Natosha Monroe

If you read my last blog, you know that I was preparing myself for a long wait in getting my temporary LPC license. Well, good news! It only took EIGHT days from the day I mailed it until the day I was granted my LPC-I number with the state of Texas! I think that must be a new record or something, right? It actually happened so fast that I didn’t know until days later. I want to share some tips with you so hopefully your license will get to you quickly as well.

After one Army tour in Afghanistan and three years working at the Pentagon and the FBI, I’m finally back in the great state of Texas. Home sweet home! I’m spending time with family and old friends again. Excited to start my life in Dallas. Happy to be only months away from my PhD. I’ve been invited to join the most amazing DFW counselors at the LifeWorks Group. I’m can’t wait to meet my first new client…but I’m stuck waiting on the state licensing board. Oh yeah…that.

I’ve been in Ghana, West Africa for the past two weeks on an exploratory visit in hopes of learning from professionals here and setting up collaborative relationships to benefit one another. While they face outrageous challenges to include blatant societal stigma and lack of funding, respect, and support, the mental health professionals I met in Ghana clearly demonstrate best practices I wish were more prevalent back in my own country. I’d like to share some of these with you.

Congratulations! You’re at the point in your graduate program where you get to choose a topic for your doctoral dissertation or master’s thesis. Yea! All those classes…all those dollars spent on tuition…the pages upon pages of mind-numbing journal articles…now you finally get to choose a topic for the final requirement necessary to hang that degree on the wall! You’re energized. You’re ready to get started on your research. You have some interests in mind. Now to choose your topic…easy right? Not always so, as I learned this past year.

YouTube is not typically my thing, but I’m glad my mom put her cell phone in front of my face Monday to share this video with me. It’s AMAZING. I shared it with my psychology students because our topic was the psychology of healing and it fit perfectly. The ex-paratrooper featured in the video had all but given up: He was overweight, unhappy…but someone believed in him and offered him hope. If you haven’t seen it, stop reading this right now and go watch it…then come back and finish reading of course! Here’s how to view it: