#3: The Therapist In Therapy with Lori Gottleib

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Podcast 1 each week. When you join me here, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. Come on this journey with me. Hi. I'm so glad you are joining me again this week. It is great to be here with you. This week I want to share something a little different. One of the things that I did when I was launching this show, creating confidence, is I leveraged LinkedIn to create opportunities to convert my followers on LinkedIn to listeners for my podcast show. One of the ways that I did that and I shared this with everyone last week was I changed my job on LinkedIn to podcast host. That created a massive opportunity opportunity for me and I recommend LinkedIn to everyone. It's such an amazing platform for business and allows for such great conversion. So it was a great opportunity for me to drive audience for this show. And one of the things that I did that I didn't mention last week was I also published an article on LinkedIn. Now I had so many people asking me, how did you sign with Podcast one? How can I get signed with an agent? You know, a lot of these questions that I used to ask about myself before I actually did it. So I want to share that story with you. And when I was asked so often about it, I decided to publish an article on LinkedIn about it. That way I had a place to drive people, which ultimately helps to build more traffic for me to my profile on LinkedIn, which creates more opportunity for me to convert people to customers of my course customers to buy my book or potential audience for my podcast. And here we are. So I'm going to actually read you the article that I created that is published on LinkedIn that shares the story of how I signed with podcast one. So I published this on May 14, 2019. And that's important because I'm actually talking about some value of stock and I want everyone to know that I did this on May 14th. So July 27th, 2017, I was fired. That day, the company stock was trading over $10 today. Remember, it's May 14th when I wrote this. Less than two years later, the same company stock is trading at $3.55. And no, this is not a joke. I was a Chief Revenue officer then. And when the CEO who I'd worked for for 14 years became ill, he elevated his daughter to CEO. Clearly she wasn't a fan of me. That day, I felt like I had lost everything. The funny thing I is I was wrong, but I wasn't the one who had lost. However, I did not know that at the time. It took two days for me to realize that no one knew I had been fired. When I had this realization, I posted about being fired on every social media platform I had. That catapulted me forward very quickly. I landed on the Elvis Duran show where Elvis asked me about the book I was obviously writing. Funny thing is, I wasn't writing a book. That is until then. I hopped on my flight home and I googled how do you write a book? And then I began writing. For three months I wrote every day and then I taught myself the self publishing process. For six months I worked around the clock to get my book out. May 22, 2018 I launched Confidence Creator. Not knowing if people would love it, hate it, or even notice it. I knew I loved it and that was enough for me to go for it. My book did really well, taking number one on the business biography list on Amazon it's first week. I even trumped Trump's Art of the Deal. I was feeling really good and I realized I needed to lean into promoting the book and breaking through all the noise out there in order to get some traction and drive some revenue. It didn't take me long to figure out that going on podcasts was the single most powerful thing I could do to sell books. Luckily, while I had been writing, I had been going on a lot of different podcasts to familiarize myself with being a guest. By the time my book was live, I'd been a guest on hundreds of shows. Mind you, most of the shows were small, but I had experience now and I knew the steps to take to ensure a good show. I had learned to listen to the podcast a few episodes ahead of time so I would know the cadence of the show, potential questions I knew to ask about the audience and what they were looking to learn from the show so that I could be sure to add value. I knew to Google the host before I went on so I could relate things back to them and to their life. I had learned a lot and I was ready to go to the next level. During this time, I started getting booked on bigger shows. When you begin to get booked on bigger shows, other big shows want you. Because I had so much experience, I felt confident and I was able to add value. At one point someone said to me, you need to have your own show. Heather I was brand new in this entrepreneurial world and while I had my book out and it was doing well, it hadn't reached that tipping point yet where it could just sell on its own and I could not be concerned with it. I would study the metrics closely and if I didn't have a speaking engagement or a show, my book wasn't selling. I liked the idea of having a show and having my own show, but I realized I needed more bandwidth to take on more and I was not in a financial position yet where I could hire a team. I would thank others, kindly let them know that I was interested in launching a podcast and having a show. But the timing wasn't right yet. I couldn't take any more on. Instead, I had decided I would launch a show with a marquee podcast company. I just didn't know who that was yet. I knew I wanted to join a team of experts that could help me where I lacked experience. And I knew there was no way I could take another job on my own at that point in time. I began asking questions. One of the first people I spoke to about this was a friend of mine from Miami who now lives in la. He's a big producer on a big show and he's got lots of experience with agents. He agreed that I needed to get an agent and he was also kind enough to take my book and give it to his agent. His agent submitted Confidence Creator to his team for review and the response was unbelievable. Two months after giving Joey my book, I received a message that his agent, Sid, would have a phone meeting with me. My call with Sid went great. He was interested in the book becoming a TV show. He even mentioned that they have a podcast division and a speaking division and could hand handle all of my needs. Then crickets. It was nearly Thanksgiving last year and I painfully learned Thanksgiving through New Year is a time when no one responds to you in la. During that same time, I'd reached out to one of my clients from my media career. Lauren had been a great client of mine for years and an even better friend of mine since I had been fired. I called her to ask her to introduce me to a few different people in the podcasting world and to see if I could get booked on some more shows. She did exactly that and one of the companies she introduced me to was podcast one. Podcast one responded immediately and booked me on Dr. Drew and the Lady Gang. I was really excited because Lady Gang was really starting to blow up at that point in time. So it was just an excellent time for me to go on the show and for me to have that opportunity. And the show went really, really well. So not Only did the show go well, it actually charted. I believe it was top 50 on the show' the. On the all the shows on Apple podcast that week. So the Dr. Drew show went great, but the Lady Gang show really blew up that I was on. So one of the things that I do whenever I have the opportunity to interface with a new company that I don't know well yet is I reach out to the head of that company to see if I can get a follow up meeting. And I jumped on the success of that Lady Gang show and reached out to the head of Podcast One via email to say thank you. I would love to come in, meet you face to face and thank you in person. And yes, in the back of my mind I was thinking this could be an amazing opportunity for me to pitch myself. However, I did also genuinely want to say thank you and see if I could get on more of their shows because Podcast one has hundreds of amazing shows. So I got a yes back and I got that meeting with podcast one. I wasn't there maybe 15 minutes before the conversation turned into the success of the episode that I did with the Lady Gang and the idea of me joining the team, that was really exciting. It's important to note here I had credibility before delivering by delivering results for Podcast one before I walked in to pitch them. And I think that's really important. I had the credibility from the introduction from Lauren, who I had worked with for over a decade. So she was able to vouch for me. That got me the opportunity to get on the show. Then I did an excellent job executing with Lady Gang. We delivered a show that went to the top of the charts and then I went for the meeting where I was going for the ask. So I had credibility via a great reference and execution on one of their shows and that really put me in a great position for that meeting that day. That was in October of last year. We began negotiations and then suddenly crickets. Just like that other opportunity that I was pursuing through the agent. Podcast one was adding so many celebrity shows during this time that my potential show was getting lost in the shuffle. I was in Miami also, don't forget. So when you're in another city, it makes it even more difficult because you can't be face to face with people and have the impact and sense of urgency that you want. There is a very fine line between annoying people and staying top of mind with them. If you don't stay top of mind with people, you will be forgotten and it can be very challenging to stay top of mind when they're in LA and you're in Miami. Since I couldn't be there in person, I decided to send a life size cutout of myself to the head of Podcast one and remind him that I wanted to be there in person, but I needed him to help me accelerate the process and get this deal signed. That was a good decision. I did receive follow up immediately and our discussions picked back up again. Still no signed deal. Now it was February of this year, 2019. Luckily, I had booked myself to do a number of shows for International Women's Day in March in la. I used that trip to schedule a follow up face to face meeting to go in for the close. Closing in person is always the answer. I arrived at Podcast one. We both signed the contract that day. While I was there, I made a sense of urgency and I was not leaving that office without this deal getting done. This process has been so lengthy and slow at times. I didn't know if it was going to work out. I didn't know if I was letting go of other potential options like the one with the agent. I didn't know if that was going to pan out. But here's what I did know. When you follow your instincts, things will inevitably work out in the end. I couldn't be more excited that I signed with Podcast one. I couldn't be more excited that you're here with me on my show, listening to this now. And I couldn't be more proud of the product that I've created. So I hope that gives everyone some insight to what it takes to not only get signed with a company, but really create a sense of urgency. Rely on your gut and intuition to know which direction to go and how to navigate through those dark moments when there are crickets. Because at the end of the day, it's really up to each one of us to make sure we separate ourselves from the package, stay top of mind with others and give people a reason to do business with us. So I'm hoping that you are loving my show. I hope that you love my next guest. I'm really excited for you to hear what she has to say. She's a really brilliant woman and definitely comes at things from a very different perspective than I do. So when we come back, you are going to get to meet my fantastic guest. But first I need to share something with you. It's 2019, people. Everybody needs a great pair of wireless earbuds. How do I know that? I know that because my son is turning 12 and that's the number one gift he's asking for. So I've done my homework on this. 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Hi.

So I'm so excited to be sitting here right now with Lori Gottlieb. She's a psychotherapist, New York Times bestselling author, and by the way, that doesn't even do it justice. The book Right now is number five on the New York Times bestselling list, which is blows my mind away. Her book is being developed into a television series with Eva Longoria. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes the Atlantic's weekly Dear Therapist advice column and contributes regularly to the New York Times. An advisory council member for Bring Change to Mind and contributing editor for the Atlantic, Gottlieb has written hundreds of articles related to psychology and culture and appears frequently as a sought after expert in media such as Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS early show, cnn, npr. I mean, she's everywhere. Lori, thank you so much for being here.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. So it's interesting for me, my show is all about creating confidence and reading your book. Holy cow, did you take a vulnerable leap of faith in yourself? Is what I that's what I read when. When I read it for you. Was that a major confidence creation moment launching this book?

It was one thing, I think, to say I'm going to bring people into the therapy room and write about these stories of four of my patients. But I also felt like there was something that felt like I was hiding if I didn't include myself outside of the therapy room. So I'm the fifth patient in the book, basically. And, you know, I really was going through a time of upheaval. And I think that instead of sign of weakness, I think showing my vulnerability was really a sign of strength.

I could not agree with you more. When I published my book Confidence Creator, it was a series of my lowest moments in my life and how I learned how to create confidence from them. It was the scariest thing I ever did was publishing that. Did you feel that same way?

I think that you feel very exposed when you put your life out there. And at the same time, I think it's less about how people are going to react to you than what the experience was like for you to put it out out there.

And what about your son? How did your son feel about it? Did he know about it when it was happening? At the time?

He got to read his parts. He's not. He's not in the book very much, but he got to read his parts and approve them because that's his story to tell. And I wanted to make sure that it was told in a way that he was comfortable with and he liked it. Yes.

Oh, that's good. That was interesting. The whole banana eating portion was very interesting to me because listening to how you listened to him was eye opening for me. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Right. So the book opens where I go through an unexpected breakup and the boyfriend that I was with said that he had decided he didn't want to live with a kid under his roof for the next 10 years. That kid was my 8 year old. So it was very surprising to me. And it wasn't just my grief that I was dealing with, but it was also my child's. And so in this chapter in the book called How Kids Deal with Grief, I break the news to him in what I think is sort of a developmentally appropriate way that we've broken up. I don't go into all the details and the way that he deals with grief, which is going through all of these different emotions of it's okay, it doesn't matter, or, you know, using metaphors of other things that he, you know, Sort of angry about, you know, and you really have to kind of listen for the feelings, but with younger kids, so it was. It was interesting to watch him go through his own process of grief as I went through mine.

As a mother, I'll tell you, I didn't even know to listen for things like that, you know, so that was kind of the beautiful part is that you were trained to do it. But when I was reading the story of him explaining, you know, does the banana die or is the banana harmed?

Like, do you hurt. Does it. Does it hurt the tree when you take the bananas off?

Exactly. Thank you. And. And I wouldn't have known that was him expressing his feelings. So how do you. Or how can we, as parents, Is it just paying attention or. I mean, what advice can you give?

You know, Yes, I have training as a therapist, but I was very much a mother in that moment because my heart was breaking for him. And I think as parents, we have the instinct to protect our kids from these uncomfortable feelings. Hey, let's go to Disneyland. Hey, let's go see a movie, right? To distract, right? And I think the important thing is to let people feel their feelings and let kids feel their feelings so that when they grow up, they know that it's not the end of the world. If you feel sadness, that it's. I always say that feelings are like the weather. They blow in and they blow out. And, you know, it might. The weather system might be like it is right now, but that will change and then it will go back and, you know, so I think it's really important for all of us to not distract ourselves as we do with technology, with our phones. You know, a lot of us today, when we have an uncomfortable feeling, we want to get rid of it.

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Absolutely. I think that is the core of our society. Right. That we're trying to find ways to get rid of it. So being in therapy and you exposing and being vulnerable enough to share that you went to therapy, that was your way to try to deal with the feelings?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you're a therapist and you go to therapy, you really have to be the patient in the room. You can't backseat drive. That's gonna be hard, you know, And I do all the things with my therapist. I write about this in the book that my patients do with me. So, you know, I want him to like me. I wonder what he thinks of me when I leave. There's this other woman in the waiting room sometimes, if she comes early for her appointment, and I think, oh, I'll bet he dreads my sessions. And I wonder if he likes hers more. You know, all these. All these things that I know my patients have felt with me at one time or another.

So it's normal to feel that way?

Absolutely. I mean, I think one of the things I try to do in the book is demystify what therapy is, because I think that a lot of people are afraid of it or assume that they wouldn't benefit from it because they don't know what it is. And it's really this very rich human experience of having someone hold up a mirror to you so that you can see yourself more clearly. We all have blind spots, and we all shoot ourselves in the foot and end up in the same place over and over. We have these patterns that we aren't aware of. And it's kind of the difference that I talk about between idiot compassion and wise compassion, where idiot compassion is what our friends do.

You're right.

He was a jerk. You dodged a bullet.

You share that in the book, right? Right.

Yeah. And it feels really good in the moment. Wise compassion is what a therapist will do, which is to say, I want you to look at your role in this. I want you to see this from a broader perspective.

That's hard. I went through a lot of therapy in my life and had a difficult childhood and difficult times throughout my life. So I leaned into therapy, was a huge fan of it. But my whole frustration with therapy was I wanted her to tell me what to do.

Yeah. I think a lot of people want advice. Well, they want two things. They want validation, which is what I wanted. I wanted my therapist to say, you're right, he was a jerk. You know, what my friends did, and he didn't do that. Which was the most helpful thing that he could have done, which was to help me to see something I wasn't already seeing. But also, yes, people want advice. And the problem with that, it's funny because I write an advice column 2 but in my advice column, sometimes I'll give prescriptive advice, but often I want them to. I want to tell them what I'm thinking as a therapist so that they can see the problem differently, they can see the other person's perspective. I know that when someone comes into therapy, they want advice on something and I'm getting a very specific telling of the story, right? So they're sort of gunning for me to take a position and I'm not hearing everything. So any advice that I would give wouldn't be very good advice because I'm not hearing all sides of the story.

So so many people, I feel like, get frustrated with therapy. I mean, there's a whole faction of people like myself that believe in it wholeheartedly like you do as a patient and a therapist. But then there's so many people fearful of it. So how do you advise people who are afraid? I've heard from people, I'm afraid because what if they change my mind? What if they control my mind? These are, you know, it's real feedback I've heard from people or I don't need therapies for weak people. How do you respond to things like that about therapy?

Well, first of all, just going back to the advice thing, our goal is to help you to be able to make these decisions in your own life. So we want you to learn how to trust yourself. That's going to help you so much more than my telling you what to do. First of all, I may not have the right answer. I know what I would do, but I don't necessarily know what you should do because I don't have to live your life. I'm living my life. So that's part of it. And you know, we really want you to learn how to not need us. It's the worst business model ever, but it's.

You're getting rid of your clients.

Well, we do from day one. It's this thing where you go in and you're going to form this very intimate relationship with somebody and have to say goodbye. And that's the model. But I think that some people will say, well, I don't want to go to therapy because they think of their emotional well being different from their physical well being. If something is feeling off in their body, they'll probably Go get it checked out by a doctor before they're having a massive heart attack.

Right.

But if something feels off emotionally, often people will say, well, I have a roof over my head and food on the table, so really, you know, it's not that bad. And then what happens is they try to ignore the feelings. But if you try to ignore feelings, they actually become stronger and they come out in behaviors, in patterns, in self sabotage and irritability and sleeplessness and all kinds of things. And so then eventually, if they do end up in therapy, it's at a crisis point and it's when they're having the equivalent of an emotional heart attack. And then it's harder to treat. And also they've suffered unnecessarily for all of this time.

And you call that the presenting problem.

Right.

Which is interesting to me because that might not really be the problem. It probably isn't the problem.

I always say that I'm listening for the music under the lyrics. The lyrics are here's why I'm here, and it's the narrative, you know, whatever the problem is. But I'm listening to the music under the lyrics, which is I want to know what, what pattern or struggle helped you to end up where you ended up. So how did you get there? So it's not just help me with this one discrete problem, but how did you end up in this situation in the first place so that you don't end up there again?

Which is something people aren't able typically to do by themselves to be able to get that insight. Right.

Right. I think that it's really hard for us to see ourselves clearly. And that's one of, I think the real gifts of therapy is that I think outside of the therapy room, we just kind of go about our days and we sort of externalize our problems. It's this person's fault or that person's fault, or we self flagellate. I'm worthless, I'm unlovable, you know, all of those things. And neither of those narratives is really accurate. And therapy helps you to see things more accurately so you can make better choices.

That's so interesting to me. You write in the book about what you were just talking about a moment before the self numbing and television. Use this example, which resonated with me, that if you're living your day to get home just to watch TV, and I've been there 100% and I find myself, maybe I'm not there every day, but there's times when things start getting super stressful That I like, I do like putting my son to bed and putting TV on. And when I read that chapter, it hit me like a ton of bricks because. And I understand from what you wrote, and you can obviously detail this better, that if this goes too far, that can lead to bigger issues.

There are so many ways that we try to distract ourselves and it's not even in our awareness. But I think, you know, one of my colleagues calls the Internet the most effective short term, non prescription painkiller out there. You know, you can say the same with tv. Not that there's not good TV out there there, but I think a lot of the time what happens is we don't realize that we're kind of stuffing our pain down or that we're in pain and we try to ignore it. And you're not going to move forward and get to a better place if you can't first acknowledge what is not working so that you can figure out what will work.

I think what's scary about that for a lot of people and you dive into these things is that fear of the change.

Yeah. I talk a lot in the book about change and how even positive change is scary because with change comes loss.

That's huge.

And sometimes we don't realize that because we would rather cling to the familiar, even if the familiar is unpleasant or even downright miserable. Sometimes it's easier to say it's the devil I know as opposed to if we have to make changes that's going to require us to go into a place of uncertainty. I might need to leave this relationship. I might need to switch jobs. I might need to switch friends. I might need to stop drinking. I might need to, you know, like, be more accountable.

You dive into all of these topics in the book.

Yeah, yeah. You know, and if I change in these ways, you know, if I look at my problems, I might have to do things that feel uncomfortable, that take me out of my comfort zone. So I don't want to have to look at that.

It's really hard to look at that. And I like the different, I like number one that you did, the very small chapters, each one being its own entity, its own story, and something that you could take away. I thought that was really powerful because you can put the book down at any point in time, pick it back up, and you didn't miss anything, you're right back in it. But there's also. You can relate, you might relate to certain characters more than others, which I like that too. I found myself, I was a psychology major in school, and I left that behind because I wanted to make money, and I got into sales, and I just thought that looked too hard. So I didn't think about purpose and passion back then when I was younger. And when I was reading, when you opened the book and the first. Your first patient, and it was frustrating me listening to him how everyone's an idiot in his life. It was causing anxiety for me reading it. And I was thinking, how do you deal with sitting in a room with someone like this? I mean. I mean, that, to me, just seems hard.

I think before I became a therapist, I really wondered about what that would be like. And when I was training, a supervisor said to me, there's something likable in everyone. It's your job to find it. And I thought, yeah, well, you know, that can't be true of everyone.

But you did find it in him, but.

Oh, absolutely. And in fact, I think he's the person, one of the people in the book that people readers come to love the most, as I did. And I think what's interesting about the way I structured the book is that people go along on the path that I went on with these people, where when it starts off, this guy is extremely unlikable. He's very hard to like. And then you start to see what's underneath, and you start to see the tragedy and the trauma and the humanity, and you start to really develop a deep affection for him. And even though I chose four very different people to follow, I think we can see aspects of ourselves in each one of them. And I really wanted to hit home that point of we are more the same than we are different at our core. We have the same universal longings to love and be loved. The struggles of, what do I do with my pain and how do I move past it, and how do I get unstuck? And, you know, all of those big.

Questions, those are massive questions, especially because we live in the society today that wants. Wants instant gratification. Is that the hardest challenge with people trying to get therapy is that it's not fixed fast enough?

That's a great question, because when I was training, a supervisor had said we were all sort of like, rushing toward, you know, the next rung on the ladder. And she said, the speed of. The speed of light is outdated now. Everybody moves at the speed of want. And she was talking about how we're all rushing towards something, but then what happens when we get there? It's not like we use the time in a way that we want. We just rush toward the next thing, I think so many people come in for all kinds of reasons, but one thing I see is this lack of connection that everybody's sort of liking something on Facebook or they're tweeting or they're Instagramming or they're doing whatever, but they're not really sitting face to face without something pinging or dinging or vibrating or a screen on the wall or a phone on the table and just being present with another person. It's so rare given our, you know, our culture. And we don't have that organic sense of community either, where, you know, you walk out your door and, you know, you know, your neighbors, people move around a lot, and so it's harder to connect that way. And I think people have to be much more intentional about it, about putting.

The phone down, even with your children, taking the phone from your children, whether it be at dinner or. Or decided times that everyone's going to separate from technology, which can be easy to do as a parent, to tell your child to do, but oftentimes we don't want to do it.

Right. Do what I say, not what I do.

Right. I mean that. Listen, I'll raise my hand on that one. I'm sure plenty of times I've told him to put the technology down, but I don't know that I do it as often as I prescribe for him. And that's about that self reflection, self awareness, which is a lot of what. What I took from the book is about taking a step back and observing your own behaviors, being curious to them and what could they potentially mean?

Yeah, what is that? Instinct. Why do we dive for our phones even in the elevator? Right. Like we almost can't be with ourselves so much.

So in the elevator. Actually, that's a great example, right.

That, you know, a ride down an elevator, people just pull out their phones. And I don't think people know how to ride in an elevator anymore just to stand there with other people.

No. I am thinking right now, just yesterday, being in an elevator and moving from my phone immediately because I didn't want to have a conversation with somebody I don't know.

Right. And if you don't have a conversation, which no one's expecting, which is funny, people just don't know how to just stand there in the same space without having some buffer between them.

But also for me, I think of other experiences where something happened. Negative. My mind will go right to there. Oh, I remember that time I got stuck on a flight with that guy. That was so annoying. The whole flight and wouldn't leave me alone. So I immediately, you know, I go back to my past and back to my memories. Do you see that happen a lot?

I think people don't have the same kind of skill with interpersonal interactions anymore. There are ways that you can tell the annoying person next to you in a nice way that you're not, you know, interested in having conversations because you.

Say you're a therapist.

And they run. Exactly, exactly. Let me analyze you. Oh, that'll. That'll quiet them down.

That definitely will. But you weren't always a therapist.

No, no, I. I took a very, very circular route to becoming a therapist.

And how did that happen? Because I'm super interested in regards to creating confidence around finding where you're meant to be and your real passion.

I started off working in the entertainment business, and I first worked in film and a junior executive at NBC. And that was the year that a show called ER premiered. And I spent a lot of time in an actual ER with our show's consultant. And he started to notice that I would spend lots of time there that I didn't need to be spending there.

Because I loved it. I loved it.

You know, I love telling the rich fictional stories in the show and the shows that we were doing, but I really like the real stories, like the real human experiences that I was seeing in the er. It felt. Felt different. And so I ended up going to medical school. And when I was in medical school, a lot of people were talking about this new thing called managed care, which meant that I wasn't going to have these rich human experiences with people. I wasn't going to get to be sort of the family doctor who guides people through their lives. And so I left to become a journalist, and I loved that. And I felt like I could really dive into people's stories and help them tell their stories. And then I had a baby. And that changes everything. It changed a lot. I really had loved the experience of having that solitary time and then being able to go out into the world when I wanted to as a journalist. But as a parent, you don't have other adult humans to talk to during the day. And I wanted colleagues. And so I called up the dean at my medical school after the UPS guy would come every day and I'd be like, how about those diapers? And how's the weather? And, you know, do you have kids?

Talk to me?

Right? And he would back away to his big brown truck. And I knew that I needed to do something. And so I called up the dean And I said, maybe I should come back and do psychiatry. And she said, that's going to be mostly medication management. Why don't you get a graduate degree in clinical psychology and you can do exactly what you always talked about doing, which is having these really meaningful experiences with your patients. And that's exactly what I did. And it was the best advice that I think anybody could have given me. And so I feel like I went from telling people stories as a journalist to helping to change people's stories as a therapist.

That's a huge pivot and a really impactful one. What I don't want people to think is listening to you. She's so smart, she's so successful. Everything just goes right for her. Not for me. What would you say to someone who thinks that about you?

Well, I think that's why I share my struggles in the book. You know, I think that the way people look on the outside is, you know, just not the full picture. And that's why when I talk about, you know, why am I sharing these stories, not just mine, but those of my patients, I think it's really important to see that we all struggle with such similar things.

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We all do that is for sure. And the older I get and the more experience I have, the more I see I need to start taking people off of pedestals. Whether before years ago because of your education and your background and having a doctorate, you know, having a New York Times bestseller, all these titles, labels that are put on us, we end up putting people on these pedestals and don't realize that we can communicate with that one on one like normal people. And it's a really important thing because when we do start seeing each other as on a level playing field, we can start to connect.

That's right. And I also think that the ways that we compare ourselves tend to be really they make us feel bad about ourselves. So I always say to people in the therapy room, compare yourself to Yourself, meaning compare yourself now to who you were before and look at the progress that you've made. Look at the difference between what you know now and what you do now versus what you did then. And that's a healthy comparison because you can see the way that you've evolved. But I think when you compare yourself to other people, you know, you're either going to feel inferior to them or you're going to feel better than they are, which is not a way to connect either. It's kind of a. Like a. Like you're positioning yourself in a way that. That feels like you can't connect with them because you're not on the same playing field.

Right.

We're not equal.

Right.

And it's all about being equal. One of the ways that I've learned myself to leverage social media to my benefit is using my Insta stories. It sounds crazy. I did it by chance one year, I did a recap, highlight of the year. But you have that opportunity to go into Instagram and, and pick all these different photos and put it into one feed for you for the year. And when you look at that, you say, oh, my gosh, I didn't know back in January this was going to happen in March, and I was going to take this on and go for this, and it was going to work out. And it really gave me that opportunity. Like what you're saying, that self reflection, me versus me, me, for me, of the growth I had in that window of time. And it does make you feel more confident. Does make you feel stronger.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think sometimes we don't give ourselves enough credit in that way. So many times we focus on the things that aren't working out or that we haven't gotten to yet, and we weight them differently from the things that are working. We don't give ourselves enough credit in that way. And people think, well, that's boastful, or that's conceited.

Oh my gosh, I hear that all the time. How can you be that full of yourself to share that?

Right? Or just even to acknowledge it to yourself, to feel proud of yourself. When you said to me earlier, well, look, you're on the New York Times bestseller list. My Instagram instinct normally, you know, would be, and it still is a little bit like, oh, no, it's no big deal, or I got lucky or something like that. And now I just say thank you.

Because I'm proud of it and. As you should be. As you should be. But even for you as a therapist, it took work to get to that place. It still does.

I mean, when people say that, I still. My instinct is to say, you know, like, is to downplay it, to minimize it.

You know, it's taking hundreds of years for us to get to this place where we think the way that we do, our culture, our society. And it's gonna take work for each one of us to take this on, but it is possible. And your book lays out a blueprint of very specific steps people can take, as well as relatable stories that anyone can connect with. And I think that's why, in my opinion, the book is so amazing.

Well, thank you. Thank you.

I appreciate it. Thank you. So maybe you should talk to someone, Lori Gottlieb. You've gotta pick up a copy if you have not gotten it yet, because it definitely will give you insight into yourself and give you that insight into therapy, which so many people just aren't open minded to yet. So thank you for writing it.

Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me today.

Thank you, Lori. I hope you enjoyed meeting Lori and getting the chance to sit down with a therapist can be intimidating. But I also believe it's very insightful to tap into her expertise and knowledge, which was very eye opening for me. So I hope you enjoyed it too. So now I want to answer some of the questions that I've received. And actually I was just sitting here struggling to find the most recent questions I've been asked. And I'm really making an attempt, an initiative to organize things in a different way to make my life easier. I totally recommend this for you, but what I'm doing now is I take screenshots of when I ask people all the time if they reach out to me, if they hear me speak or they love my course or what my book, I always hit them back with, hey, thanks so much. I so appreciate your support. Is there any chance you'd be willing to share a review or recommendation with me that I could post on my website or on LinkedIn, et cetera? And then what I do is I take a screenshot of that positive feedback and I put it into a file. It's just like on, on your phone in the camera portion. You can heart something and it goes into favorites. You can just, you know, create a new album and put reviews and recommendations as the name and store things there. What it is, it's a great pick me up anytime you're having a bad day that you can just scroll in there and take a look at all the positive things people have to say about you and Remember how great you are, but it also helps you to stay organized. So one of my new files is questions for the podcast, and I just take screenshots of questions people send me and put the questions into that new album on my phone. And I just started doing this, so it's helping and definitely will make things much easier moving forward. So organization is key and definitely an area in which I lack. So one of the questions that I received this week was. Heather, I've got a career question for you. What's your take on direct emailing a hiring manager in this age of online applications? Ugh. It's like the black hole of job applications. This is a very desirable opportunity. And that came from someone named Lisa on Twitter. So here's the thing, you know, and I. I will always say this face to face. Is it. That's the answer. Now, I understand you might not know. How do I even get a phone call, much less get face to face. When you're actually filling out a job application online, that sounds like it's three leaps from where you are. So the first thing that I would do is I would Google that person, whoever this hiring manager is, you're going to be able to find out, you know, who that person is. So if you're going through an HR portal, you know, Google the company, go to our team, figure out who the HR director is, or if you know what division that you're going for, you know, Google that division and find out who that ultimate decision maker is, because you want to, you know, do your research and due diligence on the person that's making the decision as well as the person that you need to get through that gatekeeper that's going to lead you there. So it's probably the HR director first and foremost, but then that person's ultimately going to get you to that decision maker in whatever department you're, you know, that your expertise is in. So I would Google both of those people, and the first thing that I look for is, you know, I go to my social feeds. I want to know where they graduated from, from school. I want to know where they live. I want to know if they have kids. And the reason why is I'm always looking for common ground, right? Because we're, first of all, we are all more alike than we are different. However, when people are super busy at work, they're not thinking, oh, I bet, you know, this woman, Heather, is such a nice person, and she's a mom like me. No, we are doing 9 million different things at work. Our plate is overloaded and we're usually just trying to get by. That's, you know, typically 90% of the workforce in corporate America. So you need to differentiate yourself. You need to be unique and stand out of that massive amount of resumes that this person's getting. So when you can, you know, create a subject line that's eye catching and unique to them, right, we want to lessen their workload, we want to help solve their problems. We're making this a about them. So the more information you know about them, the more you're going to be able to help them solve those problems. Now one of the best ways you can do it is when you can get a reference in. So when I'm googling these people and I'm trying to figure out who they are, I take to all of my social feeds. I want to know what point of connection I have in common with them. And the reason why is I want to leverage that connection to be, be that voice to connect me. So if you find out you have a mutual friend, I'm reaching out to that mutual friend and saying, hey, I need you to do me a favor. Here's the situation. I'm trying to get into this company. This is the gatekeeper. Looks like you know her. Can you make a phone call for me? Because that warm introduction is going to help you out.

Huge.

And this, you know, this isn't just for applying for a job online. This is all also, you know, if you're trying to get, you know, to a decision maker or if you're trying to make a new contact, you know, you want to have that warm lead and warm connection to introduce you whenever possible because then you're just asking for that meeting. And once you've got the meeting, you can get the face to face, you can make things happen. So leverage that contact and ask for the favor. If you don't have a mutual point of contact, again, you just want to find out what commonality or common ground or what's special and unique about that person that you can highlight to them to make them feel really good. Maybe you find out that person was valedictorian in, in their school and that's how you reach out to them is what's up valedictorian. You know, it's going to put a smile on their face. So our goal is to differentiate ourselves from the masses that are out there of mediocrity and to make people feel special. And when you're able to do that and then show, show them how you're Going to solve problems for them, how you're going to lessen their workload and how you're going to make their life better. Suddenly they want to talk to you. Right, so those are some of the things that I do if I was in an online, you know, job application world. If you do nothing and just apply online, hey, best of luck to you. But I don't think it's going to be working out for you. Right, you've got to do some massive follow up. You've got to connect those dots. You've got to show up as you and different than everybody else. So say you do all these things and still crickets, nothing's happening. Well, if you do nothing, nothing will happen. So now you got to take that next step. Okay, I tried to find common ground. I tried to find a warm introduction. Didn't work. I came up with a cool approach in my email and, and reached out and separated myself. Still nothing back. Okay, well obviously this person's underwater or they didn't get my message and it went to spam. I always say that to myself. I'm sure my email must have gone to their clutter file. I've got to do something to reach out and make sure this message reaches them. So the next thing I would do, and I've done this before, I've sent people flowers. I sent a woman that would never return my phone call flowers before with a note that just said, I know you are so overwhelmed and busy. Hope this puts a smile on your face. When you do have time, please call me back. You know, anything that you can do that's just going to get their attention and again, just make them smile and feel good about you and you noticing them as well as eliciting a response. You want to get that call back. Another thing you could do, stop by the office, bring bagels and drop them off with a note. Sure you guys are busy. Hoping to get the opportunity to show why I will lessen your workload and can start immediately. You know, just find ways to be different than everyone else. I'll never forget when I was leading the sales team at the last company I worked for in Media. Media, the largest insurance company that spent hundreds of millions of dollars in Media was I wanted to find a way to increase the our business with them because you can go out and attack, you know, thousands of different accounts and to increase them all slightly or you can go and attack one of the largest accounts and increase their business slightly and still have that same return. So I thought, okay, I'm Gonna go after the big fish. I'm gonna see what I can do to increase their business. And I went and met with this massive company, the head of marketing for them for this major insurance company. And he said, listen, hey, I've got an existing partnership, Heather, with your competitor, and for me to start moving business from them to you, I don't see that happening. So I remember saying to him, okay, listen, everyone's got a pain point. Everyone's got a want. What is it? What wants? One thing could I do for you to show you I'm so serious and committed to growing your business. I'm so serious about this partnership that, you know, give me anything.

You.

You tell me what it is, and you've got it. I'm gonna show you how big this is to me. And I'll never forget he said, get me a dinner reservation at Rao's. He was testing me. Well, back then, this was a few years ago. Rao's is a restaurant in New York, and it was impossible to get a table. Little did I know there was, like, 10 tables in the whole restaurant, and people own the tables. And so he was giving me a hard time. And I didn't know it, but I didn't let that stop me. You know, I could have left there and said, I don't even know what Rao's is. Forget it. Oh, heck no. I called every single person that I knew, and I ultimately found out it's essentially impossible to get a table, a dinner reservation at Rao's. And I said, okay, well, that's not going to stop me. I've got an opportunity to access this guy's. Hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm getting to freaking random Rao's. If I have to get on a plane and walk into Rao's myself, I will figure it out. But I did not stop there. Everywhere that I went, I called American Express. I said, there's got to be someone here through my credit card that can get me in. I spoke to people in the grocery line when I was food shopping. I mean, at the gas station. No matter where I was, Rao's was top of mind with me. And I was putting it out there that I was getting this reservation. And this went on for probably a month. I was obsessed with Rao's. But in the end, I was actually out at dinner one night and was talking to some people that I didn't really know well that were in the restaurant, but just saying hello, and I was about to walk away, and I said, oh, gosh, one last thing. I have to. This is a mission for me. I have to ask everyone, do you know any way to get a dinner reservation at Rao's? And randomly. This one guy that I didn't really knew, but I knew someone he was talking to said, oh, hey, my brother has a table there. I said, you're kidding. Can you call him right now? And so he phoned his brother and he said, hey, I just met this woman. She's really desperate to get a table. And the guy said, oh, yeah, no problem. She can, you know, what date works for her. And I said, let's just pick a date right now while I have you here. We picked a date a month in advance. He said he was happy to do it because it was his table, and I guess there was plenty of times that, you know, he didn't want to go. So they set me up, gave me the guy's phone number so that I was able to deal directly with him. So nice. I think I bought their dinner that night, that whole group that was sitting there, because I was so grateful. And I phoned back to my customer at the insurance company and said, oh, hey, we're all set for dinner, and I'm having dinner with you at Rao's, and let's get our partnership started. So again, you know, just going back to. There's always a way to break through. There is always a way to separate yourself from everybody else that's out there. Luckily, there's so much mediocrity in the world that when you really start to shine and go for something, you can. Can just. You can make it happen and separate yourself from everybody. So don't fall into the world of the online abyss. No. Find a way to get face to face. Find a way to. To, you know, be different and be unique and be yourself. Thanks for being with me today. And if you like this show, please subscribe, rate, and review. It means the world to me. Keep creating your confidence.