JTBD Interview #11 – Cathy Stretches Her Creative Brain

Cathy is a retired educator who now works as a contractor providing leadership coaching across industries. She has spent the past 2 years doing this, and the past 18 months writing a book that will help her promote the new business.

At the beginning of 2024 she was 10-11 months into the book writing project, with around 25% of the book left to write. She found Janis' visual ideas and they stopped her and caused her to think about the idea in a different way. She noticed that other people commenting would also interpret the idea depending on their own background, and as she likes to help people see the world in a different way through her training, this approach appealed.

At the same time, this was 'outside of right field' - a real challenge for her given her strengths are written and verbal communications, not a visual communicator. She felt this 'pushed her out of her comfort zone', allowed her to learn something new, and would be a fun challenge to do as a hobby that could also potentially be content for her book.

She joined the course in January 2025 - looking to learn how to show your ideas in a visual way without words. She remembers it being $40-50 dollars - 'cheap' - this was not a lot of money to spend on a course, The benefit was the course was available on-demand, always there online, and she had the freedom to fit this into her schedule and around her 'brain space'. It also meant she didn't need to join another course where others might be there who have more skill.

The thought was 'How can I learn how to use this in my business, as it caused me to stop and think and I want to cause others to do that, too?' - however this is also seen as a hobby learning project to get a new skills.

- She first found Janis on LinkedIn, then went to his Substack, and eventually his website

- She wasn't looking for a course to learn, she went to Janis' website to find more of his visuals and see more of his art

- Once she saw the course she thought 'Maybe someone might be able to teach me how to do that?'

- She wanted to learn Janis' creative process - how does he come up with ideas, and how might she come up with new ideas, too

- it was 'not her forte' but this would be fun to learn to push her out of her comfort zone

To take the course she needed to carve out time from writing the book and her hobby of hiking. She set aside 2 hours a week to 'dig in' to the course and stretch her brain. This was planned time that she put into her schedule to ensure the training was done - and she learned that this showed the thinking process, could see Janis showing sketching in real time as he comes up with ideas, and gave a checklist for the process that she could follow

She hit a roadblock when trying to learn how to use Figma - and this coincided with her editor moving forward on the book, so the visuals were dropped from that and her focus moved elsewhere. As someone that hasn't used Figma before, it is a bit daunting, so more simple explanations of how to use that tool would be good.