Course Overview

Overview

You don’t need to feel safe to write. You need to know what you’d do if the bad outcome happened. Most fear lives in the unspecified — ‘something terrible’ is much scarier than ‘rejection from this specific magazine in March.’ We’re going to specify the terrible. Each week we run a pre-mortem on a piece of work: rejection, bad review, silence, viral disaster, professional consequence. You write a small contingency for each. The fear shrinks as the contingencies grow. Four weeks. Twenty lessons. By Friday of week one you’ll have one written contingency in your hand. By week four you’ll have a Contingency Library. The library is the safety net.

What’s inside

• 4 modules, 20 lessons + contingencies — analytical, professional, scales to high-stakes work
• Mindset Maven Test that names YOUR specific catastrophic-imagination pattern
• 4 guided meditations averaging 8 minutes — short, calm, designed for the busy professional brain
• Toolkit: the Pre-Mortem Worksheet + the Contingency Library Template (per piece, per scenario)
• Lifetime access, unlimited retakes — new work needs new contingencies; come back per project
• Companion blog post per module — public, perfect for the client / coachee staring at a big launch

Who this is for

• The ghostwriter who can run pre-mortems for clients all day and not for her own book
• The speechwriter whose principal is about to give a controversial keynote and she’s catastrophizing about consequences she hasn’t named
• The course creator about to launch a $2,000 cohort and lying awake imagining unspecified disaster
• The coach who teaches risk-assessment frameworks and freezes on her own product launches

FAQs

Won’t imagining the worst make me more afraid?
Counterintuitively, no. Specified fears are smaller than unspecified ones. The brain treats ‘something terrible’ as infinite. ‘A rejection email by March 15’ is bounded and survivable. The specification is the shrinking.

Is this just risk management?
Yes, applied to creative work. Risk management is well-developed in operations, finance, and engineering. Creative work has lagged. We’re importing the framework.

What if I imagine the worst and it actually happens?
Then you have a contingency for it. That’s the whole point. The worst outcome is no longer unprepared-for.

Will this work for high-stakes professional contexts (executive speeches, large launches)?
Yes — that’s the design target. The course was built with input from speechwriters, course creators, and coaches working in high-stakes contexts.

Is this CBT?
Adjacent. CBT addresses cognitive distortions about the future. Pre-mortems address PLANNING for the imagined future. Both useful; this is the second.

Can I retake?
Yes. Unlimited. Every new project benefits from a fresh pre-mortem.

What one student said

★★★★☆

“Useful framework, well-organized, no fluff. Took it primarily because I needed better risk-modeling for the executive memoir I’ve been ghosting for two years. The pre-mortem structure scales — I now run it with the principal before every major speech as a routine pre-publication check. Docked one star because the meditation audios are not for my taste; I skipped them after module two and the course still worked. Worth the money.”

— Adaeze O., speechwriter for two C-suite executives