Cultivating Yourself
with Landria Seals Green
Behavior Bites Podcast - Ep69August 27, 2025What does it mean to raise a profession?
How much do you value developing staff personally, as well as clinically and professionally?
During today’s meal— I speak with a speech language pathologist, behavior analyst, and current PhD student about what her journey has been like, her advice to professionals and business owners, how she balances her many roles, and keeping summer alive with all the tomato dishes.
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Amuse-Bouche
Tell us about your passion for “raising a family while raising a profession.”
Appetizer
How did you get into both SLP and BCBA, and now jumping into a doctorate in special education?
Having a foot in both the SLP and BCBA world, how has that helped collaboration?
You say “academia is a trip,” which I’ve heard in numerous ways, but I’d love to hear your take.
What advice would you give someone thinking about pursuing their PhD?
Palate Cleanser
Describe your favorite dish that keeps summer going for you.
Entree
What are people generally surprised to find out about you?
Something you wish you could have told yourself when getting started?
Dessert
How do you practice self-care and balance life/work?
What’s your take on “how we develop people”?
How do you help others honor and respect children in the work we do?
Excerpts from the Episode
(*Paraphrased highlights)-
When we talk about leadership, mentoring, and all of these wonderful things— how you exercise it first, I believe happens in your personal life, and then your profession benefits from that.
I have a whole family that has all of these different activities. It’s important to me to not only exercise leadership there, but also to know that I need to raise leaders. I need to raise people who have communication autonomy, who can organize themselves, and also give me all kinds of feedback— and I need to be resilient enough as a person to take the feedback, how filtered and unfiltered it comes to me.
In raising a family, it gives me the opportunity for those things, so when I go into my profession, I am ready for those things. I'm geared to do the same in terms of cultivating that level of communication autonomy and leadership, and being resilient enough to understand that not everyone's words will be nice, while also having the patience and grace to help shape communication and behavior inside of my profession.
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Be okay with failure. Don't beat yourself up about it, it's supposed to happen.
For me, keeping the stress inside or being so burdened with schedules and all the things that I have to do, really has a physical manifestation. I deal with high stress situations well, but when I'm over my threshold things start to happen for me physically. That does not put me in the best health state, and I need to be in the best health state in order to work in my optimal state. That's the connection that I don't think I made early enough in my career.
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I have this group called The Huddle. We look at the personal self, the professional self, and the clinical self. Oftentimes we focus on the clinical development of people, and we focus on the professional development of people, but we do not focus enough on the personal self.
The personal self will make or break your clinical work. People will talk about masking and unmasking, and that's often because they don't feel at home to integrate their personal, professional, and clinical self. How you develop people is making sure you put as much energy into developing your personal self as you do in your clinical self.
For example, if I am a BCBA supervising people and I don't know how to speak to them, I don't know how to cultivate community versus cliques— if I don't know how to do that, that is because my personal self is underdeveloped. This creates division instead of community.
If a clinician enters a workplace, and they're expected in their scope of practice to be able to do a certain type of job and they don't know how to do it. Does that clinician personally feel as though they have communication autonomy and skills to be able to say, “I don't know what that is. I don't know how to do that. I'm uncomfortable doing it without guidance and structure”? People don't reach out for help because they may have learning histories where saying, “I don't know how,” is aversive. Then the client's progress is impacted, and the outcomes are impacted because we've not developed the personal self of the clinician.
ABOUT Landria
Landria Seals Green, MA, CCC-SLP, BCBA
Landria Seals Green is a Founder, Innovator, Speaker, and Trainer. Her clinical experience includes being a dually certified Speech-Language Pathologist and Board-Certified Behavior Analyst.
Landria is the Founder and CEO of ExcelPrep Schools and has been a speaker for over fifteen years delivering messages and high impact trainings. While her research interests align with personnel and professional training and social communication skills, her joy comes when delivering messages of equity, diversity, justice, belonging and wellness to corporate and education organizations.
Landria is a self-described visionary, crafter, and entrepreneur. She has consulted and supported clinical practice process improvement and completed the merger and acquisition of her own multispecialty clinical practice.
Landria completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and graduate coursework in speech-language pathology at Northwestern University. She is currently completing her PhD in Special Education.
She is a full-time wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend, business owner, and student. Landria is from the Southside of Chicago, lived in Connecticut and Michigan for a number of years. She now resides in Illinois with her husband Alfred and their children Adam and Alison, and their dog, Asher.
CONNECT with Landria
Facebook: LandriaSLPGURUInstagram: @landriagreenslpguruLinkedIn: Landria Seals GreenYouTube: @slpgurulandriasealsgreen5445Please support our podcast by leaving a rating or review!
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