How to Design the Career You Want as a Therapist with Dr. Emily Anhalt

Emily Anhalt (00:00):

I would like to say that therapists have taken a difficult path. They've decided that it's worth their time and resources to learn complicated things and to do it the hard way. And that in and of itself is so beautiful and so commendable, and it's so easy to have some imposter syndrome in this industry and to not always know if what you're doing is working, but just know that you have spent more time learning and practicing this craft than most people will ever do at anything and give yourself a lot of credit for that. And while we should always have a learning mindset, I think there's also something so important about stopping and celebrating yourself along the way.

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Michael Fulwiler (00:45):

This is Heard Business School where we sit down with private practice owners and industry experts to learn about the business of therapy together. I'm your host, Michael Fulwiler. This week I'm joined by Dr. Emily Anhalt. She's a clinical psychologist, keynote speaker, and author of the new book, Flex Your Feelings. In our conversation, we dive into emotional fitness, which is proactively working on mental and emotional health. Just like physical fitness, Dr. Anhalt’s work focuses on helping high performing individuals like founders and executives level up their emotional health. She's matched more than 800 people with therapists and partnered with companies like Google, Ted, Salesforce and GitHub. We discussed her unique approach to therapy, blending emotional fitness with a proactive mindset and journey from Silicon Valley to a career combining therapy, public speaking and tech. Here's my conversation with my friend, Dr. Emily Anhalt. Enjoy.

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Emily Anhalt (01:53):

Thank you so much for having me.

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Michael Fulwiler (01:55):

Thank you for being here. Very excited. We actually met on Twitter during the pandemic. I was remembering that I reached out to you to interview you for my newsletter about how to grow an audience on Twitter because you were one of the few therapists at the time that had a large audience. Are you still on Twitter these days or I see you mostly on LinkedIn.

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Emily Anhalt (02:16):

Yeah, I'm still on Twitter. I would say I'm a little less in there the way I was before to build my audience back then I challenged myself to describe a complex psychological concept in 180 characters or less every single day, and it kind of built from there. But I've noticed that Twitter has a really different energy these days. So while I'm still there, I'm focusing a little bit more of my energy on LinkedIn and Instagram.

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Michael Fulwiler (02:43):

Yeah, I agree. I've noticed that about my own behavior. Any other recommendations as we think about social media content there before we move on here? I think describing psychological concepts is a really great one. I think social media, especially Twitter, is a force function to get your ideas into concise language. Any thoughts for therapists who are either struggling to come up with content ideas for social media or who are thinking about maybe starting to be more active on social media?

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Emily Anhalt (03:18):

I think consistency is key post every day. I struggle to tell people that they should do this because I don't know if I necessarily think being on social media constantly is actually the healthiest or best thing. I can't say that it's contributed greatly to my mental health to be checking my phone all the time. So I'm not trying to say, you should definitely go do this, but if you do want to build a brand in that way, I think consistency is quite important. And the other thing I learned a little later in the game is how important it's to be generous and giving and focus, not entirely on how you can grow your audience, but also how you can support other people and lift other people up. And in the end, you'll build a really lovely community that everyone will benefit from.

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Michael Fulwiler (04:00):

Yeah, I think that's great. I think it's very obvious when people are self-serving on social media and you can tell even in their comments and replies that they're just looking to raise their own kind of profile and visibility. So I think helping others is a great approach. Also, just building relationships, reaching out authentically. I think those are all great things when thinking about social. I want to back up a little bit, and so you are from Silicon Valley, kind of born and raised, went to Michigan, studied psychology, came back to California, got your master's PhD at the Wright Institute in Berkeley. I'm wondering, did you go right into private practice coming out of graduate school or did you go get a job in between?

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Emily Anhalt (04:49):

I went straight from college to grad school, which I don't necessarily recommend. I think I entered grad school still very young, and I hadn't had any experience in the real world of what it's like to have a real job and be out there. But I went straight in and was in grad school for many years. Doctorate program took a while, and then I did my pre-doctoral and post-doctoral hours in a setting that allowed me to launch right into private practice. So I did my pre-doc hours at a community clinic that started you with patients and you could take those patients with you when you go. And then I did my post-doc as a psych assistantship, so I worked under the license of a supervisor. So by the time I was really truly licensed, I already had a small practice going, which I think set me up pretty nicely. But I always knew that I wasn't going to be able to only do private practice. I'm such an ADHD kid at heart and I need to be doing 20 things to focus on any of them. So while I was building that private practice, I was also planting a bunch of other seeds for myself with public speaking and teaching and creating courses and the social media and starting this startup, all of that, and that's kept me engaged and energized all these years.

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Michael Fulwiler (06:02):

I definitely want to talk about each of those things. I want to stick with the private practice here for a moment because I'm really interested in how you define your niche for your practice. You have a very clear population that you work with. You operate at this intersection of mental health and psychology and entrepreneurship, and I know that you work with founders and executives. I'm curious what your process was like to define that niche and how you got there.

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Emily Anhalt (06:30):

So I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that I grew up in Silicon Valley. I was really immersed in it. I went to the same high school that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak went to, and there was just this energy of technology from when I was really young. But I'd say a big part of it was that because I went to grad school in Silicon Valley, the people that I was training with were all in tech. So when I was working at these clinics and we were seeing people who would come through, many of them were also in tech jobs, I started to understand this sort of psychological thread that runs through entrepreneurs and founders and decided to try to put words to it. I also at this time started to realize that the people who run these big companies are deciding a lot about our society, and a lot of them are not necessarily super mentally healthy.

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(07:19):

And so it felt like an interesting thing to pursue a specialty in helping people who will likely have a lot of influence work on their mental and emotional health. However, this population often doesn't think of themselves as necessarily needing mental health health. There's this real dichotomy in our culture of you're either mentally ill or you're mentally healthy. And I saw this middle ground that most of us are in. A lot of entrepreneurs are relatively high functioning, they're succeeding in life, but they wanted to level up the relationship they have to themself and to other people. And that is when I started to think about this idea of emotional fitness, this practice of strengthening your mental and emotional health in a proactive way rather than feeling like you have to wait until everything's falling apart to tend to it.

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Michael Fulwiler (08:05):

I love that. And my understanding from reading the book Burn Rate by Andy Dunn is that founders, especially startup founders, tend to have more mental challenges and have higher percentages of mental illness as well. So there's probably, it's just a type of person likely that just also is drawn to that kind of energy to being a startup founder as well, right?

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Emily Anhalt (08:35):

It feels like there's a chicken and egg there or a self-fulfilling prophecy there where yeah, there is a certain type of person that finds their way into that work. And then the work itself is also not necessarily great for you. If you talk to a physician and you said, I want to take the best possible care of my body, so I'm going to be an, they'd probably tell you that's actually not the best way to take care of your body. You're going to have to push yourself to such extremes all the time. You might get results, but I don't know that it's necessarily the healthiest lifestyle. Similarly, I would say for founders and entrepreneurs, I don't think that is actually the most mentally healthy lifestyle, but for some people, that's how they want to operate. They want to succeed in this particular way. So I at least wanted to figure out maybe almost a harm reduction approach here of how can you take care of yourself as best as possible while living this wild occupational lifestyle.

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Michael Fulwiler (09:28):

I love this framing of emotional fitness because it feels like something that's more proactive and more preventative. I think there's this idea that you go to therapy if something's wrong, like you said, and I think that that's changed over the last four or five years. But when you started to develop this idea around emotional fitness, was anyone else talking about it at the time? Because I feel like that's become more common language that I've seen these days. My sense is you were kind of at the beginning of that.

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Emily Anhalt (09:59):

Yeah, I think I was just catching the beginning of the wave there. I think the idea of therapy was starting to become slightly less stigmatized, and I did try to spend a lot of time talking about it just as you described it, which is when you wait until things are really bad to go to therapy, then therapy is helping you just get back to baseline. But when you go to therapy, when things are mostly okay, then you are doing this kind of deeper work that will actually prevent a lot of the issues that might have sent you to therapy later. So just like you wouldn't wait until you have the flu to go to the gym, you shouldn't necessarily wait until things are really tough to go to therapy, go now, develop this relationship with someone, understand your patterns, figure out how you're getting in your own way and how you're kind of manifesting things into your life that might not even be serving you.

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(10:47):

And then when life does inevitably throw something at you because that's how life works, you'll already have this really solid ground to work through it in. And I think people resonated with that because it's a little less pathologizing and a little less stigmatizing. This idea of nothing has to be wrong with you to work on yourself. And what I noticed is with this high achieving population who values learning, when I started to frame it as this idea of no world-class athlete ever achieved their full potential without a coach, why would you expect to achieve your biggest potential as an entrepreneur without some kind of support? So people resonated with that a little bit more, I think. And it opened the door for a lot of people who might never have considered going to therapy thinking, oh, that's interesting. I'll throw another thing in here, which is I have matched, at this point probably almost a thousand people into therapy in one form or another.

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(11:41):

And when I get people to go from a position of, oh, the therapy is not for me to, huh, maybe I'll try it. It's almost never for me talking about myself as a therapist, it's usually for me talking about myself as a patient. I decided as a therapist, I do have to be careful about how much I disclose about myself. But one thing I've always been really transparent about is I am in therapy. It has changed my life. It has created a completely different set of opportunities for me and here's why I recommend it. And I noticed that as a relatively high functioning person myself, when I was willing to talk about my own therapeutic experience, it gave other people permission and some curiosity about what therapy might do for them as well. I

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Michael Fulwiler (12:23):

Love that. I love to stay on that topic of self-disclosure. We've had therapists on the show who are very open, they're perspective is this idea that therapists are a blank slate, like that's outdated. I talk about my own lived experience. I specialize in eating disorder. So I talk about my experience with an eating disorder. I'm curious your perspective and how that's maybe influenced by your own training in terms of how you self-disclose and specifically in your marketing, but I think also just in general how you talk about your own experience as a therapist.

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Emily Anhalt (12:59):

Well, I certainly wouldn't say that there's a right approach for everyone here because for sure there is some value to someone trusting that you've been through a thing. But I trained psychoanalytically and yet I work with this population that really likes action. And so I think I have found this kind of middle ground where I'm always thinking analytically, but I'm willing to meet people in a more, I don't know, integrative way. When it comes to self-disclosure though, I for myself do believe that there is value in leaving room for people's projections. If I put everything about myself out there, then I take away from my clients the opportunity to make me into whatever they need me to be for long enough for them to figure out what that means to them. So when I decide whether or not to self-disclose, I always ask myself the question, if all of my patients heard this, if every single patient I've ever worked with or am working with now listened to this podcast, would I be ready and willing to talk through whatever they feel about what they heard?

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(14:02):

And if the answer is no, then I'm not disclosing that in a public way and I've just had to decide what kinds of things am I ready and willing to be talking about with my patients? And I found that that has been a pretty good litmus test for me, but it's not without issue. I've certainly had patients who feel certain types of way about the things they've found out about me, but there are things that I'm not super disclosing about. I don't talk a lot about my romantic relationships. I don't talk a lot about my family traumas in detail, that kind of thing, because there's something powerful about a patient saying, well, have you ever been through this? And me being able to say, well, what would it mean if I had, what would it mean if I hadn't? And if I were to put it all out there, then I don't get to explore their fantasies and their imaginings about me.

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Michael Fulwiler (14:50):

Yeah, that makes the rule of thumb that I've heard on this show is before I disclose something to a client, is it in service of them or is it in service of me? Am I saying it because it's helpful for them or for our therapeutic relationship, or is it just something that I feel like I need to share because if it's for me, then I should just keep my mouth shut.

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Emily Anhalt (15:13):

That's a good way to think about it. And one thing that I don't think grad school students are taught very well is if you decide that you don't want to disclose something, what are some ways to communicate that? Because I think a lot of times therapists will disclose just out of the discomfort of what it feels like to say, no, I'm not going to share that with you. And I remember I was teaching a grad school, like a master's psychology class years ago, and I made a list of here are all the ways that I don't answer questions. Here are all the things that I'll say to not answer a question. And I think it was really helpful just to see some frameworks to say something like, I might be willing to tell you that, but before I do, let's explore what it would mean to you if I were to say one thing or another or to say something like, it feels like the way I answer this could be really important. It could have a lot of implications here, so I'm not going to answer it quite yet. Let's think about it together. Just having those kinds of phrases in your back pocket I think is helpful so that you're not just out of discomfort, kind of blurting it out.

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Michael Fulwiler (16:13):

Definitely. I want to go back to your work in emotional fitness. As I think about kind of positioning emotional fitness with founders and executives, these high performing folks, I imagine the line between therapy and coaching starts to become blurred as well, where now you're sort of getting into executive coaching or coaching, and so I'm curious how you think about what that boundary is, because my sense is that you offer therapy as a clinical psychologist, you don't necessarily offer coaching, but is that not the case?

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Emily Anhalt (16:48):

I've been on such a soapbox about this for so long. I have a lot of feelings about the coaching industry because I think the vast majority of the time, what people are looking for is therapy and it might feel more comfortable to ask for coaching. And I think there's something powerful about executive coaching in the sense of, you have done this job before, I haven't. You can help me make decisions about my job. To me, that's what coaching is. I think as soon as you start to move into the realm of here's the reason why I am not able to show up the way I want, or here is the problem in the relationships I have at work, that to me is now therapy based. You're exploring all of these complicated dynamics that you have. And so I kind of described that what I'm doing is a mix of therapy and coaching, but ultimately it's all the same soup and what a person needs sort of depends, and I feel that I can meet them wherever they are because of my training. And I would imagine as a coach, it can just be complicated to know at what point should you be saying this isn't really the best place for us to explore that. It feels like it would be complicated where that line is. Exactly. So I feel grateful that for the most part, whatever it is that walks through the door, I can meet them there.

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Michael Fulwiler (18:03):

That makes sense. I think so much of how you frame your therapy as emotional fitness, I think makes it feel more accessible and maybe less scary than therapy. It's almost like how coaching feels like, oh, coaching. That's something that I'm doing proactively or I'm investing in my development as a professional by working with a coach, whereas like, oh, I'm working with a therapist. That's not what I need. Right, right. If we're doing emotional fitness. Yeah, exactly. So I think the positioning of what you do maybe allows you to still offer therapy while still kind of avoiding some of that stigma or resistance

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Emily Anhalt (18:44):

Maybe. For sure. I think too, if you haven't been to grad school and if you haven't done the training and if you haven't gotten the 3000 hours and if you haven't had a supervisor look over your work and if you hadn't done this work yourself, it's easy just to not know what you don't know. And I think that there is an art to all of this that's really complicated to understand if you haven't really been in the training for long enough to see it sort of emerge. And so I think that there are a lot of people out there with the best of intentions who don't understand actually how deeply complicated this is, and I've just seen it go wrong. If you don't understand transference and you are out there doing coaching, then you're going to get yourself into a whole bunch of really sticky situations and not even know they're happening.

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(19:29):

So I don't know, for a little while I thought about starting a training program for people who want to do coaching and not be working with really pathologized really extreme cases and don't necessarily want to go through nine years of grad school, but still want to understand the complicated dynamics of sitting with a person in this way. I thought about starting something like that at that point. I think they are starting to merge. There are coaching programs now that focus on things like transference that I think are useful, but we have a long way to go there.

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Michael Fulwiler (20:02):

You mentioned you do other things, which I also mentioned at the top of this conversation here. One of them is speaking and workshop facilitation. It sounds like that's something that you've kind of done since you got out of grad school kind of from the beginning. Is that true?

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Emily Anhalt (20:20):

Yeah, I did my first TEDx talk in 2016. It was just after I was getting out of school and I did it based on the research I did for my doctoral dissertation. And it's so funny watching it back now, it's so cringe for me saying it, but if you're not a little embarrassed by what you're putting out there, then you're not putting out fast enough is the idea. So I'm a classic middle child attention seeking person and at some point I realized, oh, I can just make that part of my career and sort of sublimate it into a healthy place. So the TED Talk kind of launched things and then I dunno, for anyone out there who's interested, the best advice I can give if you want to start some kind of speaking career is put together a talk or two on something that you have some expertise in and offer to do it for free at the companies of the people who and love.

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(21:13):

I essentially went to the people in my life who were all in tech and I said, can I come do this? Talk about imposter syndrome or about resilience or whatever it was for free for your team. And most of the time they said, yeah, sure, we could use that. And I had the cred of having a degree and I would come in and do these talks and now all of a sudden I could say, oh, I've done a workshop at Twitter, I've done a talk at Google, that kind of thing. And then from there you sort of gain a little bit of traction and at some point you can start charging for what you're doing. So I started that really early and each year that goes by, I've just pushed more into it being a big part of my financial picture.

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Michael Fulwiler (21:53):

How do you make that transition to start charging and how do you think about how much to charge?

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Emily Anhalt (22:00):

That's such a big question because it's the wild west out there. There's no standard pricing. There are people with very little experience charging a ton of money and people with a ton of experience charging very little money. The way that I did it for myself was I tried to find community of people who were doing it too and gut check things like how much are other people charging for this kind of thing. And then I also asked myself, how much money do I need to be making for this to feel worth my time? If I'm making so little that I start to feel resentful when I get an opportunity, that's not a good thing, but I also don't want to charge so much that I am cheating myself out of opportunities just because they can't afford my high price. So I wish I had a perfect answer for you, but I would say the best thing to do is find other people doing similar work and create a really transparent community where you can all share information and resources.

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Michael Fulwiler (22:51):

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Emily Anhalt (24:03):

But they're

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Michael Fulwiler (24:04):

Thinking about

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(24:04):

Too low. What they're not thinking about is all the time that goes into preparing for the talk and also just all of the experience that they bring. And so that would be one piece of advice that I would give here is to not think about your time if you're being hired as a speaker, as a therapy hour and that you can definitely charge a lot more than that. And I think even turning a one hour talk into a workshop or maybe a workshop series, is there an opportunity to do more or maybe you start with a talk and then that could lead into other things as well.

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Emily Anhalt (24:43):

For sure. I mean, when you think about it, therapy is priced to make it possible for people to come every week, sometimes for decades. Obviously you can't charge an insane amount of money per hour because you want people to come often, you're almost giving this discount for repeated engagement. If you're just doing a one-off workshop, they're still benefiting from all of your years of training and expertise, all the money and debt you went into become a therapist, all of that. They don't need that repeat pricing in the same way. So let me think, if I could come up with some equation, I would say that my keynote price when I was first starting was probably about four times more than my therapy hour price. And now both my therapy price and my keynote price have gone up and that Delta has widened. So now I'd say it's a bigger difference between the two, but that felt like a good starting place for me. It made it feel exciting and still achievable as a person who didn't have a ton of experience yet.

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Michael Fulwiler (25:49):

Definitely. Yeah, I think being okay, like you said, doing a few free talks, a few free workshops starting to charge, but maybe not as much as you'd like, and then just kind of continuing to raise that price over time. A piece of advice that I give to therapists is when you're putting an offering like speaking or offering workshops out into the market, talking to companies, if you're pitching a price, sending a proposal and there's no pushback, you're probably not charging enough. So the next time you quote a price, maybe bump it up 10%, 15%, see how it's received, and then if there's no pushback, like, okay, maybe I can go a little bit more. So I think just putting it out there, seeing what the reaction is, but always experimenting with it too.

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Emily Anhalt (26:32):

And I'll often ask a company, what's your budget? So I have a sense of what is realistic. One thing I have learned recently though as I've put myself more into the speaking world and really started to commit to it and learn more about it, is I don't think this is as true at the beginning. You do have to find your way and figure out what your pricing should be, but once you are at a good price for yourself, be consistent and quote the same price across the board because it doesn't feel good for a company to find out that you've done the same talk for a lot less for another company. It doesn't mean you can't negotiate down. It doesn't mean that if a company says, oh, we can't afford that, we can only afford this. You can say, okay, well I'll make an exception this time. Perhaps in exchange you can write me a testimonial or whatever. But I am learning that there's something important about consistency and that you're not just trying to make as much as any given company will happen to pay you.

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Michael Fulwiler (27:23):

That's a good point. If it's a Google or Twitter, oh, I'm going to double my price because they're a bigger company, but I imagine it's a small industry and people talk, people talk. Yeah.

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Emily Anhalt (27:36):

And for example, I do have lower price if it's a virtual talk and I have a lower price if it's a nonprofit. It's not that you can't be flexible, but try to be consistent in that flexibility, if that makes sense.

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Michael Fulwiler (27:47):

So with the speaking you do and the workshop facilitation that you do, how do you also think about consulting as a part of your business? How is it different from that?

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Emily Anhalt (28:00):

The consultants sort of happened naturally when I would go in and do toxic companies and they would say, oh, this kind of thinking would be helpful to get us through an issue we're dealing with. So for example, I came and did a talk at a company that was going through an acquisition and they said, we're noticing that people are feeling really upset and anxious about the emotional aspects of this acquisition. Would you be willing to come in and talk to a bunch of our employees and then write up a report giving us suggestions about how to best emotionally support people through this complicated change? And so that was something I hadn't done before that point, but I thought, yeah, I can do that. I'll say one of my traits for better or worse is that I'm a big believer that we're all really just making everything up as we go along anyway.

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(28:42):

And so I'm not afraid to say, okay, I haven't done this, but I'll figure it out and if I don't feel like what I delivered is great, then I won't ask for money for it. But for the most part, I feel like I can usually get there. And a lot of that has to do with my trust that when you get a degree in psychology, you're learning this language that a lot of people don't speak, and essentially you're learning the language of relationships and most of business is ultimately spoken in the language of relationships. So when a lot about psychology in a way, a little about everything, and I've just found that I've been able to apply my training to almost anything that I find interesting and that I can offer perspective that a lot of other people can't because I spent so much time learning this particular language.

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Michael Fulwiler (29:25):

Definitely. I think that's such a great point. We talk about that a lot on this show that just because you're a therapist doesn't mean you're just a therapist. You can do other things. That doesn't mean that you have to do other things. So there's certainly no pressure, obligation or like, oh man, I feel like I need to have six streams of income. But as a mental health professional, you do have translatable skills that you can apply to the workplace to a consulting engagement. And I also love this idea too, of just figuring it out. It doesn't, if you're going to work with a company in a consulting capacity, it's okay if you don't have your offering figured out, and the worst thing that happens is you get in over your head or you figure, oh, I can't, you get into the engagement and Oh, I don't really know if I can help here. I'm not really sure what to do. And then at that point, you give them their money back or they don't pay you and that's it maybe, right? I've

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Emily Anhalt (30:26):

Never actually read into that situation, right. I mean

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Michael Fulwiler (30:29):

You figure it out.

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Emily Anhalt (30:30):

Yeah, figured things out. I mean, I remember when I was first starting to do therapy, I didn't really have any idea what the hell I was doing for a really long time, and you just sort of gain trust over time that you will figure it out. And I would say it took probably about 10 years from when I started seeing patients that I got to the point where I felt like no matter what walks through my door, I will be able to handle it in one way or another. And I think I started to feel that way with the consulting and the speaking and all of that, that you just start to trust the process and trust your own abilities and you also start to learn what you are and are not willing and capable of doing, and you can say no and have boundaries and all that good stuff.

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Michael Fulwiler (31:07):

Yeah, I think that's the way to kind of push through imposter syndrome and perfectionism. It is just leaning into I don't know what I'm doing and no one knows what they're doing, but we're all just figuring it out.

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Emily Anhalt (31:19):

No one knows what they're doing. I mean, if anything, I want to say perhaps that is the biggest thing I've learned from working with the Silicon Valley elite. I have patients who are really sort of at the top of these incredible organizations and they're struggling with all the same things, all the same confidence issues, and not really knowing if they're supposed to be where they are and what to do in any given situation. And it's really showed me, wow, we all have no idea, and that's okay and we're all figuring it out.

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Michael Fulwiler (31:51):

That's a really, really interesting insight. Something that we've talked about, and I just love this topic, is this idea that you can design the career that you want, which is something that you've done. Could you talk about that and how therapists can think about that coming out of listening to this conversation?

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Emily Anhalt (32:11):

Yeah, there really is just, I think this idea in our culture that you have to sort of pick from a menu that other people have created of what's available to you. And I think I had the privilege and the support and also maybe the necessity of having this A DHD brain that just didn't work like everyone else's to feel like I could say, no, forget all that. I'm going to design it to be exactly what I want. If I'm going to have to focus and work hard every single day, I want it to be on something I interesting because otherwise my mind just doesn't work well. And again, I do want to emphasize that this requires privilege. Not everyone is in a position to design a career of their dreams. Some people just need to do whatever. We'll put money on the table for themselves and their family, so I don't want to undercut that part, but I think that it's more possible than we realize to really create exactly the kind of job that you want.

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(33:00):

And my model for that is essentially thinking, what do you enjoy doing? What do you not enjoy doing that you're still willing to do some of the time, and how can you put those things together into a career for yourself and then how can you just try it? That same principle of do it for free for a little while, I kind of did that across the board. Anything I found interesting, I would just do it for free for a little bit until I felt like I knew that I wanted to do it until I felt like I was good enough at it and then I would start charging money for it, and I would just do that in all these little areas until I had cobbled together a career that felt really exciting to me. The other thing about it I will say is to live that way, you have to be comfortable with a bit of a sort of feast or famine mentality between patients and speaking and workshops and all of that. There are months that I'm making really good money and there are months that I'm not, and that was something I had to get comfortable with is that when you don't pick a steady consistent job, you're not going to have a steady consistent paycheck. Again, that takes some privilege and luck, but over time, I came to trust that another wave would come and budgeted accordingly. Essentially,

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Michael Fulwiler (34:10):

I love what feels like to me, almost a reframe of work life balance to designing the life that you want by doing the types of work that you want to do. And I think that is one of the best parts of being in private practice as a therapist is you can decide how many clients you want to see and when you want to see them, and if you want to offer other types of services and you can really design the career around the life that you want to live. And so then it's less about your work life balance and more about how the two integrate.

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Emily Anhalt (34:42):

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. What is work life balance these days anyway? I don't know a lot of people who are like, oh, this is my work life and this is my regular life. We're friends with our colleagues, we're answering emails till midnight, we're working from home. There's all kinds of things that are blurring the line now. You should still have hobbies and passions and relationships and things you enjoy that are totally separate from what you do, but perhaps that's another thing about psychology is psychology isn't everything that I do. There's no part of my life that some knowledge of psychology is not helpful for. So in that way, the line has been very blurred.

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Michael Fulwiler (35:20):

In addition to all of the things that we've discussed, you're also the co-founder of a tech company, so I'd like to spend some time here as well. The company is called koa, your Gym for Mental Health. Where did the idea of KOA come from?

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Emily Anhalt (35:37):

So my co-founder Alexa, and I feel like we're sort of ideating on a similar thing at the same time from two different parts of the world and came together serendipitously. She found me on Twitter actually, and from her angle, she is very business-minded and was walking around San Francisco and seeing all of these brick and mortar spaces that validate the importance of physical health. There's one medical, there's Equinox, there's all of these spaces that say your physical health is important, here's where you can work on it. And there was nothing like that for mental health. There were no places you can go that are visible and clear to work on your mental health. And so she wanted to find a solution to that. Meanwhile, I was doing all of this work on a more proactive approach to mental health and thinking about how we needed to think about our mental health, more like going to the gym and less going to the doctor.

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(36:25):

And so when we came together, it was just this sort of perfect merging of the ideas into this, let's create a gym for mental health. And originally we had brick and mortar spaces planned. It was going to be therapy gyms where you came, you saw your therapist, there was a community aspect. You could sit and have a snack or a coffee and be amongst people who are also working on themselves. And we had our whole first space in San Francisco architect plans done and everything, and then COVID hit. So we pivoted and it became an online company. But one of the things that was really important for me as the clinical person at the company was that we did not sacrifice integrity in pursuit of growth. And there's just so many mental health companies out there popping up and they all have the best of intentions, but a lot of them are not understanding the things that actually make therapy work the true mechanisms of change and healing, and you can't undercut those things for our company. I wanted to make sure for example, that all our classes that are teaching people about mental health we're taught by actual licensed therapists. So all of our instructors are licensed therapists and the classes that we teach are based on this research that I did about these seven traits of emotional fitness, the same stuff the book is about, and it's just been this really beautiful experience to help people and companies work out their mental health in this proactive way without sacrificing the things that I know are important for this work to be safe and generative.

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Michael Fulwiler (37:54):

That's such a great idea. I remember when I first, I probably heard about it through you and through Alexa, just through Twitter, but this idea of why isn't there a boutique fitness studio for your mental health? Why is there not a soul cycle or a Barry's bootcamp for your mental health? Your physical health is just as important as your mental health. To me, it was so obvious. Yeah, that's amazing. So I hope that that continues to grow. I am curious for therapists who are listening who are interested in getting into tech, maybe as a co-founder or kind of a chief clinical officer at that executive level, what advice would you have for seeking out those opportunities and how to get involved in tech for folks who aren't right now?

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Emily Anhalt (38:45):

What a good question. I don't know that I have a perfect answer. I feel like I sort of stumbled my way into this one in a way, but that wasn't for lack of effort beforehand. I remember right when the pandemic started getting crazy, I was contacting every VC in Silicon Valley and saying, you need an on-call therapy coach for all of your founders. Let me be that person. And at the time they were like, no, we don't get involved in that way. That's really not our place. Mental health's not really. Our thing doesn't matter. And now these days it's very common to provide that kind of service. So I feel like maybe I was a little too early in some ways, but those seeds I planted probably did help me get to where I am. So maybe what I would suggest is don't be afraid to just try. Reach out to a company you think you can be helpful for and or helpful to and tell them how you can be helpful and maybe again, offer to come do it for a little while for free so you can show them your value or at a low cost or whatever it might be. Don't be afraid to ask. That's kind of my philosophy in life in general. It usually doesn't hurt to ask and often if you can provide value, people will be happy to integrate it.

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Michael Fulwiler (39:58):

Definitely. I think don't be afraid to reach out, just build a relationship. Even if something doesn't happen, then it might happen in the future. And I also think this approach of reaching out to investors is an interesting one. It's a similar approach that I took when I was marketing consulting full-time with mental health tech companies as I was reaching out to investors that were investing in these companies and essentially pitching myself as, Hey, I can be a marketing consultant to these companies that they're investing. They have a financial interest in the company being successful. So if I can get in that way, and that worked pretty well for me. And so I think that's a good approach. I would also plug therapists and tech here is a great community for therapists who are kind interested in working in tech or consulting in tech or advising tech companies. And also just building relationships with other therapists like yourself who are in the space too,

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Emily Anhalt (40:55):

Definitely and have a niche I think is helpful. I think some therapists are nervous to niche down because they don't only want to do that kind of work. And I felt that way too. At first my niche was A DHD because I'd done my research on it and I have it, and I did see a lot of people with a DH, ADHD for a little while, but that sort of naturally progressed into this entrepreneurship niche because a lot of founders and entrepreneurs have a DHD, and then I ended up helping them with all kinds of things. So I do recommend think of something that you love doing and get creative with it. One of the things I do is I was trained in couples therapy. I love couples therapy, and so I offer co-founder therapy. It's pretty much the same thing. It's really just helping two people be able to create something together, whether it's life like creating a life together as a couple or creating a company together as co-founders. And at the time, this was something that didn't exist yet, and so I just said, oh yeah, co-founder with therapy. That's something I offer, and I was using skills I already had. So think about what you love doing and are good at and figure out how can you apply it to this population or to this company or to this whatever it might be, and just put yourself out there.

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Michael Fulwiler (42:04):

That's so smart. I remember seeing somewhere that the number one reason that startups fail is not that they don't reach product market fit, it's that there's co-founder conflict, and that's the biggest reason why a lot of these companies fail is it's really about the interpersonal relationships between co-founders and executive teams. And so what a great way to position your experience as someone who's done couples work.

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Emily Anhalt (42:33):

I'd maybe give one other piece of advice, which was as a very analytic qualitative kind of clinician, I've always been so resistant to putting stats on things. I hate being like, I will lower your attrition by 68%. It's all account bullshit. You know what I mean? The work we do is not so quantitative like that, but I did learn to find research that supports what I am trying to offer and the change I am trying to make. So to be able to say to a company, Hey, did you know that burnout is responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousand dollars every year in any given company? And one of the things I help with is burnout, or to be able to say what you just said, 60% of failed startups cite co-founder conflict as one of the main reasons they failed. Guess what? I help with that. So I'm going to be able to save you a lot of money if you can appeal, because ultimately in this industry, it is very much about the money. It just is. And it doesn't mean that you have to only care about the money, but you have to meet people where they are and show them why it's worth them investing in you. So if you can say, here is the money ultimately you'll save by investing in this service, you'll be more likely, I think to have people take a chance on it.

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Michael Fulwiler (43:45):

I think that's great advice. There's a difference between guaranteeing outcomes, like you said, of all, I'm going to reduce attrition of your employees versus providing supporting evidence to build a case for why they should work with you.

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Emily Anhalt (44:00):

Perfectly said. Yeah,

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Michael Fulwiler (44:01):

I love that. I want to make sure that we talk about your book. And so I'd love to ask, how did you first get this book published? Because I talked to a lot of therapists who they have an idea for a book or they want to write a book, but the process of, do I get an agent? Do I have to write a proposal? How does that all work? Could you just break down what that process was like for you?

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Emily Anhalt (44:23):

Yeah. Also, before I do, I just want to quickly recommend if you are interested in getting into public speaking, check out a book called The Breakthrough Speaker by Smiley pki. It's a really, really great resource for people who want to get into the speaking industry. I just want to throw that one out there. And he quotes me in it, and it's just a really lovely book. So for the actual book, I also kind of lucked into all of that in the sense that I had a literary agent attend one of my keynotes, and afterwards he wrote to me and said, this should really be a book. Let's talk about it. And at the time, I was just starting coa, so I kind of put him off. I was like, yeah, that sounds great, but I'm so busy right now. I can barely handle what I have.

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(45:04):

And he's like, okay. And then a few years later, we noticed that people were taking up this language that we'd been using about emotional fitness, et cetera, and my co-founder encouraged me. She's like, I think it is time to write that book. So I went back to the agent and he really helped me put a proposal together, and then he did all of the heavy lifting of shopping that proposal to publishers. And I did end up getting a publishing deal with Putnam Imprint of Penguin Random House, and it would've been really hard for me to do that without the agent, but you sacrifice things when you go that route too. The agent gets 15%, the publisher gets essentially 90%. You're going to make a lot less in some ways, I guess it depends on your advance, that kind of thing, but they take care of a lot of things for you.

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(45:46):

So you have to decide what route to go. But the first step is the idea and the proposal, and there are ways to get support with that. I paid some money out of my own pocket for an editor who had experience writing proposals to really help me take my ideas and put them in the format that publishers want to see. So that could be something worth investing in. Then this is another place where I really recommend finding community. There are a lot of therapists who are writing books now. Find those therapists writing books, ask them what they wish they'd known, ask them if they like their agent, and if so, can they refer you to them? That kind of thing. It'll help a lot.

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Michael Fulwiler (46:22):

It sounds like you started with an agent, but the agent found you. So if you're looking for an agent, do you typically have to have a proposal that you're kind of pitching to an agent first?

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Emily Anhalt (46:33):

I dunno the answer to that. I think agents are probably going to want to see something. And I will say that one of the reasons I think both my agent and my publisher took a chance on me is because I had this big following already, and unfortunately these days, they kind of want you to sell your own book, even though part of the appeal of going with them is that they help you with all of that. So I've been told build a follow first, then write the book. But I also think that, again, that's all in pursuit of making things as big and grand as possible. If you have a book in you and you want to write it and you want people to read it, then forget all that. Just do it because the world needs more qualified, trained people in psychology talking about all kinds of things.

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Michael Fulwiler (47:18):

The advice that I've heard is make sure that you really want to write this book because you're not going to make a lot of money doing it. Likely some people get a big, but for a first book, that's typically not the case unless you are someone who's famous or you have a big audience. The kind of money that you make on book sales, the royalties on those book sales is not very much unless you're selling millions of copies. And also it's just a lot of work you can take a year. What was the actual book writing process like for you? Was that kind easier? You already had all of the content

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Emily Anhalt (47:55):

In your head? I would not call it easy. I mean, I give so much cred to my editor, to my agent, to my publisher. They helped me a lot along the way, just kind of stick with it. It is a grind and I'm more comfortable speaking than I am writing. So I really had to learn how to sort of translate that. But I also have a classic ADHD brain where I do everything at the last minute. So my process was a lot of procrastinating followed by furious intense work as various deadlines approach. So you kind have to figure out what works for you. It is a real undertaking. It's an endeavor. It will take up a lot of your time. It will be difficult, but there's also something really beautiful about it, so proceed with caution. But if it sounds exciting, it's worth looking

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Michael Fulwiler (48:36):

Into. I also think it opens up other opportunities, right? Because once you're a published author, you may become more appealing as a speaker. You wrote the book on this topic, so then companies may be more likely or interested in hiring you to speak about it, or maybe you can go to conferences and speak

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Emily Anhalt (48:53):

About it. That's a good business card. It legitimizes you in a particular way,

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Michael Fulwiler (48:57):

Definitely. For therapists, is this a book that therapists can use with their clients?

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Emily Anhalt (49:03):

Yeah, that's a good question. I think what is useful about this book is I think my superpower is taking overly complex jargony psychological concepts and explaining them in really digestible ways. And anyone who's trained analytically, if they read my book, they'll be able to see all kinds of analytic concepts hiding in there. But I'm not using that complicated language very much, and I'm trying to make it somewhat actionable. And so I think that the book can be really useful to therapists as an example of how we can merge these worlds. And most of the examples I use in the book are of people in tech. So if that industry is interesting to you, it's a nice peek into what my work with that population can look like. And then maybe I would also just plug the idea that emotional fitness is even more important for therapists than it is for anyone else. Because we're in the position of supporting other people with their mental health. We need to be fit. We need to be supporting ourselves in this way if we're going to be doing this work. And I do think the book is a helpful way to think about how you might peek into your own blind spots and how you might apply the things you're telling other people to your own self.

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Michael Fulwiler (50:10):

Absolutely. Very, very true. We'll make sure to include the link to order. I'm excited to read it. I can't wait. And so at this point, we're kind of coming towards the end of this conversation, Dr. This has been amazing. We are trying something new this season where we wrap up these conversations with a series of rapid fire questions. I have themed these around emotional fitness. So first one, do you have a favorite trait? So of the seven traits of emotional fitness, do you have a favorite? And if so,

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Emily Anhalt (50:42):

Sure. So just to go over them, the seven traits are mindfulness, curiosity, self-awareness, resilience, empathy, communication, and playfulness. And I would say my favorite is probably playfulness because it's unexpected. And I think play is a hugely undervalued thing that we all need to be prioritizing in adulthood and in the world of therapy. In a way, therapy is really just teaching people how to play. People come to therapy and don't know how to make use of this as if sort of space where things can be real and not real at the same time. And a lot of our work is teaching people how to lean into that and be playful with us in new ways. And so I think playfulness has been my favorite.

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Michael Fulwiler (51:28):

I love that. And I think it makes therapy feel like such a not so serious thing. It can be serious, and it is at times, but it doesn't have to be. You can laugh in therapy, right? For sure. You talk about this idea of an emotional pushup. So can you give us an example of what an emotional pushup is?

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Emily Anhalt (51:46):

Yeah, so an emotional pushup is anything that puts you just a little outside of your comfort zone so you can grow And if you just do one, you're probably not going to get a lot stronger. But if you're doing them every day, you will become more emotionally strong. So what's uncomfortable for me might not be uncomfortable for you. So emotional pushups are kind of individual things, but some examples might be not being on your phone right before bed one night. It might be apologizing for mistake. It might be holding a boundary saying no, even though you want to say yes, but you know that you shouldn't. It might be something like asking for feedback. One of the pushups I tell people to try is send a text to a few people in your life right now that says, what's one thing I'm doing well as a friend or a boss or sibling or whatever, and what's one thing I could do 10% better? And then really lean into what you get back. Take a second to see how it lands in you and consider it, that kind of thing. So think of one little thing that you might avoid in your life because it's a bit uncomfortable and lean into it today. And that's an emotional pushup.

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Michael Fulwiler (52:45):

What's your favorite self-care activity right now?

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Emily Anhalt (52:49):

My favorite self-care activity is that I put in my AirPods. I pull up a podcast of some kind, and I take a one hour walk around the city and I pretend like I'm in a city I've never been before. I pretend like I'm a tourist in my own city. So I'll just go to a different neighborhood. I'll just try to see things with fresh eyes, and I'm just kind of enjoying my little podcast or music, and I'll stop in a bakery or whatever it is. And I treat my own home, like this gift, this lovely vacation like experience. And I try to do that actually about once a week.

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Michael Fulwiler (53:22):

Love that. So the next time you're listening to this show, take a walk. Yeah. Take a walk around your city. What's one company that you'd love to work with, either as a speaker or as a consultant that you haven't been able to work with yet?

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Emily Anhalt (53:35):

I'm going to broaden it a little, which is an industry I'd really love to lean more into is higher education. I think that universities are full of people who could really use some emotional fitness support, and I would love to be doing a circuit of going to different universities and talking about the seven traits.

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Michael Fulwiler (53:53):

We're putting that out into the universe. Let's manifest. So you're listening to this, you're affiliated with the university, reach out to dr. And finally, what's one thing that you want therapists to take away from this

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Emily Anhalt (54:07):

Conversation? I would like to say that therapists have taken a difficult path. They've decided that it's worth their time and resources to learn complicated things and to do it the hard way. And that in and of itself is so beautiful and so commendable, and it's so easy to have some imposter syndrome in this industry and to not always know if what you're doing is working, but just know that you have spent more time learning and practicing this craft than most people will ever do at anything. And give yourself a lot of credit for that. And while we should always have a learning mindset, I think there's also something so important about stopping and celebrating yourself along the way the world needs. You get out there and spread that knowledge.

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Michael Fulwiler (54:56):

Absolutely. Well, Dr. Anhalt, thank you so much. This has been so fun. Where can folks find you online if they're interested in learning more about the work that you do and also if they would like to order your book?

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Emily Anhalt (55:08):

Yes, let's connect. I am at Dr. Emily Anhalt on all the things. So find me on whatever social platform you like to be on, and my website is dr emily anhalt.com. And for the book, I think you'll put the link in there, right? But if you type flex Your Feelings into Amazon or Barnes and Noble or anywhere that you get books, you will see that pop up.

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Michael Fulwiler (55:33):

Go order the book. Dr. Anhalt, thank you so much.

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Emily Anhalt (55:36):

Thank you so much. It's been such an honor, and I really appreciate the work that you're doing to support therapists. I have a lot of respect for Heard, and I've been your biggest fan for a really long time. So thanks for having me. Appreciate that.

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Michael Fulwiler (55:47):

Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Heard Business School, brought to you by Heard, the financial management platform for therapists. To get the class notes for this week's episode, go to join Heard.com/podcast. And don't forget to subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll see you in the next.

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