Saying "Yes" To Opportunity
Noelle McWard Aquino, therapist, author, and speaker, is embracing new possibilities while venturing outside her comfort zone.
I’m a therapist with a group practice in Chicago. When I started out as a sole practitioner, I was immediately drawn to working with clients suffering from anxiety without really knowing why. So, early in my career, I took a lot of training on treating anxiety disorders. Then, as I worked with clients, I began to see patterns in how they were describing their anxiety.
At the same time, I was raising two young children, a son and a daughter, two years apart in age and it was apparent that my son, the younger of the two, struggled from anxiety from the time he was a young child. Looking back, the early signs were there even when he was an infant, and certainly when he was a toddler. I feel that my interest in anxiety actually developed so I could train to be his mother — so I could better understand what my son was experiencing and be able to support him.
My daughter is now 26 and my son is now 24, and anxiety has very much been a part of my son’s life. As a result, I feel like I’ve had this front row view of the distress that comes from living with anxiety, which means I have a deep personal investment in wanting to help people with it.
My desire to help people with anxiety and the therapists who care for them led me not only to write a book, but actually to venture outside my comfort zone again and again. There are two through lines in everything I’m going to say about my journey to where I am today. The first is that I am, by nature, a very shy person. So, for many of the things I’ve done — most notably writing a book and everything that comes along with it — I’ve just had to ride the waves of discomfort and anxiety. The other is that everything I’ve done that has surprised me was because somebody gave me an opportunity and I said “Yes,” even if it was something I hadn’t considered, or didn’t think I could do.
The book is called “Anxiety Unpacked: Discover Your Type and Recover Your Peace.” It’s based on a framework for understanding and treating anxiety that I developed in my work with clients. I’ve identified three manifestations or types of anxiety that I refer to as the three root causes of anxiety, each with unique characteristics and each with an underlying need that’s driving the anxiety. Once you understand the need, you can address that need rather than just the overarching symptoms of anxiety. Each also has its own “objection,” or way the anxiety fights to preserve itself when challenged. That’s also really powerful information.
The book is written for people who live with anxiety, and anybody who wants to understand anxiety better. Though written for the general public, therapists have read it and told me they have then recommended it to their clients. It’s a book that is very relatable to any human being, because it describes the human experience through the lens of anxiety.
When I share my model with clients, 100% of the time they can tell me where their anxiety comes from. And many of them say “Why has nobody ever told me this before?” Or, “I never thought about it that way, but that makes so much sense,” and then, as we work together, they’ll often tell me how much it helps them, and often they find they’re making greater progress than they have in previous therapy experiences.
It’s a simple concept to understand, but you can really do some deep work with it. It’s been really helpful to me as a therapist. Sometimes when we sit with clients, we therapists can feel overwhelmed too, and find ourselves wondering, “What am I supposed to address here? Where should we begin?” You have to know what to listen for and that will guide where you go from there.
Before I ever considered writing the book, I was at a point where I was trying to determine the next step for the growth of my practice and I reached out to another practice owner, who I actually barely knew, but who was further along in the journey, to get some insight. When we sat down over coffee, one of the things he said was that he thought the next obvious thing for me to do was to become a continuing education sponsor. I had never considered that before. He told me how to do it and I got the license. Initially, I offered training on cultural competency to build on experience I had doing mental health evaluations for undocumented immigrants in support of them getting legal status. That seemed like an obvious path, but in the back of my mind I thought, “I have this framework that I use for treating anxiety. Maybe I’d like to do a training about that.”
When I started training therapists in the model, I got a lot of very positive responses. People would ask me, “Are you going to write a book?” And my answer was always, “No, I don’t think so.” I never felt the need to write a book. Plus, I have a discomfort with visibility. Often, in unfamiliar situations, I hang out in the back and observe for a while. Once I’m comfortable, I’ll participate and engage more, and it always leads to really great things. But I’m definitely quiet, and generally, I’m not a joiner of things.
Then, three years ago, I was invited to a conference for women interested in speaking and writing. It was being given by a woman who I knew and respected, yet my first thought was, “I’m not going to go to that.” It was really nice that I was invited to go, but I didn’t think it was for me. A couple of weeks later, I mentioned the conference to my husband, and as I read the description to him, I was thinking, “Why wouldn’t I go to this?” He said out loud, “Of course you’re going to go to that!” and I did.
I knew the woman hosting the conference was going to be pitching coaching to help people write books and get speaking engagements and I knew there was no way I’d ever consider it, because, like I said, I’m not a joiner of things. But sure enough, I found myself at the conference, thinking, “Actually, I do want to do this.” The time felt right. My kids were launched. I felt like I had the time in my schedule, and I felt like I needed something new in my life. That was October of ‘22.
I feel like writing the book was the easiest part. Getting it published, building an audience for it, promoting it — all of that is so much more work. And those are the kinds of things that make me very uncomfortable, that push me outside of my comfort zone. The writing is not uncomfortable, but pitching myself is.
I did not have a social media account when I started writing the book. When the publisher said you’re going to have to start doing social media, I literally wanted to throw up. At the same time, I happened to get an email promotion for a continuing education training from a therapist with a huge social media following. He was offering a training on the ethics of creating social media content so I signed up for it. The training was great, and at the end of it he said, “I’m starting a group for therapists who want to use social media. We’ll meet once a week, and I’ll teach you how to do it, and we’ll give each other feedback and support each other.” You had to apply to be in the group, so I applied and was accepted. When I got the acceptance, I was so visibly uncomfortable about it, my husband said, “You know you don’t have to do this, right?” But I knew I needed to push myself to do it. The group, and the connections I made through it have been invaluable.
If you were to go back in time, what advice would you give to your 25-year-old self?
I would tell myself that you don’t have to hide, and it’s okay to feel uncomfortable. I think one of the things that I used to (and still do) struggle with, is knowing that I’m more shy and reserved. I often would think that I needed to be more of an extrovert. I thought I needed to be an outwardly extroverted personality, a big dynamic personality, to do things like speaking or writing a book. When I see people that I admire doing very public facing things, I think you’d have to be a dynamic, big personality to do that, and I’m not that. I would want her to know it’s okay to be quiet and reserved. You still have something to offer, and it’s going to resonate with people. You don’t have to be different than who you are to do the things that you want to do, or to be seen.
Belle Curve Stories is about women navigating life with grit, grace, and growth. What do those three words mean to you?
Grit is being willing to do the things that you feel called to do or that you aspire to do, even if they make you uncomfortable.
Grace would be recognizing that we don’t do any of this alone, and that there are so many wonderful people who will help you if you are open to that. Being open to receiving and being one who gives as well, that’s being in a state of grace.
Growth is what happens when you use the grit and the grace to expand into a different version of yourself that you may not have even imagined was possible.
I’ve come to the point where I realize that if I’m willing to be uncomfortable, I’m just expanding my container of comfort. Every time I do that, it doesn’t feel good to go through it, but on the other side, I’ve got a bigger container for love.
As told to and edited by Teresa Bellock and Sandra Ditore. Belle Curve Stories is brought to you by Belle Curve Ventures LLC.
Noelle McWard Aquino, LCSW, 56 is a Chicago-based, licensed, clinical social worker with more than 30 years of experience, and a frequent contributor to Psychology Today and Psychotherapy Networker. She specializes in anxiety disorders and is the creator of the Anxiety Unpacked model, a framework that helps clients and clinicians understand the forms anxiety can take, and how to treat them effectively. Her book Anxiety Unpacked was recently released and can be found here. You can follow Noelle on Instagram here.
