Nurturing Your Next Professional Step
/I am excited to welcome Michelle Farris, LMFT as a guest blogger on The Counselor's Coach. I had the great honor of providing some coaching support for Michelle recently as she launched her fantastic, "Taming Your Anger Workshop for Women." Michelle has kindly shared her journey and some supportive tips below.
Enjoy!
Nurturing Your Next Professional Step
by Michelle Farris, LMFT
As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist I love supporting clients who are struggling with addiction and anger management challenges. Though I enjoy my one-on-one individual session time, I wanted to create something new to support my community, so I decided to develop an anger management workshop for women called, "Taming Your Anger."
Creating a workshop and designing a leveraged income stream was a whole new area of clinical work and entrepreneurship for me. I had heard how challenging it was to build a workshop, but I knew in my heart that this was my next professional step in growing my skills and nurturing my practice.
Hiring a Journey Companion AKA a Coach
In order to move into this new territory, I decided to invest in some coaching with Mari Lee.
Best decision ever!
Whenever I am branching out into something completely new, I like to have support. I find that it is incredibly helpful to brainstorm and work with a professional who has already done it successfully. So I reached out to Mari for some coaching and I can’t say enough about how valuable that was both professionally and personally.
To have Mari literally walk me through the various steps gave me the added information and confidence I needed to move forward. We discussed specific workshop exercises and ideas, put together a timeline, walked through marketing language for my landing page, and other important aspects.
Working with a "team mate" saved me a lot of wasted time and energy trying to figure it all out on my own. I wanted my workshop to offer a high level of support for the attendees, and I wanted to feel confident in my facilitation skills.
Unexpected Personal Rewards
As I dove into the tasks and as the process began to unfold, what I realized is that the workshop was not only going to be a supportive resource for the wonderful attendees, but it was becoming an avenue to help me face my fears in putting myself out there in a new way. A win/win!
Here are some of the things I learned along my journey that I wanted to share with others:
1. Give yourself time: For example, it took 3 months to write the content, to get a solid curriculum set, and to create electronic flyers and social media posts for advertising to promote the workshop.
2. Invest in support: Having a coach walk along side me in this project felt really empowering and supportive. Sometimes it is scary to try something new and we don't have to do it on our own.
3. Make sure you have a list: I sent out an email to my list (this is when having a list is gold) and got 3 sign ups right off the bat. Then I posted it on Google + and got another one. In the end, I had 6 women sign up and attend!
Professional Success
And then the day of the Taming Your Anger workshop arrived. Though I had a few butterfly's in my belly, I felt a sense of confidence because I had done the leg work. And, drum roll please...it was a hit! The women who attended shared excellent feedback and it allowed me to grow as a professional.
This experience gave me the extra boost to schedule another workshop next month, and I’ve already decided that having an online class is my next nurturing step in supporting clients as well as creating an additional leveraged income stream!
The process of creating a group workshop to help women was a lot of fun. It also taught me the value of investing in myself in order to give myself what I needed to succeed.
Do you have a professional goal that you would like to nurture? If so, what is your next step, and who is going to support you to get there? Please share with Mari and I below, we would love to learn more about you and your dreams!
Warmly,
Michelle Farris, LMFT
www.counselingrecovery.com
Meet Guest Blogger Michelle: Michelle Farris is a licensed marriage and family therapist in San Jose, CA. She helps people who struggle with self-esteem, anger, relationship problems, communicating through conflict and addiction recovery. She works with individual and couples and offers workshops to transform toxic anger into integrity and empowerment. (408) 800-5736