Corey Wilks: The Interview
Going from clinical psychology to executive coaching, building online courses & writing for non-academics: Context Collapse #150
In this issue: Talking with Corey Wilks, Psy.D. about Intentional Life Design/The therapy-to-executive coaching pipeline/Building a writing business/Writing for Psychology Today/Growing up poor/Finding your business’ target audience/Building community in online courses/Unlearning academic writing habits.
A few months ago, I took an online course called Intentional Life Design taught by a gentleman named Dr. Corey Wilks. It helped me a lot in figuring out some tricky things for work-life balance, growing my business, being a better person and achieving desired outcomes for my life.
All of those were good things.
Corey and I share a love of metal music and both, as he discusses in the interview, grew up in families that had some hard financial times. But he knows a lot about psychology and building online courses and running online communities—things I am honestly pig-ignorant about.
So I thought it would be a good idea to interview him about going from clinical psychology to running an online comms business. Enjoy.
Neal Ungerleider: Hey Corey. For the readers, who are you? What do you do, exactly?
Corey Wilks: I am a licensed clinical psychologist and executive coach. I used to work in integrated primary care and did a lot of addiction treatment working alongside physicians. Helping people with depression, anxiety, that kind of thing.
Towards the end of 2020, I stopped practicing therapy and started doing executive coaching because I was tired of only being allowed to help people survive and just keep their head above water.
I wanted to help them thrive, flourish and get more out of life than what I was allowed to do practicing therapy. That's why I switched.
Now, I coach, I write, I create content around how to how to flourish and build a fulfilling life and be more intentional with how you live, work and create.
NU: We're gonna get to the intentionality part in a minute. But… I'm curious what the pathway was from working in a clinical environment to executive coaching and teaching a course online. Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like?
CW: Long story short is that towards the end of 2020, I had negotiated a remote telehealth position with my old employer. About two months into that new contract, they decided to pull support for remote work. Because I was remote, I was fired. So I had about three paychecks worth of runway and no job prospects to figure out my life.
Because of the way licensure works for therapy, I couldn't feasibly get another job for about four to six months. Basically, I was living in one state and licensed in another one. And I couldn't find another job out of the state I was licensed in. And in order to get relicensed in a new state would have taken, like I said, four to six months. That’s just… the therapy world is behind the times to say the least.
So I decided to go into coaching.
I went to the College of Executive Coaching and got certified through them. The main thing that training helped me do was to make the mental shift from a pathology model to a wellness model.
Clinical psychology, along with the medical field in general, largely defines wellness as the absence of illness. But just because you're not sick doesn't mean you're healthy. I didn't realize that when I only did therapy because I only saw things from a pathology lens.
That training really helped me make that mental shift. I did all that, became a coach and really just Googled and YouTubed my way into learning about business. I ended up meeting a lot of cool people specifically on Twitter who were willing to lend a hand to point me in the right direction as far as how to build a website, learn copywriting and marketing and how to create an offer.
None of these were things that I really knew anything about 18 months ago.
I don't have a business background. I grew up super, super poor—like food stamps, public housing type stuff. So I didn't know anybody with an entrepreneurial background.
So everything I've kind of figured out, like I said, through Google and YouTube and by meeting some super cool people who were very generous with their time and their advice. And that's kind of where I'm at today.
I started off offering free coaching for a while just to get my name out there and build up some testimonials, then charged a little bit, and then progressively started charging more and more. It got to the point where I realized I couldn’t have the impact I wanted to have on people if I only continued to do one on one coaching.
So I decided to learn how to create courses, digital products and things like that. One, I could obviously scale my income without scaling my time. But beyond that, I could scale my impact beyond what one-on-one offers.
I have a live five week course called Intentional Life Design. I'm also currently working on a couple of complementary self-paced products around the spheres of distilling down everything that I know as a coach and everything that I help people with in coaching, but productizing that up so it is more affordable to more people.
NU: What’s the mix of the different parts of your business?
CW: I increasingly reduced my availability for one-on-one coaching. The money is good, but I value time more than money. Because I can always make more money, I can't make more time.
The majority of the time when somebody reaches out to me for one on one coaching, I kind of try to funnel them into the course because it is more affordable for them. It's more bang for their buck, honestly. They're getting access to a network of entrepreneurs, freelancers and other driven people.
That network is invaluable, especially when you're early in your journey when nobody around you really gets what you're trying to do when you're trying to build toward a fulfilling life and business. That's usually what I do at this point so that I can so it's better for them.
But it's also better for me because whether there are 10 or 50 people in the course or however many more, it's relatively the same amount of time investment on my part. It's just a win win for them to take the course. Then if they want, after the course, we can have that discussion if they want to do one on one.
But for me, I primarily am a writer. I love writing and everything about the writing life.
I'm a hermit, and I love pajama pants as anybody who's talked to me for any length of time knows. So I try to optimize my schedule for long, inner uninterrupted blocks of time so that I can write.
Writing may be writing, you know, one of the two newsletters I write. It may be an article for my website, it may be an article for Psychology Today, it may be a landing page for a product that I'm building.
Writing is sort of an all-encompassing skill set; that is primarily what I optimize my day-to-day for at this point.
I also include product development in that as well. Funnels, products, all of that stuff. All of that really comes down to putting your ideas into a structured format, helping other people achieve the results that they desire to achieve.
Writing is that distillation of your expertise, knowledge, your skill set, and giving it to somebody else across time and space.
That is largely what I optimize for at this particular point.
NU: How did you start writing for Psychology Today?
CW: I came from an academic background. I have a doctorate in clinical psychology.
Academic writing doesn't get you to too far when you're trying to build a lay audience platform. So I knew I needed to learn how to write for, like, regular people.
So I took Write of Passage by David Perell. It's a phenomenal course and I highly recommend it to anybody who wants to learn how to write online.
One of the concepts that David talks about is a “serendipity vehicle.” All the serendipity vehicle is is what people refer to as increasing your luck surface area, right?
That means every time you create a piece of content—-whether it is a Tweet, a LinkedIn post, an article, a podcast episode, whatever it is—that piece of content goes out into the world and works for you and attracts opportunities to you.
So I understood that concept. I just started putting out a bunch of content and I slowly grew a small audience. At one point, I was just like “Hey, I'm looking to do more podcasts and things. If anybody who follows me or who I have interacted with has a podcast that you think would be good for me to come on, I would love to just, you know, hit me up.”
I did that for a minute and then some of those people enjoyed our conversation. Then they were like “Hey, do you want to be on more? I have some friends I could put you in contact with.”
I was like “Hell yeah, let's go.” That eventually led me to getting on a pretty big podcast called Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson.
Then, one of the editors for Psychology Today watched or listened to that podcast. He then reached out to me and was like, “I really liked what you had to say. Would you be interested in writing for Psychology Today around human flourishing and fulfillment? You know, in life and the workplace?”
I was like, “hell yeah.” I've looked up to Psychology Today since I was an undergrad and picked psychology as my major.
15 years later, I became a writer for them. That's kind of where I'm at right now.
NU: You mentioned your background earlier and coming from humble beginnings. How do you think that impacted your trajectory and career?
CW: My parents didn't have much financially, but they were very emotionally supportive. A lot of kids don't grow up with the amount of emotional support that I had.
It was always instilled in me that some of my family had a lot of disabilities and things; some of them work related. So I was taught the idea of “Don't use your body, use your brain.”
I come from a very blue-collar, rural, hard-working area where everybody just goes into manual labor or something. They just, you know… it breaks your body.
But my family always told me “Don't use your body, use your brains, whatever that looks like. Go to college, Do this, do that, whatever, but use your brain.
From an early age, I was like “Okay, I have to think my way out of my situation, I have to figure out how to accrue knowledge and apply that knowledge in some creative way.”
Just really doubling down on on optimizing for critical thinking and problem solving skills because that was what I was taught. That was what I believed could help me sort of break the chains of poverty, as it were.
NU: Getting back to Intentional Life Design, your course helped me a lot. Can you tell about what you envisioned for the course in terms of target audience?
CW: It's primarily designed for entrepreneurs, even though that's an umbrella term.
All I mean by entrepreneur is people who are relatively in control of their schedule, and what they do on a day to day basis, right?
If you have a 9-to-5 with a terrible boss, you have very limited freedom to change things up or to pivot the work that you're doing. Don't get me wrong—plenty of entrepreneurs have golden handcuffs but it is what it is.
The other thing is that just in general, entrepreneurs can afford a course like mine because they understand the value of the investment. That said, even though I primarily look at how it can help entrepreneurs, specifically… Content creators, freelancers, and other people who even if they have like a “normal job” are very driven. They're makers, they're doers.
We have neuroscientists in the course. I've had directors of nonprofits reach out, because, you know, they say, “I'm a new director, or I've been the director for this company for a minute. I see the potential we have, but nobody around me does.”
Those tend to be the people that I target just because they have more leverage, freedom and flexibility to execute on the things that we talked about in the course.
But that said, you know, it's this idea of never asking a barber if you need a haircut, right? Don't ask me if I think you should take my course. Because I'm going to tell you yes, because I think it's a kick ass course, because I made it right. And I intentionally made it to be kickass.
But the main reason I made it a live course rather than like a self-paced digital product or something is because of the community aspect.
People come for the content, but they stay for the community. Your content has to be good, but your content can be copied. But your community can't be replicated as somebody else's community.
So many people talk about the power of accountability and of having a network of people to support you. That's what I designed the course around.
It is very much trying to leverage the network effects of an engaged community of people who are dedicated toward being more intentional with how they live, work and create, building fulfilling businesses and pursuing whatever human flourishing means to them.
NU: Do you have any recommendations on building community for other course creators out there?
CW: By no means do I have this mastered. But from my experience, it comes down to setting expectations.
Both setting expectations on your landing pages, like, “Here's who this is for,” “Here is the level of engagement that you should come in with in order to get the most out of the course.”
But also setting expectations on a session by session basis. For me, every session, I talked about it as an us and a we; as a community of service and not charity in the classical sense, but as being charitable in volunteering to help other people.
This sort of collectivistic approach is how you build a community as people feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves. There's this sense of trust and an ability to be vulnerable in opening up and connecting with other people on a really deep level.
That takes time. You can't force community and you can't just be like, “Here's an icebreaker and now, magically, we're a community.” It takes time and consistency.
But if you model the correct way to interact with people, you give people the space to do the same, you empower them and support them to do the same over time, community occurs naturally and organically.
NU: Do you have any tips for psychologists, clinicians or coaches for figuring out things to write about or post on social media?
CW: First, you have to remember that you're not talking to grad students. You're not talking to other academics. If you were talking to other academics, whatever you're saying would be published in a journal article.
Most people don't read those and can't read those because they're behind paywalls. You are writing to an audience and you have to like have an idea of your target or reader or customer avatar.
I've worked with very intelligent people who are very financially successful and successful across the board. But even they have never heard of a functional analysis or don’t understand the basics of a cognitive behavioral approach.
There are things that I learned in intro psychology, that I think are so basic and ubiquitous, that some of my clients have never, ever heard of.
It doesn't matter who you're talking to—You need to be easy to understand. That doesn't mean writing at a fourth grade level. That's common advice people give, but you have to do away with the majority of the jargon.
Most jargon is just a smokescreen, and a way to to obscure insecurity or just obfuscate, which isn't a word you use typically in writing, right? But, like, I literally use the word obfuscated in normal conversation—you can just ask my girlfriend.
But, like, you have to talk like you talk. You have to be authentic,but most of the time jargon just obscures poor thinking. If it takes you three paragraphs to qualify the point you're trying to make, your point sucks.
You need to simplify, you need to keep the person who's reading it in mind. You're not doing this for a grade or a word minimum. That isn't how the real world works.
If you can lose or forget the majority of the things you've learned through academia, you'll do well. But if you cling to it, that adds a lot of friction for the reader.
When was the last time you read an academic article that you enjoyed reading that it was like a pleasurable reading experience? Probably never. Don't write like that if you're trying to engage with real people.
NU: Last question. Anything you want to plug or anything you think our readers to be aware of?
CW: I mean, obviously, the course. Otherwise, my website and my Twitter. Those are the only things I really plug; my website also has articles and my newsletter signup is also there.
NU: Thank you.
This interview was conducted via Zoom in August 22. Some light edits were made for formatting purposes and article length + text contains affiliate links. Article was updated August 26 to correct typos.