Lisa Dion & Jen Taylor: The Topic We Don’t Study Enough As Therapists

Lessons from the Playroom Podcast Ep. 121

Lisa Dion & Jen Taylor: The Topic We Don’t Study Enough As Therapists

Lessons from the Playroom Podcast Ep. 121

Lisa has a really special guest joining her for this episode and they’re doing something different today … It’s time to talk about business! – One of the most important topics we don’t talk much about as therapists. And to help Lisa out with this conversation, she has Jen Taylor who’s going to be interviewing her on her business journey.

If you’ve ever wondered about Lisa and her entrepreneurial journey, what it took for her to build the Synergetic Play Therapy Institute or create this podcast, get ready for an insightful and inspiring conversation where you’ll get to know Lisa a little more and get some business insights along the way.

Tune in and hear the answers to some very fun questions such as: ✨

What was Lisa like as a child and how did this influence her becoming a business owner and entrepreneur?
How did Lisa hone her craft as a teacher (…and some tricks she uses to manage the anxiety she has before she teaches or gets on stage- yes she still gets anxious!)?
How did Lisa give herself permission to go after her dreams? (and ways you can too!)
How did Lisa learn to tackle and work with her fears?
How did Lisa reconcile the challenge and conflicting feelings of wanting to be of service and make money at the same time?
How did Lisa come to learn about the ins-and-outs of business as a therapist? (…because it’s not something we learn in graduate school)
Why does she spend money on learning about business (the same way we do as therapists for training and certifications) and why did she take the same business course 4 times?
What was the most valuable lesson Lisa learned as she reflected on some of the biggest unsuccessful business decisions she’s ever made on her entrepreneurial journey?

Plus, hear answers to some more personal questions like: 💕

What is one of her favorite business books;
Her biggest pet peeve on the business journey;
The worst business advice she’s ever received; and
The best advice she would give her younger self now.

Listen to this episode and learn insight’s from Lisa’s journey on how to manage some of the learning curves, detours, and clunkiness of having a business, while continuing to stay focused on your dreams as the deepest expression of yourself. 💙

And if you want more, join Lisa for The Business of Therapy, a 2.5 day live (and virtual hybrid) course on Nov 11-13, 2022 👉 Lisa is so excited to get therapists in a room to teach them, not only the nuts and bolts of the business of therapy, but the psychology of being an entrepreneur – come learn how to write the book, launch the podcast, start your private practice or take your existing business to the next level! And something we do well as therapists is be in community – rallying around each other, playing, and bringing the conversation of business to life.

*Some of you might be very familiar with Jen Taylor. She’s done amazing things in this world and to support play therapists worldwide. She’s a therapist, teacher and writer. She originally launched the Play Therapy Summit a few years ago and she’s been a previous guest talking about cooperative games. Find her here.

Episode Resources:

Episode Transcript

Thank you once again for joining me for this Lessons from the Playroom podcast episode. I have with me another really special guest and we’re going to be doing something different today. I have with me Jen Taylor. Some of you may be very familiar with Jen Taylor. She has done amazing things in this world and with play therapists. She originally launched the Play Therapy Summit a couple of years ago and she was also a previous guest on here, if you’re recognizing her name. She and I did a conversation about cooperative games, but today we’re talking about business and Jen is going to be interviewing me and we’re going to get to know a little bit more about my journey as a business owner and an entrepreneur. So I’m going to go ahead and pass this over to Jen. Jen, I’m super grateful, first of all, to know you. That’s the most important thing. You are a very important person in my life and I’m so grateful that we get to have this conversation and I get to share part of my story and I feel really honored that you get to facilitate this discussion. So thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you for having me and thank you to everybody who’s listening for allowing us to have this conversation. So I’m really excited to be able to talk to you today. I have a whole list of questions. I’m a little nervous. I want to make sure that I represent well, all the people who are listening that wish that they could sit down and have a cup of tea with you and ask you a bunch of questions about your business. Journey and what it’s like to be in the position that you’re in right now on this podcast in all of these different countries with hundreds of thousands of people listening to you and listening to the things that you have to teach. So I want to get down to it. I’m going to jump right in if that’s okay. That’s great. Yeah. Okay. So as people know, Lisa Dion is a teacher, an entrepreneur, an author, a coach, a mother, founder of Creative, of Synergetic Play Therapy of this podcast, right, like your resume speaks for itself it goes on and on. I’m curious to know, what were you like as a kid? How did this all get started? Selling lemonade on the side of the road or like, pedaling Girl Scout cookies and always knew you were going to be a business owner or what was that like? What was seven year old Lisa Dion like? That’s what I want. Oh, my gosh, what an awesome question to start this conversation with. So what’s kind of funny is I’ve thought about this before. I’ve tried to really think about the connection between my play as a child and who I was as a child and who I’ve become today. And I like to think of myself as like a play therapist, entrepreneur. So both of those hats. So as a child, one of the things that I used to play quite a bit was teacher. So I would take my stuffed animals and I would line my stuffed animals up in my makeshift classroom and I would create worksheets, and I would hand out my little worksheets to my stuffed animals, and I would pretend to grade them and this whole thing. So I love teaching my stuffed animals. So I played like that quite a bit as a child, so I could see the part of me that wanted to be an educator or be a teacher was there. And then the other thing that I did, and I didn’t really give a lot of credit to this until much later in my life because I really thought that why I did what I’m about to share with you was more of a way for me to bond with my dad. So my dad is a businessman, and he traveled quite a bit. And so one of the things that I would do when he was home is he would be in his office paying bills and doing that kind of stuff. And I would sit on the floor next to his desk. And when he would throw papers in the trash can, receipts, I don’t even know what right, I would actually pull them out of the trash can and I would organize them in my little desk and I would, in my mind, pretend like I was running my own little business. Or pretend like I was paying my own little bills. And again, at the time, I thought it was, oh, this is a way for me to connect with my dad because I don’t really get to spend a ton of time with my dad, but I can also see that that was actually a really meaningful play for me. And so, yeah, I look at what my life is demonstrating now, and in so many ways, that’s what I did. I took my stuffed animals and then I took my time next to my desk with my dad and brought them to life as an adult. So, yeah, kind of fun. It is kind of fun. I’m imagining that, you probably don’t keep all of your receipts in the garbage and go through them now. You probably have learned strategies. Think about the stuffed animals, though, because if you had all that practice teaching your stuffed animals, I’m just imagining that you’re a natural born teacher, right? Teaching came easily to you. You started doing workshops and teaching people all around the world, and it was just always I mean, one might think from the story that I just shared, but the answer to that is no. I really jumped into teaching when I was forced to. And I’ll say a little bit more about that. After I graduated from graduate school, which was in 2003, I moved to a really small town up in the mountains in Colorado. And when I moved to the town, I had this idea in my head, oh, I’ll get a job at like, a mental health agency or at a community mental health center or something like that. And when I got to this small town, there was nothing, there wasn’t the job opportunity. And so I was really left with, I need a job, just the reality of life, how am I going to make money? And I had in the back of my head this message that I had really ingested in graduate school, which was, you have to earn the right to start a private practice, and you can’t just open up a private practice right out of graduate school. But I’m sitting here going, I don’t know what else to do, so I’m going to do it because I need to. But I didn’t know how to build a practice. I didn’t know how to market. I didn’t know anything like that. And so one of the things that I did was I went around to different preschools and I asked them if they’d be interested in a short little presentation for free, and nobody said no, it was a free, like, 30 minutes with like a 15 minutes question answer kind of thing, like super simple. And I put myself in the position of, okay, Lisa, well, now you’re going to have to go stand in front of a group of people and you’re going to have to teach them something. And I remember Jen, the very first I remember the room. I remember which preschool it was in. I mean, I remember the whole thing because it was everything I could do to not throw up, if I’m being honest. I was so anxious, I was so nervous. I was so worried about doing it well. I was so hyper focused on being liked. I really was not grounded in myself as I was teaching. I remember as I was talking about what I was talking about, there was a woman in the front row who had the whole still face thing going on. And I remember going into a panic because, oh, my gosh, I must stink at this. There’s no reaction. It was really unsettling and a very unsettling experience for me. And yet I didn’t know what else to do to build the thing that I felt like I needed to build because I needed the job. And so it was very much an uncomfortable experience that I’ve had to learn how to become good at and I’ve had to grow into. And I have taken classes and I have studied how to teach. When I go to conferences, I don’t just go to conferences to learn about the content. I watch presenters. I get ideas from presenters. So I feel like if we’re going to talk about your craft, I feel like I’ve been consciously trying to hone my craft since 2003. And I feel like even now, I am still on a learning curve and I’m still constantly asking myself the question, how do I get better at that? Or whatever it may be. I don’t feel like I’ve arrived as a teacher, if that makes sense. I feel like I’m a teacher that’s always in process of learning how to connect to the audience in different ways. So, no, it was not easy, Jen, not at all. I wanted to run away really quickly. All right, well, thank you. I love that story. I can imagine you with this green face trying to hold it all in, but I’m imagining listeners going, I think you’ve arrived as a teacher, Lisa. I think you’ve learned a few things along the way. So I’m sure that people are wondering what are the tricks that you use now to keep yourself from wanting to throw up in the garbage can before you go onto this big have a panic attack? How are you not doing that now? Regulation one of the things that I love about synergetic play therapy, if I’m honest, because it is a model that I can embody. And so learning about my own nervous system, learning about my own signals that I’m about to get really ungrounded. Learning how to stay connected to myself when I get really anxious. Learning how to ground myself. But, you know, another really big one, Jen, that I’ve learned over the years is that when I focus on me and I make it about me, I lose myself when I’m in front of an audience or I’m having a conversation with someone. If I can really recognize that I’m being of service and that that’s the highest priority in the moment is to be of service to someone else’s growth and to someone else’s learning, there is something extraordinarily grounding for me in that because it’s not about me. It’s not about, oh, they like me. Do they not like me? That kind of a thing. It’s about how do I provide something that’s of value? And that’s the piece there that fuels the question, how do I continue to hone my craft and be a better teacher? Because every student is different. And so what one student needs is different than what another student needs. One platform is different than another platform. Talking into a podcast, I mean, we can talk about that. I had a huge learning curve even in just creating the different podcast episodes, because it’s not natural for me to talk into a microphone staring at a wall. That’s not a natural form of teaching for me. But I had to learn, how do I do that? How do you teach online? How do you teach in person? How do you teach one on one? How do you teach in group? The more I can stay focused on my job in this moment is to provide a service, and the more I can stay focused on, I am here right now to support somebody’s growth. That in and of itself is so grounding for me. Yeah, I think inspirational too. And so I’m sitting here going, well, how are we supporting people’s growth by the people who are listening to this podcast? What is it that you’d like for them to get out of this particular conversation? Yeah, I think one of the pieces that you’re alluding to in the questions that you’re asking Jen, is maybe there is a part of my journey that looks easy, or maybe there is a part of my journey that looks like, oh, I don’t know what people’s ultimate perception of me is, but everybody goes through learning curves. Everybody, even the things that someone looks and appears to be masterful at, it didn’t start that way. Nobody is born being this thing. Even a great musician is on a learning curve. Even a great dancer is on a learning curve. A great play therapist right. There’s learning curves. And I think that there’s something that we can all continue to remind ourselves about, which is, it’s okay to be on a learning curve. It’s okay to be a newbie at something. It’s okay to feel clunky at things. It’s actually really necessary. It’s okay to feel like, oh, my gosh, I’m back to square one. Or I thought I knew, but now I don’t. If somehow that went away from our experience. I think that’d be really sad, I think would really stop our growth trajectory, really. So permission to be super clunky. Speaking of clunky, I was doing math when we were getting started, and I realized that Synergetic Play Therapy is 14 years old.

Yeah, almost 14 years old. So it’s like a clunky teenager now, which makes perfect sense since my daughter right now is a clunky teenager and I’m in that developmental stage with her.

I say that so lovingly because I’m a clunky parent right now with teenager who I think that’s the developmental stage is clunky as a teenager. And Synergetic Play Therapy came to be at the beginning of our relationship. So that makes total sense that it’s on a very similar developmental trajectory. Yeah, it really is. I’m like looking at it going, and I’m also a little bit in disbelief because I was first introduced to Synergetic Play Therapy. I took an intro class in 2014, and that seems like ages ago where I was at that time compared to where I am now. There’s some clunkiness to that as well, into my journey. So I’m wondering if you can talk from kind of that business journey of how do you get permission to create a whole new play therapy model, to open a business, to kind of go through all these things, start a podcast, write a book, keep just giving yourself permission to do a lot of things. And over the past 14 years, I want to hear about kind of how have you worked out some of the kinks? How has it become less clunky? Yeah, that’s a great question. So you said the word that’s really the magic word, which is give permission. Because where we end up sometimes minimizing ourselves is when we have the story that I need to get permission, which is different than give permission. One is outside, one is inside. And so it’s really been a journey of how do I give myself more and more permission? And then I think the next part of the question is, well, permission for what? And one might say, oh, Lisa, you’re giving yourself permission to create. Yes, but that’s simply an expression of the larger permission, which is, can I just give myself permission to be myself? Because when I’m more and more me, there’s a natural expression that goes along, and that’s true for everybody. The more I allow myself to be the teacher, the more I want to teach, the more I allow myself give myself permission to be the entrepreneur, the more businesses I want to create, the more I allow myself to give myself permission to invent I don’t know, invent or whatever it is, the more creative ideas come in. So it’s less about the doing, actually, and more about permission to more fully be. And the doing, in my experience, has been an extension of that. And I think that’s really key right, the more authentic we are. Jen every one of us, we all have a desire to contribute in this world. We all inherently want to actually be of service, everybody on the planet. And the more that we allow ourselves to be who we are, the more of service we want to be. Because we want then to help other people also have experiences of growth and experiences of clarity or whatever feels meaningful. So I think that’s really the question is what has helped me give myself permission to be more of me? A lot of it has been studying with people that I perceive have given themselves permission. So I think sometimes we need mentors and we need models of what the possibilities are. And so I look for people in the world that I perceive give themselves permission and I become really curious about them and I become curious about their life journey. There’s something in that that has been useful for me along the way. Another one has been really learning how to work with my fears. Because the thing that’s in the way of me not giving myself permission sometimes really boils down to because I’m scared. It’s really what it boils down to. I’m afraid of what someone’s going to think of me or I’m afraid of maybe not even just one person, like what many people will think of me. I’m afraid of falling short in some way. I’m afraid of perception, of some experience of pain or discomfort in my choices. And I’ve learned along the way how to work with my fears. It’s one of the big skills that I feel like has been really invaluable for me. How do I work with my fears? How do I tackle my fears? How do I look my fears right in the eye? Because we all know that Joseph Campbell’s famous quote that says the cave you fear to enter, I’m gonna mess the quote up, right? But like holds the treasures you seek. I think that’s what it is. And to that’s, that’s what that is all about is recognizing that the fear is actually the path. The fear is not the thing to run away from. The fear is the thing to run actually towards. And the faster I actually move in the direction of the thing that seems scary, it seems the faster I grow. And it seems like one door opens and then the next fear door is like, oh, now over here. And then it’s like, if I can go over there and open that door and then the next fear over here. And it’s like my fears throughout my journey, my entrepreneurial journey, have actually guided me on my path towards becoming more and more me. Which is so ironic, but that’s been my experience. I’m just going to let that sink in for a minute because I know people may be in their heads thinking about all the things that they’re afraid of right now, bring everybody back for a second, be like, okay, we’ve talked about fear. I think sometimes people are afraid of being successful too. Does that ever happen? Yes. Because what will people think? So here’s an interesting story. So when I was living in the small town that I was referring to earlier in our conversation, I remember when there was a choice point about buying a new car. This is going to probably sound like, where are you going with this? But there’s a choice point about buying a new car. And I remember at the time feeling nervous about the idea of driving a nice car. Something as simple as that, right? Like just a nice car. And I’m not talking about a super fancy car, I’m just talking about driving a nicer car than what I was driving at the time, right? And I remember feeling like I don’t want to pull up in my nice car and have my clients see me driving a nice car. This is part of my early money mindset that I think sometimes we get caught in because I don’t want to be judged, right? I don’t want whatever negative feedback I thought that I would get. And then there was also the like, do I even deserve to drive a nice car? Kind of a thing. And I remember that even being clunky around, gosh, is it even okay for me to be successful? Is it okay for me to wear the clothes I want to wear, drive the car, or whatever it may be that was there at the very, very beginning. As simple as something like what kind of car am I going to drive? Didn’t worried about being judged for being successful. It’s a symbol. And I think it goes back to this. There’s like a dissonance that happens with people sometimes between this idea of being of service and being able to make money, doing something that serves people and how do we help people to get to the place where they can earn money and maybe even lots of it and still be of service? Like, how do you reconcile those two things? Look, Jen, here’s the bottom line. I serve more people in the world. The more money I make I don’t know how else to say it. The more money I make, the more I have to build and develop and create things that are able to help more and more people. What I can do now is very the number of people that I can serve now in a given day compared to in 2003 is a different reality. I’m not saying one is better or worse than I’m not saying one is better or worse, but I think sometimes people do. They’re like, oh, if you make money or you have a successful income, then that means that you’re being selfish, or I’ve heard words like narcissistic or you’re too spoiled or sort of that feeling about it without recognizing that we’ll call it fair exchange. So fair exchange is another way of saying integrity. Integrity with yourself and integrity with somebody else. And in order to be in fair exchange, there has to be a balance between receiving and giving. And so if I am not able to receive, I will spend a lot of my time altruistically giving. And even though I can tell myself a story that, oh, I’m so nice and I’m being so helpful and all of that, the reality is I’m actually out of integrity. I’m out of integrity with myself, and I’m out of integrity with my client or whoever it is that I’m serving. And the same thing is true is if you start making a lot of money and it is all about, oh, now I get to go buy the house or I get to whatever, and then there isn’t the component of being in service, then you’re also out of integrity. But when you put both together, what you recognize is that you can be in a high level of integrity with making a lot of money and then also contributing back in larger ways where you’re very much integrity with yourself and you’re very much integrity in integrity with the people that you’re serving. That’s masterful, in my opinion, and that is a generous gift to self and other in this world. So when we start labeling like, oh, being too successful or making a lot of money is bad, and oh, just serve, serve, serve, serve, serve, that’s better, we’re actually really missing a really important understanding of what being in service ultimately is all about. I mean, it’s interesting when you think of some of the people in this world that are considered to be the wealthiest, they’re also some of the greatest philanthropists and they’re some of the people that contribute at really high levels. They can’t do that if they’re not making money. So they go hand in hand. Permission again, permission again, permission right. And permission to be in integrity you deserve, right? Permission to own your deserve and also permission to serve and help other people recognize that they also deserve it. Both so was this something that you got from your dad when you were pulling receipts out of the garbage, something that you learned in one of the business classes that you’ve taken? How did you come to get this level of understanding of this concept? Because I don’t think they teach us this in counseling classes. No, I sure did not get this in my counseling classes. My degree is not in business. I’ve never taken a business class on the level of at a college or a university, so to speak. I don’t have a degree per se in business school of hard knocks, as they say, is where I got my business degree. But because I recognized that I was lacking knowledge in business and that I didn’t know what I was doing and I was flying by the seat of my pants. I made it a priority for me to learn about business. So I have taken a lot of business classes. I’ve taken some classes. I shared this with you. There’s one particular class I literally took five times, and it was a four day course. It wasn’t like a three hour course. It was a four day course that I took five different times every single year. Every January, I took it. I have read countless books. I’ve done countless trainings. I put myself through the equivalent of going to business school. And what I have learned along the way is that there are principles that are sound and that are kind of like the building blocks of business. And it doesn’t matter who you learn business from, you’re going to hear them because they are the building blocks, but you got to come back to them over and over again. Just like in play therapy. There are fundamental building blocks in play therapy that every single play therapy model addresses and every single theory addresses, and every single play therapist needs to address. And then there’s expressions of that that go into different models. The same thing is true in business, but if we don’t know those foundational pieces, we’re really holding back our potential and we’re holding back our growth. And I know you said the word clunky. I mean, it’s a great way to make the process extra clunky, right? Because the reality is, as play therapists, yes, we’re serving, but we’re all in business. Even if we work for an agency, we’re still in business. So I don’t know if that fully answered the question or not, but yeah, I’ve put myself through a lot of learning, which I think is really awesome. And my experience has been for a lot of people, myself included, we spend a lot of money on play therapy, training, certifications, and all those kinds of things. Maybe not so much on the business classes and those four day programs or those kinds of investments, but what would you say you’ve gotten from that, aside from knowledge? How has that helped you actually make better decisions? For example, permission. I mean, go back to that word, permission. Normalizing the clunkiness, normalizing that there actually is a process. There were experiences, and there have been experiences along the way as I’ve built things where I’m looking around going, oh, my gosh, is this just me? Is this just my reality? Does it have to be like this? Is it always this hard? Is it whatever the story I was telling myself at the time, and then to go and learn and realize, oh, it was supposed to be hard. Oh, got it. Okay. Oh, I get it. That was supposed to happen that way. Oh, you mean that’s actually a developmental stage of growing a business? Jen, some people don’t even know that there are developmental stages. I know we were joking about the teenager, but there. Are developmental stages in growing a business. And when we don’t know that, we can sometimes feel like something’s off or something’s wrong or it should be easier. We can create fantasies about what it’s supposed to be like. I’ve learned that the nuts and bolts because again, there are those foundational pieces and there are the nuts and bolts that are super important. I’ve also learned along the way, the more that I can normalize my own entrepreneurial journey and the more I allow myself to be an entrepreneur, then I also learn that it’s something else I get to teach. And it’s one of the reasons why I like coaching people in business and business creation. And I do. I’m a mentor for different organizations and that type of a thing because it’s another way that I can express something that’s deeply meaningful for me. I couldn’t have done all that without my classes. I couldn’t have done all that without reading all the different books and finding what is my expression of business growth or what’s my understanding of business growth or what’s my way of making sense of the different processes that it takes to be successful in business, if that makes sense. It makes total sense. I’m looking at my notes to kind of see where else we want to go before we have time to wrap up, because I’m imagining this again with the fantasies. I’m imagining this fantasy of, oh, you’ve done everything right. You took all the classes, you went and studied all the things, you faced your fears. You went into all the caves and opened all the doors. Yeah, that sounds scary, but it means that nothing but success is, I think, the myth that people have sometimes. We see all of the products that you have launched that have been successful. We see the things that are going well. We see that your book is awesome. We see all these things. And so in my mind, I’m imagining like, oh, okay, if I just do those things, then guaranteed success, and it’s all going to be easy, just like it is for you. As you’re saying that what’s coming to mind are the two data points in my brain. One about Albert Einstein, like, how many hundreds, if not thousands of inventions he did that never took off and didn’t go anywhere until he created the light. And and then the other one that just came to mind was, you know, Michael Jordan didn’t even make the high school basketball. Know the number of baskets that he likely missed as he was developing his craft. Extraordinary. But we hear of Albert Einstein in his success, and we hear of Michael Jordan in his success, but we don’t hear the back end. And the back end is there for every single successful, whatever successful means. However, I want to define that person that’s doing anything on the planet, anything in the world. And the same thing is true for me. I’ve made business decisions where here’s an interesting one that actually happened in a class where I was asked, well, us as the students, we were asked to write down what is the number one business decision that you’ve made that has cost you the most amount of money? And we had to journal about it, and then we actually had to add up how much money we’ve lost as a result of that decision. Talk about another moment of nausea. Jen right. Where I really had to look at things that I said yes to even at the Institute, things that I said yes to, things that was like, oh, sure, let’s launch that, or let’s create that, and it just fell flat, or it just actually became a place where the Institute just started losing. That was like the hole in the boat and money is like sinking out the bottom. What I can say about every one of those, Jen, though, the amazing gift in it is in every single instance, I was trying to be someone that I wasn’t and I was trying to turn the Institute into something that it wasn’t. I was trying to focus it in the direction because I thought it’d be a good idea or because someone told me that, oh, well, you should do this, or you should do this. And every time I have veered away from the vision that I hold in my heart for the Institute, I’m actually going to get emotional in this or the vision that I hold in my heart for my students or for even the people that work at the Institute. Every time I veer away from authenticity, my business lets me know and it lets me know really quickly. And so, yeah, there have been a lot of feedback. I’ll close call feedback. There’s been a lot of feedback that you could look at it objectively and go, that was not successful. Oh, my gosh, that was actually a fail. Oh, my gosh, that wasn’t just a little fail. That was like a massive, massive oopsie doopsie kind of a thing. I’ve had so many of those, so many of those. I’ve lost money, all kinds of things as feedback on my growth curve in trying to hone in and do more and more of what feels most important to me and ultimately what the deepest expression of my heart is. And the more I do that, that’s where I find that I have the most success. I like that part about anytime I veer off what’s authentic to my business, my business lets me know. Yeah, totally. As much as we normalize therapy, I’d like to normalize failing in business as well. I’m pretty sure there’s at least one book in your drawer that you haven’t finished yet. Do you have the one that everybody there’s more than one? Yeah. Okay. There’s courses I haven’t written, there’s books that I haven’t finished, there’s conversations I haven’t had. Oh, yes. Every published successful book. There’s a few that are in the file cabinet somewhere that didn’t quite make it out of the jewel yet. Yes, absolutely. Well, before we wrap up, I just have a few super short and simple questions that I wanted to ask you just to kind of wrap up with your favorite things and some of maybe your least favorite things. Best business book. If you were going to tell somebody, read this best business book. Gosh. My brain just went to starting a private practice or, like, running a company. One of the books that was most influential for me to get me going on getting clear about who I was in business is a book called Inspired Destiny, and it’s by one of my mentors, Dr. John Demartini. But that was a beautiful book to help me begin to think about what is the dream that I have inside of my heart. Okay. All right, you guys, put that on your Amazon wish list so you know it’s going to happen. What is your biggest pet peeve? In business or just, like, in life? Both. Either in business. What is the thing that is just kind of irks you? That one. Let me think about that. Maybe about the just thinking, like, how could I answer that in terms of the business process? Well, I could do I don’t pet peeve is the word. But the most uncomfortable part for me in business are the ongoing learning curves, the ongoing feeling of oh, back to the beginning. Oh, back to the beginning. Back to the beginning. That back to the beginning part is not a comfortable feeling. It’s a necessary feeling, but it’s not a comfortable feeling. Yes. Agree. No matter how successful you are, every time you do something new, it’s the first time again. It’s the first time again. It’s another growth opportunity. Yes. What’s the worst advice you ever got in business? The worst advice I ever got in business for me again, because of who I am and how I tend to market and how I tend to move to the world, the worst business advice that I got was that I needed to follow a script for a funnel. Right. I have to make this one video. It has to be this long. And then you have to upsell this thing, and then you’ve got to make this other thing and then whatever, and then it feeds into this other program. And this very structured sort of protocol way of marketing is so 100% not me. And talk about me getting clunky really fast if I try to do that. So that was a marketing advice for me from someone that didn’t know who I was and didn’t know how to teach me how to be myself as a business person. Yes. Oh, the dreaded funnel and the product. You must have a product. All right, one more. What would you tell your younger self now? Which one? The one with the stuffed animals or the one that was sorting out Dad’s receipts? I don’t know, the one that started the private practice before she was fully younger. Self I don’t know how young of a child needs advice right now? What would you tell your eight year old and your 23 year old? Self yeah, it’s actually the same advice, which is get clear on what you love and don’t let anything get in the way of the pursuit of what’s actually in your heart. You’re put on the planet for a reason and your existence on the planet isn’t random. And I say that to anybody. And so discover what that is because everybody in their expression and the thing that’s most in their heart and of how they want to be of service, everyone is needed. There really is no competition when we really embrace the reality that every one of us has our own unique gift to offer the world. So that’d be my advice to myself earlier on, is follow your heart and take that really seriously. I can’t think of a better place to end than with that message. There really is no competition. Follow your heart and do what you love. Yeah, totally. You’re going to be doing more of what you love when it comes to teaching. Tell us where we’re going to find you next. Yeah, well, let’s announce the business. And since we’re talking about business so, as I mentioned, I love to teach about business. I want to be able to support play therapists and to be able to really bring the thing that’s in their heart out onto the world. So the business of therapy is happening. It’s a two and a half day live but also online hybrid version for individuals that can’t make it to Denver, Colorado, which is where it’s going to be. It is November 11 and through 13th this year and I have had an online course for a while, but my original heart vision was for it to be in person and then COVID happened. So I am so excited to get play therapists in a room to teach them not only the nuts and bolts, but the psychology around becoming an entrepreneur or what it takes to write the book or launch the dream, whatever it may be. And I’m super excited to do it in community because I think that’s one of the things that play therapists, like we do best in community, rallying around each other, playing. I’m super excited to be able to bring this conversation that we’re having actually to life, to really bring it to life for people. Yes. Well, I’m looking forward to it as well. I’m going to be there helping you a little bit behind the scenes because some of the things that I love are having meaningful conversations in gatherings with people and encouraging them to do things outside of their comfort zone. So we’re going to be doing a little bit of both, I think, during that in a very fun and safe way. Yeah. Well, Jen, thank you so much. I really appreciate this conversation. It was lovely to be interviewed and for me even to reflect on my own journey. Listeners, I hope you found this useful. I hope that there was something in this conversation that you can take to heart and get curious about. And if you are interested and you want to follow and be a part of the entrepreneurial education that you feel like I might be able to offer, please consider joining either Hybrid live or online. And thank you everyone for being a part of this podcast. This part of my dream doesn’t get to come true without all of you. So wherever you are in this world, thank you for listening and for believing in me. And remember, you’re the most important toy in the playroom. Until next time.