Creating Courses, Coaching and Community with Michael Wolf

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Michael Wolf share a passion for online education, technology, and personal transformation.

With more than 3,000 lessons and 33 courses developed on LifterLMS, Michael highlights the value of fusing technology with purposeful learning. He also emphasizes the fruitful collaboration with his co-founder, Maha Jolene Louie, who combines his technical and structural approach with her creative and language skills.

Michael wants to make education a vehicle for genuine change by combining philosophy, self-awareness, and real-world application in his comprehensive learning method.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Oh, there we go. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, a longtime friend, and lifter, LMS community user community member. His name is Michael Wolf. He’s from Empowering Now and Golden. XPR Michael’s got something special for you. To check out, go to golden xpr.com/lifter.

He’s gonna tell us more what that’s all about in a little bit. But first, welcome to the show, Michael. Thank you, Chris. It’s a privilege to be with you. It’s really awesome to do this episode. The cool thing about running a software company, we’re both super passionate about education but there’s a community that builds behind it, and you’ve been around for a while.

So I’m excited to get into your story what you’re doing with the tools, how you got there. But let’s start now like current state, like what are you doing with teaching online, and then where did it start in the beginning? 

Michael Wolf: Thanks, Chris. Great question. Yeah. What are we doing now? We have a pretty extensive lifter site.

Our entire learning management site is built around lifter and we’ve got. In the neighborhood of 33 courses, and that’s with over 3000 lessons. So quite extensive In terms of the teaching content, we have probably around two dozen inquiry tools, featuring a random number generator to assist in doing inquiry.

We have six memberships. We’ve got basically all. Lifter’s core functionality deploys custom fields, notes, videos, social. We’ve integrated with Groundhog, WP Fusion Astra and Elementary for the front end plus gravity forms. So we’re pretty much whatever lifter recommends kind of house. We do it and we stay with the latest updates consistently.

In terms of students, we’ve got roughly 60 registered students. We deliver one-on-one services with extensive use of private areas. We also are in the process of a Train the trainer program using lifter groups in a beta mode at the moment. And we have, wow, what else am I forgetting?

We’ve got it all deployed. Trust that gives you a flavor for what we’re up to. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And it’s cool to see when, lifter’s extendable, so you could just have one free course on your site or you can get complex with coaching and community and all kinds of stuff.

That’s so cool to see. You’re using the majority of the tools. Tell us a little bit about. What empowering now and Golden XPR is all about like your subject matter and what is this niche? 

Michael Wolf: Thank you, Chris. Yes. It goes back to the early two thousands and at that point I was a high tech sales guy.

My background is in corporate sales, worked for Xerox Parametric Technology, I-B-M-P-T-C. I’ve always been a software sales guy. Going way back to the beginning and. I had a life changing experience and that’s really a longer story. But after that experience, I really did an about face with my life and I began to open to receive a business plan to help our planet.

And that sounds lofty and perhaps on the strange side of things, but the mission that had come to me was to help transition our planet from greed to grace. If we look at greed it’s more than just money hunger. It’s like any place where I’m not enough, there’s unfelt, greed, and it’s really insidious how for me in my life, greed has sourced so much unconscious behavior.

So I went through a deep experience. I said, look, I’m really committed to bringing forward something impactful and real, and. That’s when I wrote the business plan for Empowering Now, which was, as I mentioned a learning idea. I knew that I needed to develop a curriculum. I knew that we needed to build out the courses and train trainers, all of this idea.

So that was the vision is to provide something meaningful for the healthcare system, the political system, the monetary system, without being. Just another woo training option. Something that was practical and real well as soon as the business model was written. Interestingly, I met my business partner, ma Jolene Louie, and she’s an artist and an author from France and has spent her entire life essentially revealing.

Codes that have been held in ancient language. So that comprises the business model and the beginnings of the curriculum, which we’ve been now working on close to 17 years together. Very long-term project. This is our life’s work, both from a business model and from a curriculum perspective. So we we really need it and have depended upon.

A strong technical foundation so that doesn’t plague us as we do grow. 

Chris Badgett: So how did you like start with, you said how many courses, now 

Michael Wolf: we’re up to 33 courses. 

Chris Badgett: So did it start with one, or, I’m sure it did, but like, how did you get going? 

Michael Wolf: Making lots of mistakes would be the practical answer, 

Chris Badgett: but 

Michael Wolf: the that, what that’s not saying is that, that there’s probably been 200, 300, maybe 500 books that have been written that have been synthesized down to the current 33.

So Maha is one of these really gifted creative types that, if something doesn’t work or if we make an error, we take that in, we assimilate that, and that becomes, okay, let’s do it differently next time. Fail off and fail a lot mentality. But in 2018 we published the first 22 courses, and that was after three years of development on the backend.

Writing, editing, publishing, changing. So we went through lots of changes, which involved the initial mystery school launch, which had 22 courses, and that was introductory courses. We have a, an application called Expired Tarot, which uses the Hebrew letters in order to gain insights for inquiries.

So those 22 courses were what we launched with. We just decided not to launch till we were happy with it. We’re we knew that it, yes, we could have launched sooner and that was what we were advised to do, but we didn’t. We waited till the first 22 were prepared because that’s what we needed to do. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the partnership ’cause some of the most successful lifter LMS projects I see it’s often like a couple people or more behind the project, how do you all divide and conquer and think about making that partnership successful? 

Michael Wolf: Good question. There’s two sides to that answer. One side would be the interpersonal side, which is we’re both completely committed to one ideal, which is know thyself. So any problem I have with my partner reflects something that I have not yet understood about myself without that agreement.

Nothing else works. And what I would say in terms of my partnering with Maha is the two of us are quite opposite. I’m your traditional male archetype south Texas country boy, business guy, and more recently educated obviously, and all of the modalities that were associated with transformation and workshops.

I’ve been through lots of. Lots of different mod modalities there. Maha’s the artist and she’s, she thinks in terms of beauty. And if you look back at the gates to the eternal Maha has gifts, literally the touch all three, the good, the true and the beautiful. And really it’s that kind of synthesis that produce experiences tat are worth having.

That would, that’s be one big part of it is the, working through the interpersonal side of realizing that my partner is me and the other is that, I’ve largely focused on tech and editing and, ideas and structures for how we deliver the content. And that goes hand in hand with what she’s receiving relative to the written materials that source the mystery school.

Chris Badgett: I know you’re big with language, so if there’s better words than what I’m going to use, but is it a an artist and a producer kind of dynamic? 

Michael Wolf: Similar. Yeah. The other part that she’s clearly the artist and the author and she has a deep relationship with ancient language, not just Hebrew, but Greek and is schooled in virtually all modes of ancient scripture and revealing patterns that are common to all modes of let’s just call it human development.

And from my perspective, less of a producer. But yes, I’m an editor. I also say, Hey, look, just this doesn’t make sense to me. Can we, and so that editing role is part of it, and increasingly I’ve noticed that this material somehow lives in me, not as if I’m the author, but I can feel things when I’m opening to this sort of, language concept, and it, again, it’s not like Spanish versus French or c plus versus, some other Java scripting language. What we’re speaking into is the understanding that language is life. In other words, what I see an experience represents patterns and ideas that flow through archetypal.

Archetypal elements that give us what we call life. And so when I begin to look at the a language that’s alive, many people will say, oh, language is only a symbol. Yes. And there’s a realm at which when I am real life is language. That would be a summary. 

Chris Badgett: Lemme see if I can ask this in the right way.

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This is interesting. A lot of folks, whether they’re want to teach online or they’re building websites for clients, they wanna make more sales, you have a background in sales, but you’ve also taken this path with transcending greed. The word that comes to mind for me, like you strike me as a gentleman.

A gentle man. And how does a gentle man sell? So I’m so take us through the kind of how to look at language and what’s inside that question 

Michael Wolf: that’s sourced. My initial idea, the, and then the idea started, if I might go back one second. In 2006, I quit my corporate job. I was making a lot of money.

Way more than I needed at the time. And then I started working on donation and I had a large child support payment and lots of bills. Long story short, I went broke. 2010 I went back to work and I worked for IBM for another 10 years covering corporate accounts. But in the time where I was off, I recognized that as a healer.

I still had to buy groceries and I still had, there’s this thing called money that people struggle with, and so I really was interested in knowing that I was enough beyond the amount of money in my checking account. And so what my idea for the business model was that if the business model delivered the sense of enough as a product.

I wouldn’t have to worry about, I got nothing to sell. And I have what I know is that for me, my own development is worth more than all the money in the world. I am not for sale. And that’s really the core idea that I wanted to transmit as a concept in leadership. A way in which I could interact with world other.

Family, food, sex, money from the perspective that I’m enough. And so that’s the business model and the way that it developed was out of a lot of failures. We’ve for a long time I really thought that I needed students and that had me showing up as. The, I don’t know, the overbearing teacher that needed to find students and needed to find that’s not happening anymore.

I’m in service to people that are interested in making the decision. So the business model is structured as that. While we do have some things. Where folks are given an opportunity to contribute. The clients set their own tuition and that’s very cool. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us just for people that are interested in the subject matter here. What’s at golden xpr.com/lifter.

Michael Wolf: Thank you, Chris. Yeah. On that, and I have to go back and thank Lifter, and especially you, Chris. You are one of those. Influential people that when you, when I first got this plugin, I listened to every LMS cast out there and I was, everything that you would recommend, I would say I need that, don’t need that.

So anyway, I’m happy to provide the offer of two different things. One is a course that we just completed recording. It’s called The Small Print of the Law of Attraction. It is a very rich. Teaching and it’s not pro faint of heart. It’s not it’s a very beautiful teaching. The overall number of recordings, I think there’s over a hundred recordings.

There’s a 120 some odd lessons in it. We’re offering it complimentary. No need to pay. If you find value out of it and you decide that you were. You’re interested in learning more. Reach out, but that is complimentary. The small print of Law of Attraction. And the other is a complimentary ebook, which is from one of our latest publications.

It’s sample chapter of the Love that has no opposite. Which was published last year on Amazon. Awesome.

Chris Badgett: That what the whole book. What tell us at a high level what is the love that has no opposite about 

Michael Wolf: Whew. It’s about something that’s everybody’s written about over the generations. It’s the first sentence of the Bible, and it has six chapters that unfold essentially a code.

That demonstrates the difference between what we call primary communication. There’s this Genesis chapter one where God says, let there be light, and there was light, zero delay, zero unconscious time. Genesis chapter two has a different atom. A different name for God in Hebrew and introduces Adam that’s lonely and disobedient and guilty and ashamed and punished ultimately.

And so those two stories of creation really demonstrate two ways of creativity. One is instantaneous where there’s zero delay, no unconscious time, and the other which demonstrates. A pattern, if you will, of the collective unconscious. So the love that has no opposite unfolds that and is a it’s a very deep study of language, of power and how we keep ourselves in what we call scare city, where not only do I not have enough, but I’m afraid.

Chris Badgett: Wisdom and I don’t know if I’m saying it the etymology or of words like scarcity. You’re a master at unpacking those and teaching those. On the language front, what’s the, let’s say our, we only speak English as an example. What do we learn from, ancient languages. That doesn’t necessarily translate, or maybe it does. But like how does this study of language. Tell us about the richness of that and how we may be perhaps limited. If we are just in our native tongue and what does that mean in terms of our worldview and stuff like that? Big question.

Michael Wolf: Think about language as not only. Spoken, but also consider the idea that numbers must be involved. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Sounds must be involved.

Michael Wolf:  Linguistically structured information is a small fraction of language. And so when we get into the discussion of a meta language and what.

What’s interesting about what we’re doing is that we’re bringing a resonance between the ancient language of Hebrew, which we call she, because it’s the feminine receiving, Maha being essentially in my view the world’s most powerful woman rabbi that has come to bring a woman’s view. Of male scriptures.

So truth be told, we all have a male and female component, those sides of us that give and receive. And truly, I cannot be total unless I am in harmony between my giving and my receiving. Thus the sense of enough. But coming back to the idea of language, what we’ve discovered and what we continue to witness is that there’s a very deep resonance between the English language, which is the most spoken language on the planet right now, and the oldest language with, Hebrew is an alphabet that has not changed form and has been preserved in its original method.

Original way since the initial revelation of the Bible way back when. So we’ve got something that is dancing together to highlight perspectives that really come back to an an embodied sense of integrity. I said a lot. Thanks. Yeah 

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. I remember digging into some of your stuff around the different, the four different missions of being a coach, a seeker, a emissary, and a visionary.

How does that play into all this? 

Michael Wolf: Yes. The way I would say that for myself is I’m not gonna engage in this kind of work unless I am really interested in bringing forward full potential. It’s likely that it’s likely that the. This is not just about finding a parking space on Main Street.

It’s not about, it’s about understanding the difference between where what I say I want and what I experience in reality are different. So I. What we found in our work is that most of the people that are engaging are folks that would claim to have some sort of initiative to be an emissary between one group or another, or folks that are coaches.

They’re here to help and of course. Going back to Socrates Healer, heal Thyself. That’s really the program we have for coaches and mentors and some folks are just unlimited seekers. And we have a program of infinite depth that addresses those folks that are seekers. And many of our clients are visionaries.

They see new ways of doing things, and clearly in order to really be a visionary in our climate today. I had to reconcile the money issue with my vision of a business model. So visionaries are stressed with a future vision that have constraints in the now. So to reconcile that, what, those are the kinds of people that most of our clients have ended up falling into.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the the actual mechanics of the platform in the sense of what’s in the stack. It’s, you’ve got courses, there’s books, there’s coaching calls, like what all comes together to facilitate the learning and the transformation? 

Michael Wolf: Good question. Yes, we have, on Golden xpr.com. We’ve got six memberships, and those memberships are marketed to individuals and they support our one-on-one work with clients.

So when someone signs up for the one-on-one program, they receive access to the entire mystery school. All of the 33 courses we have extensive use of private areas there. So when we. Deliver our coaching sessions. At the conclusion of the session, we have something called an ecap. That ECAP gets published on lifter private areas. Then prior to the next session. They’re invited to fill out a form.

How did you do with the last session Since we were looking at this particular area and it keeps those. The, that learning alive we couldn’t operate without private areas at the moment. That’s one of our most powerful capabilities for one-on-one work. We also do a group course every Monday night, and anyone who’s interested can go to our events page check out the Paradise Circle.

The first month is free. We invite you to contribute after that if you’re interested. But Paradise Circle is similar to a inquiry game where one person gets in the hot seat and we. I come up with a structured inquiry and then go around the circle and everybody says, oh yeah, I can relate to that.

This is how it applies to me. So we do a group class that’s not recorded, but it is live. And then we have recorded several offline courses. Most recently the the small print of the Law of attraction using lifter videos. So custom fields are huge for us. We have a ongoing inquiry tool, which. It’s called the seven by seven tool that someone picks out something. That they’re gonna make alive over a seven week period, and every day they go through and complete the lesson.

And so that, that’s available using custom fields. We use Groundhog extensively integrated in a number of our inquiry tools. We have WP Fusion, Zapier Acuity. And then as I mentioned earlier, going down the path of lifter groups as well. 

Chris Badgett: For those that are thinking about getting into coaching, how do you like what’s the structure?

Is there does somebody come with challenges or do you come with something specific to focus on? Or both? Or how do you coach? 

Michael Wolf: Before we invite anybody into a long-term coaching agreement, we do a three month kick the tires because. We may not wanna work together. They can quit anytime.

There’s no shoulds. But the way that we focus on it is we’ve got a very specific introduction to all of that. It’s called the Power Conversation that we start off with. And then once they’ve entered the three [00:26:00] month trial period, and that’s, lifter access plan with three months, then we sit down and we discuss, do we resonate, do we wanna move?

And as we do. Basically from week to week, the issue of the day develops and we’re using the curriculum and all of the pages that I mentioned before with the private areas to, to allow for studying in between sessions plus the group course. So it’s all integrated. One place to go, one place to interact from one-on-one group and on your own.

Very cool. 

Chris Badgett: What kind of impact is this work having in the world? What are either anecdotally or stories of 

Michael Wolf: We’ve done no advertising. We’ve done nothing really public and everything has been word of mouth up until now. And I would say that what speaks for where we are now is all of our students have decided to become at one level.

A train the trainer, they’re all interested in becoming that. That’s a hundred percent of our clients are interested.

Chris Badgett: Writing message. Yeah. That’s a pretty good conversion rate, if you will. 

Michael Wolf: Yeah, that’s what I think you were the one that taught me that, Chris, I can remember you said don’t focus on how much money you’re gonna make, half fun doing what you do and focus on the impact.

Yeah. And that I took that to heart. And that’s exactly, that’s where exactly where we are. 

Chris Badgett: That’s when people become raving fans and wanna spread the message and train the trainer, there’s no higher form of success or signal of what’s going on in the platform. That’s awesome.

Michael Wolf: Yeah. I took you at face value on that. 

Chris Badgett: Cool. What do you think about the future? Like, where do you want to go with it? For somebody who’s, you said you launched in 2018. What you’re committed? Like you’re the, it’s inside of you at this point. What where do you want to go with it?

Michael Wolf: From the beginning, from the very beginning. The program was designed to scale. It was designed to offer learning that could scale. That wouldn’t require a development team of, hundreds of people. So scaling yes. In, in supporting our clients is really right up there without, because if we do a good job there.

Then everything else is gonna happen. If we can make it easy for those that are working with us to gain results and to share the content, it’ll happen naturally. Our work is strange. In other words, the, if you look at the material from a marketing perspective, it’s. It’s not the kind of thing that in my experience, that you can just read and say, oh yeah, I wanna buy 10 of those.

It’s just not that, it’s not that kind of messaging, but scaling is part of it. Impact is part of it. I do see that the, there will be a day coming where we will have a global stage. I’m imagining. Folks like Jordan Peterson would be very interested in what we’re providing. And others I can’t wait till we meet Ken Wilber, for example.

I’m just, if So those are the kinds of conversations that when we get further down, I’m imagining there’s gonna be more interaction. But folks who are out there in this community doing big things on the global stage I’m imagining that we’ll be in that position. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I remember it was a long time ago, maybe 15 years ago, I was at a, like a a fair for organic farming and a bunch of stuff and there was like this book area and I picked up a Ken Wilber’s book on the theory of everything or something related to that.

And I went down that rabbit hole and I. I’m not, I’m the kind of person that’s into this kind of stuff and I know there’s a lot out there. ’cause I remember when I look at Ken Wilbur as an example, or Jordan Peterson’s work, there’s a lot of people that go deep into. These [more visionary seeking transcendent things.

So it’s, and like you said the platform is infinite. It’s infinitely particularly with the train the trainer thing, it’s, it can go as far as it could ever go. Before we started recording, you mentioned democratizing education was important. You mentioned you had sold websites for a million bucks or something, and.

And lifter has a free tool and some add-ons and all that, but obviously it’s free to much cheaper than a million bucks. Tell us about democratizing education from your perspective. 

Michael Wolf: Yeah, thank you Chris. And I’m going back to the days where I’m sitting in my apartment listening to LMS cast and the vision of democratizing education coming from.

In 1999, I got hired by a company called Vignette. And Vignette was based upon TCL tools, control Language, and it was a scripting language where you would build a content management app and a content delivery app. And it was a very. High performancewebsite, and back then you could go to the dot coms, which were booming up everywhere, and it would be half a million to a million dollars for a simple website.

That continued for years where, you know the web was just launched. It wasn’t that long ago. And then WordPress and Jumela were. Adversaries for a while. We built our initial site based upon Jumela, which was difficult, and we went down what is the one that you know yeah, a Moodle.

A Moodle, I was interested because I do see our curriculum would be able to leveraged for universities at some place. I was looking at the whole Moodle approach and. As soon as the business model became clear, the next point was, nobody’s going to invest in this idea. It’s too weird. So we gotta do it on our own.

And when you were back in your early days, way more talking about this idea of democratizing education, and I’m thinking about what I wanna do in terms of the sense of enough, it was a like a perfect marriage. You had my listening straight out of the shoot. That’s been the reality for us in terms of really looking at what we’ve been able to do in terms of a life work and to put it onto something that I can trust, we can trust and it works and secure all of the things that you would need for a strategic platform are there.

That’s a, there’s probably more. I may have left something out. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Michael Wolf. He’s at golden xpr.com/lifter. He’s got some free stuff for you. I love getting into Michael’s work. Take some time, set it aside and get into the book and the course. Highly recommend it.

Any final words for the coaches, the seekers, the emissaries and the visionaries out there 

Michael Wolf: fail often. Invite failure. Fears are a path to sacredness and any fear that I can understand offers a new relationship with what life is really about is to come into the sacred. Fear is not something to be resisted, but to be embraced and understood.

And that’s been in our backend in terms of doing something as radical as what we’re up to is. Daily, am I enough to do this project, and taking a step anyway, in the face of the fear, in the face of the overwhelming size of it, and the lack of support and the lack of money and all of that. Just don’t give up.

Get clear on what it is that you’re here for and reach out to other communities. Go to the lifter, office hours and share and talk and listen and give yourself. Space to do it in in your own time. 

Chris Badgett: Thanks Michael. It is great to have you on. We’ll have to do it again down the road. 

Michael Wolf: Look forward to it.

Chris Badgett: Go to golden xpr.com/lifter and I hope you have a great rest of your day. 

Michael Wolf: Thank you, Chris. Thank you everybody.

Chris Badgett: That’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.