Overcoming Course Fatigue with Charlie Gilkey

Charlie opens with a bold claim that frames the entire conversation: teaching sales is one of the most transformative things you can do for an audience. But here's the catch—it has to be a *really good* learning experience. The online course market is saturated with mediocre offerings, and students are increasingly skeptical.

The solution isn't to create more content or add more modules. It's to focus relentlessly on transformation. What specific change will your students experience? Can you articulate it clearly in one sentence?

When Charlie talks about being an "authentic expert," he's not referring to performative vulnerability or manufactured relatability. He's talking about something deeper: a genuine orientation toward service.

The question isn't "How do I position myself as an expert?" but rather "What's going to best serve my tribe?" This distinction matters because it shifts your focus from self-presentation to student outcomes. Natural expertise—where you actually know what you're talking about—emerges from this service mindset. It's the opposite of "social expertise," which is just convincing people you know things.

Before designing any course material, Charlie emphasizes the critical importance of understanding where your participants are starting from. He references the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition—novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, expert—as a framework for thinking about your audience.

Most course creators make a fundamental mistake: they design for a vague "everyone" instead of a specific skill level. The content appropriate for a complete beginner is radically different from what serves an advanced practitioner. Think about the difference between a freshman survey course and a graduate seminar. Same broad topic, completely different approaches.

This has pricing implications too. Advanced students with specific needs are often willing to pay premium prices for targeted, high-level content.

Here's where Charlie gets tactical. He introduces what he calls "the minimum question": What's the very minimum students need to learn to get from where they are to where you're trying to take them?

Anything beyond that minimum is scope creep. And scope creep is the enemy of effective courses. When the course scope is too big, "nobody wins." Students feel overwhelmed and drop out. Creators burn out trying to create too much content. The transformation gets lost in a sea of information.

This is counterintuitive for experts. We naturally want to share everything we know. We think comprehensive equals valuable. But online learners are distracted. They're checking email, dealing with kids, squeezing in lessons between meetings. You have to simplify your material as much as possible.

Many experts lean toward creating big, comprehensive courses because they intuitively seem more valuable. A 50-module masterclass sounds more impressive than a focused 8-lesson program, right?

Wrong, according to Charlie. Participants in sprawling courses feel cognitively overloaded and check out. Completion rates plummet. By creating smaller, focused courses, you can get started faster, test your ideas with real students, and develop a library of offerings instead of betting everything on one monolithic program.

This approach also forces clarity. When you only have 8 lessons to work with, every minute has to count.

One of the hardest skills for course creators is being willing to say "this isn't for you." Charlie is emphatic about this: it takes discipline to say "it's only for these people—if that's not you, don't buy the course."

Exclusion feels like leaving money on the table. But the opposite is true. When you try to serve everyone, you create a watered-down experience that truly serves no one. Your best students—the ones who would champion your work and provide testimonials—get frustrated alongside the beginners who shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Get crystal clear about the "future positive state" you're helping students achieve. Then build the entire course around getting specific people to that specific destination. Really clear, really direct.

Before you spend months creating a course, Charlie suggests a simple step that many creators skip: ask your audience what they want. Survey them. What type of product would they like? How would they prefer to learn this topic—via a workshop, a book, a coaching program, or a course?

You might discover that your audience doesn't actually want a course at all. Maybe they want a quick workshop. Maybe they want ongoing group coaching. Finding this product-market fit before you create saves enormous time and heartache.