4.4: How Big of a "LEAP" is Enough?

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🗣️ Transcript

Hello again! In this lesson, we’ll dig a little deeper into your course’s destination by asking: how big of a leap is enough?

In other words, how close must you get your target market to their ultimate goal?

So here’s what you’ll learn:

So let’s get started!

Previously, we talked about defining a desirable destination by looking at the goal through four different result “lenses”: asset, ability, status and reality.

But here’s the challenge: sometimes your market’s goal is just too big and too distant.

Let’s explore what I mean with an example.

Imagine your target market is young professionals who want to retire early but don’t understand what they need to do to make that happen.

“Retiring early” is a broad goal, but you could still create a vivid and specific result using the process I just taught you.

For instance, using the Reality lens we could paint this group a future where they’re no longer dependent on a regular job. Instead, income from investments and sources means they have the freedom to take several holidays each year, spend time on their hobbies and with family, and so on.

The problem is that the result, however vivid, will take years to achieve. Certainly more time than you’d expect someone to be active in a course.

So what do you do? Do you promise this big result knowing that your course won’t deliver it anytime soon? Or do you promise something smaller and take the risk that it’s too far removed from the main goal to be strongly desirable?

So here’s what you do. Instead of trying to deliver a result that satisfies your target market’s goal 100% and takes them all the way to where they ultimately want to be, you just get them to meaningfully closer midpoint via what I call a LEAP.

I define a LEAP as a point in the future where your students can say to people around them – both supporters and doubters alike – “Look! Evidence of Actual Progress”.

It’s a meaningful result that makes their ultimate goal seem much closer and more achievable, perhaps even inevitable.

And it lets your students say to their sceptics: “I wasn’t crazy to pursue this goal, because, look, I’ve made a big step towards it already.”

Going back to the previous example, while your course couldn’t lead students all the way to early retirement, it could help them establish the right working, spending and investment habits that will ultimately enable them to retire early.

On completing your course they could confidently say: “I’m going to retire early and here’s how I’ve changed my mindset and behaviour to make sure it happens.”

By the way, the other reason you might want to target a smaller, less ambitious result is if you only need a mini-course to achieve your mission.

In that case you could bite off just a piece of the goal instead of trying to “eat the whole enchilada.”

There are two main ways you can dial back from a large, distant goal to create a destination people can reach in less time that’s still desirable.

The first is to pick a result that occurs earlier in their journey. So just imagine someone who’s on the path to longer-term success and ask yourself: where are they at after 3 months, or 6 months, or 12 months of being on that path?

Specifically, what new asset, ability, status or reality is achievable within those shorter time frames?

Let’s say your target market is fine artists who want to make a full-time living from their work but don’t know how to turn their hobby into a business.

Becoming a full-time artist from a cold start would usually take more than just a few weeks or months, right?

But if your course could help artists sell their first painting or land their first commission, that would be a major leap forwards, right?

After getting that first sale they’d probably feel like if they can do it once they can “rinse and repeat” until it’s a full-time profession. So it’s a big win for them.

The other way to create a more modest but still appealing result is to help your market solve a smaller but essential part of the overall puzzle. It doesn’t satisfy the main goal on its own, but it is necessary for success.

So let’s say your target market is digital entrepreneurs who want to grow and monetize a successful YouTube channel but don’t know how to do it.

Growing a channel has a lot of elements: picking a topic, setting up the channel, creating and promoting videos, engaging with the audience, and so on.

But you could choose to just tackle the challenge of creating professional-looking videos: how to plan the content, how to film and edit the footage, how to add titles, etc, etc.

You could essentially say: “If you want to make it big on YouTube, you’ll need to learn how to make good videos first!” – and few people would disagree with you.

So the LEAP would be this intermediate midpoint result called “skilled at creating videos”. It doesn’t take them all the way to a profitable YouTube channel, but it’s a major step.

Okay, that’s all for this lesson. In the next one, I’m going to give you a way to clearly articulate the promise your course makes to its students.

See you there!