A little trick for moving your course forward

For a few years I had a fun side business writing wedding speeches.

And I really enjoyed helping people create entertaining speeches from their stories about those closest to them.

(Well, except for the time I agreed to write an entire speech in rhyming verse. 30 verses later and I was about ready to retire!)

But as a business, the best thing was the hard deadlines.

If you were due to give a wedding speech, it didn’t matter what else was going on in your life, the big day kept getting closer and closer.

It didn’t stop because you were busy, or had other priorities, or you didn’t feel ready yet. It kept on coming, like The Terminator.

And the closer it got, the more motivated you were to get help from someone like me. :-)

In other words, it’s very much unlike the launch of your online course.

Because you can absolutely keep putting that off. It’s one of those “important but not urgent” things. You really, really want get started, but… not today.

And I totally get it. I’m the same. My important things get pushed back too.

But what I’ve found works is setting sneaky little traps for myself.

I look for small, easy things to do that commit me to doing the bigger, more difficult things that I’ve been avoiding.

I’ll give you an example…

A few months back I volunteered to give a Zoom talk about online courses to a group of local business owners. I had no idea how many people would show up or how serious they would be about online courses.

But I’d been meaning to create a slide deck about courses for months.

Volunteering was the easy part. Pulling together the 90-minute presentation on the other hand took me the best part of two days.

But once I’d done it, I had a reusable asset.

And the next time I was asked to give a presentation, it took me just a couple of hours to repurpose the one I’d already built.

The easy step committed “future Glen” to taking the harder step.

So what’s the small step YOU could take this week that would commit you to moving your online course forward?

Here’s one idea:

Announce on social media you’ll be giving a free talk next month about a topic related to your future online course.

It’ll force you to advance your ideas and give you some material for your course-to-be.

And even if nobody shows up to your talk, the possibility that somebody might will give you the motivation you need to get the work done.

If you give one talk a month and bit won’t be long before you’ll have enough raw material to build your course. (You’ll also have established yourself in the minds of those around you as someone they could learn from.)

Worth thinking about, isn’t it?

So, what’s the topic of your first talk? ;-)

See you soon,

Glen.