Hi there, welcome to the Matthias J. Barker podcast.

My name is Matthias, I'm a psychotherapist from Spokane, Washington, and this is a podcast

about mental health and moving towards what's meaningful, even just by hardship.

I am so excited to share this episode with you.

It's been one that I've been looking forward to reposting and reflecting on.

You know, even as I was listening back, I recorded this episode a year ago, and I was just

remembering that season of life that I recorded this in and just the struggle of kind of

establishing my career and moving from school into the professional field, and I think

I was just thankful.

I was thankful for all the mentors that I had around me at that time and still do.

People like Russell Colts, who's an expert in compassion and focus therapy, he's been

a direct mentor of mine for a while, and I mean, a lot of these ideas that I'm sharing

with you were from him.

Unbeknownst to him, I think I would just ask questions posing as if it was a clinical

situation or I had a client that was wondering this or that, but it was really just me exploring

my own stuff.

And he was really generous and kind.

He probably caught on.

That's what I was doing, but I don't know, just gave me some pieces and some skills to

hold that actually made the self-criticism and the judgment or the shame or just the uncertainty

around establishing yourself in a new career, doable, and not just doable, but profoundly

meaningful that you actually didn't have to get over all the self-judgmental thoughts

...