Raise Your Voice Blog | Nicole Clark Consulting

19 Jun, 2019

Try This: Context vs Content

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:39:50-04:00June 19th, 2019|Categories: Program, Service, & Campaign Design|Tags: Facilitation, Try This, Workshops|0 Comments

Like a glass of water, the content of your workshop is contained within the context.

Next week, I’ll be facilitating a presentation and discussion on the reproductive justice framework for a client organization that provides health services to underserved individuals and their families along with partnering with community-based organizations and government agencies.

The client’s project is a learning collaborative that brings together local healthcare providers to adopt best practices for the provision of contraception within primary care, post-abortion, and postpartum settings.

It’s been a while since I’ve presented on RJ for an audience like this, and I’m pretty excited about it. So much so, that it’s reminded me of my goal for creating a Try This blog around the topic of context versus content.

In short, content is what you talk about, while context is how you talk about it.

Think about a glass of water. The content is the water while the glass is the context. Like a glass of water, the content of your workshop (the activities, group discussions, etc.) is contained within the context (or topic of the workshop).

In my case, the content of my presentation is RJ, but I’m presenting the information within the context of clinical and primary care settings.

However, in the client’s case, the participants in the learning collaborative will be looking at how they can provide patient-centered care (content) within the context of RJ.

Another way to look at this consider context within the context (haha) of big-picture thinking. Context is the surrounding atmosphere, the circumstances, perspectives, and intentions that form the foundation of the topic. Content is the activities, details, and events.

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone who has a workshop, presentation or training coming up and you’re tired of throwing together haphazard workshops, presentations and trainings

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 and create a diagram, like this:

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13 Jun, 2019

Self Care Corner: Staying Friends with Your Ex (?)

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:39:20-04:00June 13th, 2019|Categories: Self & Community Care|Tags: Self Care Corner|0 Comments

If being friends with your ex is affecting your ability to move forward, read on.

Nothing brings about a flood of emotions like our exes.

On a website and blog that focuses on workshops, research and evaluation, and program sustainability, why am I blogging about relationships?

Well, I promised myself I’d blog more about self care in 2019. More specifically, how we think about self care within the context of our relationships. This is something I want to explore, given that it’s something that we all face at some point in our lives.

I’m happy to say that the people I’ve had romantic relationships with are good people, and I’m at a place in my life now where I can identify the purpose each one had in my life and the life lessons I learned at those moments in time. I can think about the good times I’ve had with them and wish them all well. But are we friends to the point that I’d consider them part of my inner circle? Not really.

When identifying your “breathe” supports, one question to ask yourself is “Do you feel that the people you’ve chosen as your ‘breathe’ supports are sufficient or do you need to expand your circle of support?” For some, a former romantic partner might be part of that support system.

I never thought about being friends with an ex until I experienced my first heartache, about a year after graduating from college. He asked if we could remain friends, and I agreed. My rationale: I wanted to get him back and thought the best way to do it was to show him I could be a good friend.

I remember attending a party with him about a month after we broke up, and it was one of the most awkward experiences of my life. Not only did I feel uncomfortable, he and I barely spoke and when we did it felt forced. Plus, the people at the party were confused as to why we arrived at this party together in the first place. (It’s funny now, but at the time it wasn’t). Every communication I had with him was awkward and didn’t feel good. Even months and years later, most interactions with him felt forced and disingenuous.

I had to be honest about why I’d attempted something that in the end, didn’t make me feel good. First off, trying to get an ex back by being friends with them doesn’t work. I also thought about how I physically felt when interacting with my ex (shallow breathing, quickening heartbeat) and how I felt emotionally (defeated, and a loser).

So one day, I gave myself permission to stop trying to be friends with him because I needed to find some relief. This didn’t include an announcement that I would no longer be contacting him or blocking him from contacting me. I just slowly lessened communication with him. When I checked in with myself, I felt better physically, and not so much like a loser. But I had a nagging thought: He’s a good guy. We technically didn’t end on bad terms, so what gives?

If we’re honest with ourselves, not all romantic relationships are supposed to last, and not all relationships end on bad terms. But does this mean we have to remain friends with our exes?

I realized that I shouldn’t force myself to continue doing something I didn’t want to do, even if my intentions for wanting to remain friends weren’t exactly pure in the beginning. Plus, it was preventing me from moving on with my life.

If you find yourself contemplating whether to remain friends with an ex and it’s impacting how you take care of yourself, ask these questions:

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7 Jun, 2019

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

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:38:46-04:00June 7th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting|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 Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:38:20-04:00May 29th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: consulting, Reflections|0 Comments

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 Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:38:00-04:00May 24th, 2019|Categories: Self & Community Care|Tags: self care, Self Care Corner|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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Try This: Context ​vs Content

Self Care Corner: Staying Friends with Your Ex (?)

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

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

Self Care Corner: Change the Narrative

This Is A Custom Widget

Try This: Context vs Content