Why I Closed My Private Therapy Practice to Found Scaling Within

Usually when someone learns that I was a Marriage & Family Therapist for 10 years before shutting down my private practice to work with CEOs and founders, there next question is, ‘why did I switch?’

It’s more common to hear of someone leaving the marketplace behind to go into a helping profession then the other way around. And to tell you the truth, I never had any intention of entering “the business world” when I first set out to become a therapist.

So what changed?

I recently sat down with Joshua Fedie on The Founders Mentality podcast and shared about my motivation for making this transition. You can check out the 7-minute video excerpt here or continue reading below for a modified version.

I’m Meredith Neumann and my business is called Scaling Within, which is a place for founders and CEOs to be able to work through their issues. My background is as a Licensed Therapist and I was in that field for about ten years before closing down my private practice and shifting gears into the marketplace. My interest behind that transition was seeing that whether it’s the head of a family, or a business, or any kind of system like that— the issues at the top always flow down.

If you can have healthy whole people at the top of a system, then that flows into a healthy culture below.

My interest has really been in working with the pioneers— the founders that have the vision to bring change in some sort of area but need a space where they can work through and process through issues. So, Scaling Within is also about expanding your internal capacity to sustain external growth.

Previously my specialty was in complex trauma and PTSD, so it was a therapy practice for people coming out of abuse and manipulation. That could be relationships with narcissists, con-artists, people coming out of spiritual abuse and manipulation, cult-stuff at points— just a range of trauma.

When I first went to grad school, I knew that I wanted to help people. Specifically, to help people remove barriers that get in their way so they could fully be what was inside of them to be. But, you can have the heart to help people and have no idea what to do— like, what do you do if someone has anxiety or is suicidal, etc?

I knew that I wanted to get the skill and training (and it’s a massively long, intensive process to get licensed as a therapist), but I always had an internal sense that it was going to be a foundation for something else. I didn’t know what that meant, but it was kind of this intuitive sense that what I would end up doing, there wasn’t a precedent for.

I loved working with complex trauma and PTSD and it was very useful for understanding the depth of peoples’ issues. But how I see the difference between that work and what I’m doing now is my previous work was often me putting in a lot of effort to help people go a little bit of way.

What’s different about my work now with a lot of high-performing achievers is you give them just a little bit, and they take it really far. And then everyone that they impact, it cascades down.

So, in a sense, it was a way to scale my efforts— to take something that I could do six months therapeutically with one person and kind of work one-on-one with a leader where then the impact of that is very far-reaching. 

This is kind of my personal language for this, but I think that part of what’s in my DNA to do is to bring counsel to “kings.” In other words, modern-day people of influence— those who, whatever they do, has massive impact.

If you are a “king” in an industry, or pioneering something new (whether it’s well-founded or you’re at the beginning stages); what I hear most commonly is how lonely it is at the top. That’s a common understanding for founders.

Even the language ‘scaling within’ is like scaling a mountain of influence. The further up you go, the thinner the air is and less people make that trek. But also, the influence at the top of that peak spreads far beyond yourself.

When you’re the tip of the spear, the one to have to break through in these areas— it can be extremely painful, but the impact is massive!

Sometimes the thing that you’re overcoming as a leader is not just about what you’re personally overcoming, it’s for those that are coming behind you in the area that you’re spearheading.

If you’d like to listen to this interview in full, you can find the complete interview with Joshua Fedie on the Founders Mentality Podcast here.

I am Meredith Kathleen Neumann. I work with entrepreneurs and business leaders to help them identify and overcome internal barriers and limiting mindsets so they can graduate to the next level of leadership. I call this work Scaling Within, and it’s basically a hybrid between executive coaching and counseling. In my past work as a Licensed Therapist, I specialized in understanding the neurology of complex trauma. This background helps me identify my clients’ limiting beliefs quickly, enabling them to level up both professionally and personally.

Additionally, I do speaking and team trainings for companies where I teach a simple framework from neurobiology that helps individuals grow in self-awareness, so that they have the practical tools needed to scale within as they scale up their businesses.

If you are interested in learning more about individual consulting sessions at Scaling Within or bringing Scaling Within to your company or team, don’t hesitate to reach out.

You can find out more information on my website scalingwithin.com or email me directly at [email protected]

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