BECOMING A CLINICAL SUPERVISOR- feat. Dr.Kate Walker

Hello, Through the Eyes of a Therapist Podcast listeners!  If you’ve gotten this far in my latest series on becoming a therapist, you’ve heard about Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists, Clinical Social Workers, and School Counselors.  You know by now that to become a therapist, you need to get a master’s degree and to become fully licensed, you must complete a post-graduate internship.  Most of these last at least 18 months post masters and you need to accumulate 3,000 hours of supervised practice.

Supervised practice means that you must contract someone who is a clinical supervisor to oversee and sign off on your 3,000 hours.  Clinical supervisors make an investment in provisionally licensed practitioners by meeting with them on a weekly basis, going over treatment plans, evaluations, personal issues that may be affecting work with clients, and progress notes.  This is, probably, the last time a clinician is being closely monitored in their career before becoming independently licensed.

To explain this further, my guest on the podcast today is Dr.Kate Walker. She is an expert on therapist development and growth.  Her work includes training fully licensed therapists in becoming clinical supervisors.  She has also written a book called “My Next Steps, Create a Counseling Career You’ll Love.” Find this book on amazon for less than 15 bucks! https://www.amazon.com/My-Next-Steps-Create-Counseling/dp/1937514722

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Must Have Info about today's guest:

Dr. Kate McLellan Walker Ph.D., LPC, LMFT is an experienced clinician, entrepreneur, writer, researcher, educator, and speaker. Born in Texas and raised in the Midwest, she struggled with ADD and FOMO (fear of missing out) throughout her adolescence. As soon as she could she ran to the live music capital of the world and earned her Bachelor of Music degree from The University of Texas at Austin. She used that credential to teach public school orchestras and freelance as a bass player until 1998 when she decided to pursue her MA and Ph.D. in counseling from Sam Houston State University.  

Her achievements and many diverse interests include doctoral advisory board member, university professor, president of the Texas Association for Counselor Education and Supervision, and licensing board liaison.  An avid researcher (and still blessed with ADD), Dr. Kate harnesses her love of business, novelty, and creativity to speak, teach, and write about her experiences running her successful clinical practice AchieveBalance.org, training over thirty-seven cohorts in her ground-breaking leadership organization Kate Walker Training, and being the wife to a soldier and mom to three amazing kids. In her spare time, she still freelances as a professional bass player for singer-songwriters in the Houston area.

Balancing business and family places Dr. Kate in a unique position to help other leaders achieve balance too. In her new book, My Next Steps: Create a Counseling Career You'll Love, she synthesizes interview data garnered from five successful entrepreneurs in the counseling field. The result is a step-by-step guide containing practical tools so readers can create the successful career they fell in love with, make a living, and keep their sanity.

 *Recommendations, discussion, and disclosures are for informational/entertainment purposes only.  You should never substitute consultations/information from your own mental health/medical professionals with information from this podcast.*