How to Build an Effective Growth or Training Path

If you feel inspired to make a growth path, start with the following video as we begin to learn the art of making a splendid growth path!

7 Tips to keep in mind while building a growth path:

1. Put yourself in the shoes of the person that is experiencing the problem you are addressing, or the needs you are fulfilling. Sink into their life for a minute. What are the stressors they are experiencing? What are their needs? It can be helpful to do a sketch or create a quick persona (person is X years old, having Y feelings, Z needs etc.) to help see/imagine the person you are wanting to help.
   
   
2. Don’t be a perfectionist! As you all know, failure is welcome at 7 Cups. This is how we learn. We see mistakes as a natural part - and welcome! - part of the process of learning. There are no teachers or professors here to grade your growth path steps or growth path. Just do your best and iterate on it.
   
   
3. Think in Internet time - many clinicians often think it is okay to ask clients to do long homework assignments or other activities that take a longer time to complete. Try to keep exercises / steps very brief - like 1-3 minutes to complete. Think of each step as a sort of digital medicine or therapeutic. If you have an effective step (or medicine), but no one wants to take it because it is too long, then people won’t use it to help themselves or others. What we are aiming for are small steps that people want to take. If you go back to 1, think of the person for each step - how is this step going to help them? Is it getting them the info or exercise they need to better manage or cope with the challenge they are facing?
    
4. If you feel the need to make a longer step, make sure you highlight (by using bold italic or underline) the key information, as well as look to present content in attractive ways (for example, by giving eye-catching headings and subheadings, presenting the content in points than in endless paragraphs, adding images, videos, using colours, formatting etc).
   
   
5. Collaborate! - Invite others to help you build out the growth path, this is especially important for sub-communities. We recommend having one key leader for each sub-community. Other leaders can also create steps in different paths and tag the steps with the name of the sub-community. They can then let the key leader know and they can drag those steps into the primary sub-community path.
   
   
6. Look to our self-help guides for information - the self-help guides are great, but they are very long (see #3 above). They can all be broken down into much smaller chunks.
   
   
7. If you want to help us build and are not sure where to start, please consider these posts as they highlight the songs and self-help books/talks that our community likes the most.
    

 
Happy path building!