Paul Kiger shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Paul, really appreciate you sharing your stories and insights with us. The world would have so much more understanding and empathy if we all were a bit more open about our stories and how they have helped shaped our journey and worldview. Let’s jump in with a fun one: What do the first 90 minutes of your day look like?
I am a firm believer that the way we start our day can have a huge impact on how the rest of it plays out. Life does not always allow us to have the exact type of start to the day that we would like, but there are a few habits I have worked into my life that have helped me immensely. A major part of starting off the first 90 minutes of the day right is getting a good night’s sleep. The amount of sleep needed is different for every person, but if we do not get enough sleep it can lead to focus issues, irritability, health concerns, etc.
To start my day, I wake up and meditate for 30 minutes to an hour. This helps get my day started off calm and centered. On Mondays, I like to start with an energy center meditation which helps center and ground me as well as help me elevate gratitude around my life and circumstances. I often ask people “When was the last time you had a perfect moment?”. I have one every day at the end of my meditation when I elevate my gratitude and find joy in the moment of stillness and comfort. I also do intention based meditations where I focus on what I want for my day/week/month/year/life/career/family/etc. This helps me align with what I want to feel and experience, which I have found helps draw it in. Lastly, by setting a positive intention for the day, I go into my day feeling more motivated and energized.
Next, I make sure to eat breakfast. Study after study shows how important breakfast is for our physical and mental health. While eating, I either listen to motivating music or read. I avoid screen time and social media in the morning since I get plenty of it during the day, and the media we absorb can often lean, if not completely fall, towards the negative, which is at odds with the positive intention I set for my day.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
When I was 8 years old I started taking piano lessons and at around 13 started teaching myself how to play guitar. From then on my dream in life was to become a rock star. I played in bands in the Detroit area before moving to Grand Rapids to attend college at Grand Valley State University. I studied social work and Spanish with the hope of becoming a mental health therapist if my dream of becoming a rock star did not pan out. While attending college I was able to play in a band that had decent success in the Grand Rapids area playing shows at a variety of well known local venues including Skelletones, The Intersection, and The Orbit Room. In the end, we all decided to go our separate ways and I decided to continue to pursue a career in counseling and spent time living in Central America. When I returned to the United States, I began working as a therapist and adjunct professor. After about 7 years I had the idea to start Supporting Act Counseling which allowed me to combine my two passions, music and counseling.
As the demands of life, especially those of artists and creatives, can make it difficult to attend counseling in a physical space, Supporting Act Counseling offers telehealth sessions to ensure touring artists can build rapport and maintain continuity of care with one therapist who can address their unique needs. An aspect that I believe sets me apart is that I am a musician who has played in bands and can relate to the stress, pressure, and anxiety that comes with being an artist. This is also an aspect of Supporting Act Counseling that I am proud of. I was able to find a way to combine two of my passions into a career that I absolutely love.
One of the joys of working as a professional therapist and life coach is supporting people as they move through various phases of their lives to realize and reach their full potential. I currently support clients and staff as they move towards openness, acceptance, compassion, justice, wisdom, and self-understanding. We are all on our own journey and my hope is to meet clients where they are at in their journey. The skills I have refined over the past decade have uniquely prepared me to work in the mental health field to serve individuals, families, and groups.
With over 10 years of experience working in the mental health and substance use field as a therapist, life coach, university professor, trainer, and mentor, my goal is to bring my knowledge and skills to my practice supporting artists as they navigate the complex issues that accompany touring and a lifestyle with such high demands. Before becoming a therapist I played in bands alongside groups such as Hellogoodbye, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Taking Back Sunday, The Spill Canvas, Mayday Parade, Motion City Soundtrack, and The Summer Set, to name a few. I have worked with Grammy nominated artists as well as professional athletes and reality show contestants. My hope is to bring a unique understanding of what it is like to be a touring musician or artist in addition to providing quality and evidenced based counseling and life coaching. I am a Licensed Master of Social Work (LMSW), Certified Advanced Alcohol and Drug Counselor (CAADC), certified in Brainspotting, as well as trained in Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), the Sanctuary Model of Care, and Motivational Interviewing.
Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. What part of you has served its purpose and must now be released?
For a lot of us, our self-worth is often tied to our productivity. If we are not producing, we do not have self-worth or value. This is reinforced in our society that we need to be working, producing, moving, active, and BUSY. Although this facet of our personalities can be unhealthy, it can also serve a purpose. Subscribing to this mentality helped motivate me to work harder and achieve. But, it came at the expense of believing my self-worth was tied to my productivity and made it difficult to relax into who I am instead of what I do. A common theme I find in my work as a therapist is that people believe they will be happy once they get the next promotion/title/raise/etc. The hustle can help us achieve those, but it often comes with a cost. As with most things in life, there is a balance that can be found. It is not inherently wrong to have goals and work hard to achieve them. But, if we connect our self-worth to those goals or cannot find a way to be content outside of them, we will never be satisfied. For me personally, now that I have released those unhealthy traits, I can relax into what I have built without chasing the next achievement.
If you could say one kind thing to your younger self, what would it be?
Trust the process. This is something I have had to work on in my own life and encourage my clients to do as well. The older I get, the more I see the web of connections in my life and how certain, difficult situations, went on to not only make me stronger, but helped prepare me for other tasks/trials that have come up. Whether it be break ups in high school, a tough class in college, difficult jobs, rocky patches in relationships, when I look back at those experiences I see how they uniquely prepared me. Now, when I go through a difficult time and choose to trust the process, I feel calmer, more prepared, and sometimes even grateful because I know I will come through it and exactly what is supposed to happen will. My clients will often look back at a difficult situation and see that, although it was challenging, they grew through it in a way that prepared them for the next challenge or allowed them to be successful in their next job, relationship, financial situation, etc., because they had been through something similar and learned from it
A caveat to this is that trusting the process does not mean we need to stay in a traumatic or abusive situation if we have the ability to change it. Radical acceptance encourages us to change what we can and accept what we cannot change/control. By radically accepting what we cannot change, we suffer less, which leads to more emotional freedom.
Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
It seems our culture has instilled and reinforced in us that we need to work ourselves to death, make as much money as possible, and have all of the latest and best products to be happy and “successful”. Yes, those things can be great and we can enjoy them. But, how many people spend their lives working for those things and do not have the time to enjoy them or find that they do not make them happy. We work ourselves to death for the hope of retiring and then enjoying life.
This is similar to the idea of needing to gain more power/prestige or having a big social media presence. This has been exacerbated by social media where we are told in order to be successful, we have to constantly put out content and increase the amount of followers we have. Not only has this put a huge strain and pressure on ourselves, it has created a world in which “keeping up with the Joneses” is no longer the neighbor next door to us, but anyone whose profile we can see online.
(Side note: we all know people who create a social media persona that does not necessarily 100% show their true, authentic situation. So, we compare ourselves to those profiles and feel sad/anxious/envious/etc. of the person, but their life may not be as amazing as they show it online.)
I realize that in our digital world there is value and opportunity in business to have a strong online presence. However, in a new book by Lee Tilghman, who is considered one of the first online influences, she talks about how traumatic the years as an influencer were, which has been a common theme amongst other influencers as well. This is another testament to the idea that “success” and “more, more more,” will not make us happy, and it often pushes us in the opposite direction to complete dissatisfaction, discontent, and at times depression.
Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. What do you think people will most misunderstand about your legacy?
It is common to think of legacy as being remembered. When we think of legacy, we often think about famous people whose names have been enshrined in history. Part of my attraction to the music industry and playing in bands was to secure my legacy. If people knew my songs then they would know my band, and then they would know me, and then they would remember me. I think of the famous musicians who have passed on whose music continues to have a positive impact on me. This was the type of legacy I was chasing. And although this is a type of legacy, my views on what legacy can be have dramatically changed over the last several years. The great privilege of my job as a therapist is that I get to help people heal, which in turn will help them engage with their family/children/friends/co-workers/etc. in ways that slowly begins to decrease generational trauma. Even if nobody remembers my name, I know that future generations will be better because we stood here, faced the darkness, healed, and have created a better life for ourselves and for them.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.supportingactcounseling.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/supportingactcounseling/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-kiger-lmsw-caadc-995b10173/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/supportingactcounseling
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@supportingactcounseling
- Other: https://flow.page/supportingactcounseling?fce_id=11e7e318-b267-4886-9e56-2bffd628b11d&utm_term=eWwjCsnc4E#fid=eWwjCsnc4E&c=ca9e208a-5557-4254-a60d-7353ead72a51-SSE:1620259924
