Welcome to the Continuing Education for Mental Health Professionals podcast. I'm your host, Natasha Moharter, a licensed counselor, OCD specialist, and founder of CEUS.xyz, the continuing education directory for mental health professionals. This podcast is here to inspire and equip mental health professionals who want to share their expertise through continuing education. In our Community Member Spotlight episodes, we sit down with CEUS.xyz members to hear about their personal and professional journeys as CE providers. You'll pick up practical tips and ideas to help you start your own CE journey or enhance the trainings you already offer. Also, if you provide continuing education trainings, you can get listed in our directory by visiting www.CEUS.xyz/join. Today we are joined by our very special guest, Dr. Ashley Stevens. Dr. Stevens is a board certified licensed clinical social worker. She's a supervisor and she's licensed in nine states. She's in the process to complete her doctoral degree in industrial and organizational psychology from Grand Canyon University. She earned her master's in social work from East Tennessee State University and her bachelor's in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a consultant and trainer, Ashley has taught courses in cultural awareness and competency, mindfulness, brain injury and leadership development. She has coached executive leaders, managers, and frontline employees while providing opportunities for individuals to grow in the areas of organizational development, team building, and executive development and training. She looks forward to continuing to train and teach others. It's such a pleasure to have you here today.

Happy to be here.

So tell us a little bit about what got you interested in starting to become a continuing education provider?

What you'll learn very quickly about me is that I am very honest, and this is one of those things. Honestly, I wanted to travel. I was talking with my business partner, Dr. Regina VanBurg, and one of the things that we talked about was how owning a business and having that freedom and privilege to do that opens up the opportunities for so many different things, including being able to make your own way in the world and doing what you want and not doing what you don't want. And so when we were talking about what we wanted, the thing that kept popping up was being able to travel, see the world, explore in ways that were opening us up to more cultures, more lifestyles, more people, the beauty that there is to those people in the world. One of the things that we wanted to do is bring along our folks, bring people, LPCs, LMFTs, social workers, psychologists, whoever along with us on the ride.

Your company is called The Crane and the Bull.

Yes.

Can you tell us a little bit about the meaning behind that name?

Yes. Such a funny story. My business partner and I actually never meant for the Crane and the Bull to be what we were known as. Regina did her dissertation on mindfulness and mindfulness practices. And one of the things that she included in that, there's a novel called Death in the Afternoon by Hemingway. And in that book there is this story about these bulls and bull fighting, that's kind of a central theme in it. And there is this thing known as querencia, which is like a home base for the bull in the ring when it's fighting, there's this zone that it feels most comfortable, most at home, most safe in. When you think about a bull, you think of like grounded, rooted. Like that masculine energy, but like very, like analytical sees the world for what it is. Very rational and realistic. So we knew we wanted something to counterbalance that. I'm Native American, I'm a member of the Chickasaw tribe. And so when we were thinking about what is their symbology, what are the things that we can look to on the native side, that kind of opposition to that energy. So the crane in native culture is this wise, eloquent, graceful, patient and in a lot of cultures it has the balance between earth and spirit. Our tagline is as above, so below, and that to us is very much from this view that everything we are doing comes with that integrity of, you know, we have something that we owe to others when we work in this field and as trainers and retreat leaders we wanna be able to share who we are in an authentic way with having both of those kinds of energies at play. And Regina is Indonesian. And I am native, like I said. So we have this, like, we're both white appearing. We both look very, very American, very white. And we have privilege that's associated with that. But that's one of the, like, tying it back to who we are and our roots and knowing that when you're working with us, you're working with a company of, you know, first generation immigrant and native and woman owned and tiny and all of those things is really important to us.

I love how you bring in that sense of responsibility as well, what are some of the purposes behind the work that we're doing.

Absolutely.

You've gone through several, approval processes. You have N-B-C-C, A-P-A, A-S-W-B which is in process, and then, you also are a CEU provider in Texas. So how do those compare and what would be helpful for someone considering those approvals to know?

So first, if you are listening and you're thinking about this process. Join Natasha's Facebook group. It's really important. I'm like, I can give you feedback, but also find people who are doing it, get their opinions, see what they've gone through. Every journey is a little different, which is kind of fun and exciting, but also it's a party of one. When you're doing this, it can feel really isolating and, nerve wracking. NBCC is the one if you have one that you're gonna go after. NBCC to me was the most personable, helpful, reachable, accountable. They are just so darn approachable is the best word. You can call them. You can set up meetings with them. They're very, very informative and kind and lovely, and not that some of our APA and ASWB and all those other things aren't, but it was a lot harder to reach people at those larger organizations.

That is something that I've heard before is that NBCC is a little bit more streamlined and you get feedback and it's not so kind of like, okay, now you pay for this revision and then you pay for this revision, which maybe is present in some of the other approvals. I know for me it was, I've wanted to be a continuing education provider since I was in grad school. I loved continuing education for whatever reason, and yet I was so intimidated and looking at these things and like, can I do that? Are you sure? And it wasn't until I started interacting in a community with other CEU providers, right? And being like, wait, you've done this. How did you do that? Okay, wait, yeah. What else does that entail?

What we ended up doing, we tried the classic route of just signing up whatever. And as you said, the problem is you don't, you kind of just get a yes or no four weeks or six weeks later, you get a why. Why was it a yes and why was it a no? And for us it was a no. Literally it was like every single thing that we did, they had a problem with. So we paid the money and then they're like, there's no redeeming this. You just have to start all over. And that to me feels very backwards. We're not trying to bowl one over on anyone. We wanna provide high quality, amazing trainings that are interesting, that help people, that help the clients that are fun and exciting so we're not trying to get away with something. If we don't meet muster, then that's okay. We wanna be better. But paying all of that money and then just receiving a nah, do everything different was really demoralizing. Actually with APA, there's a process called sponsorship. How we title it is we're APA sponsored training, which means we can offer our CEUs for APA credit through someone else who is APA accredited. So we kind of went the like back route to get to the same thing. And that is working beautifully for us. She has to turn in all of the paperwork and making sure it's of high quality. And she also saw the value and it was like a real person that we could talk to about, like, here's our thoughts, here's what we're doing. I would say if you are offering a CE that's local, that is in person, that is just for a community or a small group of people getting a state certifying body to do that is like chef's kiss easy, quick, and cheap. If you wanna go national with it. And that is your ultimate goal is to get your training in the hands of any clinician in the country. NBCC is, to me, the best. You have to do a lot, but like a process that you can do that makes you feel kind of good about yourself and that you're not like an idiot and you know what you're doing and that there is someone to help you out. Absolutely. But don't sleep on your local NASWs or your local counseling groups or your local psychology groups, whatever it is. They're very kind. And we've offered, Louisiana, we've offered North Carolina credit. Any place that we go, we try and reach out to those local communities who are often really pumped to have you. So that's a great option too if you're looking to start small.

I started as a Nevada licensed CEU provider. And my Nevada one is I think $150 a year and I can offer as many trainings as I want live, asynchronous. Not all states have them, but there are processes to get state approved and you can actually reach several different states and clinicians that way as well.

Yeah. The local ones really, we found to be really an amazing advocate for what they approve. It's an amazing option.

You don't have to start big. We can start at our local levels.

So in Texas, that one is a little bit different of a state approval. So in Texas, being a board approved supervisor also makes you a CE provider. How do you navigate that and are your Texas approved courses limited to supervision or can they cover other topics? Yes, so Texas is fun. It's the wild West out here in some ways. They wanted to get away from the business of like approving CE providers. Texas kind of solidified that in our state law. It now says that 50% of your hours have to come from a list of types of providers, so they're not gonna approve them. But if it's a school system, hospital system, mental health clinic, charity, 5 0 1 c3, there's like these big buckets. But one of those is a supervisor in the state. So LPC supervisor, LMFT supervisor, or an LCSW supervisor. So if you are a supervisor in the state of Texas, you are an automatic approved CE provider. So with that, any training is on the table. Now what I tell people when they ask is, I would still make sure that you're doing things the way that it has been accepted in the CE world. So have an agenda, have goals, make sure that it's not 42 minutes long. Make it an hour, make it an hour and a half, whatever. Offer certificates and make sure that you have a process to do that. Make it like it's real, even if no one is double checking and make it relevant. So what that means for us is any training that I provide, including this one, because I'm a supervisor, I can give credit to Texas providers which is amazing.

You also created a supervision training that's moving through approval. What goes into developing that type of course, compared to others?

So in the state of Texas, it requires 40 hours of training in supervision in order to become a board designated supervisor. Every single state and each of our professions has different requirements for the supervision course. So in the state of Texas, 40 hours, and they actually are pretty dang specific about what they require. So there's ethics required, there's technology. You have to think about all of the people that live in those rural areas that don't have access to go to a training in Austin for three days. When we created our supervision training, I actually partnered with an LPC, LMFT, Kate Walker, who I work with very closely. She has been doing the 40 hour training for those professions for years. She was like, I am thinking about offering this training for social workers, but I need a social work supervisor to do it. I love supervision, but to me as a clinician, I've always been more macro in nature. My brain, the way I think, the way I process things is that macro level, and to me offering supervision was that I am able to affect so much change with the 10, 20, how many ever supervisees I have, how many clients am I able to reach. Now expand that even further by being able to train those trainers to be good supervisors, to think about the legal aspects. What happens if your supervisee has a legal complaint or a board complaint or whatever else. So our training, I was in the fortunate position to kind of just piggyback on something that was already going and then tailor it to social workers rather than create it from scratch. But if you have a passion like I did for supervision, think about how you can use that passion to create trainings in your community and to think about that next level up. How can I give people the knowledge and the information they need to do what I do? And to me, I love supervising. I love supervisors. I love supervisees. I love providing that information. So it was kind of just a natural extension of who I am to then offer that training to people in a way that is attainable and approachable. We are the only training in Texas that does it completely asynchronously. You don't have to be on a Zoom call for eight hours, which is how I did mine. I did three days of eight hours on a Zoom call on a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and then had 16 hours of readings before that. Our course there's videos, worksheets, papers. We hit anti-racism and multiculturalism really hard. And all of that is done on your own time. The only rule in Texas is that you have to do it within 90 days. So parents, single parents, people who have their own businesses. I think that our course is a lot easier to do as you have time than to take a weekend when you might not have the time to do that.

When you sit down to develop a CE training, what does that process look like for you from kind of idea to delivery?

So we kind of thought about what are the ways in which we can get people at our trainings that we can really start marketing and selling these things? And we went through different ideas about what we should offer, what we could offer, what our expertise was, what we wanted to, which I think is just as important. What do you wanna talk about if you're creating a business for CEs make sure it's stuff you care about and that you're going to want to talk about time and time and time again. And I think that that's one of the things that we kept going down wrong pathways because we asked what does our customer want? And I honestly think that when you get like business coaching and you pay for some of these programs that help you create your CEs or whatever else, that's what it says all the time is figure, like get in the mind of your customer. What does your customer want? What does your customer need?

Do you get into the mind of your client and your customer or do you pursue something that you want? Or both. And so how did you bridge that gap?

So Regina is a trauma trained psychologist all day, every day. Trauma. Trauma, trauma and combat. Veteran trauma for the most part. We both worked at the VA together, that's where we met. And so she knows trauma like the back of her hand. My dissertation was on burnout in government employees. But when we talked about traveling, it was like, you can kind of do a trauma training why would you wanna go to Spain or Indonesia or Japan to learn that it just didn't really pair with what we were trying to do. So we're like, let's go back to home base. What is the most important and vital aspects of mental health providers in travel, and that led us to our current state, which is cultural humility, cultural immersion. Cultural competence is a word that we use because it's what the field knows, but can you ever be competent? So really what we wanted to do was provide opportunities for ethical tourism, funding the people and the places and the companies of that local area. How does that help you grow and learn as a clinician? So when we kind of shifted to that, like, well, what makes the most sense for the trip itself? That is what created the most magical experiences for our participants. And I naturally believe that the people who are meant to be seated at your training, who are meant to be your participants will find you when you get really good at following your passion and educating people based on what is needed in our world.

Your retreats are unique. What does it look like to attend one and how does immersion reinforce that learning differently than a classroom?

One of the things that we ask people in our trainings is to get uncomfortable, and that's on purpose. Growth happens when you're out of your comfort zone. It doesn't happen when we're in our comfort zone. We've had the whole gamut of super well traveled all the way to people who've never been outta the country, we've had it all. But no matter how familiar or comfortable you are with traveling, one of the things that we will be asking you to do is get a little uncomfortable because what the research says is that when we increase our cultural awareness, our cultural humility, when we're out there doing this work. Our burnout decreases our life satisfaction increases. Getting out of our bubble is good for us. Even if it's hard. And we ask our clients to get uncomfortable every minute of every day when they're with us. How dare we act like we should be comfortable every minute, right? Like we have to walk the walk and talk the talk. I like to joke, and Regina would hate me for saying this, but our retreats are not for fun. Will you have fun? I hope so. I think it's a great time. But the training itself is quite serious. What we're asking you to do is open your heart, your mind, reflect on your biases, your judgements, your stereotypes. That's not fun. That's not easy. It's hard work. And learning about where you come from, your people, how you think, where those thoughts come from, overlaying that on where you are and those people and what they think. So our training is called Self, Other, World. Self-Reflection. Other- who are these people. World- how do we then incorporate what we've learned being in these places, in these locales with our own stuff into being better, more culturally aware, more competent clinicians. So every single one of our trainings has a welcome dinner where we gather and share a meal prepared with local food by a local chef. We wanna give back to our local community wherever we're stationed. We wanna make sure that this is culturally prepared in a way that is legit. They make food from there. They tell stories about the food, why they chose these things, why the ingredients are what they are, where they were grown. Each one of our trainings we hire someone from the area to talk with us. The things that we have learned from those individuals as individuals, as well as what they have to say about who they are as a people has been so amazing. Our first one in Scotland, we partnered with an organization that trains homeless individuals to become tour guides. To give them a stable income, get them off the street, but like that to us is the linchpin of like, who, not just who do we say they are, not who do we say we think they are? Meet them, get to know them, look at them, watch them, be with them, engage with them. And then who are you in that and who are they in that? And how do we move forward together knowing a little bit more about who they are and hopefully confronting some of our preconceived notions and beliefs about who they are. Our trainings are on couches in living rooms and on the streets. And that's purposeful. Anyone can open up Google and type in a place and get to know the locales and the weather, it's something else to be in it. Boots on ground, walking the streets. Everywhere we've been so far ancient places, hundreds, thousands of years of people walking these same streets. Native peoples were on this land for a really long time, but our cities aren't those cities. Our streets are not those streets. So to me that like the real world understanding of culture, you have to be in it while it's great, you know, take your cultural competence training at your conference, and there are times where a box checking has to happen, funds are limited, or this is in my backyard or whatever else. But if you own your own business. These are write-offs. And to me that changed like many of my trainings were just like, whatever was close and quick. You can use these experiences to further get some relaxation and rest, but also to see more of the world. And if you're thinking of something and you don't see it out there, create it. If you're not a 10 99 or you don't own your own business. Think about asking your HR person, your boss, your supervisor, whoever else. We've had a couple people come with us who got it completely paid for. A lot of places are offering people those kinds of things as extra benefits and perks in order to bring them on board, ask, the worst that they can say is no. But we've had a fair few now that have come completely covered by their employer.

So you do have this retreat in Mexico City. How did you pick Mexico City?

So this retreat is a little bit different than the ones that we've done before because this one is actually centered around a holiday, around a festival, around a time period that is meaningful for people who are Hispanic or Latin. When we decided that we wanted to go to Mexico City, one of the things that we thought about was why not do it this holiday period, which has deep, meaningful connection to not only heritage, identity, religion, spirituality, but grief and bereavement and connection with yourself and with your past. And as mental health providers, how meaningful different types of populations grieve and what they do to celebrate that, the passing and the connection with their ancestors. We've been excited about every one that we've done so far, but this has got an extra something to it because we'll be there during this season. The goal is learning and reflection and meaning and connection and all of those things. And I'm like, not that we shouldn't have fun, but this isn't a food tour, it's not a wine tour. It's not a like, how many bars can we stop at in an hour? So for our tour, one of the things that was really important for us is that we are not interrupting people's actual sacred processes for Day of the Dead. That we're not infringing on the local cemeteries and the people who are actually celebrating and having the intimate family ceremonies that they're having. So we're gonna go to like the really popular cemetery, and we're gonna see the decorations, we're gonna see the Catrinas, we're gonna do the street festival, the parade. We're gonna have pan de muerto, which is the day of the dead bread. We're gonna build our own ofrenda, so people are going to bring pictures of their loved ones and we're going to honor them. Actually we think Mexico City again next year because this has been such a joy and we're so excited about it. And I think I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the irreparable harm that our current administration is doing to people specifically of Hispanic descent, and LatinX folks. It's such an important piece of our American culture, especially where I'm from the Southwest. This is, it was Mexico. This was another land. And the people that are from here are of this land and no one is illegal on stolen land. Right? So when we think about places like Mexico, I think that we wanna continue to honor that. There's a lot of misconceptions and a lot of preconceived notions that are wrong about the Mexican people, about Mexico as a place, the government, et cetera. So like we have to continue showing up. I don't feel like we can do the work of cultural humility, competence, immersion, whatever you wanna call it, and act like we're above or untouched by some of the things that are going on. We owe it to the profession of mental health to live in the real world. And the real world is suffering. So we can't do cultural competence work and act like these things aren't hurting our neighbors to the south and our actual neighbors here, there, and everywhere, because Mexican people are part of our culture.

And we can do that through things like our continuing education. We also can make change at that grassroots level when we are intentional with let's see what's happening in today's world, where are we needed and how do I connect with that? What is important to me about that and what part can I do? And peace is a form of resistance, right? Being able to make money and resource and be able to fund certain things, right? That's a form of resistance. Being able to say, Hey, I want to use my creativity and do a cultural immersion.

And we think that there's room for deep, meaningful work and taking care of who we are, expanding our brains, our horizons, and our cultural knowledge while honoring and celebrating the amazing cultures that we share this planet with. And that's who we are and that's what we're for. Do you make it a safe place for everyone who walks in the room, no matter what they look like, sound like, act like. It's really important work to do and we owe it to our clients to be better at knowing who they are and where they come from and what they stand for, and being curious and open about who they are.

Anything else that you feel would be helpful to share?

I would just say, again, I think that your Facebook group is such a amazing resource for people. If you are looking to enter the CE space and want support, validation, guidance, advice, resources, please join us. It's so much fun and people get so many different opinions. You know, we all kind of come from different places and are in different places in our CE journey and it's been so wildly helpful and fun to just read along and watch as people navigate the world of CEs. It is a intimidating venture, but one that if I can do it, I swear to you, I am no one special. I just am a girl who decided to do a thing and it worked out. Anyone can do this. You don't have to be a mastermind at business. You can just be you with all of your knowledge, skills and abilities. And I think there's a place for all of us here. There's enough room at the table for any, and if you are a person of color, if you are someone who is different than the majority, I believe that we need your voice even louder than those of us who aren't those things.

Where can they find you?

www.thecraneandthebull.com We're on social media, we're on Facebook, we're on Instagram, we're on LinkedIn. All the ways the Crane and the Bull. And if you're interested in supervision my website for the course is SW as in social work swsupervisioncourse.com.

Thank you again for being here today. I hope all the best for you on this retreat and all your trainings to come.

Thank you. Appreciate it.