Year of Practice
A year-long habit-building course in cohorts.
Last updated
A year-long habit-building course in cohorts.
Last updated
This course is currently ongoing and therefore not opened for enrollment. Join our newsletter to hear about our next facilitated course.
A year-long habit building course, including:
guide to pick 3 practices to focus for the entire year (1 per quarter)
private onboarding call
bi-weekly workshops
asynchronous community of practice
extra workshops and meetups throughout the year (created based on the needs of the group)
private chat coaching
The Year of Practice is a result of over a year of experimentation with habit-building courses in cohorts. The key idea is to create a dependable, long-term rhythm for relational growth, and grow in iterations based on the individual experience of the the ups and downs.
Click on the tweet below to read my thread about Relational Growth in Rhythms ⤵️
Towards the end of 2020 we came up with an idea of a year long program helping conscious creators to stay consistent with the most important life practices, with a built-in community of practice. After getting initial positive feedback (we weren't sure if one year commitment is just waaaay to long for people to sign up) we decided to go ahead and create the program.
We decided to limit the cohort size to 20 people, to provide intimacy and more focus on every participant. The pricing was a result of optimizing for enough: €499 per year, or €150 per quarter.
Interestingly, while this is our biggest program so far, it is also the one that took the least amount of time to create. We see it as a result of our extensive experience with habit building, relational growth in small groups, as well as aligning our work with our core values (rather than making shittone of money).
2 participants quit. One joined a two-month retreat and the other couldn't attend the workshops and struggled with keeping up. Interestingly, there are a few participants who don't show up to the workshops regularly and still are consistent with their practices.
We used easyretro to harvest insights during retrospective workshop – it's the first time we're using "an artifact" in the workshop, as we like to keep them as simple as possible, due to different degrees of familiarity with tech. It was a perfect tool in the perfect place. We got excellent feedback, both in terms of what works well and what we could improve.
One of the popular request was to find a way for everyone to know who is working on what. This gets confusing with 20 people and 1 practice, and now we have 18 people with 2 practices each. We created a shared Board of Practices and then turned it into a visual.
This is useful info not only for the Year of Practice, but also for the next iterations of our shorter habit-building course Habit Sprint. We're considering focusing on one pre-defined habit for the next cohort. Also, we found it interesting that some people picked a practice within the same area.
Based on a request for more spaces to connect people working on the same areas, we created Discord channels to facilitate conversations in between calls. We're also opening this space for participants of the current Habit Sprint.
We're shifting the chat coaching to be less proactive (unless they request to be nudged frequently). It's still available to all participants, but only if they really want to use it.
We also addressed a slight confusion between habits vs practices.
I'm still mindblown by the energy of this group and the beautiful connections that are forming.
We were taking a month off in June. We came back to Year of Practice with a retrospective session. We deliberately designed the course to have a month without support, so participants can get a feel for how it might be when the course is over.
5 people quit, we have 13 people left in the cohort. We were expecting the amount of participants to drop, especially as we notice than less people are showing up to the workshops. One year is a big commitment, and it's to be expected that not everyone can keep it up, but it seems that the "regulars" are getting tremendous value from this recurring spaces we're creating. The length of the journey allows for depth and feeling of friendship to emerge.
Relational Weekly Review is the single most effective thing. RWRs are not technically a part of the Year of Practice, but are mostly attended by people participating in YOP. We were considering dropping them in this quarter, as we want to reduce the amount of Zoom calls, but after hearing fantastic feedback we've decided to keep them going. So far the calls have been open to all of our subscribers, but we'll move them behind a paywall, and make them available to participants of our courses and Patrons.
Widen the scope of the course and explore new topics. We'll use a collaborative topic-sourcing tool (sli.do) to get ideas from participants and include the most popular ones in the workshops.
Set up email reminders 1 hour before the workshop.
We're very curious to see how this program will evolve. The feeling in the group is magical.
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