Kim Olver, LCPC, NCC, BCC
Founder and Creator of Mental Freedom®
Kim Olver is the founder and creator of Mental Freedom®, a practical, psychoeducational framework that helps people navigate life's challenges with greater clarity, responsibility, and emotional steadiness.
Mental Freedom® emerged from Kim's decades of professional experience and, just as importantly, the lessons she learned navigating challenges in her own life. In 2020, while reflecting on why she was experiencing considerably less stress during COVID than many people around her, Kim began identifying the principles she had been using throughout her life. By 2021, those lessons had become the Six Principles of Mental Freedom®.
A Career Centered on Choice, Relationships, and Human Behavior
Kim's professional life has been profoundly shaped by Choice Theory® and Reality Therapy, developed by psychiatrist Dr. William Glasser. She has spent decades studying, teaching, and applying Glasser's ideas, serving as Senior Faculty in Choice Theory/Reality Therapy and in executive leadership roles with both the Glasser Institute for Choice Theory and William Glasser International.
Her professional experience spans counseling, coaching, leadership, relationships, trauma, work with the military, diversity and inclusion, and personal development. These experiences, combined with lessons from her own life, helped provide the foundation from which Mental Freedom® emerged.
While Choice Theory and other professional influences shaped Kim's thinking, Mental Freedom® represents her contribution: a framework for helping people reduce unnecessary psychological suffering while preserving personal agency, responsibility, and the reality of whatever they may be facing.
About Kim
Kim is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC), National Certified Counselor (NCC), and Board Certified Coach (BCC). She is a Clinical Trauma Specialist and holds a Diversity & Inclusion Certificate from Cornell University.
She has led international nonprofit organizations, trained professionals around the world, and worked with individuals and organizations across a wide range of settings. Kim is the author of five books, including Mental Freedom: You Hold the Key, and host of the Life = Choices; Choices = Life podcast.
Through speaking, writing, training, counseling, and coaching, Kim has dedicated her career to helping people strengthen relationships, think more clearly, and make intentional choices about how they want to respond to their lives.
Building Something Bigger Than One Person
Kim's vision for Mental Freedom® extends beyond her own teaching.
She is building Mental Freedom® as a framework that can be learned, practiced, taught, and carried forward by others—one capable of continuing to grow and serve people well beyond its founder.
At the heart of that vision is a simple hope: a world where people create less unnecessary suffering for themselves and each other.
The Story Behind Mental Freedom®
Kim's professional background is only part of the story. Mental Freedom® grew out of a lifetime of experiences that taught her what it means to remain grounded when life doesn't go as planned.