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

Emily, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Looking back at internships and apprenticeships can be interesting, because there is so much variety in people’s experiences – and often those experiences inform our own leadership style. Do you have an interesting story from that stage of your career that you can share with us?

When I was brand new in the mental health field, I remember looking at the more experienced and wise people who I had the privilege to work with. I felt an intense feeling of imposter syndrome at times. I wondered how I had gotten to where I was and when people around me were going to figure out that I had no clue what I was doing.

It is only after years of experience that I realize that no one starts out with experience and wisdom. As a newbie, I didn’t realize how much people had to go through and learn to get to where they were in their careers. I look back on that young girl and wish I could tell her that everything she is doing is leading her to bigger things.

However, we shouldn’t start at the top of our game. Not only would I not have appreciated it, there wouldn’t have been anywhere to go from there. So, I am grateful for all of the challenges, lessons, and opportunities that were presented to me.

Here’s the thing… I’m not done! I’m still growing, making mistakes, and learning. I hope that I get to keep growing for decades.

Emily, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am the founder of Tribe Mind Body Wellness. Tribe is a counseling and wellness company that provides mental health counseling and therapy to children, teens, and adults. In addition to the individual work we do with people, we also strive to provide those we support with a chance to find belonging in a community. So, we offer groups, ranging from women’s support, teen support, co-parenting, divorce, and grief; and we offer workshops and wellness retreats.

Everyone on the Tribe team has a passion for learning and growing. We all pass along this passion to our clients. We believe that with the right tools, people can grow and live fulfilling lives in which they get to show up with intentionality. So, we give people the place to find their tribe.

I worked in community mental health for over a decade before starting Tribe. One night after work, when my husband asked me how my day had been, I burst into tears. I was overwhelmed with the pressure I felt in my role. It was that night that he challenged me to consider what I really wanted to do with my life. I valued and felt proud of the work we did in community mental health. But, after so many years of working as a small part of a bigger system, I felt the urge to be creative and fine tune my skills so that I could provide even more value to clients. This was the beginning of my journey toward creating a business that felt purposeful for not just me, but for my team, and for our clients.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

My journey has taken me down some unexpected paths that have knocked me off balance multiple times in my life. With each of these experiences, I have done what any other human would do: I’ve cried, I’ve vented, I’ve reflected, I’ve wallowed in my own sorrow. But, then I have realized that I can’t stay in the negative place and I begin to consider what I can learn from the experience. Inevitably, this leads to personal growth and personal growth creates wisdom that I share with my team and my clients.

In February of 2023, my dad, who I adored died very suddenly and unexpectedly. I had experienced grief before in many forms at other times in life. My grief has previously come from an estrangement to my mom for many years when I was young and the unexpected end of a marriage when my children were small. However, the grief that hit me after the death of my father was shocking. It felt like I was drowning in my sorrow at times.

I work to be self-aware and do the things that I ask my clients to do. One of those things is to actually feel all of the feelings, not just the good ones. As humans, we are meant to experience suffering in order to experience joy. So, after the news about my dad’s death, I took my own advice and felt everything. It was challenging and painful. Although the acute feeling of suffering is no longer as intense, it is still present with less frequency and the grief journey will likely continue for the rest of my life.

By allowing all of the feelings to emerge and be felt, I found that no matter how intense they were, I was capable of experiencing them. This experience is part of resilience. If we deny our feelings or push them down, they don’t go away. They just bubble beneath the surface and then like a pot of boiling water, bubble over and sizzle at the most inopportune moments. This may come up as feeling angry that someone didn’t hear us as we were trying to get by, or getting overly angry at our child when they made a simple mistake.

Resilience is about a willingness to learn, grow, and change. It is also about including other people in your healing and having gratitude for all that is in the present moment. So, when people have shown up in the capacity that they were able to while I have experienced grief, distress, or trauma, I have been incredibly grateful for their love, their kind words, and the fact that they took time to just be with me.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

When I founded Tribe Mind Body Wellness, each of the words in the name had a meaning that I found to be helpful in my own healing. Tribe is about giving each of our team members, as well as our clients a place to go and feel like they belong. Mind, Body, and Wellness are words that describe various aspects that allow us to heal. We can’t heal our mind without our body and we can’t heal our body without healing our mind. Our wellness is made up of many parts and when we find our tribe, we are able to heal in really effective ways.

So, the most effective strategy for growing our clientele has been a belief in the work that my team and I do. It has also been about courage, authenticity, and vulnerability. Our team members at Tribe are always working to learn and grow. We do the hard work to heal ourselves and our relationships because this also helps us to help our clients. Our team is always reading, looking at research about healing and wellness, listening to podcasts, and consulting to make sure we are using effective strategies for growth.

The relationships that each of our team members have with clients and colleagues has been an invaluable aspect of our marketing as well. We have been given the special privilege to walk alongside our clients wherever they are on their healing journey, which is something that we don’t take lightly. So, this has led to our clientele growing significantly through relationships and word of mouth. The best referral we can ever get is from someone who has worked directly with us to heal.

At the same time, we diversify our marketing efforts in order to tap into multiple marketing streams. We attend community groups, networking meetings, work on our Search Engine Optimization, run Google Ads, post regularly on social media, and more. All of these methods help us to stay relevant in people’s minds. We are open to new ways of thinking about marketing and willing to try things we’ve never done before. We will never be done learning about how to most effectively build our clientele.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://tribemindbody.com/events/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emily_tribemindbodywellness/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/emilytribemindbody
• Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-garcia-tribe
• Other: Find strategies for dealing with stress here: https://tribemindbody.com/strategies-for-stress/

Image Credits
Chris Valiant Photography & Tara Visconti Photography