How We Knew We Needed to Change to Scholar’s Voice™

In episode 153, Cathy and Gina discuss the starting point of their working relationship and how everything since that point has been working toward where Scholar’s Voice is currently at. They share everything from how the company grew, and how they knew they needed a bigger team, to how they knew they needed to evolve as a company and what that process of growth has looked like as a team. In this conversation, they explain their new desire for a simplified and more impactful version of their programs and how the Navigate Pilot was born!

The Shift in the Acceptance of Coaching

The shift from 2019 to now has seen much more acceptance and excitement about having a coach as an academic. In the past, people associated coaching only with sports, so we had to draw people in with the language of ‘training’ and then show them what coaching was and how impactful it could be. Now, academics love this concept of coaching and find so much growth and value in having a coach.

There was a point in time where it almost felt like this very beneficial bait and switch where we were describing ourselves as writing coaches because all of the stuff that was going on with people trickled down into their writing. That’s where academics usually see what is going on, and we can get to the root of the issue, which is usually some sort of underlying systemic issue. With that, we can show them that what we’re doing is career reimagination, and so our coaching always ends up being much more about career, even though we draw people in with all of our talk about writing and publishing.

When It Became Clear We Needed to Make an Outward Change to Reflect Our Inward Changes

When Gina and Rocio were hired on full time is when we began to put in motion this massive change. When Cathy no longer was the main person delivering programs, but Gina and Rocio began delivering programs as coaches, this became much more of a team-focused business and brand. We realized there was a misalignment between Cathy’s face being the main face of the program, but once people got inside the program there were many more faces like Gina, Rocio, and Thea, who were the ones doing a lot of the delivering of material and one-on-ones.

How We Are Creating a Business That’s Different From Other Businesses

At the root of this business, we decided to create a new sort of system for ourselves that worked for us after coming out of systems that no longer served us in the ways we wanted or expected them to. One of the really basic parts of our system that we’ve built is acknowledging who we are. We all have all kinds of other things going on in our lives and other roles we play like parents, caregivers, etc. In our business, we don’t necessarily have to change every element of our life to fit work, sometimes we can make work fit our lives.

Ultimately, we are creating an institution from scratch, so we are always getting coaching guidance, reading books, and watching what others are doing in order to do this in the best and wisest ways. We are continually evaluating the organization of our business and the ways that it plays out with the different women who work within our company.

The institution we are creating is created with everyone’s mutual benefit in mind.

How Our Programs in Scholar’s Voice™ are Simple and Impactful

We know that our audience and clients live very complicated and complex lives. We want to honor and respect that, and so we created programs that are both simple and impactful based on what we know our clients’ days look like.

We set a 30-minute mindset call twice a week that allows people the freedom to come as they are and not have another ‘opportunity to be behind’. We believe there is value in focus and not giving our clients another reason to feel behind in life. 

We asked ourselves how we could pace the programs and create the most impactful program components so that the clients get the result without feeling like they’re behind, or have something else to be overwhelmed by.

One of the most simplified and impactful things we offer is group coaching, which is why we chose to redesign Navigate and are running our new Pilot Navigate Program which we curated to be both more simple and impactful.

 “I want to thank anyone who’s ever described themselves as difficult, because, really, it has been in that resistance to whatever we thought we were creating, that really had us growing and extending what we were doing, and actually connecting to clients.” – Gina Robinson

“The people who I think we attract, and who end up in our programs, are people who are changing academia, which is the mission of our business because they’re pushing the boundaries of fields.” – Cathy Mazak

Join our Pilot Navigate Program: We are going to offer Navigate as a 12-week program to test out some changes we are considering making. It will run from February 2023- Mid-May 2023. In addition to our core Navigate curriculum, which we are reorganizing, reordering, and revising for this pilot version, what we’re looking for is 10 to 20 academics who want to do this new pilot version of Navigate. 

There will be more details to come on this in the coming weeks, so make sure you’re on our email list to get all the details first!

Info sheet for Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap®

Get on the Navigate waitlist here!

Continue the conversation:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors with a disruptive perspective on their field to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Get on the waitlist here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing, and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. Want to train with us for free on your campus? Now you can when you recommend our Scholar’s Voice Faculty Retreats to a decision-maker on your campus! Download the brochure with the retreat curriculum and both in-person and online retreat options here.

Read the full transcript.