In this Treasure Tuesday, Robert Donnell from P5 Marketing is my special guest. The topic: How we wrangled 70 smart medical (i.e., quite technical) articles into an amazing health program. What can you glean from that for your work? Take a listen or read below.
It’s my pleasure to introduce you to my special guest, Robert Donnell, from P5Marketing. He is the co-creator of the BEAT-IR program, which guides people to beat insulin resistance and inflammatory response. This show’s title is “Dr., Dr., How to Convert 70 Medical Articles into a Transformative Program.” (we changed the title to “How to wrangle 70 smart articles into an amazing program.”
Dr. Stephie: Welcome, Robert.
Robert: Hi. Great to be here.
Dr. Stephie: We wanted to take a few minutes and give our listeners/ viewers an idea of what happened with the BEAT-IR program and how that came about. It all started with a big pile of medical articles.
Robert: A big pile of medical articles. One of our other founders is a physician. He’s a plastic surgeon and had a rush with diabetes. He is a researcher. He sat down for at least a month or so, pounded out studies and research, and made up his mind about what needed to happen to cure insulin resistance, which is the precursor to diabetes. Literally, it was an overwhelming stack of word files. If you can stack word documents together, it was anywhere, single space, page after page, highly medical terminology not necessarily laid out in any way for anybody other than a research paper. That’s why we called you.
Dr. Stephie: You realized that we need to take this out of the realm of what a medical doctor can understand and make it available to people who have insulin resistance or are pre-diabetic or diabetic and that this material could be transformative if only it were related in a way that those people could understand it and act on it.
Robert: Absolutely, but much more than that; what made the project work was your ability to look at the stack and go, “No, this goes over here. This goes over here. Then this has to go before that.” You organized the whole flow to be presented logically and helpfully, even before we translated it from doctor speaking to people speaking.
Dr. Stephie: That’s true. Yeah. The structure is always critical. At first, when I looked at this pile, some of it was over my head, and I googled many words. [Understanding the structure we needed] even led to a change in the logo.
Robert: I was going to say that. If you look at the logo, you came up with six-by-four as the structure, right? There are six underlying guiding principles and four pillars supporting the whole structure. That was the format in which we could hang all of our information.
I’ve worked with you on Brilliance Mining. A founder of a company, a software company, a tech company, or whatever, he’s got all this information in his head.
In this case, we had 70 articles. If you’re going to take that and pull it out of somebody’s head, then you have to put it into a structure that makes sense for the people that don’t know everything that the person who had those thoughts knows.
Dr. Stephie: Yes. The structure is really important, making sense of it, simplifying it, making it more teachable, and putting yourself in the shoes of the people who will ultimately consume this information. To get transformation, you have to make it actionable. Whether that’s a health program or teaching the secret sauce of someone’s business, it doesn’t matter. It’s, it’s the same.
The other thing that happened was: As we digested this material and started to file it into the different “drawers” of the structure … I sometimes compare the structure we use for the information to a set of drawers.
In this case, we had six drawers representing six aspects of lifestyle, like sleep and intermittent fasting, and don’t eat too much sugar. We had six of those, and then we had four support pillars. You can say it was a chest of drawers with six drawers and another one with four drawers.
We started to decipher the content of these 70 articles and stick them into these different drawers. We then simplified it and orchestrated the bits of information, and put them in a reasonable order. Sometimes we even said, “Wait, this is too advanced. We’ll do this later, but let’s keep this basic enough.”
Then what happened, too, sometimes we found some information was missing. Additional Brilliance Extraction happened when we cornered our beloved doctor and said, “Wait, tell us more about this.” Right? Do you remember that?
Robert: I do. He was happy to help. Yes. Then we got right back to work translating it again.
Dr. Stephie: Yes. That’s very true. Then we even pulled in the psychologist. Tell us a little bit about that.
Robert: Well, she’s a Ph.D. psychologist who has been very helpful because she provided this concept of a mindset. At the end of every lesson, we always had a mindset check-in to get the learners’ minds right before they tackle changing their lifestyles. Because if you don’t have that psychological background, it’s very difficult to make a change.
Dr. Stephie: Yeah. So we ended up doing Brilliance Extraction. As I’m thinking about this, all four of us were involved in creating this program. You have applied this methodology we’re teaching in your own life. You had a lot of experience with it. Then the doctor as well, the psychologist, and then myself. It was basically like a team Brilliance Extraction. The 70 articles certainly came from the doctor, but we all shared “brilliance.” That’s a great situation where when you can tackle something from multiple perspectives, it makes it all better.
Well, one last question; we want to keep this brief but impactful. What would you say are the top three or five things you learned while doing this?
Robert: It takes way longer than you think, as you told me, which I didn’t want to believe. Getting this information into a course program is a lot of work. The Brilliance Extraction itself (getting the information out of the doctor’s brain) is almost easier than producing a course out of that material. I mean, it’s faster. It’s quicker. It’s not necessarily easier.
One of the things I wanted to say is that I watched you do this for a while, several months, as we were going through this because it’s not our only job. It’s kind of a side hustle for us. But you’re able to do stuff in a very clever way that gets to the bottom of stuff. I meant that this is meant to be a kind of testimonial. Sometimes, if you weren’t available, I said, well, “I’m going to wait for Stephie because that’s part of your magic sauce, that ability to see patterns and structures that we mere mortals can’t see.”
Dr. Stephie: Thank you! That’s, that’s sweet. Well, seeing patterns and structure, this is one of the blessings of having been a Ph.D. chemist, you know, by training, because you know you see all this data. You’re trying to make sense of it, and then you think, “Okay, now that I understand it, how do I teach it? “
Robert: Right.
Dr. Stephie: What do you hope will happen with this program? By the way, when we said we worked on it for months, let’s also say that this was seven courses, not just one. It was a massive amount of material.
Robert: At least eight hours of recorded lessons. It was more than that, probably. Well, yeah. Easily. We were working on it part-time. We were doing a session a week or a session every other week. We all have lives. Holidays intervened, and our doctor went on vacation for a month. Things always take longer than you think.
Dr. Stephie: I mean, harder than you think. In some cases, clients and I have developed training material within only six weeks to the point where it made a real difference. That’s something to consider, too, that you can see in many cases: Put the material you already have to use while you’re still working on the next batch of material.
Robert: Right. We consciously decided to have all the course material ready before we launched. If we’d had said, here are the first two courses, and we’ll release one every 30 days, we’d already been in the market. That’s true.
Dr. Stephie: Of course, there’s a strategic difference between doing Brilliance Extraction to create a program that you market to the outside world versus doing it for growing and scaling your own company.
Robert: Right. [In the second scenario] it doesn’t have to be as polished.
Dr. Stephie: Yeah. All said and done, what do you think is going to happen with this program?
Robert: I think it’s going to be rather successful. The format we delivered was very similar to the conversation we’re having now, except there were two more squares [faces on the video], one for the doctor and one for the psychologist. We put up a set of slides, and we all talked to them and gave our opinions and insights. So, it’s not a boring course at all. We will beta-test it and roll it out over the next couple of months, but we’re frankly excited!
Dr. Stephie: We hope it will transform millions of people’s health.
Robert: I would settle for hundreds of thousands, but for sure <laugh> very useful. I mean, a big number. Diabetes is so prevalent today. I think we’ve figured out why with our courses. I’m excited.
Dr. Stephie: Awesome. Thank you so much. We might update our viewers/readers on this at some point. Thank you.
I’m Curious
First off, how does this apply to you? Do you have piles of complex information you want to convert into bite-size training?
Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t invite you to look at the Brilliant Mining course we’re now offering as a self-paced course with one-on-one support scheduled by the student when they’re ready.
If you have any questions about this, please ping me. I’d love to talk with you.
Live brilliantly,
P.S.: I appreciate you commenting and sharing this Treasure Tuesday with others. Thank you!
