The Pandemic & First Course

The Scene

It’s March 12, 2020. Im in my Dublin clinic and the world is signalling that something very different is happening. My cousin was in clinic yesterday and she (a teacher) told me that they have all been advised by the Department of Education to take ALL their textbooks home and be prepared to work online for the foreseeable future….. I think shes full of shit. Riiiiiiiiight?

Later that day the annoucement comesand schools, colleges and childcare facilities are ordered to close. Pretty much all in person services advised to close too. Wow - that means I get a short break from work. I’ll take that!Little did i know then, that this would expand into almost 5 months of lockdown.

Fast forward to the beginning of April.The sun is beaming in Ireland, Im happily training with my kettlebells, reading books, bingewatching Breaking Bad (again - because my wife hasnt seen it!) and enjoying the time off work…… but inside me there is an itch building….

“You’re probably never going to get this amount of time off work again Dave. You should use it productively instead of lying about….”

“Ah but you deserve a break every bit as much as everyone else does, you work hard - who knows when you’ll get a time to rest and recharge like this again…”

“What about that idea you had 3-4 years ago about building an online course for people in pain?You will likely NEVER get an opportunity like this again….”

On social media im getting so many messages from clients saying that they are grateful to have the exercise videos I give to all my clients - if they cant get to see me in person, at least they have stuff that they know can help them. I scroll through instagram and see that online courses are popping up left right and centre and then…

Something clicks inside me and I hop up off the couch, tell my wife that I’m going to build an online course and I will be upstairs in the box room planning this out for the foreseeable future.

The Course

Over the next 7-8 weeks, I plan out and record 96 separate videos, 4 guided meditations and 10 assignments. A mix of long educational lectures about pain, mindset, stress and loads of my favourite exercise videos. I film ALL my exercise videos in the kitchen (LOL) with all of the furniture piled into the one side of the room. At the end of this process, its all uploaded onto Thinkific course hosting platform and I announce to the world that Move Out Of Pain is available for sale on June 16th 2020.

I genuinely didnt know how this would land and I was shocked when sign up after sign up rolled in. Loads of current and previous inperson clients signed up and lots of people I have never and likely will never meet. This was my first bit of signal within the noise. That there was an appetite for this type of thing. Feedback came in gradually with some users getting genuinely lifechanging results which blew my mind! And i got lots of incredible constructive feedback.

• The lectures were too long and if i get pulled away I cant remember where I was and that puts me off restarting.
• How do I know what modules/videos are relevant to me?
• How do i know which exercises to pick from? The cheat sheet isn’t really helping me with this

The Realisation

October 3rd 2020. Im back in clinic now since July 2020 and my wife and I are about 4 weeks away from the birth of our first child. I have successfully signed up well over 100 people to the Move Out of Pain course. That was beyond what I thought was going to happen so on one hand I was delighted.

On the other hand, I’d been taking my time to reflect on the course I’d built, the feedback I’d received and the questions that users were asking. It was clear to me that I had done some things pretty decently. It was also (frustratingly) clear to me that I’d completely missed the boat on quite a few things.

I decided that I was going to stop offering the course for purchase in its current form and rebuild it from scratch. I was going to expand it out to become a much more comprehensive course, make it more accessible and build structured progressive rehab plans for each body area.

I realised that people need education, its important. I was right about that first time around. What I’d failed to understand was that people need guidance and I had to build my course with that in mind. This was a seed that got planted in 2020 and little did I know what was going to grow from that….

I was happy that I had a plan to work from, a new project to get stuck into and I was doing work that was meaningful to me. Perfect timing, right? 👶