THURSDAY IS THE NEW FRIDAY WITH JOE SANOK | EP 28

[DAWN GABRIEL] Faith Fringes is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith in Practice, Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic or Impact Driven Leader, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, host of Faith Fringes Podcast, recording live from Castle Rock Colorado, not only where I love to live, but I also work as the owner of a counseling center in the historic downtown. This podcast is a place to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. For those desiring deeper connection with God and engaging their spirituality in new ways, this will be a safe place to allow doubt, questions and curiosity, without judgment. We will be creating intentional space to listen in on other’s faith journeys, whether that is deconstruction or reconstruction, with the hope of traveling alongside you on your own spiritual path. If you’re interested in getting even more out of this podcast, grab my free email course Spiritual Reflections on my websitefaithfringes.com. Welcome to the podcast. Hello, welcome back to the podcast. This is Dawn Gabriel, your host. So I don’t know about you guys, but it is fall where I am at and I am seeing some beautiful colors. Some slight changes in weather. Being in Colorado, our weather changes a little bit drastically in fall. Like you wake up it’s like forties or fifties, but then it can be in the eighties by the afternoon, but I am enjoying the chill and the change in colors. It’s so fun. Fall is my favorite season and so I’m very excited. With the change, it also, I feel like it makes you reflect on what do I need to change? What needs to change for me? And for those who’ve been listening to my episodes in order, not that you have to, but I just recorded episode 27 where I talk about the unexpected good that came when I experienced COVID. It’s interesting, in there, I talk about how I need to slow down and how it was a forced rest and how much that actually was super spiritual for me and I feel like God invited me into this place of just reevaluating some things in my life and getting back to some values that I needed to bring back and that I needed to get boundaries around. So it’s interesting because today’s episode, I’m going to be interviewing one of my consultants that I’ve been working with over the past year or two. He actually wrote a book called Thursday is the New Friday and we talk about his new book. It actually is coming out October 5th. So I think this episode goes live October 6th. So you can get his book today. You’ll hear all about it, but his book is actually about slowing down so you can have a better life, but also you’re more productive, you’re more creative and everything that happens when we slow down and learn to rest. So it’s interesting how all this is happening in the same month. I feel like, again, it’s another invitation from God to say, “Hey, walk with me, listen to what I’m saying. Just walk with me. No running, just walk, just be.” So let me tell you about our guest today. It’s Joe sand. He is the host of the popular, the Practice of the Practice podcast, which is recognized as one of the top 50 podcasts worldwide. He has over a hundred thousand downloads each month. Bestselling authors, experts and scholars and business leaders and innovators are all featured and interviewed in the 550 plus podcast he has done over the last six years. I highly recommend the podcast. It’s been instrumental to many people in helping them launch their therapy business and even just helping with life. Joe has been actually named a top therapist resource for his podcast, blogging and consultant services. And for those of you wondering, I highly recommend checking out his podcast and actually joining one of his communities, whether that’s Next Level Practice or his mastermind groups, or even Consulting with Joe. And at the end of this episode, you will hear how you can join one of his mastermind groups by buying some of his books. It’s going to be really cool offer he’s giving. So check it out at the end. It’ll also be in the show notes, but today we are going to be talking about his new book out, which is again, Thursday is the New Friday. And I just want to say welcome Joe, to the podcast. [JOE SANOK] Dawn, I’m so excited to be here with you. [DAWN] Yes, I am excited because this is going to go live the same week your book is out and that is what I want to talk to you about today, because I haven’t been able to read it yet, but tell us about Thursday is the New Friday and more about like, I’d love to hear the background; why did this book come about, how did it come about, anything like that? [JOE] Well, Thursday is the New Friday is all about why the four-day work week is better for society, creativity and productivity. For me, it’s interesting as I’ve written this book to think back about kind of why this book within my career path. Sometimes in life we have these kind of upward trajectories and sometimes it’s a returning home and I really recognize that this was more of a returning home than anything. I remember my freshman year of college, it was my freshman orientation, so I’m sitting down with the academic advisors, we’re in a small group and they said, right, we’re going to make your schedules. I raise my hand, I’m still in high school about to graduate, I’m like, “Well, do we have classes on Friday?” And they’re like, “No, this is college. You can do whatever you want.” I’m like, “Awesome.” So throughout all of undergrad and grad school, I never had a Friday class except for one semester that had that one mandatory class on a Friday. Then I went into my first job as a counselor and I was offered the job and I was very used to working four-days a week. So I negotiated to have a four-week in my first job out of grad school. So to have lived it from all through college and then my first job I eventually got into the regular work world and then consulting and podcasting, but then when I left my full-time job in 2015 to do my private practice and do the podcasting as my main source of income that first summer I took Fridays off. And I didn’t experiment that summer to see if I could have the outcomes I wanted working only four-days a week but every month was financially better than the month before. So I just kept doing it. And I’ve continued to teach people how to do that and didn’t ever really realize that that was a mega superpower to teach people how to work fewer hours, but to get better outcomes. [DAWN] Wow. I love hearing the background because I know, I’ve heard of, I first heard about your book a year ago when we were actually in like a dream big retreat. I remember you totally were talking about how to slow down to be better productive and it was life changing for me. So that’s cool. I didn’t realize you started that way back in college. [JOE] Yes, it’s funny how you think that something is new to yourself and then you’re like, wait a second. This was here back in college. And that idea of not just following the typical script is actually something that in a lot of ways that I’ve done, but didn’t recognize it being something that was special in the world. [DAWN] Yes, and like you said, it was more turning back to home to you. Like it sounded like a deeper value in the way you found life work. How did it go from that to, I’m going to write a book actually? Like that’s a big transition, this is how I live and I’m teaching people, but now I’m going to write a book? [JOE] So that was actually kind of a difficult process to figure out. In late 2000 I asked myself kind of what that next big thing was for me. So every year or two I’ll do that where I’ll say, “Ok, I freed up space in my schedule. No what’s that next big thing? So at sometimes that was adding mastermind groups, it was adding membership communities, starting conferences and then writing a traditionally published book was kind of the next big thing for me. So I went through that process of finding an agent and eventually found Greg who I know you get to meet through the art of dreaming big. And then he referred me to Nancy, my writing coach and Nancy and I spent every Thursday talking for about two to three hours for almost a year of her getting me to talk about how I do my work. And for a while, I’m like, what are we doing here? We’re just chatting over and over. What she was actually doing was trying to figure out what, from what I teach is someone else’s content is me kind of regurgitating or taking something that someone else has taught and maybe just adding my own flare to it versus more original content, like my core belief. Because the goal was that this first book would be something that for 10 or 20 years, I can hand to people and say, this is how I think, read this first, then let’s do consulting or then let’s join the mastermind group or then join membership community while also leveling up beyond just kind of the therapy world. So finding that tightrope of where is that sweet spot really it was working with Nancy to just talk and talk and talk until she, as an expert was able to say, Joe, here’s what I hear over and over as your super power and I really think this aligns with where kind of book buys are going right now. Because she knows the pulse of the industry. She’s a former Harper Collins editor. She knew who had bought what recently and what angle to take. So really it was having someone that I trusted that was in the industry that could guide me and say, “Joe, here’s what I see in you and here’s where that actually lines up with what they’re buying right now.” [DAWN] Wow. That process seems like intimidating and vulnerable all at once and exciting. [JOE] Yes. Oh it’s it was all of it. And also to make sure you don’t lose yourself in it because I didn’t want to just write a book that someone would buy. I wanted to write a book that I could passionately stand behind also. So there were some ideas in the original pitch that I said that just doesn’t feel good to me as to what I want to be teaching on an ongoing basis or the way we phrased that I just don’t, that’s not, I would never say it that way. So it’s interesting in this process, how you perceive Harper Collins as being this huge, amazing book publisher, then there’s still people helping make decisions. And even the name of the book I had come up with Thursday is the New Friday and then they had all these other titles that their team had come up with and you think, oh, like Harper Collins’s marketing. One of them was work less, make more. I’m like I have heard that a billion time. That does not sound like Joe Sanok at all. But we had to do some testing then with some different markets and luckily Thursday is the New Friday was right on up there with work less, make more. Otherwise if it was like only 5% of the people even liked the title, I’d have to say, well, oh man, maybe we have to rename it. So you just can give up a lot of control if you allow it to happen. [DAWN] Wow. Let’s jump in a little bit more of, let’s get some more nitty gritty of what is it about Thursday is the New Friday that is different that you say, these are my passion points and this is what I’m really talking about, not just how to work four-days. What would you say are those bigger moments for you in the book? [JOE] I remember a moment in writing the book that I wrote some stuff in the book that wasn’t in the original proposal, but was just so enlightening to me that it had to be the beginning of the book. When I started writing, I wrote two big whiteboards in my office and I just said, I’m just going to brainstorm where I would start if I were starting from scratch on the four-day work week. What questions would I have? And right away it was, where do we get the 40-hour work week? Why do we have a seven day week? There’s all these questions around just time and how we view it because I really believe if we don’t understand our history then it’s really hard for us to know what we really could deconstruct and what is harder to deconstruct. And I figured if we could figure out, if the way we view time right now, is it as solid as it feels or is there some wiggle room there? To me, that’s where I started. So I went back to the Babylonians, 4,000, some years ago. They made up the seven-day week. They looked up and they saw the sun and the moon, they saw the earth, mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, the seven brightest things they saw, and they said, let’s have a seven-day week. So these power brokers, 4,000 plus years ago made up the seven-day week. There’s nothing in nature that points to seven. A year makes sense because it’s how long it takes us to go around the sun. A day makes sense. That’s how long it takes to spin. Months loosely line up with the moon, but we just as easily could have a five-day week and have 73 weeks a year. So we were just starting with that was totally made up. The Egyptians had an eight-day week. The Romans had a 10-day week. That really is made up. And then fast forward, I’m like what, what is super normal is actually just made up. And then when we look at the late 1800s, early 1900s, the average person was working 10 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week. So they were working a farmer’s schedule, even if they weren’t a farmer. So when Henry Ford comes in 1926 and says, we’re going to switch over to the 40-hour work week for everybody within Ford, and for the most part, it was to sell more cars to his own employees. He said that if people had a weekend, they would then buy a car because they’d want to make the most out of their weekend. They wouldn’t buy a car just to get to work faster. So then this power broker in 1926 in Detroit changes the way that we view things. So if we then fast forward to the pandemic of 2020 and 2021, we deconstructed everything the industrialists gave us. This way of working that we thought was just based on hours in the chair, completely changed. And now we see this great resignation of people saying, I’m not going to go back to working for these industrialists. They just want me to sit in a chair for 40-hours. I want to do something meaningful. I want to do something flexible. So by understanding kind of us as the post pandemic generation and saying, okay, the week was made up, the 40-hours was made up, we can be the future. This was all made up. At some point a hundred years from now, they might say, man, that generation post-pandemic gave us the four-day work week. That was a step forward for humanity, but we can continue to do better. [DAWN] I love that. It’s so true. The timing of this is, yes, everyone is reconsidering how they work and how many hours, whether it’s at home or in the office. Everything is shifted. I love that. But yes, at the same time it’s making us really look on like a countercultural type of view and we have to change some major things to make that happen. Yes, it’s like we have to sit with it for a while in our heads to figure it out. [JOE] Well, and more and more, the research is pointing to it. I mean the recent ice study, it was a multi-year study looking at a 32-hour week, over four-days. So it wasn’t 40-hours cramed into four. It was a genuine 32-hour week and they found that those people were actually more productive in 32 hours than they had been with 40. So you would think with A2 percent drop in time, you’d see a 20% drop in productivity, but it basically showed that that last eight hours just doesn’t even matter. We shouldn’t be working it. It’s not more productive. People also had better health outcomes, they were happier. So we’re seeing over and over that smart companies like Kickstarter or countries like Spain and Portugal or New Zealand are starting to test out the four-day work week in order to get these better health outcomes, better productivity, better overall creativity. Because when you really think about what we’re going to need in the 21st century, we’re going to need creative minds. We have challenges we have yet even discover. Even thinking about you and I, we are doing things as podcasters that weren’t even invented whole we were in school. We are getting trained in things that we have to adjust and be creative to apply that we would to something that had not been invented. There wasn’t podcasts when I was in college. So that idea of we’re training our kids and this next generation to be creative, adaptable individuals that are going to be able to actually do jobs that have yet to be created. [DAWN] I feel like that word adaptive is so true and it’s so important in the last year and a half, even of you have to be adaptive or you’re going to fizzle out, you’re going to die. I mean, your business will die and yes, you had to adapt. So, but this also more than adapting, this sounds like so vital to holistic health, like emotional, but also productivity. I mean, it feels like from what you’re saying and what you’ve researched, that it affects more than just your productivity. It affects your emotional and mental health as you’re able to work. [JOE] Absolutely. I mean, you think about the way we were working pre pandemic. Were the health outcomes, the mental health outcomes, the lifestyle outcomes, the time we had to engage with our kids or our friends, were those optimized? Were those the best that they could be for humanity? I would say, most of us would say, absolutely not. No, we were burned out, maxed out, adulting was harder than it should have been. And we can then step back and say, okay, intentionally, how are we going to do this differently? We don’t have to do this. And it doesn’t have to be just an affluent white thing. It can be something that we across the board say we as a society, believe that we are worse off when we just burn ourselves out this much and we need to look systemically about how we switch to a four-day work week so that we can have better outcomes in all these different areas. [DAWN] I’m going to ask a personal question here. I’ll tell you why. For example, I’ve been shifting my mindset of slowing down to work better, but yet I feel like things still sneak back in and find myself working five, six days and not like even it may be sometimes seven days I’ll work, not like all day long, but like really needing boundaries and having to retrain my brain. In fact, I just got over COVID, which took me out for two and a half weeks but it was Joe, I just dropped a podcast episode on it, a solo episode talking about how it changed my life. It was spiritual in fact, because I had forced slowing down to nothing and that revolutionized, I came out of that, looking at my business differently and my time with my kids, everything you just said, and then like two weeks later I realized, oh, I let it get away from. So I guess my, and realizing, no, I want to go back to slowing down. So my personal question to you is do you ever find yourself sneaking in that fifth day or it like overlaps and you’re like, “Oh wait, I got to come back.” Or is it just this easy thing of, “Nope, I’m going to work four-days and that’s it?” [JOE] I mean, I think that there there’s times that it gets busier and times that it’s easier to work that four-day week. I’ve been doing it so long that now I’ve developed such clear, hard and soft boundaries that it really makes it near impossible for me to overwork. And that’s because I’ve set up these boundaries and these habits that it feels icky for me to not do what I’m supposed to do. So for example, if I had a new podcast or consulting client that I’m doing a pre-con consulting call with, and they said, I want to meet with you every Friday. I’m going to give you your highest rate ever. I wrote a book about not working on Friday. That’s a hard boundary that I’m not going to break. After my kids are in bed, at the end of my day, I close out all my work tabs so that I’m not tempted when the kids are in bed to just check a couple emails or just look at a few things on my schedule or just record a couple podcasts. Those exceptions I’ve set are super hard book ends of what my day looks like when I’m done. Now there’s soft boundaries. If Jess, my director of details text me on a Friday morning, that Practice of the Practice is on fire, I’m not going to say, “Ok, let it burn till Monday morning.” I’m going to go through it. We’re going to put out the fire. We’re going to figure out what the flare up is, and on Monday we’re going to look at well, why was it that Joe was the linchpin to bring us together and to solve this problem? Who else needs access to certain aspects of things? Why aren’t we able to pause or mute someone on social media that was treating us inappropriately? Whatever the fire is, we’re going to then look at the process where I became the one that had to solve it, because I want to empower my team to be able to do that within their best judgment. They may say, “Hey, on Friday we had this flare up. This is how we took care of it. It’s 80% done. Joe, we need your feedback on the final 20%. That’s totally fine. But being able to say, as someone that’s an entrepreneur, I have ideas all the time, but that doesn’t to I’m when I’m playing Mario Cart with my kids, I’m going to pause and go write a blog post. I may pause and like write a note to myself for Monday morning to capture that so I don’t lose it, but I’m not going to just disrupt my whole life around it. So the more you do it, the easier it gets and then you start to see these results where I could not be at this level of having a Harper Collins published book if I hadn’t slowed down over the last five years. [DAWN] Yes. Oh, there’s so much in there that I feel, I was taking notes. I mean, it sounds like you first started with there’s like this internal knowing when I hit a boundary and go over and it feels gross to me. You said icky. But it was based on your values. You had already set some hard boundaries and that lended you to be able to know when a soft boundary needs to be pushed. But at the same time, I heard you talk about systems, like I need to look at my systems and that actually goes back into some other things I was hoping you could talk about, is I work with the lot of therapists and a lot of therapists listen to this podcast and I feel like can we make it even more practical for therapists that are running their own business? And I think the thing I’ve been noticing in the last couple years is there’s such a difference between running a group practice when you’re a therapist and then just running another business, because, I call it the therapist matrix because you have so much training to know your own issues, know the issues of the your team. So there’s so much like emotional, sacred space, you’re holding and working on all your stuff. Sometimes that can bleed into everything and so I feel like let’s make it practical for therapists. What would you say, boundaries and how can therapists do this and actually slow down, especially group practice owners who are running full speed and they usually love it sometimes? [JOE] Well, I think one thing is separating the business from your own ego and personality. To me, the amount of times that I’ve heard someone say that it’s really hard to let go of control because this business is my baby makes me want to puke because, I will never kill my child, but there are times you need to kill a business. There are times you need to kill arms of a business. There are times you need to fire people and get rid of them, or just shut it down for a while, be for your own mental health. So this is not your baby. Let’s just start with that. This is something you’ve done to create income for your family, that you hope reflects your values, that you hope does good for the world, that you want to address the mental health access crisis, all those things. And there might be a time when you need to kill it or sell it. I’m not going to kill my kid. I’m not going to sell my kid. So let’s just step back and say the way we talk about our business is often inappropriate. Once we realize that it becomes a lot easier to say, okay, what do I want out of this business? So, for example, when I had my private practice that I sold in 2019, I wanted a business I could show up at, I could make really good money at, and I could go home. I didn’t feel the need to have barbecues with the people I work with or have a new friend group. Like I have enough friends as its. Now, the people that I attracted were the same. They wanted to show up, do good work, be a team when we were there, but we aren’t going to do all these team building activities and going out to eat together and wasting our time doing that stuff. Now there’s other people that have practices that they want that sense of community. They want that sense of family. They want to have that depth with people. That’s awesome. That’s your practice, but identifying even what you want out of your practice, I think is first, before you even get into the systems. And then for me, the give and take is always that I have the plate of things that I’m working on, that I need to slowly be taking things off of that, that I can automate through people or through systems or just eliminate it completely from the plate so that I free up that extra energy and time to put it into the big, risky, fun things. So there’s like the systems that some people find interesting, I find kind of boring, but it’s so important because the only way that I can put in the amount of hours I put into say launching this book is because I have an amazing team that has systems that are giving me dashboards that take me one or two minutes a day to know how things are because they’re reporting out to me the basics of the entire ecosystem. [DAWN] Wow. I feel like this is a consulting episode. I’m totally writing notes down. This is awesome. And I feel like you did what you do really well. You got just straight to the point, but also on a deep level, like stop talking about your business as a baby. I love that. And just identifying what you really want from the business and then always be looking at your plate. Wow, these are some really good tips and one thing I want to say as we are getting ready to close is that I’ve been really noticing how slowing down to me has been more of a spiritual experience. I feel like you have to like dig deeper into your soul and really look at it makes you look at your values. It makes you look at what’s important purpose in your life and that will then therefore go into your business. Have you noticed any like spiritual things that have come up for you as you’re looking at this? [JOE] Yes, I mean, overworking can be as much of a vice or a distraction as drinking or drugs or overeating or not living a healthy lifestyle. So when you reign that in, you’re left with yourself. And anytime you’re left with yourself, you notice your negative habits so much faster. So you notice your tendency to play games on your phone or your tendency to not do things that are good for you. So by slowing down, what’s great about it and spiritual about it is it often exposes the real you on a deeper level than if you just kept working and working and working. You’re left with oftentimes being a little bit bored and just say, well, what have I filled my life with other than work? Well, ok, I’m going to take, so for example, me, I’ve taken up watercolor painting over the last, last six months. I love how the water has its own personality. I’ll have a vision for something and the water does something different and it used to really me off, but now like, okay, I’m learning to be adaptable with my art. Or I’ve been learning to play November Rain, the Guns and Roses song on the piano. It’s just this epic bell I’ve wanted to learn since I was a kid. So I’m watching these YouTube videos at one quarter speed, playing a note at a time is just fun. Or I joined an improv troop or I was asked to be, to fill in for a curling team when they need someone. So to find these things that give me life that’s then going to lead to a greater spiritual experience because I’m in community. I’m connecting with people. I’m creating art. I’m spending time in nature and with music and doing things that fill me up in a different way beyond just having it be through business. [DAWN] Wow. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing even your personal stories, how that relates to your business, but also how it really impacts you. I’ve really appreciated just sharing. Tell us more if people want to get ahold of you or where should they look on social media and your book, anything in closing. [JOE] Yes, my website is joesanok.com. We have all sorts of resources, my keynote speeches, podcasting, all that over there. We also have the new Thursday is the New Friday podcast, which by the time this goes live, we’ll have dropped all 22 episodes of the first season. The team did an amazing job with that. But the biggest thing is purchasing Thursday is the New Friday. The book’s available everywhere starting October 21. We have an amazing mastermind group we’re kicking off the first Thursday of November 2021 that’s going to six sessions where anyone that buys 10 copies of the book then just submits their receipt over at thursdayisthenewfriday.com you get access to that. We have so many amazing podcasters, entrepreneurs, big thinkers that are joining that. So the first bit of that mastermind group is going to be us just talking about concepts from the book and going beyond that. Then we have a few hot seats to help people practically implement Thursday is the New Friday and the four-day work week. But then the most important part to me is the networking with other people there. I want you to leave with six to 10 new friends and contacts that you say I want to collaborate with you. I want to know you, help me level up because that’s, to me where the biggest value is when you get great minds together and you help them just connect with each other. So all you do is you buy 10 books, wherever you buy books, and then go over to thursdayisthenewfriday.com and submit your receipt to join that group. [DAWN] Yes, and I highly recommend joining a mastermind group. I agree the community and network you provide is amazing and it lasts a long time. So, Joe, thank you so much for time. I appreciate it and I can’t wait to get my hands on the copy. Well, I bought a few copies but I can’t wait to read your book coming out October 5th. [JOE] Thank you so much, Dawn. [DAWN] Thank you for listening today at Faith Fringes Podcast. If you want to explore more of your own faith journey, I offer my free eight-week email course called Spiritual Reflections, where you take a deeper dive into your own story included as a journaling workbook that has guided exercises. So if you want to explore more of what you were brought up to believe, or even look at where you may have been disillusioned or hurt, but yet still deep down you desire to authentically connect with God, then this course is for you. Just go to faithfringes.com to sign up. Also, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email and tell me what’s on your mind. You can reach me at dawn@faithfringes.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.