Career Coaching Secrets

From Personal Struggle to Scalable Solution: How Jane Macky Is Transforming Addiction Support

• Davis Nguyen

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In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, Jane Macky, founder of We The Village, shares how her personal journey led to creating a powerful, evidence-based coaching program for families of people struggling with addiction. Learn how she blends digital and live coaching, scales impact with clinical trials, and trains professionals using the CRAFT method.

You can find her on:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-macky-6a403710/
https://www.wethevillage.co
https://www.instagram.com/wethevillage.co/?hl=bg


You can also watch this podcast on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/@CareerCoachingSecrets

If you are a career coach looking to grow your business you can find out more about Purple Circle at http://joinpurplecircle.com

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Jane Macky:

You know, when I reflect on what we've done, it's take something really personal that was a gap that we identified and to make it more accessible to people. So like craft is one thing. There are like a million things out there that people struggle with. And so we've gone really focused. And I think that blending the digital asynchronous and the live aspect I just think that's really powerful.

Davis Nguyen:

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. Before Purple Circle, I started and scaled several seven and eight figure career coaching businesses myself and consulted with two career coaching businesses that are now doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or just building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Rexhen:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Rexhen, and today's guest is Jane Macky. Jane is the founder and CEO of We The Village and the certified Craft coach who's been pioneering a radically compassionate approach to addiction recovery. With a background in philosophy, psychology, and digital strategy, Jane blends science and heart to lead the only clinically proven online program for families impacted by addiction. What's unique about her work is that she doesn't coach the person in addiction directly. Instead, she empowers one motivated family member with evidence-based tools to create lasting change. And it's working. Her programs are backed by the NIH and NIDA. And now they're also being used to train professionals. And it's a pleasure for me to have her on the podcast today. Welcome to the show, Jane.

Jane Macky:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Rexhen:

Jane, so tell me a little bit more about what inspired you to become a coach and then start your own coaching business.

Jane Macky:

So as you mentioned, I was working in digital advertising. I was part of a startup that was pioneering mobile advertising. So we were creating some of the first iPad, iPhone apps for big Fortune 500 companies. And while on the one hand, I was helping these companies connect to clients to sell more cars and cheese and underwear, I had a relationship with a colleague who was a mentor, someone that I admired a lot. And it became clear to me that he was struggling with addiction. As we were working late one night on a pitch for a big client, I go to order dinner thinking, hey, we're going to be here a long time. He pulls out a substance to fuel him through the night. And I start to get the sense that something was wrong here. So while we're trying to sell Connect Oak, customers, clients with fees, underwear, and cars. I'm going online to try and find out what to do, friend, cocaine addiction, and met with crickets. And that was the first sort of moment when I started to realize, hey, there is a big gap here. And it wouldn't be for some years beyond that till I found a method that really inspired me. I tried a lot of things. I went to Al-Anon Maranon meetings, a sort of 12-step approach for families. I went to talk therapy, but Most of them had me leaving feeling sort of disempowered and feeling bad about the care that I had for this person that was really struggling. So it wasn't until I found the method that I now work with, which is community reinforcement and family training or CRAFT. It's an evidence-based approach. It's an evidence-based therapy, actually. And it's really, really compassionate. It works by having families sort of reconnect and use their influence to shift harmful behaviors and sort of learn skills to support long-term addiction recovery and sort of just removing sort of the stigma and sort of the scare factor of it and sort of normalizing it. We know that one in two Americans have a loved one struggling with addiction today. So it's much more normal than we might think. But it was in finding this approach after years of sort of struggling and watching my now husband, who's 10 years into recovery, struggling, that I realized, hey, there's something here. And it was only accessible in a book at that time. So I wanted to bring it online for families. And so I became certified in it. I was mentored by the creator of this evidence-based approach. He was a researcher and a therapist. So really great at those things. Not necessarily really great at trying to get the message out there. the way that it needed to be so when i learned how simple some of these concepts were it inspired me to do everything i could to to get it out to people

Rexhen:

like when you brought it online that's when the coaching part starts in right

Jane Macky:

yeah so so we started by running group sessions over zoom um that was kind of and we tested a couple different ways of of to make it more accessible it started in a group online setting and over time we've sort of revised it to be a multi-tiered coaching sort of approach so The first tier is really about just running through an online curriculum. So essentially, you're getting coached by online videos, myself and online videos. And the next tier is sort of group coaching. So that's a little bit more expensive because you're having live interaction with a certified coach or the top tier is one-on-one coaching, again, alongside this curriculum. And I think that's one thing coming from this digital background is, especially with an approach like craft, it's really, it makes a lot more cost effective and it gets a lot more out of our time if we can have our clients learn a little bit online and then come into a session and then we can move forward especially with a topic like addiction where we're trying to change the narrative we're trying to have them think about things differently and we're working with a very distressed client often so that's something that's been really helpful to blend that sort of asynchronous and synchronous live aspect for us.

Rexhen:

And the craft method, is it similar to an intervention or kind of different?

Jane Macky:

Yeah, great question. So we could call it an intervention. It has nine core sort of themes or like little sessions that we run. So as a coach myself, I'm trained to deliver these kind of nine core topics. And what I would call like skills. So I'm working with a client to upscale them in these nine different areas. And those are things like communications, like techniques. So being able to communicate positively, to reconnect with their loved one, using positive reinforcement. How do we rebuild sort of self-efficacy with their loved one who's struggling with addiction? How do we allow for natural negative consequences? Sort of these behavioral principles that sort of shift the way substance use and the harmful behaviors with a loved one by using the relationship of the concerned person that we're working with. And one core sort of part of it is how do we talk about treatment? How do we talk about the fact that maybe you really need some professional help and maybe it's traditional professional help. Oftentimes when people say intervention, they think of rehab. So like that could be an option, but it could also be working with an addiction counselor or a therapist or attending a you know, a meeting or people have different sort of things that might be appropriate given how severe the situation is and what the person is willing to do. But it's more compassionate in that we're helping the family with skills that they can collaborate with their loved ones. So an intervention historically and what you've probably seen on HBO, if you've ever watched that series, is more of a confrontational approach and to someone going through that, it can feel like an ambush. can feel very coercive. I've worked with clients where it's really driven a wedge in the family and years later, there's still resentments and disconnection and craft is really about reconnecting and reaffirming relationships. Like that's why family members have influence because we care about what each other thinks and bringing that care together in a way that's collaborative and empowers the person to recover as opposed to sort of enforcing it and it's like this it can have the same outcome right getting a person to become willing to enter treatment but it's a totally different sort of way for the family to move forward together and to really support recovery and and yeah it's very different

Rexhen:

interesting and with your coaching business right now who you're working with typically are the family members not the person directly You almost maybe never have interaction with a person or?

Jane Macky:

Correct. So yeah, we work with one person who's concerned about their loved one and motivated to make change. Oftentimes they're seeking help before the loved one. The sort of definition of addiction is kind of to continue using a substance despite the harm that it's creating in your life. So what we know is often that person wants to make a change. Maybe they're even trying to make a change. but it's really hard and they're not succeeding or not succeeding enough. And it's really scary when they realize that. They're like, I don't have control over this. And that is really, really hard. They're kind of stuck in that space. The family member, they're a little bit more in present mind, have more of their functioning together, though they're also struggling because it's really hard to see someone go through that that you love. But yeah, they're willing to do the work. And so they're a great client. What we deal with a lot, though, is that they've been fed all this misinformation, right? Like that you need to kick the person out, that they need to hit rock bottom and those sort of things. So we do a lot of work educating them in this more compassionate and evidence-based and effective approach. But yeah, we work with one family member and it only... we don't need the whole family to buy into this. And we don't, we just need one person motivated that has enough sort of interaction with their loved one to start implementing changes in their behavior that can change the whole sort of outcome to the family.

Rexhen:

And how do people find you or how do people find We The Village and reach out to you in terms of

Jane Macky:

like? Yeah, so that's kind of our biggest focus at the moment. So we've spent We've been in business since 2018 or really like the kernel of the idea started in 2017. We've spent a lot of time perfecting our programs and our approach. We've run them through clinical trials funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. We have efficacy data and validation on what families can expect. And that was really important to us because when we were going through this, addiction world is really scary and it's often really opaque and there's often people asking for a lot of money and you don't know why and and what result you're going to get this is proven and and so it was really important for us to do that but the other part of our mission is getting this out there to people so if we sort of stopped here we would just be the same as the previous researchers right like here's a great method let's write about it let's prove that it works but like And so what? So now we're moving. We really made a transition when we wrapped up our full-scale clinical trial last year to move into this mode of we really need to get it out there. And we've had customers since we got started. We're available online. People can purchase this. The state of Colorado actually funds it for people in Colorado. Yeah, now we're trying to get the message out there. We don't spend on advertising at this point. We have quite a big social presence on Instagram. A core partner for us is treatment providers. So the people that, you know, the rehabs, the outpatients, the therapists, trying to get them to be aware of this. And I think it's a big awareness play as well because, you know, craft, It's a great acronym. It's easy to say, right? But it also is like, what is craft? Are we playing with knitting or drawing or what sort of crafting are we doing? So we have a big job to just even get awareness on what this method is and why it's important and sort of going against this cultural narrative of that. people struggling with addiction are morally corrupt and all of that. So yeah, it's something that we are actively working on and it's really, I think, for us about partnerships.

Rexhen:

So basically the focus is right now in trying to grow more awareness around it. And so far it's been mostly through referrals or people that knew about it already.

Jane Macky:

Yeah, people will search online and come across us. We know that every person that comes to our program, probably at least two or three people will find out about us through them.

Rexhen:

And apart from like growing the audience, do you have any other goals that you're working towards with your coaching business right now that you'd like to share?

Jane Macky:

Yeah, I think in the last two years, so we started direct to families and then in the last two years, As Dr. Myers, the creator of Craft, has sort of continued to take steps into retirement, we worked with him to capture him on video doing his professional training. So we can work directly with families, but we also recognize, and we can bring it online, right? So those are two huge parts of scaling the approach and accessibility to families. But the next piece is that there are a lot of professionals out there that also don't know about craft in the industry. So they're still thinking, hey, let's send families to 12 Steps and let's send families to interventionists, but we really want them to know about craft. So we have begun training them through our online program, a very similar model to our family program. We really believe in this sort of balance between digitally recorded content to get information out there and then like balance with live access to real experts. So we have a model for professionals and that's kind of our next piece. We're also studying that and the clinical trial funded by NIDA. We're about halfway through that. So we can train about another 120 professionals in craft through this funding. And yeah, that's another sort of core strategy of getting craft out there. And it's sort of fidelity to the families that need it to change the way we, yeah, families can get through addiction recovery together.

Rexhen:

And what are some investments that you've made so far in your business that you feel like actually have made a good impact on the business and have helped it grow over time?

Jane Macky:

So we've spent all this time running clinical trials to get data. And there've been moments where I was kind of like, well, you know, Kraft already has data. And like, we could just say Kraft has data that came before us and we're doing Kraft. So therefore we get that sort of outcome. And these clinical trials have taken years. Sometimes there are delays, like we did a pilot to sort of prove feasibility. And then there was follow on funding from that to the full scale trial. And it takes years. And I think there have been times when I've questioned, was that worth it? But getting to the end of it last year and getting the outcomes and the data, I see now when we're talking to potential referral partners that we can answer all their questions, like any concerns, any reasons why they might you know, want to sort of poke a hole in what we're doing, what we're able to offer. There are other people out there sort of offering craft, but there's no one offering it in the way that we do with, you know, the founder, the creator of craft on our team with all of the data, with access to certified clinicians and method or certified coaches. And so I think, you know, sitting here in 2025 and we started in 2020, 17 seems like a long time. I think I see that paying off now and I'm glad. And I think it was, I think people understand the intentionality behind it as well. Like that we really don't want to just add noise to the system. Like when there's already a lot of people sort of trying to grab money and, and sort of provide services. I'm not saying that they're not trying to do the best things for their clients, but I think that it's, people are not always informed in the best way possible. And so having the data, having the outcomes, knowing that what we have works, knowing that it's all about connection and not disconnection, I feel like five years or however long, but it's all paying off.

Rexhen:

So it was a lot of investment, you'd say, in what right now serves more as credibility for Kraft. And how long has Kraft been around?

Jane Macky:

Yeah, so it's been around for about 40 years, and it's been studied in over 11 well-controlled clinical trials, including our own. So it's been around a really long time. It's written up in books. There are a lot of people out there that have been trained in it. Not enough, but there are people, but there are not enough sort of also trained to the fidelity. And people, just the general public and even the professionals in the space don't have access to it. It is... Often in sort of professional master's programs and substance use disorder sort of counseling programs, it'll be like a little footnote in one session of a whole semester on substance use. So that's also something we want to change as well, like getting into the curriculum so professionals are aware of it. But it's definitely a long game and it's a commitment that we have to making sure this is out there and available to families because we know that it works and that it's better than the alternatives.

Rexhen:

Interesting. So you'd say that there was already some, like a very good amount of research. You've just added more for your own business as well to add more credibility in it.

Jane Macky:

Yeah, well, Alza is on our program. So Alza is saying, hey, We know that craft got those outcomes and sort of individual therapy in many cases. But if we bring it online, if we have this curriculum, if we pair it with like group coaching, do we still get the outcomes? And so we're the only online program in craft or the only sort of formal program in craft that can say that this program actually has, does get those outcomes.

Rexhen:

Oh, I see. So you had to prove that it works online as well, just as it was before doing it online. yeah then definitely worth the investment is there something that you wish you had known first before you start scaling your business that is like an unexpected lesson learned or even an expected lesson learned

Jane Macky:

i think that when families come to us sometimes they're a little resistant to some of the messaging and craft because they've heard all this like i mentioned you know detach detached from your loved one, like they need to hit rock bottom, like kick them out, those sort of things, like tough love. I think when we work with families, they sort of instantly get that craft. It doesn't do any of that. That craft says, like, stay connected, be positive, like reinforce and reward them when they're doing healthy things. And I think family members kind of get that. And it's like in their gut, like it was in mine when you start hearing this different narrative and you're like, oh, this– feels good. This feels like it makes sense. I should try and help them like I want to help them. But I found that professionals often it kind of hits them at their core and they're like, oh, I don't know about this. Like, for example, like a word or concept in this space is codependency. And we don't use the term codependency it's a label it sort of has negative connotations it makes me feel like you know if you're saying i'm codependent for caring about my loved one i'm bad and and i shouldn't care about them when it makes all the sense in the world that you're watching someone struggle that you should you want to help them and a lot of professionals like find that really hard they're like hey codependency is a thing it's not a dsm diagnosis. And so I'm realizing that some of the concepts and craft are more radical to professionals and the way that they've been trained and that we probably need to do a bit more work and getting them on board. And again, some of them get it right away, but I'm seeing that it's causing more rub than I expected. And I think It's like a very simple concept that families can play a positive role in recovery alongside their loved one. But in some ways, because there's this cultural narrative that we've inherited around it that we have to overcome. So we're not just battling like awareness of it. We're battling also like a totally other narrative that people sometimes want to cling on to.

Rexhen:

Yeah. And I have to say that even other coaches that I interview sometimes do have to face that cultural rejection, meaning a lot of people sometimes don't believe in coaching. For example, do you need a coach for your career? Do you need a coach as an executive? Do you need a coach, I don't know, for leadership? Oftentimes, I've gotten the feedback that that seems like a nice to have or like a luxury or but not always or maybe in the early years it was mostly for the elites and right now it's something that has become more common but there's always that narrative that you might not need it so I think that Or is

Jane Macky:

there something wrong with you if you need it? I don't

Rexhen:

know. Yeah, and that too. So it is also what I'm saying is also in other spaces of coaching, it seems to be the case. And eventually, I think that is going to change. So you're battling with two different issues, like obviously the awareness part and also the cultural aspect of it. Is there any other challenge? What would you say is the biggest challenge that you're facing when it comes to scaling further your coaching business and your impact?

Jane Macky:

One other challenge we have is we're a small team and there's a lot to do. So we're running a clinical trial right now. We also, you know, have an increasingly thriving client base, professionals and families that we're working with. And we do, a lot of our team does some coaching and, you know, other parts of the business. So, yeah, it's just prioritizing and focus and, you backlogs of things that we're like we should change this on our website or and so it's just yeah the time and capacity

Rexhen:

and looking into mostly like expanding your team further or is that something that is more in the horizon

Jane Macky:

we have you know ability to bring on like interns and and that sort of thing which can be helpful we do work with contractors that's an easy way to sort of scale a little bit without you know having the full time and yeah hopefully as the business grows we can bring on more full-time people because we were able to do that in the last year and it's made an absolute world of difference. So yeah, I think that would be the goal, keep scaling and justify the need for more team members. Yeah.

Rexhen:

Great. And is there any final advice you'd give to other coaches in a similar space who are looking to scale their impact?

Jane Macky:

I guess, you know, when I reflect on what we've done, it's take something really personal that was a gap that we identified and to make it more accessible to people so like craft is one thing there are like a million things out there that people struggle with and so we've gone really focused and i think that blending the digital asynchronous and the live aspect i just think that's it's really powerful i wouldn't have our programs work any other way yeah so i think those are those are some things

Rexhen:

Thank you. And thank you so much for coming to our podcast today. For anyone who wants to find you or connect with you, they can go into your LinkedIn account, Jane Macky. Apart from that, they can also go into the website courses, wethevillage.co.

Jane Macky:

Just wethevillage.co. Yeah.

Rexhen:

wethevillage.co.

Jane Macky:

And then you can find everything there. Yeah.

Rexhen:

And is there any other way to connect or these are the two main ways?

Jane Macky:

Yeah, if you want to reach out over email, hello at wethevillage.co is a great one. And we are on Instagram as well and love to have you join us there.

Rexhen:

Thank you. Thank you so much, Jane. It was a pleasure having you

Jane Macky:

on. Thank you.

Davis Nguyen:

JoinPurpleCircle.com.