Most recently, I got my master’s degree in counseling. My thesis explored the intersection of psychotherapy and marketing.

I had learned that most therapists loathed marketing, but I felt strongly that so much of the storytelling I associated with marketing seemed to fall into the category of therapeutic "common factors"--factors in common across all forms of therapy that actually make therapy work. Things like:

• Inspiring hope,

• Getting buy-in from the client,

• Setting and managing expectations, and

• Providing both an explanation for the client's current distress and a roadmap to a preferred future.

Marketing is about all those things. So I set out to uncover two things:

1. Why do therapists hate marketing?

2. Could marketing be an overlooked way to improve therapy outcomes?

I found the answers I was looking for, and so much more!

So now I'm dedicated to helping people improve the quality of their services by optimizing their marketing -- and hopefully making a better living along the way.

Like most of us, I need to have a job to survive. Through much trial and error, I’ve realized that I’m pretty miserable when the best eight hours of my day are spent doing what someone else thinks is important. I feel like I’ve finally found the nexus of what I‘m good at and what other people need from me. Nothing has ever felt more fulfilling than the work I’m doing now. I want to help you find whatever that is for you.

I certainly hope so! But there’s a fair chance you won’t. I’ve hopefully been authentic enough in my Interpersonal Branding that I have inspired “approach” behavior in right-fit clients and “avoid” behavior in wrong-fit clients. If you’re a wrong-fit, I hope you’re finding me annoying, twee, unprofessional, or whatever. If, however, you’re thinking I’m probably super-fun after a couple glasses of wine, let’s give this a shot!

A central component of Interpersonal Branding is the development of a single, cohesive professional identity that is meaningful and authentic to you and useful to your clients. I know what my personal boundaries around my identity are, so I am not going to regale you with my hobbies or thoughts on what happens after we die. I have an educated guess about what about me might be useful to you to know, but I don’t know for certain. So I want to give you the option of exploring why my dog is all over my website, for example, but I don’t want to force it if you don’t really care!

I graduated from the Honors College at UCLA in 2004, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with a B.A. in English Literature (no regrets). After college, I put all that academic rigor to no use at all and worked in sales and marketing, a non-profit, and copywriting before becoming a full-time actor.

Acting was...interesting. The most important thing I learned was that there was a discrepancy between how people experienced me and who I wanted to be. I found success playing a particular brand of nice dumb blonde, but it was absolutely exhausting performing that version of me all the time. And when I tried to be more...well, me...I stopped booking.

When I career-pivoted into grad school in 2017, I found an authentic version of me that felt sustainable but also seemed to be helpful to other people. I loved being back in school and threw myself into the academic side of psychotherapy. I started a podcast with Ben Fineman (Very Bad Therapy) to explore things we were curious about, including the client experience. And I started getting curious about what the hell was going on with therapists and marketing--namely, why do they hate it so much? That led to my thesis, a realization that I was a better branding therapist than mental health therapist at this point, and here we are!

It's possible you have seen/heard me:

• Podcasting (Very Bad Therapy)

• Podcasting with Ben Caldwell of High Pass Education (Think Like the Test)

• TA-ing for Diane Gehart

• Helping future therapists get into grad school through MFT California

• Trying to get into the running car

Chance has been my faithful research assistant since day 1 of grad school. In fact, he’s entirely responsible for me becoming a therapist in the first place. There was something about having him in my life that pretty quickly shook up my priorities—I was an actor when I adopted him, and suddenly no part of that seemed anywhere near as important as finding out what kind of squeaky toy he liked best. I started to think about what kind of lifestyle would allow me to spend more time with my dog, and what would be fulfilling enough to justify spending any time away from him at all. He changed my life completely, and I am eternally grateful.

Nope. When I graduated from my counseling master’s program, I put my licensing pursuit on hold so I could work on turning my thesis into something service providers could actually use. I have found I am, at this point, much better at being a branding therapist than a mental health therapist!

Many marketing/branding coaches and consultants are their own best advertising—they built successful practices for themselves and now teach others how to do it, too. But there are lots of service providers who still struggle with those approaches. By turning to the literature, I figured out why, and that’s how I can help.