Leadership Archives - Andrea Tackore

Our health privacy

September 5, 2023 by Andrea

What does corporate use of consumer data have to do with therapy?

How do I make sense of how my personal data is being bought and sold in the world wide web marketplace?

What does all that have to do with counseling?

Phenix is about holistic health – working with you to address mental and emotional health while connecting that journey to your body and spirit. Every now and then, a “random” issue comes along that intersects with our work. For example, we posted last week on the approaching hurricane, not because we are weather experts but because we see the mental and emotional health dynamics associated with storms. Today’s post on data privacy may seem outside the scope of mental health content but hang with us…it does intersect and it does matter.

Our clients are aware that we use an electronic health record (EHR) platform called Simple Practice. Not only are health care providers strongly encouraged to use an EHR (required if they accept Medicare/Medicaid funds), but as a telehealth practice, an EHR is a basic necessity. One of the principles we have adhered to since founding is to utilize tools and solutions which honor the privacy protections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). That said, HIPAA standards represent the minimum level of care. As therapists, we operate at a much higher ethical standard based on our role as stewards of our client’s information. Our clients trust us to protect their vulnerability as much as possible and we take that responsibility seriously. With those values, recent developments are causing concerns that we want to share with those who invest in their health through therapy (whether our client or not).

On August 2nd, our EHR provider released a new terms of service document which aggressively required signature within two weeks to retain access to all of our client care information. This was the first red flag to indicate that clearly, this company does not understand the legal access requirements for medical records. Most of us pay little attention any more to the terms of service agreements that we all “click the box” for nearly every day. We’ve all probably joked about possibly signing over our first born without knowing it…The thing is, terms of service are fairly standard for general tech companies but healthcare companies must operate very differently. Some clinicians were tipped off by the inappropriate presentation and started reading the new terms of service. Within days, a firestorm erupted with clinicians raising concerns in multiple online communities. The new terms claimed rights to user data which did not sensibly align with what should be needed just to provide the service we are paying for, and clinicians weren’t having it! This resulted in the company backpedaling slightly…extending the deadline for agreement and entering into the compliance review process they should have completed before setting up the terms. The easy answer would seem to be – just find a new provider. Unfortunately, the problem is bigger than this one company…

In the past decade, a quiet war has been unfolding in technology. Capitalists long ago discovered the profit in monetizing data. Most of the technology tools we use today are based on this practice of offering a ‘free’ service, (social media, email, web search, cloud storage, etc.) in exchange for access to data that can be aggregated and sold to the highest bidder. This purchased data allows businesses to target us with advertising and offers, personalized to what we are searching for/interested in. Investors have found more and more spaces and creative ways to entice us to hand over data they can monetize. About ten years ago, venture capitalists discovered the health care industry as an unmonetized space and started moving in. Technology companies started offering online therapy way before COVID made it popular knowing that it allowed them to set up systems which could collect valuable data. These companies were launched and run by investors with zero healthcare experience. The problem is, monetizing healthcare data is illegal, resulting in over 7 million dollars in fines against one of them, for example. For a company raking in over a billion dollars annually (2022) though, that fine is simply the price of doing business. So the quiet war behind the scenes wages as tech experts launch healthcare companies daily with nary a clinician in their leadership hierarchy, leaving them out of touch with the ethical rules clinicians must follow. Therapists and medical providers have been sounding the alarm for years but the millions of dollars these companies have available to control the narrative and pay the fines is almost impossible to beat. What that means is that it is extremely difficult to find the technology tools we need, set up with full understanding of healthcare ethics and even healthcare law.

Trust and transparency is the foundation of the therapeutic alliance. What our service providers do with our client data (even when it is ‘deidentified’) matters to us. We see our role of stewarding client data as a sacred trust. While it may seem hopeless to expect today’s environment of corporate greed to prioritize privacy over profit, we have a responsibility to keep fighting. What that looks like for us is participation in the collective pushback on our EHR provider to: practice the Safe Harbor Method in deidentifying data, legally commit to respecting the intellectual property rights of clinicians who customize EHR features, as well as to disclose the client portal access terms of service, how data is used for AI training, and what exact information is being sold to exactly what companies. Electronic Health Record software is not a free service. As a small practice, we pay over two thousand dollars a year, so imagine what more than 170,000 clinicians are paying (estimate of customer base for our current company)! Selling user data is not a necessary component of their profit strategy.

Additionally, we are taking the time to explore the alternatives. This is labor intensive and exhausting but necessary. We will look for tech companies run by clinicians, and who provide the ethical parameters our clients deserve. We have been strategic from the start in how we structured our processes. Our EHR happens to be a comprehensive practice management platform as well, capable of handling every technological need but we have never used it in that way. We use separate platforms for payment, messaging, video-meeting, etc. for two reasons: 1) We are not at the mercy of one platform if it shuts down for some reason, containing every tool we need to serve our clients and 2) Our client’s information can never be accessed in one complete package. While the companies who serve the healthcare industry have the greatest access to tech tools of confidentiality, perfection does not exist in this world and so we have structured things accordingly even before this latest concern. Moving forward, we will keep you updated every step of the way so that you have clarity about how your records are stored, accessed and managed.

Filed Under: Mental Health Tagged With: Boundaries, Business, Corporate Culture, Counseling, Leadership, Psychotherapy, Telehealth, Teletherapy, Therapy

Vision

October 28, 2022 by Andrea

Have you given up on dreaming big in this season of unpredictability and global chaos?

Wondering how you can recapture your joy for life?

Join us on a journey of building Vision!

I don’t know about you, but I feel as if the last few years have been an exercise in wandering – it has been so difficult to set goals, make plans or set expectations when at any moment, things can be upended. All of us dealt with the complete upheaval of life that COVID brought in 2020; many of us witnessed propaganda, viewpoints and behaviors from loved ones during global and cultural crisis that we would never have expected; thanks to ongoing supply shortages and the long-overdue revolution of a workforce tired of being exploited – gone are the days when you can order an item or step into a store and assume that it will be available at whim. Inflation is rapidly changing our financial expectations. Anyone who has traveled recently knows that we do well to hold travel plans loosely. Justin and Andrea took a vacation/scouting trip last summer where not.one.single.planned task or event went as intended. Not one. Coming home early was definitely discussed but it got to a point where it was downright comical how predictable it became that whatever we planned would fall through or be delayed in an endless variety of ways. Experiences like this have made it very difficult for many of us to generate motivation for specific goals or plans. I have said many times out loud that without a vision, the people perish.

What happens when we have no feasible vision for the future; when our days are a series of unfortunate dynamics – both globally and domestically? We become focused on the negative, the unpredictability, the instability, the worries of what’s next?. Problem is, the science of neurology tells us that we move toward what we ruminate on. I find that we so often focus on what is not as we would like or what we don’t want in our lives: I need to stop doing [insert dysfunction here]. The problem is, this thing we don’t want is the mental ‘vision’ before us and though we are running from it, we somehow find ourselves entangled in it. That’s because we must decide what behavior or thought we want to replace it with. What need is that dysfunction trying to meet? How can we meet that need in a healthier way? Time and time again, in my own life and in the lives of clients, success is finally achieved when we stop worrying about the thing we don’t want and focus on it’s desirable replacement instead! So, for example – instead of saying, why bother making plans – it will all fall apart anyway, we ask ourselves, what character quality do I want to cultivate in myself? and focus on the steps required to do so.

It is this understanding of the importance of focusing our brains on what we value that inspired me to launch a vision-boarding quest as we close out the year. The reality is, life is not settling back into ‘predictability’ anytime soon. The overdue bills from corporate greed and environmental abuse are coming due. War is brewing in a world that no longer has the luxury of dissociating from conflict in other hemispheres. Now, more than ever, we must develop the ability to focus our minds on possibility and values if we are to avoid throwing our hands up in defeat. I want to facilitate a fun-filled process of identifying what matters to each of us in this season and create together, a visual representation to which we can refer, throughout the next year.

Vision boards have been used for all sorts of goals: professional accomplishments, material possessions, travel wishes, physical milestones, etc. For the past several years, I have used vision boards to illustrate a value or concept that I believe God is emphasizing in my life at that time. As we take this journey together, you decide how you want to use the process. Is there a physical activity you want to train for? A goal you want to reach for at work? A place you want to visit? A value or characteristic you want to cultivate in your life? I will encourage you to distill the desires of your heart down to what is stable – what endures despite the unpredictability of our world.

Each week in November, I will post prompting questions on Facebook and Instagram, to help you tune in to where your heart is now and what matters most to you moving into the new year. I will offer general prompts as well as additional questions that invite a faith perspective to the process if that is of interest to you. Use these prompts to journal and reflect, building a vision that is authentic to you but durable in the face of uncertainty. These posts will show up in our stories as well as timeline on both platforms. On Instagram, I’ll create a Vision highlight for our stories so that this can be used anytime in the future.

In early December, I may host vision-boarding events, online or in person, (depending on interest), where we will make our boards together.

Filed Under: Mental Health Tagged With: Career, Hope, Identity, Leadership, Life Seasons, Mindfulness, Purpose, Transformation, Workshop

Global Overload

May 31, 2022 by Andrea

Are you feeling out of sorts?

Does the word “tired” not quite capture the state you’ve been in for too long?

Are you finding that your old-reliable strategies aren’t working to boost your functioning?

In April, I wrote a post about rest. It was a recounting of strategies we had actually used to give ourselves the opportunity to recharge and be renewed. While we enjoyed some immediate benefits from those efforts, we quickly found ourselves depleted once again but not in the usual way. We are well familiar with all the symptoms and signs of burnout: anxiety, headaches, poor sleep, cynicism, etc. Those are not our experience. Instead, it has been this indescribable mental exhaustion that persists despite all of our diligence around sleep hygiene, gentle nutrition, movement and sabbath. We are committed to walking the talk, so we have been leaning into the strategies we teach our clients. While we are grateful to be doing fairly well overall, we fully recognized that we are not functioning optimally…we are regularly dipping into our reserves and at some point, would find our “account” overdrawn.

Does this sound familiar? Do you feel like you’re doing OK considering, but wonder how much longer you can coast on your reserves?

We have been discussing this for quite a few weeks because we see this happening with our clients and friends as well. When we stop and think, the reality is that the past two and a half years have been one sucker punch after another: raging fires, global protests, pandemic, climate change disasters, race-based traumas, political depravity, migration crises, supply chain failures, global war, inflation and the mass murder of children in our own country. Those are just the low lights…so much more is happening every.single.day. It is RELENTLESS and therein lies the problem.

The brain’s number one job is survival and a main component of that is scanning for and responding to threat. Our brains have been in perpetual response mode since March of 2020. Every single person in our world has daily faced some level of threat – whether from health concerns, financial instability, race-based stressors, or potential violence. Not only that, but many of us are living with a high level of uncertainty regarding the future which can feel threatening in and of itself. For those of us who own our own businesses, the usual marketing strategies are no longer effective, learning the details of social media content is a full time job, shortages and inflation make it impossible to plan and execute both in the short term and certainly in the long term. All of this requires the brain to activate and maintain response systems that were never meant to stay online long term, yet here we are…still having to pump out cortisol and stay vigilant over 700 days later, each day awakening to a fresh reminder of just how unstable our world has become.

This is not sustainable.

Feeling unsafe or “untethered” as I call it taps into so many soul triggers. Depending on our life stories, we struggle with the lack of control, lack of connection, and crumbling foundations we have previously rested upon. We may find ourselves having to re-establish our safe base: that person, place or thing we rely on to ground us. We are having to develop more intensive strategies for soothing our inner child, giving voice to our adolescent selves, and silencing our critical voice. How do we build up a loving adult self who faces life with wisdom, courage and confidence when the world is metaphorically on fire around us?

Personally, we have had to lean in to our spirituality in unprecedented ways! Faith, hope and love take on earthier, more intense and tangible meanings when they are the only steadfast factors left. One thing that has struck us in our scripture study is the extended period of time that civilizations would endure turmoil. Over and over in the Old Testament, we see invaders or evil kings wreaking havoc for years and years – it wasn’t unusual for trials to go on for 40 years! In modern times, we are trained to expect things to resolve in a few weeks, if not days. Psychologically, we haven’t had to build the mental and spiritual muscles it takes to find internal stability in the midst of prolonged chaos. That is where we have decided to focus our efforts. While it may not be comforting to read stories of long-term tribulations in the bible or any history book, I do take comfort in the fact that humanity has overcome so much and God has sustained and redeemed far worse than we are seeing today.

There is one significant difference for modern times however, that we must take into account. It was summarized well by Nadia Bolz-Weber last year:

It is this insight that informs our next step in the process of establishing internal stability: disconnecting from the global chaos and focusing solely on our village. Beginning on June 1st, Justin and I will be working to remove ourselves from the fray for a season. We are not sure how long is needed. We are not sure what the disconnect looks like exactly. What we do know is that it begins with logging out of phone apps and minimizing time on electronics. What that looks like to our audience is quiet on our platforms: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, blog, etc. Thankfully, we’ve built up a LOT of content in the past two years so there’s plenty there for you to check out and benefit from.

As psychotherapists, it is our responsibility to lead the way when it comes to mental, emotional and spiritual health so we are committed to doing the work of building the muscles needed to face the current task. This gives us more to offer in our sessions with clients and as we figure out how to reconnect, we will share what we have learned. It is our hope that this post sparks your own thoughts about reasonable expectations for yourself and what steps you need to take to thrive in this marathon we didn’t sign up for. Give yourself grace and compassion – wherever you are emotionally, physically, mentally or spiritually. We were not built for all of this so extreme measures will be required to move through it well.

Stay tuned…

Filed Under: Emotional Health, Mental Health, Mind-Body Tagged With: Coping Skills, Leadership, Mind Body Connection, Self Care, Spirituality

For Those Who Want to Become a Therapist:

February 7, 2022 by Andrea

We are starting a new blog post series focused on those who would like to pursue becoming a therapist. The plan is to breakdown important questions to not only ask your future graduate school, but to ask yourself.

Now, as a precursor to this post, I want to direct your attention to a post our director, Andrea, has written about what it takes education wise to become a therapist, as well as how to maximize your own therapy experience. She states in “Maximizing Therapy”,

By the time a new therapist graduates from their masters program, they have spent more than 600 hours in graduate level classrooms taking courses dedicated to the art of helping people with life problems. They have sweated almost 2000 hours on homework and completed 1000 hours of supervised internship. All at a price tag of over $35,000 (minimum). Upon graduation, they must work under supervision for at least two years, complete an additional 1500 hours of client service and pass a national competency exam. When you show up in a therapist’s office, or log on to their teletherapy platform, you are meeting with a highly trained clinician who is there to help you reach your mental, emotional, and relational health goals.

Whew. The journey to licensure is no joke, but is highly rewarding to those who believe being a therapist is part of their calling. Let’s dive in to a few questions to ask yourself as you decide whether this journey is right for you.

Why do you want to be a therapist?

This will be a common question on graduate school applications. Take some time as you are researching different schools to explore what is driving you.

Every individual enters into the master’s program for a different reason, many times because of their own stories. Responding from a place of healing and wanting the same for others can be powerful.

Alfred Adler was a psychotherapist in the 1900’s. (You’ll learn about him in grad school.) He commented on the nature of therapists who have struggled through different aspects of life and the power that comes from having done your own work. Now it was written in 1928, but there is much truth to what he says.

There must be experience [for the therapists] as well. A real appreciation for human nature, in the face of our inadequate education today, will be gained by only one class of human beings. These are the contrite sinners, either those who have been in the whirlpool of psychic life, entangled in all its mistakes and errors, and saved themselves out of it, or those who have been close to it and felt its current touching them….The best knower of the human soul will be the one who has lived through passions himself. (pg. 13)

Are you open to doing your own work?

One of the best mirrors to your own unhealed areas in life will be your clients. This is why it is so vital that you have explored your own story before sitting with someone else. Your clients are not there to save you, fix you, or help you figure out your stuff. You are there for them. As our supervisor, Larry Shyers, loves reminding us, “It is never ever, ever, ever, ever about you”.

I highly encourage you to continue therapy throughout graduate school. Implement the things you are learning, allow yourself to go on the adventure. Having an openness to growth and knowing that you are selecting a profession that will constantly challenge you is a necessity.

If not, then when something comes up in session that reveals an area of wounding in you, it is so much easier to stick your head in the sand and push it down. When this happens, we can cause harm. The session inadvertently becomes about us and our own avoidance, thus taking the focus off the individuals coming to us for help.

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At the end of the day, you are pursing a profession that has a profound impact on people’s lives. You may be the first person they share their deepest, darkest moments with. You may be the only support they have at this time. Please don’t take that for granted. Realize the impact you have on people’s lives and walk through your own story. Pursue your own healing.

At the same time, you also have to realize that you cannot save your clients or rescue them from their problems (as much as we wish we could). There will be nights this rocks you to the core. There will be days you wish you could pull them out, especially when they are not a number or a “session” to you.

Continuing to walk through your own story helps you remain present and humble, no matter who may walk through your door. It also creates an environment of authenticity in the room that can be felt (even through telehealth).

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Join us next week as we continue to explore important considerations and aspects of learning how to be a therapist.

Filed Under: Mental Health, Service Tagged With: Business, Career, Counseling, Group Therapy, Leadership, Psychotherapy, Purpose, Therapy, Vocation

Business Success

June 16, 2018 by Andrea

**This is the second in a two part series. Click here to read the first post.***

Intelligence and knowledge are so common these days that we can’t trade on just those anymore. Emotional intelligence, applied to corporate culture design is now the factor that sets you apart and is the key to longevity. Yesterday, we defined business smarts as the usual trifecta: strategy, marketing and finance. ‘Smarts’ gets you in the door. Let us not minimize that. However, you need emotional intelligence to work the room. Here’s the cool thing: learning requires clarity and interest so organizations that focus on health automatically get smarter. Whaat?! Think about the airline in yesterday’s story. Their company has the smarts but smarter does not automatically lead to healthier since we are typically relying on expertise rather than creativity and relationships. It’s like a bank safe full of cash (smarts). Organizational health is the combination to access the safe.

Organizational health is an integrated and intentional approach to the things we already know matter, but usually attend to in isolation: team building, strategic planning, productive meetings. Reflect on my airline fiasco story from yesterday. Can you fathom the losses leaking from the bottom line daily? (Every member of our group ended up with a $500 flight credit. A credit I have been loathe to use as I NEVER want to sit on one of their planes ever again). Organizational health is ridiculously expensive to ignore! More importantly, the physical, emotional and mental toll on you when you work in an unhealthy culture is far too high a price to pay for short term gains.

As a counselor dedicated to holistic health – this is the factor that drives my passion for helping businesses design a healthy culture. Combine that with my 15 years in the corporate world in various positions of leadership, several years of higher education leadership plus seven years as a successful business owner and you have a uniquely qualified individual who understands both the business and psychological components of organizational culture. The fact that healthy organizations are more likely to increase productivity and profit is a nice bonus that pays the bills for all of us 🙂

To learn more about organizational health – check out this great resource:

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Business, Corporate Culture, Executive Coaching, Leadership, Organizational Culture, Purpose

Let’s talk business

June 15, 2018 by Andrea

**This is the first of a two part series. Link to the second post is at the bottom.**

After 30 minutes on the plane, we were all asked to get off as the mechanical problem identified needed further attention. We were a band of 25 people from Orlando heading to a connecting flight in Newark that would take us to the other side of the world for a study abroad course. This was not a great way to begin our adventure. When the plane was still unfixed a couple of hours later, tensions rose. We began to abandon hope that we would be able to continue on together. However, as negotiations began to figure out how to get all of our members across the Atlantic, employees insisted that since our tickets had been booked as a group – they could not break up the reservation to split the group onto available flights. This, despite the very real mathematical problem of ZERO flights heading into Greece with 25 open seats over the next several days. The story is long and epic so I’ll offer the low-lights:

Due to employees’ inability to use common sense and creatively problem-solve, several flight opportunities passed before they finally realized they would have to split the group. One half was put on a plane to a connecting city. The other half was placed in a hotel for the night which turned out to have trouble with running water. The staff at the hotel commented that they are forever housing ‘refugees’ from this airline.
When the second group boarded their plane the next morning, they again had to deplane when a mechanical problem was identified. They eventually left on a different plane.
Both groups upon arrival in Frankfurt found that their reservation had not been properly transferred to the partner airline that was rescuing the flights and so they had no seats booked to our destination. Thankfully, this new airline did have a different organizational culture and a few nail-biting hours later, managed to book seats for every person….except one who ended up having to wait alone in a foreign airport for a later flight. It just so happened that she was the one student who had expressed a mortal fear of being separated from the group because on a trip she had taken in undergrad, a classmate was separated from the group and found murdered. We begged and pleaded for someone else to be left behind but already taxed by their efforts to fix the ticketing problem, they explained that because the original airline had not broken up the group booking in their system – they were unable to switch out any individual tickets.

This particular airline has been in the news numerous times over the past few years for GROSS mis-steps resulting in severe consequences. They are a perfect illustration of poor organizational health manifested in high turnover, low productivity (major fleet issues), politics which prevent employees from having the freedom to problem solve, confusion and low morale. The employees we encountered were clearly unhappy and we could not blame them. The public remains puzzled as to how these problems continue. A closer look at the players reveal experts in all the usual concerns: marketing, finance and strategy. Clearly, the problem is not smarts. So what is it?

Organizational health. I’m not talking bean bag chairs and napping rooms here. It’s hard to describe; difficult to measure objectively, but you KNOW when it’s good (Southwest) and you KNOW when it’s bad (the airline we were on). It’s a simple concept but it’s incredibly complex to implement. Finance, Strategy and Marketing (smarts) are the what. Organizational health is the how. The way in which you implement and maintain budgetary management, goal setting, and telling the corporate story – that is organizational health. That strays into emotional and awkward territory which is why it is typically skirted over in management schools (or spoken of largely in intellectual terms) and avoided by most managers/leaders. Problem is, as organizational culture expert – Patrick Lencioni asserts: sustainable success is impossible without BOTH smarts AND health. Business leaders may want to stay in their ‘smart’ comfort zone but guess what?

Intrigued? Interested in learning what this looks like and how it applies to you? Stay tuned tomorrow for more…

Part Two

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Business, Corporate Culture, Executive Coaching, Leadership, Organizational Culture, Purpose

Doing

March 14, 2017 by Andrea

Experience is the greatest teacher they say… Whatever dysfunctions we have going on in our lives (and yes, we all have some) – we come by them honestly. None of us wakes up one morning and decides to be defensive, destructive, avoidant, etc. for no reason. We approach life based on the experiences we’ve had and the meanings we’ve made of them. When those meanings are no longer functional, that’s where therapy comes in. Together, we explore past experiences and how we interpreted them to identify the sticking points that cause negative results today. Then, we work together to re-examine those experiences and expand the meanings to understandings that lead to more positive ways of doing life. The healthy relationship formed in therapy provides a model for the rest of life and offers a safe base from which to go out and change our worlds for the better.

The work done in the therapy room is not effective without implementation into daily life. Healing requires doing. We must test out our new meanings, creating new experiences that will cement those meanings in our hearts and not just our brains. This is the terrifying part. It can be so comforting and enlightening to have ah-ha moments in therapy. “Whaaat?! That’s why I’ve always done that? Oh my gosh, this totally makes sense now!” Those insights are wonderful and make for much internal relief and de-stressing. But then….we have to act “as if”. If this new understanding is true, what do I do differently? This is where the terror comes in because it is a great act of vulnerability to go out into an unchanged world with our changed selves and trust that we will be successful.

Sometimes, this becomes a stumbling block for clients. It could be because we need to do more work on our own internal anxiety before we can take action. Often though, it is due to confusion about how to actually handle things differently. Isn’t it normal to need some practice with a new skill before we use it ‘for real’? This very basic truth about learning is why I believe therapy has to be active. Perhaps the most common technique is to role play anticipated situations/conversations. That is an incredibly valuable exercise as we get to form new words and even hold our bodies in different positions than we have before.

I am finding though, that there are plenty of additional ideas for experiential learning. Last week, I joined a team of colleagues at WinShape to participate in team building exercises with a facilitator who happened to be a therapist. As we funneled tennis balls through short plastic tubes, held mousetraps in our joined hands, and moved a bowling ball without touching it, I saw so many connections between these activities and the principles that clients are often struggling to implement in their lives: Creative problem solving, collaboration, trust, believing they can do hard things, believing it is possible to do things differently than before, etc. Our activities culminated with a climb to the top of what they refer to as the “Pamper pole”. I’ll let you imagine why it has garnered that name. Let me just say that I have not experienced that level of terror in a very long time! Conquering it was the best thing that could have happened though, at a time in my life when I’ve been questioning my ability to rise to the amazing mission unfolding before me. It gave me absolutely tangible proof that I can dominate and that has already provided energy to move forward with the hard things. There is nothing like actual success to fuel further success. The same techniques I used to get through the exercises at WinShape are the same techniques I will use to power through the obstacles I face in the rest of my life. That is how this works.

I am so excited to bring these kinds of activities back to my clients. Not just individual sessions, but family sessions, groups and especially corporate workshops. I have a passion for leadership development and building corporate culture, so this approach fits perfectly! I do promise however, not to utilize 30 foot telephone poles 🙂

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Adventure Therapy, Corporate Culture, Counseling, Executive Coaching, Family Therapy, Group Therapy, Leadership, Organizational Culture, Psychotherapy, Rebirth, Transformation, Workshop

Leadership Calling

August 14, 2016 by Andrea

Last week, I attended the Global Leadership Summit put on by Willow Creek Association. It has been an annual tradition for several years now as I have a passion for leadership. When I started attending, I was the Director of the largest department in the Student Development division of the university where I worked. That first experience was such a tank filler and I’ve been hooked ever since. With responsibility for six staff members…all strong and diverse personalities – each handling the tasks of what would be an entire department at other schools, I often referred to my job as “herding cats”. I saw my main role as equipping/empowering my staff to do the difficult work cut out for them as well as fostering relationships across the campus needed for my team to accomplish their mission: facilitating student success. It was an exhausting position but I loved my work and more importantly, I loved my staff. The founder of the Summit – Bill Hybels said “Everybody wins when a leader gets better”. He has said it every year since and I absolutely believe that is true! I knew that any effort I made to understand myself better, to hone my skills and to gain insight into the sacrificial work of leadership would pay off mightily for my staff.

I have not been responsible for a staff since I started teaching in 2012. In some ways, I miss the nurturing aspect of leadership….the joy of investing in the growth of my staff. However, I now have 100+ students I get to lead (in our program) and so I continue to attend the GLS.

As I reflected on the many insights gained at this year’s event, one stood out as the most affirming and inspiring: In his opening talk, Bill Hybels stated that today’s workers are coming from largely dysfunctional homes/backgrounds but as leaders, we have the opportunity to rewrite their story line in how we lead and love them well. That really struck a chord with me. I suppose that’s because as a therapist, this is how I work with clients. I understand that the relationship I build with the client is the main channel through which healing flows. I had never really thought of it in that way though, when it came to those who work for me or study under my tutelage. My hope is to build Phenix into an organization in which other therapists will thrive and grow. I am already investing in that future. I quickly realized that my investment is rewriting the storyline and that was an amazing feeling!

Isn’t this a wonderful (yet terrifying) concept?! How we lead can positively change the trajectory of a person’s life forever. Or, we can reinforce the dysfunctions they have come to know. We get to offer redemption by crafting a healthy organizational culture. One fueled by love, vision, passion and purpose. This gives a whole new spin to the meaning of leadership. It is a high calling. May I say, even sacred? I don’t know about you, but this is the kind of leader I want to be and I am excited to help other leaders in that quest as well!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Corporate Culture, Executive Coaching, Leadership, Organizational Culture