Emily Clark

I attribute my success to motivation from my own family and their work ethics. My mom and my dad were very hard workers and very engaged with their jobs. My choice for mental health came from a personal experience with mental health and other family members going through mental health issues. That personal connection really drove me to this field and keeps me motivated in the work I do.

The biggest career advice I've received is taking care of yourself so that you can maintain your job satisfaction and your own life satisfaction. That means implementing things like self-care and making sure that you're taken care of. It's like putting your own oxygen mask on before you put someone else's on. I've received so much great career advice, but this one really stands out as the most important for sustaining yourself in this field.

I would say be yourself. People want to know and have an authentic conversation. Don't try to be anybody but who you are. And listen with curiosity. Authenticity is so important in this field because clients can tell when you're being genuine, and that's what creates the foundation for real therapeutic work.

The biggest challenges right now in the field would be working with the demand of the position. You could take people all day long, but you also have to be able to monitor how much is realistic for you. If I have a certain caseload and I start feeling worn down by that caseload, I need to make sure that I'm not being assigned more clients. I need to have that feedback with the private practice that I work through. You want to be honest with that, and you need to take time off when you need time off. It's not like working at some paper company where you just take orders - when you're working with somebody and you're holding space for that person, you also have to maintain your vacation time, your time off, and your self-care. That's the most important thing.

One of my biggest values is integrity, so do what you say, take accountability for when we make mistakes, let people know that you're acknowledging responsibility if you're wrong, and apologize when somebody is feeling that they were wronged in some way. Another thing is I take my job seriously because people are coming to me in very vulnerable states, and I want to protect them from any outside influences as far as anybody trying to come in and get any sort of information out of me about them. I'm very much like a vault, basically, which is part of the job, but at the same time, I take that very seriously - protecting people's valuable shared information.