Fine Tune Your Program With Dr. JaNaè Taylor

Rebel Therapist

As you get ready to move beyond private practice and create your signature program, you might believe you’ll need to run many many programs in order to stay interested. I’m gonna tell you to start with one. Usually boredom is not what happens. If it does, you can add more!

I’m on round twenty (!) of my core program right now, which had a few different names in the beginning. It’s been called Create Your Program for quite a few minutes now. I’m having fun making changes to improve it every single time. We just added a session with an attorney who answers legal questions and a systems expert to help with setting up tech.

Of course I’m always fascinated by the participants and what they're creating.

There’s just very little boredom happening around here.

This week's Rebel Therapist podcast guest is positively obsessed* with her program as well.

You’re about to hear from someone who loves fine-tuning her signature program. Therefore she’s created an outstanding program that her participants love.

It’s called Mindful Moguls.

Listen to how Dr. JaNaè Taylor thinks about the needs of her Mindful Mogul participants, as well as her own needs, to craft an excellent experience. You might even discover that you want and need to jump into the next round of her program.

Dr. JaNaè Taylor is a Licensed Psychotherapist in Virginia Beach, VA, where she owns and operates Taylor Counseling and Consulting Services. She specializes in providing mental health services exclusively to the Black Community. JaNaè’s expertise has been featured in Money, SHAPE, Refinery29, Cosmopolitan, NBC, and CBS among many others. As the Founder of Minding My BLACK Business, Dr. Taylor has created a digital space that provides resources, workshops, programs, and a podcast for Black Entrepreneurs to check in on their mental health and each other.

She was on Rebel Therapist back in November of 2017 so go listen to that one too to see where she was 4 years ago.

Here's some of what we talked about:

• Creating her 8 week program for Black Service Oriented Entrepreneurs
• Creating an after-care program
• How she landed on 8 weeks for this program
• Using 1:1 sessions within her the program
• Making changes in the second iteration of her program
• What she sees as successful outcomes for her participants
• Her love-hate relationship with social media and which posts gain traction
• What happened when her IG account was shut down
• An update on her podcast, Minding My Black Business

Here are some takeaways that particularly stand out to me:

Takeaway #1:

When you set the length of your program, go for that sweet spot where participants are still engaged and excited, and they have enough time to develop as a group and attain their goals.

"You definitely don't want to feel like people are rolling their eyes when it's time to join the group on week seven, that they're over it. And at the same time you want to have that kind of natural group development."

Takeaway #2:

Get started with your program and then be ready to make changes in round 2. In the second iteration of her program, she made a few changes to make it ever better for her and for her participants: bringing in 2 guest teachers, increasing the number of weeks, and adding individual sessions.

"One of the feedback points was that they wished that they had had more time with me. And in my mind, I was like, well, what do you mean? We were together for 6 weeks.

And I was like: Oh, solo! Okay."

Takeaway #3:

As you run your business for a number of years and reiterate your program, you don't necessarily have to work as many hours to keep growing as you did in the beginning.

"I don't feel like I'm doing it as many hours as I've done it before. There have been months where my laptop is closed on the weekend and that was unheard of for me."

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/159

*"Positive obsession" coined by Octavia E. Butler