Meet Kim Slipski | Therapist, Coach, Certified Yoga Teacher & Founder of Wellful Therapy

We had the good fortune of connecting with Kim Slipski and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Kim, what role has risk played in your life or career?
Funny enough, I tend to self-identify as pretty conservative when it comes to risk. But if you look at my track record – quitting my corporate job, solo backpacking around the world, and starting my own business – you’d probably say anything but!

It’s absolutely true that the bigger leaps I’ve taken in my life and career have been what have offered the biggest rewards – from making a living doing something I absolutely love, to total autonomy over my schedule, and deep connections to people and subjects that give me a significant amount of meaning.

To-date, I can attribute my ultimate decisions to take these risks to a couple important factors.

First, despite being pretty big swings, almost all of the risks I’ve taken in my life have still been been quite calculated. In fact, the amount of work behind the scenes that can go into deciding to take a risk is rarely too visible or glamorized. You might see the career change, but you don’t see the hours, weeks, and even years I’ve spent talking to people, trying out small experiments, journaling and internally weighing my decision, before finally committing to the leap. I think it’s important to highlight that risk taking doesn’t necessarily mean being impulsive. Good risks are actually choices that can take a lot of work.

Second, my level of tolerance for risk to this point has more often than not been directly linked to my my level of resource and support. In therapy and developmental psychology, we talk a lot about a child’s “secure base” when we study the different ways children explore the world around them. Children with secure attachments are more likely to venture away from their caregivers to explore their environment or try something new because they’ve internalized a sense of safety they know they can return to. I believe the same continues to be true later in life. Resources like supportive friends and family or choosing to build up a nest egg can make a big difference in the confidence you have to take a risk. It’s true that the resources we might individually start with or have access to can vary greatly, but we can also actively work to get connected to and build out more resources and parts of our base where we might currently lack.

Now, today, I find myself in a new chapter of expanding my relationship to risk. While both components of risk taking mentioned above remain important, today I’m finally stretching that which we typically tend to associate with people who have higher tolerance for risk: mindset. As we know, risk is fundamentally about uncertainty and the possibility of failure. As such, over the past couple years, much of my own work has shifted toward more wholeheartedly accepting – even embracing – change and uncertainty, as well as welcoming the reality of failing along the way. It’s a slow process, but unlocking this perspective continues to unlock greater and greater opportunities, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes me next.

So perhaps you can start to see that it’s all pretty relative. What’s “conservative” to me might be incredibly bold to someone else – and vice versa. The point is to find the edge of your relationship to risk now, continue to stretch it, and the rewards will continue to grow.

What should our readers know about your business?
Currently I own a private practice in Pasadena called Wellful Therapy, but as a private practitioner, I always have my hands in a lot of pots. I have therapy clients in LA and throughout California and I have coaching clients around the country; I write and make content and I run all the logistics of a woman-owned small business; I’m still active in yoga, and I hope to continue to expand my offerings into supervising younger therapists in training, or even hosting workshops, groups, or retreats down the road.

While most of my work still orbits around themes that have been central in my own life, including stress, anxiety, burnout, career, and now parenting, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that as an entrepreneur it’s not only ok, but can be a huge strength to have a multi-faceted, multi-hyphenate career, and even for the various components of it to ebb and flow over time.

Narrowing in on a niche can have huge value, especially when it comes to marketing and making a name for yourself quickly. And if you find a super specific you love, it can also be great to learn to do one thing really, really well. But the longer I’ve been doing this, the more I’ve come to embrace the idea that as long as you are good at what you do, what people often want most is to work with you for what makes you uniquely you. I set a high standard in my work, bring in connections between my own unique background in corporate, and work across multiple fields, make sure I manage my time and energy in a way that allows me to show up not burned out, but creative inspired, and ultimately get to set an example of this for all my clients, too.

As humans we’re complex and our lives are complex, so when looking for partners on our journeys, it can be a real asset to have relationships with people who are equally as complex, too.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
One of the things I love most about LA is its absolutely incredible diversity and breadth of offerings. When we have visitors, the first thing I almost always love to show them if we have the time is the beauty of Southern California – be it a day trip or hike in the Santa Monica Mountains, Channel Islands, or even up to Ojai or Santa Barbara. A day at the beach is also obviously a must!

We also really love showing off the amazing food and culture in LA. One of our favorite rituals is to have friends watch the documentary, City of Gold, about LA food critic Jonathan Gold, who was a pioneer in highlighting the unique tastes in LA’s various cultural enclaves, and then to find a Jonathan Gold list restaurant to go and explore!

And around Pasadena and the East side, we’ll often take friends for a cocktail at Capri Club, tacos at Villa’s, or mouth-watering bagels at Wake & Late. Because we lived in Altadena before the fires, it’s also important for us to keep supporting the community and small businesses growing in the area, and so you can also often find us taking friends up to our favorites at Highlight, Bevel, Miya, Good Neighbor, and more!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Gosh, the number of people and supports who I’d want to acknowledge for their impact on my journey is simply unlimited, but for today I would love to specifically name my very first therapy supervisor, Dr. Rachel Bar, PsyD. As I continue to grow in my own journey in the field, to this day she is still an example of someone I look to for wisdom and inspiration not only as a clinician, but even more as someone who has dedicated herself to mentoring and teaching others.

Website: https://www.wellfultherapy.com/

Instagram: https://instagram.com/wellfulwithkim

Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/kimslipski

Twitter: https://x.com/wellfulwithkim

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wellfultherapy/

Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/wellful-therapy-pasadena-2

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@WellfulTherapy