Today we’d like to introduce you to Natalie Steele.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I grew up playing a lot of competitive sports including soccer, softball, field hockey, cross country and track here in San Diego. I went to UC Berkeley for undergrad and joined a sorority, played field hockey and walked on to the cross country team my senior year. Although my major was mass communications, after college I found most of my professional network worked in finance, and so I found a job in public finance at Morgan Stanley in San Francisco. While living in San Francisco I ran my first marathon. Eventually I moved down to Southern California and realized financial services didn’t excite me as a long term career path, so I started thinking about what my next career move would be. It was thanks to a close relationship with a friend’s mom that I learned about the concept of being a therapist and having my own private practice helping people with a variety of mental health issues. Throughout my collegiate experience I both experienced and observed, with compassion and curiosity, the challenges of stress, anxiety, depression and peak performance, and often felt unprepared to be helpful. With this goal in mind I went back to school and obtained a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Even with a master’s degree, you need a total of 3,000 hours of supervised experience before you can take the marriage and family therapy licensing exam, so while I worked on my hours of experience at an internship in the evenings, I also worked a full time job at a start up company in Santa Monica called Headspace. Headspace is an app that teaches meditation, and the company’s mission statement is to “improve the health and happiness of the world,” so it felt like the perfect fit for me. It took me another three years to finish my hours of experience and finally become a fully licensed therapist. Once licensed I decided I wanted to return to my hometown of San Diego to open my own private practice and be active in supporting my community.
Today I am still a runner, a long boarder, a die hard Padres fan, and I am a therapist in La Jolla, CA.
I am also an avid learner, and aside from my formal education and ongoing training, I enjoy traveling the world and experiencing people, places and cultures with gratitude and curiosity.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The struggle of becoming a licensed therapist was the need to gain hours of experience, which are unpaid or minimum wage as a trainee, while still needing to work to support myself. A lot of sacrifice was made with regard to my social life while attending night classes for grad school and then continuing to work at an internship in the evenings until I was eligible to take the licensing exam and finally start earning money as a licensed therapist.
As you know, we’re big fans of Sunshine Daily Rx. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
I am the owner and president of Sunshine Daily Rx, a marriage and family therapy corporation. I am the only licensed therapist but offer internship opportunities to post graduate therapists still looking for hours of experience and supervision towards licensure.
I offer couples and individual therapy to people 18 and up. My therapeutic approach is based upon the clients’ presenting problem and needs but is influenced by the evidence-based approaches of emotionally focused couples therapy, mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy. I am also in the process of becoming a certified EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapist.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
When I first opened my private practice, I was a newly licensed therapist and I had moved from Santa Monica down to San Diego, so I had left my professional network and clients behind. This was before COVID, and therapy was almost entirely done in person at that time. I was not excited about starting from scratch but knew I would need to stay patient and that eventually I would rebuild and be happy to be settled in San Diego. COVID lockdown changed how a lot of the world conducted business and online therapy became normalized. Because of the general stress caused by COVID and the ability to offer therapy online, I was able to reconnect with many of my former clients as well as people all over the state of California seeking therapeutic support. Today I’ve found that many therapists never returned to offering live sessions, just like many companies have remained fully remote or hybrid. I decided to keep my office and now that COVID is over, I realize that clients seeking in person therapy are finding it harder to come by, so I am fortunate to be able to offer that option for people too.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sunshinedailyrx.com
Image Credits
All images are mine.
