We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alissa Ellis. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alissa below.
Alissa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?
I think my parents did a lot of things correctly, but one that really stands out is that they never really tolerated us saying “no” or refusing to do something that we didn’t want to do. This could be anything from not wanting to eat something that was prepared for dinner to not wanting to go to swim practice after school. We were always encouraged to at least “try one bite.” They never forced me to eat everything, but they challenged me to always try a new food before deciding whether I liked it or not. To be clear, I still do not like mushrooms! This attitude of giving something a chance before judging it, and taking things one bite at a time has made the journey more exciting and, palatable, should you say. If I were too afraid to take “just one bite” out of going out on my own to start my own practice or do my own independent thing, I may never have been in the position I am today!
They also did not let us quit commitments which we had made in athletics or other activities in which we were involved, and they did not fight our battles for us. Those were for us to fight. This idea of continuing to persist, despite it being challenging and not wanting to do it helped me to develop a sense of grit that has served me well through graduate school and as an entrepreneur and business owner. This lesson also helped me develop a sense of personal accountability where my actions are the only things I’m concerned about when it comes to my outcomes which is empowering. When obstacles hit, you can’t just quit and give up. You have to keep going, and you have to be in the driver’s seat of your own life to make things happen.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’m a neuropsychologist! Most people aren’t entirely sure what that is, but it’s basically a clinical psychologist who just did a bit more specialized training focusing more on how the brain directly affects our behaviors. Neuropsychologists can do everything that clinical psychologists can do, but we often work closely with neurologists to understand how disorders affecting the brain such as dementia, stroke, ADHD, traumatic brain injury, etc, will impact a person’s cognition, emotion and behavior. My personal specialty is actually a bit different though. I’m really interested in how psychological disorders, like depression, anxiety, and ADHD, impact our cognitive abilities. For example, some of my research looks at how our memories and our attention are biased to recall and pay attention to more negative information versus neutral or positive information when we are depressed than when we aren’t depressed and how these biases may actually worsen our depression and keep it from getting better sooner. This means that the disorder actually changes the way our brain is interpreting the world around us! It’s pretty fascinating and gives us information on ways that we can work to change it to feel better. I work with my clients to help them understand how their brains are interpreting certain situations and help them to identify potential biases in these interpretations. I do a kind of therapy called cognitive-behavioral therapy which is backed by decades of research showing that this kind of therapy is helpful to alleviate symptoms of depression, anxiety, and improve symptoms of ADHD.
I think that what sets my work aside from other practitioners is that I truly embody the “scientist-practitioner” model. That means that I’m actively involved in doing the research! I’ve published numerous papers…I don’t just read them. I get my hands dirty in the lab testing hypotheses while also working directly with clients in the real-world to test the research findings. Additionally, I think that my style is down-to-earth, authentic, and relatable. I don’t necessarily fit into a stereotypical “box” of a scientist or a therapist, and I never expect a client to fit into any “box” either.
Any advice for managing a team?
This is a great question and one that is incredibly important to me, as the happiness of my team of associates and office management is one of my top priorities. High morale is a core value of my company and any decision I make reflects one that has considered what is best for the associates. It’s hard to provide concrete advice since every business is different, but I can provide a few concrete examples of ways I try to maintain a high morale. 1) I set their value to help them feel their own worth. I help my team to establish their rates, and I compensate fairly, particularly as compared to others in the community. 2) I encourage them to be their own business. That is, I do not put restrictions on them through non-competes. I encourage them to do whatever they need to do to feel successful, and I let them set their ideal hours and number of clients that they’d like to see. I do not put quotas on any of my team members. 3) I allow room for growth. Given that we are a relatively new practice, I have rented additional office space that is not currently being used to encourage my associates to expand and to let them know that we have plenty of space to do so if they are interested in that! I think that seeing that there is literal space for growth can boost morale and productivity! 4) Weekly Meetings. We have weekly Rounds where we meet to discuss our cases in order to support each other in our clinical work and to help with any challenges. This helps to maintain a team approach to clinical care, as well as provide support. In a field like mental health, compassion fatigue can contribute to significant burnout. Having a weekly check-in can be helpful to prevent isolation in a field that can be vulnerable to this. 5) I give them a seat at the table for decisions. I involve all the associates on any “practice-wide” decisions that are made. For example, if a policy is being changed or an email is being sent regarding the practice to current clients, it is run by EVERYONE for approval prior to being sent. There are no decisions that are made without discussing them with the team. Showing the team this level of respect has certainly maintained a sense of morale, as they all feel included and heard.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
As I sit here, I chuckle when I think about the idea of resilience and its role in my journey because in so many ways, everything that my career is today seems to have happened because of the choices I made during one of my most significant times of adversity. While some might call that resilience, I’d call it creative survival. Regardless, I’m on the other side of it, and that’s what counts. Here’s the situation in a nutshell: I had just started my 2nd year of a prestigious 3 year postdoctoral research fellowship when the grant that was funding my position was not renewed to the university which meant that they were no longer able to fund my position–the equivalent of losing your job–and losing your job prior to completing the requirements of your postdoc. Unfortunately, a PhD is not very glamorous, so despite having one of those in LA, as a single, unemployed woman, this required immediate problem solving. I had about 6 months to try to figure out how to secure something to allow me to complete my postdoctoral training requirements for the additional year, while also fund myself. So, I literally went to the drawing board and listed out what I could do. I could do 1) research, 2) clinical work, 3) something else? what? Of these 3 options, I decided to try ALL 3. I mean, why not try everything since the likelihood of them all working is slim, right? And, I was desperate!
Over that next 6-8 months, I wrote a grant for the NIMH for a 5-year grant to look at reward processing mechanisms in adolescents with mood problems. I got licensed and started a private practice where I started working with adolescents and adults with mood, anxiety, and ADHD. I also got really creative and developed a program that I started running at UCLA for teenagers and their parents where I teach them strategies to improve their time management, organization, and planning skills (i.e., executive functioning) that I called thinkSMART. What’s crazy is that NIMH funded my grant that next fall and covered my salary at UCLA where I’m now on faculty! I’m currently writing up all my cool results from that study. I also expanded my practice to include other psychologists and call it Ellis Effect. thinkSMART, the executive functioning intervention, now has empirical support and has helped teens and their families across the US to improve their EF skills! Losing my funding was one of the most stressful experiences of my life, yet it cultivated some of the most exciting and prolific projects of my career and has truly shaped my journey.
Contact Info:
- Website: dralissaellis.com; elliseffect.com
