Continuing on theme of documenting my work over the past nine months, I am following up with a personal reflection of my development in the Praxis program.
What I’ve Created:
Phase One: Career Foundations
- Week one: I spent a lot of time working on my career vision and goals. Getting connected with my cohort, I did many personal exercises and laid the foundation for my innate interests moving forward.
- Week two: a week that I remember being nervous about, I set up my personal website and newsletter. I was introduced to the importance of showing work & “learning out loud”, two foundational principles I will always keep with me moving forward.
- Week three: professional performance and time management. I set up my google calendar, task managers, and learned new ways to stay organized.
- Week four: I created my final “about me” video, that is no longer living. I also worked on analyzing my habits & creating a habit improvement plan. To finalize the week I did my first case study, on Ramit Sethi.
- Week five: I wrote, a lot. I wrote four different pieces: a life lessons paper, a thought piece, a company blog post, and a sales email. This week was meant to be a push on time management.
- Week six: how to rapidly learn and how to showcase a new skill. We watched this interesting TED talk to open our week. I chose to work with my current boss on marketing her health coaching services through her small business. I made flyers for her, in order to advertise this to her customers.
- Week seven: personal finance. We created budgets, talked about value creation, and made financial goals.
- Week eight: review & create plan for Phase 2.
Phase Two
Content Marketing
I spent my content marketing month, foremost, understanding what content marketing is. “Creating and sharing content around a specific topic, idea, product, business, or service in order to engage potential customers”
I then moved on to create my first landing page, social media campaign, and email campaign, before moving on to wrap up my work. Which you can read about in more detail here.
Copywriting
I did a lot of learning about psychology behind words in this module. It was more content based, as I spent time diving through the 10 laws of copywriting. Here is my final wrap-up post!
28-Day Writing Challenge
My most intensive module, and the one I’m most proud about, was my 28-day writing challenge. I wrote a blog post every day for 28-days. I didn’t miss one. Here is where I shared all of my work.
Growth Marketing & Analytics
Going back through, I learned some good things from this module, but ultimately decided that it may not be for me! Here is a link to my final newsletter detailing my work.
“Overall, I think that what I learned in this module was important and will be a helpful resource to me in the future. As for right now, it was challenging to wrap my head around what I was given and fit it into my world. Every profession has their “language” and, while it wasn’t impossible, it took me awhile to decipher the readings and tasks I was given. There were so many abbreviations and phrases to sift through.
I didn’t find relation to 100M+ companies or busy startups, but I will review and apply the necessary tools I was given in this module to my personal business ventures. Testing and implementing new tools along the way!”
Phase Three
Capstone Month One: Storytelling
In this module I experimented with sharing stories online. Through written, picture, and video form. I focused on impactful and positive life lessons.
Capstone Month Two: Copywriting
I took a copywriting course, learned more about copywriting formulas, and did practice exercises to strengthen my writing abilities. In this month I unexpectedly got a job.
Capstone Month Three: Digital Design
In my final month of the Praxis program I laid out plans to focus on digital design, and then got a job that requires social media management–a brand new skill to me–so instead of pursuing additional projects, I treated this month as an opportunity to focus on that wholeheartedly.
What I’ve Read
We read nine books, one per month through the duration of the program. I have highlighted my favorites in bold.
- Mastery by Robert Greene
- Finding your Life’s Task (or calling) is a process of trial and error.
- Share Your Work! by Austin Kleon
- Atomic Habits by James Clear
- How habits work and how to gain control over them.
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- People want to feel valued.
- Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
- Money wisdom, but in a fun storytelling way.
- The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
- Business dictionary.
- The Psychology of Money by Morgon Housel
- The most valuable thing you can have is enough.
- The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
- Learning how to listen to yourself in creation.
- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
- How Nike was created, the personal impacts of building business.
- How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen
- Seek long-term fulfillment rather than short-term success.
What I’ve Learned
In nine months, I have completely transformed as an individual. The ripple effects of what I’ve taken away will continue to develop, but as of right now here are my biggest lessons:
- Learning out loud. Something that I would have never done without a push forward, learning out loud and sharing work online.
- Growth outside of comfort zone. This is a principle I have always applied to my life, although I’m very young, but my time in Praxis allowed me to continue to expand upon this skill. To the point where I now fight people daily for fun. Because of my continuous, yet imperfect, rise to the occasion, I now feel like I can move forward and do anything. True confidence comes from experience.
- Learning how to learn. My time in Praxis has taught me a lot about how learning works foundationally. I now find myself with an advantage over many people in my life, knowing that I can tackle a new skill and overcome the scripted challenges of trying anything new.
- Respecting my time. One of my biggest takeaways I have been burned with during Praxis is understanding how to respect my time. My work-life balance is off kilter, and has only gotten worse as I have been more worn down by life. Working multiple jobs outside of the program, along with personal hobbies and activities, has left my body at minimum capacity. It sounds negative, and is….slightly, but I also feel that this was a very real lesson to learn despite that. Moving forward with more respect to myself and my schedule is paramount to my long-term success.
My Favorites
I want to simply link my newsletter and website. I did a lot of writing in this program, and it’s lovely to see the growth that has happened so quickly. These are my most treasured, living, projects.
What Comes Next?
Foremost, a scheduled vacation May 4-18th. Through taking on too much over the past three years of my life, I have worn myself down to a degree that I need a break in order to begin to catch up. When I get back, I will be moving forward heavily with Apogee Oakland County to:
- Help finalize and set up space
- Begin guide training
- Begin Apogee Women’s program
- Help host summer events & camps
- Manage social media
- I’m sure lots more
With the ultimate goal to be mentally & physically ready to begin guiding and educating children forward on their journeys!
I’m proud of the work I have done, and am looking forward to recharging, reflecting, and moving forward more sustainably in the future.
ooliviacrowley.com 
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