We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Joy Berkheimer. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Joy below.
Hi Joy, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about how you went about setting up your own practice and if you have any advice for professionals who might be considering starting their own?
When I began my practice in 2015, I was fresh out of grad school. Many don’t think that’s even possible, but it is. We have to have supervision when we leave school. With the right supervisor, already in private practice, they can accommodate you having the space to go ahead and start to build your name, specialty, and brand of therapy in the beginning of your journey.
One of the biggest challenges to anyone beginning a new practice, myself included, would be no one knows who you are. Your job is to build trust, and that’s pretty hard to do when they are not clients on your couch. What does push me to do is get a better understanding of social media and how therapist can ethically utilize this to start providing therapeutic tools to people on a larger basis. These days the first thing somebody will look up is your website and any social media platforms you have available for them to get a feel of what it would be like to be in therapy with you.
Honestly there’s nothing I would’ve done differently from how I did it when I begin. I took my time to look through several resources and how others conduct their practices. This did not mean that I did a copy and paste. What it did was allow me to see that clinicians can show up authentically and very differently from each other. I understood the importance of having a niche and not just being cookie-cutter.
If I were to have any advice for a young professional who is considering starting their own practice it would be understand your gifts, your strengths, and your vision for the best version of therapist you want to be. With those things in mind you will be able to create a unique space that will attract your ideal clients. Plus loving what you do, feeling challenged but not defeated, is a recipe for great therapy!
Joy, 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’m known as the Nation’s # 1 Goddess Glow Up Expert and I flourish in my private practice, Renew Yourself With Joy LLC, in South Florida, where I promote a constant inner shining as the founder of the Glow Your Goddess ® Movement. Whether on stage, screen or in my office, I journey with women to cultivate a new love of self, while facilitating their abundant connections with the right partners. I consistently share relationship gems & guidance to 1000’s through my Dear Joy Live Series, facilitating weekly webinars, and hosting the Glow Your Goddess podcast. My work as an experienced Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, trusted Dating Coach and Sexologist has proven to be invaluable in changing the lives and love of everyone I connects with. Motivated by my pursuit to put powerful tools in the hands of every women, I created a guide for goddesses and wrote the 5-star rated, published book, “Why Won’t he Call?”:Empowering You to Date Like a Goddess.
There has been no pause in my mission, especially after graduating from Barry University, with dual specialties in Marriage, Family & Couples Therapy, as well as Mental Health Counseling. I immediately opened my private therapy practice, am currently a solo practitioner and now working on my PhD in Clinical Sexology. I’ve further trained with the Coaching and Positive Psychology Institute (CaPP Institute) and received intensive intuitive healing training. My time with individuals and couples is focused on a humanistic and strength-based foundation to allow for clients to regain spiritual connection, self-discovery, and healing.
For 10 years, I stepped into a career at the Miami Dade Attorney’s Office, dedicating myself to the Domestic Violence Unit. It was in these eye-opening years I realized that my energy and passion would always align to walking with women who have forgotten who they are. I found I was placed in women’s lives to help them remember there is a limitless goddess within, ready to no longer survive, but fully thrive. Colleagues seek out my expertise in relationship dynamics, mindset shifts and activation of inner strength. They do not hesitate to refer goddesses to me, knowing I am just the person to help them “get their glow back”.
My vision is to guide every women who seeks abundance of joy and freedom in their lives to discover her inner goddess & fully glow up in her relationships.
It is through not only my professional experience that I engage in my work, but I show up with my own real-life experience in loss, shifts in points of view, walking through a battlefield of change and finding ways to shed an old skin to come to the other side of things, more empowered and full of light than imagined. I remain inspired by a belief that there is always more for you and a faith that you are 100% the author of your own story.
Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?
I would choose the same profession however I would get into my specialty even sooner than I did before. I always knew that I had a passion for working with women and that will never change. But the truth is I understand now that I wanted to be able to walk on the journey with women’s more intimate concerns.
I connect with the need to live our lives authentically. Specifically in the cultural community that I am a part of we don’t talk about our intimacy, sex, and shame enough to free us from ongoing narratives that are not aligned with us experiencing pleasure in every way. So if I could go back I would be specializing in sex therapy much earlier and not just relationship therapy.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
The biggest lesson that I had to unlearn was thinking that I had to fit in this box of “professionalism“ in order for anyone to want to work with me. I had to suppress some of my creativity and ideas because I was afraid that people would discount me as if I had no education or experience at all.
With time, good mentors, some faith and bravery I have been able to really glow my true goddess self and with that realize that that is the most powerful inspiration to all of the people who come to me and they themselves wanting to be exactly who they are.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.renewyourselfwithjoy.com
- Instagram: @glowyourgoddess
- Facebook: @glowyourgoddess
- Other: www.thatjoyplace.com
Image Credits
James Burgess, Photographer