Our pathway, as laid out here, includes a number of elements (particularly within Phases 2, 3, and 5) that you can move through at your own pace. As such, the time taken to get certified is heavily dependent upon your own schedule, how you go about engaging your own clients etc. In addition, the thoughts below may be helpful in thinking through this:
Phase 1: Your LifePlan — The LifePlan itself is a 2-day process. From the time you first reach out to us, to the time you are sitting in Day 1 of your LifePlan, that gap is typically 1-2 months, as we align dates with you.
Phase 2: Your Online Training — If your own LifePlan clarifies and affirms the decision to move forward with our training pathway, you’ll sign your provisional license agreement and begin the online training portion of your training. If you were to go through the online training (Phase 2) from start to finish, without breaks, it would probably take about 20 hours, but of course we don’t recommend moving through in one setting 🙂 Rather, we typically advise creating consistent time, in blocks of 2 hours or so, to move through the training at a healthy pace. As such, you can move through Phase 2 in perhaps 4-6 weeks.
Phase 3: Serving clients under your provisional license — You are responsible for engaging your own clients (2 clients for StratOp, and 4 clients for LifePlan). You’ll want to begin engaging potential clients in a more intentional way during Phase 2 of the pathway (or sooner). This phase is about helping you to experience guiding clients through the process, bring them great value, and give you further clarity as to whether this work is well aligned with you. Completing Phase 3 is likely to take, at a minimum, 3 months, but again it depends heavily on your own schedule and pace.
Phase 4: The in-person training, hosted in the Denver area of Colorado — Groups are intentionally small, and scheduled on an as-needed basis (with some good lead time to allow you to plan your travel etc.) The training is 3 days for LifePlan and 4 days for StratOp. Presently, our next in-person training is scheduled for mid-November (exact dates to be confirmed). You can apply to attend the in-person training once you’ve completed Phase 2 and are making good progress in Phase 3. At the end of this training, you are fully certified in the Paterson Process (be that LifePlan or StratOp).
Phases 5 and 6 continue on, into the future. As such, the journey from Phase 1 to the end of Phase 4 is about a 6-8 month journey, at a minimum. You may want to plan for more like 12 months. Of course, the pace of the journey is built on the assumption that most Guides moving through our training pathway have other jobs and commitments, which may or may not be the case for you.