[LEXIE LEE] The Married Entrepreneurs Podcast 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 Bomb Mom and Grow A Group Practice, go to www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. [RON LEE] Welcome to the Married Entrepreneurs Podcast. This is Ron Lee. [LEXIE] I am Lexi Lee. [RON] We are professional counselors and serial entrepreneurs who are married [LEXIE] To each other. [RON] Thank you for joining us as we explore the business of life and the life of business. [RON] Welcome to the Married Entrepreneurs show. Today we’re talking about why we got into counseling, what drove us into that? [LEXIE] Yes. [RON] So I’m going to start off with asking Lexie her story. What got you into counseling Lexie? [LEXIE] Most people get into the counseling field because of their own experiences and that’s no less true for me. But not so much, I mean, I guess part of it is to fix myself because we always want to be better, but more of it is because there’s mental health issues in my family. So I grew up in a home with a parent that has bipolar and of course I’m old and that’s back when the diagnosis was manic depression and not bipolar. I got to see it firsthand on what mental health can do to a family, how it can just make everyday life hard to navigate at times because it wasn’t constant, what it can do to a marriage. My parents divorced when I was around 10 and how the system just doesn’t have at least certainly nothing, we’re getting better, how the system doesn’t have a good handle on how to help families. So that was my initial interest. But talking about that just a little bit more it’s my mom that is bipolar and if I didn’t have such a strong family structure, I don’t know that we would’ve come out of this situation as strong as we did. My mom is great. We have a great relationship, up and down. My dad is great and has always been very supportive. When I was 13, I made the choice not to live with my mom anymore, but to go live with my dad because — [RON] That had to be difficult. [LEXIE] It was a very difficult choice, not something that I think a 13 year old is really equipped to say. That’s a pretty heavy decision. [RON] What led to that decision? [LEXIE] Well, mom’s illness was up and down. Stress makes depression or manic episodes much more intense and being a single mom, raising three girls, it was very stressful. I can’t even imagine. I admire her so much for working multiple jobs. She would often work two jobs at once and I’m trying to do that. Parenting is stressful by itself when you have a person that you can tag team to and say, okay. I’m done. You take over. When you’re a single parent, you don’t get to tag team on a daily basis. It’s you most of the time. Custody situations may sometimes be different now. It was not that way when I was growing up. There wasn’t standard visitation where we knew the first, third and fifth weekend that we were going to go to dad’s. It was hit or miss. My dad had a job where he would be gone out of town a lot and so that made it even harder to do regular visitations. So all of that was very stressful on mom and then she just wasn’t handling things as well at times. So I grew up pretty quick. I was raising my sisters. I would be responsible for cooking and for keeping the house clean and taking care of them a lot of the time. I at some point realized that, okay, this is not okay that I’m taking on this much at 13. So I guess I had a little bit of wisdom. I went to have a visit with my dad who at this point was getting remarried. He’d remarried. So there was a little more stability in that house. It felt more like a traditional family. I talked to him and he respected my wishes and he didn’t know quite what all was happening in the house. So then he went and got custody of us and so the rest of my teen years were a little more stable in that I lived in what was a two-parent household with my dad and my stepmom. Then I had more regular visitations with my mom. But after we, the three of us, my sisters and I went to live with my dad that was very difficult for her. Around that same time also she lost her mom and there were a lot of family stressors that were going on. So at times I have some regrets that all that had to go down that way but that’s like the hard choices that you have to make when mental illness is in your family, knowing that sometimes decisions that you make that are better for one member may cause the other family member to have more stress. That certainly happened when my sisters and I went to go live with my dad. That was a tough time for my mom. Because she had bipolar, I was very curious about, okay, how did this is happen? What’s the cause of it? Am I going to get it? That was a fear. What is going on? So I would do lots of research. This was before Google when research was even more hard. That just kind of drove my fascination with psychology because I wanted to figure out and understand more of this struggle that my mom had. Again, a big fear was that if she has it, I could have it. That was something that I battled for a number of years. [RON] That’s got to be a very scary thing. [LEXIE] Is it this sign that I’m going to have this too? So again, that’s what led to my interest in psychology, but also I think I lived with a lot of guilt also about making the decision to go live with my dad and how hard that was on mom. Then also struggling with, I didn’t love school. I mean, I loved learning. I loved, loved — [RON] High school or college? [LEXIE] College. I didn’t love college. I started out, like I said, in previous episode as a business manager or a business major because that was practical and I didn’t want to go to school for more than four years. Everybody’s like, you can’t do anything with a four year psychology degree. I still had a practical side to me. So that’s part of why I went back and forth before I finished my master’s because I loved learning, but I didn’t necessarily believe in myself in doing the output according to what teachers wanted. It’s so funny because I was an excellent student. I just didn’t love it. So that’s the process that got me interested in being a counselor. Once I actually wrapped my brain around, dealt with my limiting beliefs and I finished my masters, then it was off to the races, working for an agency, deciding that I could do things on my, and now have a group practice and looked back on that. I was like, why did that seem so hard? Throughout that whole process, knowing that this is what God called me to be and this is still the thing that gives me so much joy, but also how being able to draw from that experience of growing up in a broken home, growing up with mental illness it drives my passion for wanting to have healthier families. I made up my mind pretty quick that divorce was not going to be an option for me. Murder maybe, but not divorce. [RON] Thanks. [LEXIE] But I really believe that when you just make a decision, I love the meaning of different words and the meaning of decide is to cut off all of the options. So for us, we decided that we were going to be married. Luckily I had a good picker because a lot of times that’s an issue. So I picked someone who had very similar beliefs and while, I’m sorry, you’re not perfect, but you, anyway you do have a heart — [RON] Let me ask you a question. I want to interrupt you, sorry. So you’ve been a counselor for how many years now? [LEXIE] 18 years. [RON] 18 years? Who was your preferred client? [LEXIE] You asked me this the other day and I’ll tell you that my preferred client is still a married couple who are disconnected and they’re just trying to find their way to that connection and they just are wanting to have a happier family. Does that answer your question? [RON] It does. It does. The audience may want to hear it more than once. So just double checking to know who your favorite client is. [LEXIE] Yes, couples by far are my favorite. [RON] Okay. Anything else you want to share about your story? [LEXIE] I think that’s like the gist of it, just that the reason I became a counselor is that curiosity about mental health and then it morphed, especially as I started working with couples, into wanting to help others to have what we have and to be able to find a way through the messiness of being married because it’s not easy. When there are other factors like you’re spending all your time together, you’re in business together or you have a mental health history or all of these things, being able to bring my experience and my perspective and help that to be better. [RON] My story’s a little different. [LEXIE] Tell me about your story. [RON] My story would have to begin when I was about 9, 10 when my father passed away. He died at 37 years old. He had a Widowmaker heart attack. I don’t know if you know what the Widowmaker is, but it’s basically your, like one of your arteries just kind of explodes in your chest. It’s not pretty. So he passed away when I was quite young and following his death I had a, prior to my father, I lost my grandmother, then my dad, then my grandfather, then my grandmother, then my grandfather. [LEXIE] I was just going to say all in a short amount of time. [RON] It was about one every summer. So we would hit summer vacation and it started becoming who’s going to die. Instead of summer vacations, we had summer funerals and we would be going, oh, well we were going to do that, but we’re going to have to cancel that because now we got to go to this in-laws and bury somebody. So by the time I was 14, 15, I was a little angry. I had a very dark outlook toward life and I was very angry. So my mom was like, you’re going to to go to counseling. So she took me to go see a guy named Randy. I’m not sure Randy was used to working with teens. We just wasn’t but it was very interesting. He did help me a little bit, but that experience is one of those that made me want to go into counseling. So when I turned 18, I did go to college. I failed miserably because of my dyslexia, but I was a psychology major. So then I went into the world and did all the real world jobs. Then we, I was in the dry cleaning industry. You had just finished your master’s program and you were going to school and it really was, I got kind of jealous of you to be honest because I’d hit that magic point where I was working in average of 60 to 70 hours a week at the dry cleaners. I would be there at five o’clock in the morning and I wouldn’t leave till seven o’clock at night. That was basically six days a week. [LEXIE] Working in temperatures where you’re sweating and over a hundred degrees on a daily basis. Inside the building in the winter, it was 120. [RON] Yes. During the winter, it wasn’t horrible but during the summer it was just misery. So with all that being said, I was watching you work four hours a day and making more money than I was. I was just like, “What is this? How is she working four hours a day?” Because in counseling, you can’t work 40 hours face to face with people. You do work 40 hours a week, trust me on that folks, but you’re not necessarily face to face for 40 hours a week [LEXIE] Now to be fair when you’re in private practice, while you only see four clients a day, there is more work that’s going on, but you can do that. You don’t have to be like buried to an office, married to an office to do that. [RON] Correct. You can do that from home. You can do that from other spots. So that’s what I would see from you. You would be at home, sitting on your computer, typing out a note, watching TV or Oprah or something like that nature. It was just like, oh, I want that gig. That sounds like a cool gig. So when we sold the dry cleaning, got out of that, I was went back to college and I wanted to be a counselor at that time. As you said earlier, that you saw natural counseling skills. It’s funny, because people sometimes make the joke of how do you make the transition from being a bouncer to a dry cleaner, to a counselor? I said, it’s because they’re all related. They really are, each one of those talking like, well, thing of a bouncer, you’re doing conflict resolution. You’re helping people control their emotions. And dry cleaning, well, you’re still ironing out people’s problems. So for me it was almost like a natural transition and dry cleaners, bartenders, barbers, hairdressers, they all kind of have that counselor thing where people walk up to the counter and like, oh, let me tell you about my story. So it was just an easier transition for me and I loved it. I loved it once. Once I got into it, I never looked back and have not regretted a single moment of choosing to go into the counseling field. [LEXIE] So once you became a counselor and we went into business together, off to the races, you asked me who my ideal customer is. Who my ideal client is. Who’s your ideal client? [RON] My ideal client would be, at one point I would’ve said just men. I enjoyed working with men, but here lately it’s been men, women, couples, mainly couples. I really like to do intensives where you do anywhere from 13 to 14 hours over a weekend. I really find that enjoyable because you really can hone down on a lot of stuff. People can’t just run away and you’re quiet because after a while the truth comes out, which is the problem with one hour counseling and sometimes you’re not getting the whole story. [RON] So when you’re doing an intensive after a while, you get to figure out what the true story is because you’re not just nickel and diamond it one hour at a time. So mine would be couples, intensives, dealing with not too many problems. I mean, I’ve seen it all, but not necessarily too many problems. I like working with married couples that are in business together. That’s a good one. They have different and unique problems that most of the time you may not see in a situation where it’s just a standard husband and wife standard jobs. [LEXIE] Thank you for sharing some of the vulnerability that you did about how you became a counselor. [RON] You too. You’re talking about your mom. That’s big stuff. That’s hard. [LEXIE] Well, and I think we both have a heart that we want our listeners to understand who we are and where we’re coming from. So that was the purpose of today’s episode. I think this is where we can kind of tie things up and come back next time and get back on more of the entrepreneur topic. But this is who we are. [RON] I am Ron Lee. [LEXIE] I am Lexie Lee. [RON] Have a good day. [LEXIE] Thank you for listening. Time is our most valuable resource and we appreciate that you shared your time listening to us. If you enjoyed our show, please rate us or give us a review. You can share this episode with someone that you think may benefit. You can find more from us at marriedentrepreneurspodcast.com. [RON] 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.