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

William , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. 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?

I sort of fell into the idea of founding my own practice after grad school. Overwatch Counseling was born out of my own experiences and those of my teammates during my military career. I spent 21 years on active duty in the Army, and over 80% of that in Special Operations, and what I saw convinced me that for a subset of the population traditional mental health practices weren’t effective. I worked alongside leaders who could make life-or-death decisions under pressure, lead teams through chaos, and carry immense responsibility without hesitation. What I also saw was what happened when the mission ended but the nervous system didn’t stand down.

High performers are often praised for resilience, discipline, and endurance. What’s less discussed is the invisible toll: chronic stress, emotional disconnection, identity confusion during transitions, and relationships strained under the weight of unspoken pressure.

Overwatch Counseling Services was built to serve those individuals.

So, that’s where we sit today. It has been along road over and took years of consistent effort to get my practice to this point. My first piece of advice to anyone looking at starting a practice is to look at it like a technician. I approached the business side of my practice trying to do one thing to improve the business or one decision to support its development daily. This breaks the monumental effort into achievable chunks and gets you at least a little excited to keep coming back to the project. The art that makes your therapy different from mine will shine through with your clients, but the process of starting and running a practice is not unlike building a house. It’s a deliberate process you choose to undertake every day, or you don’t choose it and then your practice will take much longer to take flight if it ever does.

William , 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?

For readers who may not be familiar with my work yet, my name is William “Will” Kimmins, and I am the founder of Overwatch Counseling Services. I’m a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor and a former Army Special Operations professional who spent over twenty years serving in the United States military. Much of my career was spent working in high-stakes environments where leadership, resilience, and discipline were not just ideals, they were survival skills. That experience profoundly shaped both how I see the world and how I approach the work I do today.

My path into counseling began during the later years of my military career. After decades of working alongside exceptional leaders, operators, and professionals who were capable of incredible performance under pressure, I also began to see something that is rarely talked about publicly: the personal cost of operating at that level for long periods of time. Many of the strongest, most capable people I knew were carrying invisible burdens. They were dealing with chronic stress, unresolved trauma, relationship strain, identity challenges during career transitions, and the constant pressure of responsibility. These were individuals who were highly competent and respected in their professional environments, yet privately struggling with the toll that sustained performance can take on a person’s nervous system, relationships, and sense of self.

That realization led me to pursue formal education and training in counseling and trauma-informed mental health. My goal was never simply to become a therapist in the traditional sense. Instead, I wanted to build a practice specifically designed for people who live and work in high-pressure environments—people who are often used to solving problems for others but rarely have space to process their own experiences.

That vision eventually became Overwatch Counseling Services.

The name “Overwatch” comes from a military concept. In operational settings, overwatch refers to a position where someone provides protection, perspective, and support while others move through uncertain terrain. In many ways, that perfectly describes the role I play for my clients. I’m not there to take over their mission or dictate their decisions. Instead, I help them gain perspective, stabilize under pressure, and move forward with clarity.

At Overwatch Counseling Services, I work with high-performing professionals, veterans, first responders, leaders, and individuals navigating high levels of responsibility and stress. While my background allows me to work naturally with military and tactical populations, my clients also include executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals who are dealing with the same underlying challenges: sustained pressure, emotional fatigue, leadership isolation, and difficulty transitioning between professional and personal roles.

The services I provide include individual counseling, trauma-focused therapy, leadership resilience development, and relationship-focused work with couples and families. Much of the work centers around helping people better understand how their nervous systems operate under stress, how past experiences influence present behavior, and how to regain agency in areas of life that may feel stuck or reactive.

One of the biggest problems I help clients solve is the disconnect between external success and internal well-being. Many of the people I work with are highly competent and respected in their fields. From the outside, their lives look stable and successful. But internally, they may feel exhausted, emotionally disconnected, constantly on edge, or unsure of who they are outside of their professional identity. Therapy provides a space where those realities can be addressed without judgment.

What sets Overwatch apart is the integration of real-world operational experience and clinical expertise. I understand the language, culture, and mindset of high-performance environments because I lived in them for decades. My clients don’t have to spend the first half of therapy explaining what pressure feels like or why vulnerability can be difficult in leadership roles. There’s an immediate understanding of the environment they come from.

At the same time, the work is grounded in evidence-based therapeutic approaches including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, trauma-focused modalities, and strength-based counseling. The goal is not simply to talk about problems, but to help people develop practical tools that allow them to regulate stress, reconnect with their values, and rebuild relationships that may have been strained by years of operational focus.

Another area that shapes my work is cultural awareness. During my time in Army Special Operations, I had the opportunity to work with individuals and communities across many different countries and cultural backgrounds. Those experiences taught me a deep respect for the ways culture influences identity, communication styles, relationships, and worldview. In counseling, that awareness helps me approach each client with humility and curiosity rather than assumptions.

What I am most proud of is not the growth of the practice itself, but the impact the work has on the people I serve. Some of the most meaningful moments come when a client begins to reconnect with their family after years of emotional distance, when someone who has lived in constant hypervigilance learns how to experience calm again, or when a leader realizes they can maintain strength without sacrificing their well-being.

Many people assume therapy is about fixing something that is broken. In my experience, it is much more often about helping people reconnect with strengths they already possess and learning how to apply those strengths in healthier ways.

The main thing I want potential clients or readers to understand about my work is that seeking support is not a sign of weakness. In fact, some of the strongest leaders I know are the ones who are willing to examine themselves honestly and make deliberate changes when something is not working.
High performance should not require self-destruction. Discipline and resilience are powerful qualities, but they must be balanced with awareness, reflection, and connection.

Overwatch Counseling Services exists to help people achieve that balance. My role is simply to provide perspective, guidance, and support while they move forward in their own lives and leadership with greater clarity and steadiness.

At the end of the day, the mission remains the same as it was during my military career: serve people well, help them navigate difficult terrain, and ensure they don’t have to do it alone.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

Within mental health I prize something that I refer to as “the ability to lean in.” It comes from working with clients who have endured serious chronic trauma over their lives. The simple fact is that in many of those heavy-case situations clinicians have a tendency to metaphorically lean back when confronted with the client’s trauma history or past actions. Hearing about military combat, or abuse situations, or the particular aspects of surviving human trafficking feels heavy for regular nice people. It’s not a bad thing to be taken aback when hearing about things like that, unless of course you’re the therapist whose profession requires that you take all that information on board without pulling away so you can help the client sitting across from you. In that circumstance, you have to be able to lean in and get to work without judging the client or their past situations. It’s a trainable skill, but so very important if you want to have impact with the type of clients I seek out. It comes from a good therapist’s genuine fascination with people and how other minds work. You lean in because you heard something that doesn’t make sense or that clearly brings something different up for the client than it does for you. If you’re fascinated, you spend time figuring it out and from there you can recommend positive change.

I generalize the ability to lean in beyond dealing with difficult trauma histories and to anything that might come up in session with a client. Because when someone trusts you enough to let you be their therapist, it means by default they are going to let you in on things that are uncomfortable or they wouldn’t share with others. You need to be able to lean in and get to work whatever it happens to be because that is the only way to help the client make healthy change. Not talking around the subject, not avoiding it altogether, but instead examining it from your perspective and offering the client support according to how you practice therapy. That’s part of what I love about this field, it’s one part art and three parts science. No two therapists practice in exactly the same way, which is a good thing since no two clients are the same. Good therapists adapt how we show up in session to fit the needs of our clients. That process starts from being able to lean in and really examine whatever they have brought to therapy.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The story of Overwatch and my involvement in the mental health field in general is once huge pivot. I spent my adult life up until about a year ago working in the hardest environments and on the most high-stakes problems the Department of Defense had to offer. My daily decisions concerned life and death, the requirements of modern warfare, and the country’s national goals and objectives. I was successful in that life. I achieved every goal I had within my time in uniform and loved my job. The thing is that career had to come to an end. It’s the fate of every soldier to finish their career one way or another, and as a friend of mine once told me “even the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff has to pick up his clearing papers eventually.”

As I looked towards my retirement I began thinking about what the next chapter of life would look like. The chapter that didn’t include gunfights or jumping out of planes or doing the parts of the job I had truly loved during my service. I started thinking about what I would miss, and came to the conclusion that it was my teammates that would leave a hole in my life that could add purpose to my days once I hung up my gun belt for the last time. I started contemplating how I would remain connected to those teammates and at the same time I was thinking through the mission focus of Overwatch. I knew that the mental health system wasn’t working for a lot of people in my tribe, and knew I wanted/needed to change that. So, the pivot into mental healthcare seemed only natural. Next came the question of “well how do I go about doing any of that?” However, special operators are pathological problem solvers. We are the type who will look at literally anything, grab the first tool that seems like it might help resolve the issue and get to work. I’m serious, I once welded a tie rod end on a vehicle by using a metal rod and a set of jumper cables attached the to car’s own engine so we would have enough steering power to get back to town.

Making my pivot, undergoing my training, earning my license, building my business were all parts of one big process. I spent time each day as I was working through the process trying to make whatever area of focus I was currently on better. That enabled me to do the schooling at night and on the weekends even while bouncing around the world for work. I did my internship at an inpatient facility, and I would drive over to see clients after my duties were complete for the day on the base. I built my business one metaphorical brick at a time over a year, which allowed me to be deliberate in the choices I made along the way. The whole concept was to make just a little progress every day, or what I have heard referred to as an artisan’s approach. It took years of consistent effort, but in the end I am here today helping people who haven’t been helped by their other interactions with the mental health space. High performers who struggle with quiet burnout and chronic trauma survivors who feel separate and isolated from the rest of society.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.overwatchcounseling.com
• Instagram: @overwatch_counseling
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Overwatch-Counseling-Services-61557551446829/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-kimmins/
• Other: https://www.overwatchperformancecoaching.com

Image Credits

Professional photos taken by Elements Studio Photography in Kansas City, MO