Advanced Certification in Feminist Coaching
Enrollment for the Advanced Certification in Feminist Coaching is now open!
It’s a lens through which you understand the world and how women move through it, relate to it, are shaped by it, and shape it in turn.
It’s a holistic social, political, historical, and intellectual lens on coaching tools, the coaching industry, personal change, and social progress.
And you can’t truly understand what is happening in women’s brains and how to help them change their lives without it.
(I said what I said.)
In ACFC I was pushed to think harder than ever before. To challenge my assumptions more courageously. To coach myself harder and with more compassion than ever before (and therefore equip myself to do the same for my clients). To investigate again and again what was important to ME, and be better able to articulate to myself WHY. I made myself available for this work over and over again, even when it got hard.
As a result, today, I am creating bodies of work that feel like a more coherent expression of my deepest values than ever before. And as a result, my business has become so much more joyful, and every dollar I earn more soulful.
Thank you Kara! And thank you to Past Me for investing in ME.
Almost every woman in the world grows up in a patriarchal society.
Almost every woman in the world grows up in a white supremacist society, or a society impacted by white supremacism exported by “first world” countries.
Almost every woman in the world grows up exposed to sizeism, ableism, and a host of other intersecting structures of oppression and marginalization.
It’s what they believe they are allowed.
It’s what they believe they can accomplish.
It’s what they believe they are worth.
And if you’re coaching a woman of color, or a fat woman, or a woman living with a disability, or an LGBTQ+ woman, or a woman who lives across more than two marginalized identities?
And you don’t understand the history, theory, and impacts of the social forces that have shaped their experiences, minds and lives?
This advanced certification is intended for certified coaches and licensed mental health professionals of any gender who support clients of any gender, because understanding what society teaches us to think about ourselves based on our identities matters to everyone.
No matter how many intersecting identities you live in or forms of marginalization you’ve experienced, there are others you don’t know about first-hand. This certification will teach you about your blind spots, and will deepen your experience of yourself as a multi-faceted coach and human being as well.
I understand coaching in a way that I was unable to before this program. I can recognize patterns in my clients with their thinking, what they fear and where they’re holding back and now I know why. This deeper understanding of the patriarchy and internalized oppression has made me one thousand times more effective. Prior to ACFC, it felt like I was coaching on the surface and now I can recognize the deeper cause of their issues.
I loved being immersed in a community of diverse women with all the various intersectionalities. Loved it. The open and honest conversations were like medicine for my soul. I witnessed truth, struggle, confusion and many exciting brain exploding moments.
Welcome to the Advanced Certification in Feminist Coaching.
This advanced certification is intended for coaches and licensed mental health professionals.
The curriculum focuses on the gender-based socialization that women receive, but certification is open for coaches and licensed mental health professionals of any gender who coach clients of any gender.
I’m the host of the internationally top-ranked podcast UnF*ck Your Brain, and the author of the forthcoming book “Take Back Your Brain: How Sexist Thinking Traps You – and How to Break Free” (Penguin 2024). My work has been featured in publications like Glamour and the New York Times, and praised on podcasts as varied as My Favorite Murder and We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle.
Why am I qualified to “write the book” on feminist coaching? Well, I’ve been a professional feminist my whole life. After graduating from Yale University, I worked as a media writer for Planned Parenthood before enrolling in Harvard Law School, where I was the President of the Board of Directors of the national organization Law Students for Reproductive Justice. I clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and then litigated at the Center for Reproductive Rights. After that I held academic fellowships at Yale and Columbia, before leaving the law to become…a life coach, of course!
I started my new career with no business experience of any kind. I got certified and then master certified as a coach, and was bringing in seven figures in revenue within three years. Now I run a team of 10 and have created over $20 million in revenue since 2017 using my feminist coaching tools. More than fifteen thousand women have participated in my feminist coaching community, The Clutch, and I’ve created an entirely new framework in the coaching industry that shines a light on the social context that has been missing from this field since its inception. Coaching and therapy were both created mostly by straight white Christian men. It’s time the rest of us had a say.
You will learn from Kara’s in-depth feminist coaching curriculum. No one else is teaching this work at this level anywhere else in the world. She literally wrote the textbook!
Weekly calls with Kara will take place on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. EST beginning January 2, 2024.
You will learn from your peers and small group coaches by giving and receiving peer feedback, and receiving weekly feedback from your certified feminist coach instructor.
You will complete a certification project. The idea and the final project will be reviewed and you will be given feedback.
Calls with your certified feminist coach instructor will take place on a weekly basis beginning the week of January 8, 2024. You will be placed in a small group based on your availability.
You will have the option to practice written coaching by answering commonly asked questions in our Clutch Ask the Coaches feature.
10 first-run copies of Kara’s forthcoming book, Take Back Your Brain, when it comes out May 2024.
PLUS How to Coach the Scary Stuff (and Make Money When You Do) Masterclass Replay:
An exclusive recording of a one-time live event Kara hosted in 2022 that dives deep into her Intersectional Coaching Framework. This training is a preview of some of what you will learn in ACFC, and it will help you confidently and skillfully coach on challenging issues like discrimination, oppression, bias and unfairness – even when they are outside of your own lived experience.
This two-day masterclass alone will help you elevate your coaching from “I’m doing ok as long as nothing unexpected happens” to “I’m a coaching badass who can handle anything” before you even get officially certified.
You will be able to start coaching like a Certified Feminist Coach right away and you’ll be able to use these skills to support your clients better and make more money while you do it.
10 first-run copies of Kara’s forthcoming book, Take Back Your Brain, when it comes out May 2024. They make a great client gift!
Partial grants are available on a need-basis from the Feminist Mindset Revolution Fund. This edition of the Feminist Mindset Revolution Fund honors Katherine Johnson.
Katherine Johnson began working as a “human computer” at NACA (NASA) in 1953. She is best known for having calculated trajectories for Alan Shepard, the first man in space, as well as John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth. Glenn asked engineers to, “Get the girl” — referring to Johnson, to personally check the electronic computer’s results. Katherine remembers the astronauts saying, “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go.” Johnson also calculated the trajectory for Apollo 11’s flight to the moon in 1969. She did all this while raising 3 daughters alongside her husband. She retired in 1986, after 33 years at Langley. In 2015, at the age of 97, Johnson received a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama honoring her accomplishments in paving the way for gender and racial equality as a black woman in STEM. She was played by actress Taraji P. Henson in the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures” which told the story of Katherine and the team of female African-American mathematicians who served a vital role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program. Katherine died in 2020 at the age of 101.
Your job as a coach or mental health professional is to help your clients free their minds.
And to do that, you have to educate and free your own.
All the rest will follow.
ACFC elevated my work as a coach and increased my ability to make change within my niche. And most importantly (to me) you created the first place since kindergarten that I can recall feeling completely comfortable being myself, being curious, and knowing other people would understand what I was talking about. That is priceless.
The most valuable part of ACFC was learning about why we think the way we think. The effects of living in a world with patriarchal and white supremacist views. I finally have the words and explanations for what I’ve been experiencing and witnessing. It all makes sense now.