Creating Self-Driven Counseling Clients, A Conversation with Dr. William Stixrud: Ep. 25

Episode Overview

• Episode Topic:
  In this episode of Mastering Counseling, Dr. William Stixrud, a clinical kids neuropsychologist and the founder of The Stixrud Group shares insights. He delves into his career journey, the significance of autonomy in child development, technology’s role in therapy, and applying his book’s principles to counseling. Dr. Stixrud underscores therapists as non-anxious presences, the need for self-care and meditation among mental health professionals, and the rewarding nature of the counseling profession.
• Lessons You’ll Learn:
  Dr. Stixrud emphasizes autonomy’s pivotal role in child development and its integration into counseling practices. He explores technology’s impact on therapy and the importance of downtime in our fast-paced world. Dr. Stixrud highlights therapists as non-anxious presences, promoting self-care and mindfulness among mental health professionals. Aspiring therapists gain insights into the rewarding aspects of the counseling profession.
• About Our Guest:
  Dr. William R. Stixrud, a prominent clinical neuropsychologist and founder of The Stixrud Group, specializes in adolescent brain development, stress management, and sleep science. He’s affiliated with Children’s National Medical Center and George Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Stixrud’s insights regularly feature in publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He also dabbles in music as a member of the rock band “Close Enough.” With a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, he’s committed to understanding young minds and promoting their well-being.
• Topics Covered:
  Dr. Stixrud discusses his career journey, emphasizing autonomy’s importance in child development. He addresses concerns about technology in therapy and applies principles from “The Self-Driven Child” to counseling. The interview highlights self-care for mental health professionals and encourages careers in counseling or therapy.

Episode Transcript

Dr. William R. Stixrud: The status of mental health problems in adolescence is the defining public health crisis of our lifetime, and it’s gotten worse since the pandemic. But it was bad before then. And so our two major concerns was this epidemic of mental health problems, these unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and this fact that we see so many kids who had unhealthy motivation, they either were obsessively driven and they’d sacrifice anything to get into a good college or you had to kind of try everybody’s trying to make them work, and they’re resisting everybody’s attempts to make them work. So we thought, this must be a really big deal. If it’s the key to motivation and mental health, it must be a really big deal.

Becky Coplen: Welcome to Mastering Counseling, the weekly business show for counselors. I’m your host, Becky Coplen. I’ve spent 20 years working in education in the role of both teacher and school counselor. Each episode we’ll be exploring what it takes to thrive as a counseling business owner, from interviews with successful entrepreneurial counselors to conversations with industry leaders on trends and the next generation of counseling services, to discussions with tech executives whose innovations are reshaping counseling services. If it impacts counseling, we cover it on mastering counseling. 

Welcome to another episode of Mastering Counseling, where we dive deep into the world of therapy and the business behind it. I’m your host, Becky Coplen. Today I am thrilled to announce and introduce Dr. William Stixrud, a clinical neuropsychologist, esteemed founder of The Stixrud Group, and a multifaceted individual who is making a mark not only in the field of psychology but also in the world of music. So nice to meet you today, Dr. Rude, and welcome to the show.

Dr. William R. Stixrud: Nice to meet you, Becky. Thanks for having me.

Becky Coplen: There’s so much to share. We’re going to get right into some questions. So let’s just go back to the beginning of The Stixrud Group and how you join together your clinical neuropsychology and counseling. How did this all begin at the start of your career?

Dr. William R. Stixrud: Well, the transforming experiences of my life was after college. I was a good college student in English, and so I got into a Ph.D. program, a really good Ph.D. program in English at Berkeley. And I promptly flunked out within two quarters, 20 weeks, because I was so anxious and insecure I didn’t turn in any work. Luckily, I eventually got into education and I was a terrible teacher. I was nice, but I couldn’t control a classroom, so I needed an easier job. So I eventually got into a Ph.D. special ed program, but I didn’t really like, but I was able to transfer to a school psych program. So I got my Ph.D. in school psychology and then did an internship in clinical psychology and a postdoc in neuropsych. So I took my first job in Washington DC, Children’s Hospital, and I just wasn’t suited for hospital work. My advisor didn’t like me that much. I didn’t like working with her very much. Eventually, I went into private practice in 1985, and as for many people, when they started practice, it took me about three years to have more work than I could handle. And it’s interesting because I’ve talked to many people who are starting a practice in counseling or some kind of therapy, and I said, plan taking it three years, you’re really comfortable and you as much work as you want and you’re turning work away.

That’s for a lot of people. It’s been pretty reliable marker. It takes a while and it’s definitely worth it. So but in any case, what happened with me was that I’ve been practicing meditation, and the person who brought the kind of meditation I do, transcendental meditation to the world at one point had said that he realized he couldn’t teach meditation to everybody in the world, so he had to replicate himself. And I use that model because I was one of the first neuropsychologists in D.C. who worked with children who was interested in learning disabilities and ADHD. Most of them were hospital-based and concussions and strokes and stuff, so nobody knew what I knew. So I trained the first person in my practice probably four years after I started it. And then the man just continued to grow. And from the very beginning, I started with one of the ideas that I read, a lot of self-help stuff and a lot of basic positive psychology before positive psychology, What does it take to be successful if you’ve got a negative mindset about making money, how do you turn that around so that you’re open to doing well financially and not being worried about money? I had the idea that people would make money are bad kind of idea, you know, so but really able to work that.

And so we focused on one of the ideas I got was that give people more than they pay for. And that was one of my early kind of want to bring people in. This is part of our mission here is that we assume that people are always doing the best they can. And we try to give people more than they pay for and we go a little bit go that extra mile. We had kind of a Nordstrom’s idea of service. And the other thing that really helped me, Becky, was I read this book, it was written in 1902, and it said focus on creating rather than competition. So various times people are doing similar things. And some of the people in my group been very anxious that they’re going to take all the business. And I just focused on what we’re doing and making sure that we were offering really good service like that, and it worked out really well.

Becky Coplen: So many great things in there with your work. As I mentioned, I work in an elementary school, so hearing the progress that’s been made with the brain and I know we’ll get into that more in your book and we’re looking at the difficulties kids have and studying the brain. And for you to be doing that on the cutting edge in the 80s is huge. And I love the give people more than they pay for because it’s kind of a lost art, it seems, in many places.

Dr. William R. Stixrud: It’s true. It feels good to go the extra mile for somebody. I spent an extra five minutes in something or ten minutes, something. Big deal for creating a business and having a business where you don’t have to worry about referrals. You know, you’ve got enough work coming in. My experience is worth it.

Becky Coplen: Yes. Can you talk a little bit about some pivotal movements that defined your path with The Stixrud Group and went on to contribute to the success of it? I know there’s so many things to share.

Dr. William R. Stixrud: Yeah, certainly, for me, when I flunked out of graduate school, I had no idea what I was going to do. I thought my whole future had blown up in smoke and that was a great learning lesson for me because it didn’t take me long to realize that flunking out of graduate school in English was the best thing that could have possibly happened to me. I always felt like an imposter with other English literature types, and when I started studying psychology, I felt like, oh, these are my people. So it took me a while to get into psychology, but once I did, I took my first job at Children’s Hospital and one of the defining moments because I wasn’t happy there and my boss wasn’t that happy with me, was I said, well, I’ll probably go into private practice like in January. This was in September, my boss said, well, actually you’re going into private practice in two weeks. So I hustled, but I was ready because I knew I wanted to do it. I’d been reading all this stuff and preparing about how do I create a successful business. So just being fired, that was a great experience for me. It made me really appreciate what I needed to do. So I got started right away. I had wife and kids. I got started right away. And also, I would say that early in my career, for probably the first 13 years of my career, I did neuropsychological evaluations and I also did a ton of psychotherapy.

I was trained pretty well in family therapy, a lot of psychodynamic stuff I didn’t really use, but I was pretty early on applying cognitive therapy to work with children and teenagers. And also I did training in neurolinguistic programming and NLP. So I had a lot of different things that I offered in therapy, and I saw both children and adults and I really liked it. But what happened with me, Becky, was that I realized after about 12 or 13 years that, as both fields more as published, more things were changing. I couldn’t keep up with the neuropsychology piece and the therapy piece and be really good at both. I realized that I had to specialize. I had the same kind of experience fairly early on when probably after about 5 or 6 years I was thinking, I want a full-service group. I want to have therapists, I want to have psychiatrists in the group. I want to have speech and language therapists and an occupational therapist. But then I thought if I have all these people doing this stuff in-house, who’s going to refer to me? Other speech and language therapists won’t refer to me. Occupational therapists won’t return me, other therapists won’t refer to me because I won’t be sending them back. And so I decided to really specialize in the neuropsych piece, and that’s just to do one thing and do it really well. And I love the energy of getting referrals and sending them back out.

So that was another one. I would say also at one point, the woman who was running our practice who had no experience in running a business had to leave or was going to move. And so my wife took over. My wife was a former early childhood special education, but has a good mind for business and very organized. And so she took over for going to be like a month and she stayed for 30 years. And having somebody who could really do the administrative part was really useful. And very early on we’d argue about an employee that I wanted to keep and she didn’t think it was working. So we consulted with this guy who said, the thing to do is, Bill, you’re in charge of the clinical decisions Star. You’re in charge of administrative. You can give each other advice, but ultimately you’re responsible for this, responsible for that. That was a great thing, not only for the business but for our marriage. So I’d say those are some of the major things. And then once we got going, once we got, I don’t know, 4 or 5, six neuropsychologists, we just kept focusing on doing really good work. And I did a lot of public speaking. I enjoyed even before my books came out. I did a lot of public speaking, a lot of teaching, which helped bring in referrals. It helped just kind of share stuff, keep people apprised about what’s happening in the state of the art in our field.

Becky Coplen: Thank you for sharing. You shared it earlier as well in that being willing to fail and how that was the best thing for you because everyone is afraid to do it. But this is where it’s brought you. And that’s amazing that your wife has been the business person side of it. That’s great for 30 years too.

Dr. William R. Stixrud: Yeah, and we sold the Stitchery group in 2018 to 2 of the neuropsychologists in the group, but I still work there. I’m still a big part of it, but I like advanced age. I mean, I like not owning it anymore. I like working for the man, but it’s beautiful because we created something that was a pretty flourishing business. It’s done. It’s done really well even during the pandemic. But the people who run it now did a beautiful job. But my wife and I, we love developing the business. We loved running it for 30 years. But after 30 years, we were ready to let somebody else do it. So I get to just enjoy the clinical work. Now.

Becky Coplen: That’s really an amazing and inspiring story. And just to add on to that, I understand that you are very musical and you are either in a band or you have been in multiple bands, and so we’d love to hear about how your work in clinical psychology is influenced by your music. Tell us about the whole music part.

Dr. William R. Stixrud: My contribution to the field of music has been very minimal. Basically, like everybody else in my generation, when the Beatles came out in the mid-1960s, I was recruited to be in a band even though I didn’t play anything. But I learned how to play and I’m pretty musical. So I was in bands from junior high and high school, a bit in college, and then I took a break. I did some singing. I did a lot of playing with groups kind of informally. But in mid-1990s there was this. It was the point where a lot of these classic rock and roll groups were starting to reunite and people started saying, Well, it’s not actually you can still play rock and roll in your 40s So I teamed up with people I grew up with in Seattle to start a rock band, and for 25 years we had a working rock band in Seattle, and I’d fly from Maryland to Seattle several times a year to practice or play gigs. It was so incredibly enriching. And just this in part because being in a band is just so with people You like that. Just the camaraderie, the sense of teamwork. And all this research is emerging about not only what music does to your brain in a good way, but how it’s magnified if you’re playing with other people. So it’s not that I incorporate music into my work, but I would say that having this chance to play music and singing, playing a lot has really helped me stick with really. I never get tired of my job. I still I’ve done it for 40 years now. I don’t get tired of it. I just like doing it. And I might get more burned out if I didn’t have that experience of playing and singing with other people on a regular basis.

Becky Coplen: That’s such an amazing story. I love that you flying across coast to coast to play in the band. It was worth it. And I hear you on the outlet. I play the piano for many years and it’s literally a stress release for sure. So that’s so fun that especially with people you grew up with, what a way to stay connected.

Dr. William R. Stixrud: That band ended five years ago and I started a new one here in Maryland. So we’re still playing.

Becky Coplen: Okay, good. So you’re still playing at the local places and it looked like maybe some charities and things do a lot.

Dr. William R. Stixrud:  We do a lot of benefit kind of things.

Becky Coplen: Yeah, well, if you land here somewhere near Detroit, I want to know because.

Dr. William R. Stixrud: Okay, see you. We’ll do that. 

Becky Coplen: This episode is brought to you by Mastersincounseling.org. If you’re considering enrolling in a master’s level counseling program to further your career, visit Mastersincounseling.org to compare school options via our search tool that allows you to sort by specific degree types tuition, our costs, online flexibility, and more. Let’s shift and talk some about your book, The Self-driven Child, co-authored with Ned Johnson, and that had a lot of attention through the years empowering children with autonomy. Can you share the science and rationale behind giving kids more control over their lives?

Dr. William R. Stixrud: My co-author, Ned Johnson, is a test prep guy. He works with adolescents and incredibly effective and helping them do well on tests by applying principles that ended up in self-driven child. And so the idea is this all mental health problems are rooted in a low sense of control. A low sense of control is the most stressful thing you can experience. And all mental health problems are stress-related problems. So it’s really one of the true keys to mental health is having a healthy sense of control over your own life. And also, every place that I look to try to understand how do young people become self-motivated, that intrinsic motivation to developing themselves so they have something useful to offer the world. And every place I looked, all the arrows pointed in the direction of autonomy. You have to have a sense that this is your life. And in terms of the mental health part, if you’re really anxious, your thinking is out of control. You’d like to stop worrying, but you can’t. It feels out of control. If you’re depressed, forget it. You have to try to make yourself do everything. You have very little sense of control. If you have substance use disorders. Talk about feeling out of life, being out of control, eating disorders, whatever it is. So we know the mental health problems are deeply rooted, certainly obvious. The kinds of anxiety disorders been clearly linked to a low sense of control. So that and we also some of the recent studies have shown that the reason that cognitive behavioral therapy helps people is by increasing their sense of control. Same thing with exercise, Same thing with sleep meditation.

In a minute I’m explaining to you what I think the sense of control is, what I’m thinking of. But that’s the basic idea, Becky, is that it’s the key to mental health and it’s the key to that intrinsic motivation. And the thing that motivated Ned and I where we saw so many. I mean, we have what the surgeon general recently said, that the status of mental health problems in adolescence is the defining public health crisis of our lifetime. And it’s gotten worse since the pandemic. But it was bad before then. And so our two major concerns was this epidemic of mental health problems, these unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and the fact that we see so many kids who had unhealthy motivation, they either were obsessively driven and they’d sacrifice anything to get into a good college or you had to kind of try. Everybody is trying to make them work, and they’re resisting everybody’s attempts to make them work. So we thought this must be a really big deal. If it’s the key to motivation and mental health, it must be a really big deal. So what a sense of control is. We think about it in two dimensions. One is the subjective sense of autonomy or agency. This is my life, and it’s also the subjective sense, that subjective confidence that I can handle stressful situations based on the experience of having handled stressful situations. You carry that confidence with you. I can manage that, so you’re unlikely to feel overwhelmed. So it’s that subjective sense of autonomy or agency, the subjective confidence in your ability to manage stressful situations without panicking or freaking out.

Dr. William R. Stixrud: And secondly, it’s the brain state that supports that which is in which the prefrontal cortex, which the most recently evolved part of the brain that can think and can solve problems and go backwards and forwards in time, put things in priority, calm yourself down when you start to get upset. The prefrontal cortex regulates the amygdala, the primitive part of the brain that senses and reacts to threats and the rest of the stress circuits. So when you’re in your right mind, or if you work with kids, the kids you work with, your own kids are in your right mind. Your prefrontal cortex is regulated kind of down, regulating the rest of the brain. And once you start to get stressed, the stress hormones jack up the level of dopamine and norepinephrine in the prefrontal cortex. So it just doesn’t function very well. It’s not supposed to because when you’re really threatened, you’re supposed to respond instinctively, instinctively, not thoughtfully. So we evolved this kind of situation that in an emergency, something stressful happens. We go into emergency mode and the prefrontal cortex really shuts down so you can respond instinctively. So it’s these two dimensions, the subjective dimension and the brain state where that prefrontal cortex regulates the amygdala. And once Ned and I started thinking about this a lot, every place we looked, it seemed like a sense of control was coming up. I remember reading there’s an article in The Atlantic, I think, in 2016 about this spate of suicides that had happened in Palo Alto. And one of the experts was asked what’s happening with these kids. And she said they feel existentially impotent.

Becky Coplen: Is this high?

Dr. William R. Stixrud: This high school kids are committing suicide. Another one said, I’ve been doing therapy with these kids for 25 years, and 15 years ago they were still fighting back. I’m not going to live like this. That’s I don’t give a shit. And now they’re just resigned to it. So what a healthy sense of control is, that sense of autonomy and the brain state. But it’s not is feeling helpless or hopeless or passive or resigned or stuck. And also it’s not feeling obsessively driven or anxious or exhausted when you’re kind of in that state where you’re focused, your goal-directed, you’re engaged, you’re motivated, but you aren’t highly stressed. So it’s a really big deal. And the more I know about it, it’s good for everything. You live longer. If you have a sense, if you’re given choices about things, you’re more successful in business, you’re more successful academically because the brain works better. So it is a big deal.

Becky Coplen: That’s a great summary of going over the brain. And yeah, we’re seeing so many of those things in the schools these days. Oh, man. It and yeah, the more we can equip parents for sure and it’s always a good reminder I’m a parent as well so thank you in with the way this whole field has been evolving and everything and technology and all of that. What role do you see technology playing in enhancing therapy in balance with face-to-face and the human touch?

Dr. William R. Stixrud: I have mixed feelings and given my age, I’m not the most technologically savvy person on the planet by far. I will say this that I just attended a seminar recently on telehealth and the research is looking very encouraging in terms of, you know, it seems to be as effective as in-person therapy for many things. And it certainly it opens up it makes it a lot easier for a lot of people to access therapy. I’m not up on like virtual reality applications or I apply nations. I will say this, though, Before I flunked out of graduate school when I was at the University of California, Berkeley, I actually read a book there that was called The Causes of Increased Nervousness in Americans. And it was written in 1881. It was written by a physician in 1881. And what he noticed was that in his lifetime, the people just kept getting more and more anxious. And the hypothesized causes were the railroad, Western Union, the stopwatch, and other things that made life go faster. It made us more attentive to smaller increments of time and also around the same time or some years later I went to I took my kids to the Farmers Museum in upstate New York.

We’re at the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s right near there. So the next day we went to the Pharmacy Museum and I’m looking at all these exhibits that are created on the invented in the farm. And the thing what I remember and everyone said it was widely anticipated, these new inventions would save work, but actually the save people time. But actually, they created more work. So I’ve always been concerned about the influence of technology on humans because we sleep less, we get busier and busier. We have so little downtime. It’s really a dual-edged sword in many ways. There’s so many technological things that may open up new ways of helping people therapeutically. But also I think that unless we really kind of pay attention to that, we didn’t evolve to be online 24 over 7, including all the time, unless we practice some of the stuff that’s in the Self-driven Child about radical downtime, meditating, having times, unplugged times. I think that it’s not going to be good.

Becky Coplen: I love the history you brought into that. It’s amazing, right? Everything should be so simple now and yet everything feels very complicated.

Dr. William R. Stixrud: So I know we have all these time-saving devices, but most people I know just can’t keep up with their work. I remember when the fax machine came out, this lawyer saying it used to be well before FedEx used to be if we got somebody, we got a brief or something, that we’d have to turn something around in 24 hours or two days or a week. When Fedex came out. Now we had to get it in the mail the next day when the fax machine people started expecting it within a couple of hours. And now if somebody wants, send me an email and you don’t send it with it right away, that there, where is that? So I think if we increase the pace of life without making sure that we’re getting adequate rest and unplug, we’re in bad shape.

Becky Coplen: All right. So let’s just talk a little bit more about the use of your book for counselors. In your experience, how do the principles that you outline in your book translate to counseling and therapy practices?

Dr. William R. Stixrud: Well, I’ll mention first that many people around the world have commented that the principles in the book really help them not only with their children but with their marriage or with, you know, with their employees or their coworkers. The things that we recommend to parents that really have a lot of implications for for therapists as well. And one is we suggest that parents think about themselves more as consultants to their kids than as their boss or the manager or the homework police. And the idea being that we want kids to be able to run their own lives before they leave home because so many kids that we see go off to college and they’re home by November, they can’t manage it. They haven’t had any experience really making their own decisions and solving their own problems, planning their own stuff. And I was giving a lecture in Houston and I happen to mention the most elite high school in the Washington, DC area. And this woman came up to me afterward and said, I’m a counselor here at the Menninger Clinic. This is a very good mental health clinic in Houston. We know this independent school really well because so many of the kids get into the top colleges, but they can’t handle it emotionally. As soon as they realize that everybody here is smart as I am or as soon as they get a B or they ask a girl out and she turns him down, they can’t handle it emotionally, so they take a medical leave of absence.

So our goal is for young people to be able to run their own lives. And the parents’ role as kids get older is to switch to that. Now, as we’re trying to manage our kids, but trying to move in that consultant role, help them figure out who they want to be and what kind of life they want. So part of the consultant’s role is we offer help and we offer advice, but we don’t try to force it. And I think that so as therapists and counselors, you may give advice, but you don’t tell somebody 100 times the way parents do or educators often do. And I think in our new book, I’ll just say parenthetically in our new book or newer book, came out in 2021 called What Do You Say? It’s about communicating with kids, and there’s a chapter in it called The Language and Silence of Change. And we focused on the chapter on motivational interviewing, which I’m sure some of your counselors use this questioning process that helps people discover their own reasons for changing without trying to change them. And this new space program supported parenting of anxious childhood emotions coming out of Yale that treats childhood and anxiety only by working with the parents. And so I think this idea that in families, parents have tremendous power to help their kids by changing their own steps in the family dance as opposed to trying to change their kids. So this idea of a consultant, we offer help and advice. We encourage kids to make their own decisions. And I think that certainly as therapists, you do a lot of helping people really understand what you want, what’s important to you.

Dr. William R. Stixrud: When I used to do therapy, it’s very common for me to see somebody who’s 35 or 40. And I’d say, How can I help? And they’d say, Well, I feel like I’ve spent the first 35 or 40 years of my life trying to live up to other people’s expectations. And I’m trying to figure out what’s important to me. We also talk about being a non-anxious presence, the importance for young people of having a non-anxious presence in their life. Somebody who can can listen to them without judging them is not overly emotional. And I think, again, the therapist, that’s what we get trained to do. We train to be a non-anxious presence. And I think this idea can help people understand the value of what we do. And we also talk about in both of our books the idea of radical downtime. And my sense is that life is so fast-paced now and the balance of rest and activity is so much out of whack. And yet young people sleep, like, almost 90 minutes less than they did 60 years ago, that we need more radical downtime, meaning kind of unplugged times of daydreaming or mind wandering. And I’m a huge fan of meditation. I encourage a lot of my clients and their parents to learn meditation because all of our clients by definition, have a sensitive stress response that you don’t get anxious, you don’t get depressed if you don’t have a very sensitive stress response. And my feeling, if you’re doing this work for so many years, is that if you have a really sensitive stress response, it just makes sense to develop practice at least one practice through which you can experience a sense of inner peace and calm and through which you can throw off the stress that accumulates in the day because of cumulative stress just gets more accumulates, more and more and more than bad things happen.

So I practice transcendental meditation for 50 years and I recommend I like I like certain mindful practices too, but I recommend a lot, a lot, a lot of meditation and I think is a really useful adjunct to therapy. And so I think there’s a lot of ways that we can certainly this these ideas help us understand the value of what you’re doing. It helps understand the appropriateness of the role and also the value of being a non-anxious presence who is not anxious or mostly reactive. We ask this group of high school kids where as we were writing our second book. Who do you feel closest to in this world? And some said my parents, some said my grandparent or an uncle or an aunt or a teacher or an older cousin. And this group of kids said, refer to this teacher who they really liked. And she said we don’t have a class with her. We just go in at lunchtime and talk to her. And I said, What makes you feel so close to this person? They said, She listens to me without judging me and she doesn’t tell me what to do. I think about the role of a counselor or therapist. It’s exactly that. So that’s why I wanted to tell you.

Becky Coplen: No, thank you for that. So many things you said. But the one that resonates is if we’re not taking care of ourselves, we can’t take care of them.

Dr. William R. Stixrud: Oh, my God! Really! To help people, they have to sense in us that we are afraid that we’re really with them. And I think with the meditation, one of things the meditation does for me, Becky, I never have the experience. Virtually never. I would say I never have the experience of being with clients and thinking about something else. I’m just there because I have practiced, so I’m not worried about stuff all the time. And so I think effective. I think it really helps. And I will say that that certainly a ridiculously high percentage of successful entrepreneurs and CEOs practice meditation. They really think it’s really good for creativity. It’s really good for throwing off stress, for kind of just integrating the brain so that you really are your brain is really functioning optimally.

Becky Coplen: Fascinating information for sure. As we move to close out our time, what advice would you give to the newer counselors and therapists or those even considering the field? What would be the biggest takeaways you’d want them to hear?

Dr. William R. Stixrud: Well, the one thing I’ll tell you is that I’ve been a neuropsychologist for 40 years, and I know a lot of people have done therapy as long. I almost never meet somebody who is a therapist who is burned out and wants to quit. I mean, I see so many people who are in their 60s and early 70s, they’re still doing it. They still like it. And so I really think it’s a very rewarding profession and it may not make a ton of money, but as many of you know, once you have a certain threshold of income where you aren’t worried about money all the time, more money doesn’t make you happier. And I think that for me when I used to do therapy, God, I, I saw this kid once who was afraid of going to any of the rooms in his house without a parent. And I just used this kind of technique I’d learned from a neurolinguistic program. They’d set up like ten sessions and they canceled the other nine. And I thought, well, they didn’t like me or I didn’t help him. And in years later, like maybe ten years later, we get a call from this kid’s neighbor and said, You helped him so much. We hope you can help mark it. And so you just never know. But the idea of being able it’s just such a satisfying feeling.

And if you have that combination of high social interest, like talking with people, you learn how to skillfully interact with people. It’s just a great way to spend your time. Most of the people I know who do this work, their mind’s not wandering constantly because it’s deeply engaging. And I would say for people who are building, they want to build a practice. I would listen to a lot of positive psychology. Even some of the self-help stuff I’d read about What does it take to start a successful business? I learned all this stuff studying, reading, that, that kind of material that I had no clue about. I didn’t have any training in it. I mean, most of us don’t have any training in starting a business, and I would hire experts. If you’re starting a practice, don’t try to do everything yourself. Even if you borrow money for it. Hire people who know what they’re doing, who can help you with the taxes and whatever kind of technical things you need help with. So if you think about the way you get really successful, building a big practice, a successful practice is you do a really good work and you focus on the quality of the work and assuming the quality of work will lead to more and more business and successful practice.

Becky Coplen: That’s so inspiring, and helpful to me personally, and I know it will be helpful to many of our listeners. Dr. Stixrud, thank you so much for your time and we’ll definitely be posting the links to your book and to our listeners today. Thank you for being a part of this and I hope we can keep the conversation going. I’m going to be signing off on Mastering Counseling today, but look forward to our next podcast and everyone have a beautiful day. 

Thanks so much. You’ve been listening to the Mastering Counseling podcast by Mastersincounseling.org. Join us again next episode as we explore what it takes to be a business success in the counseling industry.