Dr. Tricia Groff - Executive Coach, Clinical & Business Psychologist, Author

Mergers & Acquisitions – Weeklong executive course at Chicago Booth Business School

Tax & Legal 360 – Three day in-person conference for tax advisors and attorneys

*Founders, Owners & CEOs  – Construction, Healthcare Tech, Sustainable Technology, Engineering, Security, Military Technology

*Senior Executives – Construction, Finance, Healthcare Technology, Multinational Technology Conglomerate, Multinational Tech Distribution, Healthcare, 

* Team & Culture – Healthcare, Healthcare Technology, Security, Sustainable Technology, Biotechnology

— My clients, which I’m sure I’m not supposed to say

— People who allow me to exist without fitting me into a box

— Speed

— Stillness

— The feeling of a hard day that took everything I had, and funneled it into the highest use I can offer, so that at the end, I know I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, and showing up as I was created to be

— My mentor Al Forsyth, who taught me that I can be smart and I can play, that I can eschew politics and also be expert in them, that social justice is a thing to live and that the pursuit is unending

— Down-to-earth, blue-collar workers, like my parents, who had so much less opportunity than I, but were fully content and fully committed to life. It’s not simply hard-working, it’s the humility to do what is necessary in service of our values and the people we care about.

— The person in the room who is fully aware of social dynamics, fully aware of the cost of speaking the truth, and who, with kindness and grace, speaks the truth anyway.

— In order for me to accept answers, I need to see a robust foundation of knowledge and a sequence of logic. Without those variables, I accept hypotheses, hunches and the suspended state of unknowing; I simply won’t cloak them as truth.

— I like to extrapolate metaphors from new learning because it helps me to understand the thing I am learning while adding dimension to the thing I already know.

— I believe that the sequence, origin, and meaning of thought can be more important than the thought itself.

— My brain retains information that I believe to be critical and dumps the rest. I may be one of the worst trivia players that exists (but usually, I’m so bored by minutiae detail that I don’t even try).

— When someone asks me a question, my brain floods with the intersecting variables that produce the correct answer. I have difficulty verbalizing it into a single sentence. Hence, the clients and friends who are partially able to intuit my thought network without me explaining each node feel like oxygen to me.

(2 SD = 2 standard deviations to the right on the normal curve)

— I am fueled by doing work that simultaneously helps others and refuels me.

— Traditional specialities, as in, a single area of knowledge, feels boring because I like to learn. I’ve had the experience of having the same conversation on repeat, and its emotionally draining.

— Specializing in people who are constantly raising their own game, inspires me to raise my own, so that I can continuously serve both of us.

— I have experienced, and I continue to witness, the degree to which people at the far right of the bell curve feel alone. I want to change that…one person at a time, but with the hope that I can figure out how to connect them to each other

— It’s the only way of problem-solving and architecting that makes sense to me

— Once I have mastery, I’m bored, but the things I’ve mastered still matter.

— It’s fun.

I have no idea how to describe what I do, and each of my clients would tell you something different. All of the pretty words are on the Working Together page. The truth is, I’m a database of fluid and crystalized knowledge that intersects the fields of psychology, business, and health. When I work with an individual and/or their organization, I look at the needs at hand, extract the patterns that seem relevant for them, and we work together to move the needle on whatever makes things better. The relationship itself adds its own stream of information as we learn how to move and work together.

Depending on the hour, I might look like a coach, consultant or therapist, but what is most typical is that we dance among both the knowledge and the roles so that we’re constructing what is most uniquely helpful in the given moment. This is the same way I move in organizational or team work that I do–it’s more about making choices that account for and optimize as many variables as possible, rather than having a template that I use for specific pain or growth points. Working with fast-thinking clients who appreciate the broad skillset allows me to flex between deeply personal and high level business needs and constructs.

I was raised in a culture that didn’t value higher education — pursuing it wasn’t just about school, it meant separating from my family. “You think you’re better than us.” At school, I was in the gifted classes, but there was perhaps an awareness that my culture might not allow college — so the counselors didn’t address it with me.

My actual decision-making process was this: “my oldest brother is working in gardens and complaining about his job. Maybe I won’t have any additional options either, but maybe I will.” It was a bet placed on nothing except the possibility of opportunity and the need to be congruent within myself. That pattern of reasoning has existed in every risk I’ve taken since.

I also knew I was smart and I felt like I owed it to God to see if I could use the intelligence.

I had no idea what to major in, so I just thought about what I might be good at. In the high school lobby, kids would come and sit down beside me and tell me what they were thinking. Adults would sometimes ask for advice or tell me that they thought about something I’d mentioned.

Even as a high school senior, I knew that working within the systems of social work would drive me insane and that I’d be bored by sociology. Thus, psychology was the only major that made sense.

I was a first generation, self-paying college student, so I applied to one school, within driving distance. It was only later that I realized the caliber of education I obtained. On the personal side, it felt like the first time that I met some of my people and where intelligence was respected instead of a social liability.

The thing that makes me smile but is really bad to say out loud, is that I used my innate knowledge of humans to do less work. If I didn’t feel like paying attention anymore, I’d figure out how to tie the subject matter to a personal point of passion in the professor. Then I’d ask a question that would result in them talking excitedly for 20 minutes. On a deeper level, I always saw professors as people. That helped me develop real relationships, which definitely helped me, but hopefully, was rewarding to them as well.

My mentor, Al Forsyth, suggested that I consider a higher degree. When I said, “Masters?” and he said, “Doctorate?” — it was beyond my comprehension because I had no mental schema to even consider it. That moment is a reminder to me that some people don’t know what they are capable of or what can be achieved — not because they aren’t intelligent but because no one has opened the door.

Each teacher thought that maybe I should specialize in whatever they were teaching. This happens to this day when people witness whatever I’m doing in a single setting, and it’s made me careful about assuming that people should do more of whatever they are good at because that may or may not be what fulfills them. I knew that I was susceptible to going down a path created from someone else’s perspective of who I am rather than my own.

The diverse skillset in psychology that I have today comes from taking more psychology classes than I needed because they were fun, and then implementing them in different work environments as I paid my way through school — figuring out the difference between what I can do versus what I love to do.

I returned for my PhD because my personality doesn’t handle ceilings. Hell-bent on getting out of the cold Pennsylvania climate, I used my knowledge of neurology, anxiety, and rebellion to break the GRE scoring system so I could have my choice of universities in sunshiny states. That was successful, but the program with the most healthy, grounded, and excellent professors ended up being in Muncie, Indiana.

The most stressful part of my PhD program was finding people to play with. I wanted to put my work-hard, play-hard personality to good use, but it was hard because everyone was studying or procrastinating on studying. So one day, I made them all write papers in my apartment with no internet, so that they could actually finish their work and we could go to the zoo. 

Following my PhD, I opened my practice. As is my practice of reverse engineering everything, I found myself making a graph of client profiles and intersecting the characteristics with my net energy at the end of the day. The results birthed my specialization in High Achievers, which later sharpened to 2SD high achievers.