It’s “SHifra”

Szifra Birke has been a therapist in private practice and a consultant to service professionals and small business owners for over 25 years.

Building successful practices in three different cities, out of necessity Szifra became a student of the business aspects of self-employment. As she learned her own experiential lessons, she also studied approaches to sharing this knowledge with other professionals.

One group of people who sought Szifra’s help were professionals puzzled by their clients’ and customers’ attitudes and decisions. As she worked with these highly motivated people, Szifra developed an individualized approach to help clients learn listening and insight skills. She has now refined this practice even more to focus in particular on the difficulties brought about by the way emotions affect financial behavior.

Early on, Szifra discovered she was effective at marketing. Over the years she has appeared in BusinessWeek, Cosmo, The Boston Globe, and on local, regional and national TV, and has had her own television show for ten years. As Szifra watched other small business people struggle with their marketing, she became interested in the difficulty many people had in effectively marketing their services and products.

Many of her private clients are entrepreneurs, artists, legal and financial professionals. Szifra combines her love of marketing and her understanding of behavioral stuckness to create another specialty of customized marketing plans that include individualized coaching. Szifra is on the Board of Experts at Marketing for More.

Szifra coaches other therapists on practice development. These business-minded clinicians tap into her years of experience and interest in both doing good and making a satisfactory living.

With Kathy Mayer, she co-authored the book, Together We Heal, the first self-help exploration written on Adult Children of Alcoholic’s group therapy. PBS excerpted this book to create a booklet that accompanied a Bill Moyers’ national television program.

Szifra earned a BA in Psychology and Education from Boston University, and an MS in Professional Counseling from Purdue University. She grew up fully involved in her family’s retail business and has co-owned a number of other small businesses over the years.