The new Stature character sculpting course is coming along beautifully during our co-creative phase. I just published the 13th and final lesson of Module 1: Awareness, and I’m about to start on Module 2 next.

At the start of the year, there were only 4 lessons published, and now we have 13 lessons in the Stature member portal. By the time the course is fully completed, there will be dozens more. I aim to continue adding about 5-6 new lessons per week till the full course is done. That pacing feels good to me.

The intention is to create a truly deep, worthwhile, and transformational deep dive experience for people who want to change their characters – and their lives – for the better.

The average lesson is 14:30 in duration, so that’s nice and compact. The average lesson length for Submersion, by comparison, is about 26 minutes, and for Deep Abundance Integration, it’s 73 minutes.

Stature also includes a workbook with exercises to accompany each lesson as well as lesson summaries. I’ve been evolving this workbook along with the lessons, so the workbook is now up to 30 pages. And we’re publishing full text transcripts for each lesson too.

Creating these lessons is challenging but also creatively engaging and fun. I feel like this is a course I couldn’t have created a few years ago. This deep dive is the product of nearly 30 years of exploring personal growth, along with an increasing amount of coaching experience.

It feels really nice to be in this phase of my life, where I’m finally getting a chance to share some deliciously deep approaches to personal transformation that go way beyond anything I’ve blogged about in the past 15+ years – unless I wrote a 200,000-word blog post. These courses are way bigger than most books, closer to 3 books in size for each course.

Imagine taking on the equivalent creative challenge of writing a trilogy of original books in about 2-3 months, while also blogging every day as you go. And throw a big launch on top of that for good measure… and running a coaching program with 150+ members… and a trip to Panama… and other stuff that would just scare you.

I’m really enjoying the depth of this project. It’s right at the perfect level of challenge that fully ignites my creative circuits each day. I love the edgy feeling that comes from the stimulating, positive pressure to keep designing, recording, and publishing new lessons each week because hundreds of people are already in the portal going through the existing lessons. I like trying to maintain a fast enough pacing to stay ahead of most of the group, so not too many people are fully caught up to the most recent lesson and nipping at my heels for more.

One thing I had to accept about myself is that I’m predominantly a high stimulation person. I used to seriously dislike significant time pressure for creative work, but if there’s just the right amount of it, it brings out the best in me and makes me highly productive. Figuring out how to create the right level of pressure to feel stimulated and excited but not so much as to feel overwhelmed took a lot of experimenting.

I think the best pressure isn’t really time pressure with a strict deadline but rather an aligned form of social pressure. This involves inviting a group of people to support each other in achieving worthwhile goals. It’s helpful for me to know that the people going through the course want me to succeed. They want the lessons to be good, and so do I. I find great value in tuning into that energy and intention. It’s similar to how I got over fear of public speaking many years ago. I just had to recognize that the audience wants me to do well because it benefits them too, so we’re allies in co-creating a good experience together.

Sometimes I ponder that in order to create this significant course on character sculpting, I had to sculpt my own character into the kind of person who could actually create such a thing. That was far from easy, but it’s super rewarding to realize that I’ve actually become that kind of character and that now I’m capable of a level of creativity that’s well beyond where I used to be. And that also makes me wonder: What more is possible after this?

It’s so tempting in business and life to obsess over our external and measurable goals, but there’s so much to be gained from working on character-level goals. One of my external goals was to do a 3-day workshop on the Las Vegas Strip. That happened in 2009. And now I’ve done 16 of those kinds of workshops. But the external goal was nothing relative to the inner goal of sculpting myself into a character who could design a 3-day workshop with relative ease and deliver it without fear. Knowing that I’ve trained that ability into my character and that I can use it for the rest of my life is worth way more than achieving the external goal of doing any number of workshops.

I’m having similar feelings about the courses that I’ve been developing since 2018. Publishing each new course is an external goal, and I do find it meaningful to achieve those goals. But even better is sculpting my character into the kind of person who can consistently design, develop, launch, and publish a deep and fascinating new course in a relatively modest amount of time. Knowing that I’m turning myself into a person who will have this ability locked in for life is precious indeed.