In this solo presentation, Ruth Schwartz, director of the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, explains the purpose, structure, and enrollment details of a new six‑month, 60‑hour coach training and certification program for lesbian, queer women, and adjacent non‑binary individuals. She recounts the evolution of the Conscious Girlfriend brand from a small side project to a global resource, highlighting the community’s demand for conscious relationship guidance. The program is designed for existing LGBTQ‑focused coaches/therapists seeking deeper specialization, helping professionals wanting to expand their practice, and a smaller cohort of non‑practitioners interested in personal growth. Key logistics include a start date of June 4 2023, a tuition around $3,000 (early‑bird discount, payment plans, partial scholarships), and a certification pathway requiring 12 practice sessions, two recorded sessions reviewed by Ruth, a $500 certification fee, and an optional $500 annual listing fee. Ruth emphasizes diversity among cohorts, her own extensive background (PhD in transpersonal psychology, hypnotherapy, Somatica, coaching training), and the broader mission to increase accessible, culturally‑competent coaching for the lesbian/queer community. She concludes with a call to applicants who resonate with the “wounded healer” ethos and wish to help co‑create healthier queer relationships.
Chapters
Hi there, I'm Ruth Schwartz. I am the director of the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, and this video is to tell you more about our upcoming coach training and certification program, to answer any questions that you might have about that program before applying. Once you do apply, we will schedule a 30-minute one-on-one, and I look forward to getting to know you and answering Any other questions that come up then? So for now, why am I doing this coach training program? Training and certifying lesbian and queer women and adjacent non-binary people to become coaches for the lesbian and queer community that we are both part of and serve. Well, the reason why I'm doing this is because It feels like an idea whose time has come and has grabbed me by the collar and shaken me until I did it. I never intended when I was growing up, or even 10 years ago, to start the leading global resource helping lesbians, queer women, adjacent non-binary people date, And love and have sex in conscious ways. It was not on my radar. My former partner, then known as Michelle, and I started Conscious Girlfriend just as kind of a small, fun side project, thinking that we had worked really hard to be able to have the kind of relationship we wanted. It wasn't a kind of relationship that we had grown up. Seeing around us or even seeing in our communities once we came out. It was a more conscious, intentional, thoughtful, deep, compassionate, emotionally generous, generally conflict-free relationship that was not the kind either of us grew up witnessing in our parents. And so we just thought, hey, we'll teach some workshops. And one thing led to another. Pretty soon I was writing a book because I'm a writer. Pretty soon the book was on Amazon, and from there things just kind of grew and had an incredible momentum of their own because it turned out that the lesbian and queer community was really hungry for this kind of information, which has been so hard for us to find in language and in contexts that really speak to our experience. And so literally within a few years, the book came out in 2015, by 2016 or '17, our classes had been attended by women from over 25 countries around the world. Pretty incredible. And since 2017, I've been running Conscious Girlfriend on my own. Since 2020, I've been running the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, which greatly amplified and intensified the, uh, presence of the information, the number of classes I've been teaching. And so last year, 2022, it became clear that it was time to train coaches because I had gotten so busy running the academy and teaching. I no longer wanted to work one-on-one or with couples, but people were writing me all the time saying, hey, I need coaching, or we need coaching. The academy classes were becoming too much for me to teach all on my own. So I also wanted to train coaches who could not only work one-on-one and with couples, But also, as they wished and had skill and capacity, could also teach classes in the academy to this burgeoning community of women and lesbians, queer women, queer people, again, from around the globe. So I did the first coach training cohort in spring 2022. I started the second 6-month cohort in fall 2022. That one is just wrapping up, and I am super excited to teach another coach training cohort beginning this June. So that's the why. Who's it for? I would say there are 2 main groups of people who have been attending thus far. One group is women and adjacent non-binary people who are already coaches and/or therapists in the LGBT community, maybe wanting to increase the number of LGBTQ+ clients they serve, maybe wanting to branch out after working for an agency or a company, wanting to start or grow their private practice, wanting to get more referrals. I hear from a lot of people like, hey, I want to be with the clients. I don't want to have to do the marketing. So that's a huge win-win, I think, for the Conscious Girlfriend Academy and for you if you're in that position, because we are growing so fast. My reach between social media and email is about 16,000 people at this point, and it is growing at the rate of about 500 people a month. A lot of those people want coaching, and they want it from someone whom they see as like them, someone who has lived experience in the lesbian or queer community, as well as who really understands the unique challenges and dynamics that our community faces. And this is what I have acquired an incredible amount of information about over these years since 2014 of teaching Conscious Girlfriend classes. You know, I really see what it is that lesbians and queer women tend to experience over and over in our dating lives, our relationship lives, How we connect or don't, how we bond, how we attach, how we fight, what we do with conflict, how we sometimes sadly break up, what we do with sex, how we sexually connect and disconnect. So this is a body of knowledge that I simply don't see being accessed Or even being held, much less being taught elsewhere in the world. So if you are already a coach or therapist or in the process of becoming one, this training can help you better serve our community. If you are not yet a coach or therapist, but you're thinking about wanting to make a career change, um, in general, I ask that people have additional coaching or therapy certification in order to get certified as a Conscious Girlfriend coach, because this is not a Soup-to-nuts training. This is specifically a training on lesbian and queer dating, love, and sex, and how to work with people on those topics. But in some cases, if you have substantial experience as a teacher or other helping professional— we've had nurse practitioners, we've had spiritual directors— we do make exceptions on a case-by-case basis. Now, Maybe you are interested in this training not so much in order to start or grow a coaching practice, but just to take your own knowledge of conscious lesbian queer dating, love, relationships, sexuality deeper. Maybe you've already been involved in the Conscious Girlfriend Academy for some time, or maybe you've just found out about it, but you know it's where you want to be. So there is room in the training for a smaller number, I'd say probably a quarter to a half of the training, uh, for people who are not necessarily aiming toward having a coaching practice. Maybe you're a teacher in the community, maybe you're a leader in the community in other ways. You are definitely still welcome to apply. When does it start? The next round of coach training will start on June 4th and end on November 19th, 2023. It's a 6-month, 60-hour training program. How much does it cost? Depending on when you sign up, it is in the neighborhood of $3,000. There's an early bird discount by April 15th. Uh, price goes up, so it's a little below $3,000 before April 15th, a little bit above after. There are payment plans. You can do a 2-payment plan, you can do a 6-month payment plan. There also are partial scholarships. And the way I feel about it is, if you feel strongly called to serve our community in this way, and the tuition price is too steep for I would love to talk with you anyway and find a way to make it possible for you to be there. And, you know, I believe that you will pay it forward. So it's also really important to me not only to make this coach training and certification program accessible, but to make coaching accessible to the members of our community who want and need it. And who deserve it and who really will benefit from it. Because as you know, if you're watching this video, relationships are hard between any 2 or more human beings, and there are particular ways that they can be hard for us as lesbians, queer women, queer people. We've got homophobia, internalized homophobia, We've got all of the challenges and traumas of potentially being 2 women in a relationship. Many of us have sexual trauma. Many of us earn less money. Many of us have kids, blended families. Um, so there are a lot of things that make lesbian and lesbian-adjacent relationships difficult. There are also a lot of things in our favor because lesbians and lesbian-adjacent people tend to be incredibly relationship-oriented, incredibly motivated to make our relationships work. So, um, I am really excited. If you're still watching, I'm thinking you might be one of the people that should be there. So I would love to have you apply. What is the path to certification? If you want to become a certified Conscious Girlfriend coach who is listed on the Conscious Girlfriend website, receiving referrals from the many, many, many eyeballs that are looking at our site every day, the path to certification is first to go through the 60-hour, 6-month training. Also in that process and/or afterward to do at least 12 sessions, practice sessions, in which you have your practice client fill out an evaluation, more for your own learning than for me, but just so that you really learn how is it that you're showing up that works for the people you're working with. How could you show up even better? How could you connect even more fully, orient the session even more fully to their needs and their wants? After those 12 evaluated practice sessions, you would also need to do 2 sessions of an hour or more in length that are recorded on Zoom or similar, in which your client agrees to let you record, knowing that I and only I will watch those sessions so that I can check out your level of coaching skill. I can give you feedback as part of the mentorship I'm providing to you. And then based on what I see in our conversation, I will either certify you or give you really specific suggestions and recommendations that I want to see you implement as part of your path to certification. And then you can reapply. The certification process does have a fee of $500 because I spend about 3.5 hours on it watching your 2 recorded sessions and then meeting for you, meeting with you for an hour and a half. If you do get certified and you wish to be listed on the Conscious Girlfriend website, that has an additional fee, flat fee of $500 for the year. And for that fee, basically an advertising and visibility fee, you get potentially many client referrals. So the handful of certified coaches thus far have each reported getting quite a few referrals. Quite a few have started providing quite a few coaching packages, and the visibility will only be increasing. So again, that's optional, but I would love to have you go through the training, get certified, and then be present on the Conscious Girlfriend website so that the Conscious Girlfriend community, the, the 16,000+ people currently on the mailing list and social media, will be able to find you. So you will be able to serve them. Um, who will your classmates be? I am committed to having our classes represent the diversity of our community, so I can tell you that the past 2 coach training cohorts have included people who identify as women, people who identify as trans women, uh, people who identify as non-binary people, people who range in age from their 30s till their 70s, people who have come out recently, people who have been out for decades, and people from 3 different countries and representing a number of different races and ethnic backgrounds. And so I fully hope that this next coach training will represent a similar level of diversity. That's what I am committed to, because that's how I believe we serve our community best. Who am I? Who is this person speaking to you now who has organized this training? As I said earlier, my name is Ruth Schwartz. I'm 61. I came out at age 20. It's hard to believe, 41 years now. Uh, I identify as lesbian, uh, somewhat pansexual, definitely homoromantic. Um, most of my long-term— well, all of my long-term relationships except for one year have been with women or people I thought were women at the time. Since 1982. One of those people later transitioned and now lives as a man. And I have been passionate about this work of trying to love in a healthy way since I was a teenager, partly because I grew up seeing my parents not love in a healthy way, partly because love is just so important. Important to me. And for many, many years, I had to learn everything the hard way because nobody handed me a book about conscious lesbian dating and love. Um, nobody that I knew of was really a role model for me. So along the way, I became certified as a hypnotherapist and shamanic practitioner. I then went back to school and got my PhD in transpersonal psychology. I then studied coaching with Gay and Katie Hendricks, the author of Conscious Loving and many other books. I then went through 3 years of training in the Somatica program. Uh, the Somatica Institute offers experiential sex and intimacy coach training. And I have also been a student of my own relationships. And a student of myself. Now, I would say that for many years I was a pretty unconscious girlfriend. I didn't know myself well. I didn't know my triggers well. I didn't know how to understand or work with the feelings that would pass through me with such intensity. And so my girlfriends would end up bearing the brunt of that. And I went through a lot of pain. Because of that. And, and frankly, some relationships ended that probably would've ended anyway, even if I had been more conscious, because I also wasn't choosing those con— those partners very consciously or wisely. But I think I created a lot of suffering both for myself and the women I was trying to love and who were trying to love me. So I have been on a journey for the past 20 years now in a very conscious way of striving to learn how to practice, how to have, how to show up for the kind of relationships that I really want, and also how to choose the partner or partners who could show up and be on the other side of that. So, so we could do this thing. In ways that really serve us both, that really make us both happy. I am a work in progress. I always will be. I do not teach Conscious Girlfriend from the position of a guru or someone who has all the answers by any means. I teach Conscious Girlfriend from the position of somebody who is dedicated to, to living the questions. But also as someone who has spent a lot of time gaining skills, gaining tools, working hard to walk my talk more and more fully every day. So who are you and what do you value most? That's the question I want to leave you with. You know, are you someone who also, like me, Wants to walk the path of the wounded healer, wants to repurpose all of the suffering you've had in your life around love and relationships, and maybe around coming out, living your sexuality, if that has been a painful, challenging process for you, as it is for so many of us. Do you want to make use of all of that on behalf of our community? Do you want to help other lesbians, queer women, queer people have an easier time learning what you have had to learn the hard way? Do you want to help co-create the world we all want to live in, one lesbian or queer person at a time, one lesbian or queer relationship at a time? I hope your answer is yes. And if it is, I hope you will apply to be part of our next Conscious Girlfriend Coach Training cohort starting in June 2023. I look forward to seeing your application or getting an email from you with other questions and then meeting you one-on-one once you've submitted your application. Lots of love. Thank you so much for being you. Talk to you soon.
