We were lucky to catch up with Kaylin Zabienski recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Kaylin thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the best advice you ever gave to a client? How did they benefit / what was the result? (Please note this response is for education/entertainment purposes only and shouldn’t be construed as advice for the reader)

All of the advice I give to my clients comes down to one thing- you have to know and trust yourself. I see my clients once a week for 45 minutes, that is a very insignificant amount of time to be a part of their lives. They have to live with themselves 24/7. So my focus is on empowering my clients to think for themselves, to decide what they want their lives to look like and to trust themselves in those decisions. The trust includes not just making the decision and trying something new, but also trusting themselves to change their minds when something doesn’t work. Trust to stick it out when things get hard, but to ultimately learn and know what works best for them. It looks different for each client, and I don’t want to break anyone’s confidentiality, but some examples include leaving bad relationships, setting boundaries to improve relationships, applying for new jobs and even ending the therapeutic relationship with me to find a therapist with a different style! That was disappointing for me on a personal level, because I enjoyed working with that person, but I was also so so proud that they made the decision for themselves and stuck around to have the difficult conversation with me about it.

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?

I always wanted to be a helper from a young age- and as soon as I discovered psychology, I knew that therapy would be the route I took. I love being able to hold the sacred space and build safety around people deepest fears and insecurities. I love teaching my clients how to think differently and learn how to believe in themselves more instead of the messages all round them. I’ve been a therapist for 12 years and I am just starting to break into the coaching world, because it feels a little less restrictive for me and what I want to do. Therapy is supposed to be focus on mental health, but in my own journey I have discovered that our mental health is so much more than that. Out overall health and wellness is interconnected to physical health, relationships, environment, social surroundings, existential health… it all comes together. That’s why I’ve moved more toward coaching because I can talk about all the things that I’m technically not supposed to as a therapist, while still maintaining my own ethical standards of course. One of my favorite services to provide is my book club, Revitalize360. It’s a self-mastery focused book club for anyone interested in personal and professional development. We read one book per month that will improve some aspect of holistic health and wellness.
I also offer 1:1 therapy and coaching, which allows my clients to get a lot more personal and dive deeper into their health journey.
Most of my clients are highly stressed out, high achieving millennials- just like me! I had to learn how to stop putting so much pressure on myself and recover from burnout and now that’s what I help my clients to do too.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

So, in the therapy world, there are actually a lot of lessons I’ve had to unlearn. One of the biggest is the misguided belief that therapists can’t or shouldn’t make a lot of money. Therapists are taught from day 1 that you can “never make money in therapy” and that we shouldn’t charge a lot for their services. Honestly, a lot of people still believe this and it’s very much how the world sees the therapy industry. It’s one of the only helping professions where people will try to barter price- like have you ever gone to your doctor or your dentist and tried to convince them that their fee is too high? I think this is partly because therapy is still seen as an “extra” expense instead of a very important part of your healthcare. So, even as a therapist, I have had to unlearn this and learn how to take care of myself financially, mentally, and energetically so that I can show up for my clients as the best version of myself while helping them to become the best version of themselves.
I believe that therapists can and should be paid well for our services, we are quite literally changing lives!

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

In the therapy and coaching space, I think the most helpful thing to succeed is to pull from your own experience. It’s a totally different experience to be a therapist or a coach than it is to be a client. If you get too separated from the other side, you start to forget how scary and vulnerable it is to be there. I remember years ago when I hadn’t been in my own therapy for quite some time, and I was working a lot so I was burning out, I would show up to help people and I would get so annoyed with them. Like they wouldn’t open up enough to me, or they wouldn’t do any of the work in between session, and I would get so frustrated. I’m never going to show up and do more work than my client, but it was getting to the point where I felt resentful, like they were wasting my time. I got back into my own therapy and I almost immediately was hit smack in the face with just how hard it is to show up for yourself… especially when you have so much other stuff going on in your life. It was a really good reminder for me that we need to keep in mind that our clients are coming to us for a small amount of time during their lives, and no matter what training or experience we have, we are still sitting across from another human with feelings, insecurities and doubts that we are there to care for.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kzcounseling.com
• Instagram: @kzabswellness

Image Credits
Professional Photos taken by David Wiskowski