Chapter 43

The following Monday he was sitting in a meeting with his two bosses, two older gentlemen with a long history of practicing psychology in New Zealand. His presence had been requested in the email he received over the Christmas holiday, and he was curious as to what he was there to discuss. Work culture in New Zealand was much more “hands off” than America, which was something he was thus far very appreciative of.

“So John we’ll get right to the point, as we know you’ve got patients to get back to. The truth is we’ve been hearing a lot of things about your work from both your patients as well as your supervisees, and we’ve been thoroughly impressed.”

“Well thanks,” John replied. “Truthfully I didn’t know exactly how it would go moving so far from home, but so far I’ve found it all pretty seamless. People want a lot of the same things I think. To love and be loved. To be respected. To do something meaningful when they work. It’s pretty universal I guess.”

“Which brings us to why we’ve got you here,” the senior manager replied. “Regarding doing something meaningful with your work, we’d like to offer you a position where you would be in charge of supervising a number of our company’s clinicians. You seem to have a natural gift for teaching and the feedback we’ve gotten from our patients has also been exemplarily. We’d like you to take a much larger role in training our next generation of therapists. I know you’ve wanted to remain relatively anonymous, but it’s something we feel would be good for you and good for our younger clinicians.”

“Wow,” John replied. “I. Um. Well I didn’t really see this coming. It feels like the last year of my life has been a bit of a blur, but I certainly have enjoyed working and teaching again. Truthfully I wasn’t really prepared for this and would like to take some time to think about it. Is that okay? Please know I’m very honored and will think very seriously about this.”

“Of course John, of course. I know that it’s a lot to think about and you were clear when you started here that you wanted to remain behind the scenes. But if I may say so, a talent like yours deserved to be shared, and I’d like to challenge you to think about why you got into this field in the first place.”

“I will. I certainly will,” John replied. “And again, thank you so much. How about I take a week and we’ll talk again. Is that fair?”

“Of course John. Take a week. It’s a big decision and we really hope you’ll say yes.”