Strategic business coach for Canadian therapy practice owners.
I'm Cecilia, Creator of the Sustainable Practice CEO™ Framework. Professional rebel against hustle culture.
This page is for the practitioner who wants to know who she’s actually considering working with — not just the credentials and the achievements, but the person behind them. The real story. The messy parts. The reasons this work matters beyond the revenue numbers.
If that’s you — keep reading. This is the honest version.
THE ORIGIN STORY
Where it all started
I wasn’t born into certainty. I was born in Winnipeg, grew up in Chile from age five — my dad is Chilean — and came back to Canada at thirteen. Two countries, two cultures, two languages, two versions of belonging that never quite overlapped. I grew up as a first-generation Canadian in a biracial family, with parents who understood what it cost to build a life in a country that wasn’t always sure it wanted you there.
That experience of being between worlds, never fully inside, never fully outside, turned out to be one of the most useful things that ever happened to me. It taught me early to question the dominant narrative. To notice whose rules were being enforced and whose experience was being left out. To understand that the way things are done is rarely the only way they can be done.
I was always meant to be in rooms about social change
Finding power in rewriting an age-old story.
I was the oldest of four children, and achievement was the family currency. My dad used to say I’d either be a lawyer or a social worker — because I loved to talk, loved to debate, and had a critical thinking mind that wouldn’t quit.
He wasn’t wrong.
When I took my first social work class, something clicked into place. It felt like a homecoming — the same sensation I later had in narrative therapy training. The right place, the right time, the right people. Social justice wasn’t just a professional interest. It was the thing that had been organizing my worldview since childhood. And social work gave me a framework for it.
I became a therapist because I wanted to help people rewrite their stories. What I didn’t anticipate was that the most important story I’d eventually need to rewrite was my own.
THE HARD JOURNEY
The Business Books Nobody Warned Me About
I didn’t go to business school. I went to Dalhousie’s School of Social Work. And when I started my private practice — full of hope, full of vision, genuinely excited to build something that reflected my values — I had exactly zero business strategy.
So I did what any good student does. I read the books. Took the courses. Implemented what the experts recommended.
Here’s what I slowly figured out: all of it was designed by men, for men. The leadership models were authoritative and hierarchical. The growth strategies prioritized competition over collaboration. The success metrics celebrated hustle over sustainability. And none of it, not one framework, not one strategy, honoured the feminist and anti-oppressive principles that guided my clinical work.
I kept trying to force myself into frameworks that felt fundamentally wrong, wondering why I couldn’t just make it work. I was working 50+ hours a week.
Sacrificing relationships. Staring at the ceiling at 2am while my mind raced through every possible solution. I ran myself ragged, throwing everything at the wall and hoping something would stick.
I hit a wall. Hard. And I couldn’t see a way forward if continuing meant this level of depletion.
In 2019, I made one of the hardest decisions of my professional life: I ended my business partnership and started completely fresh.
It was terrifying. It was also the best thing I've ever done.
For the first time, I asked myself: what if I built my practice the same way I approach therapy?
What if narrative therapy principles — challenging dominant stories, externalizing problems, re-authoring narratives — applied to business building? What if feminist and anti-oppressive theory wasn’t just my clinical foundation but my business foundation? What if I stopped trying to lead like the men who wrote those books and started leading like myself?
Everything shifted. I stopped forcing myself into patriarchal business models. I started designing collaborative systems instead of hierarchical structures. I built boundaries as strategic business functions, not just personal self-care. I challenged the hustle culture narrative that success requires sacrifice.
And something remarkable happened: I started building a seven-figure group practice that actually felt sustainable.
The Year That Changed Everything I Know About Sustainability
I need to tell you something that doesn’t appear in most coaching bios. Not because it’s not relevant, but because it’s the kind of thing that’s easier to leave out.
I became a widow at 36.
I was in the middle of building what looked like the perfect life. A thriving practice. A beautiful home. A marriage. I had the vision, I had the momentum, I had the plan. And then my husband died suddenly — an undiagnosed health condition, without warning — and everything stopped.
I didn’t work for five months.
Here’s what that experience taught me about sustainable practice that no business book ever could: my practice held. Not perfectly. Not without difficulty. But it held — because I had spent years building systems, developing a team, and creating structures that didn’t require my constant presence to function. The work I had done to make my practice sustainable wasn’t just a business strategy. It was a form of protection I hadn’t known I was building.
Grief changed how I show up as a therapist. It changed how I lead. It changed the decisions I make as a business owner. It taught me that life is genuinely, profoundly messy and that no matter how carefully you plan, things can fall apart without warning.
Because I had survived the most devastating and surprising experience of my life, the risks of building differently, leading differently, charging what I was worth, letting go of control — all of it became smaller. If I can survive this devastating grief, I can survive trying something that might not work.
Grief has been my greatest teacher. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. And I take everything it taught me into every coaching session, every supervision hour, every room I facilitate — because it gave me a depth of understanding about what’s actually at stake when a practice isn’t sustainable that I couldn’t have gotten any other way.
A sustainable practice isn’t a luxury. It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s the thing that allows your life to keep going when life decides to get hard without asking your permission.
That’s not theoretical for me. I lived it.
THE SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE FRAMEWORK™
The Framework That Came Out of All of It
Crossing the seven-figure line.
The day I crossed the revenue line into the seven figures and proved to myself that it was possible to scale a therapy practice without abandoning your values or burning yourself out in the process, something became clear: other Canadian therapy practice owners were struggling with the exact same things I had struggled with.
Brilliant clinicians caught in the identity crisis between healer and CEO. Exhausted practitioners are working endless hours without proportional income growth.
Women leaders are trying to force themselves into masculine business models that feel inauthentic. Practice owners want to scale but are terrified of losing the heart of their work.
And nobody was addressing the actual problem.
So I developed the Sustainable Practice Framework™.
A methodology that integrates what traditional business coaching was missing — clinical wisdom applied to strategy, feminist and anti-oppressive principles embedded throughout, and a specific approach designed for healing professionals navigating the practitioner-to-CEO identity transformation. An approach that integrated the years of boots on the ground learning I had to do to build my practice.
Because here’s what I learned through my own journey: you can’t just fix the systems. You also have to address the beliefs, the guilt, the identity crisis, and the internalized narratives about what success is supposed to look like.
And you can’t just do therapy on yourself either — you need actual strategic business systems.
Addressing both the systems and the mindset as a leader.
You need both. That’s what makes this framework work.
I now work exclusively with Canadian therapy and wellness practice owners — because the provincial regulations, tax implications, professional governance structures, and cultural context of our market are specific enough that generic business coaching consistently misses what matters most.
Who you'll be working with:
A commitment to dismantling the narrative that success requires sacrifice.
I will push back on hustle culture, challenge the belief that "good therapists don't focus on money," and prove that your clinical values actually enhance your business success.
Someone who gets it because I've lived it—
The hope-filled beginning with zero strategy, the draining partnership, the wall-hitting burnout, the terrifying decision to start over, & the freedom of building something radically different that works.
I didn't go to business school—
I attended Dalhousie’s School of Social Work to help others. And that's precisely why I can help you lead your business without losing your practitioner touch—by building it with your therapeutic wisdom, not despite it.
Proof that you can build a $500K+ practice
(or scale to seven figures) that serves your life, not consumes it. Because I've done it, I've helped others do it, and I know exactly what pillars need to be in place to make it sustainable.
Clinical wisdom applied directly to your business challenges—
We'll use narrative therapy principles, systems thinking, and trauma-informed approaches to build your practice. (Yes, we're bringing therapeutic concepts into the boardroom.)
Real talk about the transformation required—
without the corporate BS or toxic positivity. I'm not going to tell you to "just delegate" or "set boundaries" without addressing why that feels impossible right now.
Feminist & Anti-Oppressive
Your growth plan will challenge patriarchal business norms, honour your collaborative values, & create systems rooted in equity, collective care—not because it's ideologically correct, but because it actually works better.
The Credentials
25+
Education
I hold a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Social Work, with 25 years of experience in mental health & 17 years of building my therapy practice, navigating the complex evolution from practitioner to CEO.
12
Teaching
12 years as a professor teaching social work and mental health — which means I don’t just know this material, I know how to teach it. Complex frameworks become accessible. Strategic concepts become actionable. The ability to take what I know and help someone else genuinely integrate it comes directly from over a decade of doing exactly that in academic settings.
17 years
Practice
Founder and CEO of Eterna Counselling & Wellness Inc. — a seven-figure group therapy practice in British Columbia, Canada. Built from solo practice to an established group model using the same framework and principles I bring to every coaching engagement.
100+
Coaching
I have worked with 100+ Canadian therapy and wellness practitioners across coaching, programs, supervision, and mentorship — which means I understand the provincial regulations, tax structures, professional governance requirements, and specific cultural context of the Canadian market in ways that generalist business coaches simply don’t.
Framework
Creator of the Sustainable Practice Framework™ and the Sustainable Practice CEO™ methodology — built specifically for Canadian therapy practice owners scaling to $500K+.
Approach
Explicitly feminist, anti-oppressive, and anti-hustle — not as ideological positioning, but as the foundation of a strategic approach that actually produces better outcomes than the conventional alternative.