10 Tips to be Wildly Successful & Ridiculously Happy

Hello and welcome back to the Productive Therapist Podcast!

Thank you for joining me today. I really appreciate you listening and following along.

So today I want to tell you a quick story that relates to prioritizing your goals. And I also want to talk to you about the book that I'm going to be writing with the title: Productive Therapist: 10 Tips to Be Wildly Successful and Ridiculously Happy.

I'm going to share those ten tips with you without a lot of additional detail and then tell you how you can follow along. So hopefully this will be helpful for somebody. But at the beginning of this year, I told my business coach and I told my leadership team that I was not going to take on any new projects. There is plenty for us to do, both in growing and solidifying my counseling practice as well as productive therapist. And one of the mistakes I made last year was trying to do too much and take on too much.

It was stressful, not everything got done. And I was like, I need to learn from that. And also the overarching sort of umbrella goal for this year is the phrase is make it so. I want everything in my businesses to operate smoothly and efficiently and really run like clockwork, hopefully without me, so that I can have more freedom, take more vacations, and enjoy life. So what happened, of course, is an idea that I've been thinking about and kind of rolling around in my brain for quite some time.

The idea is, hey, I should write a book. Sort of. It all came together one day as I was in the shower, funny enough. And the sort of clarity of the direction for this book that I want to write came together and I got super excited about it. So I did what most entrepreneurs will do, for better or for worse.

And I started pursuing it. I started making phone calls, sending emails, making plans, taking notes, all of the above, right? And I sort of started to pursue this for maybe like one or two months. Not full time, obviously, but just sort of on the side in and around my other tasks and projects. And long story short, I finally came to the realization that I want to create the best book that I can possibly create so that it can reach the most people and be as just really good quality and really something I'm proud of.

So I decided to sideline this project and plan on doing it most likely next year. And I'm so glad I did for a whole number of reasons. As the year has progressed to where we are now, in the middle of May, some personal things with family came up that I just realized if I was trying to write a book right now, I would be so stressed and overwhelmed, I would be discouraged because I wasn't making progress. And I'm glad that I made that decision. And I'm also experiencing some strange sensation, which is being caught up with my work and not having to work as much.

So that's a wonderful thing. So that is just a little story about prioritizing your goals. If you've got an exciting idea, if you've got something that lines up with your bigger purpose and your vision, that's so fantastic and it's so exciting. Just make sure you slot that into the right spot in this quarter in this year or even bigger picture in this decade. So there you go.

So the book that I'm going to write is called Productive Therapist. Like I mentioned, 10 Tips To Be Wildly Successful & Ridiculously Happy. It's a book that's really about success and lifestyle design for therapists.

And it's going to be sort of mixed media, if you will. Not mixed media. That's not true; it's going to have a variety of different things in the book, from music, playlists to art to quotes to jokes, all kinds of fun things, cartoons, et cetera, as well as some words - probably going to put some words in there! 

So very excited about this. I think it will be the type of thing that will benefit and energize any therapist around the world. And it will be something that I'm super proud of and I'm thrilled to share.

So here you go. Here are the ten tips. And these, of course, are subject to change. And each one of these will be fleshed out with all kinds of fun things.

Tip number one, find your big Why?

Tip number two, make friends with success.

Tip number three, dream big, like really big.

Number four, become burnout proof.

Number five, own your own awesomeness.

Number six, don't follow the quote rules.

Number seven, never stop growing.

Number eight, optimize for joy.

Number nine, build a dream team.

And number ten, find your tribe.

So I don't know what your thoughts are in listening to this, but I'm excited about all of these ideas.

And I'm so looking forward to writing more and collecting interesting things to support these ideas, express them to you and our therapist community, and really sort of inspire and energize all of us.

So there are the ten tips. And if you want to follow along on this journey, might be some slow progress at times, but I'm going to basically this year. I don't have a goal of writing a book, but I do have a plan to write more about these ten tips whenever I feel excited or inspired or just inclined to do so. So you can follow along at ProductiveTherapist.com/Tiny

I don't know if I mentioned that earlier in this episode, but this is going to be a tiny book, so small format, and very possibly - I'm looking into some options - it might be so tiny, it can fit in your pocket, so we'll see about that! But I think that might be really cool.

So thanks for listening. This has been the Productive Therapist Podcast and if you want to find more about our services and anything that we've got going on, go to ProductiveTherapist.com and I look forward to helping you continually be more wildly successful and ridiculously happy.

Have a good one!