Balancing Authenticity and Professionalism in Private Practice with Susannah Horwitz of Well Connected Therapist Ep. 43

Episode Overview

• Episode Topic: In this captivating episode of Mastering Counseling,  we delve into the fascinating world of trauma-informed therapy with Susannah Horwitz, a licensed professional counselor, and nature-based expressive arts therapist. The focus is on exploring the unique contributions of nature-based expressive arts therapy in healing trauma and fostering well-being. The episode also unveils Susannah’s innovative coaching program, the Well Connected Therapist, designed to support introverted therapists in navigating the challenges of networking and building a successful private practice.
• Lessons You’ll Learn: Listeners can anticipate gaining valuable insights into the power of nature-based therapy for trauma healing. Susannah shares a compelling success story that illustrates the profound impact of this therapeutic approach. The episode also offers practical tips for therapists, especially introverts, on successful networking. Susannah’s journey, marked by transitioning from Medicaid panels to a thriving private practice, provides lessons on balancing authenticity and professionalism in networking. Additionally, therapists can discover how the Well Connected Therapist coaching program contributes to both business aspects and personal fulfillment in the field.
• About Our Guest: Susannah Horwitz, a trauma-informed therapist and licensed professional counselor known for her expertise in nature-based expressive arts therapy. With dual licensure in Massachusetts and Colorado, Susannah brings a unique perspective to the geographical influences on therapeutic practices. As the founder of the Well Connected Therapist coaching program, she empowers introverted therapists to build professional relationships and a referral base for their private practices.
• Topics Covered: The episode covers a range of intriguing topics, from the transformative effects of nature-based expressive arts therapy on trauma to the geographical considerations when integrating outdoor elements into therapy. Susannah’s coaching program takes center stage, addressing the challenges introverted therapists face in networking and offering strategies for success. The power of networking in therapy, practical tips for effective networking, and the delicate balance between authenticity and professionalism are explored. The episode concludes with reflections on Susannah’s commitment to innovative therapeutic practices and her dedication to supporting therapists in building meaningful connections and successful private practices.

Episode Transcript

Susannah Horwitz: Maybe one of the questions we’re going to ask is like, what’s a practical tip? Well, if I was going to go and meet somebody I’d never met before, or if I was going to even go and speak and do a workshop or something, I either would go out and move and listen to music, or I would dance in my office to music beforehand. I might write in my journal, I might do some meditation, breathing, a combination of a lot of these things. Before, and during, I would be doing the same kind of grounding exercises that I do when I tell people, like when you’re feeling activated, like I’m just going to feel the table, I’m going to have my water here. So I’m going to be able to know and feel myself being actually here while I’m talking, and then afterwards, always not just going straight directly to the next thing, but taking some of that downtime to really refuel myself, whether it was going for a walk or it’s going for a run.

Becky Coplen: Welcome to Mastering Counseling, the weekly business show for counselors. I’m your host, Becky Coplen. I’ve spent 20 years working in education in the role of both teacher and school counselor. Each episode will be exploring what it takes to thrive as a counseling business owner. From interviews with successful entrepreneurial counselors to conversations with industry leaders on trends and the next generation of counseling services, to discussions with tech executives whose innovations are reshaping counseling services. If it impacts counseling, we cover it on Mastering Counseling. Welcome back to another show of Mastering Counseling, where we focus on the world of therapy and mental health. Today, I am so excited to welcome an expert in nature-based expressive Arts therapy, whose name is Susannah Horwitz, and we are so happy to have her here today. Welcome to the show.

Susannah Horwitz: Thank you so much, Becky. I really appreciate it. I’m excited to get talking with you today.

Becky Coplen: I’m so excited to hear from you. We have not delved into this specific type of therapy, so let’s just get right into what it is you’re doing and where you’re at. And how does the nature-based expressive arts therapy uniquely help people that have gone through traumatic experiences?

Susannah Horwitz: Where I think all of this actually started, and I was mentioning this to you before we even got on air doing this, even though I never thought of myself as like a real adventurer risk taker. I was a nature girl. I loved to be outside. And yet I also, in many ways, there were times when I felt disconnected from nature, growing up in the 80s and the 90s and being we lived in a space where I grew up that was beautiful, forested, like there was a pond outside, and we did get outside. But I look back on it and think, I didn’t get outside as much as I should have, because growing up in that time, we were inside all the time. We were watching TV and movies and we didn’t have what the kids have now, but we still were, I think, a little bit more disconnected from it, because I think that’s a huge part of why the nature-based therapy is so wonderfully supportive and transformative for people. It started with me, so when I was 15 years old, I went on an Outward Bound course. It was when my parents were getting a divorce and I was feeling lost. I was in like going between ninth and 10th grade and high school, and I was meeting with a therapist and he was a CBT therapist, he suggested Outward Bound for me and for my brother. And I was really shy, very quiet, very introverted. I had friends, and I was going to a performing arts school, a high school at the time. But there was just this feeling deep within me that I just didn’t know who I was. I didn’t feel like I had opinions of my own. I didn’t feel a lot of self-esteem. And that’s what he was suggesting it for. So I went out into the North Cascades, in Washington state, in the wilderness for three weeks with a bunch of kids I didn’t know, and I think there was some excitement about it, but there was also a lot of nervousness. But going through that, I think that was one of the very first times I was going away from home. I grew up in Ohio. I had never seen mountains like this before. I grew up, went out there and just it was a deeply transformative experience. So I think that set off a lot of things because when I returned from just three weeks, I felt so much more confident in myself. I just had done things that I had never done before. I started to believe that I could be a leader, even if I wasn’t the one standing up and talking loud in front of people or getting all the big roles in the shows. And as I went through the rest of high school, I started to realize that was a really big part of what I wanted in my life was just to be able to be in nature. So I went and became a Camp Counselor, and I worked at camps in the summertime during college. I loved working with kids, and eventually, I thought, maybe I want to be a teacher. So I graduated my undergrad with an English degree. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and like a lot of people who don’t know what they do with a liberal arts degree, I went and did something completely different. But there were a bunch of us who just had sociology and psychology degrees and English and whatever, who had gone to this outdoor education center. That was one of the camps that I worked at in the summertime, actually, in Michigan, where you are and I taught year-round at an outdoor education center and just learned so much again about not just teaching about nature, but what happens to people, kids in particular, but also adults, because we were doing high ropes courses and things like that. When they’re outside and connecting with nature and doing things in a very experiential hands-on way. So there were kids whose teachers would tell us like they never do anything in school, and they were just the best student for those 3 to 5 days that they were there. So from that point on, I still was on this track of I want to be a teacher and made the leap to do Teach For America in Baltimore.

Becky Coplen: I’m familiar with Teach For America.

Susannah Horwitz: Yeah, I went I taught sixth grade in Baltimore City Public Schools. That was actually probably one of the first times I was really deeply learning about trauma and what happens with trauma in systems, just systemic trauma. I don’t know if I had called it that at the time. I was 23 years old. I was very idealistic white teacher coming into a school where I probably had 40, 35, 40 kids in a class. The system itself was really burdened. I think just like a lot of systems and a lot of big cities. But particular Baltimore, and after a year I was so worn out by trying so hard to give and support all of these kids and not be like the other teachers that I saw with relieving every 2 or 3 months. I wanted to be consistent enough, but after a year, I had to really think about taking care of myself because I was emotionally drained. I was physically not healthy, and I decided we were supposed to do two years. It was a two-year commitment. I decided that I was going to end it after a year, and I was going to go explore and see what else I wanted to do. I actually went back to outdoor education in my home state of Ohio, last place I ever thought I was going to go back to. But turned out to be one of the best things I ever did because I worked in this outdoor education center very similar to Michigan, but worked for two years there until I finally started to discover expressive arts therapy. And so that’s actually what led me to grad school. To get my degree in counseling, I went to Lesley and Massachusetts for expressive arts therapy because I thought, “Oh great, this combines everything I love. It’s all of the arts and therapy. It’s not just art therapy or music therapy.” So I took classes in all of the arts therapies, dance therapy, music therapy, even poetry therapy, art therapy. But all throughout that, I was missing the love of being in the outdoors. And by the time I graduated from grad school, I was doing my thesis around the ways in which nature and the arts, both in combination, to be able to go to places where, and when I say people, I was working with kids and teens for a very long time, but now I’m working mostly with adults, just to be able to have these safe spaces where they can take risks and not harm themselves and have not only the support of the therapist but also the support of nature and the support of the playfulness of art and music and all of these other things. So I had always wanted to open a private practice, but I had no idea how to open up a business. But I just was so afraid once again, to take that leap into doing something completely on my own. After having worked for people for so long. And what ended up happening is I started to talk to other people who were doing what I thought was so cool. My husband was in a cafe, met another guy who, towards the end of their conversation said, “Oh, so what does your wife do?” And he said, “Oh, my wife’s an expressive arts therapist. I don’t know if you know what that is.” That’s so weird. He said, My wife is an expressive arts therapist. So we ended up meeting and then eventually she helped me really learn the ropes. Now at that time, this was in 2009, 2010, I finally had gotten my license. I didn’t need my license for a lot of things. I had worked for the places I worked for before. I was following what everybody else was doing again, and it was like, get on this insurance panel, get on this insurance panel. You need to rent an office space. You need to do all these things. So I was just trying to land and figuring out like, how do people do this, get this liability insurance? And eventually, I built up a private practice that I felt proud of. That was part-time while I was still working at the nonprofit. And then I got pregnant. As my son was getting a little older, through many different things that happened, my husband and I decided we were going to move to Colorado, and this was in 2014. We moved out here and I knew no one professionally out here because all of my professional contacts were out there. And one of the very first things that I did was I thought, Colorado has a lot of wonderful open space trails and just beautiful areas. So I found somebody who was doing trainings in both somatic interventions for trauma and also nature-based things, and that person to this day. So this person is now one of my main mentors here. She has been somebody I’ve taken courses with. She’s an EMDR trainer and consultant. So when I trained in EMDR, now she’s my EMDR consultant. I just got certified in EMDR.

Becky Coplen: Oh, awesome. Our last couple of episodes had a lot of focus on EMDR, so very cool.

Susannah Horwitz: Well, and that’s the other thing. I now do EMDR outside, which is a whole other thing that I know there’s not a ton of people that are doing that. So when I moved out here, I just started trying to figure out how do I incorporate this. And the first step was just going outside with clients. Now, that said, I have worked with this mentor of mine, she and other people who helped me to understand, like, “Okay, well, when you go outside, how do you deal with a liability in the confidentiality of all of that?” I now have a separate document that for the last five years or so that clients have signed that basically talks about the risks and the liabilities. It’s been looked over by a lawyer about going outside. Now, there are people who do nature-based adventure, even adventure-based therapy, who do a little bit more physically riskier things like rock climbing. That’s not really my thing. However, in the last several years, in particular, we see deer. I’ve seen a bear with a client. That was a roosting session. We saw a moose one time. There’s just all sorts of really cool things that can happen out there, but there’s risks. So the thing that I would say, because just to answer your question about nature-based therapy, there’s two things that I’ve always thought about that what happens when we go outside? One of them is for most people who come to work with me, they know that I’m nature-based therapist and they love being outside. Most people, we talk about trauma whenever we’re working with trauma, I always start with and sometimes end up doing it for a long time with people, trauma-based resourcing. And so this is also something that you’ll find in EMDR and sometimes in an IFS and all sorts of different kinds of trauma-informed practices, resourcing, and grounding. It’s just being able to regulate your nervous system within the unknown. So it might be in an unknown environment, or it might be the kinds of emotions that feel vulnerable and scary. Generally, resourcing with nature is one of the easiest ways for people to resource. So for example, we’d go outside and I usually start by walking and talking, and I’ll ask people to because it’s really their choice. Do you want to sit somewhere? Do you want to keep moving? Because the movement in and of itself is also helpful for resourcing, helps with breathing. And in general, if somebody is talking about something that’s really working them up, I spend a lot of time and this is a lot of my somatic training, too, interrupting people. And I’ll tell them that right away. I may interrupt you and say, hey, what are you noticing is happening in your body right now? Or if we’re not even getting into the body right away, because that takes people some time to develop that language, what are you noticing that you’re feeling, right? They might be like, “Oh, I’m feeling nervous or anxious”, or “Maybe I’m just feeling keyed up. I’m just feeling activated.” I’ll see probably more activation than I will see depression outside. In fact, there was a time when I was doing EMDR when I first started doing it with a client, and we started in the office, and I noticed that she was starting to move towards dissociation, and we paused it. I said, hey, what would it be like if we got up and moved outside? And almost immediately her whole demeanor shifted, her coloring and her face shifted. We went outside. She’s breathing, and she was like, “Wow!” And so one of the things that I do with people a lot was just to notice something that feels neutral or pleasant with one of your five senses could be something you see, hear, feel, smell, taste even. And they just focus on that one thing. Just get really concrete about it. Well, what about it feels neutral or pleasant? It doesn’t have to be particularly pleasant. It could just be like a blank color or just be like the shape of a leaf or something like that. And I’ll have them describe, oh, what’s the shape of it? What’s the color of it? And when they start to do that, because this is something that a lot of us therapists do anyway, even in the office, then I’ll have them check back in and notice, “Well, I’m still feeling anxious, but it’s a little bit lighter than it was before. I feel a little bit more like I’m here.” That is one of the main things is that it is resourcing, even without me guiding them into an exercise. Everybody has some sort of connection to nature, whether it’s the beach, whether it’s the ocean, whether it’s an island, whether it is a mountain somewhere in a different country, or whether it’s somewhere here, like where I am in Colorado. Nature doesn’t have to try. Nature just holds space for risk-taking, for grounding, for all of the things that we want our clients to do in therapy. And I’m just helping people get out there and reintroducing them to it. Because one of the biggest things about all of this, and the reason why I think nature is so important and why, if we look at how trauma and even the systems that were part of that are exacerbating and creating the trauma were very disconnected from nature in a lot of our cultures for many different reasons, either because we’re privileged enough to stay inside or because we don’t have enough privilege to be in a place that has something that feels pleasant in terms of nature, we have become very disconnected from it. We are so connected through screens and through technology, and yet we forget to shut that stuff off and go outside and be connected to it and understand, like, nature isn’t just this other thing that we go to. We are nature. We’re part of it. And I think that sometimes people just may need this sort of reintroduction to it. And there are a lot of exercises I do with people to outside of just being in the space and just walking and talking because a lot of what I really love to do in therapy does not involve talking. It just involves using pagination and play and processing what’s happening in your body and all of that. So I do EMDR outside, I do bring the tappers for EMDR outside. But I also sometimes people tap on themselves. I’ve done Walking EMDR where this is bilateral stimulation when you’re walking at a certain pace, and also just to process things. People. When Frances Shapiro developed EMDR, she just had gone on a walk and noticed her eyes were moving back and forth. But I think there were a lot of those different things that were happening. I also will send people off on little wanders within certain boundary and they laugh about it later. Like “Susanna made me go talk to a tree.” But it’s just to be able to have this connection with nature. And notice what is developing an understanding of the language and communicating with nature. Like somebody might have a burning question that they’re just like, I don’t know how to solve this. And if they’re not particularly spiritual, a lot of times I find that people will be able to connect to imagination and play and nature. Go and find something wise in nature. It just seems wise. It could be that it’s just like a crack in the sidewalk. It could be that with like a little plant growing up through. It could be a big old tree over here. It could be that you see a deer or a bird, and I have them go off with a piece of paper or their journal if they want, and just have a dialogue about holding that question in mind and asking the question and noticing what comes back, and then going through it, and then they’ll come back and we’ll process the experience. And I’ve had people say, I had no idea therapy could be like this. And these are not things that are really super hard to do as a therapist. It’s just making that jump in, that leap to do something different. And for me, it was like I was a big rule follower. Even after Outward Bound, I still was like, oh, I’m going to get caught by the licensing board if I take my clients outside. Right? And the thing is, it’s like there’s always different ways to work with using what works. That’s what I landed on. I was like, if my clients getting better, then who cares?

Becky Coplen: This episode is brought to you by Masters in Counseling. Org. If you’re considering enrolling in a master’s level counseling program to further your career, visit mastersincounseling.org. To compare school options via our search tool that allows you to sort by specific degree types, tuition, our costs, online flexibility, and more. Well, first of all, thanks for sharing your journey with us. So much of what you’re sharing resonates. I work in a school and I’m such a big proponent of outdoor recess, especially with the younger I’m in elementary, I’m like, they have to get out in the outdoors and just cool things happen, especially for kids who do not love the sitting and drawing, writing, all of that. And what a way to bring all of it to therapy, which is a little outside of the box, but I love it. I was thinking so many different things when you’re talking, but one thing that came to mind is, and I think I saw this on your website, some clients are they do a hybrid model, which I assume is some telehealth and some in-person. So talk to our listeners about if you are doing a lot of outdoor experience, do the clients go on those on their own as like assignments? Do they meet with you sometimes inside? How does that work?

Susannah Horwitz: I’m glad you asked this because this was something that I just had to learn along the way, and especially during the times that we were all locked inside. Those answers came very quickly. And from the things that I’m grateful for about the pandemic, I’m very grateful for what it taught me about how to be flexible and different ways that you can do different things. The basic way that I love to work and I was why I say, yeah, it’s hybrid. So during the pandemic, I went completely online. Everybody went online, right? I wasn’t meeting anybody, even outdoors. There were some therapists who were early on meeting people outside, but I was just being super, super careful. And I think it wasn’t until April or May 2021 that I started meeting people in person again. And when I did that, I decided I’m only going to meet people in person outside, and if they don’t want to meet in person, then we’re going to meet online. So when I was during the pandemic, I would have people connect with look out the window. What do you see out of the window? That was where it started. Then I would say, oh, do you have houseplants? You can feel them. You can feel the soil, the houseplants. You can look at it, you can smell it, you can have a conversation with it. People have cats, they have dogs, all of that kind of stuff that felt to me like nature-based therapy, too, because we would incorporate and include conversations with them into the therapy. That was one of the things that I did was like, if you’re inside, how do you still do nature-based therapy? Then it moved into clients who said, they would ask me, can I meet you outside? Like on my phone? I was like, that’s fine, wherever you want to go, that you feel safe doing this, just let me know where you are. And so I remember there was one session that I had with a client where they were out by like a pond, and they had this moment of wanting to yell out, and we just together figured out that she could pick up a rock and throw it as hard as she could into the water and just yell. And based on what it was she was working with, this was super, super helpful for her in processing through the emotion. There were other people who would go on a walk, people who would just be sitting outdoors in a park somewhere where there’s not a ton of people. Those spaces I have found, and this was a surprise to me until I started doing it, are actually a little more confidential and private than even being in my office here, and even sometimes on telehealth because we’ve all gotten interrupted by we do telehealth from home or whatever it is. So I just really love the fact that I can be flexible with it and that we can all be flexible with it. It’s just I think it just takes some creativity. And that was the other thing with expressive arts therapy and EMDR, I started going, “Oh, this works online too.” All I have to do is ask them to like have a few materials, even just a pen and a paper, or maybe it’s just something sensory to play with and EMDR, there’s lots of different things you can do, like with a light bar on the screen and everything, but I’ve had amazing EMDR processing sessions with people, reprocessing. They are tapping on their side, and I’m tapping on my side. I think that sometimes we tend to make excuses because we’re just afraid of change, and we’re afraid to do the next thing. And for me, it helped to be able to connect with other people and see other people doing these things and then to just take the risk to try it myself, and then also to talk to other people about how that went and just constantly get good peer and other group supervision.

Becky Coplen: I think that I love the most is just the amount of free resources that you can utilize things around your home, pets, the house, plants, go to a park, these rocks, all of it. So we’ve talked a lot about the different modes of therapy and ways to help clients. Let’s talk a little bit about the well-connected therapist in your coaching practice to help other therapists and counselors, particularly those who may be more introverted.

Susannah Horwitz: Well, to start, I had told you that I am introverted. Sometimes people don’t believe that because they’re not really quite understanding what introverted is. I also happen to be somebody who was shy. Like I told you before, I was one of the quietest kids in my class before I started getting into theater and things like that. But introversion, just in terms of how I refuel the most. And I find that even as I get older, it’s like I’m going back in time to when I was younger. I love to just hole up in a space that’s not around a ton of people and just regain my energy. However, one of the reasons that this whole well-connected therapist thing started, I’ll back up a little bit. This actually is a huge part of why I’m doing a ton of the stuff that I’m doing right now. I got to the end of 2020 and realized after having gotten onto some Medicaid panels and just working a lot in my practice had filled up. But my income went down as my clientele went way up, and so I was exhausted. I was starting to edge towards some burnout, and I was like, what is going on here? And then I was like, oh, because Medicaid, not only was it a hassle to get through, and even though the reason that I got on in the first place was because my husband had been so supportive to me when I was on Medicaid myself and I was pregnant and having a baby, I wanted to be able to give back. Well, what turned out is that it was actually really draining me to be doing that kind of work. And by the beginning of 2021, I was like, something has to change. I’ve got to maybe increase my other full fees. I don’t think I’m going to leave Medicaid right away. But then what ended up happening is I joined a coaching program. It’s a money mindset coaching program for therapists and private practice, and I got way more out of it than I ever had anticipated. I thought I was going to go, and they’re going to help me figure out how to raise my fees. Well, it transformed a lot about me just generally taking care of my own energy, scheduling vacations for the first time in my life in private practice. I had been a private practice for 11 years, and I had not scheduled a vacation unless I was actually getting on a plane to go somewhere. I would still work with clients, especially after doing telehealth. I was like, “Oh, I can still meet with them everywhere,” but I was draining myself. I ended up increasing my fees significantly. I ended up getting off of insurance panels, and I don’t work with as many clients as I used to. Then I started to do intensives. So EMDR intensives. Now I do just nature-based retreat-style therapy that I really love to do because it gives us uninterrupted space and time where we don’t have to rush and say, “Oh, it’s 15 minutes, time’s up.” So one of the things that happened early on when I was making all these changes was I was in this money mindset coaching program, and people were talking about how do they market their practice as a premium feature, as a therapist who’s charging out of pocket. And a lot of times people are like, I know I need a network, but I just hate it. I’m an introvert. I know I need to go and do this, but I’m such an introvert. And I was like, what is this? What’s going on here? Because previously when I moved from Massachusetts to Colorado and I know I’m an introvert, I was like, that’s all I did was networking. I did not have a website for the first, I would say eight years that I was here. I started to realize what was it that I was doing in between, just automatically, I started to realize I was meeting with people, going out for coffee, with people reaching out to people, going to even big networking events. And then during the pandemic, it was online networking things, and I was really enjoying it. But I also was like, you know what? The thing that helped me was to really pull back and take that downtime and process things and figure out what’s the next step but give myself space and time for it. And in the midst of all of it, I thought, “Wow, I’d really love to coach people with this” because I was offering advice to people about this and they were like, “That’s so helpful, thank you.” So I was like, I’m going to start a coaching program. And I developed an eight-week coaching program for a one-on-one thing where I could meet with one person at a time for eight weeks, give them this really individualized attention. But based on a structured coaching program around networking that is really, honestly just based in somatic emotional regulation and distress tolerance techniques. So because of all the stuff I was doing, just generally in therapy, I was realizing like, “Oh, well, what do I do before? And I know maybe one of the questions we’re going to ask is like, what’s a practical tip? Well, if I was going to go and meet somebody I’d never met before, or if I was going to even go and speak and do a workshop or something, I either would go out and move and listen to music, or I would dance in my office to music beforehand. I might write in my journal, I might do some meditation, breathing a combination of a lot of these things. Before, during, I would be doing the same kind of grounding exercises that I do when I tell people, like when you’re feeling activated, like I’m just going to feel the table, I’m going to have my water here. So I’m going to be able to know and feel myself being actually here while I’m talking, and then afterwards always not just going straight directly to the next thing, but taking some of that downtime to really refuel myself, whether it was going for a walk or it’s going for a run or being outside in nature or making art, there were all these different things that I think we think we have to do it like an extroverted person would do it. I think even extroverted people. We shaded this too because they’re like, yeah, this, this can’t be draining too. But the whole before, during, and after process. So basically, the way I’ve set up the program is to start with connecting with yourself. And so a lot of it’s just somatic grounding techniques for you as a therapist. How do you come back to yourself and developing that for yourself? Because I could give you a whole bunch of things, but I’m just going to hold the space for you to develop that. Then we move into connecting to the spaces and the places that we occupy at any given moment. And that is also another one of those nature-based things where it’s like feeling connected, becoming acclimated, and becoming more comfortable with feeling connected to where you are. And then also just the afterwards, how do you take care of yourself afterwards? So I would move from really grounding and doing all these grounding and resourcing techniques with yourself and the spaces and places that you might occupy just by yourself, and then to be able to go, oh, this is how I feel when I feel really grounded. How do I bring some of that with me when I’m going to meet one-on-one? So we start practicing one-on-one with another therapist or somebody in your field. Maybe it’s somebody you know, and then we process all of that, and then we come back and then we choose somebody who’s outside of your profession. Maybe it’s somebody like a lawyer that you want to be able to connect with, to build your referral base for a certain specific niche that you’re working with. And we apply all these same grounding techniques when we’re going out and connecting with them. Then we move into the last phase, which is maybe a group networking event. It might be something that’s small with four people, or it might be something with a hundred people just depending on the person. Now, with all that said, I also have shaped the networking coaching for different people at different times depending on what it is that they need. So it may not look exactly like that. It may be that person’s really looking for because this is around like really being able to connect and network so that you have a support system professionally for the type of niche that you’re working with. So I might help people with their niche statement. I might help people with their money mindset stuff. I’m actually now a coach in the money mindset program that I was a part of. And so I’ve developed a lot of skills around that too. I’m actually expanding that, and I’m going to be starting to branch off and do different things. Like, one of the things people have been asking me about tons of times is, how do you do nature-based therapy? How do you do therapy outside? And specifically, people are asking me, how do you do EMDR outside? So I’m going to be offering some coaching around that. I’m going to be offering any kind of coaching around money mindset stuff that’s keeping you from, as a therapist, being able to charge the kind of fees that you want to charge or do the kinds of things that you want to do as a therapist and or coach. So it’s just all branching off of that. But really, that’s what it was born out of, was just how do we shift the idea of like, what well connected is well connected is not just like some nepotism that you’re just born well connected. Being well connected is being well connected with yourself so that you can be more well connected with the environment that you’re in. And again, I consider this to be nature and with other people. And so I incorporate nature and arts-based stuff into the coaching as well, because I can’t separate myself from it.

Becky Coplen: So exciting and creative. Just so many parts of this. Thank you so much for your time today and sharing a lot of insights. Many things we haven’t explored on the show yet, so we really appreciate you being here and sharing all about EMDR in nature and the arts and expression, and now the coaching and so many things. You’re just always I feel like adding something new, which we love. So thank you so much.

Susannah Horwitz: Thank you, Becky, I really appreciate this time. It was fun.

Becky Coplen: To our listeners. We’re so grateful that you’re part of the conversation. Feel free to leave questions, comments. Visit Susannah Horwitz’s website to learn more about what she’s doing. Maybe get yourself a coaching class there. We hope that you will consider this part of the field and that you’ll continue to listen to our episodes in the future. Have a wonderful day! You’ve been listening to the Mastering Counseling podcast by mastersincounseling.org. Join us again next episode as we explore what it takes to be a business success in the counseling industry.