Simple Hack for Designing a Course You Love
When you begin dreaming about your vision for your course, you probably have a thousand ideas in your head. The beginning stages of the program creation cycle and designing a course you love can feel a little daunting.
You may wonder where the heck you’re even supposed to start and ask yourself questions like:
Do I pick my platform first?
Do I figure out the tech first?
How do I position it?
How do I market it?
These questions are all completely valid and normal when you’re designing a course or program. I want to help lead you through these beginning steps to support you in getting anchored in your vision so you can create the program of your dreams. This is the exact process I go through with all of my clients and my students, so let’s dive in!
Get Clear On Your Intention For Your Course
The first step in designing a course is to get clear on your intention and vision for the course you want to create. The further into the program creation journey we get, the more off track from our original intention we can veer if we don’t set this piece in stone first.
We tend to get bombarded with all the “shoulds” of it all, such as should I...
Record videos with slides?
Have a community aspect?
Launch it this way?
Have this?
Do this?
We start to second-guess ourselves and our true vision for our program because that’s what we see other people doing.
I want you to remember, this is your program. This is your vision and your passion. Stay true to who you are and what you want the experience to be like for you and your students.
The Hell Yes vs. Hell No List
By taking the time to get clear on your vision and intention for your program, it gives you a place of groundedness to come back to. I like to guide people to start by tuning into their vision and intention for their program with this one simple hack, making a hell yes vs hell no list.
This is one of the first things I recommend that you do when designing a course to remind yourself of what it is that you want this program to do for you.
We all have different intentions behind our program, so this will look different for everyone.
Sometimes the intention is to simply make the work we do 1-to-1 with clients more accessible to more people.
Sometimes we simply want to do less 1-to-1 work with clients and be able to scale our businesses without reaching the point of burnout.
Other times, we want to create a program that will compliment something we currently do or add a new offer to our repertoire.
We all have different intentionality behind our programs. As creators, we also tend to have really big hearts.
We start to brainstorm all of the features and aspects we could add to our program, like:
Adding live calls.
Creating bonuses.
Having an online community.
Offering 1-on-1 sessions.
Then, before we know it, we've designed this mammoth beast of an online program that maybe wasn't our original intention in the first place.
It’s really important to be honest with yourself on your hell yes vs hell no list. Think about the things that you truly want to lean into and out of around your program.
Like I said, this is your program. You don’t have to do or add anything that doesn’t feel in alignment with your vision and energy.
For instance, one person may say hell yes to live calls because they want to connect with their people in that way.
Others may say hell no to live calls because they want this program to be scalable and not include live elements.
Guiding Questions
Do you want:
Live calls?
A community that you're managing?
Any sort of interaction with your people?
It to be purely self-study?
Videos or do you want to find a different way to teach your content?
Bonuses or extra resources?
To offer 1-on-1 sessions?
If you could wave a magic wand and bring your dream program to life, what would that look like?
Anything is possible. If we’re intentional and creative about it, we can find a way around pretty much any of the “shoulds” of an online program. By tuning into what feels good energetically to us, that makes our hell yes list, then that can give us information around how we need to structure and make things work in our program.
If you are ready to step into your true vision and design a course you love, but you need help structuring it and making it all come to life, come join me in the Incubator, where I’ll support you every step of the way, from creating your vision to launching your program in a way that feels good to you!
