7 Jun, 2019

Ask Nicole: What Does Your Day as a Consultant Look Like?

By |2021-08-19T20:38:46-04:00June 7th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |0 Comments

Have a question you’d like answered? Let me know.

I’m asked this question often, or some variation of it.

I think it’s because people want to probe what it is I’m actually doing with my time because “consulting” can mean different things. Plus, there’s the assumption that I have more time on my hands compared to someone who doesn’t work for themselves.

The short answer is: It depends.

The longer answer is: It depends on what’s occurring at that point in time during a project, which projects are operating simultaneously, what’s going on with my clients, and what’s happening with my own non-client projects.

On any given day, I may have 2-3 client calls, a webinar meeting to either attend or host for a client, prepping for an in-person presentation or workshop, invoicing, planning out my blog content and newsletter editorial calendar, scheduling social media posts, participating in online forums to seek or give advice, writing a project proposal or end-of-program report, 1:1 coaching with client staff, doing an informational interview for someone interested in what I do, or scheduling a meeting with a prospective client.

Some days I get up and prepare for the day in the way I used to when I worked in an office setting, and some days I literally roll over, grab my laptop, and get started. Some days I work from home, or I’ll head over to the nearest cafe or coworking space.

Some days I’m more productive in the morning, where other days I feel more productive in the evenings. You may see people in online blog posts give a by-the-hour breakdown on what they do, but unless I have to do something at a particular time, I allow my day to flow the way it needs to.

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29 May, 2019

Play Bigger: What I’m Learning After Three Years of Full Time Consulting

By |2021-08-19T20:38:20-04:00May 29th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |0 Comments

On to Year Four!

This Friday will mark 3 years since I left my day to run Nicole Clark Consulting full time on June 1st, 2016.

Time flies, and it’s true what they say about a running a business: It really is like caring for a baby.

In my first year, I hit the ground running. Everything was new and exciting, like a baby taking in all of the new sights and sounds. I was trying to make up for all the time I’d spent building up my business while working full time.

When I entered Year Two, my business started experiencing the Terrible Twos. It literally felt like my business was running me, and not the other way around. All of the business systems I had in place that helped me during my first year were no longer working. I also compared myself to others who have been at this for a while, and I started to doubt myself a lot.

In Year Three, I started to hit my stride and realized that it’s like a marathon, not a sprint. I didn’t have to scale up as quickly as I thought and I started to give myself more grace. I became more mindful about my capacity to take on certain types of projects, and I also gained a greater focus on capacity building in addition to working with clients to implement their projects.

I also made these observations in Year Three:

  • Evaluation has been the focal point of my business, but I no longer want it to be the main attraction
  • I want to do help audiences apply Reproductive Justice thinking on a broader scale and in a variety of settings
  • While working one on one with clients has been great, I want to do more one-to-many work
  • I’m craving more collaboration and collaborative projects with other consultants
  • I did a lot of behind the scenes work in Year Three and it’s time to play bigger

So what’s on deck for Year Four? A few things:

Build up my non-evaluation services: As with many businesses, you cultivate what’s been working well. I did that with evaluation, to the detriment of my other services. So, I quietly took on smaller projects related to research and program/curriculum design and added some program sustainability components to my evaluation projects. I also scrapped the strategic planning services after taking on a few of these projects and realizing that it didn’t interest me all that much to continue this service. I’m also going to be more mindful of the types of evaluation projects I take on, with a focus being on capacity building and incorporating evaluative thinking within organizations.

Go back to basics: The main reason why people started to follow my work is because of my blogging about reproductive justice and intersectional analysis. While I’ve embedded RJ into the content I’ve created in Year Three, what I want now is to make more explicit RJ-related content by way of my blogs, future webinars, and trainings. This was spurred by the recent abortion bans in Alabama and Georgia and other states, along with more spotlight on improving maternal and infant health outcomes in communities of color. There’s a major difference between learning about RJ and actually incorporating it in our personal and professional lives, and I want to help people bridge the gap.

Finding more ways to engage people on a broader scale: Doing one-on-one client work is great, but I have a desire to do more trainings, webinars, and workshops with a broader audience. If I’m wanting to scale up, this would be a great way to do it. I also have a project that I’ve placed on the back burner for too long, and Year Four is when I’ll finally buckle down and get it started, so stay tuned for that.

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24 May, 2019

Self Care Corner: Change the Narrative

By |2021-08-19T20:38:00-04:00May 24th, 2019|Categories: Self & Community Care|Tags: , |0 Comments

What happens when we challenge other people’s narratives about us?

One of my limiting beliefs is “I always have to prove myself”.

Like most of us, working hard is something that’s ingrained. In order to achieve a goal, we have to work hard for it. And by working hard for it, we have to prove to others that we’re competent.

The other day, I was doing some client work, and playing on a loop in my mind was “I don’t know what I’m doing”.

I stopped working. The task I was doing is a task I do all the time for my clients, and everything I present the results back to my clients, they’re appreciative. So, why was this thought playing?

Instead of getting frustrated, I became curious. I decided to get to the bottom of it. Where did this belief come from?

I discovered that this belief stemmed from a comment my 7th-grade math teacher made about me to my mom during a parent/teacher conference. I had been struggling with a math concept in the class, and it was playing out in my grades at the time. My mom was upset because the teacher told her “I don’t think Nicole knows what she’s doing”.

I remembered feeling embarrassed because I hadn’t told my mom that I was struggling in the class. I also remember making it my mission to prove to my teacher that I did know what I was doing. For the remainder of the school year, whenever I would complete a problem, I would go up to my math teacher to show her that I figured it out. Essentially to prove to her that I do know what I’m doing.

Looking back, that teacher probably never changed her opinion about it, no matter how many math problems I solved. Second, I never questioned my mother why my teacher felt that way. Third, it’s possible that the teacher said positive things about me, made mention to the fact that she noticed I was beginning to struggle a bit, and my mom interpreted the way she did. Lastly, not only did I pass the class, I went on to pass every other math class I enrolled in.

I see how this one incident–told to me from someone else’s interpretation–created this narrative that, years later, I still struggle with. Instead of getting upset with myself, I asked, “What happens when we challenge other people’s narratives about us, and how can we do it in a way that is beneficial for us, rather than trying to prove a point?”

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16 May, 2019

Try This: Take a Bird’s Eye View

By |2021-08-19T20:36:01-04:00May 16th, 2019|Categories: Strategic Planning & Sustainability|Tags: , , |0 Comments

There are various factors that impact your program.

If you’re a nonprofit or social service agency, chances are you run several programs and services.

These programs and services don’t exist in a vacuum. In fact, a variety of factors make up a complex system in which your program or service operates within, including budgets and available funding, policies (organizational as well as federal/state/local), organizational structure, staff leadership capacity, participant perceptions, internal and external stakeholders, and more.

We often lose sight of these and we can be in the thick of it, doing what we can to keep the program afloat. However, when we take a bird’s eye view, we see the context that programs and services operate under.

This activity is ideal for:

  • Staff responsible for developing and overseeing the implementation of programs, services, and strategies

Here’s what you need:

  • Sheets of paper or an erasable whiteboard
  • Writing utensils (pens, pencils, markers, or dry erase markers)

The steps:

Take your preferred writing utensil and either a sheet of paper or erasable whiteboard. Draw a large circle, and a smaller circle in the middle. Write the name of your program or service in the middle, like this:

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10 May, 2019

Tomorrow’s Another Day

By |2021-08-19T20:33:33-04:00May 10th, 2019|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: , |0 Comments

During the summer of 2010, I was in the throes of my first job after graduating from my graduate program.

I was running out of money and couldn’t afford my apartment any longer due to my roommate moving out. I ended up moving out and placing my belongings in storage.

When you’re unemployed, running out of money, trying to find a job in a profession that you’ve only studied and didn’t have real experience in, and living in a stressful place like New York City, you’re tired, to say the least.

The best part about that time is having friends who opened their homes to me and invited me over to eat. On this summer day, the friend I was staying with invited me to join her and some of our grad school classmates for a day at the beach.

A beach in New York? Yes. Though I can’t remember which beach we tried to go to. “Tried” is the operative word, as we tried getting there by car and ended up getting stuck in traffic for hours before turning back around.

As my friend and I were getting ready to leave, I remember how excited I was. I needed a break from applying to positions where I never got a response back and getting “thanks, but no thanks” emails from recruiters.

I want to feel normal, even if it is for a day, I thought.

When you don’t have a permanent home to feel safe in, to cook for yourself in, to have your belongings surrounding you, or to have your mail delivered to, it’s pretty difficult to care about anything else. I could have easily asked my family to book a flight for me so that I could go home to Atlanta, but I was too stubborn for that. I have a Masters degree now, I thought, and I need to find a way to make this work.

Flash forward to December of that year. After a summer of struggle, I managed to land a job as a clinical case manager and had been on the job since August. I also moved into my first apartment without roommates at the start of December. Toward the middle of the month, my agency held its annual holiday party for clients.

During the party, I was standing with a few of my coworkers as we watched our clients eat and enjoy themselves and their families. I spotted several of my clients, many of whom tend to be in crisis mode when I would have regular appointments with them.

But on this day, they were fine. In fact, I met with one of my clients the next day. When I asked her if she enjoyed the holiday party, she said:

“I loved it! I love coming to the holiday party every year because when I’m there, I feel normal. Even if it’s just for a day.”

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