Course Lab
Interview with Gayle Van Gils
Mindfulness Teacher & Leadership Consultant
Interview Summary
Gayle Van Gils, a mindfulness teacher with 25+ years of experience and an MBA from UCLA, created Smart Tips: Wellness — a course of 54 standalone two-to-five-minute videos on Udemy that 3,500 students have enrolled in with a 4.5-star average rating. Her bite-sized format is so effective that a majority of students complete the entire course in a single day, proving that shorter, action-focused modules can dramatically improve completion rates.
Three Decades of Mindfulness Distilled into Five-Minute Videos
Gayle Van Gils brings together an unusual combination: an MBA from UCLA's Anderson School, certification as a Search Inside Yourself instructor (the mindfulness program developed at Google), and over three decades as a senior meditation teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition. Millions of people have listened to her meditations on the Simple Habit app. When she decided to create an online course for stressed employees navigating pandemic-era challenges, she drew on all of that experience to create something deliberately concise. Smart Tips: Wellness consists of 54 standalone videos, each between two and five minutes, covering emotional resilience, healthy relationships, exercise, diet, sleep, and fostering an abundance mindset. The course includes three hours of on-demand video and 58 downloadable resources. Gayle's approach was to distill each topic down to its core message with one actionable practice attached to each video.
I learned to be quite succinct in what I was saying. I had to drill down to the core of the message. And then I drilled that even further to put it in the workbook for them.
Why Broad and Bite-Sized Beats Narrow and Deep
Most course design advice emphasizes going narrow and deep — pick one transformation and build around it. Gayle deliberately went the opposite direction: broad coverage of wellness topics, but each one delivered in a compact, self-contained module. The bet was that stressed professionals don't have time for hour-long lectures, but they can find five minutes in their day. Each video stands alone, so students can jump to whatever topic is most relevant to them at any given moment. The approach paid off in a remarkable way: the majority of students complete the whole course in one sitting. They binge it. The standalone format means there's no dependency chain — no need to complete module three before module four makes sense. Students consume what they need, when they need it, and often find themselves watching everything. Udemy actually reached out to Gayle because of the course's strong engagement metrics, which led to broader distribution across their platform.
Interestingly, every aspect of self-care is based on developing self-awareness. When you know what you are thinking, feeling, and aspiring to achieve, then nothing is impossible.
From Online Courses to In-Person Transformation and Back
Gayle's course sits within a larger ecosystem that includes in-person teaching, corporate consulting, and her work on the Simple Habit meditation app — reaching people in 70 countries. Her specialty brings together mindfulness teaching with practical solutions from her career as a business consultant and executive coach. The online course format let her package three decades of in-person workshop experience into something that employees could access on their own time. Each video is paired with a downloadable resource that helps apply the information. Students receive a certification after completion, which adds professional value for corporate learners. The trade-off of going broad instead of deep is that individual topics get less attention — but Gayle found that the actionable nature of each short module (one practice per video) compensates by giving students something they can implement immediately rather than getting overwhelmed by complexity.
My niche is regular employees who are stressed out by the changes at work and having to work at home and juggle additional responsibilities at the same time.
Gayle's Action Steps
Gayle recommends these 3 steps to improve your course planning:
Distill each lesson to one core idea plus one practice
Gayle keeps every video under five minutes with exactly one actionable takeaway. Before recording, ask: what is the single most important thing a student should do after watching this? Cut everything else.
Make modules standalone so students can binge or browse
Remove dependencies between lessons. If every module stands alone, students can start anywhere and consume in any order — which paradoxically increases the likelihood they will complete everything.
Pair each video with a downloadable resource
A short companion worksheet or guide for each lesson bridges the gap between watching and doing. Gayle paired 54 videos with 58 downloadable resources, giving students a concrete tool to apply each concept.
About Gayle Van Gils
Mindfulness Teacher & Leadership Consultant
Gayle Van Gils is an award-winning author, leadership consultant, life coach, and meditation teacher with over three decades of experience teaching transformational work. She holds an MBA from UCLA's Anderson School and is a certified Search Inside Yourself instructor (the mindfulness program developed at Google). She is a senior meditation teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, and millions of people have listened to her meditations on the Simple Habit app. She is the founder of Transform Your Culture and author of Happier at Work.
Listen to the full episode
From Course Lab with Abe Crystal & Ari Iny on Mirasee FM