Figuring Out Your Why

So, I want to start with your ‘why’. Why is it that you want to have a successful private practice? When I was in the sixth grade, we had this adjustable basketball hoop. And, I had never dunked on seven foot seven. I thought that I was going to be Michael Jordan. I was actually pretty certain of that I was going to be a successful MBA player, as most kids in the 90's did. SO, I ran up to this basketball hoop without a ball in hadn’t to see if I could touch the rim. I jumped up, grabbed the rim just with the tip of my fingers, but my body kept moving forward. So now, I am parallel to the ground, and I fell straight back, reached out with my left arm, and broke my shoulder. I had to have surgery on it, and I was in a sling all Summer. Little did I know that that decision to dunk, or just to grab the rim, was going to change my life in a  number of ways. So I went to a school that was sort of like a ‘Friday Night Lights’ kind of school. Football was the sport that people played. Everything else was defined by your status within the football team. And, so at this school, every year or two, we would go to the State Championships for football. And, I couldn’t play football in seventh grade. It was the first year of tackle football and, because of the shoulder break that I had had in the Spring in May, I couldn’t play football that Fall, because I still had pins in my shoulders. On the first day of basketball season, in the Winter, this kid, Jeremy, gave me a wedgy so bad that it ripped my underwear. All because I hadn’t played football. So, I had to have my first practice be with floppy underwear. The next year, eight grade, that same guy, Jeremy, beat me up in front of the whole Math class, as I was leaving. It was small, Catholic school, so there were around 50 people in my class. He beat me up because he thought that I had told the teachers that he was stealing staplers and punches which, he was doing, but I didn’t tell them. One of his friends thought it would be funny to just say, ‘Hey, Joe Sanok told on you’.

For a long time, I held this bitterness and resentment over that bullying. And then I started working at a Runaway Shelter in early college to explore if I wanted to work with angry kids, really to help there be less ‘Joe Sanok's’ in the world. And, I realized that a lot of these bullies had been raised in really tough environments. When I got to know them, they’re really cool kids. They had a lot of potential. They thought differently about the world. And, I had a huge empathy for their situation. Which then led me into learning more about parenting, and Systems Theory, and helping their parents, and how poverty informs that, and all these other things that were risk factors for these kids. So my ‘why’ started with ‘I got beat up and I don’t want other people to get beat up’. But then, it moved into a different area where I then wanted to help people that were supporting those folks. And so, I launched a therapeutic sailing program where we took at-risk kids sailing and then did therapy on the sail boat, and they learned some team-building.

So, my ‘why’ has continued to expand where now my ‘why’ is to help therapists grow their practices to have even more of an impact on the world. Understanding your ‘why’ and what is your driver is really important. The metaphor that really hits home for me is, if your know your ‘why’, that’s like the gas pedal, electricity, or gasoline on / in your car. It’s what moves you forward. You then have the direction of where you are headed, your destination. That’s more like your goals within your practice. And then, the steering wheel is like those micro-decisions every single day that you make to stay on course or the get off course. Those little micro movements that keep you on track of staying focused so that you know exactly what to do next.