What I didn’t learn in graduate school

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what I didn't learn in grad school


The summer before college, I started selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. When I went in for my interview, the owner had said that he became a millionaire before he was 30 years old.

It was terrible. You know, I’d go up to these doors and knock on them, and people would reject me time and time again, to try to sell a $2000-dollar product that I didn’t even care about. Ended up selling only two and a half vacuum cleaners. One to my parents, one to my parents’ friends, and then I got so sick of doing door-to-door sales by myself I invited my friend to go with me. This was my first time doing sales and I hated it. I didn’t believe in the product, I didn’t believe on what I was doing, and it was just terrible.

So then I go off to grad school for counseling after I do a major in Psychology and Comparative Religion. And I learned all about group dynamics, I learned about theory, I learned about counseling, I learned about what to do when someone’s sitting across from you on a couch. And I launched into this career and the expectation is that I’m going to work for somebody else, and that I’m going to just eventually make a little bit more money by being a supervisor.

It’s amazing how when I work with people, they already have that bedrock of clinical skills. When they start to take the business and the marketing and all of this that expresses who they are in their private practice. It’s amazing to see what happens to their influence and to their income. See when we learn, when we discover, when we dive deeper, we then can share that with the world more, and we can affect our communities in ways that we just couldn’t have if we just showed up. Instead, we show up and we make a splash. We win the game; we go after those ambitious results that we want to get.

So I’m Joe Sanok, and I help counselors  get results – ambitious results.