and see who’s speaking at the Faith in Practice conference. I can’t wait to see there in Georgia.
[JOE SANOK]
And I think one of the mindsets I want to just talk about briefly in regards to your audience building or anyone’s audience building is we want to give knowledge and solutions for knowledge and solutions sake. For me, for example, I can talk on a podcast about how to start a private practice and give a bunch of advice and it will never point to one of my products. It can just be knowledge for knowledge sake. We want to have things that in and of themselves are just great free things that we offer. We can also eventually have things like we have Next Level Practice, we have consulting, we have different things like that that can help speed that up. But we don’t want all of your solutions, and I haven’t noticed it yet, but I think with this one in particular if it’s, yes, the only way to have more networks and connections is to join my consultation group or join my program. Like you don’t want that to be the only talking point.

So even to say, even if you just get coffee with one person a week virtually that by the end of the year, you’ll have 52 clinicians. From those 52 clinicians, you may find five that you really connect with and you can just bounce cases off of, you can connect with them. You can get that generational knowledge. Find someone that’s four years ahead of you that can just give you a little bit of advice, find someone that’s 20 years ahead of you that maybe you can meet with quarterly. So I think even just having those talking points of, okay, how do we build networks and connections if they never gave you a dollar, if they never joined any of your programs and making sure we have some advice around that so it doesn’t always point back to your program every single time. Sure. Because that can feel like, okay, the only reason she’s giving advice is it points to her program, which we want to just give good advice for good advice sake. Then through that, people are going to say, well, man, her free advice is so awesome. What’s her paid advice going to be like?
[ANNA]
Right.
[JOE]
Okay. So what would be the fifth one? So we have lack of confidence, lack of knowledge, lack of understanding how their own stories might interfere, a lack of network and connections. What’s maybe one last struggle or lack that new clinicians deal with?
[ANNA]
Education on —
[JOE]
Would that be different from lack of knowledge?
[ANNA]
Probably. I mean, maybe only in that it’s clinical versus business.
[JOE]
Mmh, okay.
[ANNA]
I don’t know if that, I mean …
[JOE]
Tell me more.
[ANNA]
Well, I mean, I feel like people come out of grad school with basically know business information at all in how to, even if you’re part of a group and not doing your own thing entirely, that there are so many pieces that we don’t learn in school on how to do that business side of things. So I don’t know if it’s totally separate from the clinical knowledge piece, but I think it’s, I think it definitely is a lack.
[JOE]
Yes. Well, so your homework for this, and we’ll keep talking, doing some more consulting, we’re not quite to the end of the episode, but would be to really just sit with these struggles that you gave your first draft to. I mean, this was just on the fly. I didn’t prep you at all for this. It was just here’s what the average clinician. Then I would also, think through when you’re talking to new clinicians, when you’re coaching them, when you’re chatting with people in your practice, when you’re doing hiring. So between now and when Audience Building Academy starts and just, I think we’re less than two weeks out from that, you just allow yourself to notice the way you teach. So it may not be that it always comes from a place of lack or a place of struggle, but we do want to be able to articulate the pain of being a new clinician and then create solutions to make that easier for people.

So that may be a podcast or may be a blog. It may be a YouTube channel. We’ll figure that out as we work together. But I think that right now, the more information you have on the lack or the struggle or the pain, and then how do you help that person solve that? It may be that you come up with 10 other things or you start to say, oh, well, these ones seemed separate, but they’re actually all under the same heading. So it may be just lack of knowledge, you know points to case conceptualization. It points to a holistic approach. It may be that you lump business education and lack of knowledge under that heading so that we end up with five. So I’d say continue to play with and practice and notice how you speak from your perspective to new clinicians.
[ANNA]
Okay. I’m taking notes.
[JOE]
Good. You have also got a recording right here. That you can come back to.
[ANNA]
That’s fair. Yes.
[JOE]
Okay. Tell me a little bit more about why the world needs a fast forwarding of knowledge for new clinicians, or like, I guess if you could snap your fingers and make new clinicians be better in some way, why is that good for the world?
[ANNA]
I mean, I think it’s good for their own practice, of course, because I think it feels better when you feel confident doing what you’re doing. Better client care, you know a lot of people don’t have the resources to be in therapy forever. When I think about the early people that I saw and how helpful that was or wasn’t, I think it would be cool to have less on ramping to getting really good clinical services from new clinicians. There’s so much need that if we could serve people efficiently and mindfully, but maybe quicker, then it would be better. Everybody would have more access, hopefully.
[JOE]
Yes. So I think as a technique to learn one thing we want to do is we want to think about the micro and so the individual. That’s what we did first. We thought about for the individual. What’s it like to be in this? Okay, we’ve got these struggles, these pains, these solutions, and that’s how we think through the micro. Then if we can zoom out and say from the macro, like what would it mean for society if we had more competent early clinicians? Like you started to touch on it that instead of a long on-ramp where maybe the skills that we’re building, it takes six months to a year instead of it might take a seasoned clinician only a month to do that same work. That’s cheaper for society, for therapy.

We can have better outcomes for society and so zooming into the micro and then pulling out to the macro, whether that’s in storytelling, whether that’s in podcasting, whether that’s in how we write blogs is a really effective way to talk about what happens on the negative to the individual? What happens to the negative for society? What happens to the positive? It allows us to speak in different ways through different modalities. So if you’re on YouTube, say you’re on a YouTube live with a podcaster to be able to tell a story of one single clinician that was just getting started, here’s what was lacking so that the micro negative and then thinking about, well, the micro positive here’s what happened for them, but let’s zoom out. Imagine that all of grad schools did something or we had a program like we’re trying to create that really helped people rock it out. What would that mean for society? What would that mean for the broader, negative things that we see? It’s just effective storytelling in a different way that if you conceptualize it that way, it’s just a lot easier to create content that sticks with people.
[ANNA]
That makes a lot of sense. I’m thinking about how many clients I’ve gotten over the years who have had a bad experience with a therapist or just people. There’s lots.
[JOE]
Well, and that’s where, I mean, and this is something I do on a regular basis. I just have a note on my phone that’s called stories. So if I think of a random story I don’t necessarily know where, or when I’m going to use that story. It could be in a book, it could be in a podcast. It could just be in there. I don’t know, but as you think of those things, I would capture them in some sort of easy to document things. So don’t worry about carrying a notebook around, because you’re going to forget that notebook in your car and then you’re going to be in the grocery store, but you usually always have your phone.

So even having a note that’s called stories and to say that one client that had the raccoon situation and the intern that didn’t know how to handle it, it’s like, oh, like you remember what that raccoon situation was. So just those quick notes to yourself and then the more that you can have some stories that back up what you’re talking about, the more engaging it is. Our brains do neural mirroring when we’re telling stories. You want to have a whole arsenal of stories over time that make your points in addition to you making your points.
[ANNA]
Yes. That sounds good.
[JOE]
Cool. So as you think through this first round of consulting and things that you are thinking about, what questions do you still have, where do you feel like you might get stuck? What final pieces of advice do you want from me before we give our final send off?
[ANNA]
Sure. I mean, I feel sort of in awe of how much traction this feels like it has already. So that’s cool. I don’t know if I have any right. I don’t know if I have any like immediate questions. I took note of the homework of just paying more attention to how I interact with, mostly it’s my team, talking about how I practice and all of that. Then I think I’ll have a space for this as I’m working with our university to try and get things figured out with them course set up wise because it fits into this framework pretty well also.
[JOE]
Awesome. Well, it sounds like you’ve got a whole lot of things to keep working on and I’m going to give you all sort of more homework in Audience Building Academy. I’m so excited about the group that’s coming together and how we’re going to be supporting each other and all of that. By the time this goes live Audience Building Academy, this cohort will be closed, but if you’re interested, over at audiencebuilding.academy. You can sign up. If you want info on the next cohort we launch, it’s going to be a six-month program with milestones every single month to help you build an audience. So you’re welcome to head on over there. Anna, what is your first thing that you’re going to get done after this call at some point? What are you going to commit to getting done right away?
[ANNA]
I think outlining those lacks a little bit more and working on what the umbrella organization needs to be for new clinicians and putting it into. Because I’ve already started the outline for this university course thing. I’m going to try and overlap it with that. I think that’ll just make it flow. So that’s my plan, an outline.
[JOE]
Awesome. I love it. Well, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast today.
[ANNA]
Thank you so much.
[JOE]
What a fun episode to do these live consulting? It just fires me up because I feel like we get glimpses into people’s potential different lives. That to me is part of the really fun and interesting thing of thinking differently than maybe how we were trained, that we don’t have to just do private practice. I know when I say, just do private practice. It sounds like I’m diminishing private practice and that’s not my intent at all. I think that it’s more that sometimes we have a limiting mindset of what we can or are allowed to do within our licensure and to see people that are saying I have these awesome skills and I want to build multiple streams of income and different audiences and e-courses or membership communities or whatever. The world is so much more open than maybe we were taught or believed or thought in regards to how and where we can make money.

I’ve said it a lot frequently because there’s so many consultants to C-Suite business executives that lately I’ve just been shocked at how many of these folks are teaching basic psychological techniques. Things that for us are so intuitive and mental health in the workplace right now is such a primary issue, especially as the way we work is changing. We’re not going to go back. We’re not going to go back to that industrialist way of thinking of how we do business.

So we have these skills and we have this opportunity now to really go out into the world and do things that we enjoy and have more time and financial freedom than maybe we’ve had in the past. So it’s so exciting to hang out with people like Anna to really think through what could that look like for her? What’s her first couple of steps? How do we make sure she feels supported to go do that in a totally different way? So it’s going to be awesome to see Audience Building Academy really get out there and grow.

If you are interested our sponsor today is the Faith in Practice Conference. The Faith in Practice Conference is a faith-based conference that’s for people that have any sort of faith-based practice. It’s a unique space for faith-based counselors to develop their clinical skills, boost their business acumen and take time away for quietness and reflection. Whitney Owens, who is the head of the Faith in Practice podcast is putting it on and we are partnering with her to help support folks. Thank you so much for hanging out with us. You can read more over at practiceofthepractice.com/faithinpracticeconference.

Thank you for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great day. I’ll talk to you soon.

Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.