Season 2 Episode 24 | Nicole Rainey | Running a Multidisciplinary Creative Practice

Hey there creatives. This is season two episode 24 and today I'm talking with licensed mental health counselor and art therapist Nicole Rainey. She and her husband Julius own a multi-disciplinary group practice called mosaic creative

counseling in Tallahassee, Florida and I've known Nicole for a couple of years now she's been in my practice semester mind group and I'm excited to share all of the amazing things that she's been doing to build and grow her

practice. Today she's going to be talking about how she's gone about diversifying, how she's gone about expansion, how she's been learning from the different you know attempts and risks that she's taken that maybe haven't

worked out but there's always a lesson to be learned and and talking a little bit about what's to come in the future. So I hope you enjoy. 

Thanks for listening to the Creative Psychotherapist podcast. I'm your host Raina Lombardi and I'm very very excited to welcome my next guest Nicole Rainey. She is a licensed mental health counselor and registered art therapist. She and her husband Julius are the owners of the multi-disciplinary group practice, Mosaic Creative Counseling and Tallahassee, Florida. She has over nine years of experience providing therapeutic children, teens and adults from diverse backgrounds, cultures and life experience. She believes therapy should focus on healing through authentic self-expression. And as a registered art therapist, she strives to make clients feel safe and comfortable expressing themselves and problem-solving through talk imagery and creativity. 

And I'm really excited to have her on because I've known her for a couple of years now and I'm excited to share all of the cool things that she's putting out into the world. So welcome Nicole. Thanks so much for being willing to talk with me today. Thank you Raina. I'm so excited to be here. So let's jump right in. What? What? Like how do you know that

you were going to go into private practice? What like brought you to that conclusion? Did you always know was it something that you kind of came to after working in the field for a while? I wish I could say that I always knew but I don't think I did. When I was very young in high school, I wanted to do a multi-disciplinary

creative practice for survivors of sex trafficking. And I wanted art therapy and yoga and music therapy and equine therapy and wilderness therapy and play. 

And I wanted it to be very holistic and healing with a lot of creativity. And then that graduated with my art therapy degree went into community mental health, loved the clients there, went into like sexual abuse treatment, even got a job working with sex trafficking and loved working with that population. Very challenging but the community mental health piece of course there's challenges with that and I had multiple experiences where funding came above the program or the people and so programs were cut because of funding and so I worked with my dream population but

then fast forward and I had my first kiddo and I couldn't my job with sex trafficking clients was 24/7. I was on call all the time and I couldn't do that with my baby and so I needed to figure something else out private practice. 

There was a group practice in town that so graciously like incorporated me a little bit gave me my first tries at private practice and then the stars kind of aligned and I it was funny because I'd kind of forgotten that dream a little bit that I'd always said oh I always wanted to work with sex trafficking survivors but I'd forgotten that I wanted this multidisciplinary practice and so yeah so it kind of came back around, came full circle. So how did you end up making the switch? It sounds like it happened after the birth of your first child which that can feel really intimidating I

think to launch into it right at the crux of being a new parent. 

Yeah it was definitely a I had those little life events that just reassured that I was on the right path because I knew going back into the 24/7 job wasn't feeling right in my body and then so I started a private practice on the side with this group practice and then had enough clients decided I was going to make the switch. I gave like probably like a two month notice probably something very extreme very long notice to my my agency job and two weeks before I was officially going to be out they announced the entire program was shutting down anyways so very much

being like you go girl go in your direction you're on the right path so any doubts that I had were kind of like nope this was where you needed to go and we would have pushed you there if you hadn't stepped out on your own. 

So yeah that was that was all in 2020 and then COVID happened and that just kind of solidified everything I just feel like I kept going one step at a time and clients kept showing up kept coming I was very fortunate with that and because I started dabbling in private practice January of 2020 so I was building a caseload as COVID happened so I didn't see this giant caseload and then a dip and I didn't freak out because I was just still building a caseload so it all

just kept going from there and then I added our first clinician probably I think it was maybe one year into me being in private practice I officially started mosaic in June of 2020 and I think our first clinician came in March of

2021. Oh wow when you first started was it both you and your husband or were you just kind of getting started on your own. 

It's just getting started on my own Julius always jokes he's like I would never be in private practice if you

hadn't started so yeah I started kind of created all the systems which him staying at his job allowed that was definitely a privilege that allowed me to take that financial risk take a lot of that risk on and then once mosaic was a

lot more stable he joined so we kind of balanced the risk one is one person at the time. I like that I think that that's helpful for folks to hear because it can be such an intimidating process where we really are

children a big risk creating our own business and especially as a couple with with small children that that can feel really intimidating I have some friends here in town they're a couple that own a practice together and kind of similar

beginnings of like it happening when she was having their their child and like meeting to have more control and autonomy of her life as she was taking care of a newborn but it's a lot. 

Yes yeah and I think both of us are very especially me I'm very risk averse and so that's that's been an interesting walk because I have to keep moving forward but I move forward very cautiously we've always

moved our practice like at the speed of cash and not taken on a lot of like extreme risks and any risks we do take on of course I'm over here in the background being like uh it's very and sometimes it's just the next phase but yeah so

having us do it one step at a time when letting me and to establish the practice while he's still how the job was very very helpful and then letting him join after it was at least a year maybe even two years before he joined and so

2020 fast forward now to the end of 2023 you started off just yourself added on a clinician then your husband came on board. 

But now you have many more therapists working with you kind of can you describe for the audience how your group practice is structured and how many folks and the different disciplines that you have because you've grown you've grown quite quickly yeah yeah so Mosaic has eight clinicians myself and my husband included because we still see

clients so eight clinicians and then we have two student interns so we have this team of ten clinical practitioners we have art therapists several of our clinicians have a background in art therapy we have a play therapist we have two

music therapists one of our art therapists has kind of a dual background in also she's becoming a yoga therapist and doing sound healing credentials and then we have my husband who specializes in couples counseling but doing that

through the lens of the enneagram so he talks a lot with couples through that personality assessment. 

We also do animal therapy which isn't necessarily one practitioner we partner with another agency that brings in the therapy animals and so any of our clinicians can do that yeah wow that's interesting yeah yeah tell Hasse Memorial Healthcare but one of the hospitals in town has a really unique program of animal therapy and they will go out to the community they're wonderful and they have all these little therapy dogs that are trained and screened and they have handlers and so they come and join us for our sessions or sometimes just for our self-care that's wonderful yeah nice to have animals in the office for sure yeah so what has been your strategy for growing.

 Im know you had mentioned that you know your risk averse and you kind of move it this slowly and I would say methodically yeah have have you employed a strategy for saying like okay we're ready to add on another person have you been looking did you look at like the number of calls that you were getting in in order to say yes we can support adding another person how did you come to that determination in terms of your growth process yeah so if if it's truly a good clinician that doesn't already have a caseload because that there might be a few

clinicians that want to join that already have a caseload but that's not really

been our experience.

 The calls and not having anywhere to put a client or having like a specific subset of clients that I can't accommodate but I feel like they match our practice really well that's an indicator to me that there's this

gap in services that that it feels really an alignment with mosaic but it feels like we don't have the space to fill it so that's a little like soft indicator I think that just gets my feelers out and then once my feelers are out

I try to look at actual numbers as best as I can but try to see like how many is everybody actually full or is there this big service that people are searching for they assume mosaic has it and we don't I think we have this huge gap in services before we hired our play therapist where we had an art therapist that wanted to specialize in teens and then we had my husband who wanted to specialize in couples. 

Then we had music therapist that was trying to age up she was trying to take less kids she was like I asked seven or

older and so we were getting all these young kiddos that in a sense mosaic creative counseling their parents were like yes my kid needs creative therapy not just normal boring therapy and we didn't have any place to put them we

didn't have like a highly trained therapist that could meet the needs of these like complex cases for young kiddos and I was like we are missing something here so that was a big indicator and that's where we started looking for a play

therapist or some something to fill that niche so I always look for a stream of referrals that aren't that fit our values but aren't getting served from us or if we just have nowhere to put anyone and we everyone is full we have no one to assign. 

Or if we only have one person that we're taking we're assigning that's my biggest indicator but I will say just to be like fully transparent that each time I've grown and the first few times I had to do that I was completely insecure that that was actually an indicator like I was very scarcity mindset like the moment I add someone and everyone else's case will drop and we will need all these referrals for our current therapists and we won't have enough. 

 So I can say that looking back now but my logical brain knew that then and it still wasn't didn't get rid of all my scary thoughts. I don't think those scary thoughts really go away I think we just get better at like attending to them in an effective way and being like oh there you are again thank you for the warning it's gonna be okay it has been okay before it'll be okay again. Yeah and I've had to I'm I say that I move slow but a lot of people especially Julius would be like no you don't move really fast. I'm always like thinking of the next thing and thinking of the next project and I'm very much like a little bit of a hustler for how could we serve this how could we fill this need how could we provide this service.

I have to remember that even in times of scarcity or in times of struggle that that comes with me and that like someone can take away or a circumstance can take away my excess my abundance a little bit it can threaten that but it can't threaten my like problem-solving skills and my ability to see a need and think creatively to fill it like that comes with me and so that was helpful for me to be like no like I've always thought of something new

something new even to a detriment where I'm always thinking but it's helpful to remind myself that that that goes with me.

 I think that that is part and parcel of an entrepreneurial mind. Right like successful entrepreneurs they're really able to pivot and see you know like okay yeah there is these external circumstances in the market that are gonna impact what I'm doing but I can shift how I'm doing it in order to move around that barrier effectively and we've had to pivot so much like we when we first added Julius I thought yeah people need couples counselors you know and that adding him was unlike any other addition when I first I was an art therapist. My first ad was a music therapist and those go so well hand in hand and we both specialized in trauma and so if you weren't looking for art therapy or music therapy if you were looking for trauma you found us either way and then Julius over here with

curveball being like couples counselor and I realized like our SEO we were not ranking for couples counseling we had never reached out to it's very different marketing and networking for couples counselors it's just different to carve that

niche out.

 I'm glad that it was my partner that we experimented with that with because it took him a while to get full because we were learning it was a different niche it was something we weren't doing before and our old ways were working for us they were still working but we needed to tailor them for adding this new niche and adding this new service so what did you do on the backend how did you make adjustments in your website and SEO in order to start getting hits

for couples work what were some strategies that you used yeah I scoffed a blogging first for a while and that only lasted a few months and now I'm blog we publish a blog every single week and we have for like two years and so when he went like one month with no clients. 

I was like we're feeling it like where are they where they come in and I was like you need to write about couples therapy you need to write about relationships you need to write about the enneagram and I was like

making them pump out these blogs that I couldn't write for him because it wasn't my specialty and so he did like two months probably of pumping out a blog every single week we did a lot of brainstorming of like who's your ideal client where are they because they're not in your office so where they go in what are they

doing what are they a part of so he reached out to a lot of those places.

That was challenging because it was different than my ideal client and I didn't have to do that with some of our other hires because their ideal client was so parallel to mine that they just came in and so yeah that was we did a lot of that

and reached and then so mostly it was blogging and some SEO on the back end of our website and then a lot of it was like making one-on-one connections to places with his ideal client. Yeah I feel like there's so much value in that and building up your community connections you just never ever know who is going to reach out to you and when people think like oh it's not working I you know I know this person they've never actually reached out to me well I wouldn't say that that it's never gonna happen it just maybe hasn't happened yet you kind of

never know I received something from somebody that I worked with like 10 years ago.

My LinkedIn like hey I'm reaching out to you because I'm now working at this organization and we're really trying to find an art therapist can I connect to you with our you know program person and I was like sure yeah but I would have never expected that but it's those community relationships so constantly building the relationships over time even if you feel like okay nothing came in from that like just wait. Yeah and being open to it coming in differently than

you thought he got a lot of like opportunity I won't say a lot but he got several opportunities for like paid speaking engagements that were more about the N.A. Graham or more a little bit about like how to use the N.A. Graham to

lead how to use the N.A. Graham to like communicate better.

It still like up his alley because he is the in a group of relationships and so you know we think when we make these connections that people will want to become individual clients and they will refer their their friends you know whatever they'll refer someone friend of a friend to come be an individual client but we had that was the other thing is we have a become a contact or become a client page on our website we have like another form like we want to collaborate with you like just contact us and that has been helpful because people will contact us for supervision they'll contact us for like we want to pay the speaker and he has he's done that several times and then that kind of opened the door for some of our other clinicians to do like a workshop like we've had an art therapist that did like a workshop for an agency that works with persons with disabilities.

 That was her jam and I don't know if any individual clients come from it but it was a paid workshop that she got to do and and that's opened the doors for other collaborations more like contract collaborations or even one time and it just starts to build that presence in and maybe some individual clients snuck through from that that we'll never know of but  it definitely opened some doors and some different opportunities. Yeah I think those opportunities are really important in terms of your marketing kind of strategy whether they're paid or they're not paid I mean that's awesome that they're paid when that happens.

But even if they're not paid getting to give someone an experience and to meet you and work with you a little bit that gives them much more information if they are going to refer to you in the future like oh they did this I watched him speak and he talked all about this and this is how he uses it with couples like I could see somebody being much better able to sell the person that they're referring and not so much like sell but like being able to provide that rich full

description of here's why I'm referring this person to you here's what I benefited from when I interacted with them through this experience that's way more powerful in terms of getting the person that you're referring to take action and actually follow up and call then like oh here's this person I use here's their contact here's you know peers are contact information.

But you don't get much more than that I think I think it was in your mastermind groups that we talked about this of how many touch points does it take for someone to actually make the call and trust you specifically to call trust yeah agency to be the one that that's where they call and so these little touch points are super helpful because oh I saw you know I saw so and so present at that that conference I went to and they were from Mosaic Creative Counseling I thought I'd heard of that somewhere and now your neighbor struggling in their marriage or

in their like their kiddos and you think I think I know a place what was that place let me google it.

So yeah that's thinking of it as touch points is always really helpful because touch points make help remind you that it's not a waste it's just a point and so it's just it's just one on the path and there are a few more steps yeah I was talking with somebody else a few weeks ago about this and they were saying that they participated in some kind of marketing I don't know if it was a webinar or something but it was like the number has gone up to something like 16 touch points in order for you and your brand or business to become kind of solidified in the individual's brain that you exist I mean that's a lot of interactions and sometimes I think we we're like I want to do this.

I'm expecting an immediate cash flow or an immediate big win to come of it and it's not really like that it's really a long game strategy of like no I'm putting myself out there I'm building up familiarity in the community and reputation so that people go yeah I have heard of that company in fact not only if I heard of them but I was here I was at an event where they were at and and that's when you start to see things multiply but that takes time and I think that

truly comes from that ability to diversify and to pivot because if I'm only ever offering individual counseling in my niche or my group practice is niche.

I'm only ever receiving touch points for people that are in counseling but when

I'm offering things like little workshops or presentations or summer camps or groups or one-time creativity wellness retreats like those things reach a much broader population and so you're hearing from not just people who are already primed from mental health services you know like we love those people because they're ready to do the work but sometimes you have to get in touch with people that aren't primed and people that are not ready to do the work and maybe they go to one of your yoga events and then they go to a creative workshop.

Then they just feel really connected to you and they're not really down with this whole mental health thing but they feel like you're safe and they're ready to talk just to say person. Thanks so much for being a listener I just wanted to interrupt this interview really quick share a little bit about an opportunity in 2024 to

participate in our creative therapy practice builder mastermind group.

If you've never participated in a mastermind group before I will let you know that it's really a it's like a little environment where we all get together and support one another so that you can confidently grow on your journey to becoming the owner of a successful therapist own business whatever that means to you and we get together for an hour three times a month one of those weeks I'll usually focus on teaching something sometimes it's experiential where we go through an experiential process together to kind of explore where we're at maybe helping

people to overcome some limiting beliefs about what they're doing and the other

two weeks are more hot style or hot seat style where you come and each

participant is given the opportunity to share something that they're working

on that they need support around or need guidance around.

Or maybe they need some help with ideas and everybody in the group provides some support and

guidance and in our group we also have a concurrent Facebook group and there I share all the resources that I've developed and for you to use in your practice if you want the group is kept at 10 participants so it's quite small

and intimate and it lasts for six months I run it for six months because I feel like that's an opportunity for people to learn and develop a strategy and then put it in place and then we reconvene again in the next year sometimes people will stay a few years sometimes they might only join for one go round of the group this next group is going to begin in February of 2024 and the commitment is 150 a month for those six months if you join by 12 30 2023 the

price will go up in 2024 to 180 a month after that and like I said it'll be

capped at 20 people.

If you're interested to see if this would be a really good fit for you please go ahead and head over to our website where you can reserve a time to sign up for a 20-minute Zoom call that is at creativeclinicianscorner.com forward slash mastermind-group and I look forward to meeting with you plus you got them in your door so not now they don't leave not only do they know about you they know where you're located and they know what it feels like to be in your space.

 I feel like that too when you can offer those little things that are in your space you get to provide and a total experience for them and it does it it's like okay like this isn't as intimidating as I thought it was going to be or this

doesn't look like what I was expecting it to look like it's much more welcoming and comfortable yeah it breaks down all those preconceived judgment but any of us have when we go to a new space you know but especially with anything in the mental health field stepping into your space and doing a little collage workshops like that breaks things down makes them different.

So what are some things that you've been doing in your practice to get people in the door and

how do you approach getting people in the door for those versus clients because I feel like there's probably a different strategy maybe there's not but what have you been doing you have done a lot of different things we've done

this summer we did our first summer camps those were a week long we called them creativity camp a therapeutic summer camp so we limited that to like about 10 kiddos.

 I think the most we ever got was like eight which was good that was a blessing and so we did camps we're in the middle of a yoga series trauma informed yoga for anxiety and then we've done little one-time workshops we

did a chakra workshop that integrated art therapy and the chakras I've done a few of those paid like presentations for depending on who who requests it we've done a few free ones of those we've done like a free open house to get people in the door turn to think we've had a few that have flopped.

There was one where we were gonna do like a mindfulness and creativity workshop that absolutely

no one signed up for and I do a lot of I'll say experimenting with my interns where I'll challenge them to think of something new think of a new offering or a new service because they're kind of low risk right like they're in it for

the hours in the experience they're not in it for a paycheck. They're lively doesn't depend on it so when they're when their ideas don't go as planned it's just a great learning experience and there's no high risk to it when their

ideas go wonderfully then I can take that and then pitch that to one of our clinicians.

Say hey the interns just did a workshop on this and it made some good money maybe you want to continue it and so that mindfulness one day workshop actually bounced us into the summer camps because we realized like

mindfulness and creativity we weren't really identifying like a pain point we weren't really offering any sort of actual assistance and we were using a lot of jargon right mindfulness and so unless you were like really steeped in mindfulness. That was your thing like people weren't I mean it the numbers don't lie no one literally no one signed up for it so we talked about a pain point and what we did was we I said spring break is coming up and I'll tell you what a

pain point is is having to watch your kids spring break having to find child care

and so from there we did a spring break camp about mindfulness.

About some of those same themes but they adjusted it for an age range and they geared it towards

a time where parents needed some childcare and they needed and it was a great time for their kids to learn some extra coping skills to kind of bulk up on some of those therapeutic skills and the spring break camp was great and then I was like okay now we've got a little something so then we started doing summer camps

made them short so that they were sustainable .

But yeah it's helpful to like the that's what I mean where I'm like very risk averse as I always like try to

mitigate that first flop I'm like this could totally flop and I don't want  to help anybody on the other end of that so that it's not they're not putting their everything into it. Yeah well I think too it's really helpful for you to

share that because sometimes people's perception of somebody who's successful in

practice they're not seeing all of all of those like challenges that you go

through where you've put something together and it didn't work out.

Which is totally fine because you learned from it and certainly you're gonna realize that

the next time you go to market like okay we need to step away from the jargen identify the pain point identify the solution that this service is going to fill and that gives you a different edge but had you not had the flop you

wouldn't necessarily learn that and I think it's important like I remember early on people were like you're really luck. 

I was like I kind of feel insulted. I was like it did it kind of made me mad because I felt like I didn't

feel lucky I felt like I really invested a lot into figuring it out and making it work and of course there were flops and things along the way that didn't work out so it doesn't feel lucky it feels like you're you're you're putting the risk out

there you're taking on that risk and hoping that you're gonna learn from it.

And grow from it but I don't think it's luck. Yeah yeah no I feel like as whether it's solo practice owners or group practice owners like you show up and grind especially group practice you know not to minimize solo practice I know that's really hard to but group practice you know I care so much about my team and I feel

I have to recognize where does my initiative stop and where does their start but I know that I have to show up fully so that they can show up because if I'm not showing up fully I'm sabotaging something for them.

I will tell you that after that first flop I pointed out and I acknowledged like where did we not

show up fully where were we timid where maybe we sabotaged some things like for instance like putting it out on social media before it was perfect putting it publicizing it and getting tickets sold before we were really fully ready to do it and that kind of stuff like I think that when we did that first one that didn't work out they had only started advertising for two weeks before they wanted to do it .

Iit was a wonderful learn I've been wise it was a wonderful learning experience it was like full of things to learn and I realized like we I'm and I noticed that myself now like okay this is coming up but I'm I don't know that this flyers fully ready and I have to say like no like my me showing up timid or my hesitancy is actually going to sabotage this service or this event. We've got to push it out there what ready or not because that's gonna determine

if people have access to it and if people start to hear about it and the consumers or the clients or the participants or whatever it is they need time to like mull it over and decide but I tend to hog that time because I'm taking time

to mull it over and decide if I'm even gonna put it out there for you.

But they deserve to have time to decide if it's something they like they deserve to have time to budget for it and make their decisions so yeah showing up recognizing when I'm showing up really timid about a service and how that might be sabotaging it is hard. I love the reframe there that you know that you're

taking the time away from their decision making process.  It really does shift it because I think that that's a common a common challenge when people are trying to create something they don't mark they don't mark it far enough in advance and then they're upset that it didn't come into fruition.

But it really takes a lot like if we were talking about the touch points right it takes so many

opportunities for interaction with that particular thing and it's in competition with so many other things that are being offered right like how many other little one-off specialty summer camps if you're doing that might be

happening and many book out in advance so there's a little bit of lik competitiveness there that you might miss out even though they might want to go to yours more than whatever they signed up for because it wasn't out and they

didn't know about it but they knew if they didn't sign up for something they'd miss their opportunity and then they wouldn't have that child care for their kid makes a big difference. So where do you see you and your practice

growing in 2024? 

I feel really good about the team that we have even though we have like a multidisciplinary team I have tried to stay focused on our brand and our niche and so like of course my niche is art therapy but it's called mosaic creative

counseling and so anything that's holistic and experiential. And has that like creative specialty I always said they're wonderful talk therapists in my town and they're wonderful group practices that specialize in different

evidence-based talk therapies and so I'm not here to just recreate the wheel like if that's if that's what I'm here to do then I copying and pasting right and so I wanted to make sure as we grew that we stayed in our values.

That is  like what even led me to make like what are the values like you say that but like what

are they and so I had to like write some of them down and I made sure that creativity was a value and we've had so I don't know I feel really good with our team and I feel like we are in all of those creative niches I would love one day to add like a drama therapist and a dance therapist and continue broadening that creative spectrum. I think one day owning a building is definitely one of my goals so that we have some permanency and we can have some

some nesting control over expenses yes yeah. We have some cool like our clinicians have some really cool ideas like our therapist is like how do you feel about a swing and I was like I love it but we're renting so I love the idea of being able to get more creative and not having to be limited by our landlord.

So yeah I think permanent space I'm interested in growth but I don't feel as urgent there was a time where I felt very urgent about growth I don't know if this is the moment that everybody has but I felt like the practice

was very precariously placed and that if one thing worth like there were like a few things but if those things went wrong this wasn't going to go well so there was a point where I felt very vulnerable. It felt like we were a little pedestal table and if that pedestal went down the whole table was going down and that was probably my scarcity mindset

a little bit but I do think you know when you're a small team of three and one person leads and the other person's your husband that doesn't feel great you know that's barely a group practice so there's points of vulnerability where

it felt like we got to we got to expand we got to grow.

We got to build this thing but I don't feel that urgency as much as I did now now I feel like we're here to like water the soil right here too nourish the seeds that we've planted and I really want to see our team get to like full caseloads and they have really good like creative ideas like this yoga therapy series for anxiety like that kind of I want to nourish those kinds of ideas. yeah I love that I've been seeing the marketing for it on Instagram yeah looks great

yeah she's had a lot of fun with it yeah and the way you're talking about it it

makes me think about the theory of the great round and and how you know that that sense of urgency

just to kind of really make your mark and now you're kind of pushing it to really fully develop.

Nurture it into that into that growth and to its full form I know it's what made me think of when you're saying like oh I need to like water the soil and and nurture what we've created that's a good place to be and appropriate too because that has to do with you being a leader and like really building your leadership style and your leadership skills in order to be there for all of your team. You have now yeah we our big moment was when we switched to a big office

and you were there with me I was in your mastermind when I was making that decision I was like oh what I'm doing right now but don't leave me um and there were lots of empty offices and so I think that was the big push like that was the moment of growth for us to sign this lease on a bigger office space.

 We had like we needed to grow in some capacity and we needed to find renters and grow our team and um but that was a good learning experience that's what I mean when I say like my own resilience and my own like grit comes with me because I think I doubted that and then we figured it out and I keep reminding myself we'll get we'll figure it out.  Yeah there's no wrong there's really no wrong choice there there really isn't there's not a wrong choice I mean there'll be consequences either way. But ultimately we'll learn from them and I think as creative individuals were really resourceful and one of the things that I think you're doing really well in the practice is the diversification

that by having a diversified well-rounded group of offerings that you're not pigeon pigeon-holing yourself into like one space so like all the funds are coming from this one thing

um so even if something happens you still have this other area to fall back on.

As you figure out what your next iteration will be well I believe we're coming to an end um it's we've been talking for

almost an hour it went really fast. I know that you have an offer for listeners um can you tell us a little bit about that we have a holistic wellness guide because it wouldn't be mosaic creative counseling if we didn't have something creative and holistic um so I have a holistic wellness guide listeners if they're interested it goes into five areas of wellness physical wellness emotional wellness social wellness spiritual and vocational wellness.

It gives like very creative practical ways that you can kind of reinvigorate those and um obviously not a substitute for therapy but it's a nice like little wellness checkup um to say huh I've been neglecting this whole area

of my wellness I've been neglecting this entire part of me. I've been focusing too much on

this part of me and not enough on that part so it's a good little guide um to reinvigorate some of that holistic wellness and you can get that on our website when you sign up for our email newsletter awesome so that your website is mosaic creative counseling dot com yeah yeah and if folks wanted to get in touch with you they had any follow-up questions would that

be the best place to find you as well?

 Yes yeah they can if they are interested in any of our services obviously they've become a client page but if they just want to talk to me or if they're interested in asking questions or anything that doesn't really fall under becoming a client they can do that contact tab where it just kind of says like I'm interested in something else and I want to get in touch with someone and all of that stuff gets copied to me not necessarily forward but I see it and it'll find its way to me .

Excellent well thank you so much for being willing to talk about your experience and um the work that you've been doing in your practice and being so generous to share your learning lessons with listeners yeah of course of course all right thank you so much right now thank you for your time you're welcome thank you . Thanks for listening to this episode of the creative psychotherapist podcast I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Nicole and I um I am so inspired by what she's accomplished and how much she's grown over the past two years.

I've been working with her and getting to know her and and her business and I'm really excited to see

what's in store for 2024 I think she's doing amazing work um again if you are interested in joining us in 2024 to be part of the mastermind group where you can feel supported in your creative practice building journey uh we'd love to have you um go ahead and head over to the website creativeclincianscorner.com/mastermind-group and you can reserve a 20-minute zoom session with me.

To see if this would be the right choice for you and um even if you're kind of on the fence and you want to

talk it over a little bit uh please do sign up for the consultation doesn't cost you anything for that

um and some people in the past have asked like do I have to have a practice already can I join if I don't

have a practice yeah of course I've had people in the group actually start it. Then decide you know what I'm not actually ready um to go full force into starting a private practice but the group helps them to come to that determination in a more informed way.

 I've had others that already have a small group practice going and part of the work that we're doing in the group is helping them to build systems and strategies to um support their growth and um and nurture them in their process

so no matter where you are in your practice building journey um this might be a good opportunity for you

again head over to the website creativeclistianscorner.com/mastermind-group and sign up for that 20-minute

consultation I look forward to talking with you and if you're a long time listener or a new listener

and you really enjoy the content that we deliver for you here please do rate subscribe and provide

us feedback wherever you listen to podcasts so that other people that would benefit or enjoy

hearing from the amazing people that we have on the show and their expertise um can more easily

those folks can more easily find the show. 

 Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the creative psychotherapist if you like what you heard please

rate review and subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts for show notes

downloads and additional resources head over to the website at www.creativeclistianscorner.com