Hey there!
There’s a physical therapist in California whose approach to physical therapy eventually got adopted by Kaiser Permanente, a major healthcare organization serving millions of patients.
But for years, he couldn’t teach this approach to any other physical therapists.
His clients would ask him for more exercises.
That’s how bought in they were. His method of coaching his clients worked. But every time he tried to teach his approach to other physical therapists, they left excited but nothing changed for them.
He knew what to do in his own practice. He just couldn’t help other clinicians.
That’s the problem most experts run into when they try to build a course. Their knowledge is valuable. Their results are real. But translating what you do intuitively into something another can follow? That’s a different skill.
Today I’m going to show you the exact process I used to help him break his approach into teachable steps, and how you can do the same with yours.
Let’s walk through it.
What do you want someone to be able to DO when this is over?
Not understand. Not appreciate. Do.
That single question changes everything. It keeps course design from becoming a landfill of everything you know. And it gives you a north star so every decision you make, what to include, what to cut, how to sequence things.
It all has a clear standard.
Experts skip this all the time. They start from their knowledge and try to pour it into a structure. That’s why so many courses end up bloated, hard to finish, and hard to teach.
Start from the outcome. Work backward from there.
And once you know the outcome, your only job is to identify what someone needs to DO to reach it. Observable actions. The steps you could watch someone take.
That distinction matters more than almost anything else in course design.
Whatever your process is, try to fit it into three steps because that CONSTRAINT forces you to get creative.
When I was a facilitator in Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain program, one of the workshops I taught was about making progress notes. Tiago had a process built around several questions. They were good questions. But not easy to remember without a template in front of you.
I knew that if I told people to set up a text replacement shortcut or deploy a note template every time, some of them would get stuck right there. That friction would kill the habit before it started.
So I made a decision. I needed to make it simple enough that anyone could remember it without a system at all.
Action. What did you do?
Reflection. What did you learn, or what do you think about what you did?
Next Action. What do you think you’ll need to do next?
That was it. Action, Reflection, Next Action. They all end in the same sound. They have a rhythm to them. You can hold them in your head while walking out of a meeting.
That simplification was not easy.
It took real work to figure out what was essential and what could be let go. But THAT is the actual work of building a course. Getting clear enough on your own process that you can hand it to someone else and they can use it. Slides and recordings come after that.
Remember Skulpan, the physical therapist I mentioned earlier?
His approach to motivating his clients was so effective they ended up ASKING him for exercises. That’s unusual as physical therapy patients are notorious for not following through. His approach worked.
And every time he tried to teach it to other physical therapists, they said they understood, they said they’d use it.
But when he observed them in practice, nothing had changed. And their patients weren’t asking for exercises nor were they improving at the same rate as his clients.
We worked together to break his approach down. We had to identify what was load-bearing and let go of what was not. But we got his coaching process to four steps.
Physical Behaviors, Past and Present
Diagnosis Clues
Pain Pattern and Irritability
Beliefs and Emotions
Four steps. That was it.
I helped him build a course around those four steps. By the time his students finished it, they had genuinely mastered his process. They were doing it with their own patients.
Kaiser Permanente eventually adopted his program. They measured patient outcomes. And what they found was that it was the only intervention that had improved patient outcomes in that area in decades.
It means you did the hard work in advance so they do not have to. It removes unnecessary friction so the person following your process can focus on doing the thing, not figuring out what the thing is.
When you put in that work, the results your clients get improve dramatically. Not despite the simplicity. Because of it.
Pick one outcome. One specific, concrete thing you want someone to be able to DO after going through your course or program.
Then list every action a person would need to take to get there. Observable steps only. Physical steps, written steps. Cut anything you cannot watch someone do.
Then start cutting. Keep whittling. Push yourself toward three. If you genuinely cannot get there, four is fine. But try for three first. The constraint is the point.
What you end up with is the spine of your course.
Some experts believe they need a 15-part system before they can build anything.
Most experts who feel this way have been teaching for years. They have a process that works. They have been guiding clients to real results with a structure they never bothered to name.
The work is to find the thing that is already there, strip it down to what is essential, and make it simple enough that someone else can follow it without you in the room.
That is what a course is. That is all it is.
And you already have everything you need to build one.
Rodney
If you want a step-by-step method for building your first focused course, the Atomic Course Blueprint is 33 pages and a repeatable system that gets you from idea to finished outline fast. There is also a 60-day Smiley Guarantee, so there is no risk in trying it. Take a look here.
Have a question about your own process or how to break it down?
Hit reply. I read every one.
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