In this episode, I converse with Paul Collette, a seasoned college professor and therapist who seamlessly integrates his passion for travel with his professional life. Throughout our conversation, Paul shares his transformative journey from a traditional therapy setting to adopting a lifestyle that combines his love for travel and his commitment to providing mental health support. He discusses the challenges and triumphs of moving his practice online, which COVID-19 significantly catalyzed, and how this shift has allowed him to maintain a flexible lifestyle, traveling extensively with his family while continuing to serve his clients effectively.
I delve into the specifics of managing a traveling therapy practice with Paul, including the importance of reliable internet connectivity and the selection of suitable environments for work while abroad. He emphasizes the value of understanding local resources and maintaining professional integrity, especially when dealing with clients across different states. Our conversation also touches on the broader implications of remote work, including the need to navigate licensing and regulatory challenges across jurisdictions. Paul's narrative is not just about balancing work and travel; it's a testament to the evolving landscape of therapy where digital nomadism and professional practice converge.
Key points
About Paul Collette:
Paul Collette is a retired federal probation officer, ex-military and current therapist (specializing in addiction counseling and co-occurring disorders) and full-time college professor. He devoted a significant portion of his career to the supervision of federal sexual offenders. Paul have many interesting stories to share as well my own personal experience with PTSD with that offender population and being exposed to child pornography and that particular offender population. After retirement, pivoted into the personal counseling space and opened his own private practice serving men in recovery. For the past two years, he spent summers in Mexico with his wife and two young children navigating running his practice remotely. Paul’s LinkedIn profile has additional information about my professional background.
Connect with Paul:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulcollette
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TRANSCRIPT:
00:00
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the traveling therapist podcast. Super excited today to have Paul Colette. I hope I'm saying your last name correctly. Paul Colette with us. He's got quite a story, really interesting, super inspirational about how he's making it all work. So I'm really glad to have you here today. Paul, can you tell the audience? How'd you go from just being like a traditional therapist to a traveling therapist? Yeah,
00:24
great. First off, wonderful to be on your podcast. Kim. I've been following you for a couple of years now. During covid, after covid, you've provided a lot of service to me and helped me navigate that really difficult landscape. And even today, I get excited whenever one of your podcasts drops. So I just love listening to all the other therapists and the influencers that you have on there talking about their journey as well. It helps me and keeps me energized and focused, because, as we all are operating in a vacuum, sometimes in a very isolated little bubble, and having that connective tissue with our colleagues is can be somewhat difficult. Yeah, you provide that. So thank you very much. Thank you.
01:04
I feel a little like blushing a little bit because it's just, you never know how it affects people, but I just, I love to hear that, that it's helped you and supported you on your journey to becoming traveling therapist and everything you're doing, it's really cool to see, like the ripple effect. Yeah,
01:19
to answer your question, I first started. Let's go back just a little bit. I'm my previous life. I was a federal probation officer. I started my career in New York City, 1997 before that, I was a New York City probation officer. Before that, I was a Clinical Case Manager, which sounds pretty cool, but it's just basically it was just a case worker working in a hospital called Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Have you ever watched the show? Yeah, if you watch the show New Amsterdam, that's actually filmed. So I worked in this in the psychiatric emergency room, doing that in the very early 90s, and realizing very quickly that I didn't have the temperament nor the patience to be a therapist, because I was in my early 20s. No, really, you know what the field was like. But the same time, I was exposed to that population, drug addicted, mentally ill, homeless, working with them, providing service to them, learning a lot about field, learning, sitting, sitting at the feet of psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers, the whole treatment team, and learning from them. But that wasn't my journey yet. So what I did was, is I transitioned into law enforcement. So I became a probation officer, which is a blend, if you will, of social work and law enforcement. You work bad. So it was a good fit for me, and actually helped me out considerably in terms of honing my skills in dealing with difficult populations. So I became a federal probation officer, and I did that job for almost 25 years, and during the mid part of my career, I supervised Federal sex offenders. Those were pretty it's a pretty difficult population to work with. Not only was I supervising, I was also having to investigate violations that would occur, finding, unfortunately, this is a little vulnerable here, little graphic child pornography and victims, I'm sure, out in the fields. Having done that for almost eight years, I was getting burned out and realized towards the end that, number one, it's not sustainable for me. I can't continue to do that. Number two, what am I going to do when I retire? Because the shelf life in law enforcement is is about 20 years before you really start to develop trauma, post traumatic stress, all the other wonderful co occurring disorders that go along with working in that field. And I sat back, audited myself and said, Why did I get in this field to begin with, and that was actually to help people, and becoming that caseworker back in the early 90s was something that I enjoyed. Now I'm ready now. I think I've learned a lot. I've gotten the resilience. I have a family. I'm married to my second wife, who's incredibly supportive. She's a behavior interventionist. Got two beautiful daughters, age five and three. She's younger than me. I'm 56 and I realized that number one, I have a lifestyle. Yeah, I love making money, I love traveling, I love working, and that's just who I am, much like you are in a lot of your Yeah, and it's just something that I felt was a good fit for me. But I didn't know at the time, when I was in graduate school that this was possible, that you could actually pack up a laptop, hit the road, up on a plane, a boat, and continue to work remotely. Yeah, I've seen influencers on Instagram, and we all have about them in Thailand or someplace, living out of a hotel and laptop on the beach, laptop on the beach, sipping my ties out of a coconut. Isn't that wonderful? That's a great life, and I wanted that life. But as a probation officer, let's be honest, those are soft skills. They really don't translate well into the private sector, and it's much like many of the people that I worked with in that field when they retired, they were. Of having to live on half their income, even less, and having to figure out what they're going to do their 2.0 version. And many ended up doing having to go work again full time, finding other jobs, having to budget their money to the point where, you know, they're not able to go out to eat and enjoy certain things that they were doing when they were working full time. So I looked at that kind of lifestyle and said, What's the best way for me to hack my way through that? And it was going back to graduate school and investing in that. So I sat my wife down, and I explained to her, I said, Listen, are you into this? I said something, we're going to give up our happy hours. We're going to give up our weekends. This is going to be a couple years here for me to go back to school, but it's going to pay off in the long run. She was incredibly supportive. She said, You know, because I told her, I said, Look, when you met me, I was as a probation officer, that was what I was doing. Now I'm asking you to be with me through this other version of myself she was in and once I had that level of support from her, it was so easy graduate school. Plus I was older, graduate school is much easier for me. So I'm a here in Connecticut. This is where we live. We call a licensed alcohol and drug counselor. That's an LA DC. La DCS are very niche, where we only work with people with substance abuse, co occurring disorder. Okay, gotcha so much like going to medical school and specializing, right? Or you want to, you want to work on your feet, you become a podiatrist or a dentist, you go to dental school in Connecticut. We've got four different master's level clinicians. We've got lmfts, okay, we've got social workers, MS, W's, LCS, W's. We've got cites to, I'm sorry, we got cites and PhDs as well, and we have LPCs, licensed professional counselors, and we also have la DCS. So it's a very niche master's level program, and that's what I wanted to do, because, number one, that's only population, pretty much other than sex offenders that I worked with. Yeah, right. Pretty much everybody on probation has some type of substance use disorder I already knew about that. I already knew about working with that popular. I felt more comfortable with that as well, and I didn't want to do anything else. I didn't want to invest the time and the resources getting an MSW or an LPC. I said, let me get my LA DC. Let me get a master's degree in addiction counseling, and only specialized in that much, much like you and many of your your guests, they how they niche down, and that's, yeah, the money is for me, the
07:28
riches are in the niches. They say.
07:31
I love it. So I, once I did that, everything became easy for me. I no longer even though I was working full time and having to juggle that. And by the way, nobody at my job even knew I was in graduate school until the very gosh, wow, I kept that a secret. There was I worked with some toxic managers. Oh, I bet, oh, my God. They were just horrible people. And but I was like, I knew if I, if I shared that story with them, I would not have ended well, they would have done come for me somehow, some way they would have written me up. And I was just like, I don't know if you worked in toxic work environments, law enforcement. Oh, sure, yeah.
08:11
I'm actually a CSAC. So I was in and out of rehabs and outpatient, inpatient, non medical detoxes. Yeah, definitely some toxic environments throughout my life, before I went into private practice, and all that for
08:23
sure, exactly. And yeah, which, by the way, that was something else, right? Because, as I was in graduate school, I didn't know, I knew I wanted to have a private practice, but I was just assuming that what I was going to have to do was go work at an agency, work at some non profit, make X amount of money a year. Because in my graduate program, I was actually told by one of my professors, when they asked me what I want to do in front of the class, they were like, I said, I want to open up a private practice. And he goes, Oh, no, you can't do that. You're not going to make a lot of money in this Oh, my
08:57
God, this disgusting. I saw. This is like a soapbox. It's like, How is this possible? Even in this day and age, that professors are still talking like that? It just blows my mind. It's you can actually do whatever the you want to do.
09:11
You know why? Because I think that's all they know. That's all they know. And I'm not knocking people that do that. There's certainly room for people to work with disenfranchised populations to make 40 or $50,000 a year with a master's degree. Okay, you're certainly welcome to do that. But for me, I have a lifestyle. I have I have a family to take care of. I've made X amount of money every year, and I want to make six figures a year. I made six figures and I was working for the federal government, but I want to make more than what I was making for the Fed. Yeah, and absolutely. How was I going to do that? And I realized that I'm talking to the wrong audience here, and I don't need to be talking to these professors, because they don't. It's like talking to a it's like talking to a jellyfish. It's like a different language to them, and that whole shame. Stigma comes in, yeah? Where, yeah, I'm supposed to feel shame because I want to make $150 an hour, or make $190,000 a year, and this why should I feel ashamed of that tool's expensive I have to grind away for those 1000s of hours to do what I have to do i and this is something else. We don't shame attorneys, right? We don't you could graduate from the worst law school in the country, right? Toilet bowl law school out of a strip mall, and the day you pass the bar, you can charge $400 an hour, and nobody questions that from an attorney, because they're expected to charge that amount of money, much like a doctor, right? You don't negotiate with your surgeon when you're about to go into heart surgery. You're expected that this is going to cost 100 grand to save your life, because they spend all that time and energy and money going to school for that, and they deserve that. Why are we in this profession publicly shamed or shamed by our colleagues, because we want to have a great lifestyle and make a good living. I don't get it sometimes, and I get that from some clients as well. So I have a private practice, and I only work with men in practice. I only work with men in recovery. Ex military was in the Navy, so I work with ex military, first responders, police. I work with felons, ex felons, people that are probation and parole. I don't work with sex offenders anymore, but because that's why they call it private practice, you can choose, you can pick. So that's the that's my niche. And yeah, one of the one of the wonderful things about that niche is I'm always getting clients. I'm always getting referrals. I am insurance based, but I also do cash as well. So my other stream of income, my other part of my practice, is what we call a Department of Transportation, SAP and SAP. Oh, yeah, right. So that's very niche. So saps are if you work for those proposed listeners who don't know what that is, a sap is a specialist that say, a CDL driver or a pilot or an air traffic controller or an oil and gas worker. Somebody test positive for drugs while on the job, they are immediately grounded and they can't work, and so they have to go see a sap, somebody who is certified by the Department of Transportation to work with that person and get them through the process. Now, the great thing about being a sap is insurance doesn't pay for this, right?
12:29
It's private pay. I did something similar. I wasn't certified SAP, but I got in with whoever monitors train conductors and people that work on Amtrak and all of that stuff. I got in with them. At one point my private practice, I was getting like, a million referrals, which is scary, but kind of too that they're on top of it. But yeah, so this is super niche, and really, it could be a good, lucrative in a way, because, like you said, insurance doesn't cover it. It's private pay. They've got to come. It's mandated. But also you can be super helpful too, because you're a specialist with it. So I love that. I love, yeah, and
13:01
to give the listeners an idea of the pay, because I know you're very transparent with this, I love that about your podcast is that the pay for a sap evaluation starts around 400 and goes up to about $800 and that's usually just two sessions. It's the initial and then followed by the recommendation, and then the follow up, and that's you're getting paid $800 yeah, literally, two hours of work. And it can be lucrative. But the other piece of that is you have to market yourself. You just can't do the training and then sit back and expect Amtrak to give you a call. You actually have to do a lot of boots on the ground marketing and get to know people. So fortunately, in Connecticut, we're a small state, taking me a couple years to build that kind of cachet up with a lot around here. So that, to me, I love because it's, I'll give you an example. So we were in Mexico for the first time couple years ago. Playa Del Carmen, yeah, I'm gonna shift gears here. That's okay. Can I shift? Yeah, I
14:01
want to talk about the traveling too. Talk about, I could talk about the the CSAC or the certified substance piece stuff forever. So, yeah, we probably should switch.
14:09
So I graduate, I get licensed. Yeah, I'm happy thinking that I'm going to retire and open up my own private practice. Yeah, and I'm going to sit back at least an office by the way, live in Connecticut, so we live in West Hartford, so I at least a little office space there, thinking that, all right, the clients are going to come and it's going to be wonderful, and then I can just coast for the rest of my life into retirement, and then covid hit. Everything is shut down. I had to close that practice. And then I'm scrambling, like, What the hell am I going to do? How am I yeah, oh, we have the internet. Let's let me give that a shot. So I moved online, and everything worked out. Everything started to work out. I had to navigate, of course, getting a decent laptop webcam, making sure that I understood what the regulations are in Connecticut to see people. Online with my license. That wasn't an issue. But then now I had all this time to do, and covid started to end, and my wife and I are looking around like we want to travel. We want to take our children and expose them to the world, and she speaks Spanish very fluently. Awesome. We decided for our first test, let's go down to Mexico for the summer, it's been about five weeks there, and bring the kids and see what that's going to be like. So we Yeah, picked a spot on the map. Playa Del Carmen, we had been down there once before, the Cancun area, and realized that it's all built up. It's a beautiful place. Yeah, I love it down there. Yeah, nice people, but once again, the internet wasn't a thing for me. So made a few mistakes on that trip. They weren't terrible, but what happened was, the first mistake is I went on Airbnb, and I looked for the coolest, most extravagant Airbnb in Playa Del Carmen, and it was a three bedroom, beautiful pictures. It had its own private little pool up on the roof. Oh yeah. And we had other pools in the complex spinning distance of the water, walking distance of what they call Fifth Avenue in Playa Del Carmen. That's the That's the spot where all the shops and the nightlife is. And how cool is that? Right? Yeah, it's very cool. So it had good reviews, but here's the mistake I made. I didn't read the reviews too much in terms of the internet, so we show up check in. Turns out, yeah, the place is beautiful. It's great. Older, it's a much older condo, yeah, but made it entirely out of solid concrete. Oh my gosh. And the internet wasn't good internet. It literally was internet where I went into another room and I I had zero connect connectivity, yeah. And what happened was I moved everything online. I had a Psychology Today profile company called Alma, which has actually been pretty decent with me. And then my SAP, I'm on a sap list, so clients were starting to call into me, and I got my funny thing, got a sap client that called me up and he said, I need to see you, and I'm like, great, be happy to I'm looking at the money I'm getting. Yeah, that same day, I got another call from another SAP client, and that's when I started to realize these calls, this trip with those clients and my practice clients, it's going to pay for this trip. Yeah, exactly for the trip down here. But I didn't have a decent internet connection, so I'm emailing, you know, the the owner, and I'm like, Listen, can we fix this thing? What can we do? And they were like, No, the internet's the internet. And I was looking at my wife, and what am I going to do? I need to find something. And so I started looking at co working spaces and Playa Del Carmen. That was the hike to get there, in terms of walking or taking a cab. Yeah, I didn't want to do that. And plus, it wasn't private. I needed some privacy. So here I am holding my laptop in the air, walking around the condo, trying to find a Wi Fi spot. I feel your pain. Long story short, I found a spot in one of the bedrooms that was on the floor. So I'm on the floor seeing the clients. Janky. Zoom, but it worked. Yeah, I was able to do that for five weeks, but that was a mistake him. I will never, ever make again. I don't care how
18:27
I hear you go ahead.
18:30
I don't care how beautiful it is. I don't care how baller, how incredible the pool is and the building is, if there's not a good internet connection. And what's funny, the review said that I missed it. I just didn't look at it. I was just too enamored with the private pool and because zvo up on the roof that we could sit at and cook and drink. And I've
18:51
done the same thing. I've done the same thing, it's, oh my gosh, okay, we need a place in three weeks. We want to go here. This place looks perfect. Then you forget to look for even the most basic, does it have a washer and dryer? It's like, how do we not, how do we book a place without a washer and dryer? Or it's all these little things, like we even have, like, a checklist now, and we still forget, because we get totally enamored. Like you said, Oh my God, it's right on the ocean. Like we're on one right now. And we didn't look at the beach, we didn't think to, but the ocean is Rocky, like when you go into the water, it's Rocky in Florida, I'm like, I didn't even know they had rocky beaches in Florida. It's terrible. But we didn't do our research, because we were like, this is perfect. It's right on the ocean. This is a gorgeous place. But anyway, all that to say, I feel your pain.
19:34
Yeah, it was rough. It was rough. And yeah, the beaches were okay. Just for those who have not been to that area of Mexico, there's a lot of seaweed on the beach. Sargassum,
19:44
yeah, there's like, a whole thing. You can follow the balloons across the world that are coming towards Playa Del Carmen, yeah, it's terrible. Yeah, it's
19:52
a thing. And fortunately, the city does do a decent job of cleaning it up. But, yeah, you're out there in the water and. You're going to get some seaweed on you, and it comes up on the beach, and if it's sitting there too long, it starts to smell. Listen, these are first world problems. I'm not complaining about it. The place was, like I said, the place was amazing. People were wonderful. We had such a wonderful experience exposing our children to a different living embedded in a different country, coming right out of covid. And that was which is why the following year, we were looking at, where are we going to go? And we were looking at Costa Rica. We were looking at places in South America, by the way, I think next year we're looking at going to Colombia. Oh, cool. Yeah, places because she speaks Spanish, and I'm taking advantage. Yeah, why not? And then when the kids are a little bit older than we're looking at Europe. I'd like to go to Morocco. But what's that's maybe that's just a fantasy of mine, but it is on my checklist. And maybe going to the I love to go to the Far East, going to Thailand, which I hear is amazing. And I look at a lot of the influencers that are living out there, something that we can do. And having done that, I think, is also providing the kind of growth that we want to expose our daughters to as well. And it gives me a deeper appreciation of living in a different country, not being just tourist anymore, because we, like you, do a minute of your guests. Do we? I had the first year we were there, by the way, we my wife went out to hop at a cab to go to the Walmart because it was a little too far, but that's where all the food was and everything. I did not know that, literally, in five blocks away was Playa del Carmen's equivalent of Whole Foods. It was a Oh, really did not know that it's right there. You walk right in and it's beautiful, clean and liquor and beer and meats and cheeses and all this great food, fresh fruit every day. It was this incredible. I found that out the following year because we went back to Playa Del Carmen.
21:53
It's like, How did I miss this? I do that too. I'll leave somewhere. And I'm like, wait, there was a grocery store, like, right there. I didn't even
22:00
know. Oh my god. It was just, I was kicking myself. That's but that's we learned, right? We learned from these Exactly. So the second year, we went back to play l Carmen. This time I we got another nice Airbnb. This one a bit different. And of course, the Wi Fi was amazing. It was just perfect for me. Made sure it was going to be it was fiber optic. It was chef's kiss. Awesome. Awesome. The building itself, brand new. The rooftop, it had five rooftop pools. It had a bar up there. A lot of expats were living there as well as travel all through and it was just a really good experience for us as well. No complaints there in terms of running my practice remotely. Were there any complaints about playa? The only I think we were just getting probably a little burned out in terms of, once again, four to five weeks. And I like, because when we have children and we're embedded in another country, yeah, for those that are going to Playa or that area, there are not a lot of playgrounds. There's not a lot, yeah, right, or things for children to do. So we, and you don't see a lot of children walking around on the streets during the afternoon because it's 105 degrees, yeah, it's hot. You get used to it. We really couldn't have that experience of being around other parents. That's which is why we're looking at South America now, and we're looking at cities that are family friendly, a lot of outdoor activities for children. This year, we're heading up to Montreal for a couple weeks, and nice. We're staying in Old Montreal. It's a four hour drive for us, so we're that's going to be a fun road trip and oh my gosh, how. Yeah, and I've let my clients know I'm excited about being on the road, excited about seeing clients again remotely, and having that experience and navigating what it's to work remotely. And I think next year and the year after, we're going to maybe increase the time that were on the road as well. But, yeah, it's just a wonderful, I think, lifestyle for us that I didn't know was possible to the extent. Yeah, you know that there are other therapists out there doing what they're doing and thriving, but it's amazing. There's a lot of there's a lot of minefields too.
24:19
Yeah, I'm wondering, as you're talking like the LA DC, is that your license is, does it follow the same regulations as like an LPC would have to follow it LCSW, or does it have its own like, board and regulations and all that?
24:31
We have our own board, but it does follow the same requirements as social workers and Okay,
24:36
gotcha. Okay, that's cool. So I'm assuming, probably you've already checked this out, but I'm assuming it's fine to go work in Monte work in Montreal. See your clients back in Connecticut, yep. And same with Playa Del Carmen. I don't think I've ever heard in Mexico license that you couldn't work from there, but yeah. So I'm guessing it's
24:52
as long as my clients are in Connecticut, I can be anywhere in the world, and I can see them remotely. So as a sap, that's a more of a national certification. So when you, by the way, when you're a sap, you're not a therapist, you are evaluating and assessing them, so that I can see I pick up clients all over the country.
25:13
Oh, that's awesome. So you're not bound by a state licensure with that. I didn't know that. No, interesting. That's really interesting. And I guess being a sap, you're allowed to be located anywhere too, obviously, if it's national, and is it fine to be out of the country, and it
25:28
is fine to be out of the country. But once again, here's the problem. And I don't really, I don't like taking clients outside the state. Matter of fact, I won't, and I'll tell you why. Okay, yeah, because if I have a client that's outside the state and they need treatment, which a lot of them do. I don't know the resources in Texas. I don't know the resources in Louisiana. It's not fair for me to take their money to sit down and do an assessment and say, Okay, you're going to need treatment. You're going to need three months of IOP or three months of seeing a therapist that specializes in substance use disorders. What am I supposed to do? Hop on psychology today. Start making phone calls for them or tell them that's unethical. Oh, you need to find somebody. No, here in Connecticut, I know all the resources, I got, all the contacts. I know exactly where my clients can get into quickly if they need that. That's the service that we provide. There are some unethical, yeah, out there that are just hungry for the money, and they'll take anybody. And I believe that I'm very vocal about that, but it's that's another podcast we can really like
26:24
that. A lot of us, we're all pushing for, like, interstate compacts and all that stuff. But that is one positive thing about licensing restrictions, I think, is that you do get familiar with the resources. You do know how to get your client help if you're online, like at a telehealth session, versus somebody maybe sitting in Morocco that you're seeing or something. It's like that does get out of our scope a little bit. And we talk about this on the podcast, but also in the traveling therapists Facebook group. Know how to get a hold of 911, if you're seeing a client a different country or a different place and you're familiar with so I'm so glad to hear you say that that you really could take anybody from anywhere, especially being in SAP was so specialized, and people need it. Need that service so much, employers and all of that, but being able to say, You know what, I'm not going to compromise my values. I want to stay in this place where I know I can give you really good, reliable resources. I think that's super like, commendable, really. Thank
27:12
you. I appreciate that. And for those that are thinking about going into that specialty, please understand that you're working with people that have substance use issues that it's not just counseling, it's not just talking to them for 60 minutes a week. There's a lot of other moving parts here. There's relapse, there's slips, there's there's a lot of CO occurring most have co occurring disorders as well, trauma, PTSD, depression, anxiety, all that stuff that goes along with somebody using heroin, pain, whatever, alcohol, and they're going to need resources. They're going to need something that, and they look to you as the therapist to facilitate that, and for you just to say, I'm, you know, I'm just a therapist, you need to find your own that's unethical. That, to me is, yeah, it's not borderline. It's just completely unethical. And I would never, ever do that leave a client like that hang there's a lot writing on that, on this specialty of being a addiction specialist in the field, just like I would never children, I could not work with that population, yeah,
28:12
oh my god. I know I had to get out of that early. I tried in the beginning, but it, it's pressure, because I don't know what you're getting. Ready to say, I totally interrupted, but it sometimes it was the parent. It was the parents that were the problem, and then you're supposed to get the kid and fix them. At least. That was my experience. And it was like, so hard for me, because it was, like, the kid's great, it's you, that's the problem. So I had a really hard time with that, like, if I just didn't like that at all. So I got out of that, like, niche completely. But yeah, and what were you going to say,
28:40
No, that was it. Children, I think people, suicidal ideation. That's another people, oh, yeah, like deep, deep depression, not melancholy, not feeling nostalgic, not what am I going to do with my life? Some existential people that have, like, deep, like they they're going to kill themselves. That's another population that I am far outside the scope of my practice with, because I'm just not trained in that. I'm not going to go down that road. And it's just I've had colleagues that are very good with them, but I've also seen the consequences that when you when you do when your client commit suicide, right? Yeah, I know what I do when my client overdoses. I yeah, there's a protocol for that for me, and many of my clients have overdosed, because here in the Northeast, the opiate epidemic is horrific. Yeah, fentanyl, car, fentanyl, heroin, opiates, all of that is rampant here in Connecticut, I think the 2000 overdoses deaths a year, and those are the ones we just know about. And it's right. So when you come into this particular niche that I'm in, just much like you're it's you're going to have, except for some of the bad with the good. And I, like I said, I'm not complaining about I love it. This is what I'm I think I'm good at, because I see my clients stay with me and get better, yeah, but at the same time, I love the the freedom of having a practice that's completely remote. But. By the way, I don't have an office anymore. I completely work at home now I'm on the road. I don't think twice anymore about having to call up a client and their clients and say, Hey, I'm on vacation for two weeks. No, I'm always on vacation.
30:16
It's wild. But we my boyfriend and I say that all the time is we actually live on vacation. It's incredible, yeah,
30:21
by the way, it's in my bio, and you can put that in your show notes. I'm also a full time college professor. So when I retired, right? Yeah, so when I retired, I did not think I was going to get it. But here in Connecticut, we have a big wave of retirements, because people that 20 year, 25 year mark, with a lot of public employees, they left, and one of the the community colleges of the professor for the drug and alcohol recovery counselor program. Oh, wow, she retired and actually moved to Costa Rica, of all places. And so they announced her position, and I just for shits and grins, I applied, and they hired me. And to this day, I've been there for now three years. To this day, I expect somebody to tap me on the shoulder and say, we made a mistake. Come with made a mistake. Come with us. But it's amazing because now I'm able to train the next generation of addiction counselors in our state, as well as have that freedom that every summer, we can leave for three or four months if we want. I can. We've got a lot of around my classes and around the program that I'm teaching, we can just travel anywhere we want, which is to win for me, so
31:25
it's amazing. You're probably exuding that sort of mentality, culture, attitude around private practices and diversifying income streams and also having the freedom to have the lifestyle that you want. I'm assuming you'd exude that to your students. So you're helping the next generation with that too. I would think, yeah,
31:44
thank you. Thank you, Kim for saying that's exactly what I do. I believe, to me, some of the best podcasters out there, some of the best influencers out there that are in the space, are the ones that are completely vulnerable and honest about how much they're making, about how much you can make. They get rid of the shame and the stigma surrounding this field and working in this field, granted, it's an Associate's level degree program, but most of our students decide that they're going to move on to graduate school.
32:10
Sure, and that's the basis of everything, yeah,
32:14
and that's what I let them know. I said, Listen, you certainly can work in the field as a CAC here in Connecticut on the associate's degree level, you certainly can have a decent living at it. Nothing wrong with that. You want to make more money, you need to get your master's, at least your master's degree, and you need to specialize and niche down. And I'm vulnerable with my students. I tell them what I charge an hour, how much I make, not because I'm bragging, but because it's true, you can make good money in this field, right? Much like doctors and lawyers. You drive by a lawyer's house and you see the BMW parked in the drive. They're doing pretty well.
32:50
Yeah, exactly. So Exactly, yeah. I
32:54
pretty like that.
32:56
I love that so much. That's so good to start getting rid of the stigma that we were talking about in the beginning of the episode, and also the stigma around as social workers or substance abuse professionals, we have to, like, take these really hard cases, and we've got to do this, like, awful in the trenches work forever, like I used to, I specialize in, like trauma and like substance abuse, called substance use disorders now, but I called it substance abuse when I was coming up in was coming up. And I specialized in that. I did EMDR, so I had the toughest cases. I had people that were relapsing, but they also had tons of trauma. And I did that for so long in my private practice, and then when I decided to go fully remote and take it on the road, I was like, I don't work with these hard clients anymore. It's too much like you were saying with the probationees that you were working with, and all that is eventually you get tired of. And I think there's even shame around that in our field, like, you gotta work with, like, tough cases if you don't want to, if you want to take the easier cases, the ones that you never have to worry about suicide, the ones that just have, I don't know, like, middle class problems or whatever, if you want to take those clients, that's also, like, shameful, and to charge a lot of money for it and all of that. So also, that's part of what I hope we're doing here, too, is breaking that stigma a little bit. It's okay to be a traveling therapist and see really easier clients,
34:11
yeah, and you said something very important about the kind of money that that you can make. Yeah, it does differ. I agree in terms of your specialty, but as we have our foot on the gas pedal, we can make as little or as much as we want in private, exactly. There's nothing wrong with working 40 or 50 hours a week as a therapist. You're going to burn out very quickly on that. There are other ways like like you so eloquently talk about to have a diversified stream of income coming in. Yeah, when you can build your own private build a group practice, you can have podcasts and advertisings and books and classes and groups and all these wonderful things that you're providing a value to people that are going to they don't have to figure it out on their own, do they? Yeah, they don't have to reinvent the wheel. That you can go to some. Be like you and ask them, Hey, listen, what's the quickest way for me to get on the road to work where I need to do to live and have a lifestyle that I want? Because they're, you know, they're out there on Google and they're getting a lot of misinformation. They're on some pretty toxic websites that people are going to put negative information in their head and say, oh, you can't do that. You should. Oh, you right. What kind of liability you're going to have living in Spain? You know what they're going to do to you when they find out your license?
35:29
Exactly, nothing. Yeah, yeah. You know what's going
35:33
to happen. I'm going to feel better, I'm going to lose weight, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to drink more on the weekends and party, and I'm going to develop a new language, and I'm going to expose my family different culture, and maybe I'll become an expat and live completely 100% in another country. Do that. Yeah, hundreds of your people have done successfully,
35:52
or 1000s Exactly, exactly, exactly. I love it. I think that's a good note to end on. I just love talking to you. So people, what does ever reach out to you or learn more about what you do or how you've made it work? How could they find you? So
36:07
I have a website. I'm also on LinkedIn, and we can put that in the show notes as well. But if you just type in my name, Paul Colette, C, o, l, e, t, e, type in Paul Colette, I should show up in Google ranking in the SEO search for like the first page. But type in Paulette, Connecticut, and you'll see on LinkedIn, you can always connect with me on there. I also have a website called SAP services. CT, okay, that's one word, and that is my private practice, SAP Business. Piece, any questions or anything, feel free to email me through there as well. I'm on Instagram, but that's closed account, just for my friends and family, but yeah, LinkedIn is really where I spend a lot of my professional time. Up on LinkedIn, DM me through there, I'll be happy to provide any value or just friend me, and I'll be happy to follow your journey as well.
36:54
That's awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for being here. You.