Our Mission and Values
About Chicago Compass Counseling, LLC

We are dedicated to helping people free themselves from the cycle of self-destructive behavior.

Our mission is to help our clients create the lives they want to live. Whether our client is an individual, a family system, or an organization, we are committed to helping clients achieve the outcomes they desire. We want our clients to feel purpose, meaning, and value in their daily experience. This means we reject any “one size fits all model” for behavior change. Our VIP-level service is tailored to each client at their current level of readiness to change.

Our Practice Vision

We believe that ALL people are capable of change. Whether our client is engaging problem behavior or is the loved one of someone who is struggling, we are here to provide evidence-based support, connection, and a path towards integrity for anyone who has suffered from the effects of problem behaviors. Sometimes our client is an individual, and at other times, our client is the family system. We practice harm reduction with clients who are ambivalent about changing. We believe that each one of our clients can achieve value-based living.

We share a vision of becoming an affirming institution in a transformed society. Our process improvement involves intentional steps to become an anti-racist, multicultural organization guided by transforming values. Our group strives to better understand how we can redefine and rebuild all relationships and activities based on actionable commitments to practice with institutional integrity.

We are committed to serving our community. As we move through this year and beyond, we plan to provide a variety of educational opportunities online as well as workshops, live training, on-site consultation, and community partnerships to help members of our community achieve success.

Mission_Values_About_Chicago_Compass_Counseling_Chicago_IL

Our History

Chicago Compass Counseling was founded by Sarah Suzuki in 2013 as a solo private practice focused on moderation counseling for alcohol. In 2017, we expanded to an employee-based group counseling practice dedicated to helping the family system through evidence-based behavior change counseling. In 2018, our team made an actionable commitment to become an anti-racist organization. Today, our boutique team of behavior change specialists work with individuals and organizations to help them achieve the outcomes they desire.

Our Values

Measure community stewardship. Our guiding metric is the health of our relationships and how we are stewards of our community.

Cultivate self-leadership. We are tireless advocates for positive change. We recognize the importance of developing conscious leaders.

Balance empathy with accountability. We use empathy to be accountable to ourselves and to each other.

How We Apply Our Values

Working with Clients

Measure community stewardship. We collaborate with clients to mobilize their core strengths, supporting their work to connect with others and discover personal agency to change.

Cultivate self-leadership. We approach our work with a stance that all people are capable of creating meaningful change in the service of values-based living.

Balance empathy with accountability. We affirm client resilience, understanding that seemingly maladaptive behaviors serve an underlying function that somehow makes sense. We challenge our clients to address the underlying function with new behaviors.

Hiring and Onboarding

Measure community stewardship. As stewards of our vision, we are biased towards hiring people who can work as members of a team. Because we hire people who are humble, driven, and emotionally intelligent, we approach onboarding with a stance that they are capable of achieving self-determined goals in the context of our practice vision.

Cultivate self-leadership. We appreciate that most people do not join us with extensive past experience where self-leadership was nurtured. We specifically look for humility in our new hires, understanding that skills and experience can be gained over time, whereas humility cannot. Onboarding is designed to support skills development.

Balance empathy with accountability. We are accountable to consistently applying our hiring process to all applicants. We dialogue as a group to address and understand our concerns and hopes for potential new hires. In the first 6 months of a new hire's tenure, we commit to providing accountable feedback, recognizing that successful onboarding is only possible if we practice radical candor.

Team Culture

Measure community stewardship. We respect the need for emotional safety, first, to build vulnerability-based trust. This means measuring whether we are facilitating dialogue or false consensus.

Cultivate self-leadership. Each team member is invited to pause and recognize if they are practicing leadership “above the line” or “below the line” when conceptualizing interpersonal dynamics.

Balance empathy with accountability. We recognize that accountability requires understanding our own reaction to someone else’s behavior, first, knowing that the story we tell ourselves is just that - a story. We use empathy to be accountable to ourselves and to each other.

Professional Development

Measure community stewardship. We recognize that most of us have default patterns of scarcity worldview, either-or-thinking, reckless individualism, and secrecy mode learned from places of past employment. As stewards of team health, we take time to apply institutional anti-racism tools of analysis to identify how we are developing staff.

Cultivate self-leadership. Professional development occurs from an intentional framework of conscious leadership values. We commit to individually growing in our self-leadership through individually-tailored development pathways.

Balance empathy with accountability. We are careful to ensure that each team member is in a role and position to feel adept at balancing empathy and accountability. We are accountable to our shared path, which is our practice purpose, mission, and vision. We exercise compassion to support individual growth within our shared path.

Feedback

Measure community stewardship. We appreciate ideas and suggestions, recognizing that conflict is desirable when it helps us move towards integrity. This means we value feedback, even when it is challenging - from our clients and from each other.

Cultivate self-leadership. We understand that most professionals come from environments that punished radical candor, and that most of us lack the skills and knowledge to provide conscious feedback. We support each person in learning, practicing, and embodying radical candor.

Balance empathy with accountability. We start by offering ourselves empathy, then consider an empathetic stance towards the person we are providing feedback to. We then identify an accountability framework to provide feedback.

Decision-Making

Measure community stewardship. As our most important metric, we ask: how will this service decision impact the most vulnerable members of our broader community? How can it benefit our community? How can it harm our community? Stewardship drives service, rather than profit or individual gain.

Cultivate self-leadership. We commit to identifying “win-for-all” solutions, rather than viewing problems as “zero-sum” games. We pause to recognize when we are operating from default mode thinking when we are making decisions.

Balance empathy with accountability. We face challenges with a commitment to find resolution, even when the conflict is challenging. We support our team members in exercising discernment to be decisive, trusting the judgment of our team members.

Our counselors practice what we preach.

We are dedicated to helping ourselves break free from the cycle of self-destructive work behaviors. We recognize how most of our past employment experiences failed to cultivate our conscious self-leadership. Many of us are recovering from learned working behaviors based on scarcity worldview, either/or thinking, reckless individualism, and secrecy mode. To interrupt these toxic patterns, we honor our energy.

We are not driven by a bottom-line profit, nor are we seekers of how others may define "work-life balance." Some of us want to focus on full-time client care. Others would rather work with us part-time or focus on administrative development. We invest in therapists who are clear on the kind of practice they want to create. Our group supports lifelong learners who value ongoing conscious leadership.

Our Mission and Values About Chicago Compass Counseling, LLC