What is The Academy?

What is The Academy? It's an organized collection of materials; free, paid, live, recorded, original and curated! It's built on a foundation we call, The Counseling Landscape and the basic content is available to all licensed mental health professionals. That means you don't have to be a supervisor or an associate to avail yourself of the basic program. Simply take a good hard look at The Counseling Landscape and know that the entire PracticeMentors.us website is constructed to reflect the structure and subject-matter of The Counseling Landscape diagram.

What is "The Counseling Landscape"?

The Counseling Landscape is the entire checklist of topics that you must be familiar with to be a licensed mental health professional, expressed in one simple diagram. Some were taught to you in school, most were not. Some are required by State Law, some by your licensing Board. Some are required by Federal Law, and a lot of things are simply needed to operate a business successfully (yes, a practice needs to be viewed as a business).

You ARE going to learn this stuff eventually it's just a question of whether you'll do it in a thoughtful, organized fashion, or do it through the School of Hard Knocks.

What is The Academy & Why Does It Exist?

->Creative, "Post-S", Supervisor Training Doesn't Seem to Exist

->Associates Have a Very Hard Time Finding the Right Supervisor

->To Give the Best Supervisors a Teaching Curriculum and Content to Support It

->Post-Grads are Simply Not Prepared to Run a Practice

->It Ain't Easy or Cheap to be an Associate

"Post-S", Supervisor Training Is Lacking

We discovered that most supervisor refresher courses were simply a repeat of the material you were exposed to in the original 40-hour certification course. We think that the more robust the education of the supervisor, the more she can teach an associate. Make sense? So we designed The Counseling Landscape then built our Live and On-Demand workshops (and courses!) around that. And they all count for supervisor refresher and TX Ethics hours!

Associates Have a Hard Time Finding Supervisors

There's really no good list of top supervisors available in Texas and so we set out to build one and make it available to anyone who can find us. We call it, The Wall of Excellence.

A supervisor must complete one of our core workshops to make the wall. The more workshops he takes, the higher he climbs on the ladder of recognition. All of the Wall's members have expressed a desire to be there. They've displayed a, "pay it forward", attitude towards supervision or they don't make, The Wall. It's our list of trained supervisors; our way of making the search for supervisors just a little bit easier.

To Provide a Teaching Curriculum & Content

Our experience has shown us that after a supervisor gets her, "s", there's not much out there in the way of original, creative, forward-thinking training. Nor is there any type of teaching curriculum and content to use with associates.

Traditional supervision models center on mentoring an associate on the business of seeing clients. Our curriculum builds on that. Keep doing what you're doing, just add the topics and materials in the curriculum we're making available to you.

Supervisors who have earned a spot on, "The Wall" have access to an area of the website where the curriculum content is more highly organized. In addition there is also additional curated content and downloadable files for use in training your associates.

Post-Grads Are Not Prepared to Run a Practice

We're not trained in college to run a private practice and what little we're told is inadequate and highly suspect. Post-grads are simply not prepared for the road ahead, so we've built a training academy to teach the supervisors what they need to know, to train the associates. It's that simple.

You'll turn out "next-generation" mental health professionals ready to take on the world, run a private practice, and defend themselves properly.

It Ain't Easy or Cheap to be an Associate

Most of us had some help along the way from the previous generation. That's how it's supposed to be and our entire program is built on that precept. Because grad-students are not typically flush with cash and the time demands placed on them are enormous, we've created a subscription program to The Academy for associates only, to help them save quite a bit of money.  Once you do the math around the cost of courses and workshops vs the subscription cost, this becomes a no-brainer for your associates.

Please let us know what you think!

Plan Smart. Be Safe. Serve Others.

Kathleen Mills, LPC-S, CEAP