STP 110| The Truth About the Right Time to Turn Your Calling Into a Course
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James Marland: [00:00:00] you're not sure, you're not sure if you're gonna do it.
Once you take that first step, the next step. Is a little easier. That first step is really hard. That first decision, am I gonna do this, is really difficult. And then as you go along, you build, you build success. I took one more step. I took one more step. I'm up another stu flight of stairs. I took another step.
Have you ever said to yourself, I have the expertise to help more people. I wanna create a product or something online to sell. I just don't know where to start. I don't know if people will buy it. I don't know
if it's a good idea. And then you just put the idea away.
Well, good news. I have a five day challenge for you that is going to give you the clarity you need.
To help [00:01:00] you start building your online course or product. This is for anybody who has yet to build a course, but they have this mission, this calling, this desire inside them to do something more with their content, maybe reach more people, maybe build something that funds their mission. I can give you the first steps to getting started.
We're gonna do the therapist chair to course challenge. It's a five day challenge with videos, worksheets, and online accountability, and traveling with friends who are doing the exact same thing that you are doing. Go to course creation studio.com and look for the join here button. Or go to courses dot course created courses dot course creation studio.com/chair to course that's chair to course there'll be a link for it in the show notes.
I'm really excited to get, get many people [00:02:00] mission driven people started on building their own online course today, so go sign up for the challenge. It's free and it's starting in just a couple weeks.
Speaker 3: Hi friend. Welcome to the scaling therapy practice. I'm James Marland, your course creation coach.
I'm here to help
Speaker: therapists who want to scale their reach with effective online courses.
Speaker 3: I'll share with you all the tools, tips,
and technology I've learned along the way that will help you put your mission in motion.
James Marland: Hello and welcome to the Scaling Therapy Practice. This is your host, James Marland, and today I want to talk specifically to the therapist or person in the helping business field. Whether you're an expert or a coach, I wanna talk to you. And I wanna tell you the truth about the right time to start an online course.
What the right time to turn your [00:03:00] calling into a course You, you've quietly, consistently done a good job helping people in one-on-one services, and somewhere along the way you start thinking, maybe I could do more, or could I take my experience and turn it into an online product like a
course?
A way to teach and share and grow your audience and share your wisdom without burning out, without trading all your time for one-on-one sessions. But if you're like me, like you think about it over and over again and you consider the next step and you're afraid to get started or you're thinking.
Things like, oh, I'm not like this big name speaker. I'm not like these other podcasters. I'm not, I'm not somebody that anyone, anyone would really listen to. Who am I? Well, I've been there and you know, honestly, I [00:04:00] still feel that way sometimes when I think about how far I have to go. In this episode, I wanna specifically walk beside you as someone who gets it, as someone who has had those fears, and we're gonna talk about why your best idea isn't missing.
It's already inside you. Why courage comes before confidence, and why this journey? You don't, it doesn't have to be lonely. You don't have to. Do it alone. So if you've ever felt called to create something meaningful, something beyond yourself, but you've stopped because it felt too big or it felt scary, then this episode is for you.
first. We can get trapped in focusing on what is missing. I don't have an audience. I don't have an email list. I don't have a product. I don't have a webpage. I don't have a social media following. I don't know, uh, I don't know how to do it.[00:05:00]
All these things we focus on what is missing. The key here though, is to focus on was what is not missing? What isn't missing in your story? You've already, you already have all you need. You have your lived experiences, you have your education, you have your passion for helping people. You have your success in helping people.
And really, that is all the foundation you need for building a meaningful product. Why? Because it's unique. It's unique to you. You have your, your unique story, your unique experiences, unique, unique hurts and wounds often, uh. Uh, what you create is what, what you needed five years ago. Like, you've lived those experiences and you know what the hurts are, and now you know the process to, to get it out into the world.
So that's unique to [00:06:00] you. It's also authentic. One of the big things is you're not, you're not trying to be like everyone else. If you're trying to be like everyone else, that's a problem. I was listening to Tad Hargrave, uh, marketing for Hippies, uh, just a couple days ago, and he said, if you're, if you're looking for a boat, no, if you are, how did he say it?
I'm not gonna say it as good as him, but he said, if your, if your product can solve everybody's problem, then that's a problem. Like it's too big because then you're gonna look like everybody else's solution. So if you're trying to help people get to. Um, he calls it island A and island B. If you're trying to help people get from their problem island A to their solution, island B and your boat, you know, that takes everybody across the water, looks like everybody else's pro solution or everybody else's boat, then you're not going to be able to stand out enough to get them to [00:07:00] their destination.
But if you niche down a little bit and your boat looks different and you're more specific. Then you become attractive to the people who need your exact solution. So it's authentic. Also, when you're, you're focusing on what you already have. You are, it's personal and relatable and it's real. People don't want AI written content.
They want what's real. I don't How many times have you looked at something and you, you knock. It might be well written, but you knock it down two or three points because you're like, well, that's. That's a hundred percent from ai and the people are just looking for real. And if, if you have a real story, if you have a real way to help people, if you have real experience and real education, then you're gonna stand out from the people who are just regurgitating low quality AI information.
When you focus on what [00:08:00] you already have, you're building in the. The, the know, like, and trust factor. And then what, um, Danny iy calls the, the resident identity. Resident identity is, I wanna buy something. Uh, I wanna be like you and I want, um, and I can relate to you. So we buy things from people that we can identify with or, or we have, our heroes are people we can identify with and people that we want to be like.
And if those, if. If that is something too far beyond our, uh, experience, then we're gonna choose somebody that we can more quickly identify with. So choosing, choosing stories and choosing what you're authentic to is a built-in factor for I know, I know I wanna be like them and I know they're like me. Now we all, we all go through this a little bit.
I think we all go [00:09:00] through some version of the. Dorothy from Wizard of Oz when we think about what, what we have and what we're missing. See, Dorothy, um, she, she had the ruby slippers on the whole time, but she had to go on that journey to kind of discover that she had it with her the whole time. And that's, that's kind of like what entrepreneurship is.
We, we, uh, we, it takes us a while to discover that we have had it all along. I. And the journey is part of the process. You know, finding our yellow book road is part of the process. But then at the end of the process, we realize we are the solution. We are the answer. And I want, I just want you to know that your, whatever course or product that you are, you want to create, um, take a look inside what's authentic to [00:10:00] you.
What are you doing? Now, who is the person who, if you would've shown up and helped yourself five years ago, what would've you brought to the table? Or what are you bringing to the table now? What did you need? How would you describe that problem five years ago?
But even if you know you're, you're not missing anything, that doesn't mean that it's easy to begin. In fact, the moment you start to think about trying something new, something bubbles up to the. Something bubbles up to the top. It's like fear, and that's where courage comes in. The next big idea here is courage comes before confidence.
One of the big mistakes we make when trying something new is we wait. We wait to feel confident. We wait to feel like it, it fits. We wait to uh, have the plan written out. Exactly right. And then. Then we, we shove the plane in a drawer and we never [00:11:00] act because it never, you never feel confident enough.
You're waiting for confident, but what you don't, but what you really need is courage. Courage to get started. Courage comes before confidence.
Five years ago, uh, my son convinced me to climb to one of those. Sky high water slides. I, I, I, it was 10 plus stories. I don't know, it just felt like there, there were so many steps and I'm not very good with heights and I, you know, every step you, you go up, it's like you're getting higher and higher and you're looking out more and more.
And I feel every time you're waiting in line and you're looking around and you're, you're hearing the screams of people go down like, oh, do I really wanna do this? And I, and I question myself, do I really wanna do this? And then you get into the slide and, uh, they, they enclose you in this tube. [00:12:00] And inside the tube there's this heartbeat beating.
It's like thump, thump, thump, thump. And then. There's a countdown and the lights turn green and boom, the floor drops out and you slide down, and it, it was actually really thrilling and it was fun, and I'm glad I did it. But if I would've lacked the, the courage I had, I had no confidence in myself that I would like it.
I needed the courage to take that first step. And it's kind of what it's like when you're starting a new course or starting a new business opportunity is you're not sure you can make it to the top like I was, I wasn't sure even when I was like in line and next, I wasn't sure that I really wanted to do this, that I had the, that confidence that I could get in that tube and go down, but.
I had, I had the courage and I, and I had my son with me. That helped me, you know, it was fun. Better to do it with him than without him. I don't know if I would've [00:13:00] done it alone, but every step I took, it was like one more step of that. Built confidence. At the bottom of the tower, you, you're not sure, you're not sure if you're gonna do it.
Once you take that first step, the next step. Is a little easier. That first step is really hard. That first decision, am I gonna do this, is really difficult. And then as you go along, you build, you build success. I took one more step. I took one more step. I'm up another stu flight of stairs. I took another step.
I'm up another flight of stairs. Okay? I, I'm in line, I'm choosing the tube. Okay? I'm in the tube. It's like step after step. Once you get one thing done, that builds the confidence for the next step. 'cause confidence comes when you're successful. Uh, and the most, the most confident I was was when I was, do you know, the, the floor went away and I was in it [00:14:00] like, okay, I had committed.
And in business, taking those steps builds the co confidence. So it's, it's just one step, one step at a time to build that confidence. I. So take, you know, today, take one step. Just look, think about your course idea and type it into Google and see what comes out. You know, ask Google what, what do people search when they look for this topic and see what, what other things come up.
Just take one step to see what other people are saying about your course topic. Still, you know, in my story, one of the things that helped me get through it from that, uh, that, um, def defying water slide loopy loop thing was that I didn't do it alone. Like I, I had a partner, it was my son, and it was way more fun to do that with my son than with then by myself in [00:15:00] fact.
I, I don't think I would've done it by myself. I, I really needed somebody to support me. And that, that goes into the big idea here. Number three is you're not meant to build alone. You're not meant to do this in isolation, and you don't, you don't have to do it alone because courage and confidence grows in community.
And your next step here in, in the Truth about. Starting is do it in community, do the hard things in community. I remember when I was a camp counselor and they were, we did like a week long training with about 20 other, um, college age, uh, camp counselors and it. One of the final days of training was a hike, and we were hiking throughout the campgrounds and we were hiking [00:16:00] through the woods, just doing the different trails, getting a lay of the land from things that we hadn't experienced before.
And it was a long, it was, it was a long hot hike. It was like the middle of summer, um, uh, muggy and hot. It's probably July, June, July or August, one of those months, probably July or August, and it was just very hot and you're sweating. And then the, then, then the weather started to turn and it started to, um, get like misty and rainy and we're on this long hike.
So now, now. You know, the, your clothes start getting wet, and then the, the, the camp guide started taking us through the muddy parts of the trails. And so we're now walking through mud and stumbling over stumps. But [00:17:00] he wasn't done yet because he took us through the swamp, like he walked us through the swamp.
So we're walking over logs, we're walking over things we can't see. The muddy, the, the water's muddy and dirty. And it's starting to rain and it's a little bit miserable, but, but something happened where we started reaching out for each other. Like we started, as we're walking through this muddy swamp, we just instinctively started reaching out for the people that were with us and grabbing their hands.
And when somebody would fall and get dirty, we'd like pick 'em up and nobody would stay down for too long. And we, we just all did it together. Then, you know, one of the coolest things was, uh, one of the, somebody who had a good voice started singing a hymn. Uh, when it, when it, the rain started coming down.
And it could have been, it could have been like, [00:18:00] uh, you know, when bad things start happening and if there's, there's, uh, somebody who has a bad attitude, somebody, the complaining can start and the bickering can start and like, ah, why are we doing this? Let's just quit. That could have started. But instead somebody started just singing a hymn about the nature of God.
I don't re uh, it was, uh, how Great Thou Art. They were just singing How Great Thou Art. And there were other people who knew it, knew Harmony and they were singing that song. And so we're now out in like a swamp walking through mud tripping over logs, but enjoying the heck out of it. Just enjoying every moment of being together.
In nature, uh, doing something hard together. You don't have to do it alone. If you are, if you have a calling, if you have a mission, if you have a desire to help more people with, [00:19:00] with what is inside you, that, that spark, that authentic mission inside you. Don't do it alone. Don't do it in isolation. Don't create it in a cave.
Uh, do it with a group of people. And, uh, in two weeks we're gonna do the therapist chair to course challenge. That's for anybody who's a therapist, a coach, an expert who has this mission that's in their head, and they, they need to get it out on paper. At least take that first step of courage. To start creating that course, you don't have to do it alone.
So let's recap. You're not one, you're not missing anything. What you have inside, the problems you've already solved, the joys you have, that authentic piece of you is what people you need. You don't have to wait until you feel confident. In fact, probably if you wait till you feel confident, you're never gonna [00:20:00] do it.
You're never gonna take that first step, get some courage, and then finally, you absolutely. You absolutely do not have to do this alone. You can do it with a group of people. And I wanna, I wanna tie in, uh, a quote from a book that, that has really been, uh, the messing up my life, like messing up my thoughts.
It's the mountain is you and the quote here is, your new life is going to cost you your old one. It's going to cost you your comfort zone and your sense of direction. It's going to cost you relationships and friends. It's going to cost you being liked and understood. It doesn't matter. The people who you are, who are meant for you are going to meet you on the other side.
You're going to build a new comfort zone around the things that actually move you forward. That's, uh, Brianna West. The mountain is you. [00:21:00] So your challenge today is just take one step, you know, take one action step, look up your course topic on Google, see if there's any books on amazon co.com about your topic, or just join the the therapist, chair, chair to course challenge.
Maybe this episode sparks something in you and you're like, I do need to explore if this is something for me. I. Come to the challenge. It's free five days of clarity, community, and courage to help you finally start moving towards your calling without burnout or overwhelm. So sign up for that, uh, sign up for that challenge course creation studio.com/chair two course.
And it's just, just forward slash chair to course. I'd be honored to be your guide to walk you through that, to support you, to encourage you and to have some fun along the way. Remember, you already have [00:22:00] what it takes. You just need to trust your spark. Take that step and find your people that support you.
Friends, it's now time to go put your mission in motion.
we're doing the therapist chair to. Course challenge. This is the five day challenge, where in just a few minutes a day, you're going to refine your idea, find your key audience, and know exactly what you're going to teach and who you're going to teach it to.
You're gonna find your spark to teach your online course. My goal is to give you two years of progress in one week of 15 to 20 minutes a day. Uh, just boiling all the good information down into bite-sized chunks for you to make a plan to create your your own online course. How can you do it? How [00:23:00] can you do it when you're so busy?
How can you do it when you're not sure if people will buy it? Well, guess what? I'm gonna answer all those questions. For free in the five day challenge. So go to the website and in the show notes there will be a link to sign up for the challenge. And I'll also have a popup banner on the homepage for you to sign up for that five day challenge.
