Episode 7: Where to Start With Your Big Ideas

Today I thought it might be fun to get practical and talk through where to start when you have an idea or are coming up with a new project or offering in your work or creative life.

It can feel so exciting when an idea or a new thing lands in your mind right? Tingly, interesting, fun, scary, thrilling. All of those feelings have come up for me when I’ve contemplated something a bit new.

And if you’re also like me, the next breath can offer a whole bunch of overwhelm. Where do I start? Which part of the process of bringing this to life or experimenting is the best course to start down?

So what I want to do is offer two simple strands for starting. Two strands that will set you in the right direction when it comes to slowly breathing life into your next idea or thing.

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Welcome back to Courage is calling. If you are tuning in for the first time then let me introduced myself, I'm Mel. I am a coach. I'm the leader of the amazing assembly community. And I write, and I'm a partner and a mum too um, Assembly is my coaching business, where I help brilliant women to build courage in their life and work.

And today I thought on this episode, I thought it would be fun maybe to get a little bit more practical and to kind of talk through where to start when you have an idea, or when you are coming up with a new project or a new offering in your work or your creative life, it can feel so exciting can't it.

An idea or like a new thing lands in your mind, right? Like all of those feelings, like the tingles, it feels interesting. Maybe feels fun, scary, maybe a bit thrilling when something new kind of comes to mind, uh, that you, you know, you would love to do. And all of those feelings have come up for me. When I've contemplated doing something a little bit new, and if you're also like me, um, the next breath after that excitement and oh, whoa, this, this sounds cool.

I really like the sound of this it's formulating in my mind, the next breath can offer a whole bunch of overwhelm. So, where do I start? Which, which part of this process of maybe bringing this thing to life or experimenting with this thing is the best course to start doing. And often what I have seen or experienced at this stage is that women, we tend to get tangled up and the practicalities or the really complex aspects of a new idea. We're thinking we need to have a full website built before we can never talk about this idea. And I want to give you a little news flash here. I did not have a website for my business for probably the first year. All I had was an Instagram and a PayPal account, and I actually just, it did the job to allow me to get on with it. And experiment for the first while, or maybe we do other stuff that kind of complicates things like starting to work out a budget or costs or faffing about with spreadsheets, or maybe over-complicating things by trying to try and write a business plan or something like that, or create your own logo.

Police. I have done it all and I have seen it all and heard it all. So I want to just gently call it out as a preemptive warning for you to notice if this is where you're at, because they'll tell you what nothing can kick the enthusiasm out of a shiny and exciting new idea, faster than opening up an Excel sheet, or, you know, spending hours on Canva, trying to create the perfect logo. Um, this embryonic stage of your idea, the starting point, this kind of idea stage is not the time to complicate. Okay. And I think that often we complicate things as a really natural form of protection and maybe hiding from really getting on with the stuff we know is going to move us forward because, well, we know that fear shows up like that and distracts us.

And I really do understand why this happens. If this idea, if you have an idea and it is chewing away at you and it will not leave you alone, it's time to take some brave action. So what I want to do is offer two simple strands for starting two simple strands for starting to use drones that will set you in the right direction. When it comes to just slowly and gently starting to breathe some life into your next idea or your next thing. And the two strands that I'm talking about are in and on, in and on. And these are the small, but mighty bits of work that we need to do in our idea and the work we need to do on our idea. So I want to break those two strands, down a little bit, see if it might help you to kind of. know a bit more about where to start. And I'm going to give a little bit of context to the way that these two strands kind of pull apart and separate. So you can see how, when they come together and they're woven together, it can really create some movement and some momentum with your idea. So let's start with working in your idea.

So the, in your idea part is all about the kind of inward facing stuff that needs to happen to start to nourish your idea. And when I talk about working in your idea, I'm talking about the foundational, like root growing aspects of growing this thing. So in the early stages of ideas that I've had, the in stuff for me has looked like solidifying my impact.

Right? So putting language to this idea so that I know what it is. I want this idea today, what impact I want it to have, what problem I wanted to solve. So for you, what is at the core of this idea that you have? What are some of the key ways that you want to be able to bring people towards it? My suggestion is pick three core aspects that, you know, you can go deep with around your idea and start mind dumping.

Ways to extract and dispense that information. Right? So for me, the core of my idea, a core of my business is about helping women to build courage and the way the three ways that I know and I've experienced and seen that that can happen is by helping them get clear, helping them to build self-trust and help helping them to become more visible with their stuff, with their ideas.

So those are my three core aspects. And then the in stuff may also be about like really good information gathering. So finding out exactly. Your idea is right for starting to zone in on who this idea is going to be a really great fit for who's going to want to buy it. Who's going to want to connect with it or engage with it. And where are those people? Where did they hang out online? What are they thinking about in relation to your idea? What are they struggling with in relation to your idea? So how can you find that out and how can you ask good questions to get more information? About the people that you want your idea to connect with.

So that's the in stuff. Um, this kind of understanding your impact, understand, and the people that you want your idea to connect with. That's the kind of inward facing stuff. And then from here, armed with this information, you can start to move into the on strand, the on strand and this on strand is all about the small steps you can take to start implementing the information that you're gathering.

And create messaging about the impact you want to have. So the on or the outward facing stuff is how you start to water those foundations. If you will, how you start to tend to the knowledge that you've been gathering and allow the idea to start to be seen above the soil. Right? So you've planted, you've watered.

Um, you've got good foundations, good soil. And now you want to allow this stuff to be seen above the. And so the working on strand for me, whenever I have a new idea, it usually looks like starting to share what I know with the people that might need to connect with it. So that might look like, you know, creating content or blog posts, podcasts, Instagram, posts that speak to the new idea.

One. Like pick one way to share and then break down your new idea into those three core aspects that you identified in your in strand and find the best way to communicate about those things, to the people that you identified, um, and the places you identified as best to show up. And just pick one don't over-complicate it don't think you need to be showing up in a blog and a podcast and Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook, like just pick one and commit to that for a bit.

And then the working on strand can also look like, you know, starting to map out ways to build community or to take people who are really interested in your idea, along with you. So this might mean creating some form of content that people can opt into. Right. So for a deeper connection to you, like a mailing list, or maybe a private Facebook group or something like that, that they can go to intentionally, um, or hear from you intentionally to find out more.

So how can you create something where people can let you know that they want to hear from you? Right. So starting to share, and then creating an opportunity for people to kind of opt in in some way. Those are the kind of two top tips for working on this on strand at the beginning, um, that I would suggest, and I know that the on strand, the actually moving out of the, behind the scenes information, gathering stuff into some forward facing, um, And letting people into your idea stuff is actually going to feel really, really hard.

Um, it's going to feel vulnerable because actually keeping your excitement about your idea, your enthusiasm, about your idea in your own little container of happiness is going to feel way more safe. And do you know, I can't sit here and promise you that if you release your idea into the world, that it's going to be.

Massively connected with and a huge success, whatever that means, but I can promise you, like giving your idea some room to breathe outside of the container of just you as what it needs to evolve, because if you keep it in that container too long without oxygen, you will smother it and it will. And if you're looking for a way to measure how your idea is going, then my suggestion is that you can start by measuring your own loyalty to it because that's the only metric that really matters.

Okay. Are you showing up for it? Are you giving yourself some time and permission to pursue it? That's a really great metric for measuring how your ideas going. And if you try to measure it by any other factor in this early stage, By followers or subscribers or people who buy it or buy how much money you make from a you'll be hanging in your worth on something that can change with the wind for a million different reasons.

And the point of taking action on your idea is not so it can be perfect right out of the gate, but so that you can be a learner right out of the gate so that you can grow with your idea as you experiment. And as you give yourself grace to practice and get it wrong, and course correct. And shimmy in other directions.

So start today, take a look at how you can work in or on your idea today and stay fiercely loyal, and fiercely gracious to yourself as you explore and experiment. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening today. I would love to hear from you. If you do decide to take some action from this episode to work in or on your idea, you can reach me on Instagram @melwiggins, or you can email me at hello@melwiggins.com. And I will see you next time.