Feeling Called to Create Something New?
Personalized Collaborative Support
Including Collaborative Mentoring, Content Reviews, and Done-Together Projects
You have worked with clients for some time, and you see that you have a unique approach to supporting them through the scenarios they are facing. Your training, expertise, and personal experience give you a unique perspective that is valuable to your clients.
You want to enhance your business by developing something new, a:
New program — a workshop, retreat, coaching package, or online program
Cohesive representation of your body of work — a model, framework, or diagram
Written or visual representation of your work — a book (self-published or published), eBook, flip book, PowerPoint presentation, or website
Or you are still trying to figure out the best format to meet your goals.
At the Moment, You Are Running into Detours and Delays with Your Project
Although you may have a sense of your vision, you are having a hard time pulling your thoughts into an organized form. This frustrating feeling is actually quite common. When you have a close relationship with your work, it can be difficult to translate what it is in your head into words that others can understand. (Please know that this is not a character flaw, it’s a natural part of the development process. I experience this with my own work as well.)
You have never undertaken a project of this scope before or it’s been a long time. You aren’t sure how to proceed. You don’t know what steps to take. You can’t figure out what is most important to do next. You are worried that you are inadvertently skipping an important step.
You’ve hit a block, and you aren’t sure what to do to resolve it. The block may have to do with the focus of your work, the structure of your approach, or a creative gap.
Your work isn’t fitting into the cookie-cutter framework you’ve been told to use. It feels awkward, constrained, and rigid. The results you are producing don’t have the spark you normally feel in your work. You want to create a customized approach that truly aligns with and reflects your work.
The Benefits of Developing Your Project with a Collaborative Partner
No matter where you are in your development journey, you will benefit from a second set of eyes, a sounding board, and a mentor. Being able to reach out to someone you trust keeps your project moving and strengthens your results.
Having a collaborative partner during your development phase improves your progress, deepens the insights you have about your own work, moves you through stuck points faster and more effectively, and guides you through the process in the most effective order so you don’t get sidetracked by detours and delays.
In addition to being an experienced coach, mentor, speaker, and trainer, I bring my specialized background to the projects I work on.
I am an experienced business owner who has reinvented and deepened my work multiple times in the 35 years I’ve been in business.
I am a writer and developer in several capacities: as an award-winning author of five published books, a developer of multiple training programs and coaching programs, author of a variety of eBooks, a website creator, a presentation designer, a trainer, speaker, and facilitator.
I have an in-depth understanding of the development process and the pieces you need to have in place for your work to flourish.
I also have a strong innate sense of how to organize content, materials, and presentations to make them accessible to those you work with.
I am able to listen to your ideas, ask questions, and help you bring a deeper sense of your work forward.
I have learned (through my own experiences and my work with clients) how to navigate creative blocks, frustration, fear, and hurdles in ways that ultimately surface greater clarity, more confidence, and a deeper commitment to your work.
Think of me as your Personal sounding board, guide,
editor, proofreader, reviewer, synthesizer,
translator, idea whisperer, framework creator,
strategy partner, and project midwife.
A Deeper Look at How My Support Enhances Your Work
To give you a sense of the focus and impact of my work, I describe several key services I offer. To bring these descriptions to life, I’ve also included some one sentence comments about each service from my clients’ point of view.
Collaboratively conceptualizing, designing, and refining your project
Whether it is a new model, a retreat, a program, an eBook or book, a website, or a presentation.
Carol provided meaningful thought partnership and mentoring as I explored what is most unique, powerful, and impactful about my approach.
She helped me see the deeper patterns and possibilities within my work — including ideas, practices, and connections that were already present, but not yet fully named or articulated.
Her insight helped me strengthen the bridge between the concepts in my model and the practical design of my training programs, retreat experiences, and facilitation practices.
She helped me evolve my thinking about my actual body of work.
She is able to bring clarity to ideas that are not yet fully formed in the mind of an author.
She helped me bring my book’s structure to life.
She gave me new insights about how to polish and strengthen a diagram of my work.
Reviewing your written content
Offering alternative wording and editing suggestions, providing notes about gaps, clarifying confusing sections, identifying inconsistencies within your content, noting proofreading corrections, assessing the flow of the piece, and highlighting the strengths in what you are creating.
Carol has been a tremendous writing partner, helping me significantly improve the clarity and compelling value of my curriculum and materials.
We worked together to improve my “lead magnet” content so it connects better to my model.
Creating new content, language, and tools that clearly articulate key concepts in my model.
Designing facilitation plans and participant packets that help adult learners connect the dots and move into action (and new behaviors).
Elevating the quality of my deliverables — from my proposals to annotated flip chart transcriptions.
Asking key questions
Helping you reveal the deeper truth of your work and finding the most accessible ways to describe the heart of your work.
Through her thoughtful questions, Carol helped me tease out the strong interconnections between different elements of my model.
She helped me see how to translate my ideas into language that attracts my best clients.
She supported me in expanding and fleshing out my model and supporting tools and content in ways that made it clearer, stronger, and easier to communicate to others.
Offering mentoring on a variety of topics
Including the big picture of your work, the best ways to amplify the impact of your work, the appropriate practices and infrastructure you need to have in place to share your work effectively, and ways to create a natural flow between various elements of your work.
She was a generous and perceptive partner in helping me build an inspiring, grounded, and impactful framework and expanding a body of work.
Carol guides me in thinking more intentionally about what learners need in order to understand new ideas, engage with them meaningfully, and begin making real behavioral changes.
Carol keeps me focused on the phase of the development process that is most relevant and timely.
She helped me streamline my business name for clarity, changes in my focus, and positive impact.
She is very good at making complicated material easy to understand by coming up with a framework for it and chunking the material down into smaller pieces.
She has a wealth of information and creative ideas at her fingertips, and helped me see how to break down a process it down into bite-sized pieces.
Sharing comments through our mentoring sessions and written review comments
Helping you normalize what you are experiencing as you step into your new chapter so that you can process and move through feelings of doubt, imposter syndrome, frustration, and overwhelm.
Carol gave me confidence to listen to what is emerging and evolving rather than demanding perfection of myself.
She helped me think about things differently – seeing new possibilities with and within my work as well as within myself (greater confidence, diminished imposter syndrome).
She gave me new questions to ponder when I hit a block or hurdle.
Full Project Descriptions and Client Testimonials
For Short-Term Project
and In-depth, Longer-Term Projects
Sometimes just a few well-timed sessions can bring new life
to your project when you need it most.
Three Short-Term Project Testimonials
“Carol’s patience and insight made such a big difference in the retreat I hosted – my first in many years and the very first I had ever hosted without a sponsoring retreat center.
Starting with exploring who would be served by the retreat and what the focus would be, Carol walked with me through every step.
She reviewed multiple drafts of the schedule of activities, making wise suggestions for possibilities I had not thought of; helped me sort out details with the venue; edited marketing materials.
With her help, my fuzzy vision became a fully realized, successful retreat. I am so grateful for her steady, thoughtful guidance throughout the process!”
Developing Content for Weekend Retreat and Planning the Logistics for the Event
When Sara and I started talking, she was clear that she wanted to design and facilitate an extended weekend retreat.
We started by clarifying her goal and intention while starting to imagine the focus of her retreat. After describing a few ideas, Sara found the sweet spot for her retreat.
The next step was to create a broad outline of the flow of the weekend activities, while making sure that the activities aligned with her chosen topic. With each pass through her outline, she added more and more details, which made the entire retreat experience come alive.
Now that Sara had a clearer idea of what she was doing, she had to figure out how all of the logistics would work. She researched potential retreat centers, gained a better understanding of the services the retreat center would offer. Bit by bit she developed a detailed outline of all of the logistics for the retreat.
When it was time to start sharing this retreat opportunity with others, we came up with a natural way to talk about the retreat with potential participants, several places she could promote the event, and the best ways to answer questions about the event.
Turning Ideas into a Model and a Book
“Carol is a remarkable editor as well as a phenomenal “idea whisperer!” She is able to bring clarity to ideas that are not yet fully formed in the mind of an author, and help bring a book’s structure to life. I’ve been fortunate enough to have Carol help me clarify the model that my book is based on, which enabled me to confidently craft the structure of the book, and subsequently write the book proposal.
I highly recommend Carol to any author looking for professional editing and writing support! ”
Years ago I had several conversations with my colleague, Erica, that were instrumental in shaping her model, her subsequent book proposal, and eventually her book.
Early on in her project, Erica was having a difficult time organizing her thoughts. During our conversation, my questions allowed her to access a new sense of clarity about how to frame her model.
Later, while working on the first draft of her book proposal, she ran into some structural issues that she was unable to resolve on her own. After reviewing her manuscript, I was able to offer suggestions and questions that helped her restructure some of her ideas and strengthen her proposal.
Preparing to Market a New Book
After writing her latest book, Kirin reached out to me to help her figure out ways to market her book that aligned with her naturally introverted style. In the past she had avoided marketing all together because she could never find strategies that felt like a good fit.
Through a short series of mentoring sessions and some content reviews, we co-created a way for her to break the book marketing process into doable steps that aligned with her natural style. In the process, she gained a variety of new ideas she hadn’t even thought of before.
By the launch of her book, she accomplished more than she thought possible a few months prior.
“Thank you again for all your support with marketing my book. It would have been daunting to figure it all out on my own, and I’m sure I would have skipped some important pieces. I knew you were the right person to help me when you mentioned (maybe in a coaching class?) that you knew a lot about marketing for introverts. I’ve always avoided marketing because the standard approaches don’t fit my style, but I didn’t know there were effective alternatives before working with you.
Not only do you have a wealth of information and creative ideas at your fingertips, but you also helped me see the process as more doable by breaking it down into bite-sized pieces. You shared a lot of things that I didn’t even think to ask about or explore on my own. Your tools and perspectives are making a huge difference, and I keep accomplishing things I didn’t think I could do just a few months ago. I can definitely see us working together again in the future. Thanks so much!
”
In other situations, you may benefit from
a deeper, more consistent, ongoing connection
that evolves as your project develops.
Two In-Depth / Longer Term Project Testimonials
Creating a New Website from Scratch
When Bonnie was referred to me by a colleague, she was navigating a tumultuous period both personally and professionally. To help her weather the uncertainties ahead, she wanted to create a professional website that reflected her passions, strengths, interests, expertise, and style.
Over the span of a couple of weeks, we worked together to create a Squarespace website from start to finish. After discussing her vision for the look, feel, and framework of the site, I mocked up the first draft of the site within a couple of hours.
From there I laid out the structure of the content for each page. With a few guidelines from me, Bonnie drafted the content for each page. As I posted the content on the site, I would review it and offer questions, edits, and suggestions to make each page more robust. During a series of mentoring conversations, I helped Bonnie clarify her services, describe her audience, and establish her new professional identity.
As the site took shape, we incorporated photographs and tweaked the design colors to create a beautiful site that reflected her vision for her future.
““As I described my goals for my new website, Carol listened carefully and literally captured the nuances of what was inside my head. When I looked at the site, it was as if I had drafted it myself. The website itself is beautiful and accurately reflects my style, interests, and passions.
As we were laying out my services and my bio, Carol was so in tune with my story that she was able to structure my services with more accuracy and depth than I could have articulated myself.
Carol is delightful and very easy to work with. Throughout our work together, I was having a really rough time. Carol’s kindness, compassion, empathy, and wisdom helped me stay calm and focused as we worked on and completed my website.”
Creating an In Depth Body of Work and
Preparing a Series of Retreats for Clients
When Linda began working with me, she had a meaningful body of ideas grounded in values, along with the beginnings of a framework for her work. What she wanted was thoughtful partnership to help her articulate the depth of what she knew, strengthen and re-envision the way her model was organized and expressed, and bring greater clarity to the value and impact of her work.
We have worked together periodically over several years, evolving our mentoring focus as her work shifted from clarifying her model to putting together proposals for her clients to developing, facilitating, and following up on her retreats.
In addition we have collaborated on the content for her website, an eBook for new subscribers, and several blog posts.
With each project, we have gained deeper clarity about Linda’s work, leaned into the growing edge of her model by creating new materials, and developed a deeper understanding of the meaning, value, and impact of her work.
No matter what we work on together, we combine mentoring calls for strategic thought partnership about what’s next, and written review of Linda’s content. I add my insights and suggestions, and ask thought-provoking questions to strengthen the work. When the back and forth comment thread isn’t productive enough to bring clarity and resolution, we set up a mentoring call to work through the outstanding issues needed to finalize her project.
“Carol is a deeply valued mentor and thought partner as I have worked to clarify, expand, and evolve my original body of work around elevating workplace cultures. She has partnered closely with me to envision and craft my original I-VIEW™ framework — the heart of all that I do.
One of Carol’s greatest gifts as a mentor is her ability to see patterns, possibilities, and emerging connections. She listens beneath the surface, notices what is taking shape, and asks the kinds of questions that help me discover and explain what I know in a deeper way. Through our work together, I came to see more clearly the strong interconnections between science, evidence-based practices, appreciative approaches, and my own culture change model.
Carol’s deep understanding of how people learn and what they need to make meaningful behavioral change has strengthened my training programs, retreat designs, and facilitation practices. She has expanded the way I think about learning design, not only about what I wanted to teach or facilitate, but also about what participants need to engage, make meaning, practice new ways of thinking, and carry the work of transforming workplace culture forward.
Our mentoring sessions gave me space to visualize, organize, and communicate ideas that were evolving through my own research, reflection, and practice. Carol’s questions, encouragement, and thoughtful reflection helped me better understand what is unique and powerful about my work, — and supported me in building a clearer, stronger, and more inspiring framework and tools for culture change.
I am deeply grateful for Carol’s insight, encouragement, and partnership. Her mentoring helped me bring more clarity, confidence, and coherence to work that I feel called to do.”
Developing and Sharing Online Programs
When Dr Kim and I started working together, she had ambitious plans to create several online programs. She wanted to give more people access to the detailed information she had developed about specific conditions that she had been seeing in her practice.
Due to her full practice, she didn’t have the bandwidth to translate her concepts into an online course. I took her notes and the conversations we had about her work to craft each of her online programs.
When she was ready to launch each online program, I worked with her to plan out her marketing copy, auto-responders, sales pages, and blog posts. After she created her first drafts, I reviewed each piece to offer feedback, ideas, and additional insights about her structure.
“Carol is a wonderful person to work with. She is very bright, organized, considerate, generous, and responsive. She is very good at making complicated material easy to digest and understand by coming up with a framework for it and chunking the material down into smaller pieces.
Importantly for me, she is a thought leader herself, so she understands the voice that is needed for that kind of material. She never misses deadlines.
She can help with all aspects of an online program. She has helped me write all of my marketing copy including autoresponder drip email series, sales pages, and blog posts.
She is creative and will help you get things done quickly and effortlessly and make your copy shine. I highly recommend Carol for any of your mentoring, copy writing, or marketing needs. ”
How This Personalized Service Works
The way we proceed depends on your goals and where you are in your journey to create your new program, model, body of work, your book, presentation, or website.
Throughout our work together, we focus our time on the support you need most, which usually includes a combination of:
One-on-one mentoring sessions to clarify your focus, evolve your thinking about aspects of your work, talk through the key points of your outline, find creative solutions to sticky issues, share context, or sort out your timeline.
Reviewing your materials to provide feedback, make note of gaps or inconsistencies, or offer insights about emerging connections, new angles, or ways to reorder your thoughts.
Done-for-you or done-together services to handle tasks that are beyond your existing technical skill set.
You guide the pace. If you feel comfortable working on something on your own, you do that. I’m happy to review and offer feedback or mentoring when you hit a block. If you are in a strategic phase or building out your ideas, we may do more mentoring work where we can collaborate in real time. When you are developing content, we’ll likely work through comments in your document. If you prefer to talk through feedback and explore ideas together, that’s works as well. We’ll schedule a mentoring session when you need one.
With this collaborative support, I work on a retainer basis. You choose the amount of your retainer. As I work on your project, I track my time (mentoring, content review, and other projects) and deduct it from your current retainer. You receive retainer updates periodically. When your retainer runs low, you choose the amount of your next retainer, and I send you an invoice.
Ready to Get Started?
We will start with a collaborative conversation to talk about the Growing Edge of Your Business — what’s working well and what feels out of sync. When we have a sense of your path forward we’ll explore the best way to support you in reaching your goals.
Depending on your project, we may start with Picture Your Work to get a more nuanced picture of what you are trying to create before we start the Collaborative Mentoring.