As therapists, we work hard to help our clients achieve their ideal lives.
Unfortunately, it's easy for us to do this at the expense of our own happiness and well-being. It doesn't have to be this way. I believe you deserve to change the world AND love your life.
Check out this super fun podcast episode with the one-and-only Katie Read, as we explore this fascinating conundrum.
In This Episode, You'll Learn:
- How living a bigger life can improve your ability to care for your clients
Resources Mentioned In This Episode:
Uriah
Hello and welcome back to the Productive Therapist Podcast. So glad that you're here. Today I had the privilege to talk to my good friend Katie Reed. If you don't know her already, she's an amazing human who helps the helping professionals step into their biggest lives so they can serve in the biggest ways. She's been a marriage and family therapist forever, directed large agencies, taught grad school, supervised 40 plus interns, written psych training material, spoken at conferences, and had practices in various cities. She's also the creator of the Clinician to Coach Academy, the Clinic Coach certification, and the Six Figure flagship program. Pretty cool. Last but definitely not least, she is a special needs mom, a rescue dog mom, an eager but terrible karaoke singer, and an interior designer want to be. So please enjoy my conversation with Katie Reed on why therapists need to start living bigger lives to actually be even better helpers. Katie, welcome back to the podcast.
Katie
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
Uriah
I always love talking to you. It's so much fun.
Katie
I know. We've been chatting here for like 20 minutes now. We're like, oh, wait, we.
Uriah
Should record something. Maybe we should record this. Yeah. I feel like we could just hit the roulette wheel of topics and be like, okay, today.
Katie
And we could just go, right, we have that. I love that.
Uriah
Today we're talking about lifestyle design for therapists.
Katie
Let's do it. Let's do it.
Uriah
Well, the topic we did land on is that you gave me actually, and I love is why therapists need to start living bigger lives to actually be even better helpers. That's really a cool concept. So I'm curious, I have some ideas too, but I'm curious, from your perspective, what does it even mean to live a bigger life?
Katie
Yes. Thank you so much. I've been thinking about this a lot and I gave a speech recently at a conference out in Costa Rica, Megan Gunnel's event in Costa Rica. And when I was writing that talk, I was doing a ton of reflecting on just my life over time and how it's evolved in the health big professions. And the example that was coming to mind for me, I was thinking about how when I was younger, I was made a program director very early in my career, right after I got licensed. They were like, can you please take over this program that I was a social worker in up until that point? And I did. And so I had these younger years of being a program director and still seeing tons of clients, obviously, at that time, the way you do in agencies where you wear all the hats. And I was thinking about how I was charged with helping treating all of these parents, families where the kids had severe behavioral issues. And we would come in with evidence based practices. And I would have to be the one to go learn the evidence based practice, bring it back to the staff, make sure it was all being practiced with high fidelity, doing high fidelity myself. And I remember so clearly sitting with these parents and saying things like, every time Johnny has a tantrum, this is the exact sequence of behavioral interventions that we need to follow, and this is going to extinguish that behavior and blah, blah, blah. And these parents would look at me and be like, well, it's just not going to happen. There is no way that every single time we're going to have this perfect thing. And I remember being young and not being a parent yet myself and being frustrated like, what's wrong? If they would just follow the manual, everything would get better and they would get this outcome that they want. And it was so funny because then flash forward several years, and I remember having children and in particular having my second child. And you're suddenly in it where you know that despite no matter what you say, the next time you tantrum, I'm going to do this behavioral intervention. And then you've been up all night with the crying baby, and suddenly the three year old is there and he's throwing a tantrum because he's hungry and you have nothing left to give. And I remember quite literally sitting there when I was in that situation with a baby and a toddler and just thinking, I would be such a better therapist now for those parents because my degree of just personal development and empathy for the situation and understanding of the realities that despite any best efforts you have, you can't do this perfectly every time, especially when you are this stressed out parent and realizing that what that took for me was simply growth and life experience that would have made me a much better therapist than I had been when I was doing these things when I was younger. And I had all the best intentions, but I just didn't have that personal growth and that life experience. And I lived experience. And I truly believe the same can be said for all areas of our lives. And you might have seen those memes that got really popular during COVID where it's like the miserable, bedraggled therapist sitting behind the Zoom screen. And it's like, I'm signing on to help my clients live a happy, exciting, fulfilling, interesting lives. And here we are coming from this place where we're like, I'm barely crawling over to my Zoom screen to make the session happen. And I truly was really thinking about this as I was putting together this talk and realizing, yes, if we want to lead our clients to whatever their next level is, whatever that looks like for them in terms of their happier, more successful, more fulfilled and abundant life, if we're not living any of that ourselves, we truly can't do it. It's the difference between helping to pull someone up the mountain and standing on the ground and pushing their butt and hoping they get up there somehow. There's a big difference in how much you're able to help someone. And so it really made me think about how much that has changed for me, how me being in a completely different place than I was as a therapist 15, 20 years ago, just emotionally and in terms of lived experience, that being in that completely different place actually makes me a much better person to be able to help because I can look and say, hey, I know exactly where you are because I've been there, I know what that feels like, I know what that experience is like, and I want to help you see what it's like up here on this next plateau where I'm standing too, and I can help pull you up there. And so that is really the impetus of me suggesting this talk for us today.
Uriah
No, I love that. And there's something so vastly different about embodying an experience versus following a treatment manual or a treatment plan or something like that for any aspect of life. And I was thinking about as you were talking there, well, thinking about a couple of things, certainly me being the parent of two teenage girls now, if I was to become... If I was to unretire from being a therapist, I would be a vastly better teen and family therapist now because my advice would be just more realistic and useful. It just would be better for sure. I guess what I'm hearing you saying is that if you as a therapist are thriving and living your best life and having adventure and exploration, whatever that looks like, then you are just going to show up in the room with your clients in a much more fully alive way. You didn't use that word, but... No, I love that word though. That's what's going to happen. And then that, I would guess, would inspire positive change and growth on the other end of the Zoom call or the room.
Katie
The room, exactly. I feel like it's actually being able to lead from a place that you've been to. It's like I remember... It's embarrassing to admit, but I remember I went to a grad school where mindfulness and meditation, it was certainly all the rage. I was in San Francisco. Now, I had a terrible shabby meditation practice, but I was always telling my clients, you should meditate every day. Was I able to meditate every day? No, of course not. I knew it was a good, great thing that we should all be doing, but my practice was not on point in any way. Now you think how different that would have been than if I were a daily, lifelong meditator, being able to help guide someone into mindfulness from that point of view. It's very different. I truly believe the same goes for not only the self care and the interventions that we use on ourselves regularly to be people who take care of ourselves, but also things like eliminating our financial stress because we're charging enough that we are not coming to sessions with financial stress constantly riding on our back. It goes for things like you said, introducing adventure and excitement into your life. I think it is very, very easy to get stuck on the good enough plane of existence where you're like, it's good enough, it's fine, everything's fine. Nothing's necessarily great. Nothing's necessarily you truly living your biggest life. You might be one of those therapists that always has that feeling, that little something nipping at your heels that's like, could do more. You could do something different. You could expand, you could grow, but you're having that feeling and not necessarily acting on it because it's good enough and because we're all scared and we're all human and we're all afraid of taking big leaps or making big changes or disrupting the status quo in any way. And yet when we can embody and when we can become the people who do those things, then we're able to show our clients look at what's possible for you because we're speaking about it from such a different point of view.
Uriah
Let me ask you this question. So when you were in Costa Rica giving that talk and people were listening and maybe you had conversations afterwards or questions during or after that talk, how did they respond to that message? What did you gather?
Katie
It's funny. Can I swear?
Uriah
Of course. Yeah, of course.
Katie
Okay. What people responded to the most from that talk that cracked me up, I had one slide where it just said, Your brain is an asshole. And people were cracking up at that slide because what we were really talking about is how this is actually difficult. This is the goal, and we can all listen. Even to a podcast like this, people will listen to this and be like, Wow, they're right. Katie and Uriah sure are right. I should go do those things. But then we have these asshole brains that want to keep us safe and that want to keep us mired in the day to day. And that is the hardest part to do battle with in a way is that constant management of our own brain and of our own fears and of our own insecurities. And if there's one thing I have found in my past couple of years of coaching therapists who are outgrowing their offices, it is that because we are highly educated, because we know more than we think we do, we tend to have vicious crippling imposter syndrome. We tend to believe that everyone in the entire world knows just as much as we do because half the world has gotten their mental health education from TikTok, and we believe that that is probably just as much as we know. And it's simply not true. And it's like as therapists, we're afraid to even speak up about what we do know because we feel like it's nothing special. It's nothing unique. We really downgrade and downplay our expertise. And I just think that is one of the biggest things that holds us back. And you don't see it so much in other fields. You're not seeing doctors out there going, I don't really know much. I mean, I just do surgery on the brain. Everybody knows that.
Uriah
That's so interesting.
Katie
But you don't see.
Uriah
That, right? That's a very interesting observation. Yeah. I wonder what it is about our field, our industry, and us as therapists. I was thinking about how we are trained from day one to be very law and ethics minded, follow the rules, make sure everything is by the book thing. And even more so if you're doing evidence based treatment approaches. And that's ight. That's a mindset. That's a world view, if you will, that maybe doesn't lend itself well to risk taking and, I don't know, adventurous out of the box things. Not to say that living your biggest best life has to be some crazy thing. I was thinking about this before our conversation. I was like, Yeah, what if my best life is organizing my garage on a Tuesday?
Katie
Honestly, though, literally that's part of it. Is that boring? Is that okay? No, I will tell you what. My best life when I started, so when I transitioned and I moved from therapy over into coaching and consulting, do you know what my best life was? It was writing the check to pay off the freaking student loans Uriah. That was like the best moment.
Uriah
I'm raising my hands in the air.
Katie
It was my husband and I both had very old cars that were continuing to have expensive repairs. It was just getting us safer cars. I drive a Kia. I didn't need a Lamborghini. I love my Kia. But it was like, that was the best life moment. It was like, I'm not afraid of my car anymore.
Uriah
Good point.
Katie
It's as simple as that. And it can be, of course, bigger things. And like you and I were saying how we know so many people online as we're recording this who are in Europe right now and we're seeing all these great pictures. And I am taking my family to Europe for an entire month this summer. It's insane to even say that out loud. I'm so excited about it. That is best life moment on another level for me. But truly, when I started out, all I wanted was to bring in enough with my coaching business to pay for the groceries. That was my whole first goal was like, Could I just start this little side gig? And maybe it would make enough to buy groceries for the family. And when it did, that was the best life moment. They'd climb up slowly from there.
Uriah
Thriving looks different at different levels or whatever you want to call that. So where are you going in Europe, if you don't mind sharing?
Katie
I'm so excited. So my husband's family lives in England, so we're going to go visit them for two weeks. And then Italy has been the top of our bucket list forever. Then we're doing the next two weeks in Italy, traveling all the way around down the country. Fantastic. Super excited. Yes.
Uriah
I'm not 100% sure, but I think our next trip in the works is going to be Switzerland and Northern Italy, like Lake Cuomo area.
Katie
Yes, I'm going there. We're planning on somehow finding a way to meet George and Amal Clooney while we're in.
Uriah
Lake Cuomo.
Katie
You have to. We'll just bump into them on the street at one of the tourist spots, I'm guessing. That's so fantastic. It looks insane. It looks so gorgeous there.
Uriah
I just have to figure out if we can convince my teenage daughters to...
Katie
And it's so.
Uriah
Worth it. Exactly. They're like, Well, how's the WiFi?
Katie
I have a 12 year old and we're getting to that stage. It's like, I'm going to leave my video game system. So we.
Uriah
Talked about a couple of examples, but maybe we can throw back and forth a few more real world examples from our lives or from our coaching clients or people we know of therapists living a bigger life and doing some interesting fun things that to them feel like success, regardless of what anybody else thinks. A ny come to mind?
Katie
Yeah. Right off the bat, for our coaching clients, for my coaching clients, we have one client right now. I won't name names because I don't know if I'm allowed to on all this stuff. But we have a coaching client right now who has been really active on social media posting about her unique niche. She was approached, she's literally in talks with the television network because they want to do a show with her as the expert featuring her life and this niche that she coaches in, which is insane, right? Exactly. What? I was exchanging messages with her about it and I was like, This is nuts. This is so cool. So talk about when you start to put yourself out there and completely unexpected opportunities can come your way. And then we've also had clients... It's incredible, right? We've had clients get invited to speak at conferences now all around the states and all around the world in their area of expertise. We've had clients invited to contribute book chapters to various books, writing articles on larger websites. And then we've had people, honestly, where their best life, we have one client where she and her husband, her coaching practice took off so much, she decided to slowly shutter her therapy practice, which she's doing. And they're buying a boat and they're going to go live on the boat and travel the world because she can coach from anywhere. How cool is that? We've had other people where it was more that they had a family issue come up and they were able to go move to another state and take care of an ailing family member. And they could do that because they had their coaching practice launched. That's a huge one, right? And it's unexpected. And that could happen to any of us anytime. There's another person, she had a really complicated intro state adoption. And she said, if I was just a therapist, I could never have made all these trips back and forth and all the court appointments and all this stuff. But because I was coaching, I was able to do that. So it's a lot of just those things that truly deeply matter in your life, those heart moments where you're caring for another person or you're there for a family member, and you're not losing all of your income while you're doing it because you've expanded and grown beyond the office.
Uriah
I like all those examples. And some of those are related to the added flexibility of coaching versus therapy. So that's interesting. That's true. That's so cool. A couple come to mind for me, too, like our mutual friend Kim Toulson, the traveling therapist is doing really cool things that are unconventional, so to speak. Basically taking her telehealth practice anywhere she wants to go and traveling the world and the United States. That's pretty.
Katie
Exceptional, right? Amazing. Such a cool life.
Uriah
It is so cool. There was another one that I was thinking about. Of course, I think about Ernesto Segas Mando too, buying real estate, buying properties and using them as retreat homes and then taking groups of people to the exotic location. Oh, I know what I was going to say. So a friend of mine who actually worked as a therapist in my practice for about a year and we're still connected. His name is Jeremy, and he's got a wife and a young daughter, and they decided to move to Porto, Spain for a year.
Katie
Oh, wow.
Uriah
Yeah. And they fell in love with this location. They spent some time in France and then also just settled in this town of Porto in Spain and just loved the culture, loved the people, loved the food, everything. And so he actually continued to see his clients, therapy clients in the United States. Wow. How cool. From Spain. From Spain. That's amazing. Which as far as I know is okay.
Katie
Yeah, I'm sure as long as you figure it out in advance, that's great.
Uriah
And they crafted a plan to potentially just stay.
Katie
There.
Uriah
Forever.
Katie
Wow.
Uriah
Yeah.
Katie
That's incredible. And that's that unexpected stuff that when you are finally giving yourself a little bit of freedom to move maybe beyond the good and into what is the great or what is the next level?
Uriah
I love that. I'll give you one more example. This is one in development that's happening as we speak. But one of my current coaching clients, we were talking and we were looking at her calendar and trying to figure out where we could squeeze in some time for planning and working on the business. And then we were also just thinking about what it would be like if her calendar wasn't so full and there was more room for life and enjoying things. And she said, I think off the cuff, that she hadn't picked up a paint brush in 15 years but loves painting. And I was like, Okay, that's what we're doing. Let's organize your business. Let's organize your calendar so that you can be painting on a Tuesday at 1 PM or whatever you want.
Katie
I love that.
Uriah
I love that. I love that. Acting as an accountability for that, like, Okay, did you buy those supplies? Did you do.
Katie
The thing? That's great. Yeah. Good for you.
Uriah
That's great. Hopefully she listens to this and is.
Katie
Prompted again. She's like, Uriah.
Uriah
So that is fantastic. And I think to me, this falls under the umbrella that I love of lifestyle design. And I've thought and believed for quite some time that your business should serve your life and not the other way around. So many people in corporate America or in other industries, their work is their life, and it chews up everything that they have. And they might have a really nice paycheck, and maybe they have a nice car or whatever they have. But what they don't have is time, flexibility, and.
Katie
A life. Yeah, I.
Uriah
Love that. I always like presenting to therapists the idea that they can design things and choose what they want. For a lot of us as therapists, that's a novel idea, right? Right.
Katie
Absolutely.
Uriah
I could do something different?
Katie
Yeah. Well, it goes back to what you said in the beginning about it's all law and ethics and do everything by the books and don't change anything at all. And yet there are therapists out there who even just within the realm of their private practice are doing unique and different things. They're offering more concierge services. I know somebody who serves very high level, A list type celebrity clientele, where the degree of privacy is so different. And so they modify those services to be a concierge level service for that person where the therapist is going to travel to them wherever they want to go and where there's going to be different privacy requirements or where they're simply saying, okay, if I'm going to work with a whole family, this is the package or suite of services that's going to work better than the traditional come in here for 50 minutes every Tuesday type of service. And so there are all of these different creative out of the box ways. And often if we don't see other people doing it, it's hard to imagine it. And that's why podcasts like this one I think are important to open people's eyes up to that.
Uriah
I don't know if you ever peeped on a Facebook post or Instagram or wherever and somebody asked the question, either what would you do if you weren't a therapist? What career or what endeavor would you go after? Or I like this question also as a thought exercise about if you woke up tomorrow and you didn't have to make money, how would you spend your time? Those are both very interesting. And I find that on the first question of like, if you weren't a therapist, what would you do? People have so many ideas. There's a lot of comments, right?
Katie
Because.
Uriah
I don't know, that's an exciting thought exercise.
Katie
Right. And do you find that on the second question, they have just as many?
Uriah
Actually, to be honest, I haven't seen many posts with that. I should pose that question somewhere online.
Katie
Yeah, you should. That'd be interesting. That'd be interesting in one of the bigger groups.
Uriah
Yeah. That guy I was telling you about before we hit record, Derek Sivers, is a very interesting fellow. I could dive into his story here, but I won't. But he basically built a company and sold it for $22 million, put that money, donated it to charity, essentially, to music education post his death. So when he dies, the 22 million goes to music education. But in the meantime, he's been living off the interest of the money and the trust, essentially. And so he has, for 10 years, had no need to make money or do anything motivated by making money. So he's been living in New Zealand and Singapore, raising his son as a single dad and writing poetry.
Katie
Wow. For 10 years. Wow. Talk about just following your passion. That's amazing. Yeah.
Uriah
I mean, I wish we could all make so much money that we're just like, You know what? Tomorrow, I'm just going to, I don't know, something interesting.
Katie
Go to New Zealand.
Uriah
I'm going to invent a hoverboard. I don't know. Whatever. But I like that idea. I think there's a lot of therapists that want to break out. That's primarily what you do, right? You help therapists transition from just in the room therapy to being clinic coaches and expanding what's possible.
Katie
Expanding what's possible, moving, because there's so many therapists who honestly, we make the absolute best coaches, but we also make the best course creators. We make the best retreat leaders. We make the best consultants. We just had, oh, my gosh, I can tell you, this just happened this morning. We literally just had a client in our program who came to our... We had our group meeting this morning. He just sold, booked, he's doing a consulting package for a company. $49,000 consulting package.
Uriah
I saw your post on that. That's amazing.
Katie
How bananas is that? And then I found out afterwards, he was actually short selling himself. It was actually a $60,000 coaching package. But when he removed his travel expenses, it came down to $49,000. Oh, my word. But that's insane. And I hung up from our group call and I was thinking, therapists have no idea that that is possible. And he will be the first to tell you. It's not like he's got some special all saw special sauce, special secret, executive, anything. We all tend to be intimidated by words like consulting or executive. The reality is we all have these basic skills of teaching communication and of teaching family systems and how those might apply in the office space. Those types of things are such in demand skills. And when you think of how different your life could be if basically your entire yearly income came from just one consulting package. You sell that twice, you've just doubled your yearly income. I mean, it's amazing. Just knowing that that's out there for people gets me excited because I know what's available and I truly, I have such a passion for constantly bringing wealth into the hands of the helpers. This to me is how you change the world. You redistribute wealth so that it is coming into the hands of the natural helpers, the therapists, the social workers, the caregivers, because these are the people who use it to help. And that is the great thing about it.
Uriah
So if I was listening to this podcast 10 years ago, my version of myself 10 years ago, I'd probably be intrigued, excited, and then in unbelief about how do I get there? That sounds great, Katie and Uriah. Right. How do you get there? So I guess the question I have for you is, if you can think of any, what are unusual or creative ways to help therapists expand what's possible and then take some action? And what would that action be?
Katie
Yeah, I love that. So for one thing, I think people love to do the unicorn thing. It's very easy for them to look at you and be like, Well, that's nice. But Uriah is a unicorn. I could never do everything he does. He's got this cool, analytic mind, and he can just figure all this stuff out. People do the same with me, Well, that's nice. But Katie, she's all bubbly and outgoing. I could never do what she does. I'm more of an introvert. And they do the unicorn thing. We look for what's different about people. And this is part of why I love having a large program that I run, because what I get to see on the back end is that absolutely anyone can do this. There is room for every therapist. There is room for the most introverted. There is room for the person who's sure that they could never succeed. There's room for everyone because I've now seen every different type of person find success at outgrowing the office in whatever that means to them, whatever different way. I do think part of it is you actually have to first expose yourself to new ideas. I think part of that is very often for us, you need to expose yourself to new ideas around money. I don't know when this podcast is coming out. We're doing a live event, May 11th and 12th, so it might unfortunately be over by the time this comes out. I'm not sure. But one of the workshops that I'm teaching in that live event is called the Hell Yes to high ticket because a lot of therapists don't understand, and I didn't either 10 years ago me, oh my gosh, I was in a terrible place mentally with money. But when you move into actually expanding your consciousness around what money is, what it means, the fact that there are millions of people in the world who absolutely will not look twice at you, will not benefit from you and your services because you are lowballing your prices. And specifically, only because you are lowballing your prices, there are millions of people in the world who want the best, and they're going to look at you and you're trying to say, Well, I'm only charging twelve dollars because I want to be able to serve everybody. And the reality is you can't serve everybody that way. And it's a price for burnout, obviously. But also there are so many people in the world where they want the best, and they're going to look at your $12 and somebody else's $8,000 coaching package, and they're going straight to that $8,000 person instead of you. And when you realize that and realize how many people in the world actually just have a very different money mindset than you do, and that it is a malleable thing. No one's money mindset is set in their jeans. It's just a matter of exposing yourself to new ideas and new understanding around it that you can start to grow. And then too, like we mentioned earlier, exposing yourself to those bigger questions for you. Well, what would it look like for me to get creative around what I'm doing? If I could pick a topic to talk to people about all day long, instead of having to be a generalist, instead of having the high burnout therapist path where you're really expected deep down to be an expert in absolutely everything, no matter who comes in the door, they expect you to know how to help them. What if instead of that, you picked something that you were truly passionate about, that you could truly talk about all day, and you were able to follow that path and that passion down to its ending point? How much more good do you think you'd be doing in the world? When you stop and think of it that way, it's tremendous. I'm always, for people, I'm a big advocate of just honestly spending time with this, whether it's in brainstorming, in journaling, and maybe you go for walks outside and you are just listening for those little whispers of insight. One great practice that you and I talked about briefly that I've done a couple of times recently that I absolutely love, get a friend and go somewhere together with the intention of masterminding your ideas together. Get a friend and whether you go for an afternoon somewhere outside of your house, away from your normal environment, I highly recommend anything outside of your normal environment. So don't go to the Starbucks around the corner that you always go to with your friend. Go sit in the lobby of a beautiful resort somewhere in your city that just gives you a little bit of dream space because it's gorgeous there. It'd be awesome, right? Or even better, go stay there for a night, the two of you, and really give yourselves that full-time that you can be together because what you'll find is, and especially if you go in with intention and with, Okay, here are some ideas I'm playing with. I really want you as my brainstorming buddy? Can we bounce these ideas off of each other? And you go back and forth. Give yourselves equal time. Maybe it's two hours Uriah, we're going to talk about your stuff. Two hours, we're going to talk about my stuff. Then we're just going to go have dinner, have a good old time. And you're going back and forth with your friend and bouncing this stuff around, you would be amazed at how many new ideas and insights and fun things can slowly develop that don't happen. I recently was with Katie Bernoy. We did a weekend like this, and she said a few times. She's like, It's amazing how this goes so much deeper. She's like, I talk about this stuff to my therapist and to my coach, but that 50 minutes session, it just doesn't have the drop in-depth of really spending hours and hours together where you can keep going, Oh, and what about this? And what about that? And spiraling further into it. It's a really fun, exciting way to be growing your own ideas.
Uriah
Okay. So there's the action step. If you're listening to this and you're like, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. Do this. Grab a friend and plan. Even if it's just one night overnight or a weekend or whatever you can eke out. Even if it's just hanging out for the entire day and go into a new location. And then just freeform, open, just talk about life and business and what you want to create and what you want to dream up. I think that's a great thing to do. I did that about, gosh, I guess it was like six months ago. Went to got an Airbnb on the Oregon Coast with a friend, and we just hung out for a whole weekend. And that was where I created the idea of writing the productive practice book.
Katie
Really? And now that has come to fruition.
Uriah
From that experience. So great example, right?
Katie
That's amazing.
Uriah
That's perfect. And now I have a self published book and a coaching program and all kinds of cool stuff that came out of a friendly, mastermind.
Katie
Whatever you want to call that. Exactly. It's like informal, but it's still that mastermind vibe and energy.
Uriah
And I just love it. Something about that loose structure for me at least, and for some of my friends that really works because I love my business coach. Sandi's amazing. I've been working with her for literally five years, and we get a lot done. But we squeeze it into 45 minutes and I've got an agenda and there's no time for just sitting back and drinking whiskey.
Katie
Yes, right. Or whatever. Just like.
Uriah
Eating fried.
Katie
Cheese currants. Exactly. Just like shooting the shit, having that mixed in there, just normal life stuff.
Uriah
That's where inspiration comes from so often.
Katie
Yeah. And I love it. I think it's such a fun way to do it. I would just say get somebody that you really trust, where you know that you can just open up about whatever crazy ideas are going on and that you're not going to feel like you have to censor yourself or anything like that, that you can just be like, Blah, here's all this crazy stuff I've been thinking about and that you guys can just go with it.
Uriah
Yeah. Okay. So that's the action. There's your homework, schedule a work retreat, a Mastermind with a friend.
Katie
And then tag us. Send us a picture and tag us. I want to know these are actually happening because they're so worth it.
Uriah
We're talking about lifestyle design. Have you ever done this for your business? I was thinking about how cool it would be if people tagged productive therapists when they were on vacation or they were doing the.
Katie
Cool stuff that was.
Uriah
Made possible by being more productive or whatever. I love that. I think that that would.
Katie
Be fun. They need to. That'd be so good. I love that idea. I should start doing it. You need to. Yeah, hashtag. There you go.
Uriah
This has been awesome. Thank you so much. I know we could go for a couple more hours easily. I know we could. And clearly, we need to schedule one of these Mastermind retreats with.
Katie
Some of the other folks. The Oregon Coast. I like that. Yeah, exactly. No, that'd be great, though. Honestly, it'd be great. Oh, and we should say, you and I were talking about this earlier. If you're doing one of these mini minds with your friends, for me, I would say two to maybe four.
Uriah
People at top.
Katie
Because when you start getting bigger and bigger, you're not going to have that same depth of sharing and you're not going to have the same time to really drop in with somebody. So I really do think it's about like, you can pick one, two, maybe three other people and just all really as long as you're all going in with that same intention, doing it that way is the most productive.
Uriah
Thank you for saying that. Yeah. I personally like two and four for some reason, like when it's just me and another person or when it's like a group of four. I don't know. I like that dynamic.
Katie
It just works out. Yeah, that's great.
Uriah
Good stuff. So this is like everything that we're talking about here. You and I both help therapists with this in different, slightly different ways. And I know people probably already know who you are because you're famous on the internet and all that.
Katie
Yeah. Whenever people say that, I laugh. I'm like, You have no idea.
Uriah
No one knows. Katie, I used to have this shirt that I bought at a thrift store, and I wore it forever and ever. It was bright red, and it said, I'm huge in Europe, or something like that. I'm famous in Europe. I just thought that was so fun.
Katie
That's hilarious.
Uriah
I'm very, very well known in a tiny sliver of the internet.
Katie
Anyway. Exactly.
Uriah
But if people don't already know where they can find more about you and your cool programs. Where could they go?
Katie
They should come hang out with me at KatieRead.com. I have one of those names, it's hard to get the spelling right, so I'm sure you'll drop it in the show notes, KATIEREAD.com. We do have a lot of free guides there. You can click the free guide tab if you are thinking at all about outgrowing the office. We run the absolute best program to help you do it. We are the most established name in the game, and we love helping therapists move up to their next level. That is what we do over there. We'd love to have you. You can follow the Clinic Coach Academy page on Instagram, or you can come hang out with me and my little passion project on Instagram as well. That is Hey Katie Reed on Instagram. And I put out a micro podcast. So every day people get a text with a little two-minute message from me in the areas of resilience, entrepreneurship, mindset, all that good stuff. So it's just a new little passion project that we just started. Totally free. It's fun.
Uriah
You know what? I signed up for that and I never saw it. So I need to go back and sign up again. We need to.
Katie
Go figure out. That's too bad. Yeah, you should be getting the text. I'll go double check. I'll find your name in the system and we'll see why it's able to go through. Yeah, you got the N. You got the N, we'll get you taken care of.
Uriah
Well, thanks, Katie. I'll talk to you soon.
Katie
Thank you.
Subscribe & Review in Apple Podcasts
If you're not already subscribed to the Productive Therapist Podcast, now's your chance to join the hundreds of other therapists who tune in each week. You'll get weekly encouragement, support, tips and suggestions for growing your practice and reaching your goals.
The world needs you to be the best, most productive therapist you can be. And you owe it to yourself to reach for your big dreams. The Productive Therapist Podcast is here to help you do both.
Click here to subscribe now on iTunes.