Melvin Varghese:
Hey there, it's Melvin. I hope you're doing well. Before we jump into today's session, just wanted to let you know that STC Elite, our mastermind for therapists creating their first online courses open for enrollment. If you've been thinking about creating an online course and have been a fan of the STC podcast and are looking to launch your online course in a community of other therapists, you can check out the mastermind over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash mastermind, or you can download our free online course starter kit. It's a seven-day email course that'll help validate your course idea. That's over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash course kit. We'll jump into today's session. Hey there, welcome to today's session of Selling the Couch. I hope you're doing well, having a fantastic day. So, you know, one of the things that as Selling the Couch continues to grow and as I grow as an entrepreneur, one of the things I've been really doing is trying to study those who are a little bit further along. And in this case a lot further along than me as an entrepreneur i believe that but. You know what i used to do is i used to just focus on the successful things they were doing how they were marketing or how they were growing or how they were selling. But maybe it's just the wisdom of age. But as I've gotten older, one of the things that I've come to realize is I actually equally want to study the things that are not working for them, or the hard lessons that they learned along the way, or the sacrifices that they're making along the way to build something really great. And it's ultimately asking this question of, are those things that I'm willing to do? And today's podcast is actually based on a podcast interview I heard a couple of months ago. It's with Ali Abdaal and Sahil Bloom. Both of these are online creators. If you haven't heard of Ali and Sahil, they both built seven-figure businesses. They also have an audience of over, I believe, six million. when I last checked in recently. And so they built both these platforms as well as these very successful businesses. And a few months ago, they sat down to do a podcast interview, basically talking about life and business. They had actually done part one of an interview, I would say about a year ago. And I listened to it, and it was one of the most insightful interviews that I had heard. And I took a lot of things away from it, and I just couldn't wait to listen to the second part of this, because they had alluded to that a second part was coming. And so in today's session what I want to do is take seven of the lessons that I picked up along the way and share some of the things that I'm thinking about and more importantly implementing both in my business as well as in my personal life. So the number one tip that they shared is to change the wealth scoreboard. So change the wealth scoreboard. So in entrepreneurship, and especially even in private practice, right, a lot of times, we base success on two metrics, either the number of clients we're seeing, or on revenue. right? And revenue, especially in the world just generally of entrepreneurship, it's kind of an indicator of credibility, reputation, and all of those kind of things. And yet at the same time, if you think about it, I know for me, when I think about it, we know people in our lives that are extremely wealthy, but they're miserable. They and miserable could be defined in all sorts of different ways. Either they work crazy hours, they struggle with some sort of addiction, there is a sense of brokenness in their relationships, they are not able to spend time with loved ones as they would like, they're not able to show up to little league games or any of those things for their kiddos on a regular basis, and One of the things that Sahil and Ali point to is basically not defining your self-worth based on your net worth. And instead what they say is change the scoreboard of success. So instead of just basing your self-worth and your belief in who you are based on a number like revenue, Or, you know, if you're a podcaster or you're building on some sort of a social platform, number of followers. Instead of that, optimize it a different way. Expand that definition. So include things like health. Do I have time for exercise? Am I getting out daily to do a hike? Things like that. Do I have time for my loving relationships? Because we, just on a personal level, we seem to be entering a season where a lot of our parents' generation, they're passing away, they're coming down with cancer and Alzheimer's and all of these kind of things. I realize more than ever that these folks that I keep saying I'm going to spend time with them, I'm going to spend time with them, they're getting older and we really don't know when our last days are and so how do we want to intentionally live our days Another thing that I've thought a lot about is just time for hobbies. I started to pick up the ukulele recently. I've done landscape photography for a long time and I've recently started to pick that back up. I took a little bit of a break when our kiddo was born and it was just hard to focus on much more. But what I've come to realize is changing this definition of success, it's really hard. And I will say I do not have this figured out at all because there are times where I struggle with, man, you know, I could launch another thing, or this is an episode for a future time, but I've been thinking about, you know, jumping back into private practice, this was always the dream. But I've been thinking a lot about like, what is the reason I want to do it? And when do I want to do it? And some of those things I'm thinking about, but What I realized is you're just going to be a lot happier playing a game that's not just based on revenue at the end of the day. So the second point that they shared is set daily non-negotiables. So I feel like as clinicians, we are probably a little bit more intentional about the pacing of our days and how we think about our days. But I also know, especially when you're doing traditional private practice, you may be seeing 15 to 25 clients in a week, right? And that stuff, the work is beautiful, and yet it takes such a toll on all of us, right? And if you're in a group practice, even as you have scaled back, right, there's inevitably, you've gone more into a CEO role where you've got a really set vision and all of these kind of things, right? So their point was basically, if you live without intention, it's a formula to exist versus living. Instead, what Sahil recommended was write a list of three to five things that you must do every day to function at your best. So for me, I started to create this list and one is I have to start my day usually with a 30 minute HIIT workout. That's like one big thing. Another thing is I have to do a daily hike as long as the weather cooperates or kiddo's not sick or something like that. These little things like that, and I realize individually they're powerful, but it's the combination of stacking all of those together that really yields the best results. And what you want to do is you want to schedule those three to five things into your day. And, you know, we know this, especially as clinicians, when we see clients in the therapy room, which is we talk a lot about self-care and we know that taking care of ourselves first allows us to love and take care of those around us. Whereas if we focus on loving and taking care of others, it can work for a season, but inevitably it's a formula for burnout or resentment or something like that. The third point that they made was friends over followers. There's a, I think it's called a Harvard study on, I'm like missing the middle word, but like the Harvard study on happiness. It's the longest running study on happiness at 75 plus years. And what they have basically done is studied generations of people. And every year, year after year, asking them these questions around what makes you happy? What have you realized? And they started this study when these individuals were, I believe in their teens, and now many of them are in their 80s and 90s. And it's a pretty interesting study. There's actually a fascinating TED talk on it that you should definitely check out from the current director of the study, who is Dr. Robert Waldinger. And in that study, they basically found that the single greatest predictor of health at age 80 is the quality of relationships that you have at age 50. Now what's really interesting, and I feel this more than ever now that I'm writing on LinkedIn, there's an interesting trick that social media plays on us. Social media makes us believe that having more followers means that we have deep relationships in real life. And that could be, that's like the furthest thing from the truth, right? Instead, what I've been really trying to do is create a list of, so I've got two lists. One, I've got a list of five just guy friends that I really want to invest in. Hey, it's Melvin. I hope that you're enjoying today's podcast session. Just wanted to also let you know that STC Elite, our mastermind for therapist course creators, is now open for enrollment. If you've been thinking about creating an online course, and specifically if 2025 is the year that you want to create your online course, definitely encourage you to check out our mastermind. It's over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash mastermind. We launched this back in 2021 and since then over 60 of our colleagues have gone through our mastermind. It includes a ton of support all the way from live teaching, live feedback from colleagues and from our team to build out and structure your online course all the way to mindset coaching, all the way to access to our video editing and graphic design team so that you don't have to hire everything separately. We've made it really super comprehensive and I think you're really going to enjoy it. Again, the link is over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash mastermind. Enrollment does wrap up at the end of August, so definitely encourage you to check it out and consider joining us. And again, we have a free email course. It's seven days. It'll help validate your course idea. I know that's the biggest struggle many of us are navigating of whether the course is actually going to make money. And we put all of this into a simple to understand email course that you can check out over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash course kit. SellingTheCouch.com forward slash Course Kit. We'll jump right back into today's session. So I make sure I review that list as part of my night routine. And I just always ask myself, did I reach out to this person? Did we grab coffee? Did we have a meal together? Did we talk to each other on the phone? Something like that. And then I have an expanded list about 13-14 folks that I do regular phone calls with. and it's such a basic thing and i usually grab those those calls on my hike so it's kind of a i get to hike and talk and it's like the most wonderful feeling in the world because you're getting like physical exercise but then your heart is fulfilled too because you're connecting with somebody on a genuine basis and because i'm doing a hike it's not like i can be distracted like on a laptop or something right i've literally got my airpods in my ear and i'm just talking to them enjoying nature and just being fully present with them and this is the key part of it you have to schedule that time to connect with them so it doesn't mean always like and i realize we're all in different seasons of life so it doesn't mean you know it can be always like a physical gathering on a regular cadence it could be as simple as like a text or a call or something like that. And again, I think the highlight or the wisdom of that is life happens, and life will just pass us by if we're not intentional with our relationships. Fourth point that they made was more growth equals more haters. Now, this is one of the hardest things I, to be honest, I was completely oblivious on this, you know, the STC podcast, as I record this right now, we just passed 1.75 million downloads of the podcast, which is unbelievable and I'm just incredibly humbled for this kind of growth. Each of you are the reason why this has happened and yet at the same time the thing I was completely oblivious to is that you're gonna statistically attract haters and trolls. There's a great Tim Ferriss article that I've shared in previous episodes all about where he basically talks about the costs of success and the costs of celebrity. And it's a cautionary article, everything from Tim Ferriss wrote For Our Work Week, For Our Body, a bunch of the Tools of Titans, a bunch of these books, but everything from like, you know, the FBI having to be called because there's like a stalker or having to put pseudonyms or aliases in when they're checking into hotels because of Like the fear of like not having privacy There's just a lot of stuff that you just don't think about and I am very much very much a small fish in You know in this sort of larger ecosystem and I realize all these numbers are relative but even for me I have definitely dealt with a handful of situations that made me pause that sort of bordered on sort of stalkerish sort of ideals idealizing kind of behavior all the way to sort of threats you know when we had to remove somebody from our program because they were causing harm to the the safety of the group and all the way to like threats of you know i'm gonna blast you out on whatever right And it's really, and there in hindsight, I think there are probably things that I could have done a different little bit differently. But it also taught me a very important lesson, which is, I think we should absolutely all share our message, right. And yet at this, the other side of this is you are probably going to attract people that are just sort of have pain in their lives. And so Saha has a few tips, and he's specifically referencing Twitter threads, because he really built his audience on Twitter. But so a couple of tips. So a thread getting a lot of quote tweets early on is an early indicator that's it's potentially being perceived as controversial. So basically, you know, quote, tweet, and most of these platforms have this, right, which is basically that they take a post that somebody takes a post they've seen, and then they add their perspective on it. usually it's a, you know, like, this is why I disagree with this or this, you know, and, and because of that, you're just going to attract some people that are, you know, continue to feel that right. So he'll mutes those conversations to prevent notifications. What I actually have done is I don't have social media on my phone, I check it on my when I'm, you know, here on my desktop. But beyond that, I'm checked out unless it's some sort of weird case scenario where I just need to check it for some reason. something like that, like waiting on a DM or something. But by and large, I really try to avoid social media and putting it on my phone. Sahil also says, you know, he realizes someone's usually hurting if they're willing to write something mean about you online. this i think is absolutely true i think one thing i've realized is i mean it's that old adage right hurting people hurt people and it doesn't mean that you should be a punching bag for the hurt you should absolutely set boundaries but i think sahil's perspective which is something that I'm still working on which is defaulting to empathy at least in your mind because realizing that the person is probably just going through something in their own lives and they may be projecting that hurt or that pain onto you and it likely in a lot of situations it probably has nothing to do with you but you just became the the object where it's where it's placed. The fifth point is this tip about posting pictures of kids and sharing like revenue numbers especially. Sahil basically says, and Ali agrees with him, but basically these are inherently not bad things. They can show your humanity, your credibility. And I would even say, especially in this world of AI, where content creation is easier than ever, people really crave the human connection, that they want to be able to see somebody like this and just to be able to talk to them and say, wow, I resonate with what they're saying. They make me feel a certain type of way. Now, here's kind of the weight. There's always trade-offs. As you probably can tell, I don't rarely, and especially on very public things like LinkedIn, I, you know, one of my things is I'm a girl dad, but I actually don't post pictures of our daughter. And the main reason is, one, like from a safety perspective. Two, for me, I feel like one of the most important things that I can do as a dad to empower my daughter is that me not post it because she has no ability to be able to say like, hey dad, like I don't want you to post this or I want you to post this. I just don't think she has the wisdom that she's at. at five years old, right? And so it's something I don't know about, like, and I'm not even gonna, like, say I have it all figured out. Like, I don't know how I'm gonna navigate it as she gets sort of older, as I continue to think about STC and all of those kind of things. And so, but I do want to default to caution. I think there's definitely wisdom, wisdom in that. Revenue numbers are another thing. I think I've In the past especially on LinkedIn in the early days when I first started this what I would say is like around late 2022 early 2023 I was posting a lot more revenue numbers and What I kind of realized is It wasn't a money thing, but it just made me feel uncomfortable on some level. It made me like, am I flaunting this? But then again, also like the safety thing. As you can tell, this point is one that I'm still navigating and struggling through. But I at least wanted to share it with you because I think it's something that's worthwhile, but it's also, I wanted to normalize that this is really hard. It's really hard when you… part of things like credibility can be impacted and helped by numbers, right? So, for example, we have our online course Mastermind, right? And it's a nice thing for our colleagues to know that I'm a course creator, that I've been one since 2015, and we've had 200 plus students, we've had 300k plus in revenue, right? Like, that when I teach this stuff, it's not something random. that I'm just like building another product because, you know, I launched a course and the course didn't do well. So now I'm going to go teach other people how to do it kind of thing, you know? Yeah. So the sixth point is build micro businesses. You know, a nightmare scenario for most entrepreneurs is they have to balance making money in their business with creating content, i.e. marketing their business with all without sort of burning out, right? And if you have a team, I think that's one option, but many people I know that are listening to these episodes are solopreneurs, and how do you sort of do that in a sustainable way? Sahil has an interesting piece of advice, which is basically to scratch your own itch. So build micro-businesses within your main business to generate cash flow, ideally with minimal involvement. So, for example, in house agency, if you have a podcast, this would free up time, this would then generate revenue, and it would allow you to focus on your creative pursuits. One of the nuances that Sahil talks about is ideally finding somebody that can manage and do this for you, so that you don't have another thing to manage or form like a partnership where you have multiple partners. I don't know anything about this stuff, but it's something that I'm thinking about, whether it does make sense. Because I think that piece of advice is really good, but I think there's some nuances, which is, you know, building anything new, I think, comes with its own stressors and time and you need capital and all of that kind of stuff. And yeah, so like, just nuances that I don't know the answer to, of course, I'll share as I kind of learn and navigate and think through more and more stuff with the STC podcast. The final thing that they mentioned is connection over mass content. So I've noticed this when I started podcasting in 2015. There was a piece of advice they would say is if you want your podcast to grow, post a whole bunch of episodes and do it very consistently and basically surge those episodes, especially at the start. and that will lead to bigger download numbers. When I started writing on LinkedIn, it was a very similar advice, except it was two-tiered. Post often and then go find bigger accounts and go engage with their content because the people that are also following those accounts, especially if you leave an insightful comment, then they will click back over to your profile, check it out, and then want to follow you. I think there is definitely wisdom in this. Again, you know, as I started on LinkedIn around 690-ish followers, and right now as I record this we're about to hit 2,800 followers, and I do this, I've done this thing for, you know, five days a week. I spend about 30 minutes interacting with accounts and commenting when, you know, people comment online, and I think it's definitely a way to grow. But again, the nuance I think of this is AI is really going to change a lot of stuff. Content is easier than ever to create. You know, even down like two weeks ago, Taplio is in the STC newsletter, I share my LinkedIn live stats. So there's a page which shows you how all of my posts are done. So if you haven't signed up for the newsletter, it's over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash newsletter, we'd love to have you. But in there, that software that I'm using is called Taplio, T-A-P-L-I-O. And one of the really interesting things I just saw that Taplio rolled out is literally you can take a YouTube video that you've recorded, paste the URL into Taplio, and it will automatically generate a carousel for you. So it uses AI to kind of summarize everything. It's pretty crazy. At And I just ran this and it literally took about four minutes to write an entire carousel post. So what that's telling me is, again, content is easier than ever now to create. And what people are going to be really leaning on is connection. So even the way when I think about posting on LinkedIn, the cadence I've generally at this point done is three times a week. And then there's a Saturday morning where I just share the latest podcast episode. But with those three posts, generally two of those are kind of a human connection side. So they're usually stuff that I'm struggling with or stuff I'm navigating or stuff that I'm learning. Something like that. And the intent is One, just to share a human side, but those posts, what I notice is those tend to do really well. Because I think, more than ever, we value connection and authenticity more than ever. And I know, even on LinkedIn, I was talking with a friend about this the other day, I've actually muted or unfollowed bigger accounts that are overly optimized with perfect copywriting skills. Because what I find is, it almost feels clickbaity and it feels like inauthentic. And the biggest thing I wanted to share, at least with that pointer I took away, is at the end of the day, people do business with people they know, like, and trust. And so you can share all the knowledge and insights that you have in the world, but if people don't see your human side, your struggles, your wins, your hard moments, I think it's really hard, I think, to build something sustainable online. So the seven points just one more time are change the wealth scoreboard. Two, set daily non-negotiables. Three, friends over followers. Four is more growth equals more haters. Five is this thought around being thoughtful about posting pictures of kiddos or sharing revenue numbers. Six is build micro-businesses. And seven is connection over mass content. Hope you enjoyed today's episode and if we're on LinkedIn, when this goes live, I would love to hear what you took away from it because there's just a wealth of stuff and I'm sure there's stuff that I'm missing as well. Hope you have a wonderful day and so appreciate you tuning in. Bye.

Narrator:

Thanks for listening to the Selling the Couch podcast. For more great content and to stay up to date, visit www.sellingthecouch.com.

Melvin Varghese:

Hey, it's Melvin. I hope that you enjoyed today's session. Again, wanted to just send a final invite to join us in our online course Mastermind, which is currently open for enrollment. If you've been thinking about creating an online course and want to do this in community alongside other therapists, the Mastermind is definitely something to check out. You can learn more about it over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash mastermind, sellingthecouch.com forward slash mastermind. Have a great rest of your day. Hey, it's Melvin. I hope that you enjoyed today's session. Again, wanted to just send a final invite to join us in our online course mastermind, which is currently open for enrollment. If you've been thinking about creating an online course and want to do this in community alongside other therapists, the mastermind is definitely something to check out. You can learn more about it over at SellingTheCouch.com forward slash mastermind. SellingTheCouch.com forward slash mastermind. Have a great rest of your day.