I’ve created a short series of audios which answer questions I have been asked from people who have creative minds and a lot of ideas.
You can find them on Substack.
Episode 1 – I have too many ideas, how can I choose between them?
Transcript
How can I prioritize my ideas?
So you’ve got lots of ideas. They might be ideas for new services. For example, you’re a photographer who’s adding mini brand shoots or a coach who wants to run a series of workshops.
They might be ideas for a new marketing channel. Maybe you want to start a podcast or a YouTube channel for your business. Or some of them might be for a completely new venture that’s not related to your current core business.
But how do you choose from all your ideas? This is a question I get asked quite a lot. So here are a few. Here’s my suggestions on how to tackle that challenge.
So first thing to do is to write them all down, especially if there are a lot of them. If there are really are a lot, you might need to categorise them to make it easier to choose and to decide.
If you’ve got maybe three to five ideas, then the way that I tackle this, get yourself a sheet of A3 paper or maybe larger if you’ve got flip chart paper and write all the ideas across the top of the page individually.
So basically you’re going to make a kind of make a grid then on and take another piece of paper or just in a in a notebook and write down your current priority is it to make a specific sum of money in the next two months is it to spend some time exploring something that you just enjoy doing, is it to help a particular type of client that keeps asking you about something, or is it to set something up that you could sell over the summer holidays, for example?
So just what is that priority that’s in your mind at the moment? Once you’ve done that, you could go back to your idea sheet and then write the following questions down the left hand side of the page.
So this is just an example of the kinds of questions you could ask. If they don’t apply, then pick the ones that do and maybe add in some of your own.
How much money does this make or will this make? How easy is it to get clients for it? How much effort would it take to set up this thing? Do I love doing it? How often do I do this or can I do this? How many of these do I want to offer? Are there other benefits to doing this other than making money, for example? How long do clients stay once you take them on for this particular thing? Can I sell clients something else afterwards or as well?
You might find that there are other things that you want to factor into that. For example, if you if travel or not traveling is important to you in your decision making you might want to add that in as well. You might need a second page, depending on how many questions you want to put on there.
And then go through, answer each of the questions for each of your ideas. While you’re doing it, just notice your reactions to those answers that you’re putting down you know when you’re answering questions for one particular idea does it feel oh that’s really boring or does do you think oh yeah this is really amazing I really love this I really I’m really excited about this and just just note that in your head to come back to later.
And then once you’ve answered all the questions you can sit back sit back and look at this this sheet that you’ve you’ve created and then is there anything that having done that exercise you can cross off immediately you might find there is you might notice themes um you might and as I say you might have noticed a certain energy when you were when you were answering the questions.
And then how do these answers fit with your current priorities? So if, for example, and I did work with a client doing something like this once where her current priority was she needed some money right now. I mean, not literally right now, but she really needed some money. And she’d got all these different ideas, one of which she’s got this beautiful idea for courses, online courses that she wanted to run. But that was not the idea that was going to make her money in the short term but somebody had asked her to appear in their group and they she was going to be paid a couple of hundred pounds for being the expert answering answering questions in this group.
So it was clear from looking at all these different priorities that while she would love creating the course and they were really useful it would be really useful and in the long term there was a lot of potential with it. Actually the fact that she needed the money the natural and obvious thing to do looking at all those options was to accept that offer of speaking in someone else’s group because that was going to bring in some money immediately.
So maybe having done that, it’s answered all of your questions. And actually now you’ve got an idea and you can say, OK, that’s fine. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go off and start planning it, which is brilliant.
And sometimes I have given this idea to people and they’ve done it and it’s helped them to make decisions. You might find that it’s still feeling a bit murky and actually you still feel like there are lots of ideas here and you’re not sure where to go with it.
But now that you’ve written it all down and you’ve thought about some of those things, you could just go and talk to you could talk to someone else about it. So maybe you’ve got a trusted business friend, a co-mentor, maybe you’ve got a business coach or there’s always someone like me.
I’m both a coach and a project manager. So I have I have both of those things to bring to helping helping you to think about your ideas. So whichever of those you choose, you’ve now got some thoughts that you can talk to them about and hopefully pick an idea that you’re happy with that you can move forwards.
I do actually have a PDF of this, what I’ve just talked about. So if you’d like a copy of that, I can send it to you. There’s also a template that you can write on or you can print out and type into. So if you’d like a copy, send me an email, nina at ninalenton.co.uk and ask for my ideas choosing PDF.
And good luck. Let me know if this has helped. Let me know how you get on with your idea.
And if you’ve got any more questions, if there’s anything that actually I haven’t answered by doing this or more questions that occur to you, get in touch. Let me know. And maybe I can answer that question in the future. Thank you.