Lessons From A Client

I have often said that I think I have gotten more from my clients than they have gotten from me. And I truly wish I could go and thank every single client that has come into my office for the inspiration and the gifts and the way that they’ve changed my life. And today I want to give you a tangible example because something happened this week that kind of put that into my mind.

So I want to tell you what happened this week first. I spoke at an event, a virtual event several months ago, and someone I went to graduate school with was in the audience of this virtual event. And I hadn’t talked to this person like 15 years, we reconnected, she asked me to lunch and we went to lunch and she asked me like how have you accomplished all of the things that you’ve accomplished? Like I remember going to graduate school and now you’ve written books and you’ve done keynotes. You traveled the world.

Like, and I, and you know, I often don’t think about these things, but I sat and thought about it. And I thought about a client, it was a couple, I saw many, many years ago, and this couple came to therapy and they were, what they would describe as like, bored in their relationship. They weren’t like the kind of couple that was fighting and arguing or anything about ending the relationship. But they were definitely like, we’ve gotten into a rut, things have gotten off track and we need to, we need to like spice up our lives.

And we were like, we’re just really boring. When we were in college, we were super exciting. And now, you know, we’ve got two kids and a house and we’re professionals and we’ve just gotten in this rut and wewant to get out of it. Then I asked them to tell me what they were like in college, as you describe yourselves as like really exciting in college, what were you doing differently in college?

And I’ll never forget. The husband turned to the wife. And he said, remember our sexual bucket list. And I was like sexual bucket list. And he said, yeah, like we had a bunch of things that were like on our like intimacy bucket list, like things we wanted to do together. And I won’t go into detail of what was in their sexual bucket list.

And a couple of weeks later, they came back and they said, we revisited this bucket list. We added more to this bucket list. We started doing things on the bucket list. And now we experience ourselves as being like invigorated again and, and exciting again. And, you know, we’re happy and moving forward. And then that was that. So I had never thought of having like bucket lists for different parts of your life until that couple. Now I had heard of the idea of having like a bucket list, but I didn’t, I had never thought about having like a bucket list for like specific parts of your life.

So they left my office and I got out a pen and paper, and I wrote down my professional bucket list and I wrote down all the things I wanted to accomplish professionally. I just sat there kind of thinking and just wrote down some of the things. I wanted to talk, wanted to write a book. This was before I had done any paid lectures. So I want somebody to pay me to fly and do an event. That just seemed like such a cool goal to have such a cool thing. And I wrote that down. I wanted to have a private practice that I could comfortably live off of and I wrote it down. So all of these things on his bucket list, and now here we are several years later and I’m having lunch with my friend. And I’m saying like, one of the ways that I accomplished these things is I wrote out this like professional bucket list.

And it helped me have like a vision for my future and make decisions that were in line with that future. Now, if I review that bucket list, I actually still have it. I’ve accomplished every single thing I wrote down, except one there’s one more thing I have to, I have to do, which I’m not going to say what it is, but there’s one more thing I have to do.

And I’m hopeful that I’ll get to do it, but it just makes me think like this preferred future stuff, it really does matter. And by going through that experience with that couple, it forced me to think about my future professionally and like the future I wanted to create. And here I am years later, and I’ve created that future except for one thing that, like I said, there’s one more thing on the list that I got to do.

So I want you guys to think about that. Like, what are your bucket list things for your relationship, for your profession, for your life, even, and writing those things down it has the same impact as if you’re asking yourself the tomorrow question, it makes an impact on you. So I’m so glad I get to connect with my friend. Her name is Gina. I’m so glad that Gina and I from graduate school, got to have lunch and reconnect. And I got to sit and reflect. Cause I hadn’t thought about that in a while, but that’s a significant reason I’m able to accomplish things. And I promise if you do a bucket list for yourself, it’ll help you accomplish things too. So see you in the next video, I hope you enjoyed it later.

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