1 October 2020
Business Therapy
I’ve updated my site recently, and have introduced an initiative I simply call Business Therapy.
As well as having worn a number of hats in the working world, I’ve had the pleasure of working with business owners as a therapist, who often share their struggles making a go of running a company. Especially in the COVID-era, running a company — big or small — poses many challenges which often go beyond day-to-day logistics. Whether you are a small team of entrepreneurs with no staff, or managing an office with several others, we often come face-to-face with ourselves: it could be a lack of patience, procrastination, or facing a lack of passion. It can lead to conflict with those we’re working with.
Business Therapy is a way to take the office into the world of therapy and work out our issues with those we’re working with. Specifically for those working alongside partners, I offer a way to untangle the knots that make us avoid persistent issues, be they personality conflicts or ways of problem-solving that actually work to solve the intended problems without scorching the earth around us.
How does it work? It starts with getting in contact with me. I will ask to meet with you and your partner(s) together (in person or via phone or videoconference), so that we can get a lay of the land, and so that I can better understand what you are up against, both personally and professionally as an organization. Then, I would proceed to meet with you individually so that I might get a gist of the individual challenges that may be working their way into the mix. My approach isn’t based on a static template, but rather customized to the needs you and your partner(s) present, and the situation at hand.
For more information on Business Therapy, please feel free to get in touch: matt@downowntherapy.ca or 416.873.7828.
If you are interested in learning more about my services, about me, or perhaps booking an appointment, please call me at 416-873-7828 or email me at info@downtowntherapy.ca for more information.
filed under: business• change• corporate• general info• psychotherapy• success• work
16 June 2020
A Different World
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the human face behind our central idea of how an economy works — something we have long needed reminding of, lest those of us who are able to pay our rents and leases become too comfortable with abstract terms such as “supply chains” and “stakeholders”. We are reminded that we are a society of interdependent people — individuals, families, communities — and it’s overdue that we see our economies the same: people require support when tragedy makes their livelihood untenable.
And just as the pandemic has made us humbly pause to consider the society we have constructed (or, if I am feeling cynical, we have allowed others to manage so long as it doesn’t affect our ability to pay too much for our livelihood), so too has the tragic, preventable deaths of George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor in the U.S., and Regis Korchinski-Paquet and Chantel Moore to name just two from each country in the last two months, forced us (and not without the persistence of the Black Lives Matter movement) to reckon with our society’s implicit racism and how that directly affects the lives (not just livelihoods) of Black and Indigenous individuals in particular.
We are reckoning not with the isolated actions of “a few bad apples” but with the concept of systemic racism, that is, when racist or white supremacist notions are baked into the very structure of certain communities, businesses, and government agencies. This is particularly evident within policing organizations.
I’ve previously written about the idea social justice, and my own path from a place ignorance. There is a great sense of exhaustion I’ve heard from members of the BIPOC (that is, “Black, Indigenous, [and] People of Colour”) community. The exhaustion of having white friends and colleagues continually approach them to ask for resources to help them understand racism (imagine asking a victim of gun violence to help explain the problems with firearms licensing). The exhaustion that comes with wondering whether this will be yet another blip of media interest in which hopes are raised only to be let down.
A different world is possible, but the time is past due for white folk like myself to do the heavy lifting, to seek out and reference the many (many) resources out there already written by the BIPOC community that will help people like me contextualize and understand how racism is systemic, and — just as importantly — to help others like me better understand this situation. As a therapist and active member of society it’s the least I can do.
For anyone who is curious, here are some resources I have no hesitation recommending:
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (book)
Black on Bay Street, by Hadiya Roderique (Globe and Mail essay)
The New York Times’ 1619 Project
The Inconvenient Indian, by Thomas King (book)
A last thought for you: there are no slow news days, only barriers to other peoples’ experience.
If you are interested in learning more about my services, about me, or perhaps booking an appointment, please call me at 416-873-7828 or email me at info@downtowntherapy.ca for more information.
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