[JOE SANOK] This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 772. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. We’re here to help you start, grow, scale, and exit your private practice. This month and in early September, we are doing tons of interviews with people all about how they leveled up, what did they do, how do they think through things. Some of these folks are brand new, like they started a practice a year ago. Other people have group practices and they’re just kicking it in group practice and other folks are leveling up even beyond their practices in doing things like e-courses or podcasts or other things. So it’s just a bunch of people that have leveled up and we’re just learning how did they level up throughout this time in their lives. I’m really excited about this. In early September, September 12th, we’re kicking off Level Up Week. In Level Up Week we are going to have webinars, teachings, all sorts of things all week long to help you totally free. I’m really excited, I just got confirmation from my writing coach who helped me write the proposal to get the Harper Collins book deal for Thursday is the New Friday, Nancy’s going to be joining me for one of those webinars. So if you’ve ever thought, I might want to write a book come, definitely hang out with me and Nancy about how to get a traditionally published book. We’re going to have all sorts of other things at starting, growing, scaling, and exiting a private practice. Well, today we have Shannon Heers and I am so excited to have Shannon here on the podcast. Shannon’s someone that I’ve known through Audience Building Academy but has been involved in so many different ways. She’s an experienced therapist, clinical supervisor, and the founder of Firelight Supervision. Firelight Supervision provides clinical supervision and clinical consultation to counselors and social workers pursuing licensure as well as post-licensure professional development. Shannon, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. [SHANNON HEERS] Thanks, Joe. It’s so exciting to be here. [JOE] Yes, I’m so excited to have you here. It’s great when I know someone and they’re working on cool things and to finally say, “Let’s talk about it on the podcast.” And as part of this Level Up series, I couldn’t think of like a better way because you’ve leveled up over and over and over. It’s pretty awesome. [SHANNON] Oh my gosh, I was part of Group Practice Boss when I first launched my group practice, and then I just remained a part of your community. Then Audience Building Academy, obviously we’ve been doing the last six months and it’s been so fun, just opportunities that I didn’t know that I wanted to do, I’m now doing it. [JOE] Well, and that’s the cool thing I think about our membership communities and just like people getting to know each other is when you’re talking to people nationwide or often worldwide just the number of different ways people do things to say, whoa, that’s such a cool thing. I could totally do something similar. It’s really cool and collaborative to see. Well, take us back to when you started your practice, why’d you start it? Why’d you get it going? [SHANNON] I started private practice, oh my gosh, probably about eight years ago now, and primarily after I had kids and I didn’t want to work my 50-hour a week community mental health job. So I wanted to stay home part-time and work part-time and did solo practice for several years and then about three and a half, oh, oh gosh, almost four years ago jumped into group practice and have just loved it. We’ve always, I’ve always done clinical supervision as part of my own practice and it’s always been something I’ve done as part of my job, so that’s been included in a practice. But yes, that’s my quick process from starting a practice to here. [JOE] What were some things that maybe were harder for your practice than you expected, and what were some things that maybe were a little easier than you thought? [SHANNON] Some things that were easier was actually doing the work. I think a lot of parents who go into private practice, they try to jump into private practice and the work actually ends up being a little bit of a break from home life. That was a different surprise. It had always been the opposite for me. Some things that were harder, I think was really learning about the marketing curve, learning everything that I needed to do to become a really good marketer, being mostly a private prey practice. There is so much about marketing. You can be a fantastic therapist, but if you can’t bring in the clients. No one is going to know that. So for me that was probably the biggest learning curve. [JOE] When you were doing that initial marketing and figuring that out, what was working, what helped you learn just like as people are listening that maybe are just getting going? Any tips for them? [SHANNON] Yes, I think I just, first of all, it’s a mindset shift. I just decided and one day I was like, I want to be a group practice owner and I need to learn everything I possibly can about marketing and I’m a smart person and I’m an educated person and I have a good work ethic and I know I can learn what I need to learn. So I think that was the main mindset shift I had around that. In terms of marketing specifics, I would say that I tend to lean heavily towards digital marketing. So a website is our primary marketing strategy and so just putting a lot of time, energy and investment into developing a really good website that converts and then stepping up from there, then working on SEO and then Google Ads. That’s how we draw most of our clientele at this point. That marketing strategy just fits well with being more of an introvert and the way that I tend to work. [JOE] When you decided to make a group practice, what was going on where you said that that makes sense to jump up to level up into a group practice? [SHANNON] I was full, my caseload was full and I wanted, there was such a need in the community and I wanted to continue to serve the need in the community. I also had always in community mental health, been in management and supervision and I just prefer to work with people. I don’t prefer to work solo. It’s just, it works for some people. It just was not where I saw myself in the future. I knew that I had a really strong professional network of colleagues who were also getting burnt out with the long hours in community mental health, wanted some more flexibility and were great therapists, people that I had worked with before, I had supervised, I had managed before and I trusted and I knew they did a good job. So one by one I’ve just started saying, “Hey, you want to come work over here with me?” [JOE] Just slowly poaching them. [SHANNON] Yes [LEVEL UP WEEK] I think it’s time that we speak about you and your goals for a minute. Hear me out. For a while now, we’ve been speaking about, about how to market your practice, how to grow your practice, and how to be a better boss and encourage a company culture but isn’t it time to start making it happen? I’m serious, I’m challenging you to just do it. Take that leap of faith, put yourself out there and level up in your practice. Think about it. You’re probably entering that phase where you start to set yourself up for 2023. You’re thinking about what your goals are going to be, what you’re not going to do and what you hope to achieve. But regardless of where you are within your private practice journey, I’m challenging you to make these last few months count to dig deep, to make next year the one for big changes within your business and more importantly within yourself. If you’ve been looking for a sign to either start your own private practice, grow from solo to group, or become a next level group practice boss, this is it. You’re certainly not alone because Practice of the Practice is doing something we’ve never done before. We’re so convinced that now is the time for you to grow, that we’re dedicating all our resources to help you do it. We’re all in every single one of us and we’re inviting you to go all in and level up. From September 12th to September 15th, we’ll be running level up week to help you decide what will work best for you in your private practice journey. There will be webinars, Q&As with experts and a chance for you to meet your accountability partners, facilitators, and community. If you’re ready to make a change and level up register at practiceofthepractice.com/levelup and follow our Facebook and Instagram pages at Practice of the Practice for live updates and event details. Lastly, before I jump back into this episode, I just want to say that I really hope to see you there, even if it’s just online. Remember that leveling up week isn’t about us. It’s not about me or about Practice of the Practice. It’s all about you and growing your practice, whether it be your first solo practice or growing you from group practice boss to reaching a national audience. Make September, 2022, the month that you start your journey and level up. [JOE SANOK] No, I think, and I want to go into that burnout because I think that’s something that with the pandemic of 2020 and with cycling of viruses and cycling, just so much, just general stress and then add on top of that being a clinician that’s hearing other people’s stress, I’d love to hear a little bit about burnout. Because you’ve had supervision be such a strong part of your practice for so long but then also, I know that clinician burnout is an area of specialty for you. Where should we start in regards to clinician burnout and talking about that? [SHANNON] Well, I think just saying that we’re really worried about it, Joe. I don’t know if you are, but I’m really worried about clinician burnout in our field, especially right now after the past few years. Before 2020, a lot of the stats said maybe 20% to 60% of clinicians, therapists, social workers people in the mental health field were experiencing signs of burnout, which definitely makes sense. It’s a tough field. Then after 2020 that number was raised to 90% and I don’t know how those 10% who are not experiencing burnout, I don’t know what they were doing. [JOE] Well, how would you define burnout so we can make sure we’re talking about the same thing? How would you classify it? Parse it out for us. [SHANNON] So it’s the way that it affects you as a therapist or a counselor. Are you experiencing any physical distress emotional exhaustion, emotional compassion, fatigue is certainly one factor of it? Are you having trouble going into your sessions? Are you not giving your best self to everyone that you’re working with? You just don’t want to go to work anymore, you’re overwhelmed, you’re doing too much, any of those signs that make it so that it’s hard to bounce back? Certainly, we all experience some of those signs every day, but if we have enough strong positive supports in our life, we’re able to say, “Hey, I’m going to take an hour off or an hour away and I can bounce back tomorrow.” Well, burnout is, I think when you get to the point where you just can’t bounce back and you don’t even really want to. I’m just really concerned because there is such a mental health crisis right now. We all know that there’s not enough mental health providers to meet the demand and we are seeing people in record numbers leave our field. Every day I feel like I see another post on social media or another story about someone who just got burnt out and is leaving the field. Just think of all the training and the time and energy that you have put into this career and why you put it in. You really wanted to help people, you wanted to make a difference, and then you got to the point where you burnt out and then you’re not there anymore to help other people. So it’s, I think that’s the reason why I’m really concerned about it. [JOE] Yes, I mean even if you look at any of the service industries, whether it’s hotels or restaurants or things like that right now, so many people are like, there’s so many ways to make money and I don’t have to put up with the general public’s crap and I’m not going to do that. So now there’s this huge shortage of people in service industries and I can’t imagine if that would happen in the mental health world where there just wouldn’t be enough therapists. That would be terrible. So when you think about burnout and people leaving the field, what do we need to think about as leaders in the clinical arenas in regards to how we think about burnout, how we treat our staff how we check in with people? What are ways that you see that we need to be advocating differently in regards to burnout? [SHANNON] I think just recognizing that not, if it’s going to happen, but when it’s going to happen and knowing that it is going to happen. We want to do everything possible as leaders, as managers, as private practice owners to be aware of that and educate therapists and other people about what the signs of burnout are. Then to create a really, I don’t want to say formalized, I mean obviously that’s great if you can, but some sort of a burnout prevention plan with each of the therapists that you work with. And really identifying what are, for each therapist, what are some of the things that they, their top things that they can do or have access to to help prevent that burnout. The top three things that help prevent burnout or self-care, professional boundaries and getting the work support that you need at work. Now at work support is very generalized. So really making that unique to your work situation or the therapist you work with. What does that work support look like at work? The way I interpret that to be is are we providing the absolute best clinical support that we can, clinical supervision, clinical consultation? Are we making sure that you’re getting support for those really hard cases that you have different ideas on things to do, you’re not practicing outside of your zone of expertise. You’re getting professional mentorship in the field. All of those things can come under workplace support. [JOE] Why would you link clinical supervision to burnout? What do you think having good quality supervision does to prevent it? [SHANNON] I think that if you’re not getting it, you’re just not, you’re practicing in isolation one clinically, So I’m talking about the clinical stuff right now. You are, even if you’re an advanced therapist, I’ll talk about more beginning to intermediate therapist because I think everyone can benefit from it. Right now, beginning to intermediate therapist, there is so much knowledge that you need to know and just think about how you feel when you are trying to do something that you don’t know. It’s just really uncomfortable. It stresses you out. You don’t know if you’re doing the right thing or not and that’s where clinical supervision and consultation can really come in. You have an experienced therapist who’s an advanced clinician who’s coming in and they also know about supervision. We don’t want to forget the supervision training and experience that’s important there but they can come in and help provide that sounding board. They can give you different interventions to try. They can say, “Hey, let’s look at using the theoretical of orientation instead of that one.” Obviously, case conceptualization and case reviews are incredibly important. Videotaping your sessions and going back and saying, “Hey, how are my nonverbals presented in the session? How am I reacting to the client? Am I doing the basic counseling skills that we were taught many years ago in grad school?” So I think all of those things, one, give you the support, the ongoing learning, but also give you the support because as a clinical supervisor, I most definitely support my supervisees. They’re having a hard day, we talk through it. If they had a client drop-off and they’re not sure why. We talk about all the different reasons why. They’re just not processing this stuff alone. You have someone to work through this stuff with. [JOE] Yes, I know when I was a clinical supervisor, we would host this event every April as people were graduating called the path to LPC. So in Michigan we have a LLPC, a limited licensed professional counselor and then LPC and all these grad students that were graduating from the counseling program would come and we’d give them food and drinks and have a panel of people that would just talk about here’s what the next two years looks like for you. One of the questions we would always get is, “Well, why would I pay for supervision if I plan to join an agency and have them get supervision?” The way I would answer that, and I’m interested in how you would answer it was that if an agency’s paying for your supervision, like who then has the most power in that situation? It’s the agency. They’re going to advocate for their position of keeping you there, of helping you do a good job but if you’re like I want to try to do some private practice and I want to do these other things and I want to, they’re going to always put it through the lens of what the agency needs first and then your needs second. I mean, we would hope that a good supervisor would be able to parse that out, but ultimately, they’re hired by the agency. So we talked about how to have someone that’s independent and be able to say here’s what I think, here’s what I see, here’s what you’re telling me. To me seemed something much different than if you just had an agency given one. What do you think are some of the advantages of people paying for their own supervision outside of just doing it through say their agency or whoever’s already paying for it if they’re, say they’re working at a full-time job inside private practice? What’s the benefit of that? [SHANNON] You’re really talking about the difference between administrative supervision and clinical supervision. It’s really hard for one person to fill both of those roles because like you said, if you’re working with an agency supervisor, their, like you said, loyalty is really to the agency. So they’re really providing you more administrative supervision. Clinical supervision, like you said, should be completely separate from the administrative side of it. You’re working on your clinical cases, you’re talking about your professional development goals, you’re looking into like, “Hey, why is it hard for me to attend a supervision group?” Versus an administrative supervisor might just be like, you have to go to a group. There is a difference between those two roles but I’m going to tell you why I got into clinical supervision in the first point, in the first place, and I think that will answer your question also. I was working in community mental health. I was in graduate school at the time and I had an excellent clinical supervisor. She was so good. She helped me really reach some professional goals that I didn’t even know I had. She was just so incredibly supportive. Then she left to take another job and I was assigned a new supervisor. The difference between them was literally day and night. She was terrible. She would make me go outside with her on smoke breaks and I hated cigarette smoke, talking about how stressed she was with this position. Clearly it wasn’t great. It got to that point, I thought I had a career in community mental health. I thought my next step was moving into a manager position and a director level position. I had my career planned out at this community mental health center and it got to the point where I had such little support at work that I quit. I quit my career job because I was so burnt out, I ended up taking several months off finishing my graduate programming luckily getting back into the field. That to me just showed me the difference between a good clinical supervisor and someone who was not. That was the only reason why I quit my job. So I guess going back to your question is that knowing that people have a choice. So if you’re not vibing with your agency supervisor or you want to work with some things that your supervisor doesn’t have expertise in or your agency doesn’t work with that population, those are all the reasons why you have a choice into who you can see as a clinical supervisor and why you might want to seek external clinical supervision. [JOE] Now when you think about why you started Firelight, take us through that story. Why go beyond maybe just seeing a couple people in supervision? [SHANNON] Yes, and it did start like that. I always had one or two people, I was always supervising on the side as do many private practice therapists or group practice therapists and then I said I really like this. I’m liking this more and more and some of the therapists that I’m hiring have experience in doing supervision. They want to do it too. So I want to say about a year and a half, probably about two years ago, no, I think it was a year and a half, wasn’t that long, long ago, Joe, we put up on our website just a separate page on clinical supervision. “Here’s what we offer and it’s an official service and we have several supervisors,” and go. Then we started developing groups when we had enough people coming to us for supervision and we added clinical consultation for people who are already licensed. We had a few agencies reach out to us and say, “Hey, can you provide consultation to our sole clinical mental health therapist at the agency who needs some support?” It just got bigger and bigger and it got to the point where I did not have enough room on our counseling website for all the services and all the stuff that we were doing and wanted to do in the future. I would say right now we probably have about 10 different supervision groups going. Some of them are more supervision or consultation groups. Some of them are more specific, maybe a trauma focused one, we have one for neuro divergent therapists, which is super cool. Then we have some generalized ones. It was just too big. I couldn’t list everything on our current website. So I said, okay, well clearly the demand is there. We have at least 50 people on our supervision consultation program at this point. I should probably check, that number might be updated. But we have enough, there’s enough need that this is a separate service. I think this is a whole separate program that we’re going to be offering. We are only in one state. This is, we’re based in Colorado, so this is just Colorado, so then I got thinking, well, maybe we can expand to some other states. We’re still very early in that process, but if there’s a need in Colorado and Colorado’s very saturated with therapists, there’s probably a need everywhere for this. That’s how we just landed into firelight supervision and we just launched this summer. [JOE] Wow. Well, take us through like how Firelight is different from just you doing some supervision. Take us through what Firelight is and would love to hear how you came up with just like the different offerings and what you’re doing there. [SHANNON] Well, I do have to say Audience Building Academy, ABA did help me a whole lot with sussing out some of these ideas in the services. It’s a little different than just a therapist offering supervision because we can offer more. We have five different clinical supervisors you can choose from. We all have different specialty areas so we really try to match someone with a good fit clinical supervisor, first of all. It’s not just you get what you get. Then the flexibility of the different group offerings that we have. Like I said, we have so many different groups, so there’s going to be a group that meets on your day and the time that you’re available. Almost all of our services are virtual at this point so that really works in with a lot of people’s schedules. We also are offering monthly, I want to say clinical training slash webinars, not quite sure what to call it yet that are really low cost for attendees and it’s based on what they want to hear and what we think as supervisors they need to learn about. Like, we did one on clinical documentation, one on assessment, one on differential diagnosing, just did one on client retention. We bring in, or we’ve brought in a few specialists, DBT, a functional nutritionist, someone to talk about race-based trauma. We’re trying to provide more than just supervision so you have your choice of groups, you have a community and then you can come to these trainings based on what might fit your professional development goals. [JOE] I love it and having watched it unfold and to think about what different people gave you feedback on or ideas on and how that bloomed into more I’m so excited to see where you continue to head with it. Who would you say should get involved with Firelight? Are you looking for supervisors? Are you looking for people that want supervision? People that are listening probably want to categorize themselves in a certain area, what are you looking for in regards to helping people in their careers? [SHANNON] Well, I think at this point, we have plenty of supervisors. In the future we’d always love to be interested in hiring other people, although I don’t want to get into that messy, like, “Hey, you have your own private practice, but you’re working across for supervision type of thing.” Primarily this is geared towards anyone who’s a clinician or a therapist or a social worker, whether you’re in the beginning, intermediate, or advanced stages of your career, especially if you’re not getting the support you need either at your group practice, at your agency, or you’re working in a private practice on your own. I very strongly believe that no one should be working in isolation. That’s probably a product of all the teamwork that I have done. I was always on sports teams always worked within teams in my agency work and then group work, Group Practice Boss work right now. I just think that connecting with other people is so important. So even if you’re like, “Hey, I’m good with, I don’t need any support with my exact cases,” maybe you want to come to one of our clinical consultation groups once a month. You’re going to connect with other therapists, you’re going to get to know them, you’re probably going to learn some new things or think about cases in a different way, even if you don’t necessarily need that. I’d say absolutely anyone who’s in the beginning to intermediate stages of your career, but we can also be of benefit to people who are more advanced. I mean, I still meet with my clinical supervisor. I’ve been in the field for quite a long time. [JOE] Yes, just have someone to bounce things off of that is a professional. Even going to see my therapist I don’t feel like the daily stress of life, but it’s nice to have someone that you can bounce things off of and give you different perspectives and all of that. Well, Shannon, the last question I always ask is if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know? [SHANNON] I would say that you have a choice in who you can work with and choose, do your research, figure out what type of clinical supervisor or consultant you would like to work with. Not a question of if, but assuming that we want to do that work and that that is so important for our career. [JOE] Oh, that’s so awesome. If people want to connect with Firelight supervision, where’s the best place to send them and what will they get there? [SHANNON] If you go to firelightsupervision.com, spelled just F-I-R-E-L-IG-H-Tsupervision.com, and you’ll see all of our services. You can also opt-in to get a burnout prevention checklist, which is three pages long and includes lots of ideas, some of which you may have already thought of, but some things that might be new to you that is all going to help prevent some of your burnout as a therapist. [JOE] Awesome. That’s so great. Thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast. [SHANNON] Thanks, Joe. It’s a pleasure. [JOE] It’s so fun to just hear all these stories of people leveling up and growing and going from not having a practice to having one, to having a group practice and leveling up to building audiences and doing things beyond maybe their clinical work or in addition to their clinical work to see something that Shannon was so excited about supervision turn into something that goes well beyond just her typical four wars. Not four Wars, four walls of her office, I guess it could be walls and doors. So the four wars, I’m just here to make myself laugh. Y’all are just along for the ride as I laugh at myself, four walls that Shannon was in. Yes, beyond the four walls that that Shannon was in, to go beyond that and to build something that’s different, how cool is that? I think we all want to continue to grow and transform and evolve and it’s just so great to say we can do that. That the narrative that maybe we inherited through grad school is one important narrative. working in non-profits and working your way up the chain, like that’s great, but we don’t have to do all of that. We can build something new and innovative and different that maybe the world hasn’t seen or has seen in a different way. This month it’s all about leveling it up and we’ve got some awesome webinars coming up. It’s starting September 12th. We’re calling it Level Up Week where all of our team is seeking to be offering things and trainings around starting a practice, growing a group practice when you’re going from that solo to a group, going even bigger within your group. We’re going to have LaToya and Ashley doing all sorts of group work. We’re going to be talking about solo practices. As well, Nancy, my book coach, my writing coach who helped me get a Harper Collins book deal, she’s going to be joining me to talk about how to get a traditionally published book deal and what the industry is like right now, what they’re looking for. That was one of the biggest things, like when I wrote Thursday is the New Friday, I didn’t have an intention to have a quiz in it to have any sort of assessment. She said that right at the time of that writing that was huge, that people really liked that. So we put together a research-based assessment within the book and these things that wouldn’t have necessarily been top of mind for me, but she knew that stuff. We’re going to be talking during Level Up Week also. It’s going to be just a great week, so make sure you sign up over at practiceofthepractice.com/levelup. As well, Killin’It Camp tickets are on sale right now because we record ahead of time. I don’t know how many the volunteer tickets have gone, but if you want a volunteer ticket, you just have to do a four-hour shift and it’s only $97 for that ticket. If you want the early bird ticket, it’s $197. Crazy awesome deal. We’re going to be having that down in Cancun, Mexico at the Club Med. We were able to negotiate below $200 a night, and that’s all inclusive. That includes your food, that includes your lodging. It’s going to be an awesome time. We’re going to have our sessions, we’re going to have some pool side sessions. We really feel like that networking and connection with other people is the thing that really makes Killin’It Camp the private practice conference. So we want to make sure that we facilitate discussions and connections between people in a way that’s very different from your typical conference. If that sounds interesting to you, head on over to killingitcamp.com. As well, we’ll have links over at practiceofthepractice.com/level Up. There’s new links to Killin’It Camp there as well. Thank you so much for letting us into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. 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 producers, the publishers, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.