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Guidelines for Contributors to Learning Place Online By Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT, Editor-in-Chief If you are a therapist, personal coach, nutrition consultant, clinician or someone in the helping professions who specializes in helping people change emotionally, mentally, physically, socially, and spiritually, you are invited to provide content for Learning Place Online (LPO). If you don't fit one of those categories but have a story that illustrates how people change their beliefs or behavior, or if there is an inspirational or creative piece you think would fit our general purpose, please send it to us. This article can give you an idea of the kinds of material we want and how the material is to be sent to the webmaster. In all cases your authorship will be clearly given (you hold the copyright) with a link to a page about you and an e-mail address if you wish people to contact you directly. A Need for Different Approaches As we note in Transformation Now! (or Maybe Later), not everyone is ready to actively work on a problem they are having. Rather, people go through five discrete stages—being largely unaware of their problems or of the need to change their behavior, having an awareness of their problems but being not quite willing to commit to change, willing to take action in the future, actively taking steps to overcome their problems, and finally, working to consolidate their gains and prevent relapse. Just as each of these stages involves different issues for members of the helping profession and their clients, people who will come to this website will see their situations in different ways. They will not all be ready to "do" the wonderful things we therapists are sure would work wonders for them. Indeed, only 10% to 15% of people are actively working to change their lives for the better at any one time. But since we have needs in many areas of life, physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually, any of us may be ready for change in one arena, but not yet in another. That is why we present a wide variety of material that might be of value to a broad number of readers. Also, we recognize that professionals often have quite different perspectives on the same topic. So we aren't looking for a specific point of view, although we do want everything to be based on solid training and experience. A General Word About Style and Length Since our goal is to educate consumers so they can get the most out of therapy, or make the greatest progress in resolving their problems by themselves, we want to give information that is simple but not simplistic. It doesn't much help to say that anxiety is treated by having the client learn to relax. The question is how the therapist goes about teaching someone to relax. Besides, sharing what you as an individual therapist would do makes much more interesting reading. Remember that the person reading won't know much about who you are or how you approach problems. Besides, stories are great ways to connect with readers. In other words, if you have dealt with anxiety disorders in your past, this may be good to mention in the article. For one thing, it tells the reader that you aren't sitting in an ivory tower dispelling wisdom you've learned in a classroom. This also gives the reader hope that suggestions you make are more likely to work if you can show how they worked for you. Determining the length of an article is difficult because it will depend upon how thorough you want to be. It will probably be about one to three thousand words, which is a range that should fit a good number of topics. The important thing is to have it broken down into subsections that are easy to read on a computer screen, much as this one is designed to be. The Kinds of Material You Might Provide
You can give us permission to reprint an article or chapter from a book you've written. We will, of course, include information on how people can purchase the book.
Dozens of syndromes, situations, and scenarios eventually become so painful that a person is ready to change or at least to contemplate change (the second stage as noted above). What might you write about panic disorders, problems with alcohol and drugs, weight control, forgetfulness, post traumatic stress disorder, depression, chronic illness, divorce, etc.?
For these articles, you might give the theory as clearly and practically as possible, explain why the school of thought arose, how professionals are trained to work in that area, who would benefit from such a technique, what are the contraindications, what resources are available to find such professionals, how much it should cost, how would the consumer evaluate whether progress was being made, etc. If you are an alternative practitioner, we want you to offer specific outcome research and credentialing information. Let's fact it. A "soul-directed, psychic, ecopsychology rebalancer" may have excellent results in working with her clients. But just what does all of that mean? We believe it is important to present reasoned information with which consumers can appropriately evaluate therapies that are out of the mainstream.
The therapists and nutrition specialists I know are generally wonderful, talented souls who are great with clients, but they're usually unfamiliar with computers and the Internet. So it may be that you won't be able to help in this regard, but we would appreciate having you give us several websites that provide additional information on the topic you write about. Perhaps there is a leading center that is known for its original research, or there is a journal that covers that particular topic and is readable for both professionals and the general public. Since story and narrative are powerful teaching tools, if you are familiar with a story that you think would help in some area of the site, we would appreciate knowing about it. It doesn't have to be by a professional and may even be a story one of your clients would like to share. How to Send Us Material First, tell us what you plan to write and when you expect it will be completed. You can contact us at: Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT, Editor-in-Chief or Learning Place Online 2522 Boulder Road Altadena, CA 91001 626-797-8914 We will need a digital copy of your work. In case you don't know what that means, it is simply the form in which a computer stores information. E-mails are digital and articles on the Internet are digital. You can send a print copy by mail if you wish, but we need to have the article in a form that allows us to easily put it on the website. It can be sent as an attachment to an e-mail or just copied from your word processor (preferably WORD) and then included in the body of an e-mail. If you have trouble doing this, give us a call and Renee will help you accomplish the deed. If you want us to tell people who you are and how you can be contacted, send us information about yourself. If you want to include your picture on the page giving information about you, send us your photo and we'll scan it in or, better yet, send a digital copy if you have one. Editing As the primary editor of LPO, I will review all articles that are submitted. Our permissions director, Christ Burdett-Parr, will also help me review material submitted. If the general theme of your submission is something that we feel meets the needs of our readers, we will almost always accept it just as it is presented. However, we will review for grammatical and spelling errors (from personal experience we know how easily they can slip into material that's been spell-checked and re-read more than once). But you will be notified of any changes we make. If we feel that something you've written isn't clear enough or that it would be greatly helped with further writing, we'll let you know and give you a chance to change it. We want to support you in whatever way we can and appreciate
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