As entrepreneurs, business owners, and advisors, we have so many ideas brewing in our brains. We are always coming up with ideas and plans about how we can serve our clients. Yet we often struggle with how to bring all of those ideas and plans to fruition. If your wheels are always spinning, you may love how I started moving past the idea stage and got into creation mode.
Yes, I actually spent a lot of time with my wheels spinning, before I figured out a solution! But, since I have always been a person who loved systems, I knew there had to be a different way. And trust me, the solution couldn’t have come sooner, because I had so many things swirling in my brain!
Change Your Perspective
The first thing I did was change the way I was looking at everything. Instead of looking at ideas as to how I could make a different revenue stream or how I could make more money, I flipped it into how I could serve people. How could I share what I know? How can I help someone? Who can I help? When you change your mindset, you are coming at it from a place where you are filling a need. Your heart will naturally come out when you are sharing your offerings and the money will follow.
Once I changed my perspective, I still had all of those ideas and plans stuck in my brain, keeping me up at night. That is when I started brain-dumping.
Brain Dumping
My method of brain dumping is literally on a wall with sticky notes. I was looking for a way to get everything out of my head and on paper, but not just randomly. I didn’t want to take a notebook to scribble things down in, because I would have had to rewrite things over and over again. I could at least move the sticky notes around on the wall when I was ready to do something with them.
As you are writing ideas and thoughts on your sticky notes, it is very important to stick to one thing on each note. Do not try to write six thoughts on one note. Just write each little thing in your brain onto each sticky note and place them on the wall. Don’t be concerned about the order, just get them up on the wall. Before you know it, you’re going to have a massive wall full of sticky notes. And if you don’t, no worries. By the time you start moving things around, you will find yourself adding more thoughts and ideas and you will be wishing for a bigger wall!
Afterward, you can step back and start looking at how you can group all of those notes. Ask how they speak to each other, how they fall in line with the others or expand on them. This is when you will start to move all of those sticky notes around and things will fall into place eventually.
Course Creation with Brain Dumps
There are so many things you can use brain dumps for, but we are going to use courses for this example. You may know that you want to do a course to help others. However, you may have no idea where to begin or what to even do. This is where a brain dump can be helpful.
For one of my courses, teaching the Profit First methodology to entrepreneurs, my goal was to get the information I share one on one out to everyone. I knew I couldn’t do one-on-one services with hundreds or thousands of people, so I had to find a way to do it in a group setting. The result was self-paced modules with group meetings for implementation. Yet, it wasn’t as easy to set up as it was saying that was what I was going to do.
I brain dumped all of my ideas onto the wall and moved things around. I created the basic process and then chunked it down before breaking it down even more. At that point, I had a goal that I could then reverse engineer into actionable steps.
Those steps answered questions that included:
- What do I need to do?
- What do I need to deliver it on?
- How am I going to get my content up there?
- How am I going to get people registered for this?
- How am I going to get paid for this?
- What content do I need?
- What type of informational emails do I need to send out?
I’m sure you can see where I am going with all of this and how much easier it is to create anything once you have the steps in place to answer all of your questions.
Collection of Resources
As your ideas come to fruition, you will want to keep them organized in one central online location. This is important for your business because every new idea you have is going to build off of your existing resources. If you recently did a webinar that was extremely popular and you now want to turn it into a course, you do not want to start back at square one. Instead, go into your webinar and start a brain dump on how you can expand on the work you already completed.
Prioritize Your Brain Dump
There is nothing wrong with having multiple ideas up on your brain dump wall. However, you should prioritize them instead of trying to tackle them all at once. Ask yourself which one will have the biggest benefit & impact and then tackle that one first.
And if I could give one more piece of advice, it would be to purchase really good sticky notes and take a picture of your brain dump wall every time you make changes. Okay, so that would be two things, but they are super important! I bought cheap sticky notes once and did a massive brain dump wall in my bedroom. I went to sleep that night and when I woke up in the morning, most of the sticky notes were on the ground. I have taken pictures of my wall ever since (and started purchasing better sticky notes)!
Hopefully, this will allow you to be in a lesser state of spinning and you can actually take some action by developing your ideas into actual tangibles. It’s definitely worth a try, especially if it allows you to finally get a good night’s sleep for a change!