Carve Out Space For Your Next Thing With Sarah Buino

Rebel Therapist

When you step into a big project or a big pivot, you've got to carve out some space, time and energy.

Meet Sarah Buino who has been doing just that.

Sarah had a very full time job as a group practice owner with 12 staff people, and knew there was something else she was meant to do with healers on a larger scale. She talked to me about how she set her group practice up to require much less of her so that she could step into this new work without overworking or burning out.

Here's a bit more about her:

Sarah Buino, LCSW, RDDP, CADC, CDWF is a speaker, teacher, therapist and the founder and president of Head/Heart Therapy, Inc. She’s a member of the adjunct faculty at Loyola University Chicago and hosts the podcast Conversations With a Wounded Healer, which examines the role of one’s own healing while being a care-giving professional. Sarah is obsessed with her 10-lb chihuahua named Batman.

Here's some of what we talked about:

• Building Head Heart Therapy, a therapy center for weirdos with a staff of 12
• Hosting 2 podcasts and making that manageable
• Podcasting tools Sarah and Annie both use
• Figuring out what she needs to do less of so that she can create new things
• Finding her role as a mentor with her staff
• Moving into the work of helping therapists and therapy organizations
• Balancing her agenda with responding to what's happening in her organization
• Managing different people differently
• Creating The Ordinary Trauma Project and writing a book
• Taking a month-long sabbatical to make progress on the book
• Emotionally preparing for the publication

Here are some takeaways that particularly stand out to me:

Takeaway #1:

Sarah has built a team and handed over the day-to-day of the group practice so that she can step into her life's work of helping therapists heal.

"What I want to do is help therapists heal and I can't help my staff heal because I'm their boss. And so there's a place that I love mentoring and I love supervising, but it's not the same as helping them heal. And so throughout the sabbatical, I was really thinking: how is it that I can create space to make this shift so that I can really step into what I truly think is my life's work."

Takeaway #2:

You've got to carve out time and energy to work on new projects. You can't necessarily just pile them onto what you've already got going on. Sarah took a month-long sabbatical to focus on her book.

"I could wake up and be like, what do I want to do? What time do I want to start writing today? Right. What chapter do I want to work on today? So. Yeah. So I took a month to focus on the book."

Takeaway #3:

In addition to carving out time and energy for a big project, we've got to gather enough permission and safety. When we do brave and visible things and ask more of ourselves, we need to set up more support because it's hard and it's vulnerable.

"(When the book comes out) I think it will be an extended period of wrapping myself in love and comfort and care, and definitely not reading reviews."

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/161