A day on the Curated Path
A signature framework for true learning.
For coaches and experts who already teach something well, and want the people they teach to actually finish. One day, virtual, four times a year.
Save me a seat →Change is the end result of all true learning.
Your learner does not have an information problem. She has more of it than any generation before her, most of it free, a great deal of it good. If information were the constraint, she would already have what she wants.
What she does not have is a path. An order to do things in, a reason to believe she can, and someone at the far end saying yes, this way, keep going. A course that delivers information can be assembled. A course that produces change has to be designed. This is a day about the difference.
Five mechanisms decide whether she finishes
They are not a sequence. All five are live in every hour you teach, the way all five senses are live in every room you walk into. Think of them as a checklist you run against a design, not a curriculum you deliver.
Confidence
Does she believe she is the kind of person this works for? Nothing else matters if the answer is no. Confidence is not a mood, it is evidence she has collected about herself.
Understanding
Does she have exactly enough to take the next step? Too little and she stalls. Too much and she also stalls, which is the part that surprises people.
Resistance
What is the objection she has not said out loud? It is there in every learner, at a predictable moment, and if your design does not go and find it, it wins quietly.
Vision
Can she see where this is going, and does she still want to be there? Vision is the pull. Everything else is push, and push runs out around week three.
Evaluation
Can she tell that she moved? Change that goes unnoticed does not hold. The most commonly skipped mechanism, and why so many good courses produce no testimonials.
Think of a course you bought and never finished.
You can usually name which letter failed you. That is the fastest way to trust this framework: not because I say it works, but because you can already see it in your own quitting.
Four instruments, and none of them work on paper
This is the reason the day exists rather than a download. Each of these asks you to be seen while you are still unsure, which is exactly what you are about to ask of every learner you teach.
The Reciprocity Grid
Facts, lessons learned, and the column almost nobody fills: what your field believes that you know to be wrong. A course is worth its price when it contains a position, and a position is something a reasonable person could disagree with. That sentence rarely gets written alone. Saying it to eight people makes it real.
The Curation Audit
Every step you take when you do the thing, then every template, checklist, and half-finished document you already own for each one. You cannot see your own obvious steps. Somebody else reads your list, asks what happens between four and five, and finds the two you have been performing unconsciously for a decade.
The Objective Lab
What a learner must know, must do, and must believe. We write them, read them aloud, and cross out every verb nobody can see. Your own vague verbs are invisible to you and obvious to everyone else. It is the least popular hour of the day and the one people write to me about a year later.
The CURVE Lab
Your own course, hour by hour, against all five mechanisms. Two questions of every part: which one is this serving, and which one is it quietly spending? You leave knowing your weakest letter, which is usually the mechanism you personally do not need, and one change to one named hour.
The textbook is not for sale
The Curated Path is a sixty-four page book. It holds the whole framework: the argument, the five mechanisms, the anatomy of a lesson, and a worked example followed all the way through.
You cannot buy it, download it, or find it as a PDF. It is given to the people who spend the day, and that is the only way it exists.
Not scarcity for its own sake. The book deliberately withholds the four instruments, because a book cannot make you say the uncomfortable sentence out loud. Read alone, it would teach you the theory and quietly convince you that you had done the work.
Also in the packet:
One day, virtual
Four blocks of ninety minutes, one instrument each, 09:00 to 17:00 Eastern with real breaks and an hour at midday. You need a pen and a course you are actually working on.
Six people minimum, twelve maximum. Everyone reads their work aloud at least twice, which does not survive a large room.
The book, mailed to you
The Curated Path, sixty-four pages, posted to you before the day. Its first pages are your pre-work, and the four instruments are deliberately not in it: those only happen live.
Registration closes eighteen days out so the book arrives in time. That deadline is the mail, not a sales tactic.
Who this is for
Bring a real course, not a hypothetical one. Every instrument asks you to look at a specific hour and decide what is wrong with it, and a hypothetical has no specific hours.
And the certification
Every Certified Course Creator is reviewed against this framework. That is why it is explained here in full rather than kept behind a door: you cannot ask someone to meet a standard nobody is allowed to read.
The day is the fastest way to learn it, and it is not the only way. Coaches who come in through an organization take the same ground at their own pace and go through the same review.
Why certification exists, and what it is for →Two I can follow all the way through
These start in 2009 and 2010, when the workshop had a different name and the framework had not been rebuilt yet. I am using them anyway, because they are the clearest before and afters I have, and because I got to watch how far they went.
Christi was terrified of standing in front of people
Christi Byerly was building a coaching practice and had never imagined running a group anything. She was panicked about speaking in front of people. Then she arrived and found that everyone else was planning a one hour workshop and she had planned a whole weekend, which made it worse.
She was standing in front of her own group, delivering it. Of the people in that first room, all but one became a client. The referrals from those clients kept arriving for years.
Workshops became the cornerstone of her practice. She is now Christi Byerly, MCC, founder and chief executive of Awaken Coach Institute, an ICF accredited school that trains other coaches. Twelve students a cohort, because she wants to give them her whole attention.
Jeannie has given me a tool that I will never lose. Just like riding a bike, you never forget how.
Christi built that school. I have consulted with her on it over the years, and we are still in touch, which is the part I would point at if you only had time to look at one thing. The workshop was four weeks in 2010. The working relationship is fifteen years old and still going.
What I keep the story for is where it starts. She did not have a content problem. She knew what she wanted to teach before she ever met me. What she did not have was any evidence that she was a person who could stand up and do it, and that is the whole of the first mechanism. Confidence is not a mood, it is evidence you have collected about yourself, and she collected the first piece in six weeks. Everything after that is hers.
Christina had the hardest possible thing to teach
Christina Ambubuyog is an intuitive coach. She came to the 2009 class wanting to turn intuition into something a group could learn together, which is close to the hardest design problem there is. As she put it: intuition is a verb. It is not information you can hand somebody. They have to do it, in their own life, and notice that they did.
She did not need content and she did not need teaching experience. She already had both. What she took from the four weeks was narrower and more useful: how people learn differently, how to measure development in someone, how to quantify a result that is mostly felt, and how to get a learner to see her own learning happening.
Ignite Your Intuition launched, ran four years, got rebuilt in 2013, and is still being sold today. That is seventeen years of a course continuing to earn, which is the fifth mechanism doing its quiet work. Nobody re-enrolls in, recommends, or keeps running a course whose learners could not tell that they had moved.
I was able to get the skill set that brought my ideas into a tangible experience, so that people can receive results in their everyday lives.
Seventeen years later, the method was still the first place she went
Not because the old course had stopped working. Because her own work had outgrown the container she built for it in 2009. The language had changed, and so had the people she serves, but the thing she was doing for them was the same thing she had always been doing, and it needed a shape again.
So we did what the framework does. Find the through-line, name it plainly, and build something a person can actually move through. Halfway into the conversation she could see it standing up.
I could sense it coming. Oh, here’s the through line. Here’s this house I’m building that I’ll want to invite people into one day.
That is the real test of a timeless skill. Not that the thing you built in 2009 still sells, though it does. That when your own work changes shape entirely, the design method is still the first place you go.
I could run these without saying so and you would probably not check. But these people worked with me one to one. They are not proof the workshop works. They are proof of what I am like to be in a room with, which is the other thing you are deciding about.
Every session with Jeannie makes me a better leader. She helps identify my blind spots and asks good, hard questions.
She has this lovely way of providing useful feedback that made me feel as though I was not far from my goal, and knew how to reach it with her insight.
Jeannie asks the right questions at the right time to move me toward a decision or a behavior change.
Every client of mine, in workshops and one to one, who has finished a course and put it in front of people has a profitable course.
Read that sentence closely, because I wrote it closely. It does not say everyone who works with me launches. Plenty of people start a course and stop, and I am counting them.
What it says is narrower and more useful to you: the design holds. When one of these actually gets built and shown to people, it earns. Which tells you where the real risk is. It is not launching something that flops. It is not launching.
Which also means the number is not really about me. Want a profitable course? Start it. Finish it. Put it in front of people. And learn what it actually takes to design true learning, the way Christi and Christina did, so the thing keeps earning long after the launch. That part was always yours.
Questions people actually ask
I do not have a course yet. Should I wait?
No. Bring the last thing you taught in any form: a workshop, a talk, a long conversation you have had with clients forty times. Every instrument works on it identically, and often better, because the material is real and you already know where it went wrong.
Is this only for online courses?
No, and the language on this page is a little misleading that way. The five mechanisms do not care about format. Retreat leaders, workshop facilitators, live trainers, and group coaches have all come through, and the design questions are the same ones.
How many people are in the room?
Six at the least, twelve at the most. Not a scarcity tactic: everyone reads their own work aloud more than once, and there is a size past which that stops being possible and the day quietly becomes a webinar.
Can I just buy the book?
You cannot, and I know how that sounds. The book holds the framework but deliberately withholds the four instruments, because none of them work alone. Sold on its own it would teach you the theory and quietly convince you that you had done the work, which is the exact failure this whole framework is about.
Reading my work aloud sounds awful. Is it required?
It is, and I would rather tell you now than surprise you. It is also the part people name afterward as the reason it worked. Everyone in the room is holding the same messy page, nobody is performing, and I go first on every instrument.
Does the day certify me?
No. The day teaches the standard. Certification is a separate review of a course you have actually built, and you can pursue it whether or not you were ever in the room.
Why virtual?
Because the room that matters is whichever one we are both in, and the four instruments work on video as long as the group stays small. It also means the day costs a Saturday rather than a Saturday plus two flights. The thing you carry out of it is the book, and that arrives by post either way.
I do, and I have been at this a while
In 2009 I was in an online coaching certification, putting my kids to bed and dialing into class. I kept hearing people say they wanted to offer group programs and had no idea how. So I wrote an outline, posted a flyer on the school bulletin board, charged twenty-five dollars, and went to bed. It was full when I woke up.
That was the first time I saw the thing this day is about: people do not need more information, they need a path and someone standing at the end of it.
Before that I spent two decades designing training inside very large companies, which is where I learned the unglamorous machinery: objectives, sequence, evaluation. This framework is those two things braided together, and I have been teaching it to coaches and consultants ever since.
Jeannie Sullivan · More about me →
Ask about the next one
Dates go out a few at a time, and groups stay small on purpose. Tell me what you teach and roughly where you are with it, and I will tell you honestly whether this is the right day for you.
If it is not, I will say so. There are people for whom the workbook is a better use of an afternoon, and I would rather you spent the money on the right thing.
One letter back from me, written by hand. No list, no schedule, and nothing about the workshop until you have read what the day actually is.
Thank you. It is in my hands.
I answer these myself, so give me a few days. You will get a letter with the dates, what the day costs, and an honest read on whether it is the right one for you.