Miscellaneous
My guest today is Derek Bylsma. Derek is Executive Director, Partner, and Senior Counsellor at the nationally renowned Millennium Counselling Centre. He oversees their innovative Intensive Treatment Program as well as handling an individual caseload, specializing in addiction and treatment of co-occurring disorders within the Clinical Mental Health field. Prior to his work in the mental health space, Derek was a D1 college soccer player, going on to play professionally for a number of years after graduation. Derek then took that competitive spirit, and applied it to business, building and owning multiple successful recruiting (staffing) firms. When the time was right, Derek then returned to education in his mid-30s to gain his Masters in Mental Health Counselling, before starting as an intern at the group practice he now owns and runs. In this conversation, we explore Derek’s career journey from professional sport and into the mental health space, how to take an athlete's mindset and apply it to the business world, and how the lessons learned in sport can be applied to a successful sales career. We also dig into some of the common mental health struggles that athletes commonly experience, and what it’s like to feel as though you have no-one that you can talk to when you are performing at the highest level. Derek is an incredibly passionate and knowledgeable guy with a wealth of experience in incredibly diverse areas, and this conversation really showed that depth of understanding. This conversation is full of transferrable information, and I was fascinated by the parallels that could be drawn between the world of professional sport and the “real world”, so grab a pen and paper as ever, and enjoy!