Overcome Course Creation Fear and Overwhelm

Shownotes

Let’s talk about fear.

In some point in our lives, we are all going to experience fear; but none more so when we are going to put ourselves out to the big wide world with our own online course  (ok, accept maybe other than when you need to go to the dentist… or when a police car is driving behind you…)…

It is completely normal to experience absolute tummy-turning, toe-tingling terror before you put your course out there.

The only way to overcome this fear, is to just do it.

It takes pressing the publish button to realise that the sky really ISN’T going to drop on your head.

In this episode, I’m going to address the most common course creation fears and confidence knockers.

Resources

• Course Creation Starterkit
• Concept to Course 30-day course creation and group coaching program

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Transcript

I’m going to show you the top three fears that came up when I did my survey results the other day. We’re going over a few tips to overcome those particular fears.

Overwhelm

The first one was quite simply “I feel completely overwhelmed”, “I don’t know where to start”. You don’t know where to start and you don’t know what to do yet, because you haven’t started. It’s as simple as that. You’re not going to know how to do it and you’re not going to stop feeling overwhelmed and confused and terrified by this process that’s completely brand new to you until it’s familiar to you, until you’ve done it and practiced it and experienced it and absorbed it and taken it in and practiced it some more. 

Don’t focus on the end product, this is what happens to a lot of people. Creating an online course has a very set process to it, it’s not scary because of that. Because of the fact that there’s quite simply step one, step two, step three, step four and they can all be broken down into guidelines. There is a process, and take comfort in knowing that all we got to do is put one foot in front of the other, one at a time. 

Nothing is born in its adult form. So, please don’t think you have to just miraculously produce this perfect Hollywood production by next week. You create version one, you have the embryonic version and you slowly improve it as you go and that’s the only way to create anything in a digital world in today’s world. So, follow the steps, take a deep breath and just get started. Once you’ve been through the process once, it will all make sense, it will all be familiar and you’ll go “I wish I just started that sooner”. 

Fear of judgment

The other major fear that people get when they come to create an online course is the fear of judgment, the fear of criticism. The imposter syndrome comes in and says “you are not good enough”. This comes in at us and we are scared of what people are going to say about us and a lot of people don’t want to be judged poorly or unfairly or criticized and that’s totally okay. We’re human at the end of the day and human beings love acceptance, we all want to feel like we belong somewhere, we all want to feel like we’re valuable and loved and liked. 

It’s really important to remember that you’re only teaching the things that you do know. A lot of people think, I have to do tons of research, I have to go and get that degree, But if you think that you have to read and know everything about your topic before you start teaching it, by the time you’ve done all of that reading and researching, the whole world would have changed again and everything you’ve just learnt will be completely irrelevant. You are only teaching what you do know right now, you’re not teaching anything that you don’t know. 

You can’t possibly know everything about your topic, so just go out there with what you can give, what you can deliver, what you can help people with. You do not need to have some professor, doctorate degree in something to be able to help somebody else through something else. Remember that you’re not teaching people that already know that stuff, you’re teaching the ones that are less of an expert and less experienced than you. They are your customers and they are the only people that you need to worry about. You only only need to be one grade above the people that you’re working with and that you’re helping. 

You have been training for wherever you are right now for your entire life. Every experience you’ve been through, every book you’ve read, everything that you’ve done, has all been training you for the skills and the knowledge that you have right now. So, right now is the time to share. If it upgrades later, you can re-record the video later and share that information later on, so please don’t be afraid of criticism. 

What if nobody will buy my course?

This leads me on to the final fear that a lot people have which is, “What if I create an entire online course and nobody buys it?” Another one that ties in a little bit into that is “what if I’m boring?”. But the thing is, if you don’t create the course, you’ve got 100% chance of it not selling. So, surely, having a course of any form whatsoever is better than having none. It’s got more chance of helping somebody and it’s got more chance of selling at all if it exists.

So step one is to make something exist in the first place and now you have 100% chance of it maybe selling more than it would if you have nothing at all. It’s an evolutionary process, you have to start somewhere, you have to take something to the market to test. There’s a bunch of market research strategies that I take people through in my course creation programs. It’s a simple process that you follow that I’ve done time and time again with over 50 successful online courses of my own. 

Once you’ve done a bit of basic market testing to make sure that your topic is actually something that has market demand, you need to create a first draft and you need to just be brave and take a deep breath and put it out to the world. Because the second you do that is when you start knowing how to iterate that product, how to change it, how to make it better. You don’t know how the market is going to react to something until they have it in their hands. This is where there’s different techniques that I take my students through such as doing pilot testing, beta testing, pre-selling, getting it out to the world, strategically and deliberately gathering feedback back on that content, so that you can improve it and make it better and make it more interesting to your particular target audience. But you have to be brave enough to put something out there in the first place, in order to be able to get that for any more information. 

There is somebody out there for everyone

It’s actually not about your content. There is somebody out there in the world for everyone. First of all, your character will attract a certain type of people. You have to be yourself. There will be some people watching just going “okay, this is great, like the style, works for me, I’m happy, I’m getting what I need”. Boom, done. 

Please don’t think that you have to be like anybody else, that you have to be a certain character, that you have to deliver in a certain way in order to create a great online course. You do not change your personality when you do this. You do it your way, your style, not how anyone else does it. Because you are attracting a certain type of people that are attracted to you that want you, your personality, your way, your product, your service. If you try and be anything else in your online course, there’s going to be a really weird clash when they realize that that’s not you, when it comes to working with you in person or doing your services. 

Remember that like attracts like, there is a tribe out there for you, but in order for you to find each other, you first have to get out there. If people can’t see you, if they can’t hear you, if they cannot find you, you simply don’t exist. So the only way to get customers to build your list, to have income coming in, to build your authority, to make any difference in the world, you have to put yourself out there and trust that by doing that, you will start attracting the right people for you.  

Non-negotiable goals

Final thought here is to give yourself some non-negotiables. This is a genuine strategy that I have to use with myself: I create myself some non-negotiable goals. For you, it could be anything. It might be a financial goal that you have, it might be a number of people’s lives that you want to change, it might be a particular product that you just want to launch. Whatever it might be for you, there’s no right or wrong, but you have that goal in your head and you have to say to yourself “if I do do this, then I will meet that goal”. “If I don’t do that, if I don’t do this video, if I don’t create this online course, I will not achieve this”. Because I have created a goal for myself that’s so non-negotiable, that’s so attached to what I care about, that I can do all this.

Write some of those things down for you, because until you know what it is that’s behind why you do what you do, only then are you going to be able to use that as your motivator when you have days where you just feel down. Those days happen, and for some of us more often than others. And that’s normal, you can’t be on and motivated all the time, it’s just not human biology. So you do need this strategy in place to help you help other people.