We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jesus Hernandez. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jesus below.
Jesus, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.
I was fired from my first job as a licensed therapist. Nowadays I look back and think about how Oprah got fired too, but in the moment this was one of those terrifying make or break situations that I had to go through in my career in order to get to where I am today. When you go into the helping profession you are made to develop some pretty limiting beliefs that teach us we come second. Time and time again I was told to keep my expectations low when it came to making money, but my supervisors and bosses always emphasized a high level of commitment to quality of service. So fresh out of grad school I grew to believe that being of service in spite of my needs was essential for me to be a therapist. After all, this was already how I carried myself within my family system. I thought it’d be easy to integrate how I was with the people I loved, with how I wanted to be with my now profession.
So there I am a Master’s level therapist licensed in the state of Texas and i’m so excited to land my first job in the community where I grew up in. It was a 16 bucks an hour salary position, 9am to sometime in the evening pm, no over time pay, and I had to be on-call since I was the only therapist on the team. All I could think to myself was ‘Wow i’ve really made it’. After about six months of being at this job I, predictably, started to feel burn out. I consulted with my family about finding another job, but I felt such a strong commitment to the agency that I felt I would be abandoning the staff and my clients if I decided to leave. So I stayed, thinking that my commitment to serve my community would later pay off. Not long after, I was fired without notice. “We are taking the company in a different direction and we are letting you go”. they said. No warning, no severance pay, no consideration for me or my son or my partner or the bills I had to pay that month. Just fired.
I think it took a few days before my position was filled by my boss’s daughter. But anyway, I think you can say i’m still bitter.
So there I am, a Master’s level licensed therapist in the state of Texas serving tables at a Mexican restaurant next to my high school sister in the community I so dearly loved. I felt humiliated. I even had the audacity to ask myself if I had done enough. But, after a few days of grieving the situation I got back up, moved forward, and never looked back. My life as a therapist has never been better and I wouldn’t have been able to learn what my true worth was if I had never experienced what it felt like to be so devalued like I was that day. Sometimes we put too much value into what we came to believe was our community. We begin to base our worth as professionals, partners, friends on how much we can give of ourselves to their cause. Only to find out that these people places things were never willing to reciprocate the same effort back to you. Since this event I have learned and continue to try and master the ability to be extremely selective with where I put my efforts and energy. This isn’t about changing who you are, but changing who and where you give yourself to. Not everyone is entitled to all the amazing things you have to offer. I have really come to love the word “tribe”. Where you grew up and where you developed became your tribe by default, but once you venture out into the professional world it is essential for you to create and nurture a new tribe. One that values, cares for, and feeds your passions and desires. Now that I am doing that, I am feeling much happier about my profession and it gave me the confidence to believe in myself to venture out further than the mental health world and into entrepreneurship.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Jesus Hernandez I am a licensed professional counselor in the state of Texas and I help men who hate asking for help to rediscover their strength through intimacy and vulnerability. I guess I can say that my path into the mental health profession was pretty simple. Go to school for a bunch of years, get the degree, get the license, and just start working. What they don’t teach you in grad school however, was everything it takes to truly be a great therapist. And part of that, included how face to face I had to get with my own insecurities, doubts, and fears. When you go to school to be a therapist, you come out thinking you have all the answers. I mean, you just went through some intense training on how to treat mental health issues right? Sure, but who was I to tell my clients how to clean their room when I still had last months laundry sitting on my bed? It took some time, but I had to discover that I needed to step into my own process of healing in order to be able to more effectively connect and help my clients. It took a lot of humility and courage to start this journey, but above all else, it took me being open minded to the idea that everything I truly wanted to be was not inside my comfort zone. You never quite “master” this idea because the comfort zone serves its purpose of course, but becoming familiar with your discomfort zone is where the magic happens. It was there that I was able to discover the direction I wanted to take my career in, and that is helping men who struggle to accept and express love. For many men out there the world has taught us from an early age that how we feel does not matter. As humans we are wired for connection, but over time we learned that when we ask for help we see our cries would fall on deaf ears. I like to use the analogy of a boy crying wolf, but in this story theres actually a wolf and no one believes him so he’s left with two options: fend for myself or keep asking for the help that isn’t coming and risk being eaten. These kinds of experiences shape the kind of men we see today: on the outside they look stoic, calm, independent, never cry, but on the inside they feel isolated, cannot trust others to open up to, and avoid their emotions. It makes sense why these men struggle in relationships. You’re telling me I had to kill a wolf as a boy because nobody helped me and now you’re asking me to be an emotionally present partner, father, friend who communicates his feelings and knows how to trust others? Yeah, I think i’ll take my chances fighting that wolf again. But of course, living like this forever gets exhausting! It doesn’t have to always be like this. So I found my calling in helping men make peace with their past, learn to be vulnerable again with the right people, and teach them the skills to actually protect themselves from the people who make us keep holding on to that axe. I always feel an immense sense of pride for my clients when I see them go from that skeptical, fearful, and insecure person and see them step into the confident, loving, and strong person they were always meant to be. It takes work of course, but I think my clients could tell you themselves that the outcome was worth it.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
If there is anything my parents taught me it’s how to overcome adversity, be resilient, and just keep moving. I also realize I am about to sound like my parents when they tell me all they had to go through so that I would be more grateful. Nonetheless I feel pride in sharing this story. I was in my second year of grad school when I became a father. You know how they say nothing prepares you for fatherhood? I don’t think anything could have prepared me for the following toughest few years of my life. I wanted to do things right. I wanted to give my son a good life and provide for my partner, but I had to finish grad school first. Being who I am I decided to take on both tasks. I was working forty plus hours a week as a dishwasher, working twenty hours a week at my internship site, and going to school 12 hours a week, and finally coming home to a stressed out partner and a crying baby. Everything sucked at this point, but I knew that at some point things would get better. It felt never ending, but a year later I graduated, got my license to practice, and was finally seeing the results of my efforts. I look back at this now and I understand that this is what it took to get me to where I am today.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Ironically, the story I am most proud of and just shared, contains a lesson I had to unlearn along my journey into entrepreneurship, and that is that I cannot do this alone. I grew up with the idea that the “American Dream” was achieved by one’s individual efforts. And up to this point in my life, every single thing I had accomplished, I had done on my own. So I thought I was on the right path. As my dreams became bigger and I started to tread into waters I had never been in, I quickly discovered I was going to need some help. It has been so difficult to truly believe that the path to where I want to be involves building connections and relationships with other people. There is a loss of control in the idea of depending on others that I have to continually let go of and keep working on unlearning. The lesson that “I have to do everything on my own” has gotten me far in life, but I know that if I continue to hold on to that belief, I will be extremely limited in how far I can keep going.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.elevatemh.com
- Instagram: @elevatingmentalhealth
- Facebook: @elevatingmentalhealth
Image Credits
Photo by Alex Green: https://www.pexels.com/photo/crop-unrecognizable-man-talking-to-female-psychologist-5699418/ Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photo-of-support-group-having-a-discussion-5711167/