[JOE SANOK]
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This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 689.

I’m Joe Sanok, your host and welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast, where we cover everything private practice from that first moment you think to yourself I think I want to start a private practice. In fact, the last two episodes, I interviewed people that were talking about how they left their full-time jobs to go do private practice. So they’re in the beginning stages, their first couple of years. A couple months ago we covered, how do you start a group practice? How do you get going and grow from there? But a lot of you, I would say, good half of you have been asking about passive income and consulting and how do you level up beyond just your clinical work?

We have all these skills in mental health, in conflict management and just seeing things differently in the world. Oftentimes that just stays one on one in our counseling sessions and that’s great for our clients. It’s great for the people that come in, but also quite a few of us are saying, is there a bigger impact that we can have beyond just the walls of our counseling office? That’s why I am so excited today to have Dave Jennings. Dave Jennings is a number one wall street journal bestselling author. He’s worked with leaders from Microsoft, Salesforce, the FBI, and has spoken to leaders in over 22 countries. Dave, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast,
[DAVE]
Joe, good to be with you today.
[JOE]
Man, when I look at all the different, I mean, that was just the tip of the iceberg in regards to who you have consulted with. It’s basically the Fortune 500 of the world. They all come to you and get consulting from you.
[DAVE]
It’s been a fun ride, but it didn’t start out that way.
[JOE]
Well, let’s start there. How did it start out because I think sometimes we see people that are highly successful like yourself. You’ve got this book, The Pit of Success and all sorts of other things going on. Even the FBI and the Oregon Zoo have reached out to you for consulting. How did this all get going for you in regards to consulting with these larger organizations?
[DAVE]
So maybe this may be too far back, but when I was in college, I was getting a PhD and I had a weird angle. I went into the sports psychology department and I said, I would like to learn from you guys, but I’m a business guy. I want to understand how people perform at high levels. So great time learnt tons and then when I got out of school, no company would talk to me. They looked at my degree and they’re like, who are you? What are you ?

Literally I cannot count how many times I was turned down for interviews. It was unbelievable. Then finally I went to a career counselor and he said, “Dave, you’ve got to get in anywhere. You have these high aspirations of Fortune 500 hundreds but people don’t know what to do with you.” He said, “Find any place to get started.” That mindset actually helped me that I might have a step or two before I get there. So I was fortunate and got into a medical firm actually, and started consulting internally with them. Then one, one job led to another. So that’s the basic of the start.
[JOE]
Now, when these companies reach out to you, is it mostly around the types of topics that you’ve talked about? Like being adaptable, succeeding, repeating, all the things you cover in The Pit of Success, or is it other things outside of that as well? What, what are they looking for when they reach out?
[DAVE]
So the topics that I mainly focus on are leadership. How do you grow as a leader? How do you step up? How do you move from one level of leader to the next? So whether you’re a new leader trying to figure out how do I not be that individual contributor or in the middle, or whether you’re a VP going to president, I focus on how do you make that transition? How do you step up and operate at the level you’re at? So one is the leadership side. Two is change management, which, actually my research was in change resilience. So I’m very heavily focused on how do you help your team and organization go through change? How do you figure out how to get alignment and buy in and such?

The other piece is communications. So many things within a team, come back to how we interact, how we communicate and just almost any other topic can come back to communications. Then last I focus a lot on strategy. How do you get people aligned around where we need to go and how we’re going to get there? So those are my four main areas. They have subsets, but those are the four leads.
[JOE]
I’d love to divide the interview into maybe two parts where maybe the first part we really dive into just teaching our audience how to be better leaders, manage change, communications, all those things that you talk about in The Pit of Success. Then maybe the second part of the interview, dive into the nuts and bolts of just running a consulting agency. How do you get those bigger contracts? How did you save was, let’s see 12 million in one conversation? I want to get to that towards the end too. But let’s just start with some of those key things that you found in your research and that you talk about in the book around leadership. How would you break that down for folks that maybe they’re already, feel like they’re pretty successful leaders, they’re doing a decent job, but they know that there’s maybe skills or mindsets that they need to work on?
[DAVE]
So no matter what level you’re at, there’s always a new curve ball coming at you. Maybe it’s a new position, maybe it’s a new focus, maybe it’s a new scope. There is never an arrive in leadership. You’re always having some new demand and this area of facing demands beyond your experiences is what I love. It’s leaders have to figure out how to do things beyond their experience, but there’s a real challenge. That is normal logical people, meaning also normal logical brains, love doing what they already know how to do. We call this your current expertise.

You and I will stick to our current expertise, even when we want to do something different. Not because we’re stupid, not because we’re stubborn, it’s logical. Our brain gets wired to do something, and that’s what we stick to. So when you talk of starting to do something else or step into a bigger scope, the first logical thing for your brain to do is to come back to what it knows. So what we really help leaders do is let go of their current expertise and embrace what we call The Pit of Success, which is the space where you feel overwhelmed, lost, wondering what in the world you were thinking about that made you jump into this space and deal with these doubts. Deal with this idea that you do not have the expertise currently to do these things beyond your experience.

What we do is we help people normalize this experience so that they see it as a positive and that the demand is their ally rather than their enemy so they can leave their current expertise and grow into a higher and new expertise. So that’s the starting point in helping leaders move, is to realize as good as what you do currently is there’s so much more that you can do and letting go of something good is hard. So we make that easier.
[JOE]
What are some techniques or mindsets or things that help people to move away from that current expertise and to step into working on bigger things?
[DAVE]
So the first is actually just realizing that it’s normal and logical and accepting that I am not going to know. We love knowing. So the first is a mindset issue of just realizing, okay, I will not know. I will be confused. I will be lost and I have complete permission to be there. I am not supposed to know. I’d love to just beat a drum around that idea in that when you accept that, you’re not supposed to know you have a whole new freedom, because now, then when you’re overwhelmed, rather than spending energy on, “Hey, am I enough? Am I going to make it?” You spend your energy on, huh, I wonder how I’m going to figure this out. So mindset is the first one.
[JOE]
Let me just jump in there, even as a dad, I’m raising two daughters, seven and 10, so much of the parenting research talks about don’t praise the grade or praise the process instead of the grade. So wow, you worked really hard on that. Look at that. Even what you’re saying right here seems to align with that, that, yes, you’re not supposed to know. That’s part of it. It’s how am I going to get through this unknown and just work on it? I love that, to have that grace around not beating yourself up and saying, I can’t believe I’m so stupid. I don’t know this already. It’s there’s this process that’s unfolding and allowing that to happen. So I just wanted to underline what you just said, because I think it’s universally true, not just in business. It’s also true in at least my daddy hood.
[DAVE]
It is, you are absolutely right. In fact, part of what you’re quoting there comes from the research by Carol Weck and where, I’m sure you’re well familiar with her research that led to the growth mindset idea and what she showed and what you’re pointing out is that kids who tend to realize that they have a brain that can grow rather than they have some fixed level, when kids realize that they realize that growing is the norm. They actually are more likely to do things that they don’t know how to do. So that applies to kids and it applies to all of us. Once you realize that I have an incremental brain and it will incrementally get better as I put demands on it and I practice that is so freeing.

In fact just in the last month here, I had an associate who was taking the real estate test to become a realtor. She’s in her fifties and we were going over some of these ideas and she was nervous because hasn’t done a lot of math and other things in several years and definitely no tests lately. I was pointing out all it means, all you’re trying to figure out is how to get your brain to connect. If you don’t get it right the first time, if you don’t pass the test, all it means is I have not yet made those connections in my brain. I don’t have those foundations. So at some point your brain will connect in realizing that. When we help kids realize that we help ourselves realize that. Your brain will connect if you repeat a process enough. If we don’t have, it just means we haven’t done it enough. It’s that simple. Our brain will rewire.
[NOBLE]
Our friends at Noble believe in using technology to enhance, not replace human connection. With Noble, your clients will gain access to between session support through their automated therapist-created roadmaps, assessments to track progress and in-app messaging. These tools will help you and your clients gain a better understanding of their progress between sessions, how they’re feeling and what areas may need more focus so you can tailor your one-on-one sessions to their needs more effectively. .

Not only will Noble help you offer your clients the more transformative experience possible, but you can also earn passive income while doing so. Learn more and join for free at www.noble.health/joe. Again, that’s www.noble.health/joe.
[JOE]
So what’s next after that? So people are thinking that mindset, yes, take us through it.
[DAVE]
Mindset. Next one is also a major issue and that is your purpose or the why. Research is pretty clear that folks who jump in or fall in or pushed into this pit, they perform better when they have a reason why. So if you’re forced into a pit, maybe it’s a health issue, a relationship issue or something where you’re just pushed in, you didn’t choose to be there even in those situations where you figure out, okay, oh, how can I use this? I don’t like being here. It’s not what I wanted, but how can I use that? Similarly, if you chose your pit such as taking a new test or going back to college or a new job to figure out why did I do this, why what’s my big why? The clarity of the why makes this path so much easier? So I push both individuals to think about what’s your why and then even departments or teams, organizations say, why are we willing to go through this change? When you have your why you can put up with a lot of stuff. So figuring out the why is a big deal.
[JOE]
When people are thinking about that in organizations, how do you help them figure out their why? Because, I mean if it’s a counseling practice, oftentimes that’s pretty easy. So they’re helping people with anxiety, depression, they’re helping relationships. But then I’m thinking about if therapists are going to go work with a bank, for example, how would they help a bank figure out their why?
[DAVE]
No one answer to that but first answer is simply asking. It doesn’t have to be like a profound system. I am sure most therapists are actually better at figuring out why than I am because you help people think about this all the time. In fact, I would argue that whatever you’ve been doing with anybody in their life would apply in business because business is just people. Even though we put the label off business on it, we’re just a bunch of people trying to figure out our life. So simply asking, “Hey, what’s important for you? Why does the business need to do this?” That right there can be as simple that as that. Why does the business need to do this? Why does the customer need this? What’s going to happen if we’re able to achieve this?

The basic questions are profound. It does not need to be any deep research on this. But it is helping people bring that out. Not always the first why is the answer, but helping people just think through, and all the things a therapist does so well, such as say more about that, expand on that, helping people get that out on the table and even helping them see contradictions in their why. They may have some dual reasons here that are against each other. Some of those paradoxes, we have to negotiate, but some of them we can say, oh, that’s an inconsistency.

So I would argue a therapist almost more than anyone else is better prepared than anyone to help leaders in business do that. I would push therapists to know more about the market issues, read some books on strategy or something so you have a bigger picture on some of those issues. If it’s a particular type of business to, I always, read the website. So if I’m consulting with a client, I ferociously read their news section on their website. I want to know the issues. Often I do end up, I bring up issues that they haven’t even read about, but I’m just looking for everything I can so that when I go in there, I’m a partner. I’m not like the outsider. I’m still an outsider, but I have enough of the issues and I can ask them about that.
[JOE]
Now when you say news section, are you talking the internal news that they’re saying, here’s the things, or are you saying that you will Google and then go to the news section of Google and see if say Intel has been in the news recently?
[DAVE]
So most major companies have a about us slash in the news section. It’s a propaganda for each company. Want to say that, “Hey, look, we’re in the news. We just got funded for this new research, or we just got bought, or we just bought something.” So I usually start on their website and even before I get it to the news, I might just be reading through their whole website because I want to see what’s on their mind as an organization. Whatever is on their website is probably a big deal to them unless it’s a little bit antiquated, but most major players are keeping that fairly up today.

I want to get a feel, I want to understand the words, the issues. Then I click on that news section and I’ll see articles about the company or maybe they have a press release. I want to know what’s on their mind. Not that I’m perfectly going to use all that, but I’m at least informed because when you’re coming in with a new player, you don’t want to have to have them tell you everything about them. You want to learn a little from them, but I want to be relevant as soon as I can.
[JOE]
That’s such a great little tip. I’m sure at this point, people are just reaching out to you and you don’t have to do a lot of inbound sales, but when you were first getting going, how did that look when you were wanting to find consulting contracts when you were less well known?
[DAVE]
Lonely. Very, very lonely. So I worked in companies for nine years and then I was leaving Hewlett Packard and to be honest, Hewlett Packard back then was a big, big deal. It had been my dream company and I was so thrilled that I had got there after working at different companies. I always, always had wanted to start my own little firm. In fact, when I was back in grad school 10 years previous to that, I wrote a paper on how I’m going to start my own consulting firm. So it was always part of my mindset and so I left and the first contract came from a friend of a friend and I even moved to start that contract. Three days before I was supposed to start, it was canceled.

My entire year’s income left me all of a sudden. I didn’t understand contracts really well at that time. I had not done it. So I was broke immediately after leaving a Fortune 20 company and just struggling. To me, it was all about people who knew me, letting people know I existed, that I was out there. For me, most all of my business has come from just people who already know that I’m good. I work hard at that and I’m able to do what I do, but it’s just, it’s a referral. It’s like, “Hey, Dave, I was just talking with so and so, and they need X.” So it was all about that.

I would love to tell you, “Hey, here is the beautiful marketing plan. You do X, Y, and Z.” For me, it never was that I sure I contacted companies that I had known and put my name out there and let people know I existed and stuff, but it never was ABC and just happened. It was putting my name out, reminding people I exist, staying connected. Then I would argue good things happened by people knowing I was available. So like, if you were saying, Dave be teach us the ultimate marketing plan. To me, the multi marketing plan is do good work for whoever you’ve you’re doing it with now and make sure somebody knows about it.

It’s just, share that. I am sure people are good salesman out there and they can tell you here’s the right way to do that. Mine has been all just a word of mouth, again, doing good work and people come back. In my case, my work, they typically use me for several years and then it fades. Then they’ll come back a few years later and say, “Hey, we need you again.”
[JOE]
Yes, it sounds like you’re doing a lot of front end research too, where you’re looking at their news, you’re reading strategy books early on. Like you’re building your skillset so that you can be agile within that consulting and offer a lot of different perspectives. So it sounds like that acquisition of knowledge. Then I love that you say, there’s not just a system. There’s not this quick hack to get in because I think a lot of times people feel like no matter what it is that they’re trying to do, it could be building an e-course, it could be doing consulting. It could be a podcast, whatever. They’re just banging their head against the wall and like is what am I missing? Then they go into all this self critique, “I don’t know enough. I’m not good enough,” rather than, hey, there’s no clear cut way to make a podcast that’s successful, to get a consulting firm that’s successful. It’s hustling, it’s meeting people, it’s doing good work. It’s following up, it’s over delivering. It’s just not this like a three step plan. I actually love that you’re saying even at this level, it’s messy.
[DAVE]
It is. Now, you mentioned earlier that I don’t have to go out. I’m very fortunate. I’ve been consulting a long time and people call me out of the blue. I don’t have a beautiful marketing plan that says I am doing X, Y, and Z. I am connecting and I post on LinkedIn occasionally, but I can’t say that that is the idea. Whenever people ask me individually, as I work around the world and stuff, everywhere I go, somebody’s always saying, “I want to do what you do and how do I do it?” I have a standard answer, “Do it once and then do it twice and then do it three.”

It sounds, I don’t know if it’s pithy or if it’s rude, but the most important thing you can do is be successful one time. If you can figure out a way to be successful one time, then you’ll probably be able to do it twice. It’s learning that you can do it. So much of it is not that I’m Mr. Marketer or whatever. In fact, most people who have gone into counseling are not natural salespeople. That is not the mindset. The mindset is the helping. So it’s you leverage what skills you do have and how do you use those with the people you have to let, to even ask them to share your good news and get that out there? It’s yes, I wish I could say here is the ABCs. To me, do good work and find one, do it for that one person.

Part, like right now I’ve been doing this for years now and I’m very comfortable. I can walk into any audience, basically, any group of executives or any level and I feel total comfort. That is one of the best marketing plans ever, is your comfort, but you get comfortable by being uncomfortable. So you just got to do it and then you’re going to have to do it poorly, and then you’re going to do it not as poorly, and then you’re going to do it good.

When COVID hit, I had to switch my consulting. So I went from being on the road most every week of the year to being in my basement every week of the year. I built a studio in my basement, so I could do high quality broadcast. I built what’s called a Lightboard, which is a huge piece of glass. The glass is in front of me. I write on the glass as I talk and look directly into the camera. For the first month or two of that I was bad. All right. I am comfortable as can be getting up and facilitating a group. I’m comfortable with one or 200 and I was bad and I just kept on going, okay, I understand the pit of success. I understand that I’m going to be in, I’m going to be lost, I’m going to be confused and I was still bad, but within about, I don’t know, four or six times of talking into a piece of glass and staring at a camera eight feet away, something happened and I started getting better.

And now I’m comfortable. I now talk into a piece of glass in camera and just go, and it’s as natural now as being in front of a group, but it didn’t start that way. Maybe just one last thought on that, like in writing, I came up with the idea that I, well, I didn’t know if I came up with the idea, but I used the idea that I have to write a bad book to write a good book. Each chapter, I cannot tell you how many times I wrote a chapter that was bad and I’d write it, I’d put it out to a colleague and they would say sometimes politely, sometimes not, that it wasn’t any good and I would write it again.

Then with my co-author, she would say, well, what are you trying to achieve here and give me some tips and I’d write it again, and maybe she’d write on it. Then we had to do it poorly for it to be done really well. That is just, it is that going, you know what? I am lost, I am confused and that is the most natural place I can be. That willingness to be temporarily incompetent is where the power is. If I’m willing to be temporarily incompetent, I can do anything.
[JOE]
Oh, so awesome. So I have a couple more questions, more on the nuts and bolts of the consulting. So when you are putting together a contract, after you do say an initial meeting is every contract, every agreement, very unique to that company, or do you have a set template, or maybe even some themes that you usually go to within those contracts or proposals?
[DAVE]
So companies often can guide that. My contracting’s pretty basic in that I work on a either a daily rate or a retainer rate. I don’t do hourly work. Basically if you’re hiring me, you’re hiring me, if you’re hiring me for the hour, you’re hiring me for the day. So it’s a little bit easier to do a contract, because you’re like, well, we’re doing five days. Well, then that’s what it is. Or if I’m going to be put on a retainer for the year we usually estimate how many days per month that is. So each client is different in what they’re asking, but generally speaking my style of billing is basically a daily rate. I don’t know if that answers your question.
[JOE]
No, no, I just wanted to peek behind the curtain a little bit there, just in how you think through that. I got to ask before we wrap this up, how’d you save Intel 12 million in one conversation?
[DAVE]
It’s all about communications. So we were doing a leadership program and they were one of our main oh, I get, I don’t even call them sponsors, but they were sending all kinds appeal to this program and we had one guy come, a more senior guy. He came in and he was the most, I don’t want be here guy. I think I’ve ever seen. I don’t know what if they made him cover what it was, but he sat there. He was grumpy the whole time. We were talking about listening skills and how to really listen. We have this framework around one of the key ways to listen is simply to get people to say more and say, “Hey, expand on that. Do more. What else? Go on, continue.”

Then to summarize what you’re hearing I would assume every therapist in the world knows this process, expand, get people to expand, summarize what you’re hearing. That was the concept that, that we were teaching. So he he went out and came back. We do programs that are typically over several weeks and he came back the next week and was like, so what did you do with this? He says, well, I was in a negotiation and rather than be my normal self, I sat there and did what you said. I just, I asked them to see more about that, expand and turned and I got them to talk. Then I summarized. He said, lo and behold, rather than me just attacking and demanding, they just turned things around and they bought into what we were saying.

He says, “All I did was listen to them.” He said it was magical. So there’s the magic is, and I want you to know, I hear these stories over and over again. Most of them people don’t have the $12 million price tag, but I have heard so many stories where people, leaders come back and say, “I focused on listening and I changed the relationship of our groups.” The core skill of listening is really what I spend a ton of my time pushing leaders on. It works and every therapist out there is going to be a master at that skill and helping others do that is going be a big deal and it is a big deal.
[JOE]
Well, I think that’s such a good point that so many of the skills that we use in the therapeutic setting are skills that apply across the board in business or in sales or in all these other areas. It’s just a matter of folks making those connections, learning the language of the business world, being able to network within that and then just get some experience. That idea, like just find one place that’s going to hire you and then move on from there, such great advice. Dave, 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?
[DAVE]
I would want them to know that whatever they’re wanting to achieve is within their reach. If they’re willing to embrace what I call the pit of success, I’m sure they have other names, if you’re willing to be temporarily incompetent, you can do anything. There is nothing that your brain cannot rewire to. If you’re willing to go into that space and practice and figure it out, it’s unlimited.
[JOE]
Such great advice. If people want to connect with you, what’s the best way? So the book is The Pit of Success. I’m sure they can get it anywhere that books are sold. How else can they connect with you?
[DAVE]
So I’m [email protected], [email protected]. If they’re interested in the work we do, our website is wwwlearnablesolutions.com. It shares a lot of different ways we help companies.
[JOE]
Wonderful. Thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[DAVE]
Joe, it’s been a pleasure.
[JOE]
As I help people to level up beyond their practices, whether that’s with podcasts or virtual learning or other ways they’re doing passive income over and over there is this time when people feel so incompetent. I can think of every single podcaster. I think we now have 14 podcasts on the Practice of the Practice podcast network. Every single podcaster, their first five to 10 episodes they’re like, it feels awkward. I don’t know what I’m doing here.

Then something clicks where they say, I already have this skill set. I know how to talk to people. I know how to have conversations. I just need to apply it to a new setting. I love all the things that Dave’s talking about in this interview where he’s saying as therapists, you are uniquely positioned in so many ways to help people in the business world to help companies, to help with relationships within those companies with communication; so many different ways that you already have skills. It’s just a matter of learning their language and diving in some unique ways.

So we got a lot of exciting episodes ahead of us, but we do want to thank Noble for being an amazing sponsor this year. Our friends at Noble believe in using technology to enhance, not replace human connection. With Noble, your clients will gain access to between session support through their automated therapist-created roadmaps, assessments to track progress and in-app messaging. These tools will help you and your clients gain a better understanding of their progress between sessions, how they’re feeling and what areas may need more focus so you can tailor your one-on-one sessions, how they’re feeling and what areas may need some more focus in your one-on-one sessions. This does not replace counseling. It enhances it. So if you want to learn more and sign up totally for free, go over to www.noble.health/joe. Again, that’s noble.health/joe to sign up for free.

Also, thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day, and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

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.