I’m a creative.
I can’t help it.
It’s a thing.
My head is full of ideas ALL THE TIME. And I mean, all the time. It’s endless. I have ideas about what I want to do in my garden, ideas about what I want to do with my crafting business, ideas about what I want to do with IGNITE!, ideas about what I want to cook for dinner tonight, I basically have ideas coming out of my ears.
And what used to happen was they swirled into my head, hung around for a bit and then swirled right out again.
My desk was a tsunami of scraps of paper with ideas on them. Post it notes with ideas on them. Half used notepads & notebooks with half formulated ideas that went quietly into the Draw of Doom to die.
I had bags of creative ideas, but no means of making them make sense, or getting them from the drawing board to actual, actionable tasks.
And it was driving me INSANE.
I love stationery. I love pens, pads, post it notes & all that jazz. But I just couldn’t find a thing that worked for me.
Notebooks were too small (my handwriting is not. Small, that is). Notepads ended up getting used for grocery lists & forgotten or lost. Not being able to collate my ideas and work out if they were worth spending time & energy on was frustrating me. And, it was hurting my business.
Standing still is the quickest way for your business to stagnate & eventually die.
Implementing your ideas is a great way to invigorate your business.
But I wasn’t doing that because I had nowhere to scope out the initial idea (usually on that little scrap of paper or a post it note) and see if it had legs.
So, I decided to make one.
My Book of Brain is an essential part of my business. And I’m going to tell you why.
I have a busy life. I have a lovely, busy life. Pair that up with a lovely busy brain and things can get messy.
My Book of Brain helps me collate all the ideas together in one place and take a proper look at them. Let me tell you how that worked for the Supercharge Your Business Club.
It started with that initial post it note idea, the ‘what if?’ moment. ‘What if I could create an online business club for my target audience that gave them continual professional & personal development without the corporate price tag?’ (well, I didn’t put all THAT on a post it note, but the initial idea was).
That post it note sat on my Wall of Brain for about a year.
Then I thought I might take a look at it and do something with it.
So I grabbed my Book of Brain & made a start.
The first page in each Ideas section starts off with a whole page to List Your Ideas!
So I did.
The second page allows you to Mindmap Your Ideas – this is one of the main ways I start planning a project – so I did.
Then the magic starts to happen on the next page – What Needs To Happen Next?
This is the key element. I have 5 boxes to work with that allow me to focus on those key tasks to move this from a ‘Eureka!!’ idea to a liquid jelly kind of plan. It’s this step that gets my brain to change gear from ‘oh my god this is exciting’ to ‘is this actually going to work’.
It’s this step where some ideas happily go to die. I work to this stage and I either think ‘what on earth was I doing when I thought that was a good idea?’, in which case I park it in the book. I leave it behind. I don’t waste any more of my precious time thrashing out an idea that in the cold light of day (or page 3 of the Book of Brain) looks like a bit of a turkey. So I move on.
But some of those ideas, like the Supercharge Your Business Club, get to this point & I think ‘hey, that’s doable. So let’s do it’. And I move to page 4 – Prioritize Your Next Steps. And I do that. I have 10 priority tasks to identify to move this idea forward.
Again, sometimes at this point I can’t stop writing – I have so many steps I know I need to take that I am on FIRE. But sometimes I start searching for those steps – which tells me that I’m not quite ready to take that forward yet. So I park it.
But if my pen has been flying across the page & I can’t stop then I know I’m onto something. So the last page in the section is Let’s Review.
This is where I make the commitment to move this idea forward by committing to moving it to my Daily Focus Sheet.
Then I rate the idea up to 5 stars with a completely gut reaction – am I in love with it? Ready to give it a go? Then its 5 stars every time.
Then I give myself a target date and get started.
I wanted to launch the Supercharge Your Business Club with IGNITE! my online library on the 30th April 2024. I did that. I have my first library members already on board with access to continual lifelong learning for less than 17p a day.
17p
A day.
I have a target set for the number of library members I would like to have onboard by 30th April 2025. And I’ve used my Book of Brain to work on that too.
My Book of Brain is an essential part of my business. It can be part of yours too – take a look.