Worst of all, we didn’t get anywhere.

All that time and effort and nothing was growing. We were exhausted and discouraged. By this point we wanted to make this work more than anything. We’d overcome countless obstacles and challenges. Surely there was a solution to this.

Earlier that year we’d stumbled on amazing success when we’d done our first-ever annual planning.

Previously we let each year pretty much unfold on its own. When we met, we decided to focus on one area of the business for several weeks at a time because we were both getting worn out by all we were doing. In January we primarily worked on Master ABA, and in just a few weeks we saw so much progress we stuck with that focus even though the calendar we’d created had other ideas.

It worked so well we never looked back. Our other priorities melted away; we shut down other sites, stopped creating resources for Teachers Pay Teachers, forgot about creating videos or posting to social media.

Eventually we made this connection with the training. We picked one person to follow instead of all of them. We spent less time watching and more time doing.

We all need mentors. The internet and social media make it easy for us to learn from people we admire, but we need to be selective. They share our goals and values, but even with that, you might need to whittle down the list further. There are just too many good people to follow these days.

We created The Balanced BCBA® so that professionals in the field would have a single resource they could turn to, someone who understood the unique nuances of ABA.