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

Hi Steven, thanks for joining us today. Can you recount a time when the advice you provided to a client was really spot on? (Please note this response is for education/entertainment purposes only and shouldn’t be construed as advice for the reader)

Strike While the Iron is Cool!

Over the years, I’ve had many clients share with me heated letters and text messages that they are about to send to a romantic partner or business associate. These are the kinds of communications that burn a hole in the pocket. The sender feels compelled to get it off their chest as soon as possible.

However, as we spend a session speaking through and discharging the strong feelings the client inevitably gains more perspective and starts to reevaluate how they might communicate to best advantage.

If you can just slow down when there are strong feelings involved you almost always improve the outcome. The gap between stimulus and response is your freedom. This gap changes reactions into responses. Reactions are hardwired and driven by past experiences. Responses are present to all the possibilities that lie in the current moment.

Steven, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Sure! I am a Licensed Psychotherapist (LMFT), Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), Executive Coach, and Certified Group Psychotherapist (CGP) with training in Internal Family Systems and Attachment-Focused EMDR. I am also the Executive Director of Beyond Psychology Center and work as a Transformational Coach for Mobius Executive Leadership.

I help high-potential humans who feel stuck build a life that feels great on the inside and attracts a community of like souls. I use a mind-body approach that engages the inner healer to move from states of anxiety, burnout, disconnection, and pain to states of goodness, flow, and feeling at home in your body. This provides a foundation for deeply intimate relationships and a meaningful career adaptation, which naturally unfolds into a community platform organized around a shared sense of purpose and energy.

I combine Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems, Neuroscience, Attachment Theory, and Psychodynamic approaches and have trained personally with Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing), Thomas Hübl (Collective Trauma), Bessel van der Kolk (Body Keeps the Score), and Richard Schwartz (Internal Family Systems).

I have two Masters Degrees, one in Clinical Psychology and one in Business Science, and a three year specialization as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. Before becoming a psychotherapist, I worked for seven years in Investment Banking and Private Equity. I also spent eight years traveling the world rock climbing, sailing, creating visual art, and reorienting to my own deeper sense of purpose, which would become: helping humans to achieve their true potential.

I now live with my wife and daughter in Santa Monica, California. I still enjoy creating art and exploring wild and magical places.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Talking Myself Away from the Table

As a child, I learned to be very analytical and without realizing it I would often find reasons that I couldn’t or shouldn’t go for a hairy audacious goal such as starting a business or representing myself as an expert. I did think of myself as courageous–I was a rock climber after all–but somehow I wasn’t taking the big life risks that put points on the board and really impact the universe. I was playing the games that were already set up for me, rather than creating my own game.

I wasn’t having conflicts and standing my ground. I opted out of jobs and kept trying my hand at new fields. While these turned out to be good decisions, I was talking myself away from the table where the food was.

In the last few years, like in the movie Yes Man with Jim Carey, I’ve started to walk through any gateway that appears before me. If a client wants to work with me, I say yes, if I’m invited to speak, I say yes, if I think of a group I can run, I do it.

I’ve been surprised to find that the limits are a lot further out than I had assumed. People really appreciate a “can do” attitude and something magical unfolds every time I trust the universe in this way.

To put it more eloquently:
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.” ― Terence McKenna

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I met my business partner at a soup party in a small town in Pennsylvania. We had both moved to New York City on the same Labor Day weekend and I was visiting her home town by chance over the Christmas holidays.

We exchanged one sentence and didn’t see each other for many months. In the spring we attended a play through a mutual friend and cajoled the group into gathering so we could keep meeting each other. A few meetups later, we kissed, a few months later we moved together to California, and a few years later we were married on a dusty ranch in the hills above California.

17 years down the road and after many different places, careers. friend groups, and identities we have ended up somehow running a psychology group practice together.

It’s not without it’s challenges but running a business with your partner is extremely rewarding.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://beyondpsychologycenter.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenpbradshaw
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-bradshaw-lmft-sep-cgp-1791885/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Stevenpbradshaw
• Other: https://stevenpbradshaw.com/

Image Credits

Images from the Steven Bradshaw Collection