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Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of the get to Know OCD podcast. Although today we're going to do a slight spin off of what we normally do and we're going to talk to one of our life changing therapists here at nocd. Someone who came in without much OCD awareness, went through our amazing training program, was able to apply that training to the members that she works with and rise to be one of the top therapists that we have here at the company and get the title of one of our life changer therapists, where she was rewarded with some pretty cool stuff that we're going to talk about today. So if this is something that might be of an interest to you, where you're thinking about NOCD as a career or working with exposure and response prevention therapy, or with obsessive compulsive and related conditions, I hope you'll listen today because I think this will be very interesting for you. I'm so happy to be joined today by Sonia Keith. Hi, Sonia, how are you?
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I am doing well, thank you.
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Good to have you with us. And you know, there's so many things we want to talk about today. Just the work that you do here and what you get out of it, the training that you received. I know that you take some of that and you do teaching and other things outside of nocd and you bring some of the work that we've done here into telling other people about how we do things and the technology that we use. And you're even one of our life changer therapists. And we want to talk a little bit about that because hopefully we can even inspire some therapists out there who might be watching today to think about, yeah, maybe I want to go work for NOCD and get some of these cool benefits as well. So can you tell everybody first just a little bit about you and how you came to NOCD in the first place? That would be great.
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Absolutely. So my name is Sonya. I'm a licensed clinical social worker in California. I'm licensed here and in Arizona. I also do a little bit of teaching on the side. I'm a mom of girls and when I was working in the county office, I was referring people to therapy and I would see some people really able to change their lives with the support of good mental health therapy. And I thought I wanted to do that. So I got my license and I was doing therapy and I, I wasn't really feeling like I was making as big an impact as I could. And I had a friend who worked at NOCD she called me one day and said, I work at this amazing place. You've got to come try it. It's like nothing we've ever done before. It's a startup company. They really have a mission and a drive and if nothing else, would you just please talk to the recruiter? And I was bored that day. I said, sure. And then it's been full tilt ahead ever since. I've wanted to do well because my friend brought me on and I wanted to respect her name. But once I got here, it was more than I expected and it's been really one of the most rewarding career choices that I've made.
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B
You said coming here was one of the most rewarding things you've done career wise. And I'm interested in jumping into that a bit and understanding what specifically is it about being at NOCD that fulfills that, that makes that experience true for you.
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I'm really glad you asked. There are so many times when you join a company or you take on a position where you just feel like you are replaceable, you are a cog in a wheel and it didn't really matter who you were as long as you would just do the work and turn in the product and then you would get paid for it. But NOCD has been very different where they're really invested in me as a therapist and the things that I'm interested right down to the CEUs that I can pick and choose to take if I want to do and the relationship that I have with the team where I can say, here's a special interest I have. Who wants to know more about this? Who can tell me more information? We have a very vibrant Slack channel going on with a hundred different topics from like what book have you read? But also, hey, I'm just trying to look for a new exposure for my client. What can you give me? And I've never worked in a place where who I was as a person and my interest really kind of drove the car and the way that I deliver treatment. So because I feel very nurtured by my team, then when it comes to working with the clients, I'm not feeling dried out and like anybody could do this. I feel like, well, me as a person, I'm valuable. So then my relationship with the clients are going to be valuable too.
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B
And you talk about how we've invested in you. What has that been like to have a company that does take your opinions seriously, listen to you, even make changes based on ideas you've had. How has that hopefully been inspiring to You.
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It's wild. It's so interesting to sit at a meeting with people and say, I really wish that the electronic health record platform was capable of doing this. Or here's something that would make my life easier as a therapist and have somebody say, oh, is that true? Okay, let me send off a text message or an email, and before the conversation's over to be told, oh, you can go, look, that change has been made. Now. No one's ever had that kind of dynamic relationship with me before, where my opinion as a line worker affected the way that things happen up the chain, because quite often in other places, people mean well, but it's not practitioners who are running the program. And so then when it comes down to the line staff, our opinions don't really do much. But I think it does help that so much of our leadership also our therapists who also see clients, so when we say, hey, there's a need, they understand because they have had that need, but maybe haven't had a chance to think about the solutions. Where here at nocd, you really go to your clinicians and say, what would you like to see changed? And so that has been very novel for me.
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Has that translated into. It makes it easier for you to do your job then knowing that if there's something that comes up and you think that it could be made simpler or streamlined, does that translate that into the work you do with the members? You see.
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It translates into the work I do with members. It also translates into my free time, because doing therapy is. It's so interesting. But the hard part about being a therapist is so much of its paperwork and writing those notes. And so it's been able to streamline my writing notes, making sure that I'm capturing meaningful things, and then I can focus more with the client and having that conversation. And you know, that. That teamwork that we have as we're facing their challenge, instead of me thinking, well, if I do this extra intervention, then that's going to be so much more work on my end. I know the intervention could be helpful, but, gee, I'm already tired just thinking about it. I don't have those problems here.
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B
When you go into a session due to the fact that hopefully you feel very well trained. That is the goal that we have with everyone, and that you have tools available to you to efficiently work with your members, do you feel that that's a different kind of experience here than maybe at other places that you've worked?
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Absolutely. In therapy, your best tool is always yourself. It's what you Know, it's your confidence, it's your ability to communicate with the client. And often that's the only tool that you have. At nocd, we have a whole variety of psychoeducation and slides and things that we can share with the clients. And that has been very helpful. So not only doing a structured therapy practice where I'm like, okay, what do I do next in session, I already know because it's planned, planned out. But I'm not left as alone on an island trying to find the next thing. NOCD has built a universe of opportunities and resources that I can draw from when I'm working with a client. And I think that the clients have been telling me that they like that also that they feel like it's a robust live practice that we're doing. And it's not just, oh, well, this is like any other therapy I've ever done. It's just very cut and dry. I think NOCD makes it possible to add other layers into that because of the resources available to me.
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The goal of all of us here at NOCD is to provide top notch, great, excellent care to our members. And I think that we have an entire process to be able to get people to do that. Did you have OCD knowledge and treatment knowledge before you came here to noci?
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Absolutely not. When I learned about OCD in grad school, it was 13 slides. It took three minutes and that was all there was to it. Yeah.
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Which 13 slides sounds generous? From what I hear from a lot of places, actually it's about four or five more than normal.
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Well, now it's three hours. So that was one of the things I was able to do with what I've learned at Nose, to take it to my outside job and say, I have so much more information. Let me make the argument for why we should be talking about ocd. Let's talk about the suicide risk, let's talk about the co occurring disorders. Let's talk about now that we know and we've broken it out from anxiety in the DSM and it's its own category. Now that we have this information, I have this information, let's share it with the students so that they can feel more confident working with clients. And it's a different way of thinking about therapy altogether. Let's broaden some minds. And it has been so helpful. I've actually had students bring their therapists to class on OCD week.
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That's amazing. Yeah. And all of this is just in a few years for you?
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Absolutely. I started in, I think, September of 2023.
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By the end of 2025, you are one of our life changer therapists, a program that we started where we reward therapists who have amazing outcomes with the members that they're working with. Do you want to tell everybody what the life changer experience was and what it was like for you?
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Well, my answer was. It was. It was wild. I was kind of like, I'm your. What. What does that mean? Because we have. We have metrics that are available to us, so it's never a mystery of how are you doing in your job. Like, where are your strengths, where your weaknesses? You know, we're constantly getting that information back to us. We don't have to wait until we meet with our supervisor and go, oh, I didn't know that. But it's also that we're so supported that making those metrics is achievable. So, you know, measurable, observable. Achievable is my favorite word. I know it's more than that. Pretend that it's.
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We'll say phrase. How's that? Yeah, phrase.
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If you want to be active.
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It's not as fun as a long. Long word. Right, Whatever.
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Yeah, that. That is true. But if you. If you ask any of my children what my favorite word is, they're like, measurable, observable, achievable. All goals have to be this way.
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I like it.
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It's a great word, but it works for me. But it also works for me as a clinician to say, oh, well, here's. Here's a growth moment where I could grow or I could do better. And because I'm completely competitive, those metrics. Metrics also show, like, hey, across the company, this is where everybody is. And I don't always need to be the best. I just need to be better than average. And so it's a fun game I get to play with myself. But it also is very rewarding to say, this job that I love doing, these members that I enjoy talking to, that I'm doing it well, and it has real impact. So just measuring where they are when they do their assessments, are they improving or not? And just saying, well, over the scope of my caseload, everybody seems to be improving. As a therapist, I want to know that I'm doing my work well. And so it's nice to be able to see, overall, yes, I am doing my work well. And to be rewarded for that is just completely unexpected. And to be rewarded in such a big way and really consistently told, hey, I'm so glad you're here. Hey, you're doing a good job. It's wonderful to have you on the team. It's nothing that I've ever really experienced before. And I've worked in some large companies. I've worked for the county, I've worked in some small places. But this internal satisfaction that I get working here and being able to say, oh, I know that person. Oh, I've had a conversation with that person, is just really heartwarming and invigorating.
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B
So maybe you could share with everyone what was the culmination of being selected as one of our Life Changer therapists this year, this last year.
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So we took a trip to Cabo San Lucas, and it was initially 10 clinicians. Only nine of us could make it. And then several people from the C suite went and we had meetings about what worked well for us, what we would want to change. We learned the history of the company and where it wants to go, and we're really able to have a conversation about, oh, is that where you want it to go? This is what I think you should do. And to be heard. And then there was a lot of really good food and a spa and the beach, and just being able to relax and be treated not just as an employee, but as a whole person from that holistic point of view, it was completely refreshing.
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B
Yes, it was. I really enjoyed it myself, actually. And I agree with you, I. I'd never been somewhere in this field where that was something that you did. Right? I mean, I hear about that at very large organizations of the President's Club idea. If you sell so many millions of dollars of product, you get to do this cool thing. But that was really the inspiration for us with the Life Changer Club of what if we did that with our top performing therapists? And over the next year, we want to open that up to so many more people to be able to do something very similar again. And so we're doing that to make sure that all of our therapists know that when you achieve these results, when you hit this level of results for your members, which is what we want, hopefully everybody to be doing, you will be rewarded in this experience. And it was a great reward. I think.
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I finally got to use my passport, so that was exciting, too.
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That's awesome. As you do your work, obviously no one here is alone. There's a team of people supporting you and the work you do. You've talked a little bit about the engineers who we can call on and say, hey, let's change this in our ehr or let's focus on this. But there's also managers, there's potentials. Sometimes people get to supervise associates. Different things that happen here at nocd. What kind of support have you seen in some of those other areas? Also, because I think people considering coming to NOCD will want to know, am I just doing a virtual job where I'm just sitting home alone all day and I'm not interacting with anyone else? What is the culture of the company to make sure that people are connected?
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Well, that was a conversation I must have had 52 times in December when we went as a company to New Orleans and we were meeting people that we'd only seen as tiny little slack pictures and talked about how I, you know, I already felt connected because we'd had so many conversations. For me personally, my supervisor, currently we call them comms, Clinical operations manager, is a wonderful person. She's a great clinician that I can go to. Whether I say, hey, I've got a client that I have like a real need and I don't want to wait until I get to go to a consultation. Can you give me a little bit of support? Or I'm not feeling really confident and I'm able to walk that through with them without the fear of shame. There's a phrase that you'll hear a lot at nocd, and it is egoless questioning and just the ability to be vulnerable and say, I don't know this, I want to know this, and somebody will try to give you that answer. And I really appreciate that. I appreciate being able to talk to anybody I want at the company. There's no idea that I can't talk to the co founder, Steven, because, you know, he's special and he's elite. Don't talk to him. He has 15 minute windows that you can schedule time with him. I could schedule time with you. I can drop into the Jeopardy. Not Jeopardy. Trivia night.
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I do trivia nights. Tomorrow night, by the way, will be trivia night. Very excited about that.
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We have trivia night. We have family food, we have games outside of stuff. We have a health and wellness group where people work out on Zoom together. And it's so funny because, you know, when you think about celebrities, you know them by their first and last names. When we went to New Orleans and I was meeting people, I knew people by their first and last names because that's how I see them on screen. That's how we talk to them. But also in between all of that as a therapist, every day there are consultations going and There are specific consultations for specialty areas, you know, autism or depression or body dysmorphia. But you can really go into any one of those and say, I'm having an issue with a client who can help me out. And people will say, oh, I'm so excited to give you my idea. Let's talk about this. Let's provide some psychoeducation. So when you talk about being alone in your office doing your work, you're not really alone. You are as enmeshed in the community as you choose to be. No one's going to call you and say, hey, I haven't seen you post on Slack in six weeks. Are you alive? But if you do post, no one's going to ever say, wow, you post entirely too much. Please get some hobbies. Which is what I'm always waiting for someone to tell me.
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And you get to have a life outside of work too, right? I mean, you teach, you've designed stickers and T shirts and different things. So there's, there is an aspect of being able to balance work and life that you get to have, correct?
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Absolutely. I'm in charge of my schedule. I have agreed to do a certain number of therapy hours every week and to be present for a 40 hour a week job. But if I need to take two hours off in the afternoon to go pick up my child from the bus stop, I get to do that. If I say, hey, listen, I've had an unexpected situation with a pet, can I flex my hours and move them around? I can do that. If I wake up and I am deathly ill, I can call my supervisor and say, hey, listen, I'm not doing well today, I should not be on camera. They will help me find substitute therapists for my clients or move those hours around so that I can focus on me. Because again, I am treated so well and that allows me to treat my clients so well. But yeah, I have all kinds of hobbies and a second job and children and a whole dynamic life outside of work. Work is just one of those things that I do and I'll talk to people, my friends, about work. You know, you could either can work to live or you can live to work, but what is it like to have a job that just fits seamlessly in with your life?
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Yeah, and I'm glad that you feel that no city does that because that would be the goal, right? I mean, we want people to be here. We want people to consider this their therapy home, that this is the place that they can retire from eventually when they're set for that part of their life that we will take care of you personally. I think we take good care of people financially. I think we have good benefits for folks, so that it is a hopefully, destination place for people to work. That being said, we have standards, right? We. We expect people to meet standards. I. And, and you talked a little bit about how those are there and upfront and ready for you to take a look at. Right? You can, you can see things where you're at comparatively, in the network. And does you. You talked about how for you, that's a motivator, right? You can see where you're at and how. How does that motivate you to continuously do better?
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Absolutely. Well, and that metrics thing. So, interestingly, I took a picture of it yesterday and sent it to my com and I'm like, look, it's all green because they're green, yellow, or red. So it's visual, it's a number. And it appeals to me in so many different ways. But what I've had in the past, working places where it's been a mystery of, you know, I don't know if I'm doing well or not. Once a year, I will have my evaluation, and, you know, I'll pray for five, but nobody ever gets five, so maybe I'll get a four. What does that mean here? I constantly know, every day, you know, am I reaching out to my clients at NOCD's expectation, you know, at their frequency, or am I setting my clients up frequently enough? Like, what's the clinical expectation? But also, NOCD really respects the fact that I'm my own clinician with my own license. So what's my personal opinion on that? And that has been so helpful that there's no mystery, there's no punitive action. And even when there have been times when I have not been a perfect clinician or even a good enough clinician, I've gone through audits, and I've sat with the audit team and said, well, what did I do? How would you like me to do it better? What's my timeline for making this correction and habituating to this new change? And they've been very open with that. So I've never walked out of an audit meeting and cried. I've always went, wow, okay, I learned something new today. I'm gonna go apply it that way. And I've never had that somewhere else before. I've always talked to somebody who said, hey, I've looked at your work, and you just didn't do well enough. And Tsk, tsk to you. It's never been, hey, come in. I want to have this really great conversation with you and teach you some new things. Now show me how you can go use this.
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Sonia, I'm really glad you said that. Because we want to invest in our therapists. We know that in investing in our therapists it ultimately trickles down to the absolutely life changing experiences that our members can have. So the education, the training, the supervision, the consultation, all of the things that we provide to you allow you to do what we consider to be absolutely amazing work so that people who come to NOCD will get that evidence based and life changing care that they're looking for.
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Yes, I absolutely agree. The support that I've been given by the company has really helped me as a therapist, but has also been able to invigorate me and help me to give a members first treatment to my members to really focus on their care.
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B
There's people out there who are considering a job change, a career change, maybe coming to nocd. What would your advice be to those folks who are thinking about it?
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I would tell them do a little research on what OCD is and then live dangerously and apply. You know, take that opportunity to learn about a new evidence based practice. It'll make you a better clinician. It'll also make you a much more interesting friend. When people come to you and say, I'm so worried about this and you're like, yep, that could happen. But do it like yourself enough to trust your skills, to believe that you can expand your knowledge base and take this information and use it like yourself enough to want to work for a company that while it's rapidly growing, still feels very small, still feels very personal and try it out.
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Are you happy you did?
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I'm so happy I did all the time. I have this conversation daily, whether it's with family members or students. And the other day someone said, what's on your finger? And I'm like, oh, it's this aura ring that I got from the company because they're invested in my health and well being and they're like, they're what now? I'm like, you know, well, you know, if I keel over and die, then they have to replace me. But it's not that. It's that they really want to see me be happy, healthy and well adjusted so that I can continue to help the clients be happy, healthy and well adjusted and stay with us and then heal. Because that's really the whole point of nocd. It's not about Making money. It's about making changes in people's lives and helping them feel more confident in their lives and comfortable. And we have the skills to be able to do that. And I appreciate that NOCD says, hey, I think that you can do that, you can do that. Well, we'd like you to do that. And we want to offer you a wide variety of opportunities to learn more skills and to continue building on that skill set so that I never feel like I'm in a dead end job.
- [26:53]
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Good. We wouldn't ever want that too. So to me, it's always important that we listen to the people who work for us. We understand what makes their job fulfilling and we build upon those things because if, if we miss that right. I, I don't want anyone just to feel like complacent. I don't want anyone to feel like it's just a job. I want people to be sure that they know that this is a place that has their interest at heart. When you talk about helping members be something, like what? When you think about what you have as goals, not only that you define for the members you work with, but that your members want to achieve too. What do you want to help them achieve? To be. To live in their life.
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I want members to be able to live their lives without constantly being haunted by their own fears. I want them to be able to recognize that they have feelings, but those aren't always facts. And to be able to separate those things out and to live deliberately and consciously and to be able to say, I can have all kinds of feelings about things, but I'm going to make the choices that put me in charge of my life. So that when they're, you know, 94 and they're looking back at their lives, I don't want them to say, I could have done so much more, but I was so scared then. I want them to say, oh, I did so much, even though I was scared then that's really. The goal, is to help people have full, robust lives and not to make them never feel anything uncomfortable, but to make them immune to the debilitating aspects of being uncomfortable.
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B
That's awesome because nobody gets out of here feeling 100% comfortable. Right? That, that isn't the goal. Even though OCD might lie to you and say, that is the goal and you can achieve it, you just haven't figured it out yet. We want to help teach people that just because OCD says something doesn't necessarily mean it's true. Right?
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A
Oh, yeah, OCD wants to live. And it will constantly try to tell you how it's keeping you safe or how it's keeping your aunt safe, how it's making the world a better place and whatever it can do. I think one of the most interesting parts about this therapy is the depersonalization and separating. You know, is it me or is it my OCD and understanding where the drive is, what do I want to do, what is my OCD telling me to do and what choice am I.
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B
Going to make with that one last piece? And I think it's important too, because, you know, none of us are an island. You come here having a family also, and you're able to do your job and balance that life with your children and everything. So how, how has that been for you, not only as someone who works with us at nocd, but as a parent too?
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A
Well, I will tell you that learning about exposure response prevention therapy has made me a completely different child for my child who is currently 15, than from the child who is currently 32. Because my child who was 32 went, wow, you were just constantly terrified all the time when I was growing up. And now you just look at the little one and go, maybe she'll die. I'm gonna die. But yeah, I feel much braver. So something that's very interesting about, you know, going to therapy school, as, you know, future therapists can tell you, is it is the most expensive form of therapy ever is learning about mental health issues and evidence based practices. So it's really changed who I am as a mom. And I will listen to the conversations that my daughter has with her friends. And so she's like, okay, well, we're going to do some foursquare breathing or, you know, is this, is this a real fear? Is this anxiety or do you think it's something more? Let's talk about when your fear is pathological. And I'm like, you're 16. Can you just go listen to like Hanson or whatever the kids are listening to these days?
- [31:10]
B
That's fun. Well, Sonia, I thank you so much for being here today, for being one of our life changer therapists and for sharing a bit of your experience with everybody. Because for those of you who are out there and thinking about no cd, I want you to know this. We're on a mission to restore hope for people with ocd. We want to do that through better awareness and treatment. We know that the key to this mission is really investing in our therapists. And that's why we're talking to Sonia today, so you could see what it's like what that investment is like that we have in people because we want to ensure that all of our therapists are equipped to deliver this life changing care. If you're a licensed therapist and you're looking to deliver specialized care and you want to work with this population, we'd love to talk to you to see if you're a good fit to join our network. So go to our career page@nocd.com and you can apply there. And we would love to chat with you. And before we go, any final words of inspiration? Sonia, for those listening today?
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You know, be brave and try something new. You may just find that you really love it.
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B
Awesome. Well, thank you. And thank you for doing the work you do and being the life changer that you are. We really appreciate it.
- [32:26]
A
Thank you.
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B
All right everyone, we hope you enjoyed today's episode of the get to Know OCD podcast. Slight shift from what we normally do because we really are wanting you to think about what a career would look like here at NOCD. So again, go to that career page@nocd.com and apply. We'd love to chat with you to see if this is the right fit for you and your career and we would love to be able to train you to give this life changing therapy to others. If you like the get to Know OCD podcast, feel free to subscribe at our NOCD YouTube channel. If you're looking for help for OCD related conditions, you can also go to nocd.com and we'll see you again in another episode soon. Thanks for watching.