Grace Mok
Counselling Intern · Incourage Institute · Taking new clients until early December
- Cultural identity and belonging
- Burnout
- Career counselling and coaching
- Values and life direction
- Anxiety
You’re the one who adapted. New country, new school, new rules you worked out by watching, and you got so good at reading the room that you stopped noticing you’d left yourself out of it.
How I work
I came to Canada as a school-aged child, and some of what I do now started there: the quiet work of holding two sets of expectations at once, and what it costs to do that well for years without anyone registering it as work.
I work with people who are burnt out in a way that doesn’t show from the outside: still performing, still delivering, running on something that ran out a while ago. Underneath it there’s often a question about whose values you’ve been living by, and whether you ever actually agreed to them.
A note on language
I counsel in English. My Cantonese and Mandarin are conversational: enough to recognise the phrase you reach for when English doesn’t quite have it, not enough to do the work in. If you’d rather have therapy itself in Cantonese or Mandarin, Natalie Chan joins us in January 2027 and works in all three.
My approach
- Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
- Catching the thought that fires just before the feeling, and testing whether it’s true. More practical, and more useful, than it sounds.
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Less about arguing with a difficult thought and more about loosening its grip, so your energy goes to what you actually care about.
- Psychodynamic therapy
- Where the pattern started. A lot of what runs your life now was set long before you had a vote in it.
Background
Before training as a counsellor I worked across human resources, non-profits, education, technology, and law enforcement. That range taught me how differently people carry pressure depending on the room they’re standing in, and how rarely anyone thinks to ask them about it.
Education
- Master of Counselling (in progress), City University in Canada, graduating spring 2027
- Practising under the clinical supervision of Nelson Szeto, MCP, RCC-ACS