You Already Have the Course. It's in Your Session Notes.

When someone tells me they’d like to build a course but haven’t got the content for it, I’ve started asking a different question: what do you find yourself explaining over and over?

Nobody has ever failed to answer that one. It usually comes out fast, and there’s usually a bit of exasperation in it, because the thing you explain repeatedly is the thing you’re slightly tired of explaining.

That list is the course. It’s not a first draft of the course or an outline of the course. It’s the content, already developed, already tested on real people, already refined by the twenty times you’ve said it and watched which parts landed.

Where it’s actually stored

The material exists. It’s just not anywhere you’d think to look for a course.

Session notes. The framework you sketched out for a client in week three, which you’ve now sketched out for eleven clients because it works.

Your sent folder. The long email you wrote once explaining something properly, that you’ve since copied and pasted with light edits more times than you can count.

The thing you say in the first session. Every coach has one — the reframe, the diagnostic question, the way of describing the problem that makes people go quiet for a second. You’ve delivered it hundreds of times. It’s a module.

Voice memos and recordings. If you’ve been a guest on a podcast, or recorded a talk, or run a workshop, the thinking is already spoken out loud and transcribable.

I did a version of this with my own writing. I’d been carrying around the same handful of arguments for years — things I’d said to clients, in meetings, on calls — and the reason none of them were published wasn’t that I hadn’t worked them out. It’s that working them out and writing them down are different tasks, and I’d only done the first one.

Why it doesn’t feel like content

Two reasons, and both are worth naming because they’re what stops people.

It feels too obvious. The thing you explain constantly feels basic to you, because you’ve been living inside it for a decade. It is not basic to the person hearing it for the first time. The distance between what’s obvious to you and what’s obvious to your client is the entire value of your expertise.

It doesn’t look like a course. A course looks like slides and modules and a landing page. Session notes look like session notes. So the material sits in a form that doesn’t announce itself as valuable, and you conclude you don’t have any.

What to do with it this week

Open a document. Write down the five things you find yourself explaining most often across clients. Not in detail — just the headline of each.

That’s your module list. Five modules is a real course. Most of the ones people pay for have fewer.

Then, for one of them, record yourself explaining it out loud as if a client had just asked. Don’t write it — say it. You’ve delivered this explanation dozens of times and you’re much better at saying it than writing it, and a transcript can be edited into prose far more easily than a blank page can be filled.

The gap between where you are and a finished course is smaller than it looks, and it isn’t a content gap.

You’re not missing the material. You’re missing the container.