Dr. Gary Blake (Ed.D.)

Gary Blake is committed to using his experience and training to help individuals and couples increase their joy and satisfaction with themselves, their relationships and life in general. He is an outstanding motivational speaker, an energetic seminar presenter and a positive thinking encourager as well as a dynamic counselor and therapist.

Gary is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor who conducts a private counseling practice from his office in Overland Park, Kansas. His clients represent the entire Kansas City Metro area, though his practice reaches throughout the nation through his telephone counseling services. He is also a consultant, trainer and speaker for private agencies, organizations, and businesses as well as for ministers, missionaries and churches.

He holds a bachelor's degree in Biblical studies from Harding University, Searcy, Arkansas, a master's degree in Special Education from Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C. and a doctor's degree in Counseling from the University of Arkansas. He also completed the two year post-graduate program in Sex Therapy at the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry and Mental Health Sciences, Topeka, Kansas.

His background of experience is unique and accounts for his ability to relate well to people of various ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic-educational backgrounds. He grew up in a small Midwestern town, but his life experiences have made him a citizen of the world community.

He began his vocational career at the age of seven when he sold newspapers on the streets of his hometown, Marshalltown, Iowa. Since then he has worked as a soda fountain clerk, shoe store salesman, building custodian, laborer on the wharves of Ketchikan, Alaska, a circus employee traveling the East coast for a season, even an Avon sales rep, an interpreter and teacher for the deaf, and a tenured state university professor.

His first counseling position was as a rehabilitation counselor working with special needs young adults in the state of Arkansas. During his twenty-seven years living in the Kansas City area, he served for eleven years as a full time counselor on the staff of a large church prior to beginning his full time private counseling practice.

As a young man, he and his wife and children lived for one year in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he had a part in establishing the first school for the deaf in that nation. He has traveled literally around the world, having visited more than twenty nations on four continents including three study trips to the Middle East.

Gary and his wife, Mary, have been married for fifty-three years; and he states: "We have decided to make it permanent." The Blakes have five children and eight grandchildren.