WP 44 | Navigating the Storms of Private Practice
Introduction
In this episode of the Wise Practice Podcast, your host, Whitney Owens, takes the mic for a solo show. With honesty and a deep connection to faith, Whitney shares her personal journey of facing challenges and finding strength amidst the storms of private practice. She reflects on the power of community, the significance of embracing dark moments, and the transformation that emerges on the other side. As a counselor and leader, she delves into the idea that difficulties often precede breakthroughs and that acknowledging our weaknesses can lead to profound growth.
Embracing the Darkness
Whitney highlights the notion that difficult seasons and challenges often precede times of growth and transformation. She emphasizes the importance of leaning into these dark moments and finding solace in the midst of them. Drawing inspiration from her own experiences, she reminds listeners that even in times of struggle, God's presence and work can be felt, even if it's not immediately apparent. "God moves even when we are struggling," she says, highlighting the potential for strength and transformation that can arise from challenging times.
Finding Identity and Purpose
Reflecting on her own path and challenges, Whitney underlines the significance of knowing one's identity in Christ. She shares a personal story of a healing prayer experience, demonstrating how God uses our vulnerabilities and weaknesses to manifest His work. Whitney discusses how adversity can lead to discovering one's true calling and purpose, and how hardships can shape us into better leaders and therapists. "We move out of the place of knowing God's heart for us," she asserts, emphasizing that embracing one's identity in Christ can fuel significant growth and impact.
The Summit and Moving Forward
Whitney discusses the upcoming summit and its potential to be a space where the Holy Spirit is active in a business conference setting. She encourages listeners to embrace their faith and lean into their struggles, trusting that God is at work, even in the face of challenges. With a mix of vulnerability and enthusiasm, she shares her own experience of navigating dark seasons and emphasizes the importance of moving forward with confidence. "Keep pressing forward," she advises, reminding her audience that while difficulties may arise, God's love and guidance are ever-present.
Tips for Survival in Navigating Private Practice Storms:
Embrace Dark Moments: Instead of avoiding difficult times, acknowledge and embrace them as opportunities for growth and transformation.
Seek Community: Reach out to a supportive community of peers, mentors, or fellow therapists who can provide encouragement and perspective during challenging seasons.
Know Your Identity: Ground yourself in your identity in Christ. Remember that you are beloved and chosen, even when facing uncertainty and adversity.
Find Strength in Weakness: Understand that God's work can shine through your vulnerabilities and weaknesses, allowing you to contribute and impact others in unique ways.
Hold onto Hope: Even in the midst of pain and suffering, maintain hope that there is something better on the other side of the storm. Trust in God's plans for you.
Lean into Faith: Embrace your faith as a source of strength, allowing it to guide you through difficult times and provide clarity when facing challenges.
Press Forward: Persevere through the hardships, knowing that God's presence is with you. Keep moving forward with determination and confidence.
Claim Transformation: Believe that adversity can lead to significant personal and professional growth. Accept challenges as opportunities to become a better leader and therapist.
Prioritize Self-Care: In the midst of challenging seasons, make self-care a priority. Take time for rest, reflection, and activities that bring you joy and renewal.
Attend the Summit: Consider participating in events like the Wise Practice Summit, where you can connect with like-minded individuals, share experiences, and experience the transformative power of faith in your practice.
Stay Open to God's Direction: Trust that God's guidance is leading you, even in the midst of uncertainty. Be open to the Holy Spirit's direction and let it guide your decisions and actions.
Reflect on Past Breakthroughs: Remind yourself of past instances when difficulties were followed by significant breakthroughs. Use these memories as motivation to keep moving forward during tough times.
Remember Your Calling: Reconnect with your calling as a therapist and leader. Remind yourself of the impact you can have on your clients and your community, even during challenging periods.
Practice Gratitude: Cultivate an attitude of gratitude, focusing on the blessings and positives in your life. Gratitude can provide a fresh perspective and boost your resilience.
Encourage Others: Extend your strength and wisdom to others who might be going through their own storms. Support and uplift fellow therapists, reminding them of their value and purpose.
Stay Rooted in Faith: Continue to lean into your faith, allowing it to guide your decisions, actions, and interactions with clients. Trust in God's plan, even when it's not immediately clear.
Summary
In this heartfelt episode of the Wise Practice Podcast, Whitney Owens shares her personal journey through difficult seasons and the profound transformations that can result from embracing challenges. With an emphasis on faith, community, and growth, Whitney's insights serve as a reminder that even in our darkest moments, God's work is at play, guiding us toward greater purpose and impact. As listeners, we are encouraged to lean into our identities in Christ, hold onto hope during tough times, and move forward with confidence, knowing that breakthroughs often follow the storms.
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Podcast Production and Show Notes by Course Creation Studio
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WP 44 | Navigating the Storms of Private Practice
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Whitney Owens: Hello friends and welcome to the Wise Practice Podcast. You're hanging out with me, Whitney Owens. Today I'm doing gonna do a solo show, and to tell you the honest truth, I am winging it as I go. And the reason I'm doing that is, To be open to the Holy Spirit and the direction that God wants to take as we come together.
Whitney Owens: And you're listening to the podcast and I'm here recording, thinking about you guys. And I used to do a lot of solo shows. Mostly this podcast has been full of interviews as I've been kind of growing my content. But I hope that as the podcast continues, I spend more time doing some solo shows and share with you the ways that God is moving in my life.
Whitney Owens: And this is in hopes that. He will be showing you things about your own life and bringing you strength and encouragement. I think there's something to be said within Christian community where when one of us is going through something, it's in a way that we can encourage and strengthen each other. And oftentimes when we're in the midst of our pain and our suffering, we can't see through the trees.
Whitney Owens: It feels so lonely and isolating and uncertain. I have been going through that season in my own life right now, and I think I'm coming out on the other side. At least I hope that I am. But at the same time, it's bittersweet, right? It's in the painful moments in our lives that we find God and that we look back and that's when we're changed.
Whitney Owens: I mean, we say this to our clients, right? When things are going well. Oftentimes nothing has prompted them to come to counseling or prompted them to make changes because things are going well, and so they're not coming in, they're not making changes. But when we need God, boy, that's when he shows up. When we stop and acknowledge what we're going through and gain insight in that, that's when he shows up.
Whitney Owens: I think about times throughout my life. When God wanted to do something in me, and that could be like an internal thing or it could be an external thing. Maybe it's ministry that he has set before me, but I have almost always found that the darkness, the storm comes before the good stuff before the rainbow, right?
Whitney Owens: We can know that there is something on the other side. Now, when we're in that dark place, let me tell you, it is so hard to have hope. It is so hard to find anything to bring comfort in those places, but we have to have hope that there's something on the other side. So if you're listening right now, and maybe you're going through a difficult season, it could be in your practice, it could be in your family, it could be in your spiritual life.
Whitney Owens: It could be a season that. You can't even explain. You can't put your finger on it. You don't even know what happened. I'm here to encourage you and strengthen you in that, and I know it might seem like, Hey, this is a podcast about business, but you know what? This is a podcast about you. About me and about God and us finding God in whatever the circumstances is, us understanding his work in the world and what he's doing in us, because you, as the therapist, is such an important part of you in the therapy room.
Whitney Owens: This is who you are with your clients and if you are having a difficult time, boy, it's hard. Like I just think. Weeks ago, I was at a point where I could barely do a session like I was. So thinking about all these other things that were going on in my life, I was so distracted and in such a difficult spot.
Whitney Owens: I was having a really hard time focusing on my clients and focusing on what they're going through now. I believe that God is bigger than that, and I believe that God moves in spite of us. Right? I'm reminded of a story, and I'm gonna share some stories with you today for my own life. And, um, also help you understand the way that God moves in your practice and through you.
Whitney Owens: But a very impactful moment in my life. I was a part of a healing prayer team right after college, and a woman that we knew had cancer and we traveled to her home probably about an hour and a half, a team of us. And it was a friend. I mean, it was a mother of a friend of mine that I deeply cared for. And we went and we laid hands on her and prayed for her.
Whitney Owens: I literally remember that moment. My life was so difficult and I had gone through, um, a difficult situation with a friend and had some painful things going on in my life, and I remember going to this woman's house and thinking to myself, who am I to pray for her? I'm nothing. I, I have a terrible relationship with God.
Whitney Owens: I don't know how to pray. I feel so out of touch with my faith, and I'm so angry right now, and I'm in so much pain. But I remember laying my hands on her and choosing to pray for her anyway, and I literally could feel the heat coming outta my hands. And I didn't understand it. I didn't know what was happening.
Whitney Owens: But my mentor at the time when I met with her, she said, that's God, like God moves even when we are struggling. And he uses that. In fact, God wants us in our weakness, in our humility to look to him. Right. I think of times that I led mission trips in the past or events that I've done where God really showed up and I can say almost hands down every single time.
Whitney Owens: The difficulties came right before the darkness came right before. But then as I pushed through and I led those trips, God showed up in a really big way. And when I think about my private practice, there have been a lot of ups and downs running a private practice. And especially if you've been doing it for a while or you have a group practice, you, you know what I'm talking about.
Whitney Owens: But when I look at those moments, almost like a timeline of my practice, I can see how God used those difficult places to grow me. To grow my practice. And I'm grateful for it because it's, it's those moments that he changed me that made me a better leader and allowed me to not make those mistakes moving forward.
Whitney Owens: And I, hands down, don't believe that I would have the practice I have today if it weren't for these difficulties that I've gone through. So one story I'll share that was super impactful, and maybe I've talked about this on the podcast, um, I had an employee years ago. It was a, we were a smaller group practice, and I guess when you're smaller it does feel like so much is riding on each person and when you lose someone, it's, it's challenging, it's difficult.
Whitney Owens: And I had lost a therapist that had started her own private practice and hadn't told me, and it had been going on for four. Months. I won't go into how I found that she was having a practice, but I found it. And there were some other, um, information from the practice that she was using to her benefit at the time, and I was devastated.
Whitney Owens: I questioned everything about myself as a business owner, about myself as a boss. I couldn't believe that. I felt like I'd given to somebody and they had gone and used what I'd given to their advantage. Had not been honest with me. Um, and there was some shady financial stuff going on too with that situation, and we got through it, but it was a very difficult moment for me.
Whitney Owens: I look back at that moment with my practice and I see a huge change. A change in the way that I related to my staff, the way I respected them, the way that we came together as a team, and they supported me when I was in a vulnerable and difficult place. And after that was when amazing things happened in the practice.
Whitney Owens: I was reminded just yesterday thinking about the life of Jesus and after his baptism. Was when God came and said, you are my beloved. You are my beloved. And he knew his identity before he did anything. He knew his identity. So before we've made our mistakes, before we've started our practice, God has given us our identity in Christ that we are his beloved.
Whitney Owens: And everything we do as a business owner can function out of that place and we can step into that. But it was after he found out his belovedness that Jesus was led into the desert. Talk about a dark moment, the wilderness, but it was in the wilderness. There was even more confirmation in who he was and what his calling was, and it was out of that place.
Whitney Owens: He stepped into a place of significance and power and did amazing things in the world. Yet he always went back to his place of knowing who he was as the beloved. And when I think about these dark moments and these difficulties in my life, these are those times where God has solidified who I am in Christ and who I am called to be.
Whitney Owens: And then I see him moving after that. And I just wanna emphasize this idea of we move out of the place of knowing God's heart for us. And when we know who we are and we know that we are loved. His, his work is manifest through us and we each have unique giftings to bring in that we each have a unique story.
Whitney Owens: We each have a unique pain, and God will take that and do something miraculous with it.
Whitney Owens: Shrink Think is an online platform that provides digital resources to cultivate successful therapeutic relationships. With courses geared towards educating and empowering clients, as well as effective training and onboarding new clinicians, shrink Think supports private practices to achieve better outcomes across the board.
Whitney Owens: To learn more about Shrink Think today. Visit shrink think.com.
Whitney Owens: And so as I am in this season and in prayer, I know that God is working like I feel certain of it. Even though I would say a couple of months ago I couldn't sense a thing. It felt numb, confusing, stuck, and now I'm seeing kind of the light at the end of the tunnel. Doesn't mean it's been easy, doesn't mean I'd want to go through it again.
Whitney Owens: But at the same time, if that meant getting to a place where God allowed me to see myself more clearly, it would be worth it. Now. So I hope that you, you're gonna take these words and know that God is with you in whatever you're going through, that he's always near and he is always working and it is His kindness that draws us to these dark places, or he uses these dark places that come in our lives, the pain of others around us, difficult situations.
Whitney Owens: He uses those to make us greater and to make us greater in Christ. Now, as I said before, I have always found that I go through dark seasons before God's gonna do something really great. Now, I'm, I don't know what all that means, and I'm no expert in spiritual warfare and things like that, and I'm not even gonna pretend to get into all that.
Whitney Owens: But I do know that, you know, evil doesn't like good and evil will do what it can to trumpet and to keep it from happening. So as I've been planning the summit, which you have heard many talks about here on the podcast, I truly believe that God is gonna do something amazing, and that's what's always happened when I follow him and I wait on him and he shows up.
Whitney Owens: Now, especially if I've had real, real difficulty and I would say this current season I have been in has been one of the most difficult seasons I have ever been in in my life. And as I'm waiting on him to bring me healing in my journey, I also know that the summit is gonna be a culmination of something really amazing.
Whitney Owens: And I don't say that to. Manipulate people, tell 'em they have to come or anything like that. I say it because I wanna claim it and I wanna know it. And I want you to know that things that God is calling you to in your life, you might have some darkness right before 'cause God's gonna do something great.
Whitney Owens: In fact, I believe as leaders, as we grow in our leadership abilities and as God gives us more and more responsibility and more and more, Different types of callings, different things we're called to, it's gonna get harder and harder in a lot of ways, and easier in a lot of ways, easier in the sense that I can see what I've already been through in my life, knowing that God is still with me and great things are coming.
Whitney Owens: But at the same time, it's hard. It's really hard and it just, there's a deeper and deeper work. As soon as we think that we've gone through the deep work, there's a deeper work to be done. Right. I. I was talking to another member of the Wise Practice community and he said something really profound to me that really stuck with me.
Whitney Owens: He said, the amazing thing about the summit is we're gonna have a business conference that invites the Holy Spirit to be active. When do you ever have that? Right? We're gonna get together and experience God in our practice. Like I, I can't love anything more than that and this is the stuff that gets me fired up, gets me excited.
Whitney Owens: And so I know that I've had a dark season and I can't promise when my dark season's really gonna end. And I, what I can say is things continue to improve or have been, and I'm gonna continue to claim that. But I also know that God has got something really great going on with the summit and I have felt.
Whitney Owens: That in a deep way, and I want to implore you to consider coming if you haven't already. And I'd say that because I don't really care about the money, y'all. I really don't. And I know people would think that I'm making all that up, but it's the truth I my practice, it does great. I have the money that I need to live on.
Whitney Owens: I do this consulting because I love it. 'cause I love you guys and because I want to bring faith-based therapists together to grow good counseling in the world, to make connections, to encourage you guys and to give you the resources that you need and to have fun. I do like to have a good time, so I can't wait to have a good time with y'all.
Whitney Owens: So all that to say is if you haven't purchased your ticket yet, I really want you to come. If you feel like the Holy Spirit's tugging on you right now. Listen to that. Listen to it. You can go to my website, whitney owens.com and get a ticket to the summit. And even if you don't, I just want you to be encouraged today, and I hope that this message that I'm giving you provides you strength along your practice journey because it's a, not an easy one, but the beautiful news is God is with us and God is with us.
Whitney Owens: In our practice, ups and downs, he's with us and all the things that come across our path. It's just a matter of us slowing down, remembering our belovedness, and stepping into that place so that God can do good work in and through us. So even when you're feeling down and it's difficult, keep pressing forward.
Whitney Owens: Reach out to people that care about you. In fact, as I've been in this season, It's been the wise practice community. Not that they know everything going on, but it's been a real strength for me as we meet together and talk through our practice and talk through God's work in the world. If you are here in this episode and you wanna reach out to me, I would love to hear from you.
Whitney Owens: I genuinely love the emails I get from you guys and stories that I hear about what the podcast means to you and how it spoke to you, and so I wanna encourage you to do that. I just can't wait till October. I can't wait to be with y'all in person. It's gonna be a beautiful thing, and I appreciate you taking the time to be with me on the show and to listen to my story.
Whitney Owens: And I, I just can pray that it encourages and strengthens, um, someone as they listen. And I will probably listen to myself in the future to encourage myself through my dark seasons. 'cause it's so easy to say all the things and then we feel the things and we have to go back and remember the truth and remember reality and remember God's love with us.
Whitney Owens: So it's been a pleasure being with you. Um, would love your feedback. Let me know what you think about the solo shows. And I look forward to connecting with you again soon.
