We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tyana Tavakol a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tyana, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about the best boss, mentor, or leader you’ve ever worked with.

The way I’ve learned whether or not I have a good boss is what I’m talking about at a work happy hour: is it how we all hate our lives and want to escape, or brainstorming how we can get even better at what we do.

The first best boss I ever had was not even in the therapy field, it was when I worked in Amazon. In my previous life, I was a program manager in the tech industry. When I started at Amazon, I had a boss that, at first, absolutely terrified me. He had high expectations, stated his needs directly (not rough, but not sugar coated), and held an unquestionable and sound confidence in the profession. After a few months, I learned how amazing that kind of a boss was. He pushed me to the edge of my comfort zone in my work abilities, let me make my own decisions no matter how wrong they were, and was always there to give me next steps and support so I could use the failures as growth opportunities. He helped me learn how to communicate my personal and professional boundaries. He made sure I have work-life balance. He supported me in escalating and addressing inappropriate workplace comments head-on. The four years I was there involved immense growth, and I attribute 99% of it to the fact that he was my boss. It doesn’t mean I never had the venting happy hours, those happened for sure, no boss is perfect. But at the end of the day I knew he had my back and that’s what kept me there as long as I stayed.

Therapy may not be the tech industry, but his leadership taught me a way of guidance and support that I’ve carried with me into my sessions with clients. I learned the importance of unwavering support. I learned to trust people’s inherent strength and perseverance and find ways to help them access that. I learned how to challenge someone to stretch themselves to their edge of their comfort zone so they can bloom in ways they never thought was possible. And most importantly, I learned how to give people hope that there’s something amazing in them, something insecurities and fear mask, that we can work together to uncover.

To quote one of his favorite sayings to me, no matter where you start working in, every job and every field will give you skills you can use throughout your lifetime. His guidance has helped me be a better therapist and better leader, and I’m grateful for that beyond words.

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.

Therapists are often called “wounded healers”, and that’s really not that off. We’re amazing at it because we’ve lived through it and started learning how to solve it before we even opened our first Psychology textbook.

You can often tell what therapists have experienced, either themselves or someone close to them, through their specialties. My specialties include anxiety and childhood trauma, with a particular passion for childhood trauma (also called Complex-PTSD or C-PTSD) of BIPOC children of immigrants. I love my family dearly and I would not be where I am today without them, and, mental health is just not a thing in Middle Eastern homes. There was no Iranian book when I was growing up on how to emotionally attune to your child or the negative impacts of unjust punishment. Anxiety and trauma run through the family lines, and I quickly learned skills that make me an effective therapist today: scanning to rapidly understand the emotions and tensions in a room, providing emotional support to an upset family member through validation and listening, and navigating a people pleasing culture.

As a teenager and young adult, I unintentionally attracted people into my life who loved my skills of emotional attunement and life advice. I realized, I was good at it so I wanted to get better. I spent my free time burying myself in books to become even better at the craft my family had unintentionally placed me in: how to analyze people and interactions and how to understand my own reactions (eventually learning the labels trauma and anxiety). I started my own therapy, dug deep into myself for multiple years, and by my mid-twenties decided to ditch the immigrant parent dream of having a successful child in business and go for the job with a huge stigma in Middle Eastern communities, and my passion: becoming a psychotherapist.

Fast forward to now, many textbooks, podcasts, grad school nights, internships, and clients later, and I am deeply and happily in the field as an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist. I am part of the Beverly Hills Therapy Group private practice and am supervised by Dr. Cayla Minaiy. I get the opportunity to help clients who come to me for the same things I used to struggle with: spiraling thoughts, unending heart racing, emotional outbursts they can’t control, flashbacks, and an overall feeling of not being in the driver’s seat of their emotions and thoughts.

Through my own experiences, personally and professionally, I’m able to deeply empathize with their struggles and bring in the skills I’ve learned that actually bring the craved relief they come in hoping for. I work with teens, individual adults, and couples from a culturally-sensitive, trauma-informed model. We work on integrating the mind and body, processing old and painful memories, and creating insight into the childhood origins and ways forward from the disruptive patterns playing out in their lives today.

The biggest joys for me come when clients begin to come to sessions saying, “No significant events this week, things are going smoothly”. A smooth life is the goal, and a smooth life is where we aim.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Coming from a program manager background, planning was ingrained in me. Any meeting I went to I had prepped for, any call with a work peer involved notes I had pulled up on my laptop so I knew which points to hit. I thought I could do the same as a therapist and I am sure any therapist reading this is getting a good laugh because gosh was that wrong.

I was beyond prepared for the first client session I had. I looked over her intake questions and answers, I read articles upon articles of the best way to start a first session, and I re-read all my notes from my classes. I was nervous but confidence that the preparation I done had set me up for success. The client got on the video call, and within a second, all my preparation was immediately and obviously useless.

My emotionally engaging and thought-provoking questions sitting on a word document in front of me did not matter. She had a lot to get off her chest and she was ready to pour it out. I sat there, trying to do the validation I was supposed to do, but there was never a gap for me to speak. I kept thinking, when do I interrupt, do I interrupt? Does that ruin the process? I resorted to head nodding. Before I knew it, the hour was over, and we confirmed we would meet next week at the same day and time. I was floored. If I couldn’t plan, and I had to go into sessions not knowing what the heck would happen, was I even built for that? Was my skeleton just a planner’s skeleton with no room for a bone of uncertainty?

Thank goodness over time, there was room for more than enough uncertainty bones. It was, as therapists like to say, a process. Being a therapist has taught me to embrace uncertainty and listen to understand, flowing with the client without being too ahead of them or behind them. I had to unlearn that planning was how to succeed and trust that I could handle things as they came, without any detailed word docs in front of me telling me the next steps. It’s been a beautiful, stressful, and amazing learning lesson.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

There is no training or logical knowledge in the world that has helped me be successful in this field more than doing my own therapy. Sitting in the client role is a kind of difficult that can be hard to understand unless you’ve sat in that seat. You push yourself to the depths of your pain where you swore you would never go, you make shifts in your life that disrupt your friendships and family relationships, and you come out with a life that’s absolutely and irreversibly changed in beautiful and also painful ways. Being a client gave me empathy for my own clients, and patience when their growth is not linear and they stumble as we all do as humans. It also gave me massive respect for people putting themself in a position every week to explore their darkest parts and work on themselves.

In my eyes, there is no success in a helping profession without empathy. As a therapist, I can’t imagine truly having empathy for a client’s experience without being a client yourself, and I highly encourage anyone in this field to find their own therapist.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.therapyinbeverlyhills.com/staff/tyana-tavakol-amft/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyana-tavakol-93b50141
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcyevKJn2ksYNnszZiTMMEA