The Morning Upgrade Podcast Featuring Dr. Jeremy Sharp
Thanks for joining me for episode #12 of The Morning Upgrade Podcast. I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Jeremy Sharp, child psychologist, and manager of a private practice that has about 20 practitioners. Dr. Sharp is married and has two children that he loves to spend time with. He enjoys running and incorporates running into his morning routine.
Top Points in This Episode
- The mental benefits of starting the day with a cold shower.
- Health changes are hard, but have a life-changing impact.
- You can’t do everything on your own and learn to ask for help.
Resources & Links
Connect with Dr. Jeremy Sharp on his website The Testing Psychologist or email him at jeremy@thetestingpsychologist.com
The Testing Psychologist Podcast
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Transcription
Announcer:
Welcome to the morning upgrade podcast with Ryan Cote. Where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.
Ryan Cote:
Hey everyone. This is Ryan Cote with The Morning Upgrade podcast. Today, I’m excited to bring you, Dr. Jeremy Sharp. Hey Jeremy.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
Hey Ryan. Good morning or good afternoon. Thanks for having me.
Ryan Cote:
Yeah, absolutely. Why don’t you start out by telling everyone what you do and what your interests are, what you enjoy doing?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
Yeah, for sure. So I am a child psychologist. I specialize in psychological assessment or neuro-psych testing with kids. So I help parents figure out if their kids have concerns like ADHD or autism or learning disorders, or really just anything parents might be concerned about. I meet with the kids and give them a bunch of tests and pull all that information together and then try to give some reasonable recommendations to move forward and support the family. So that’s my work life. In addition to the actual clinical work, I also direct our practice. So I have an outpatient private practice in Colorado, and we have about 20 clinicians and staff that specialize in a variety of mental health areas across the lifespan from therapy to more testing and assessment. So, yeah, that’s the work side of things. And then personally, I am married for about 10 plus years. I have two kids, seven and nine as of today. And I love being outside, running, which I guess I’ll talk about, and just doing family stuff as much as possible.
Ryan Cote:
Awesome. How’d you get into your business? Did you know you wanted to do that when you were in high school or whatever growing up?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
Yeah, it’s funny. So, I mean, there were many factors that led to being a psychologist. I won’t dive into all of them here, but the one thing, the experience that really catalyzed it for me was in high school, you know, I got into some trouble like teenagers do sometimes and my parents thought the right thing to do would be to take me to see a psychiatrist to help. So it didn’t really help that much, but what it did do was give me the experience of meeting with someone, and I remember thinking very clearly, this guy is terrible and I can do this so much better. So that was the experience that made me say, all right, I’m going to really try to be a psychologist so I can help kids down the road who might be in my place. So that’s what kind of kicked it off for me. And I was lucky enough to be able to follow that path and get into grad school at a good program. And you know, take it from there.
Ryan Cote:
Must be a very fulfilling work I’d imagined. I mean, I don’t know what goes into your day-to-day, but just from your description of it, it sounds like it’d be a very fulfilling career.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
Yeah. There are tough moments, but I think that’s a big reason a lot of us get into it, right. That’s the cliche, right. We want to help people. And that definitely happens. There’s really no better feeling than having a family walk out of the office with some concrete ideas on how to help their kiddo, but also just a better understanding of what’s going on for their kid and maybe more empathy and to see families start to move down that path of healing with one another is pretty powerful.
Ryan Cote:
Yeah. It sounds like it. So The Morning Upgrade is a blog and podcast. It’s all about personal development morning routines. I mean, I know we’re in the same mastermind, so I know you’re into personal development. I know you’re into fitness. We were kind of talking before about what you do for your morning routine. Why don’t we talk about that? What do your mornings look like?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
My mornings are pretty similar from day to day. I guess that’s the whole point of a routine, right? So five days a week. So I’m a big runner like I mentioned. So I am running five days a week, that’s pretty structured. I’m always training for something, some kind of race of some distance. So I follow these training plans. So I always kind of know what kind of run I’m doing each day, but I’m running five days a week. So I wake up first thing, put my contacts in and put my clothes on. And then it’s just downstairs to grab maybe six to eight ounces of water. And then I’m out the door for the morning run. On the two days that I don’t run, I do the same thing, but jump up and walk our dog on this loop that we have here near our house. So I’m getting up and I’m moving and exercising right off the bat. And then when I get back home, it is again, pretty structured. So straight up to the shower, we can talk about that. I’m a big fan of cold showers, so we can dive into that if you want. And then I am down to make a smoothie and I have the exact same smoothie every morning. And then it’s off to the workday,
Ryan Cote:
Ah, so many questions, but I try to keep these episodes to 15 minutes. How many miles do you run?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
Great question. So day-to-day, it kind of varies. Weekly, I would say I average about 35 to 40 miles a week. So it typically comes out to somewhere between six to nine miles on the weekdays. And then I’ll do a longer one of maybe nine, 10, or 11 on the weekends, at this point anyway. If I’m in marathon training, that ramps up quite a bit, but I’ve been sticking to kind of lower mileage over the last few months.
Ryan Cote:
So I interviewed, his name is Brian McFarland. I interviewed him on episode four and he’s an ultra marathon runner. I think I’m saying that right. And he’ll run up to a hundred miles, which it doesn’t even seem physically possible. People do it so I know it is. But I think about like, if I have to drive a hundred miles and I don’t have a podcast to listen to, I’m going crazy. I can imagine a hundred miles. Like, what are you doing in miles 50, 60, 70, where near, not only is your body breaking down, but your mind probably went like 20 miles ago. Have you ever done that lone of a race?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
Oh my gosh. No, no. So the most I’ve ever run at one time is probably, I did 35 miles over a 24-hour span. It was kind of broken up into like seven here, eight here, 10 here, but with a little bit of rest in between. So yeah, I mean the ultra runner, I’ve thought about trying to do that and I just don’t know how they get the time to do it and to train and it’s way out there as far as I’m concerned.
Ryan Cote:
Yeah. I don’t know. I’m not sure where to even start with that. So I liked the idea of the smoothie and the cold showers. I want to dive into that. I usually like to talk about personal development habits and those are two habits that I think are worth talking about. So I’ve taken cold showers before too, and I can tell you why I do it and your reason might be similar, but I think there are some health benefits to it from what I read, I don’t know. But I do it as a way to train my mind to do something that’s uncomfortable and do it anyway. Is that similar for you or do you have a different reason?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
Yeah, that’s exactly why I do it. That wasn’t the original motivation. I think I originally got into it for the health reasons, but over time, it’s really come to be more of a mental exercise than anything else to kind of build that fortitude in the morning. I like the idea of doing something hard first thing in the morning. Cause then it’s like, you’ve already conquered something like you’ve gotten in that mindset. Like I can do something that is tough and you’ve sort of mastered your mind already. So it sets the tone for the day really nicely.
Ryan Cote:
Totally. And you’re in Colorado, I’m in Jersey, so we’ve got cold winters. And so there’s a noticeable difference doing cold showers in the summer, versus, at least for me, in the winter. In the winter, it feels like someone is jabbing me in the back with a knife or something like that. Whereas the summer it’s like, okay, it’s cold, but I can handle this. Is that the same thing for you?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
Yeah, definitely. That’s funny. The way it shifts over the seasons.
Ryan Cote:
What do those look like? I’m a big fan of food and using diet to help personal development. So what are your smoothies look like?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
So smoothie is always the same recipe every morning. I do a banana, I do frozen spinach or kale, or a blend of both, depending on what we get. I do a big sort of, probably like a tablespoon plus of almond butter. I do vanilla protein powder. And then I put in frozen blueberries as well and blend it all up.
Ryan Cote:
Wow. Do your kids drink it too?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
They don’t. I tried to get them into it over the years, but they’ll taste it here and there, but they don’t seem to get on that train as much as I would like them to.
Ryan Cote:
I mean, it sounds delicious, but I guess as a kid, maybe not as much, we’ve got this special protein powder that we got for my one daughter to help her with her growth and stuff. And it’s chocolate, it’s good. I put a little Stevia in it and they think they’re getting a treat and I’m like, Oh, that’s protein powder. They think it’s something like a milkshake or something like that. That’s a little bit different than blueberries and spinach.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
Right, I know. I like it though because this is another thing, I don’t know if we want to dive into it, but probably two or three years ago, I cut out processed sugar and bread and pasta and all that stuff. And so this to me is like a really serious treat, you know, to have the banana it’s like super sweet. And the blueberries are kind of sweet. So this is kind of a treat for me in the morning.
Ryan Cote:
They say that white bread, it’s almost addictive. Like your body becomes addicted to it. That’s what I’ve heard. For every lunch, I try to make it a salad. Like today I had a big salad with kale and beans and walnuts and some other stuff, but I still eat some white flour. I just try to be conscious of limiting it. Did you go through any sort of like withdrawal from cutting it out where your body was craving it?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
Yeah. I couldn’t tell if it was the sugar or the carbs or what, cause I cut it all out at the same time, but there was definitely a week or two there where I felt worse for sure. But then after that, it was like turbocharged, like I didn’t know all this energy that I’d been missing.
Ryan Cote:
Really?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
Yeah, It was pretty amazing. I was having some health issues as well. I was having some thyroid abnormalities and some heart rhythm issues. So I just went on this anti-inflammatory diet. And like I said, that’s probably three years ago and it made a huge, huge difference just in energy and health and just feeling better,
Ryan Cote:
But not enough to run a hundred miles.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
But not to the point of running a hundred miles. I really wanted to do an ultra. I would have to maybe add back in some carbs somehow. I don’t know.
Ryan Cote:
He’s like, we’ll wait until I’m like a hundred pounds. So I’ve got one more question for you and then we can wrap up by you telling us the best place to connect with you for those that want to say hello or learn more about you or your practice. You’ve got multiple businesses going on. You’re managing people. And I’m just curious, what’s been the hardest thing about your business and what are you doing about it or what did you do about it, and maybe how did your personal development habits help with getting through it?
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
It’s hard to distill it down to one thing. I feel like I’ve done a lot of not so great things over the course of owning my businesses, but I think the theme or the thread that runs throughout is having to learn that I cannot do everything on my own. And in fact, that it’s detrimental to my businesses for me to try to do everything on my own. So I guess you could flip it to the other side of the coin and say like asking for help or trusting others. Anything about ballpark has been really, really challenging for me to learn over the years. I think a lot of us struggle with that, especially as we grow and kind of bootstrap things, but you know, and I’m still working on this quite a bit, but I have a few things that really help with that. Certainly, running and exercise help with general stress levels. That’s fantastic. I’m also lucky enough to be married to a therapist. So we get to talk about these things and she, for better or for worse, has no problem calling me out when I’m doing things that aren’t helpful for myself or for our marriage. So that’s harder sometimes than others, but… I know she can point those things out. And in coaching too, I mean, I haven’t mentioned coaching, but I sought coaching over the years from other business owners and business coaches. And that has really, really helped to shift my mindset that, like I said, it’s actually more detrimental to try to handle everything myself and hand it off. So I’ve been working hard on that.
Ryan Cote:
Yeah, delegation’s huge, it really is. And I’ve seen it in my businesses as well. I guess it depends on how much you really want to grow, but if you want to grow to a certain level you can only handle so much yourself before you burn out or everything crumbles. And it’s not easy to get used to.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
It’s a hard lesson to learn. I mean, a lot of us go through our lives being rewarded and gaining a lot from doing everything ourselves and being self-sufficient. So to all of a sudden, have to flip that and learn to trust others to do things that we could do. It’s a really challenging process.
Ryan Cote:
A hundred percent agree. Well, this is good. I appreciate the input you gave and the habits and you covered some new things today between the shakes and the cold showers. So I enjoy having you on Dr. Sharp. And why don’t you tell us how people can connect with you if they want to reach out and say, hello,
Dr. Jeremy Sharp:
Well, thanks for having me. And this was fantastic. If people want to reach out, email is probably the best. You can find me @ jeremyatthetestingpsychologist.com. And I also host a podcast called the testing psychologists, which is really , but that’s a good place to see what I’m up to. So thanks Ryan, this was great.
Ryan Cote:
Thanks, everyone. Thanks for listeneing. Talk to you soon.
Announcer:
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