ONLINE PSYCHOEDUCATIONAL GROUP FOR HIGH-ACHIEVING, BUSY-BRAINED WOMEN
You don't need a better system for getting everything done. You need a different relationship with everything that tells you your worth depends on getting it done.
Beyond Productivity™
A 12-session online psychoeducational group for high-achieving women who are tired of measuring their lives by how much they can carry.
Continuous Enrollment | $45/session | $540 total | Payment Plans Available | Limited to 7 Participants | Colorado Educator CEUs Available | Online
You’ve gotten very good at becoming who the moment requires. The capable one. The successful one. The dependable one. The one who figures it out. The one who keeps going.
And maybe it worked. Achievement brought recognition. Being helpful made you valuable. Getting things right earned approval. Staying useful kept you needed. Working harder gave you somewhere to put the anxiety.
Being exceptional may have helped you feel a little safer in a world where simply being yourself didn't always feel like enough. So you kept going. More education. More responsibility. More goals. More helping. More proving. More becoming.
And somewhere along the way, doing stopped being something you did and started becoming how you knew who you were.
Now you're tired…
Not just I could really use a vacation tired. Something deeper. You can still function. Still achieve. Still show up. Still be the person everyone counts on. But underneath all that competence, you may feel strangely empty. Disconnected. Unfulfilled. Like you're going through the motions of a life you've worked incredibly hard to build without fully feeling like you're inside it.
And perhaps the most unsettling part is this:
If you stopped achieving, helping, producing, proving, and becoming who everyone needs you to be...
You're not entirely sure who would be left.
You probably aren't lacking insight.
Your Brain Is Very Good at Finding the Next Thing to Prove
You may already understand that you overwork, overfunction, hold yourself to impossible standards, or struggle to slow down.
You may know you're burned out. You've read the books, listened to the podcasts, saved the posts, downloaded the planner, reorganized the calendar, promised yourself you'd protect your weekends, and maybe even turned self-care into another thing you're supposed to be doing correctly.
And still...
There is always another goal.
Another responsibility.
Another person who needs you.
Another way you could improve.
Another thing you haven't finished.
Another version of yourself you think you should have become by now.
Except the finish line keeps moving.
You accomplish the thing you thought would finally make you feel successful, secure, settled, or enough. And maybe it does. For a minute. Then your brain asks:
What's next?
The Problem May Not Be Productivity at All.
Productivity may simply be where you've learned to look for something much more human: worth, safety, approval, belonging, love, or enoughness.
Beyond Productivity™ is a 12-session, continuously enrolling psychoeducational group for high-achieving, busy-brained women who are exhausted by chronic doing, striving, proving, achieving, overfunctioning, and trying to become enough through how much they can accomplish or carry.
This isn't a group about giving up your ambition. We're not going to convince you that your career doesn't matter. And we're definitely not spending 12 sessions telling accomplished women they just need better work-life balance. We're doing something deeper.
Grounded in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and The Red Door's Discover → Grow → Integrate™ framework, Beyond Productivity™ helps you explore what has been driving the chronic doing and begin practicing a different relationship with achievement, rest, worth, identity, creativity, capacity, and yourself.
Through burnout education, guided reflection, experiential exercises, creative practices, writing, discussion, and feedback, you'll have repeated opportunities to apply what you're learning to the expectations, responsibilities, choices, and pressures actually showing up in your life right now.
Understand the pattern.
Begin noticing what chronic striving has been doing for you—not just what it's doing to you. What does staying busy protect you from? What does achievement help you prove? What becomes uncomfortable when you aren't producing, helping, fixing, accomplishing, or carrying?
Practice stepping outside it.
Experiment with making room for discomfort, tolerating imperfection, creating without performing, slowing down without immediately proving your worth somewhere else, and responding to yourself with more flexibility.
Then notice what happens.
Reflect on what felt difficult, what surprised you, what helped, and what pulled you back toward familiar patterns. Learn from your own experience and the feedback and perspectives of others. Adjust—and practice again.
Reconnect with yourself.
Begin discovering what matters to you when guilt, achievement, approval, urgency, productivity, and other people's expectations aren't automatically making the decision. Because the goal isn't to become less driven, less capable, or less ambitious.
It's learning that you can still care deeply about what you do without asking what you do to prove your worth.
Beyond Productivity may resonate if you:
→You keep believing the next accomplishment will finally make you feel settled, successful, secure, or enough.
→Being useful feels good. Being needed feels meaningful. Saying yes gives you a role you understand. But sometimes you're so busy being valuable to everyone else that you have very little relationship left with yourself.
→You accomplish something you've worked incredibly hard for and instead of the satisfaction you expected, there's a strange flatness.
→Rest isn't only uncomfortable because you're “bad at relaxing.” Slowing down creates space. And sometimes space brings up a much harder question: Who am I when I'm not doing something that proves who I am?
You Don't Need Another Person Telling You to “Practice More Self-Care.”
Across 12 sessions, I'll teach and weave in the six core processes of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as a framework for experimenting with a different response.
You'll practice noticing the rules your mind has developed around productivity and worth without automatically obeying them. Making room for guilt, restlessness, vulnerability, imperfection, and the discomfort of not performing. Coming back to the life that's happening now instead of perpetually living toward the next milestone.
Creating some distance from identities built around being useful, capable, successful, impressive, responsible, or needed. Clarifying what you actually want your finite time and energy to serve. And taking action based on what matters, not simply what proves you're enough.
The goal isn't to become less ambitious.
It's to stop requiring your ambition to prove your worth.
You need opportunities to understand why caring for yourself becomes so difficult when it competes with the things that make you feel valuable, safe, successful, or needed.
You probably know many of the things that help.
Rest. Movement. Connection. Play. Creativity. Boundaries. Sleep. Eating. Being outside. Doing something simply because you enjoy it.
The problem isn't necessarily knowing those things matter. The problem is what happens when they compete with productivity.
Responsibility. Approval. Achievement. Urgency. Someone else's needs. Or the uncomfortable feeling that you should be doing something more useful.
Why 12 Weeks?
Because understanding why you're burned out and actually changing your relationship with productivity are two very different things.
Beyond Productivity™ isn't designed around completing 12 lessons in the “right” order. It's designed around having enough consistency to learn a framework, practice it in real life, get feedback on what happens, adjust, and try again. That's why enrollment is a 12-session commitment.
Throughout your 12 sessions, we'll continually return to the six core processes of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), not as concepts you're expected to master one by one, but as a repeatable framework for working with whatever striving, overfunctioning, guilt, pressure, or productivity-driven pattern is showing up in your life.
The ACT framework stays consistent. What you're practicing it with keeps changing. One week, you may notice yourself saying yes when you're already at capacity. Another, you may struggle to rest without feeling guilty, realize you've turned something you enjoy into another thing to accomplish, find yourself taking responsibility for something that was never actually yours to carry, or wonder who you are when you're not being productive, useful, or needed.
Each situation becomes an opportunity to use the Discover → Grow → Integrate™ process:
Discover what's happening, what matters, and where you're getting hooked.
Grow by choosing a realistic, values-connected action and experimenting with a different response.
Integrate by reflecting on what actually happened, learning from your own experience and feedback from the group, and deciding what you want to adjust for your next attempt.
Then you do it again.
That's also why there isn't a Week One you have to catch.Beyond Productivity™ uses continuous enrollment, so you can join whenever one of the group's seven seats becomes available.
The foundational ACT and DGI resources remain consistent, while secondary readings, prompts, discussions, creative practices, and complementary materials may change throughout the year. That allows the group to keep exploring productivity, burnout, identity, worth, capacity, and meaning from different angles while everyone continues practicing the same underlying framework.
Your 12 consecutive scheduled sessions give you a sustained period of practice without requiring everyone in the group to begin and end at the same time. And when your 12 sessions are complete, the goal isn't to have “mastered” ACT, stopped being ambitious, or achieved some perfect version of work-life balance.
It's to have a framework you know how to return to when urgency gets loud, your calendar fills up, guilt tells you to keep going, or your worth starts getting tangled up with how much you can accomplish or carry.
And if another cycle of practice, reflection, feedback, and community would be useful, you may choose to enroll for another 12-session commitment, depending on fit and availability. Because the goal was never to stop being productive.
It's learning that productivity can be something you do without becoming the measure of who you are.
A FRAMEWORK YOU CAN KEEP COMING BACK TO
What We’ll Practice Together.
Over the course of the group, you'll have opportunities to practice:
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Notice thoughts like I should be doing more, I haven't earned a break, I should be able to handle this, I can't let them down, or I'll be okay once I accomplish this without automatically treating them as instructions.
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Practice allowing discomfort, uncertainty, guilt, vulnerability, restlessness, imperfection, and difficult emotions to be present without immediately escaping into productivity, fixing, helping, or achieving.
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Practice returning to the present instead of continually living one task, goal, deadline, accomplishment, or future version of yourself ahead.
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Begin loosening rigid identities like the successful one, the capable one, the responsible one, the helper, or the person who can handle anything.
You are more than the roles you've become exceptionally good at performing.
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Explore your values beneath the shoulds, expectations, approval, productivity, and external measures of success.
What do you want your work, relationships, health, creativity, time, and life to stand for?
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Take small, values-aligned actions without requiring them to make you more productive, impressive, useful, successful, or worthy.
Why a Group?
Because it's hard to discover who you are when you're surrounded by a culture that keeps rewarding you for how much you can do.
High-achieving women often receive enormous amounts of reinforcement for the very patterns that are exhausting them.
You're dependable. So people depend on you. You're capable. So you get more responsibility. You're helpful. So people ask for more help. You perform well under pressure. So you're given more pressure. And somewhere inside all that praise, competence, usefulness, and accomplishment, it can become difficult to notice:
I'm disappearing.
Beyond Productivity™ gives you a structured place to explore this alongside other women who understand the strange experience of being simultaneously very successful and deeply tired.
There can be tremendous relief in hearing someone else say: I don't know what I actually want anymore. I feel guilty when I'm not useful. I accomplished what I thought I wanted and I still feel empty. I don't know who I am when I'm not working toward something. And realizing:
Oh. Maybe I'm not the only one.
You don't have to arrive with profound insights. You don't have to make beautiful art. You don't have to share everything.And you definitely don't have to be good at Beyond Productivity.
Come curious. Practice imperfectly. Notice what happens.
What Beyond Productivity™ Is — And Isn't
Beyond Productivity™ is a focused psychoeducational group, not a substitute for individual psychotherapy or crisis care.
We'll use evidence-based psychological concepts, burnout education, ACT-based practices, guided reflection, discussion, creative exercises, and experiential learning to help you better understand your patterns and experiment with different ways of responding in everyday life.
For some people, chronic striving, perfectionism, overfunctioning, or achievement can develop partly as protective strategies in environments where being useful, successful, responsible, or exceptional became connected with experiences of safety, approval, belonging, or worth. That does not mean every high-achieving person has trauma, or that achievement itself is a trauma response. This group isn't designed to diagnose the origin of your striving or process trauma in a group setting.
Instead, we can become curious about what your patterns have been doing for you, what they're costing you now, and whether you want more flexibility in how you respond. This also isn't an art therapy group, and no artistic skill or experience is required. And it isn't anti-work, anti-ambition, or anti-achievement.
We're exploring whether you can care deeply, accomplish meaningful things, and pursue what matters without continually disappearing underneath everything you do.
You will never be required to disclose something simply because you're participating. There is no prize for being the most vulnerable, insightful, creative, or psychologically flexible person in the room.
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The group provides psychoeducation, structured reflection, experiential exercises, and opportunities for discussion related to uncertainty and the ways people may respond to it.
Participation does not establish an individual therapist-client relationship with Emily and is not a substitute for individualized assessment, diagnosis, psychotherapy, or other mental health treatment when those services are needed.
Participants experiencing concerns that require individualized clinical care may be encouraged to seek appropriate therapeutic or other professional support.
This is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for individualized mental health care.
Meet Emily
Therapist. Educator. And Someone Deeply Interested in What Happens When “Doing More” Stops Working.
I'm Emily MacNiven, LPC, founder of The Red Door Therapy & Wellness Solutions.
My work focuses on high-achieving, busy-brained, people-pleasing women who are exceptionally good at functioning—and increasingly exhausted by how much functioning seems to require from them.
Before becoming a therapist, I spent years as an educator and school leader. I've spent much of my professional life inside high-demand, high-responsibility environments where competence is rewarded, caring deeply is expected, and being able to handle a lot can quietly become the reason you're continually handed more.
That background also shapes how I teach. I don't believe meaningful learning happens because someone gives you more information.
We need opportunities to understand something, experience it, practice it, reflect on what happened when we applied it, and return to it again.
That's why ACT is woven throughout Beyond Productivity™ and why we'll sometimes put the exceptionally competent thinking brain aside and pick up a pen with the hand that has absolutely no idea what it's doing. Because insight matters.
But sometimes the person who is exceptionally good at figuring everything out needs somewhere she doesn't have to.
Learn more about Emily and The Red Door Therapy & Wellness Solutions!
What Joining Looks Like
A Small Group. A Clear Structure. Enough Time to Actually Practice.
What Your Enrollment Includes
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Your enrollment reserves one of seven seats for your next 12 scheduled group meetings. Planned Red Door closures do not count toward your 12 sessions.
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Keeping the group intentionally small allows for conversation, connection, and meaningful practice together.
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You'll receive a Red Door Reflection Guide designed to help you notice what you're learning, connect group concepts to your real life, and reflect on what you're practicing between sessions.
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Each 60-minute session is followed by an optional 15 minutes to stay, connect with other participants, or check in with Emily.
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Beyond Productivity™ uses a combination of consistent foundational resources and rotating complementary materials to support your learning throughout your 12-session commitment.
Your foundational materials include ACT-based resources and The Red Door Reflection Guide, which gives you a repeatable way to work through the Discover → Grow → Integrate™ process: noticing what's happening, reconnecting with what matters, experimenting with a different response, reflecting on what happened, learning from feedback, and deciding what you want to adjust next.
The foundation stays consistent. The material we apply it to can change.
Throughout the year, we may also use selected books, readings, writing prompts, creative exercises, and other resources to explore burnout, productivity, identity, worth, capacity, creativity, rest, and chronic striving from different angles.
Current featured resources may include:
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle
by Emily Nagoski, PhD & Amelia Nagoski, DMAWe'll use Burnout as a companion for exploring chronic stress and creating conversations about what happens when demands, expectations, emotional labor, and chronic striving continually outpace opportunities for recovery.
We'll draw from selected exercises in this workbook as part of our creative and experiential practice, including writing and art using the nondominant hand.
And no, we're not doing this because there's a “right” way to create.
Quite the opposite.
These exercises give us opportunities to practice curiosity, experimentation, imperfection, and stepping outside the highly practiced modes of thinking, controlling, achieving, and performing that many high-achieving women rely on every day.
Plus, Your Red Door Reflection Guide
You'll receive The Red Door Reflection Guide directly from The Red Door to help you take what we're exploring beyond the group conversation itself.
You'll use it to connect ACT concepts, creative practices, group conversations, and complementary materials to what's actually happening in your life: noticing the patterns you're caught in, identifying what matters, choosing something to practice, reflecting on what happened, considering feedback, and deciding what you want to try next.
Because Beyond Productivity™ uses continuous enrollment, you don't need to finish a book before joining or catch up on everything the group has already explored. You'll receive information about the materials currently being used when you enroll and can begin with the group from there.
Secondary resources may change seasonally, which also means participants who choose to continue for another 12-session commitment may encounter new material and new ways of exploring the group's themes while continuing to practice the same underlying ACT + DGI framework.
Books and other optional external resources are purchased separately and are not included in the $540 group investment.
Some recommended book links may be affiliate links, which means The Red Door may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.
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$630 for the 14-session window
$45 per session × 14 sessionsPayment plans are available.
If you join after a 14-week window has begun, your enrollment is prorated based on the number of sessions remaining in that window.
Because your registration reserves one of only seven spaces in this intentionally small group, payment is for your reserved place in the full enrollment window. Refunds or credits are not provided for sessions you are unable to attend.
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Join a free onboarding before you begin to meet Emily, ask questions, and get oriented to the experience.
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Participation is eligible for CEUs for Colorado educators, subject to the applicable participation/completion requirements.
For Colorado Educators
Professional Development That Supports the Professional, Too.
Beyond Productivity™ is eligible for Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for Colorado educators.
Because professional development shouldn’t always ask you to become better at doing more. Sometimes meaningful growth means examining the cost of chronic productivity, reconnecting with the parts of yourself that work has crowded out, and building more intentional, sustainable ways of showing up, both inside and outside the classroom.
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Colorado Educators: Earn Professional Development Hours
If you're a Colorado educator, your participation may also support your professional license renewal.
Upon completion of this program, The Red Door Therapy & Wellness Solutions will provide a certificate documenting your completed professional development contact hours. Your certificate will include the program name, dates of participation, number of contact hours completed, and verification of completion.
The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) allows educators to use qualifying ongoing professional development and training toward the 90 clock hours required for license renewal. CDE does not pre-approve individual professional development providers or programs. Educators are responsible for determining how a professional development experience applies to their license, endorsement area, professional practice, and applicable educator standards.
This program offers up to [XX] professional development contact hours for Colorado educators who complete the full program.
Professional development hours are based on documented participation. Acceptance toward Colorado educator license renewal is determined by CDE based on the individual educator's license and the applicability of the professional development completed.
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Educators work in environments where competence, flexibility, responsiveness, and the ability to carry enormous responsibility are continually required, and often rewarded with even more responsibility.
Over time, it can become difficult to distinguish between being deeply committed to your work and chronically overriding your own capacity in order to keep doing it.
Beyond Productivity™ develops skills educators can apply directly to their professional practice, including psychological flexibility, values-based decision-making, awareness of stress and burnout patterns, responding effectively to difficult thoughts and emotions, recognizing limits, and making more intentional choices about finite time, energy, and attention.
These skills can support educators in navigating demanding workloads, responding more flexibly when expectations exceed capacity, examining patterns of chronic overfunctioning, and sustaining meaningful engagement with their work without relying exclusively on pushing harder, doing more, or continually sacrificing themselves in the process.
You Don't Have to Become Less Ambitious.
You can learn to pursue what matters without continually asking achievement to tell you that you're enough.
Imagine accomplishing something and actually allowing yourself to experience it before immediately moving the finish line.
Noticing exhaustion and treating it as information instead of evidence that you're failing.
Having an hour with nothing scheduled and resisting the urge to prove it was well spent.
Creating something that has absolutely no productive value.
Letting yourself be a beginner.
Choosing something because you enjoy it.
Noticing that someone needs something from you without automatically deciding that means you have to provide it.
Catching the thought I should be doing more and recognizing: Oh. I know this place.
Feeling the pull to prove yourself without automatically following it.
Not because you suddenly stop caring. Not because achievement stops mattering. Not because your responsibilities disappear.
But because doing is something you choose, not the only way you know how to feel worthy, safe, valuable, or real.
Voice Without Apology™
12 sessions. Seven women. One practical, experiential framework for exploring what has been driving the chronic striving and reconnecting with a life built around more than what you can accomplish, carry, or prove.
You've Spent Long Enough Becoming Who You Thought You Needed to Be.
