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Building stronger relationships with Jessica Holton
345 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, we talked with Jessica Holton, the Co-CEO and co-founder of Ours, a relationship health company that combines counseling and self-guided sessions to help people build stronger personal relationships. We discussed the fundamentals of good relationships, how to leverage those concepts in the workplace, and what the future of wellness and relationship health programs look like.
Learn more about Ours at https://www.withours.com/
Subscribe to the Content People newsletter at https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
Connect with Meredith at https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-farley
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Transcript
Introduction to Content People Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Content People, a podcast where we talk to creative professionals and leaders to get a behind the scenes look at their career experiences. And we try to turn that into actionable advice for you guys, our listeners. Tune in to hear from experts in various media and get inspired to find contentment in your own career.
00:00:27
Speaker
I'm your host Meredith Farley. I'm formerly the COO at Brafton, where I oversaw creative project management and consulting teams. I'm no longer with the company, but Brafton is still producing this podcast. So thank you, Brafton. We recorded this episode a while ago. I probably make mention of my former role, just FYI. And if you want to keep up with what I'm doing now, you can check me out on LinkedIn and subscribe to my newsletter, which is also called Content People.
Meet Jessica Holton, CEO of Ours
00:00:53
Speaker
We'll link it out in the show notes.
00:00:55
Speaker
Give it a shot. It's a once a week send where I share thoughts and actionable advice based on my 15 years of creative leadership. You can also listen, rate, and subscribe to content people wherever you get your podcasts. With me as always is Ian Servin, creative director of video at Brafftent and the producer of the show. Hello. Hi, Ian.
00:01:16
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Hey, Meredith. For today's show, super exciting. We actually got to talk with Jessica Holton, the CEO and co-founder of Ours. Ours is a relationship health company and it's really cool. It combines sort of normally what you would expect counseling, but also self-guided sessions through an app and it helps people build stronger personal relationships.
What Makes a Healthy Relationship?
00:01:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, in creative services industry, relationships are such an important part of our work experience, whether it's our relationships with coworkers, bosses, relationships with clients, collaborators, vendors. We talked with Jess about some of the fundamentals of healthy relationships and also her journey in building hours and what she's learned creating a company that relies so much on content in addition to traditional counseling. We really hope you enjoy our chat with Jessica. Here it is.
00:02:16
Speaker
We are super excited to have you. I was wondering if you could kind of intro yourself a little bit to our audience and then there are so many questions I have for you about the business that you've launched and are working on. I'm really excited to jump into this conversation with you.
00:02:32
Speaker
Thank you. I'm really excited as well. My name is Jessica Holton.
Jessica's Journey: From Finance to Ours
00:02:38
Speaker
I am one of the co-CEOs and co-founders of Ours, which is a modern relationship health company. I'm based in Brooklyn. I have a boyfriend and a puppy who I love, and I'm really excited to talk about Ours. Yeah.
00:02:58
Speaker
So I'm really excited to talk about ours as well. Maybe before we get to it and kind of explain to folks what it is, you've had a really interesting career journey thus far. You went to some very impressive schools, then you're kind of in finance for a bit, and now you're doing this really interesting entrepreneurial thing. I was wondering if you could walk our listeners through your professional journey thus far.
00:03:22
Speaker
Definitely. Well, thank you. So I like to think that my professional journey started as a little kid because my parents started. That actually sounds very sad, but it's really fun.
00:03:39
Speaker
My parents started a children's science museum when I was four, and they ran it until I was about 14. So my dad was a high school physics teacher, my mom had a business background, and this was essentially my second home. I basically grew up there.
00:03:57
Speaker
I did everything from checking customers in to thinking about what memberships could look like or birthday parties for kids. But really, what I took away from that was I watched tens of thousands of families walk through the door and they would spend hours playing together and learning together. I saw them build these bonds and these memories through this experience.
00:04:26
Speaker
So that colored my entire understanding of the power of business, the power of entrepreneurship, the power of building experiences for families.
00:04:36
Speaker
So I carried that through. I knew that I wanted to do something related to business. I ended up going to Georgetown University for undergrad, where I majored in accounting and finance. And I went into finance right after graduating. So I was at Oregon Stanley in the financial sponsors group doing classical investment banking, and then went into private equity at Carlisle in the consumer retail group.
00:04:58
Speaker
And while I was at Carlyle investing in really, really cool personal care and wellness concepts, that's when I fell in love with Power of Brands and their ability in particular to impact women's lives and help people have better lives. So after going to business school at Stanford, I started a nonprofit and then
00:05:21
Speaker
I'd have found myself interested in going to couples therapy personally, looked into it, and the rest is history because that's what really started the journey of building hours with Adam and Liz.
00:05:36
Speaker
I love that. It's really, it's interesting to think about little Jessica. And it reminds me, there's this nice like pizza shop around the corner from my apartment. And there is this maybe 13 year not even 13. I think he's like an 11 year old boy who it's his family's place. He is the most like a finches diligent.
00:05:56
Speaker
customer service, thoughtful person. I'm always like, that kid's going to be a billionaire in like 10 years. Yeah. He probably knows the best, what customers like and what their frustrations are and what they want more of or less of. It's like as a kid, that's what I so did and I just fell in love with the power of creating something that changes people's lives.
The Mission of Ours: Modern Relationship Health
00:06:21
Speaker
That is so cool. All right. Well, I want to jump to ours in a second, but also I'm super curious now, what sparked your parents to start the, it was a children's science museum. You said that's super interesting. That was the story there.
00:06:34
Speaker
I think it was my parents' dream. I think in particular it was my dad's dream for a while. He had taught physics for so long to high school students and my mom, they actually met over like science homework. So science always played a role for them.
00:06:56
Speaker
They found that there was no, as we were kids, there was no children's science museum in central New Jersey where I grew up and nearly all of our family vacations were to go to see children's science museums. So it was like why they had a dream of building something in central Jersey that didn't exist that could really facilitate families learning and playing and their whole look
00:07:24
Speaker
Their whole thing was science could be so fun if you get to play and learn at the same time. So they built that. And I mean, I had all of my birthday parties there and sleepovers there. And I went there when I was sick and stayed home from school. So it really was such a character in my life.
00:07:44
Speaker
Wow, it's kind of like entrepreneurship being in your blood a little bit. All right, cool. So, well, now you are co-CEO and founder of Ours. Could you kind of give people a quick rundown of what Ours is? Yeah, I'll share what Ours is. I'll also share why I got interested in this space.
00:08:06
Speaker
So ours is a modern relationship health company and we offer couples a way to align for their future, talk about the big stuff, invest in the most important part of their lives, their relationships. Our mission is to create a happier, healthier, kinder world through stronger relationships.
00:08:27
Speaker
I got really interested in this because I started looking into couples therapy for me and my boyfriend. We had been together for about four or so years at that point and things were really good. I loved our relationship. We had all the normal ups and downs, but I wanted to protect what we had and learn more about each other and our relationship. So we started looking into couples therapy.
00:08:54
Speaker
And we called I think about 20 or 30 therapists and left voicemails and kind of got called back by some of them, but not all of them. It was really hard to get started, but the biggest thing that
00:09:11
Speaker
I felt was shame because therapists would ask, what's wrong? What brings you here? What are we solving today? And my friends would say, oh my gosh, I didn't realize things were so wrong. I didn't realize you were going to break up. And that feeling of, yeah, it was like totally different. It was like internal in my relationship. There was none of that. And externally, all of a sudden, because I was looking into couples' counseling, this came up.
Building Ours: Team and Vision
00:09:38
Speaker
That feeling just felt so to think that there are millions of other couples and in particular for women who were made to feel ashamed of seeking out support in their relationship is really what inspired me to think about what could couples therapy look like if it were truly built from scratch with the modern couple in mind.
00:10:05
Speaker
Now, I mean, that makes so much sense to me. So hours, would you call it an app? Is it right to say hours is an app or do you think of it more as like a broader service? It's an experience or a brand that has tech, is very tech enabled and the product is
00:10:25
Speaker
the experience in a lot of ways, but we don't call it an app because the guides, the therapist, the live human touch is such a big part of the experience that couples go through. Got it. After you had this kernel of an idea, how did you find your co-founders and what was your process like to get funding, figure out the product, get it off the ground?
00:10:51
Speaker
I could talk about this forever, so thank you for asking the question. I got so lucky with the co-founder search. After I had this experience in couples therapy personally, I was starting to prototype a few different things within Relationship Health.
00:11:12
Speaker
And I was meeting everyone in the relationship health space just to do interviews, get to know. And a friend of a friend of a friend, maybe of a friend, introduced me to Adam, who was working at the time on a kind of venture studio model to build text message based technology apps to help foster proactive relationship health.
00:11:40
Speaker
So we got on the phone because we were like, oh, let's partner together. We could just get to know each other. And we had scheduled that phone call for about 30 minutes. This was April of 2020, the very beginning of the pandemic. And our conversation went on for two hours. And by the end, we were literally finishing each other's sentences. And we were very interested in partnering together. We were like, we definitely could partner and
00:12:07
Speaker
build together, but by two weeks later, we said, you know what, we could just build one company in such a more special, magical way together.
Why Premarital Counseling is Essential
00:12:16
Speaker
So we decided to be co-founders pretty quickly and have it looked back soon. And then one of our advisors, we asked, so Adam and I are both not therapists, and we asked one of our advisors to introduce us to
00:12:31
Speaker
the best couples therapist that he knew. And he introduced us to Liz and Liz and we had an incredible first conversation and we got off the phone and we were like.
00:12:42
Speaker
How could we get to work with someone like Liz? Or the next few months got to know Liz really well and she's just an absolutely incredible person. We got really lucky when we decided and she decided to work with us so closely. It's been about two years of building all together and testing and iterating. We feel very lucky about our relationship as co-founders.
00:13:11
Speaker
Yeah, and it sounds like some really nice chemistry in Kismet and that sounds lovely. So then, so it was like two years I'd imagine of like wild building. You guys are in kind of a launch phase right now, is that right? That's right.
00:13:32
Speaker
If can anybody utilize ours right now or is it currently, do you need to have a connection of some kind to get in on early stage version of it? Yeah. We just recently launched officially in the public. Right now, it is open to any couple who is engaged.
00:13:55
Speaker
To take a step back, our big mission is to serve all close relationships, romantic and non-romantic. So something you can do with your sibling or with your parent or your best childhood friend. So the only qualifications that we have right now are that you are a romantic couple and you are engaged because we're focused right now on building the best premarital counseling experience possible.
00:14:22
Speaker
So I'm really curious for your thoughts on this because someone, or I feel like I've seen some posts on LinkedIn to the effect of like, therapy should be a prereq for being a manager, which I actually think I wholly agree with. But I'm curious, do you feel like every couple should go through premarital counseling before they get married? I guess that's where Diane should go through premarital counseling.
00:14:47
Speaker
I believe that every couple should go to couples counseling before they become a couple. It's what? I truly, truly believe that. So look, we as individuals learn about relationships and how to be a partner in a relationship only from the adults in our lives growing up. And that could have been, in my case, 30 plus years ago. And so
00:15:14
Speaker
While relationships are the number one factor behind our health and happiness and the health of our relationships, really does matter. We don't have any way in the entire education system, in life, we don't have any way of knowing how to or learning how to be in a relationship.
00:15:36
Speaker
We are, by not doing couples counseling with a potential partner, we're leaving up to chance that we understand each other, that we have the same communication styles, that we have the same needs, that we can compromise together, that we can resolve conflict which is inevitably going to come up. We can build our dreams together. All of those things and so, so, so much more, we're leaving up to chance if we don't be intentional about our relationships.
00:16:05
Speaker
So what I believe, and I don't think we're that far off from a future where this is true, is that every couple should have those really intentional relationship conversations very, very early and often.
Destigmatizing Couples Therapy
00:16:20
Speaker
and that having experts and all of the supporting community and the know-how that exists out there influence the way that we learn about relationships so we can really be our best self as our partner, but also so that we can get more out of this life by getting more out of relationships.
00:16:41
Speaker
That's so interesting. I think someone on TikTok was talking about how we don't do enough personal finance education in school, maybe one semester, one class, but basically huge, wildly important, all-encompassing life skill that we just have to self-educate or learn on. As you're talking, I'm thinking, man,
00:17:03
Speaker
I guess, yeah, same thing around relationships that is really interesting to think about. So I feel like therapy on the whole has basically lost its stigma. But as you touched on earlier, I think there is anxiety or shame around couples counseling. If a friend confides in you that they're going to it, it's like, oh God, what's going on with them?
00:17:30
Speaker
And I know ours is kind of working to change that. I'm curious, why do you think we've kind of lost our shame or anxieties around individual therapy, but that couples therapy bias is still haunting us a little bit?
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, so a few thoughts here. One, internally as a team, we hypothesized that the destigmatization of couples therapy and couples counseling is about five years behind the destigmatization of individual therapy.
00:18:04
Speaker
where in the last 10 years, we've seen this explosion in embracing individual counseling. We talk in society about my therapist and about what my therapist said, and we get recommendations between individuals for therapists. And we're starting to see that more and more in couples counseling. So a few, I think, things to dig in there. I'm curious to hear what you're most interested in. I think one is,
00:18:35
Speaker
Therapy, especially as an individual with a therapist, is such a private, vulnerable experience where you're talking about things that you might talk about for the very first time with your therapist that you literally never even said to yourself.
00:18:51
Speaker
And couples counseling, it's scary to open up that circle and bring someone new into that circle of vulnerability with a third party and you don't know what to expect and you're kind of looking at your partner and saying,
00:19:06
Speaker
I trust this relationship so much that I trust it in this new environment. So it is a scary thing to do this new thing. But I think that the pandemic has played a big role in one, highlighting
00:19:25
Speaker
just how important our relationships are when we were stuck in the same place with a partner and that made us so happy or that did not make us so happy. It highlighted, it magnified anything that was going on in relationships.
00:19:41
Speaker
And then I think that the conversation just more broadly around mental health and emotional health in general is embracing all kinds of therapy and couples therapy is very much a part of that. But it's still something that when we talk to potential investors, it's really interesting because there are some investors who are
00:20:04
Speaker
who are like, this is what I need right now. I'm so excited about this. And then there are some investors who say, I can see why some other couples would need this. And there's still very much that kind of, I think we're lessening the shame associated with going to couples therapy, but we're still not at the point where couples are
00:20:26
Speaker
on the whole saying that should be me doing couples therapy. So I think it's happening very quickly as a result of the pandemic, but definitely it's still behind individual therapy. And that's why we get so excited about playing a big role in
00:20:46
Speaker
spearheading the momentum behind the relationship health movement.
Integrating Relationship Care into Wellness
00:20:49
Speaker
And we think that in 10 years, we'll be looking back and saying, okay, we as society have figured out how to take care of our physical bodies. We've figured out how to take care of our mental and emotional health. And now we've figured out how to take care of our relationship health.
00:21:11
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's really interesting. I guess, I wonder, I'm curious if you feel like, I think over the pandemic, mental health just became something that everyone was suddenly a lot more comfortable talking about. Even in the workplace, it was like, how do managers support their team's mental health? How do businesses create policies and processes that support people, their mental health? And I wonder if,
00:21:37
Speaker
you tell me like, is personal therapy like a gateway drug to couples therapy where you're like, I don't have to be broken to be made more whole or dig deeper and have fun and enjoy like, you know, the word I'm looking for, I guess just kind of like
00:21:55
Speaker
exploring your own psyche a bit and then the idea that this would be so fascinating to really see not just what makes me tick, but what makes me and my partner tick and how are we working together. Do you think there's a trend there or do you think it's separate?
00:22:13
Speaker
I do think there's a trend there. If you look at the couples that we serve today, usually, but not always, at least one partner in the relationship has either gone to therapy or has been really interested in going to therapy and comes back from that and says,
00:22:34
Speaker
wow, what could this, what could happen if the two of us go to therapy and talk about our relationship? And there's a statistic, something like I think 70 or so percents of what is talked about in individual therapy is relationships. So I think that it kind of opens up the possibility of, okay, I can talk about my relationship to another person.
00:23:00
Speaker
What could this all feel like if another person was there? But the other thing is our program and our brand is we're all about making this really fun and meaningful and special and
00:23:17
Speaker
What we're building this experience feels like a microcosm of what a relationship ideally feels like. Where in a relationship we have ups and downs and we have so much laughter and so much joy and heartbreak and
00:23:35
Speaker
problems that we have to figure out how to navigate and adventures that we get to go on. There's so many emotions in any given relationship.
Ours' Relationship Program Explained
00:23:44
Speaker
And that's the experience that we're building as well. There's ups and downs, it's not always happy, but it's really, really meaningful and beautiful. And I think that that's important because I think we have this picture of what
00:23:57
Speaker
couples therapy looks like in our heads from media or from movies that always show it in very grim situations. We're flipping that on its head and making it something that is celebrated and is an experience versus something that you have to go do or that you're dragging yourself to go do. It's something that you really want to do, you crave, just like you might crave working out.
00:24:26
Speaker
Like, have you seen this show, couples therapy on Showtime? Yeah. Yeah. I've done just the first episode this past weekend and I was like, I'm really excited to talk to Jessica, especially about, it just made me more excited for this combo. But like that show is wild because it's so interesting. Yeah. And I,
00:24:49
Speaker
feel like in some ways maybe because it's sensationalized, I presume, I don't know, but a bit of a depiction of probably more traditionally, I'd say what we think of as couples therapy where it's like, you've been together for a while and you're like, we have a problem. We need some help working through XYZ as opposed to like a proactive or super fun experience like you're describing. So what is for a couple who was like, yeah, we really want to do this. Let's do ours. What would the process be like?
00:25:21
Speaker
Well, first of all, if anyone is saying that, welcome. We are excited to have you. So right now, we are a premarital counseling experience. And what that means is that for four weeks, couples get a hybrid approach to couples' wellness and relationship health.
00:25:41
Speaker
We are actually not therapy right now, and it's a couples wellness program, an experience that couples go through. The overarching goals being talk about the big stuff, align for the future, and have a really meaningful special time talking about something that you might not have talked about otherwise.
00:26:00
Speaker
So the experience is we take the best of the human touch and the magic that happens between a third person seeing you as a couple and understanding where you came from and where you want to go. We marry that to the power of technology and content and provide a hybrid approach to relationship health. So couples are doing a mix of
00:26:26
Speaker
Meeting with their guide, all of our guides are licensed therapists at the master's level or higher, and they're meeting with their guide live over Zoom and doing 45-minute sessions that way, combined with doing what we call loveware sessions. Loveware is our product, so it's like software for your love.
00:26:44
Speaker
And those love-wear sessions are really where the work happens. So they're doing sessions on things like, what should our finances look like when we are married, if different from today? Do we want to have a family? What does that family look like? How do we resolve conflict together? How do we make each other feel hard? All of these various sessions that they do are on love-wear, so it's asynchronous and on their own time.
00:27:11
Speaker
And throughout these four weeks, they're doing challenges, talking about the big stuff, and getting supported by their guide along the way. And we've designed it to be the most important thing in the couples' lives at a given time. So we encourage couples to do it when they have about a month to really focus on hours and focus on having these conversations and making these plans and working through things that might come up from that.
00:27:39
Speaker
and really celebrate each other and celebrate the happy work that goes into building a relationship and a future.
00:27:50
Speaker
Got it. I'm curious because there have been a lot of more tech-based counseling alternatives that have popped up over the past couple of
The Future of Therapy: Tech Meets Humanity
00:28:01
Speaker
years. I think we have the pandemic, so like TalkSpace and BetterHelp, things like that. Why do you think those tools are becoming so popular? I'm really curious to know how you think therapeutic tools and tech is going to keep evolving over the next several years. What do you think the future of
00:28:19
Speaker
counseling is, do you think it's in person? Do you think it's remote? Or do you think it's ours, like a mix of kind of personal and then tech-based work? So I think that they are popping up a lot more and becoming more in our consciousness. One, because people want them. People want to talk about their emotions. They want to work on their mental health. They want to invest time in their emotions and
00:28:49
Speaker
take care of their mental health, just like we take care of our physical health. So I think that tech companies are following that trend and really following what consumers are asking for. Why I think tech companies in particular are popping up more and more, I think it's a combination of
00:29:09
Speaker
Individuals who want to maybe dip their toes in the water of going to therapy or going to counseling, but don't quite want to open their front door, get in the car, go to an office to go to a therapist. But they want to feel what it's like and kind of understand what this experience could feel like.
00:29:30
Speaker
They also, I think tech companies and as a tech company, we try to make it as easy as possible to get started in an industry that is notoriously really hard to find therapists and to make the scheduling work and to figure out insurance and payments and logistics and who the right match is. I think
00:29:53
Speaker
One of the biggest pain points that mental health tech startups are working through is how to make getting started easier and more convenient and more accessible and approachable.
00:30:06
Speaker
In terms of thinking about the future and what this looks like, I love that question because I love thinking about where the future is headed. I think we'll see a lot of innovation in this space. I think one, we might start to see more branded in-person
00:30:26
Speaker
offerings, especially as we kind of reemerge from the pandemic back into in-person, we're all craving this in-person human connection. And I think within mental health, that is absolutely at the center of it. So I think that might be something we see. I think for better or for worse, and I'm always optimistic, so we'll see, but I think that we'll start seeing even more kind of like AI,
00:30:55
Speaker
tech-driven startups that potentially serve to replace the therapist or replace kind of the personal elements of this. And then I think we'll see different models of mental wellness. So I think, again, for better or for worse, I think there are a lot of nuances to these innovations, but I think we'll see more and more
00:31:24
Speaker
class-based offerings within mental health or peer-to-peer models or group models, all in favor of making mental health more accessible and more durable. I think
00:31:39
Speaker
I think that our hybrid approach where we take the best of the human touch and marry it to technology is at that sweet spot of there's just this magic that can't be replaced from knowing your guide and knowing a therapist and building that relationship.
00:31:58
Speaker
So I think that we'll probably see even more exploration around this hybrid approach where a guide or a therapist might be there, but also so is the tech and the content and that asynchronous piece that exists already. Wow, thanks. Early on in that response, you said you think you might see more branded counseling or therapeutic experiences. What does that mean?
00:32:26
Speaker
So I think, you know how Soul Cycle was one of the first branded cycling classes? I think that we will see, so I think it's kind of two things. One, I think that we'll see destinations, almost like spas, that are for mental health. And I think that because before the pandemic, I wanted to start something like that, where there was a studio that we could go to for this kind of community feeling.
00:32:53
Speaker
So I think that this is like an in-person retail kind of trend where it's not only closing the door and seeing your individual therapist, but it's a community, it's a spot, it's a destination that you go to to work on mental health or be around other like-minded people and feel that connection. The second thing is I think that from a branded perspective, I think that there are
00:33:23
Speaker
potentially going to be different ways of delivering this service to individuals and to couples and to anyone seeking out mental health. Whether it be working with other brands and partnering with them or white labeling technology to be in therapist hands but amplify their efforts and expand their efforts. I think that
00:33:52
Speaker
It's becoming, you know, therapy more and more is kind of this, like, status symbol in a way where we as society, and I think this is a really good thing, is that we're proud to go to therapy. So I think that that means we will see more and more brands that are built for both Millennials and Gen Z in particular, um, Carpa.
00:34:17
Speaker
thinking of SoulCycle as like a, or a version of that as kind of like your one-stop therapy shop. You've got your one-on-ones, your group sessions, your exercises, like four different things. Maybe that is the millennial Gen Z, the bridge we need to get together. Well, that's brilliant.
00:34:40
Speaker
Wow. That's like, that's so interesting. And also the idea of like white label technology for counselors or therapists, like maybe by the nap where you like, I don't know, answer questions once a week or something. That's super.
00:34:53
Speaker
Wow, thanks for walking me through that.
Innovative Therapist Engagement at Ours
00:34:55
Speaker
And then, so I know from the last conversations we've had that you mentioned how ours is kind of a uniquely good experience for counselors and therapists. And you kind of like educated me a little bit about historically how counselors and therapists haven't always been set up for success by their employing entities. I found that really interesting. I was wondering if you could kind of talk about that a little bit and also how ours has engaged differently with therapists and professional counselors.
00:35:23
Speaker
I would love to. I have to give all of the credit to my co-founder, Liz, who is an incredible therapist. She's been a therapist for years and years, and she's had experiences all over the map in terms of positive and very, very negative experiences.
00:35:42
Speaker
And what I've learned from her and interviewing so many, truly hundreds of therapists is that therapists, they have such an incredibly demanding
00:35:58
Speaker
special job that their clients rely on them for their lives. And they therapists have, they're working hourly, so they're only getting paid for times when they're seeing clients.
00:36:15
Speaker
This is generally, and then I'll talk about ours. They are holding all of their clients, and of course they're trained to do this and are excellent at this. They're trained to hold their clients' emotions. They care for their clients. There's so much emotional energy and investment going out there.
00:36:35
Speaker
And yet they are being paid very, very little and it depends on where they are in the country. It depends on what if they're in a private practice, group practice, just starting out really experienced, but they get paid so little relative to the impacts that they have on people's lives.
00:36:54
Speaker
So, as it relates to ours, we do things so differently. We are therapists who work with us. They are ours. And I mean by that, what I mean by that is they are the company and they are the experience that couples has. They're the heartbeat of what couples do with us.
00:37:18
Speaker
several different ways. One, we employ our therapists, whether part-time or full-time, but not as contractors. They are truly part of the team. A lot of other places don't employ therapists to get their insights. Instead, they are kind of cogs in the wheel or inputs or things that could be easily flacked up and down. We employ therapists. Therapists are
00:37:42
Speaker
part of our co-founding team, they are part of our leadership team, they are our advisors, our employees, they are our team. So I think one is just tactically the employment model of therapists who now can get paid throughout the week and throughout the month
00:38:02
Speaker
regardless of demand and if clients show up that day or not. So having that financial stability plus benefits and the ability to take time off is something that just doesn't exist on average. Secondly, we are a fully remote company.
00:38:21
Speaker
We allow for a lot of flexibility and therapists can work part-time with us full-time as we grow and have more optionality. We really are optimized for flexibility. So therapists might want to work with hours to see couples and then they might in their private practice be working with individuals. So it's a really great way to kind of have autonomy over where they're spending energy in their career.
00:38:48
Speaker
The third and fourth, because of this full-time model that we have with therapists, what we're building is truly an interdisciplinary team where a therapist who works with ours can, in the same day, see couples, talk to couples, work with couples, and maybe create content or create
00:39:12
Speaker
be part of the marketing campaigns or lead what we think the strategy for the product should be or provide feedback or talk to customers or look at the financials or anything part of flexing their creativity and other analytical skills and kind of marry that to doing therapy. It really helps
00:39:33
Speaker
kind of brought in if someone's interested in doing something beyond helps grow and learn and lead. And then lastly, our particular model. So therapists who work with ours are working with, of course, our couples who tend to be way more proactive and preventative in nature. And it gives therapists who are often working with some of
00:39:59
Speaker
So really hard cases, it gives them kind of variety in who they're seeing. So it helps them see couples who are earlier in their relationship, perhaps therapists feel like they can have even more of an impact because it is earlier in their relationship and they're really eager to, couples are really eager to dive in. So all of those things have been intentionally designed to make sure that
00:40:25
Speaker
our therapists love working four hours and feel seen, recognized, understood, and are truly, truly part of the team. Wow. So it's like a different pay model, employees not hourly. Yes. Opportunity to learn about different facets of the business if that's something they want to leverage or explore later. And then I think I understand what you're saying, which is that
00:40:50
Speaker
newer couples volunteering to proactively go through a pleasant experience like this might be a different beak in their week than folks who are in a slightly different situation who need a different type of support. That makes sense. That's really interesting.
00:41:12
Speaker
The other thing that we are building is a community. And I know that that sounds like what every business should be building, but we really think that for therapists, it's, again, like they're going into these rooms or onto Zoom.
00:41:29
Speaker
and they're having these conversations with their client and then they're going to the next one and then the next one. It's really hard to know if they're doing a good job or if they're having the impact they want to have and they have questions like, how could I do this even better? It's a really lonely job in a lot of ways.
00:41:48
Speaker
we are building, we have a network that is open to any therapist. It doesn't have to be someone who's working in terms of an employment with ours. Any therapist who's working with couples is invited to join the network. We're building a community where therapists can get to know each other, support each other, learn from each other, challenge each other, and really just support each other. That's not something that necessarily exists in a lot of places.
00:42:18
Speaker
Yeah, I can totally see that like an actual community and workplace. Yeah.
00:42:24
Speaker
Well, all right, so the Podvast is called Content People. And I know that ours, and you referenced it, has spent a lot of time on the content that users will engage with. It sounds like you've done a ton of interviews and research with counselors and therapists about what the content should be about, what the question should entail. I was wondering if you could talk us through what that research and content creation process has been like for you. I'm very curious.
00:42:50
Speaker
So content is almost everything for us. And we are currently in a sprint around even more revamping our content and our content process. So this is very top of mind. So content is, what we think about as content is the all of the content that goes into the hours experience to drive knowledge, to drive the experience and really the foundation.
00:43:16
Speaker
of what couples go through when working with ours.
00:43:22
Speaker
Our content takes shape in our love-wear sessions. And what our love-wear sessions are designed to be hour-long conversations, basically, that have discussion prompts. They have psychoeducation, where couples are learning new skills. They're putting those skills right into practice with discussion prompts and exercises and activities. They might be asked to draw something or go on a scavenger hunt.
00:43:51
Speaker
and then come back and share with each other or they might be asked to guess something about their partner and see if they get it right. Or they might be prompted to have really meaningful discussion in a very structured way and it feels really safe.
00:44:06
Speaker
So there's so much that goes into our content creation process on that front. And I kind of walk through the inputs, the building, and then the testing. So in terms of the inputs, we are very research-backed and data-driven. So we do a ton of internal research and external research.
00:44:25
Speaker
So in all of our sessions, we cross-check and build into the session's external research. So decades and decades of research around relationships and couples and mental health and emotional health and incorporate that into ours. We also do internal research. So for any given session that we're building, we are under Liz's direction looking at
00:44:52
Speaker
What is the best way to build this for our proactive preventive couple who might want to talk about this in a slightly different way so that they're moving it forward instead of a reactive way, which is where a lot of the research today is focused?
00:45:11
Speaker
So we kind of take all this input, we combine that with we talk to a ton of couples. So we do a lot of interviews throughout the week of both customers and couples and understand what they want to know and what they're struggling with and where those opportunities are.
00:45:29
Speaker
Then we take all of that and put it into a script. And the script is really where the content creation process happens. So in that we are taking what we took from research and building out a narrative that is super easy to understand and explain. And then we go through
00:45:49
Speaker
building out the individual exercises from there. So from the script, we say, okay, we are teaching or we want couples to learn maybe how to identify what their conflict pattern is. Then let's do an exercise around a structured discussion that says, okay, let's identify a conflict that we might have had, a small one, and kind of dissect it and see what is our conflict pattern there and then synthesize the learnings that way.
00:46:18
Speaker
So that's like the during the building of the content. And then the last part is the testing phase. And this is super important. We test every single one of our session, every single piece of our content with several couples to make sure that it is achieving our goals and that we're every single time we test it incrementally improving it so that it is an amazing experience.
00:46:41
Speaker
And the three design principles that we generally use as a filter to make sure we're on the right track is, does this change your life? Is it something that you'll remember for 50 years? And is it fun? Those like research expert input expertise.
00:47:00
Speaker
Then kind of the second bit is exploring with the couples what's resonating with them, what, etc. Figuring out like iterating and tinkering with the precise
00:47:16
Speaker
order and nature of the questions, and then coming back to the guiding principles. It sounds fascinating and so complex and interesting. It is all of those things for sure. Anything that really surprised you about the process?
Insights on Relationships and Personal Growth
00:47:35
Speaker
I'm really curious, do you have a different perception of relationships now and what it takes to have
00:47:44
Speaker
a healthy, intentional relationship than you did when you started this process? I really do. What I have learned from seeing this is there's really no right or wrong way to engage with a partner and to be in a relationship. I think I came into building hours thinking I was going to help couples have
00:48:14
Speaker
the ideal relationship. And I think I had an image of what that looks like in my head. And over the last couple of years, through all these exercises that, I mean, I've tested all of these with my boyfriend and he has tested all of them with me. And I've seen hundreds and thousands of couples go through this.
00:48:35
Speaker
What I have learned is that there's no right way to be in a relationship. And what works in a relationship today doesn't necessarily work for those seen to people in a relationship a year from now or 10 years from now or a week from now, because we're just different human beings throughout.
00:48:54
Speaker
And so my biggest takeaway and people ask me a lot because I'm not a therapist and I think we all think that therapists have secrets and they know like secrets to life that us regular people don't know and it is really true.
00:49:12
Speaker
But the secret that I feel like I've uncovered is that at the end of the day, relationships are meant to be enjoyed and relationships are what make us the most human and that we have the most human experience because of relationships. And the relationships being meant or meant to be enjoyed means that
00:49:31
Speaker
I used to think that I had to kind of go through like a checklist of my relationship and say, this is working, this is not, this is really not what I need in five years. This is going to be an issue and have like all this anxiety wrapped up and
00:49:47
Speaker
seeing this relationship gets an A plus and should continue. And as I've shifted my mindset there, it's really about, am I the best person I can be in this relationship? Am I supporting my partner in the way that I want to support and be a partner? And are we having fun? Are we enjoying? Are we having an adventure that we want to have? And do we feel loved? And do we feel like life is better because of our relationship?
00:50:17
Speaker
So obviously there's a lot of nuances there. It's not always so easy as should we continue because we're enjoying each other's company. There's so many different parts there, but that's, I think the overall beauty of what we get to do is we support every single couple in wherever they are in their relationship in the ups and the downs and hopefully help them have a really meaningful experience.
Reflections and Next Steps
00:50:42
Speaker
Wow, well, thank you so much, Jessica, for sharing all this, and for kind of walking us through it. I think it's so cool. I feel like I would say I have a pitch for a version of this that's for managers. Oh, I love it.
00:51:00
Speaker
There is also no people manager who wouldn't benefit from some type of support in a formal capacity for all of the complicated emotions that they are holding and feeling and all of that too. So, I'm very excited to see what ours does next and to follow you guys. Is there anything else you feel like I didn't ask about that you'd want to maybe share or chat about?
00:51:28
Speaker
I don't mean so. This was so fun. Yeah, this was really fun. Thank you so much. Hey, everyone. We really hope you enjoyed our conversation with Jessica. Next week, we'll be talking with Brapton's own Dave Snyder. Dave is our Chief Services Officer here at Brapton, and he has a ton of insight into why we do the things that we do at Brapton and the lessons that we've learned along the way.
00:51:53
Speaker
and we'll make a couple little plugs here to support the show. You can rate, review, and subscribe. We appreciate it. Those things make a big difference. And if you liked this conversation with Jess, you would probably enjoy my newsletter called Content People. We'll throw a link in the shout outs to subscribe. And that's it for today's show. Thank you so much for listening. And if you want to get in touch with us, you can always email us at contentpeople at wrappedin.com.