84: Mapping Out Your Online Training Course - #GrowYourLife

Hey there. Thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Krakowski. On this podcast, I show you ways for you to grow in your business and your life, to get more results, to reach your goals. And today I want to talk about creating training programs, courses, and really, how do you come up with and map out the content that you're going to put into a course? How do you map out what you're going to put into blog posts? How do you map out what you're going to put in your social media content? Sometimes when you're teaching, how do you come up with these ideas, but specifically, how do you put it in the right order? And this is going to apply to anybody that has a business that takes information and helps other people with that information. And so what I want to do is walk you through that. This can apply if you're doing a challenge, if you're doing a webinar, if you're doing a free E course or a paid course is how. How do you come up with what you actually say? How do you map that out? Now, for the last couple years, I've been doing courses, creating courses for probably about the last six or seven years. And the way that I always do it, always start, every single course that I create is the same way. And there's actually a piece borrowed from that methodology with every way that I do a podcast episode, a social media content piece, a blog post, any type of information education, this is the process that I use. And it all starts with one big idea. That's the first step. I always start with that. In the process, we can get so caught up with all the things that are going on that we want to teach, that we want to bring to the table, that we want to help people with, and we overwhelm ourselves with that process. Coming up with, well, should I teach it this way or should I teach it that way? How do I map it out and put it in the right order? That overwhelm will keep you stagnated, will keep you stuck, and will keep you from taking action. One of the best ways to start your course is this process. What's the one big idea of it? Start with that. So, for instance, every course that I've done, I map out on a piece of paper or on my computer. I'll use Evernote, sometimes a bunch of ideas for about a week. I'm just coming up with different ideas that I want to teach. I got about five or six courses upcoming that I'm going to do. I think about Five or six pieces of content that I'm going to do. You can't get overwhelmed and stuck on, well, am I doing the right one? Am I putting the right piece of content out there? Am I saying the right thing? Is this the right one to do now or should I do that one later? Just do something. Pick one. Pick the thing that's in your mind and do that. Take action on that. And the last four episodes that I've done of this podcast are about taking action. So I'm not gonna repeat everything that I've said over the last four episodes about action taking. If you're struggling to take action, you know what you need to do, but you're not taking action. Go listen to the last episode, number 83. Okay? To map out your content, you want to start by your big idea and then break down bullet points. Listen, nobody's ever going to see any of this process that I'm talking about. This is for you, yourself, and you privately. This is kind of like when an artist is creating their rough, rough draft. This is like a pre rough draft of what you're doing. And so spelling doesn't matter, grammar doesn't matter, the right words don't matter. None of this matters in the grand scheme of anything because it's just for you to get the wheels turning in the right direction and so start to take action with that. You're probably going to throw away most of what you write down, map down what the steps are in, what you're going to teach. Oftentimes when you do this, it's not going to be in the right order, and you're probably going to miss a couple steps. You're probably not going to put all the things that you need to do on that piece of paper initially. That's perfect and that's okay. That's important to take that step and accept the fact that it's not going to be perfect. So write it down, then come back to it either an hour later, two hours later, or a day later, and think about, okay, now that I got that down, what are some of the gaps that I need to fill in? Fill in those gaps of what you need to teach. Again, we're not mapping out the order of it. We're just getting these ideas out of our head onto a piece of paper for what you're gonna teach. Okay, get those out and then start arranging them in the order that somebody that does not know anything that you know today would need. Starting from step one, totally green in this process to get to what you Know, start through that and start at the beginning. Start at the basics. Start at what those basics are. Okay, so you're gonna map out that order and go in the basics. And the more you do this, the better you're gonna get at it. In the beginning, this took me hours to do just for a simple podcast. Now I do it in my head, but that came over the experience of doing it for a couple years over time. So in the beginning, yes, it's gonna be hard. Over time, you're gonna get better at doing it without even having to think about it or even map it out on paper because it'll happen up here. Don't beat yourself up because there yet. Don't feel like you're not good enough because you're not there yet. Realize my process started the way that I'm telling you right now on a piece of paper. Map it out. It might take you a week or two to map out even. That's okay. Then put it in the order of how you're going to teach it. Again, nobody is going to see any of this. Nobody at all. And if that frustrates you, that you still aren't satisfied with the order that it's going to go in because it's not perfect between you and yourself, realize to give yourself grace, that it does not have to be perfect in this step. This is part of that process. Nothing in the beginning of anything is perfect. Nothing is. Nothing starts out perfect. You go, rough draft, map it out. Put it in the order of somebody who is a beginner. If they're just starting out, what do they need to figure out first? Again, these are rough bullet points. Let's not skip ahead of ourselves here. Just the bullet points. This may only be 5 items on your list. That's it. That's cool. It could be three items on your list. Put those in that order. Okay. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Think of it like lessons 1, 2, 3, 4th, and 5. If you're doing a podcast again, it's kind of mapped out, start to finish. What's the order that you go in as far as the these bullet points? If you're making social media content, it's the same thing. Don't overthink this process. You want this to start to become automatic to where you literally just do it without thinking. How do you do it without thinking? You just act. How do you just act without thinking? You just do it and see how it happens. I want to encourage you, if you've never taken an action like this before without thinking about it, first, try it. Put that into action. Start doing that as your first step to get into that state of mind to where it doesn't have to be perfect for you to start to take those actions. Okay, map it out. What's the first step of the course of the training of the teaching step? 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Okay, now what you're going to do is you're going to take another break from this and you're going to map out what. What are all the individual pieces of that step, and you're gonna write those down again. None of this anybody is going to see. This is for you to keep yourself in order. For me, I map things out. It could be a word. Sometimes I use a letter. Literally, I will put, like, the letter A and B, and I will put it like that. Letters A and B. And that reminds me of what I'm thinking of. Those represent something in my mind for the order of how I'm going to teach this. So when you map it out, nobody is going to see this. You are. This is to keep you on track with what you are going to teach. Okay, so it starts with map that out. You don't even need to map out all of these. Just do the very first one. And then what I want you to do is just start recording yourself. Just start talking. Just start talking about it. Is it gonna suck in the beginning? Probably. Is it gonna be exactly how you think it should be? Probably not. And that is perfectly okay that when you get started doing this, it's not gonna be up to that bar that you have set for yourself of what you think it should be. That is perfect. It's your process. It's the process. I have had lessons in courses where I went back, scrapped the whole teaching, and retaught the thing again because I didn't like it. Then I got to the point where I'm like, you know what? Good enough is perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect. I'm gonna put this out there at that level. And guess what? The quality of what I put out there got better. The excellence of what I was teaching got better when I stopped worrying about saying all the right things, putting it in the right order, talking in the right cadence, saying it in the right way. And I just started communicating like I was having a conversation with somebody like we're having right now. And so you want to get to that point where you're having a conversation with the people that you're teaching. You're having a conversational type of session with people or you're walking them through that. How do you know what they need? The more you do this, you're gonna get feedback from people of what they need help with. You're gonna hear from people. How did I come up with this? There's a guy in my Instagram direct messages that told me he needed a little bit of help and guidance on how to map out making a course. So that's what this episode is. That's how I come up with. All of the pieces of content that I come up with is from people that I'm on the phone with, that I'm coaching with, that I'm teaching, that I'm interacting with. Because my entire mission is to help as many people as possible take what I know and apply it in their life to get more sales and results for whatever their goal is in a business. Okay, and so you're going to start with that step number one lesson, and you're just gonna write it down. It's just to keep you on track, yourself personally, and then just start talking. Are you gonna look good and perfect in the beginning? Probably not. And that's okay. Just start talking, click, record. I'm doing this right now just to show you an example on my cell phone. This is my cell phone right here that I'm recording this episode on. And I'm gonna plug the phone into my computer, upload it, and that's my podcast. That's how simple it is. You just start talking, you just start mapping it out. You just start saying, okay. So if I'm going to be teaching somebody about Facebook ads, well, I got to give them the foundation of sales and marketing. If I'm going to be teaching them about offers, I got to teach them about their target customer. How do we come up with what the target customer's needs are? How do we come up with what they're really good at? How do we come up with what. What's gonna deliver results? How are we going to sell their offer? See, these are the different order of bullet points that I'll do in a course. And then I just press record and I just, I have the list of the bullets that I write down. They're actually next to me most of the time, especially when I'm doing a course. They're next to me to follow that because it's such a long form thing, right? So I have those next to me and I follow that down the list. Sometimes when I'm doing it, when I'm talking, when I'm teaching, an idea comes in that wasn't on that list. And I will slip it in. I don't need to go back, pause it, stop the tape, and slip it in. I just roll with the punches. So that's what you want to do, is you want to get into the flow where you can start rolling with it, talking, communicating with people, with confidence, with clarity. And that starts by having the confidence that the value that you have to bring the table is going to help people. How do I know that my value is going to help people? You have to know that within yourself. Realize that the people that meet you, they're blessed to meet you. That when they meet you, their life is better after they hear from you. I believe that, that anytime somebody meets me that they are blessed after they meet and interact with me. I didn't believe that a couple years ago, by the way. That belief actually changed my life. By having that level of confidence that, you know what? Yeah, I can literally help everybody that's on the Internet right now if they have a business, if they are doing something where they're selling a product, marketing something online, I can map out and help people get results. That's what I do with my coaching clients, my consulting clients. And that's the value that you have, whether you're selling a product or a service or you're creating a course. Start with the basics of just mapping out a few simple bullet point ideas. Can't come up with ideas oftentimes. That's the root cause of overthinking, that you don't like the ideas that you're coming up with or that they have to be perfect for you to do any of them. And so there's some deeper layers to why that is inside of you. And that's what a lot of my podcast episodes talk about. The past four or five of them. Okay, come up with some of these ideas. Just take some time. You don't have to do it all in one session, by the way. That's why I like to split up the sessions. I split up the recording of my podcast. I'll do one a day and I'll record that over the course of a week. And that gets it done, that gets it finished. Another thing that I love to do is then I will watch through my podcast, I'll watch through my course, I'll watch through my content, or right after I record it, I will write up a few bullet point notes about what I talked about to give a summary to people. If that's hard, no problem. Another great method for you is with blogging. Any form of teaching people. You want to start with what are the basic level things that people have to learn? Start at the top and work your way down the list of the goals that they have. Of the result that you want to help people accomplish. You're imparting to people the knowledge that you have. You're helping share with them what that is. And so you want to break it down to if you're basically walking a child through this, if you're walking somebody through this, how would you hand hold somebody through the process if they were there with you? Visualize that. Visualize that process and mapping it out on a piece of paper is what's going to help you do that. Another great thing to do is you can take a sticky note. You can take sticky notes and put them next to your camera with a few of those bullet points so that when you're talking, you're observing the sticky notes next to the camera and you are talking and communicating. And so this helps you have the confidence of staying on track, talking confidently, and going with the flow. Now, in the beginning, yeah, this is going to be difficult. This is going to be hard. It is for everybody, okay? But the more you do it, I promise you, it's going to get easier. That's one of the biggest reasons why I recommend people make daily videos on social media. Because as you do that every single day, that level of confidence in yourself and your ability to connect, communicate, and talk to other people verbally, especially if you're doing a course, is going to grow when you do daily videos. The reason I did those was to grow in my skill set. I did not have the confidence a couple years ago to talk the way I do now, to connect with people the way I do now, to communicate with my audience the way that I do now. And for you, that's what I want to say is you got to start where I was six years ago, start with this level of the basics. That's how I got to here right now, where I can just go with the flow. But it took like five, six years to grow in that confidence. That might be how long it might take you. So you got to set yourself up for success in that process. And the next thing is keep moving forward. Make sure to stay consistent. You know, don't start one lesson and then let it sit there for a month before you come back. Stay consistent. Block out some time in your calendar. Make it intentional. Do it on purpose. Make some intentional, on purpose time for yourself to map this stuff out. Make an on purpose time in Your calendar to do this. Make it as important as it is for you to go to a job. Make it as important as it is to spend time with your family to do this type of stuff. Not that it's more important than your family, but you gotta be intentional with it. You're never going to get results in your business by accident. You're never going to get results in your business by just hoping that one day it finally clicks. You have to be intentional to get up and. And do that. How do you grow in that motivation? How do you get motivated to do stuff? By taking action. Motivation actually comes by starting, oh, I can't get all five things done. Oh, I can't get this whole course done. Get five seconds of it done and start there. Start at five seconds. Start at five minutes. Start at two minutes of connecting and communicating and talking. Start at the first step. That will help you grow in that motivation to do that. Okay? And so eventually, you're going to start to map out lesson two, lesson three, lesson four, lesson five. And you got to stay consistent in that process. You got to do this for the long haul. You got to keep recording those lessons, keep creating that content, keep faithful to that process. If you're struggling with doing that, that's where you gotta balance, what are my priorities? What's important to me? Why is falling on the back burner? Why am I having such a hard time staying faithful and consistent to this? And what else is going on in my life? At the end of the day, you get what you choose to do. You get the results that you choose. You are the one responsible for that and nobody else is. And so you have to choose intentionally, on purpose, to do this process, to go through this. Is it fun? Honestly, it's kind of boring. It really is. It's not the most fun, exciting thing in the world to do. It's kind of the low part of the business. It's not really like this exciting, glamorous thing. And I think that's why sometimes people get so caught up where they're stuck doing that. Sometimes you got to do things that aren't, quote, unquote, fun and exciting to get the results that you're going after. Okay? And so stay consistent. Start with step one, start doing things, be intentional with the process. And if you need some help figuring out the rest of why you're stuck where things are. If maybe you listen to this podcast episode and other ideas of where you're stuck in this process come up for you, let me know. Send me a DM you can schedule a 15 minute call with me or you can purchase a coaching package with me on my website. I got a flash sale right now that's going on for the next week, November 9th on my website on coaching. And so check that out and we'll talk soon. Grow youw Life everybody. Also, if you want to win a free 30 minute coaching call with me, you can leave. Grow your Life on my Instagram. I pick one winner every single week on Sunday. We'll talk soon.