Today we’d like to introduce you to Dr. Maya Cobb.
Hi Dr. Maya, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’m a Black girl from Detroit before I’m anything else. And I say that because I truly believe it defines who I am today. That little Black girl from Detroit is still driving the boat often times.
I grew up in Detroit and graduated from Renaissance High School. It was there, sitting in my 12th-grade psychology class, that I decided I wanted to work in mental health. Around that same time, my godmother, Linda Tansil, looked at me and said, “If you’re going to do psychology, you have to go all the way. You’re going to get your PhD.” Seventeen-year-old Maya said, “Okay, I’m going to get a PhD.”
Then life happened.
When I got to graduate school, I realized I loved counseling more than psychology. I loved sitting with people, building relationships, and walking alongside them as they made sense of their lives. That’s still my first love. Psychological testing is valuable, but conversation, connection, and healing are what fill my cup. Technically, I didn’t need a PhD anymore. But like I said, little Maya still drives the boat sometimes. She made a promise at 17, and I wanted to keep that promise.
Entrepreneurship came from frustration. In 2019, I was working for a national tutoring company and became frustrated by the lack of transparency around services, pricing, and expectations for families. I believed parents deserved better. So I started my first business, Complete Clarity, where I created what I called Psych-Based Tutoring—an approach that recognizes you can’t separate a child’s mental health from their academic performance. If we only address grades without understanding anxiety, self-esteem, trauma, ADHD, or family stress, we’re missing the bigger picture.
In 2022, Journey to Clarity Counseling was born. If I’m honest, I spent a while trying to figure out what I wanted it to become. Did I want a business partner? Did I really want the responsibility of building something this big? Was I capable of doing it on my own?
Then, in 2024, life made that decision for me. Suddenly, I found myself leading Journey to Clarity independently. Like Mia Ray says “we don’t panic, we pivot”. And while that pivot was scary, I was never doing it alone. My general manager, Kayla Holden, has been beside me through every season. Between Kayla, my faith in God, and what my team lovingly teases me for calling “the Googles,” we’ve learned as we went. Kayla and I always joke that we just “effed around and found out,” but behind the joke is a lot of late nights, hard conversations, problem-solving, and an unwavering commitment to the people we serve. We made mistakes, adjusted, learned, and kept moving forward.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I also got married in 2021, earned my PhD, and built a business at the same time. Looking back, that season feels like one big blur. It was exhausting, beautiful, challenging, and incredibly rewarding. But I’d do it all over again because one thing I’ve learned is that time passes anyway. You might as well spend it building the life you’re dreaming about.
Today, Journey to Clarity has grown beyond anything I imagined. What started as a vision has become a multidisciplinary practice with therapists, clinical interns, administrative and billing teams, a psychologist, wellness providers, and a growing leadership team. We’re still hiring because the need keeps growing.
One of the moments I’m most proud of came at the end of 2025 when we launched walk-in therapy. I honestly thought it would just be another service we offered. I had no idea it would become one of the defining parts of who we are. Every day, we meet people who simply couldn’t wait weeks or months for help. Walk-in therapy has shown me that when you remove barriers to care, people will come. They want help. They just need someone willing to make it accessible.
When I look back, every decision—from that psychology class at Renaissance, to starting a tutoring company, to earning a PhD I technically didn’t need, to opening Journey to Clarity—has been driven by the same belief: mental health care should be accessible, people deserve to be seen, and your circumstances should never determine whether you get the support you need. And of course your diagnosis does not define who you are”.
That little Black girl from Detroit still reminds me of that every single day.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Absolutely not. Entrepreneurship is one of the greatest personal development journeys you’ll ever go on because the business can only grow as much as you do.
For me, one of the biggest challenges wasn’t necessarily finding clients or growing the practice, it was growing into the leader my team needed me to become. Graduate school teaches you how to be a clinician. It doesn’t necessarily teach you how to lead a team, manage finances, navigate conflict, build systems, or make decisions that impact dozens of employees and hundreds of clients.
At the same time, I was earning my PhD, getting married, and trying to build a company. Looking back, there were seasons where I honestly don’t know how I managed all of it. There were sacrifices. There were long nights. There were moments when I questioned whether I was capable of carrying everything I had put on my own plate. My husband has truly been my biggest supporter and unofficial business partner. He’s always helped me carry the load.
I’ve also had to become comfortable with failure. Not every idea worked. I’ve hired the wrong people. I’ve made decisions I later changed. I’ve spent money on things that didn’t move the business forward. I’ve had systems fail. But every mistake taught me something I needed for the next stage of growth.
If there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s that growth is uncomfortable. Every version of my business has required a new version of me. And while the road hasn’t been smooth, I wouldn’t trade it, because every challenge has shaped the leader I am today.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Journey to Clarity?
Journey to Clarity is a multidisciplinary mental health practice, but at our core, we’re in the business of helping people remember who they are beyond their diagnosis.
We provide individual, couples, family, and group therapy, psychological testing, art therapy, somatic healing, wellness services, and walk-in therapy. But our services aren’t what make us different.
What makes us different is our philosophy.
Our motto is “Your diagnosis does not define you.” Diagnoses are important because they help guide treatment, but they are only one small part of a person’s story. We spend just as much time helping people understand their strengths, their resilience, and the experiences that shaped them as we do treating symptoms.
I’m also incredibly proud of the culture we’ve created. We intentionally built an environment where clients feel welcomed, respected, and safe from the moment they walk through our doors. At the same time, we’ve worked just as hard to create that same feeling for our staff. I believe you can’t ask clinicians to pour into others if they’re working in an environment that doesn’t pour into them. We invest in mentorship, collaboration, and supporting one another because healthy teams provide better care.
Accessibility is another part of who we are. That’s why we created our walk-in therapy program. We know that mental health doesn’t always wait for an appointment six weeks from now. We wanted to remove as many barriers as possible so people could get help when they needed it.
At the end of the day, I want people to know that Journey to Clarity isn’t just a place where people come for therapy. It’s a place where they’re reminded that they’re more than what they’ve been through, more than the labels they’ve been given, and more than any diagnosis they’ll ever receive.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
My relationship with risk has definitely changed over the years. Early on, I probably took too many. I expanded before doing all the research, hired before I had the right systems in place, and often trusted that I’d figure it out along the way. Sometimes that worked, and sometimes those lessons were expensive.
Today, I’m much more intentional. I still believe risk is necessary, you can’t grow without it, but I believe in informed risk.
One of our biggest risks was launching walk-in therapy. Then, completely unexpectedly, a social media video about the program went viral. Overnight, we were serving a completely different volume and population of clients than we had planned for. We had to quickly rethink our workflows, staffing, and operations to meet the demand while maintaining quality care.
That experience taught me that sometimes the biggest risk isn’t necessarily starting something, but it’s being willing to adapt when it becomes bigger than you ever imagined. That’s the kind of risk I’m willing to take every time.
Pricing:
- Walk In Therapy- Zero Out of Pocket Cost
- We accept most major insurances
- Low cost therapy for those without insurance $30
- tutoring that incorporates mental health insurance accepted out of pocket rates as low as $35
Contact Info:
- Website: www.drmayacobb.com | www.journeytoclaritycounseling.org | www.completeclarity.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drmayacobb/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Journey-to-Clarity-Counseling-61555467481090/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maya-cobb/
