How I finally got over my negative self talk to start my first online course

In the last post I sent you, I shared about the vicious negative self-talk that lead me to a very long delay in creating my first online course.

To recap, I kept telling myself that I wasn't smart enough, I wasn't good enough, and even when I would get momentarily excited about actually doing it, I would go back into negative self-talk.

The best way I can describe it, is like this: Do you remember being a young teen and really wanting to talk to your crush?

You would spend all this time hyping yourself up to go approach them and then the moment when you would walk toward them... you would convince yourself not to and walk away.

Remember the feeling that would come next? You would beat yourself up "I am so stupid? I hate myself. This person would never talk to someone like me! Ugh, why even try?"

That is pretty much the feeling I had of wanting to start my first online course. I would get hyped about starting, then I would go to start and back away and talk poorly to myself.

So how did I finally get over it and actually create my first online course AKA talk to my crush?

That's what I'm going to share with you as you continue to read the rest of this. I broke it down into 5 steps so please read them all because they are all important, and the 5th step is really embarrassing for me to admit but it's real.

Step 1) Push past the surface questions to ask deeper questions.

The first thing I had to do was to dive deep into the real questions I needed to ask myself.

I had to push past these kinds of questions: "Who am I to build something anyway? Who would even care what I have to say? It's not like what I know is hard to learn, anyone can do it, right? Besides there are so many people already teaching about it who are way more successful than me, why do I need to do it too?"

These are low-quality questions because the answer to them can only make me feel bad about myself. I had to change the quality of the questions I was asking. I started to ask questions like: If I did build something, how would it help people? What goal would it help them achieve? What would I need to explain to make it simple for them to understand? What am I already doing that I need to document to turn it into a system? Who needs this information and would be willing to pay for it?

This is where the magic happens!

Then I did this specific step: I wrote down everything I could imagine, everything I could think of that I would want to teach someone who wanted to become a professional speaker. I wrote it in no particular order, just whatever came to my head, I wrote it down. The more I wrote, the more ideas kept popping into my head.

The next thing I did was to start to categorize each step into a general section and I realized I had 5 main categories. And this became the 5 modules to my first course! Now I had a good starting point to what content I wanted to create so that lead to some clarity I didn't have before! But I needed to do more work...

Step 2) I invested my money in a bunch of people's online courses.

Now, this is where it gets interesting. I spent (a lot) of money to join a few online courses and online coaching programs... for two reasons.

Number one, I was very interested in the topics they were selling and number two, I wanted to see how they put their course and program together so I could model it.

Though I did learn some nuggets from each that dramatically impacted my business...what I got MOST out of them was realizing "Hey wait a minute, this is it?!?!?! I could do this!"

I needed to invest in other people's programs to realize that it was not as hard as I was making it out to be, I saw what they did and honestly, what I thought could be better.

This gave me an incredible amount of confidence when I realized it wasn't nearly as hard as I was making it out to be and I could 100% do this. But I needed to see these programs from the inside.

Even knowing this I was still scared until I did the next step.

Step 3) I got present to the worst thing that could happen.

This is where I started getting real with reality. Here's what I mean with "real with reality". I asked myself: "If I sit down and dedicate myself to making this course and no one buys it, what's the worst thing that could happen?"

This is a seriously important question to ask.

I realized that the worst thing that would happen is that I would spend a couple of weeks of my time, a couple dollars (that I could always make back) and the worst thing that would happen is that I would create something no one would buy and I could just give it away as a free bonus to people in the future.

Literally, the worst thing that could happen, wasn't really that bad at all. It wasn't until later on I learned a fool-proof way to create an online course that people will actually buy.

Luckily, my first online course checked all the boxes without me realizing, but now I know how to create something people will buy before I even create it. If you are interested in learning this, leave a comment saying "heck yes Arel!" and I'll share it :)

But I was still scared about what people would think of me if I tried.

Step 4) I realized no one cared if I failed.

This was a huge step for me. In all reality, what other people thought of me was one of the BIGGEST things holding me back.

I had this thought that I would start this online course, put all this time and resources into it, I would put it out, it would fail then people would laugh at me, make fun of me, and think I was some flakey person jumping from topic to topic and lose massive credibility.

You ever think like this? Let me tell you, NO ONE cares. Nope. No one. We think people are sitting around patiently waiting for our downfall. We don't want to be on the wrong side of "Cancel Culture".

The truth is, it's quite the opposite. Most people are too concerned about their own lives to spend that much energy celebrating your downfall. I'm serious. We are a culture that moves on.

Now let me be clear, this is very different from "Cancel culture". Meaning, if you do something horrid like Harvey Weinstein did, you deserve to be canceled. But no one is going to "cancel you" because you tried to create an online course and didn't make 7-figures from it.

You will not get canceled. Listen, did YOU know I once created an apparel company? Bet you didn't. It was called Turkey Tees. I made a bunch of shirts and sold very few of them and it was an epic failure. You know who cares? NOBODY. That's who.

I think you can cut yourself a little slack, as long as you don't stop creating... you can't fail, people really don't care as much as you think.

And then this is what really pushed me over the edge to take action.

Step 5) I'm a little embarrassed to admit this one...but here goes

Ok...phew...don't judge me here... Ok...here goes...

I attended this event for all these people who had online courses and online coaching programs. I saw person after person get up and share how they made 6-figures and 7-figures and enrolled these many people and I was sitting there with MY MOUTH OPEN.

Here's why... I looked at these people and was like "This person has a successful course!!! That person did this!!!! You are kidding me, he did that? What!?!?"

Basically, I was floored at the type of people who didn't seem like they really knew that much, or really knew what they were doing or seemed so unconfident was out here crushing it.

And I had a realization.

Here I am judging them, but they are doing it and I'm not. And for some reason, this pissed me off just enough to realize these people who I thought I was better than were, in reality, better than me. They were better than me because they took action and I didn't.

And if I felt like they weren't better than me, the only thing I could do was to take action too. I needed to stop being malicious and start being motivated!

So believe it or not, what helped push me over the edge was seeing people who I thought weren't as good as me out there crushing it.

Yes...I'm ashamed to admit this. I'd like to think I'm an evolved human being 24/7 but the honest truth is I am not. I'm human and these emotions live in me.

But I'll tell you what, I'm so grateful for them because they pushed me to take action and hundreds of students later, hundreds of thousands of dollars generated later, I'm truly grateful for them.

And yes, I'm working on that part of my lizard brain every day :)

So that's the 5 steps I took to get out of my own way to create my first online course.

Wishing you authentic success!