About the Owner and Founder

Alan Peñaloza, MA, BCBA

 

I obtained my Bachelor’s in Psychology in 2008 and Master’s in Psychology in 2011. My first job after graduation was coaching soccer to toddlers and then later I decided to get a job as a Behavior Interventionist implementing Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) mostly with kids who had an autism diagnosis. I found so much purpose as a Behavior Interventionist that I decided to pursue a career in ABA, which included completing about 2 more years of graduate courses in ABA at the Florida Institute of Technology while gaining field work experience under the supervision of a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA), and passing the board exam and becoming a BCBA in 2015. 

 

As a BCBA, my role gradually shifted from only implementing ABA to evaluating, assessing clients, designing/tailoring ABA programs based on the client’s skill set, updating ABA programs, coaching family members, training Behavior Interventionists, and still having fun implementing ABA. To this day, I still remember all my clients including their siblings, parents, grandparents, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, lizards, snakes, and many moments of success, perseverance, and lots of fun moments playing games, being goofy, laughing with kids, and seeing kids advance in communicating better, becoming more flexible, and more independent. 

 

After working for several ABA companies, I realized how drastically different they are from each other with regard to their core values or what they each prioritize. In 2021, I decided that in order to work for a company that had my personal core values, I needed to start my own company. At Excel at Being You, we aim to implement ABA by carefully designing ABA programs based on 

 

1. The unique clinical needs of the client and caregiver

2. The skills that the client already has across several domains

3. The unique environment in which the client spends most of their time which includes other peers and adults

4. The unique values of the caregiver and family. Families vary on what is important and meaningful to them

5. The unique short term and long term meaningful goals that the family has for the client. For example, a short term goal might be to reduce aggression while a long term goal might be to help the client become independent, be placed in a different school, get a job, go to college, etc.

6. The unique personality of the client