Course Lab – Episode 103
Building Courses for Breakthroughs (Paul Perez)
Abe Crystal: It seems like the way Paul has built his business is by leaning into coaching, having a really solid sort of approach and client base and business model there, and then using that to develop ideas for courses and building them out on top of that. And that can be a good approach for a lot of people.
Ari Iny: Hello and welcome to Course Lab, the show that teaches creators like you how to make better online courses. I’m Ari Iny, the director of growth at Mirasee, and I’m here with my co-host, Abe Crystal, the co-founder of Ruzuku. In each episode of Course Lab, we showcase a course and creator who is doing something really interesting, either with the architecture of their course or the business model behind it, or both.
Today, we’re welcoming Paul Perez to the show. Paul is a combat tested executive and leadership coach, organizational trainer, and cultural transformation expert. He uses neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology to build unbreakable mindsets and has a four-part process for fixing organizational issues. His new course is the final step in that process. Welcome, Paul. We’re really glad to have you.
Paul Perez: Hi. Happy day to you. Good to be here. Thank you.
Ari: Awesome. So the question that I always kick this off with is, could you give us a kind of 30,000-foot view of yourself and how you came to the world of online courses?
Paul: Yeah. Wow. That’s a big question. Well, I started my leadership journey pretty early in life. I became very interested in the things of leadership. I was born and raised on the island of Guam, so had a very unique cultural perspective to leadership and communities and tribes. And then I was also very drawn to the military. Guam is a US territory for those who don’t know. I became a naval officer.
And so I learned things in the leadership lab that were very unique and interesting to me that when I transitioned out, when I retired in 2008, I saw that they were glaringly absent from the corporate world and leadership as it was. And so I quickly saw that there was a vacuum and a hunger rose up in me to try to correcting the imbalance between development and performance as it pertains to raising people up in the organizational setting.
Ari: Awesome. Tell us a little bit more about kind of how you came to the world of online courses, how online courses or courses in general fit into this kind of work, the leadership work that you’ve come to do with organizations.
Paul: So the reason why online courses became important to me is because I myself, back in the, gosh, in the nineties, I became an avid student of leadership and personal development by consuming cassette tapes. And everywhere I went I turned my car into what I used to call a traveling university, and I found such immense value through that. And I thought to myself, oh, my word, I’m learning as I go, and then I’m integrating real time the things that I’m picking up into streams of daily work.
And then, of course, as I matured in my understanding of economics and the marketplace, I said to myself, huh, I could actually make a living out of this. And it’s a way to leverage my understanding and create more impact in organizations going forward. So that, combined with the fact that I have a natural penchant for teaching and I love being a teacher, I thought to myself, this would be a really good way to spread that impact and to make a difference for my family as well, for generations.
Ari: Amazing. So tell us a little bit more about the course that you’re currently running and how it fits into what you do with people.
Paul: I call the course the Conditions for Scaling Leadership. And if you look at the Venn diagram, Venn diagrams are a powerful construct at the intersection of what’s known as interpersonal neurobiology, which is the science of relationships and how they show up in our biology, how they inform our biology and how our biology informs relationships, and then systems thinking, and then leadership theory and practice. And when you combine those three areas, then where the overlap is is where I concentrate on.
And so I teach different things about how do we recognize what’s happening inside of us in our relationships, with relationships being the foundation on which leadership is built. I say that all leadership is a smaller ship that sits on a larger ship called relationship, and there’s all kinds of ships that go in relationship. There’s ambassadorship and statesmanship, and all these things are incumbent upon how well we relate. So we start with that. Looking at the biological substrates of how do we build relationship, are they primarily defensive or constructive? And then we build out from self to now, looking at others, how do I interact with myself, and then how do I interact with others?
And then how does that affect us in a team environment, in a team milieu? And then going outwards to our ecosystem, that would kind of be the third level or the third module. What does my ecosystem look like? What are the simple rules that make this system, this complex system work? And I called the simple rules. Are these tiny hinges that swing big doors? What are the simple rules? These are things that, when I was a naval officer, we had some simple rules of, this is what it means to be a navy leader. And I took them for granted until later, you know, hindsight is 2020, right? I took them for granted until later I saw, oh, my gosh, it was these very simple things that helped us to be able to conduct ourselves as a unified front no matter where we were in the world.
Then after that, we started looking at goal setting and the science of goal setting and thinking about strategic planning. Where do we want to go? And then the last step would be how do we get there and how it kind of weaves it all back together. How is that so much the roadmap or the levers that we pull necessarily, as what are the interactions? How do we want to treat each other and who do we want to become as we’re journeying together?
Ari: And so how does this fit into the overall process? So are you directly taking people into the course? Do they need to go through work with you in some other way first? Like, how does the course fit into your business model?
Paul: Great question. It could be taken as a standalone course for people. I’ve tested this material with major, major companies like PayPal, T Mobile. I’ve worked with emerging leader programs, hundreds and hundreds of leaders, where I’ve created a way to help them grow up. And many of them, a vast preponderance of them, have gone on to get promoted just from the simple things that I’ve taught them when I was in my twenties. I’ve even done this with very senior leaders and very big companies where they look at me and go, whoa, I never knew that about leadership. So it could be standalone.
But you alluded to the foray process that I have with regard to taking an organization through the transformational process. And it starts with assessment. So I have a variety of assessments in which I’m certified and have expertise. And primarily what I measure is where are you? And then I get a sense for where they want to be. So think of the GPS, right? The GPS tells you where you are, you put in where you want to be, and it helps you close the delta. So that’s the first thing assessment. We find out where are you and where do you want to be.
The second a is awareness. And awareness is basically what it sounds like. It’s, oh, here’s the data. Here’s what the data says about where you are. And of course, as we know, when you’re doing assessments, a lot of people have blind spots, right? And blind spots are what other people see but we don’t see. So I point out those blind spots. Some of those blind spots are strengths, unused strengths, hidden strengths. So we are careful to bring all those things to the surface so that people can get a holistic picture, but not just what’s going on in them as an individual organism, but now in their organizations and their teams and in their enterprises as a whole. This is where we’re at. This is what the data says.
And then the next stage is and this is where it’s a little bit unique. I don’t know a lot of people who do it this way or have this encoded or embedded into their process. It’s the acceptance phase. It’s where we sit with the data and we wrestle with the emotional impact that it causes. We deal with things like denial. Right? Denial is. Don’t even know I am lying. So how do we deal with the emotional impact or blowback that comes from, oh my gosh, this is really the issue.
Then we move into action. And that’s when we move into action. A lot of people, they move right into action. And it robs people of the opportunity to first unlearn what no longer serves them and to be able to question those assumptions and implicit behaviors that have been driving the behavior of the organization, and then to unlearn them and to forge a new path forward. So it could be as part of that foray process or it could be standalone. Sometimes people just want to buy the stuff off the shelf.
Ari: And so does the course fit in specifically kind of at the end of this process? And does it change at all based on what you learn in this process? Or is it, you know, you take them through this process, you support them through the process, and then the course that they get to is the same every single time?
Paul: It could be either, but I prefer to have it the same every single time because of the evergreen nature of not having to continue to recreate the wheel or reinvent the wheel.
Ari: Got it. That makes sense. Abe, do you have any questions anywhere that you want to take this conversation as well?
Abe: I don’t know this program in context maybe as well as you do. So I’m still getting the lay of the land. Paul, what we’re looking to do on Course Lab is provide insights and takeaway is for other course creators who are looking to improve programs they are currently running, or someone who is maybe looking to launch a new course or a new program to do so as effectively as possible. And so what we’re looking to share with people are lessons you have learned that are applicable to other coaches, teachers, course creators. And those can be at one of two levels.
We’re interested in lessons learned around the business side of your offering. So how you have packaged it, how you market it and sell it, how you’ve made it into a sustainable business. And then secondly, we’re also looking for insights around the experience itself. Right. So how you guide people through your program and help them get results. So we can explore both of those, but you can maybe tell us, like, what’s popping to mind for you in terms of things that you have learned along the way in either of those domains.
Paul: Yeah. Well, business side, as far as building a course, still fairly new in that area. And I’ve created content for workshops, repurposed it into courses. So I don’t have a ton of empirical data to give you in terms of feedback of how well this is going at scale. But on the side of delivery and on the side of delivery and experience, I found that generally people are very, very enlightened, and they’re very open to the area of learning more about these things.
One thing that even I am working hard to try to wrap my mind around I was thinking about this on my morning walk this morning, is how do we create more experiential, embodied experiences for people to be able to not just know with their heads, but to know with their embodied experience? You know, there used to be a day I would say is pre-enlightenment. So this is way before any of us came on the scene where when you said you knew something, it meant you actually experienced it.
Today, when you say you know something, that means you read it in a book or a blog or you heard it, you know, you saw a meme on Instagram. And so one of the things that I’m exploring how to do is how do I create more immersive experiences to accompany the courses so that people are really embodying? How do I create enough of a tantalizing delivery of the content and a follow up that enables people to actually take this stuff and go practice it, go iterate with it, go fail a little bit, go see the successes, and come back to the drawing board. I have done this, and I’m iterating with it, and I’m trying to build that perfect beast or how to tweak that wheel so that it becomes more of a natural segue from course to embodiment.
So I would say that’s probably something that I’m studying and that probably course creators would really, I mean, there’s so much noise in the marketplace, right? There’s so many different courses. And so that’s the kind of lasting value that I am working on right now, and I think would benefit all of us as creators.
Abe: What do you think that looks like? Or what would be some concrete directions that people could explore there?
Paul: Study groups, workbooks that I would be able to put out reflection questions, specifically if there are places where people can role play or actually take these things into practice, and then reflection groups where people come back and say, hey, I did this, and this is how it turned out. And I had an epiphany, an aha moment somewhere along the way.
Abe: Cool. So those are things you’re going to be looking to test kind of, as you develop this program?
Paul: I’ve done them throughout the years. I have deployed people and said, go do this, and some of them have come back. But I guess what I’m trying to figure out is how do I create a higher adoption rate? Because, as you know, a lot of people will listen to something and then they’ll just check a box and go to the next thing. So how do we create a higher adoption rate of people who are actually taking this to heart and saying, you know, what I’m is something that I would like to know, not just mentally or cognitively, but that I would like to know in an embodied fashion.
And it takes risk. It takes risk because in the workaday world, it rewards certainty and it punishes uncertainty. But the truth of the matter is, the real world is incredibly uncertain. And Ron Heifetz is a professor at Harvard. He wrote a book called Adaptive Leadership. And he said the biggest mistake that leaders make is addressing an adaptive problem with a technical solution. And so it’s giving technical solutions to things and teaching people. This is how the brain works. This is what happens when you’re in this situation.
It’s a good start, but it’s not the completion of the circuit. People have to go practice these things. They have to have that. They have to slow down and have the awareness. And so helping people to be mindful, to be aware, and to stop in the moment of something and go, oh, this is what I just learned in that course. Ah, okay. And then it allows you an opportunity to make a shift, and that’s where it becomes embodied.
Abe: In terms of this challenge of adoption, how do you actually get people to adopt and implement and apply, you know, concepts or techniques that you might teach them in a course format? Like this has been one of the longstanding challenges, right, with, particularly with online courses, as a modality. You know, we see people approaching this in different ways in different contexts.
One other question about that would be, what do you see as the balance between having essentially a course or program and the role of coaching, because, like, one of the things that coaching often attempts to do is to support behavior change. Right? So to actually tackle the adoption challenge. So maybe you could just speak to how do you think about the role of coaching in courses or programs and how do you balance those two approaches?
Paul: Yeah, I started this career doing a balance of workshop teaching and executive coaching. But primarily I’m a coach. I’m an executive coach. I’ve coached at some of the highest levels in the country in different organizations, for profit or nonprofit. And what I have found is that when learning, especially if it’s an integrated or stacked program, when learning and coaching are combined together, it synergistically launches and vaults the effectiveness of the two of them because it provides, as you were alluding to, that haptic feedback that goes on where a coach comes in and says, how has this been going? You told me this is what you want to work on. What has your practice told you?
And if I’ve done my job as a coach and created a safe enough environment for people to be transparent, then they’re going to be transparent and they’re going to tell me, oh, man, you know, it was a colossal win or it was a failure, or, I’m still getting it, right? And so coaching is nothing more honestly than just having another, a relationship that provides that haptic feedback so that people can have a sounding board or a mirror to be able to have someone to check in with, but also somebody who sees them and who can help down regulate their anxiety and help them understand, hey, the journey you’re on is a normal journey.
Everybody has a developmental edge. Everybody iterates and fails. Everybody iterates and wins. And I how do we do more of this? How do we think more of this and less of this? It’s that ongoing relationship. And I think ideally, especially in the course milieu, if teaching and training could be integrated or combined, stacked with some kind of a haptic feedback mechanism like coaching, then learning goes through the roof.
Ari: And so as you’re working on the course, and I know you’ve taken a lot of people through this course in different ways, how much of the coach support is made available to the people within your course?
Paul: So in terms of what I’ve done specifically with the foray process is built right into it, and obviously, it’s whatever level of scale the organization is willing to invest in. Typically, if it’s just me, I don’t have a lot of time to work with but a few key individuals. Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll bring leaders in and do a team coaching engagement with the top leaders who are maybe the linchpins in the organization, people who can embody that change and then drive it down into the organization.
Last week I was doing an offside retreat with a clutch of these leaders that I took through a year, year and a half long training process. And as a way of wrapping up the engagement and then leaving them with tools, with understandings, levels of understanding, but specifically with a level of trust. If an offsite should do anything, it should provide an opportunity for people to put their defenses down, normalize the human experience, and just get to know each other and get to love and appreciate each other, and then stare at the daunting task of whatever the journey is ahead together.
And so that’s one of the ways that I have provided it. But I’ve also been in charge of coaching programs where I was the lead coach with a whole bunch of other coaches that have been deployed to work with specific leaders. It’s just a very effective way to embed learning and to help change behavior permanently.
Abe: And then any takeaways or insights you want to share on the business and marketing side, anything you’ve learned in terms of bringing clients, building a sustainable business model, and how that translates to running courses.
Paul: Yeah, thanks for asking that question, Abe. It’s been fun. And so what I would encourage people, because I’m in a spot right now where I’ve just started delivering a lot of the courses that I developed live in workshops or then in modules on Zoom to organizations. But now I’m doing filming where I’m actually writing the scripts and sit in front of the camera and iterating. And it’s amazing for those who might be afraid, like I was, to start moving in the direction of cutting a new path through the woods. If you have a heart for teaching and training, then go have some fun, go make some mistakes. Right?
Get out there and iterate and cut that path through the woods, because something very special lies inside of you that is waiting. Your audience is waiting for you to come and work with them. And so I’ve done a lot of filming in the last month and a half, and it’s been so much fun writing scripts and filming and doing outtakes. And so I’ve had a lot of fun. Go make some mistakes. Have fun.
Abe: Cool. Thank you, Ari. Anything else you want to go over?
Ari: Nope, nothing else on my end. Paul, for anyone who is listening to this and would like to learn more about you and your program, where could they go?
Paul: Sure. Yeah. My website is www.acceleratedbreakthrough.com. And my email address is paul dot perez, that’s P-E-R-E-Z @ acceleratedbreakthrough dot com.
Ari: Awesome, Paul. Thank you so, so much. This has been great.
Paul: Yeah.
Abe: Paul Perez is the founder of Accelerated Breakthrough, where he offers leadership development, consulting and coaching. He uses a unique four-part process to identify and fix issues in organizations. You can find out more about him at acceleratedbreakthrough.com. That’s acceleratedbreakthrough.com.
Danny Iny: Now stick around for my favorite part of the show where Abe and Ari will pull out the best takeaways for you to apply to your course.
Abe: All right, Ari, it is time for the debrief. Paul is a very experienced, very successful coach and has an interesting perspective on creating courses as well.
Ari: Yeah, and it very much shows that he is a coach first and the way that he’s thinking about the importance of making sure that the people going through the course are actually learning and experiencing the transformation as opposed to just going through video lessons. So his focus on making sure that they’re really experiencing that is critical. I think it’s super important for people to remember, to keep in mind and focus on.
Abe: I think it’s a reminder that it’s essentially a challenge that every course creator faces and there is not a push button solution. Like, it would be nice if we could just say, like, hey, just do these three things and you’ll have, like, amazing engagement and your students will adopt everything you suggest and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s just not how it works, really. I mean, like, there’s three things we could tell you to try that might work and probably will work in some contexts, but every context is different.
For someone like Paul, creating a course that might be for more senior leaders or might be for people looking to really advance along a track in an organization that’s, you know, very different than someone creating a course on how to make your first watercolor painting. Adoption and behavior change are going to look very different in those different contexts. And so the structure of the program and the strategies are used to foster engagement and adoption need to be aligned with who the learner is, what the context of learning is.
You can’t really, in a way, take away a tactic, I think, from this as much as you take away the strategy, and the strategy is to make sure that you are thinking about your course from that perspective of what is adoption going to look like, of the things that I’m going to help people learn how to do, what is it going to take for them to actually do those things.
Ari: Any other takeaways?
Abe: One takeaway is that you don’t need to rush into courses. Right? It seems like the way Paul has built his business is by leaning into coaching, having a really solid sort of approach and client base and business model there, and then using that to develop ideas for courses and then building them out on top of that. And that can be a good approach for a lot of people.
Ari: In fact, he’s tested those ideas and those courses in the form of workshops and group programs within those organizations where he had direct coaching clients. You can have a stepping stone in between even before you get to online courses as well.
Abe: Yeah, I don’t know if there were other things that you had seen talking or working with him before in terms of his business model or marketing or approach that are relevant.
Ari: No, he was doing workshops and delivering those kinds of programs and courses. But an online course was all in HCA after we worked together.
Abe: The other thing he talks about that’s relevant to people is this idea of thinking about embodiment or experiential learning. Like, those are pretty broad and vague terms, and they can mean a lot of different things. It’s easy for online learning experiences to be overly cognitive or focused on intellectual learning, right? Like here are ideas, here is information you should absorb pr even just like, here are things you can do, but they’re all cognitive things. Like answer this question or do this exercise online.
And of course there’s value to doing those things. But a deeper learning and behavior change often need to go beyond the cognitive level. It needs to engage your emotions, and potentially it needs some way to engage your body in your physical context, something that’s present in the traditional in person workshop or in a retreat or an event. That sense of embodiment is often missing from online programs. And so exploring ways to bring elements of that back into the learning experience could be worthwhile for people to explore and brainstorm for their specific context. That’s also addressed in an earlier Course Lab episode with Anne and Chantille that give some really interesting perspectives on embodiments. So people could listen to that podcast for ideas there.
Ari: Awesome.
Abe: So you can find out more about Paul Perez at acceleratedbreakthrough.com. That’s acceleratedbreakthrough.com. Thanks for tuning into Course Lab. I’m Abe Crystal, co-founder and CEO of Ruzuku, joined by my co-host Ari Iny. Course Lab is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, featuring other great shows like Making It and Just Between Coaches. Enjoying the show? Follow us on YouTube or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And please do leave us a comment or start review. It really helps. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.
All right, Ari. Who is our next guest on Course Lab?
Ari: Next time we’ll be talking to C Kamila Gornia. She has a program called Evergreen Icon where she offers online coaches and course creators a way to scale by creating an evergreen and recurring business foundation.
Abe: Sounds interesting to me.