Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses
Weekly doses of strategy and advice for mental health professionals building a practice the smart way. Non-Texans welcome!
Kate Walker, Ph.D. LPC, LMFT from #counselorsdontquit Blog and Kate Walker Training You Tube Channel reveals all of her practice and practice side-hustle strategies, clinical techniques, and killer marketing tips and tricks so you can be ahead of the curve with your mental health practice. Discover how you can create a mental health practice that works for YOU so you can have the time and freedom to do what you love, whether it's traveling the world, or attending your nephew's volleyball game.
Since 2007, she's been co-supporting her family (along with her amazing husband) with her counseling practice achievebalance.org and counselor education company Kate Walker Training LLC. Dr. Kate openly shares wins, losses, and all the lessons in between with the Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses Community.
Author of My Next Steps: Create a Counseling Career You'll Love, researcher, speaker, and professor of counselor education, Kate helps you learn about positioning yourself as your community's expert resource, marketing, building HIPAA compliant scalable systems and outsourcing, content creation, podcasting, search engine optimization, niche development, social media strategies, how to get more clients, creating online courses, becoming a clinical supervisor, and productivity tips so that you create something amazing without burning yourself out.
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Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses
107 Clinical Supervision Topics: Essential Strategies and Tools for Effective Guidance
Step into the world of clinical supervision with us as we promise to transform your approach with insights from the Clinical Supervision Survival Guide. Discover how to anticipate and tackle the obstacles of supervision much like preparing for a challenging hike, ensuring you're equipped with the essential tools and knowledge. We dive into the complexities of supervising across state lines, emphasizing the importance of staying informed in the ever-evolving landscape of counseling laws. Through the developmental model from the Kate Walker Training Online Course, we explore how to support supervisees' growth and embrace the diversity of their emerging counseling styles.
We'll unpack essential strategies, introducing the OER triad and the concept of a resource library to foster an enriching learning environment. As you tune in, prepare to note strategies that will make your supervisory role more rewarding and insightful. We'll give you a sneak peek into future discussions, including vital equipment, onboarding paperwork, and a handy checklist to streamline the process. Plus, get acquainted with a clinical supervision planner designed to complement your journey with the guidebook, setting the stage for effective supervision like never before.
Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.
So let's plan for what can go wrong. Now I'm reading directly from my new book, the Clinical Supervision Survival Guide, the tips, resources and tools to keep putting more excellent therapists in the world, and it's not going to feel like a bedtime story. I promise I'm not going to read to you, but I am going to take excerpts directly from the book because I want you to know how easy it is for you to grab the same information that I have access to, right. So the book's on Amazon you can grab it. There's a QR code on page 15. So if you never read the book, you can just scan the QR code and get all the resources, and I'm adding more of those resources all the time.
Speaker 1:So when we talk about challenges, not problems, you can probably hear it in my voice that I'm doing a reframe. Right, it's a glass half full, not a glass half empty, and this comes from my experience hiking. So you know, a couple of weeks ago I climbed or didn't climb, sorry, a couple of weeks ago I hiked, because I don't climb, I don't do any of that ropes and rappelling and any of that. So a couple of weeks ago I was hiking in Yosemite and we did 30 miles over three days and over a thousand feet of elevation gain each day. So the thing was not easy. I mean, these were hard hikes. They were beautiful hikes and if you follow me on Instagram you can see the pictures. We're smiling. It was just a wonderful time. There was a heat advisory, but hey, we're from Texas, so we were used to that. But here's the key when you know you are going to hike something difficult and last spring I hiked the Camino, we did 100 kilometers in five days you know you need oh, I don't know water. You know that you're going to need probably rain gear. You know that you're going to need food. You're going to need maybe a change of clothes.
Speaker 1:So you look at these things as challenges to overcome, because you already know you're going to get hungry. You already know you're going to get thirsty, and so when we look at supervision or at least when I do, a lot of the questions I get asked are things that I already knew that they were going to happen. So, even though I don't know the person who's asking me the question, or I'm reading this in the social media threads, you know I don't know the particular situation, but as they start to describe it. I'm thinking, ooh, that's a developmental one thing. Or oh gosh, that's a developmental one thing, or oh gosh, that's a developmental two thing. You know, these levels developmentally help us understand what's appropriate and expected at this level. Not that it's going to happen, right Like I'm going to carry bear spray, but I certainly do not want to see a bear, right? I mean, these are things that I'm prepared for on a hike.
Speaker 1:And so when I wrote my book, the Clinical Supervision Survival Guide, I came from that perspective of equipping supervisors for things we know could happen, may happen, will probably happen, and so we're not going to call them problems, we're going to call them challenges that we're prepared for. We're going to call them challenges that we're prepared for. So number one way to prepare for challenges drum roll please is know the rules. You know, and especially with all of these counseling compacts getting enacted in various states, we've got folks who want to have licenses in multiple states. Well, that's wonderful, but you must know the rules in the state that you are licensed in and where your supervisee is licensed. So if you're supervising someone for Michigan hours and you're located in Texas and you are licensed in Michigan and you're licensed in Texas. You better be quick on your feet to understand the difference in the rules and you don't just check the rules once. I mean, I don't know about Michigan, but I know in Texas we had like three rules updates in 2024. And that's not uncommon, right. That's sort of par for the course. That was an easy year, right, there weren't a whole lot of changes, but they were significant. And in Texas we are obligated to not only know the rules but to teach our supervisees the rules.
Speaker 1:Now, you heard me mention the developmental model a second ago. Well, we teach that in the Kate Walker Training Online 40-Hour LPC LMFT Supervisor Training Course because we want our supervisees who graduate from our program to know and to plan for supervisees to grow and change. The person that you interview is not going to be the same person in six months. That's not going to be the same person in two years. They will grow because they're going to gain experience. They're going to gain knowledge. They're going to maybe get some extra training. They're going to gain knowledge. They're going to maybe get some extra training. They're going to have time with you. Right, your supervision is going to impact them. So plan for them to grow and change. I mean.
Speaker 1:One of the things I talk about a lot you'll hear me talk about it again, I'm sure is level two. Supervisees are going to I'm making air quotes now rebel against you. Now that doesn't mean an all-out teenage war. It simply means, as they progress, they are supposed to be able to analyze and create their own style of counseling. They're going to take all that good knowledge that they learned in their master's degree, all that wonderful supervision that you're giving them, and they are going to create their own style, and it may not be your style. Control eponymous, it's okay. I mean and I'm talking to myself now I'm a bit of a control freak, so this may be the time when you are thinking to yourself oh, I must remediate, I must take care of this. And in reality, they are actually growing exactly how they should be, and you're the one who needs to do the changing. Which brings me to know yourself. Okay, know yourself, okay. Know yourself.
Speaker 1:If you know that you're irritated by disorganization, if you know that you are driven crazy by procrastination, then you want to be on the lookout for supervisees who do those things. If you've heard any of my podcasts or my teachings, you know that one of the ways I stretched myself as a supervisor was I intentionally took on supervisees that did not have my Myers-Briggs slash, you know astrological sign whatever. I took on supervisees who were maybe a little bit different, you know they were different from me anyway, because I wanted to grow. I did the research, I understood that sometimes the less controlling, more creative supervisees made excellent counselors or creative supervisees made excellent counselors, and I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to take on those folks.
Speaker 1:Now, did they do things in ways that I wouldn't have done them as a Capricorn thinking, judging whatever? Of course they did right. They did things in their own way and there were discussions. I would have discussions if it was a thing that I absolutely felt like they needed to do my way and I set that expectation in the orientation with my OER triad right Orientation, evaluation, remediation. So there were boundaries, there were limits, but I was willing to stretch my comfort zone, push that envelope a little bit so that I could get experience with more creative counselors or just counselors who weren't like me, which brings me to implement the OER triad.
Speaker 1:If you know yourself and you know that you are not a confrontational person, if you know yourself and you know that you are not a confrontational person, if you know yourself and you know that you get highly uncomfortable if you have to assess and you know, for heaven's sake, tell someone that they don't measure up, that's okay, but just know that is part of the job. So if you get halfway through supervision and you've got an associate who's walking all over you and you recognize in yourself that you never implemented an orientation, or you implemented an orientation but then you never followed through on any evaluations, and now you are pulling your hair out thinking, oh gosh, I have to remediate this person, but I never evaluated them. And now what do I do? I'm just going to bide my time until they're 18 months. 24 months is over. That's not a good place to be in and I would really encourage you to reach out to a warm fuzzy blanket of nurturing support, like the Texas Supervisor Coalition Facebook page, of nurturing support like the Texas Supervisor Coalition Facebook page, because folks like that can help you then implement what you need to implement and get that OER triad back on track. Right, you did the orientation, yay, go you. Now it's going to take a little extra, but you got to implement an evaluation and, of course, if something's egregious, address it immediately, and that's one of the things I talk about in the book as well. Start this is the last one well, not the last one, but the last one in this chapter start your resource library One of the things I threw out there several years ago and people just loved it. It surprised me, but then I found out that actually the data support it, and that's this idea of giving your brand new supervisees this library of resources for their first whatever.
Speaker 1:So in my practice I saw a lot of couples surviving infidelity, and so I was training my associates to do the same, and so I recognize these folks took the courses in their master's program to see couples, but perhaps they'd never seen a couple, or they had seen a couple but had never dealt or worked with the dynamics of infidelity. So one of the resources I gave them was a book about surviving infidelity. And then I knew they had a class on addiction, but did they have the training to work with the person suffering from addiction or the family member of the person suffering with addiction? I had a book for that. So right off the bat at their orientation and believe me, some of them did not like this they had a reading list. They had five books that I needed them to read in one month.
Speaker 1:So I you know I didn't necessarily quiz them on this, but I could tell, right, if we were doing supervision and it was with the couple I'm sorry it was about the couple who was surviving infidelity and they were bringing in all kinds of information that I know was not in Michelle Wiener Davis's Recovering from Infidelity book I would be able to say, hey look, I need you to have this read by next time we meet, or I'm going to assign this couple to someone else. And that was a hard boundary for me because again, we have the data that say our supervisees that are in settings where they are over their head, they're more likely to do something wrong, something complaint worthy, something unethical. And so again, what we're doing is we're not preparing for like oh gosh, we didn't know this would happen. No, we know you and I supervisors, we know that when they leave their master's program they have a lot of knowledge, but we also have to know that they are going to grow developmentally and it's up to us to know what's around the bend. Right, I'm doing the hiking metaphor thing again. Right, to know what's up ahead and even if it's not exactly what we thought it would be, we are going to be prepared. So let me review Number one know the rules.
Speaker 1:Number two don't just check the rules once. Check them a lot. Number three plan for your supervisees to grow and change. Number four know yourself. Number five implement the OER triad. And number six start your resource library. So I hope this is helpful to you. This is the first in our series of podcast episodes devoted to chapters in my book, the Clinical Supervision Survival Guide, and next time I is going to include all of the equipment that you'll need, all of the paperwork you're going to need and how to go through it, like a checklist so that you're onboarding your new supervisee. And don't forget, I've got a planner. So we have the companion to the Clinical Supervision Survival Guide. It's a clinical supervision planner and I hope you grab it and make sure you grab that when you buy the book. All right, I'll see you soon.