Creating a Heart-Aligned Offer (and the Results)

Recently I reached a point on my entrepreneurial journey where I felt it was time to start innovating my own unique offers instead of leveraging and applying the formats I’ve learned from other entrepreneurs, speakers, and coaches.

Until now the methods I’ve used to create and deliver value and to generate income have largely been based on strategies and formats I learned from others. Here are some formats I’ve used thus far to provide value and/or earn income:

  • Blogging
  • Affiliate programs
  • Advertising networks like Google Adsense
  • Selling ads directly on my website
  • Podcasting
  • Creating YouTube videos
  • Joint venture deals and promotions
  • Having a book published
  • Uncopyrighting my free content
  • Speaking (free, paid, international)
  • Participating in online events like summits
  • Interviews (radio, podcasts, videos, text-based)
  • Designing and delivering 3-day workshops
  • In-person meetups (one-on-one and groups)
  • Individual phone/Skype coaching
  • Co-creating a product with a small group
  • Creating a one-year group coaching program
  • Hosting a paid private forum (as part of the previous item)
  • Hosting a free public forum
  • Social media (mostly Facebook and Twitter)

These modes of delivery are all ideas that I learned from others. I’ve often added my own twists to them, but I’ve mostly stuck with the standard structures.

My Motivation

Lately I’ve felt that I’m running out of interesting approaches to try. I’ve also noticed that I tend to get the best results when I’m a bit more innovative. So for many years I’ve been exploring within these structures.

In 2015 I delivered the Conscious Heart Workshop – a 3-day live event without any pre-selected topic or content. I went with the flow of invitation and audience suggestion all the way through. Think of it like a mixup of a personal growth workshop plus improv. I loved the experience, and the audience rated the overall value and the transformational effect of the workshop higher than for my more structured events (4.8 versus the typical 4.5 on a 1-5 scale).

With other formats I made similar refinements, adapting them to better play to my strengths, and the results were usually very good, both for myself and others.

But I still constrained myself to standard structural containers like an in-person workshop, a speech, a blog post, a video, a coaching call, etc. And I gradually began feeling a bit stifled even with these flexible containers. I think it was great to explore a variety of known methods for sharing value and generating income, but I knew I’d get bored if I kept circling around within those structures. I wanted to stretch more.

Several weeks ago, I began feeling the urge to do something more structurally innovative.

I wanted a format that would play to my strengths. I love presenting live, so it made sense to include a live component.

I wanted to feel stimulated and challenged, so I could stay aligned with my own path of growth. I didn’t want something that would bore me. Even public speaking can get boring after a while once it feels too easy. I crave more edginess.

I wanted something flexible that I could tweak, refine, and upgrade in endless ways, something I could really sink my teeth into for years to come.

I wanted a format that could provide huge amounts of value to people around the world and really help people get results.

I wanted something that I could develop and launch quickly without taking a year to develop it first – something I could approach like an explorer and dive right in and do it.

I wanted something that could be highly scalable in terms of the number of people served and the depth of service – wide and deep. That suggested something with a strong tech element, such as leveraging scalable cloud-based services.

I wanted an approach that felt sustainable and motivating and that wouldn’t burn me out. I wanted high enjoyment but not high pressure.

I wanted a format that felt warm and connected to me – a medium through which I could express compassion, caring, honesty, playfulness, and more.

I wanted something co-creative and highly adaptive, so I could listen to people’s feedback and make rapid and frequent adjustments.

I wanted something that would stand out in the personal growth world as being different, interesting, and unusual. It’s easier to market something that stands out from the crowd. Even if it’s a structure that people can copy, no one could realistically copy the way I’d apply it (if I get it right).

I wanted something deep and immersive and intense – something that would delight the dedicated yet still provide plenty of value to the less dedicated (and encourage them to be even more dedicated to their paths of growth).

I wanted something that would include laughter as well as tears for people – lots of human emotion, intimacy, and delving into the most personal types of issues with high trust.

I wanted to allow people space, freedom, and flexibility to engage at whatever depth and pacing works for them. So nothing would be forced or mandatory – just choice.

I wanted something with a price tag for sure, not a freebie this time. I wanted a super fair win-win deal. I wanted to create a fresh opportunity for my readers to support me while I support them. This needed to be win-win or no deal.

I wanted something that could be highly lucrative too, allowing me to eventually displace less aligned forms of income. I wanted a model that at least had the potential to yield some financial home runs.

I wanted a model that could align with attracting and supporting a bigger team of skillful people with strong values alignment.

I wanted the idea to include a passive income (evergreen) element too, so with each launch I’d be creating a new stream of income that could last for decades. I didn’t want a purely launch-based approach with dry spells between launches.

I wanted something that entails a bit of risk and mystery to make it more fun and interesting, not on the potential downside but on the unpredictability of the upside. So each time there’s a jackpot in terms of the results (financial, social, personal growth, business impact, customer transformations, positive ripples, etc), but I never know in advance exactly what the jackpot will be. I just know it will be awesome, probably in multiple ways each time.

I wanted something that could grow through referrals from people who were delighted with the value they received, something I wouldn’t have to advertise unless I just wanted to scale up faster. I’m not interested in scaling for its own sake. I’m interested in alignment, but it’s nicer if the alignment can scale well with minimal friction.

I wanted to present this as an offer that would seem irresistible to the most aligned people, making it a no-brainer for the right people to say yes to it. I also wanted that offer to be crisp and clear enough to repel people for whom it wouldn’t be a good match.

I wanted a chance to share, sell, and market the offer my way in alignment with my values. I wanted to deliberately break away from common online marketing techniques and go to the opposite end of the spectrum in some areas. I wanted to launch this simply and honestly without resorting to manipulative sales tactics or pressure techniques. I wanted an offer that my friends and even my wife would respect and feel aligned with. (And I knew I had it right when Rachelle said, “If you’d offered something like this before we’d met, I’d have personally bought it.” Additionally, many friends actually did buy it.)

I wanted something that would be structurally elegant and fairly simple, so I could explain it easily, and people would readily understand it. I also wanted a format that would provoke a “that sounds awesome!” response in the right people and “I couldn’t handle that!” in the mismatches.

I wanted a format that I would love, enjoy, and find fulfilling and that I’d be unlikely to get bored with too easily.

I wanted a format that could bring out my inner genius. I also knew (but didn’t need to intend) that if I succeeded, then it would probably be a model that would either scare or repulse other people in the same field because it wouldn’t play to their strengths, and it would also be a model that some would want to emulate and turn into their own if it did mesh well with their strengths.

I wanted a model that felt advanced to me – the sort of thing that might make a beginner in this field feel a surge of fear if they thought about applying it. Thin out the field of people who could actually do this well.

So yeah… I had a lot of motivation to try something new. 🙂

Initially I didn’t articulate this list of desires like I just did here, but these considerations were floating around in my mind when I began working on this.

Values Alignment

I was especially keen to launch this idea in a way that felt truly aligned with my values.

I wanted it to be honest, direct, and trusting. I wanted to consult my feelings and make heart-aligned decisions along the way, even if I believed those decisions would reduce the income potential.

I knew I wouldn’t be using artificial scarcity and pressure tactics to get people to buy anything. I wanted to give people positive reasons to participate and then leave them free to make their own best decisions.

Since co-creativity is one of my values too, I informed my email list of the idea while it was still incubating, and I asked them to share their feedback on relevant challenges. Then I spend days reading and replying to emails, taking notes, and compressing the key ideas to something I could work with.

Designing the Structure

When I put all the pieces together, I basically came up with this general format. Call it a co-creative online deep dive.

  • Host a 30-day group deep dive together consisting of daily live video calls with me on a given topic.
  • Record all the calls as we go along, and put them in a membership portal that all participants can access, with each recording being added within a few hours after the live call.
  • Make the recordings available for streaming and download in video and audio.
  • Add an interactive element where people on the live calls can contribute to a text chat channel that everyone can see, and encourage people to share their own live commentary, crack jokes, share extra tips and ideas, and so on.
  • Share the chat logs with everyone too. With hundreds of people on a call, the live chat could be a bit crazy, but it could also contain a lot of value for people. Surely there’d be a way to leverage live commentary to increase the value creation. We could use it to crowdsource additional suggestions and ideas around a topic, for instance.
  • Add some extra gifts and resources to the portal. Don’t present these as bonuses to pump up the monetary value of the total package though. Just add meaningful extras that could help and that people would appreciate. Keep it fairly low key; it’s better if people join because they resonate with the deep dive topic.
  • Don’t plan out all the lessons in advance. Instead, choose a topic where I know can deliver a ton of value. Then listen and adapt the material day by day as we go along. Review the feedback after each session (especially the chat logs), and use the feedback to design of the next day’s session.
  • Be willing to flow with interesting ideas that come up along the way, whether I think of them or someone suggests them.
  • Keep it conversational, friendly, and fun with lots of heart – definitely not corporate style.

This felt like a really interesting – and intense – way to share a ton of value with people efficiently.

I considered that this immersive format could be used to crack open some of the more stubborn transformations that won’t succumb to a book, a bunch of articles, or a weekend workshop. It would give us a chance to delve deep into some of the hardest problems of personal growth – finally a worthy challenge.

I pondered whether to offer a money-back guarantee, perhaps for the first 10 days. Then people could try it and see if they liked it. But this didn’t feel aligned to me. It would be a sensible financial decision because I’d almost certainly make more money with a guarantee than without one, but it would also dilute the commitment level of the group. I’d be inviting people to join based on the strength of the guarantee. And when the ideas became a little challenging and people began getting close to the edge of their comfort zones, the quitters would quit. Catering to partial matches would waste some of our time and energy. It just felt more aligned not to invite them to the party in the first place, so having a strict “no refunds” policy seemed wise. Let’s repel the misaligned while letting the aligned through.

With fair and reasonable pricing, it’s just hard to imagine someone doing the whole 30 days and not getting their money’s worth many times over. If someone really needs a money-back guarantee to push them over the edge, well… I’d rather leave them on the sidelines because this format requires more than a dabbler’s attitude to extract the best value. I’d gladly trade the extra sales for a more aligned and cohesive group to spend these 30 days with too.

Designing the Specific Offer

When I design a new offer, I don’t start with how, or what, or even why. I start with who. Which type of person would I like to help next?

I considered doing a survey, but I thought better of it. I needed to choose a topic that felt aligned to me right now. If I put it to a vote, the winning topic could be won that felt misaligned to me. I already have a good grasp of the main topics that have strong appeal to my readers, so I felt good about picking on and running with it.

For the first deep dive, I decided to focus on serving my readers who are still struggling with some form of scarcity. It’s a rich topic to be sure. I’d already done the 3-day Conscious Abundance Workshop in 2016, and I’d made major revisions and improvements to those ideas.

I thought it would be great to provide something highly accessible at a very reasonable price for this one. I tend to love a good deal myself, so I wanted to price for value – not premium pricing and not rock bottom discount pricing. Give people a strong yet fair deal.

Initially I was thinking $297, but I also felt that would be too high for this particular deep dive. A lot of people in scarcity wouldn’t be able to afford that much. So I went with $97, but my intention was really to deliver at least what felt was a $497 service. In practice I think it’s more like a $997 – $1997 one, relative to what others in this space are charging. But if I charged that much, it would price out the very people this deep dive is aiming to serve.

For future deep dives, I’ll likely price them higher, most likely $297 on the low end. But for this one, $97 felt right because of the topic and the people this is intended to serve. I can say that this price was very well received when I shared it (early in the process). Only three people voiced an objection to this price, and their objections were to having any sort of price at all. One of those three still signed up.

Making the Offer

Due to the nature of this offer, I knew I had to share it by video.

This is an offer and a format I really believe in, and I knew I couldn’t adequately convey my sense of alignment with it through plain text or a static web page. I had to make a video, so people could see my body language and hear my tone of voice. Then they’d be able to tell how I felt about it, and they’d see that I genuinely believed that this would be something special and unique.

A video would also give me the opportunity to share the reasoning behind the key decisions, and it would give me a chance to convey the vibe and the style of the deep dive experience too, at least to some extent. This would be something new, and I needed to adequately explain it.

I also felt that it was important to create the video last, shortly before I opened this for signups. That way it would still feel fresh to me when I shared it. If I’d recorded it a week in advance, that would have felt misaligned to me. My energy would have shifted a bit by the time of the launch.

I recorded this video in one take and with no edits. I outlined what I was going to say in advance, and I used my notes to stay on track, but otherwise I spoke off the cuff and from the heart. I actually found this pretty easy, and I think it’s because I really believe in the potential of this format and the overall offer. I honestly feel it’s way over the top in terms of value delivery.

Before recording the video, I meditated for 40 minutes. Then I synched myself to feelings of gratitude and appreciation. I thought about the people I wanted to serve, how we could all help each other grow, and how wonderful this would be for all involved. I thought about the positive ripples we’d create beyond this group too. I made sure I was really feeling the alignment before I pressed the record button. I regarded the vibe of the video as being 100x more important than the exact words.

I recorded the video simply in my living room. I didn’t want any glitz or B-roll to detract from the vibe. My goal was to keep it real, so it would naturally appeal to people who’d connect with my intention for a real, honest, connected growth experience.

I told myself not to worry about the length. I had lots of interesting ideas to share, so the right length would be however long it took to share them. If the length scared some people off, so be it. I intended that the right people would join.

The video came out to 68 minutes. I figured that was long enough to repel most people who wouldn’t be a good fit for a 30-day deep dive. Yet it would also make it easy for people to decide to join if they watched the whole thing.

I felt a lot of heart-aligned energy flowing through me in some parts while recording, which seemed to be strongest in the second half. I got misty eyed a few times along the way.

I also put all of the key info, including the price, in the first 11 minutes of the video. I don’t like it when people stuff in lots of rah-rah fluff in a lame attempt to rile me up before they do their big “price reveal.” So I did the opposite: here’s everything you need to know right away. And then you can keep watching if you want more depth on those details.

I made the kind of video I wished other people would make when launching new products and services. Just talk to me like a real person – human being to human being. Lower your shields. Drop the marketer mask. Save the fluffy B-roll footage; I don’t need to see your fancy car or boat. Tell me what you’re offering, show me you understand my problem or challenge with some depth, tell me how you believe you can help me, and share the reasoning behind the key elements. Then let me make a rational decision on my own. If it’s a good offer for me, I’ll buy it.

When I was done recording the video, I knew it was something special. I felt it came out even better than I expected. There hadn’t been a single sale yet, but I knew this would land strongly with many of my readers. I’d taken the time to listen to them. This would be a unique way to deliver value that I genuinely believed would be worthwhile and transformational for them. I kept following the path with a heart at each step. We’d be launching this the next day, and I already sensed that this would be powerful before the doors opened.

I designed this offer mainly for my core audience of blog readers and newsletter subscribers. I also designed it to have strong appeal to past workshop attendees. I’ve met hundreds of my readers and customers in person, and I know many of them well. I wanted to offer something I knew they’d appreciate – something they’d quickly recognize as powerful too.

I decided to focus on sharing the offer with them and not trying to push it too widely. I didn’t do anything with affiliates or joint venture partners, even though some offered to promote for me. I didn’t spend any money on advertising. I just wanted to serve and delight this one core group.

I knew that if I could serve this core group very well, there would be plenty of opportunities to build upon that. If people received strong value, they’d feel good about referring others. And when I ran another deep dive with a different topic, people who loved the previous one would likely return for another round.

Although I didn’t want to promote this up front, I also felt there would be opportunities to improve the offer as I went along, such as by adding extra resources to the portal as we went along. For instance, this week we added a copy of my entire blog in ebook form (mobi and ePub formats) for all participants of the deep dive. This way people can have their own private copy of my blog to search through and reference on their own devices.

I also approached this launch with lots of self-compassion. I wanted to create something sustainable, including the launch process itself, so instead of thinking that I needed to push for every sale, I focused on staying aligned and letting the universe send the right people to participate. The night before the launch, Rachelle and I had a nice dinner and a movie date night, which I really enjoyed. I wasn’t going to stress myself out regardless of the outcome.

Launching

I launched this new abundance deep dive by going with the flow of inspiration at each step, and this went smoothly overall. I had a list of key actions I needed to take to open the program for signups, but after that there was no special plan to promote it.

The initial launch window was less than 2.5 days. I launched on a Sunday afternoon, and I planned to close out signups by Tuesday night. Then the program began on Wednesday morning, August 1st.

I’d tested everything well, but I still wanted to make sure everything was working properly before emailing my main list. So I soft-launched this for a few hours first by adding the signup links to my website and letting my existing web traffic take notice. That brought in some signups pretty quickly. Once I felt good that all was going well, I emailed everyone on the list to let them know that the doors were open. This wasn’t a surprise for most subscribers because I’d been keeping them in the loop for a few weeks prior. They’d helped me co-create the offer, so they knew this was coming up.

I started getting a flood of emails from people expressing enthusiasm for the opportunity and appreciation for the accessible pricing. I could sense a whirlwind of positive anticipation in the air.

People began signing up quickly… around $24K of sales in the first 24 hours. I think it was more than $55K by Tuesday night.

Even before the signups began flowing, I knew that something special was underway here. Ever since I started working on this heart-aligned launch, I’d been getting a huge flow of odd synchronicities each day, mostly related to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the number 42. The abundance of such syncs was absolutely ridiculous. I’ve often seen this sort of thing happen when I’m really in the flow, but this time it was literally every single day, multiple times per day. It felt like the universe was cheering me on at each step, saying, “Yes, keep going. I’ve got your back!”

And of course, “Don’t Panic!” 😉

Transitioning to Evergreen

After the 30 days were over, I’d have a completed product in the form of the call recordings as well. Then I could convert the program to evergreen mode and turn it into a new passive income stream that could potentially last for decades for a timeless topic. This would require tweaking some emails and the signup page, so not a lot of extra work. All of the order processing and delivery aspects could remain essentially unchanged from live mode to evergreen, except that of course we wouldn’t be including any live calls after the 30 days.

Business-wise this seemed all around awesome to me. Every time I’d do one of these deep dives – and I figured I could probably do a few of them per year – I’d also be creating a new passive income stream. Anyone who missed the live version could still buy and enjoy the evergreen version of any course, even years later. And if people bought one course and liked it, they’d surely like others too, and they might especially like to join a live version the next time after going through an evergreen version.

I also loved that I could do each deep dive on a different topic and never have to repeat the same topic. I could align these deep dives with my own path of growth, so I’d always be sharing what was fresh and interesting to me. I could always share from the front edge of my best understanding at the moment I shared it.

From every angle this format and offer looked so ridiculously win-win for all involved. I loved the opportunity to connect more closely with my long-term readers. It seemed like a fun and lively way to deliver some serious value. It looked like it would be a huge win for my business. I thought that maybe it could create some positive ripples in the Internet marketing community and encourage more people to create heart-aligned products and services and do heart-aligned launches. Maybe it would convince some people to drop the inauthenticity and fakeness that’s so rampant in online launches.

So you can probably see why I really liked this total package so much. It just looked and felt so aligned on so many levels, including the pure honesty of the model. I could share the details up front and let people see how all of the dots connected. This was a very nice arrangement for all involved.

However… there was one little detail that I didn’t pay much attention to. And that was the Tuesday night “close cart.” Initially I figured I’d stay up a little past midnight, maybe give the stragglers an extra 15 minutes or so, and then remove the purchasing button from the signup page.

But before we reached that point, people were already asking if they could have a few more days. Even at the very reasonable pricing, some people needed more time to get the funds together, asking if they could still join a few days into it. I told them yes of course. Why would I want to turn them away? I gave them direct links to the order form, and I told them I’d keep that available for at least the first week.

But then I felt a bit torn. Initially I wanted to close the signups after midnight on Tuesday, so I’d have some extra time before the program started – just in case anything went wrong. This deadline was really for me. I wanted that extra time buffer in case something went wrong tech-wise and we had to catch up on a surge of support requests before the first live call. I wanted to make sure that people who wanted to be on that call were correctly registered for it. However, everything was going pretty smoothly in terms of getting people registered for the live calls, and I didn’t feel I needed the extra time.

So I did what I’d been doing the whole way through. I tuned into my feelings and intuition, which said not to close the cart and to simply share my honest reasoning for continuing to let people sign up. I did that, and nobody seemed to object. In fact, people continued to sign up right until the last minute before the first live call… and then during that call… and then still after that call.

And then people kept signing up the next day… and the next… and the next. And still up to the day I’m posting this, now after 12 sessions into this 30-day experience, more people are still signing up each day.

So instead of waiting till sometime after Day 30 to put this into evergreen mode, I’ve basically put it into evergreen mode already. Anyone who joins at any point during these 30 days gets immediate access to the recordings for all previous days, and they can also join us for any or all additional live calls if they so desire.

This feels good to me. I like that it keeps the doors open continuously for everyone. I just sort of stumbled into this approach, but I could see myself deliberately doing it this way for future deep dives. However, I still think it’s wise to have some reason for people to sign up by midnight before the first live session, such as by offering an extra gift if they do so. Otherwise it could cause a support crunch if too many people sign up at the last minute right before that call. It’s in everyone’s best interests if they sign up by a certain deadline, so we can ensure they’ll be able to access all of the live calls from the beginning if that’s their intention.

Consequently, I’ve already turned this into a passive income stream going forward. I don’t see any need to pause it. Once the 30 days are over, I’ll just need to tweak a few things to remove the offer of the live calls, and then it continues as-is in evergreen mode.

And this is before you layer in all sorts of other ripple effects too. I’m sure that many people will enjoy these deep dives enough that they’ll want to join Conscious Growth Club when they can afford it. I’m offering these deep dives for free to CGC members, so they’re a nice extra benefit for CGC folks as well at no extra cost to them.

I still love doing live events, and people who enjoy the deep dives would likely love the chance to connect in person at a future live event as well. It gives them an inexpensive taste of just how amazing the community around this work really is, helping them to trust that they’ll have a good in-person connection with these people too.

Once I saw how all the dots connected here, it made me wonder why I didn’t piece all of this together sooner. I actually had the general idea to do something like this as far back as 2016, but I didn’t yet have all of the key pieces in place.

At the time of publishing this piece, we’re up to 718 signups, and more people are continuing to join each day. Multiply that by $97, and you’ll see that we’re coming up on $70K. Even after taking out the credit card and PayPal fees and covering all launch-related expenses, the net revenue is about $67K so far. And this is just since Sunday, July 29th.

This is just our first deep dive too. I’m loving it so far and would enjoy doing more of these on many more topics, especially knowing that I’ll get better at leveraging this format as a way to help people each time we run it. With these kinds of funds coming in, I can invest more in staffing, enlisting more help to improve the service over time. And the evergreen element will help us maintain stable and reliable cash flow even when we aren’t actively doing launches.

Delivery

In terms of the delivery side, I wanted to keep the live sessions casual, conversational, down to earth, and real while also packing a lot of useful value into each one. I liked that 30 days would allow enough time to cover high-level concepts like principles and reframes all the way down to practical applications like which action steps to take. I relished the idea of being able to connect the dots between key concepts and practical results, which is really hard to do in an article or series of articles. It takes time to build out the framework and connect it with solving practical problems.

I love the challenge of going with the flow of inspiration as I share ideas with a live audience. I also love adapting on the fly to audience feedback as I go. It’s such a delight to be able to apply this skill set daily for a full month because I used to be deathly afraid of public speaking. So the opportunity to connect with a live audience for so many days in a row is just irresistible from a personal development perspective.

I also like that I can use different modes of sharing over the course of a month. On one call I might be more intimate and personal. On another call I might be more riled up and passionate. And another time I might explore more of my woo woo side.

For the duration of each call, I guessed that about 30 minutes would be good. In practice it’s clear that closer to 60 minutes works very well, so we’re looking at about 30 hours of material in 30 days. If I limited the calls to 30 minutes, I’d have to keep each segment super tight and not let myself be as responsive to the live feedback along the way. I love the live interactions, and other people seem to really enjoy that aspect too, especially when some spontaneous humor or unexpected insights come up.

In practice we’re getting the call recordings published about 3 hours after each live call begins… or about 2 hours after each call ends. This includes publishing them as video and audio in streaming and downloadable forms, and it includes the live chat logs too. I like that we’re getting them added to the portal with such fast turnaround times. This is about as fast as we can do it with the services we’re using since most of that time involves waiting for Zoom and Vimeo to do their own processing.

I also want to make sure we pace ourselves and don’t try to make too many improvements too quickly. We have some great suggestions coming in from members as we go, and I’d love to incorporate them, but it will take time for some of the bigger ideas. It’s clear that I’ll need to add some staff to help out. The bright side is that I’m already getting a lot of clarity on what’s needed.

Participant Feedback

After each live call, I read through the chat logs. These often make me chuckle because people like to crack a lot of jokes. There are way too many comments for me to read them as they come in live, and it would be distracting to even attempt it, although I’ll notice (and often comment live) on some that catch my eye as they scroll by. The chat log for each call is averaging around 30 pages single spaced, so that’s a lot of commentary – and ton of valuable feedback for me. Our longest so far is 45 pages long (from Day 12). I also receive additional feedback via email. I can’t always reply in much detail, but I’m learning a lot from these daily feedback cycles. Absorbing and assimilating high amounts of input quickly is a strength of mine.

By the time I’ve read through all of the feedback from the previous day’s session, I often much the next day’s material already mapped out… or at least I have some idea of where to go next.

If you attend a live call and comment on it or watch a recording and send me feedback while we’re going through these 30 days, that’s going to change my input patterns, thereby sending the course down a slightly different path. If you participate, you’re going to leave your own special imprint on the course, and that imprint will be there permanently on the recordings, influencing everyone who ever takes that course in any future year as well. So I really mean it when I say that this is a co-creative medium. This is a chance for us to harmonize with our true selves beyond anything we’ve done before.

Engagement is super high so far. We’re typically seeing 200+ people on the live calls with hundreds more watching each day’s video recordings within the first 48 hours. Others are going at a slower pacing to suit their schedules, and some are watching the videos more than once. I think the high engagement is due to the strong focus on attracting very aligned people for this.

I’ve also been doing some live polling during the calls. Once a poll begins, it takes about a minute for people to finish voting, and then I can share the results with everyone immediately. It’s a nice tool to take a quick pulse of the group. I also share these results in the chat logs, so everyone gets a copy.

Since we’re doing a deep dive into abundance, I wanted to assess where people perceived themselves in terms of experiencing scarcity versus abundance, so I took a poll to find out:

Needs Poll

The poll results will of course be biased towards those on the live calls, but the advantage is that we can address the results immediately afterwards. I can also use the results to help me decide how to weight certain topics for the current call. The fast sharing of results also builds trust and a sense of community. We can all let the data speak for itself.

I’m doing my best to foster a cooperative, teamwork, “we’re all in this together” vibe in the community, whether people attend live or listen to the recordings later. There really is a lot of love, compassion, and understanding in this group. People share many encouraging messages in the live chat.

As I noted earlier, when I initially launched this, I estimated that each call would be about 30 minutes. For the first several days, the calls were typically landing closer to 60 minutes. This felt like the right length to me, and I sensed that most people appreciated it since it meant extra value for them and more time to connect, but I wanted to check in with them to see how they felt about it. So here we have that poll that we did at the start of Day 7:

Call Duration

This aligned with my expectations. From this point onward, I took the advice to tighten up the beginning of the calls, so we could get into the core content sooner. I like a little bit of welcoming and friendly banter to begin each call as people are joining, but I want to keep it to a modest level, so we can get into the value delivery portion. This particular call was a bit unusual since we did a lot of polling up front. I think it was still a wise investment since it helped me get some feedback in a more condensed form, and it showed me where they was room for improvement. Doing this at the start of Day 7 helps me make the remaining 23 days better.

I also wanted to see how people felt about my delivery style up to this point.

Here are the answer options for this poll since some got cut off in the results pic below:

  • Too casual for me – go for a more formal presentation style
  • I feel like it could use more structure, but keep it fairly casual
  • Keep being yourself – I like the current conversational style
  • Stretch your creativity and take more risks – I love variety!

Delivery Style

So this looks pretty good to me. The combo of the second and fourth results tells me that it may be wise to experiment with different call formats, including testing a more tightly structured format now and then. I’ve already been experimenting with the way I structure these calls, and people seem to be noticing some improvement there, especially when I share an outline of a call in advance.

Even though it was still pretty early in the series when I did this polling (still the start of Day 7), I wanted to check in to see how people felt about the value they were receiving thus far:

Overall Value

This was great to see, showing that 80% feel it’s been a very good or excellent value up to this point. I also asked those who rated it below a 5 to email me to share what they feel we could do to raise it up a point or two for them. I got some good suggestions for further improvements we can make.

This next poll seemed extra premature to ask so early, but I figured it could be interesting to see if people were already experiencing some transformational benefit even after the first 6 days:

Transformational Effect

I’m delighted that 20% can already rate their transformations or results as excellent, and 81% are already at the level of good or better. This tells me that we’re off to a strong start. Let’s keep that momentum going and help more people move up the chain and get results.

This next and final poll was a bit of a joke, so I’m sharing it to give you a sense of our playfulness as well. I haven’t shaved since the start of this deep dive, and people were starting to comment on my scruffy face. I suggested that perhaps I wouldn’t shave at all during our 30 days together, and there seemed to be some support for that idea. I didn’t feel attached to the outcome, so I thought it would be fun to take a poll and let the group decide what I should do. Here’s how it turned out:

Steve's Beard

So why not? I’ll commit to growing a wild beard for the full 30 days… maybe looking a bit like Luke Skywalker from The Last Jedi by the end. Then if people skip around and watch the videos out of sequence, they’ll have a rough idea of where they are based on how long my beard is. 🙂

Next Steps

Coming up with this model and actually launching it has opened up a new world of possibilities. It such a strong path with a heart, it’s such a great win for all involved, and it’s definitely working on a practical level. I’d even call it win-win-win since it’s already creating some positive ripples for the friends and family members of those who are participating.

Even though we’re only 12 days in, some nice results are beginning to stack up too. Some people have finally quit their jobs to pursue a more aligned career or creative path. Others are actively reassessing their relationships and social circles. Many are experimenting with manifesting and finding that the universe is indeed backing them up, including some early financial benefits coming through. The level of optimism seems to be increasing as we go along.

For now my primary aim is to keep taking this one day at a time by listening to each day’s feedback and using that to plan the next day. This is working very well, and people are noticing the incremental improvements. It’s almost like the movie Groundhog Day whereby I can keep trying different ideas to discover what works best in terms of the value delivery. I’m actually finding that having some variety works very well. This isn’t about finding a singular format and using it for every call. I see my path forward as stretching this format in different ways to make each day feel fresh and interesting.

If you’d like to join us for the current 30-day Deep Abundance Integration, the door remains open, and I’m keeping it open indefinitely. At the time of this posting, we’ve completed 40% (12 days) of the live calls, and we still have 60% (18 days) to go. You don’t have to do the calls in order, so if you want to dive right in and start joining us on the live calls now, you’re welcome to do so, and I’d be delighted to have you join us. Then you can watch or listen to the recordings of the earlier calls whenever you want.

Take note that this is the most popular group experience I’ve ever launched since I began blogging in 2004, already beyond 5x the enrollment of my most highly attended workshop, and we’re only 12 days into it.

Let me add one final note. This course is seriously hardcore. By the time we’re done I expect it will be at least 30 hours of material. When I use the words “deep dive” to describe this, that’s for real. It’s almost unfathomable that someone could go through this entire course and not be transformed by it. This is a course for people who really want to make some substantial changes and feel ready to invite significant transformations in the area of abundance. It’s likely to bring up some tears as you do the inner work to heal some major trust wounds.

If you want to get a clear picture of whether this is for you, my #1 recommendation is to watch the video on the Deep Abundance Integration page. If it speaks to you and you feel moved by it, I think you’ll know that this course is for you.

This is just the beginning too! 🙂

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Source: stevepavlina.com

Steve Pavlina

Steve Pavlina is an American self-help author, motivational speaker and entrepreneur. He is the author of the web site stevepavlina.com and the book Personal Development for Smart People.

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