SMRT Women is launching a podcast - eep! We will dish mindset, marketing and money tips and inspiration for your badass biz. Whether you are toying with an idea, just getting started, or a biz boss veteran you’ll find practical tools to demystify marketing, strategy and mindset to create the business of your dreams. Want to join us on a podcast? Get in touch and tell us your idea!
In our kick-off podcast we talk about idea overwhelm. If you are struggling with which business idea to pursue, drowning in marketing ideas you think you should try, or not sure which new program or product to launch, idea overwhelm can get us stuck - this one’s for you!
When we are stuck we don’t act. When we don’t act we don’t learn, we don’t grow, we don’t move our business forward. So how do we get unstuck?
Join Selene and Sofia as we talk about how to narrow your ideas, get clear on what matters to you, and clear the clutter so you can see success.
Idea Overwhelm: Our top tips for staying focused and moving forward
Let your strategy be your guide. Do the research, trust it, and always refer back to it
One of the best ways to sort out your ideas is to create a strategy that is your benchmark for yes and no. Strategy research gives you a solid sense of…
- Your customers and what they want and need
- Your business vision and values, what you want to achieve, and what feels good - what feels like success
- Your business numbers, how much you want to make and your plan for doing it
- The kind of social impact you want your business to have
Using these as your benchmark you can evaluate your ideas based on whether they will actually serve your audience, whether they will make you feel great and align with your values, and whether they will make you money or take your business in the direction you want to go.
This can help you clear the clutter, guide your creative mind, and stay focused.
Allow yourself to play, experiment, and fail.
No idea needs to be life or death. When we treat it that way we get locked into overwhelm and we don’t do anything. Take an experimental mindset. Try out the smallest version of the idea, observe what works and what doesn’t. If it fails, change it, scrap it, or learn and make it better. You might just be surprised at what comes. We learn by doing, not by sitting in our office coming up with ideas.
Let go of everyone else’s expectations
It’s so easy to get distracted by the bombardment of well meaning ideas from friends, loved ones, and all the business experts trying to convince you what to do. Well meaning ideas that start with “you should do…” or “your competition is doing xyz you should try it”.
All of these ideas can be wonderful and they MAY be useful to your business. They also may not. We can get stuck in marketing strategy FOMO or overwhelmed with the million ideas we SHOULD be doing. So much so that we get stuck and do nothing. When this happens a great place to start is to come back to ourselves. When we get clear on what is most important to us, the ideas We have for our business and what matters to us, we can use this as a rudder to guide our choices.
It’s not always easy but giving ourselves permission to shed the shoulds and do what feels right for us is a critical business muscle to flex.
Start with one Idea at a time
You have a million ideas for your business, from better marketing tools, to money-making ventures, to how you want to make change in the world. Where to start? With one idea at a time. Develop an idea parking lot - a place you can write down all your brilliant ideas.
Pick one - maybe the one that you are most excited about, the one that is easiest to implement, the one that will make you the most money or the one that is best related to your strategy.
Do it. You may get started and decide it doesn’t work. Then you get to move on to your other ideas, maybe it’s brilliant it goes amazingly and those other ideas that were bugging you fade into the background, or anything in between.
Have faith that each idea has its time, no idea will ever go stale or disappear if it’s important and you will learn and build on your ideas as you implement them.