Thinking. Feeling. Growing.: The Conative Group Turns 10

This month, The Conative Group turns 10.

Ten years.

Even now, it is a little amazing to write those words.

A lot has happened since we opened our doors in August 2016. We have grown our team, expanded our services, created programs we never could have imagined at the beginning, trained future clinicians, partnered with schools, navigated a pandemic and more than a few Houston weather events, and had the privilege of becoming part of the lives of so many children, teens, young adults, adults, and families.

But to really tell the story of The Conative Group, we have to go back a little further than 2016.

We have to start with a word.

It Started With a “Typo”

Years before The Conative Group existed, I had gone back to school to earn my PhD. As a practicum student helping with a research project, I spent time going through archival psychological reports.

One day, I came across an unfamiliar word:

Conative.

I assumed someone had misspelled “cognitive.” But I looked it up, just to be sure. They hadn’t.

What I discovered was a word that immediately captured my imagination. The human psyche has traditionally been described in terms of three interconnected parts: cognition, emotion, and conation.

Cognition is about thinking.

Emotion is about feeling.

And conation is about our capacity to act, to change, to grow, and to move ourselves toward something.

Everyone seemed to know about thinking and feeling. But here was this third idea—the part of us that helps us move forward.

I loved it.

I wrote CONATIVE on a sticky note and put it on a cabinet in our kitchen. My husband and I talked about that word for days. Eventually, I told him that one day I would create a group practice and call it The Conative Group.

At that point, I still had years of training and career start-up ahead of me. My husband apparently had more confidence in the timeline than I did. He registered the domain name.

The dream had a website before it had a practice.

Years later, in August 2016, “one day” finally arrived. The Conative Group opened its doors.

https://youtu.be/Yn9rF2e0rUs?si=rt4ypCdOpUwJfTlB

Thinking. Feeling. Growing.

From the beginning, our tagline has been: Thinking. Feeling. Growing.

Those three words weren’t chosen simply because they sounded good together. They represented what we believed—and what we hoped The Conative Group could become.

Today, they still do.

Our evaluations help children, adults, and families better understand the thinking—how someone learns, processes information, approaches problems, and why some things may come easily while others require tremendous effort.

Our therapists help people navigate the feeling—the emotions, relationships, experiences, challenges, and transitions that are part of being human.

And then there is the growing.

Growth doesn’t happen in isolation.

It happens through relationships. Through families, therapists, teachers, mentors, peers, and communities. It happens when someone understands themselves a little better, develops a new skill, tries something difficult, discovers a strength, or begins to believe that change is possible.

Our community of helpers supports that growth.

Even the paintings in our corridor tell this story: Thinking. Feeling. Growing. They are a visual reminder of the philosophy that has guided us from the beginning.

Sometimes Growth Starts With Listening

One of the things we could not have predicted 10 years ago was where listening to our families would take us.

The Adulting Program is perhaps the best example.

Ten years ago, three families came to us with a need. Their young adults needed a place where they could develop the skills necessary to move forward toward greater independence. They were looking for something that didn’t really exist.

So we listened.

And we built it.

The Adulting Program was born.

This year, Adulting turns 10, too.

What began because three families were willing to say, “This is what our young adults need,” became a program that has helped us think more deeply about what it really means to prepare young people for adulthood.

It also taught us something that has become part of the way we work:

Sometimes the best ideas don’t begin with a strategic plan.

They begin by listening.

When One Idea Grows Into Another

FocusWeek has been part of The Conative Group for all 10 years—but its story actually began a few years earlier.

I first created FocusWeek in my solo practice after seeing, firsthand, how many bright, capable children and teens struggled to find ways of learning that worked with the way they think.

These were students with tremendous strengths who often knew they were capable of more but didn’t always have the tools to translate that potential into success at school.

FocusWeek grew from that need.

Through FocusWeek, we help students better understand how they learn and strengthen the executive functioning skills they need to manage the demands of school—and, ultimately, life.

Over the years, that work led us to ask a bigger question:

What if we could reach more students?

What if executive functioning support wasn’t something students encountered only when they were struggling? What if schools could intentionally equip students with these skills as part of preparing them for the real world?

Those questions helped spur the development of The Skilled Student Initiative.

Today, that work is moving beyond individual students and helping entire schools rethink how they support executive functioning, teach essential skills, and prepare students for what comes after the classroom.

FocusWeek grew.

The idea grew.

And so did we.

There is something particularly fitting about that evolution for an organization called The Conative Group.

The People Who Built Conative

Of course, organizations don’t really grow.

People do.

Over the past decade, The Conative Group has grown to include more than 10 clinicians providing therapy and assessment. Our clinicians work with children, teens, young adults, adults, and parents. We offer groups for parents, children, teens, and young adults, along with programs that have developed in response to the needs we see around us.

We have also had the privilege of helping train the next generation of clinicians.

More than 25 interns and practicum students have spent part of their professional training with us.

They came to learn from us.

We learned from them, too.

They asked questions, brought new ideas, challenged our thinking, and eventually carried their own growing knowledge into the communities they serve.

When we think about the impact of 10 years, that is something we are particularly proud of.

The Conative Group has not only been a place where people receive services.

It has become a place where people become clinicians.

Getting to the “Why”

Evaluations have always been an important part of The Conative Group’s work.

I often think of a good evaluation as detective work.

A child may be struggling at school. A teenager may be working incredibly hard but not getting results that match the effort. An adult may have spent years wondering why certain things seem to be so much harder for them than for everyone else.

The question we want to answer isn’t simply, “What is the diagnosis?”

We want to understand why so the answers about what to do to help become clearer. That means looking carefully at how a person thinks and learns, identifying patterns of strengths as well as challenges, and putting together pieces of information that may have seemed disconnected before.

When we get to the root of what is happening, it can be a game-changer.

An evaluation can replace “I’m just not good at this” with understanding. It can help parents see their child through a different lens. It can give teachers clearer direction. And it can help someone move forward with strategies and support that actually fit the way they think and learn.

Today, two psychologists at The Conative Group are dedicated full-time to this work: me and Dr. Katherine Latimer.

There is a story there, too.

Dr. Latimer happens to be my daughter, but her path to psychology is entirely her own. She changed careers, went back to school, completed the years of training required to become a psychologist, and developed her own clinical expertise in psychological assessment.

There is something especially meaningful about working alongside her today—not simply because she is my daughter, but because she has become an exceptional testing psychologist and therapist, and a trusted colleague.

Growth Is Rarely a Straight Line

Of course, 10 years of growth does not mean 10 easy years.

There have been challenges, experiments, ideas that worked, ideas that needed to change, and lessons we could only learn by living through them. And there have been moments when the world around us changed almost overnight.

• Hurricane Harvey brought devastating flooding to Houston in 2017.

• The winter storm of 2021 left much of our community without power and water for days.

• Hurricane Beryl brought another round of disruption and extended power outages in 2024.

• And, of course, there was a global pandemic that changed nearly everything about how we lived, connected, learned, worked—and provided care.

But some of the biggest changes over 10 years have had nothing to do with weather or world events.

Life happened here, too.

Over 10 years, there have been illnesses and losses, but also weddings, new babies, new beginnings, and plenty of reasons to celebrate. We have watched people join our community, move on to new chapters, build families, change careers, and grow in ways both expected and unexpected.

Through it all, we have learned something about community.

It is built in the moments we celebrate together, but also in the way we show up for one another when life gets complicated.

And through all of it, we kept doing what people do when life changes.

We adjusted. We supported one another. We figured out what our clients, families, colleagues, and community needed from us in that moment.

We adapted.

We learned.

We kept going.

And after the pandemic, something happened that we could not have predicted: The Conative Group didn’t simply survive. We flourished.

Our team grew. Our work expanded. New ideas took shape.

Looking back, perhaps that is another part of what it means to be conative.

Growth isn’t about moving forward without interruption. Sometimes growth is joyful—a new opportunity, a new direction, a new baby. And sometimes change arrives in ways we would never choose.

In both, we are called to adapt, to support one another, and to find our way forward.

After all, change and growth are right there in our name.

Ten Years Later

Looking back, there are many ways we could measure 10 years.

We could count evaluations, therapy sessions, groups, presentations, programs, clinicians, trainees, or families.

Those numbers tell part of the story.

But they aren’t the story we remember most.

We remember people.

A child who finally understood that struggling with something did not mean they weren’t smart.

A parent who began to see their child differently.

A young adult who took another step toward independence.

A therapy client who discovered a new way forward.

A student who found a strategy that worked.

A clinician who grew into their profession.

A school that decided there might be a better way to prepare its students for the real world.

Those are the moments that make 10 years meaningful.

Thinking. Feeling. Growing.

A decade ago, The Conative Group was an idea represented by a word written on a sticky note on a kitchen cabinet.

Today, it is a community.

It is clinicians, clients, families, students, parents, educators, trainees, colleagues, and friends.

It is evaluations and therapy.

It is groups and programs.

It is Adulting and FocusWeek.

It is The Skilled Student Initiative.

It is all the unexpected things that grew from listening to people and asking, “What do you need?”

And after 10 years, the words we chose at the beginning still fit.

Thinking. Feeling. Growing.

We help people understand themselves.

We help them navigate what they feel.

And, surrounded by a community of helpers, we help people embrace the change they want in their lives and grow into who they want to become.

To everyone who has trusted us, worked alongside us, learned with us, taught us, challenged us, referred to us, encouraged us, and grown with us over these first 10 years:

Thank you.

We can’t wait to see what grows next.