What Weddings And Course Creation Have In Common - Part 1
When you start planning a wedding, everyone has an opinion on how you should do things.
Whether it’s about the wedding having to look a certain way, about a specific way weddings are supposed to work, or what components to include that are part of a traditional wedding, there’s always someone telling you that you have to do things a certain way because that’s just “how things are done”.
The same thing happens when you’re planning and creating an online course.
We can really be quick to say to ourselves that it has to look a certain way, or that courses always include videos, have workbooks, or have a certain amount of modules, or whatever it may be.
And we can be so used to following a default setup we’re accustomed to seeing or being immersed in that we don’t stop to question if that's actually an intentional choice we want to make within our own program design.
Here’s how to ditch the default and get more intentional with your program creation:
When my husband and I started planning our wedding we knew we wanted our wedding to be intentional. So the first thing we did was we sat down and made our list of our three biggest priorities. And then we made a list of things that were absolutely yes’s and hell no’s for us.
We wanted our wedding to be intimate, and we wanted the experience to feel like a true celebration of who we are as a couple. We didn't want to do anything just because that's “how you have to do it at a wedding”.
Garter toss? Hell no. Bouquet toss? Hell no. Enormous guest list where you invite everyone you’ve ever spoken to since kindergarten? Hell no.
We wanted to make sure that our wedding felt like us. So every step of the way when we were planning, we kept returning to our original guiding intentions.
Things like:
✨ designing tarot cards for all of our guests because tarot is special to both of us
✨ including little questions to help people connect with each other because many of our guests had never met before
✨ keeping the guest list to under 45 people because we wanted the entire experience to feel intimate and connected
✨ walking down the aisle just us because we wanted to start this new chapter of our lives together
✨ making chair signs as a nod to the thrillers like My Lovely Wife that D loves reading
And when it comes to your course, you get to define what matters most to you.
You want to think about how you want your people to feel, how you want to feel, and what your most important priorities are. You can also create a hell-yes and hell-no list so that you're continually making intentional decisions about what you want to include in your program.
You don’t have to do things that don’t feel good to you because ‘that’s just how they should be.’
For example, you don’t have to create a 90-day course or a course with 8 modules just because it’s the ‘standard’ of how so many other people create their courses, or because some arbitrary marketer decided that’s just how things are done.
You get to infuse ‘you’ into every part of the process of creating your course. So consider this your permission slip to lean into what feels best for you. What 'should’ would you ditch first?
Looking for more ways to uplevel your online course and make it feel like a celebration of you? Check out my free video series: EVOLVE.