by Laura West
Do you want to explore a new concept, idea or philosophy but you aren’t sure if it will fly?
Maybe you have this “crazy thought” that you can’t get out of your head but you keep stopping in your tracks?
Do you have a great business idea but the energy is heavy and you know you want to move forward but it feels like you are walking in quicksand?
I recommend using that age-old creative strategy: Experiment! Give yourself permission to test a new idea and see what type of feedback you receive.
Don’t put huge expectations that it has to be a gigantic success immediately. That creates heavy pressure and often will keep you from doing anything.
Instead test your idea, concept or program.
When you are stretching into this new body of work you don’t always have all the answers and proof that it works. Creating ways to experiment with your concepts, ideas and thoughts is a way of getting feedback to determine the interest and it will also give you new perspectives you probably haven’t even thought of.
Ways to experiment:
- Write a blog post
- Write an article
- Write a series of articles
- Write about it in short spurts on social media
- Ask questions about the topic on social media
- Hold a teleclass
- Send out a survey to your list
- Talk with your clients about it
- Share it with a small group
- Pilot a smaller version like a short workshop
- Put together a Research & Development team around the topic to explore it further
- Get together a bunch of colleagues and ask for their ideas and thoughts
- Create a series of Photo Quotes focused on this topic
- Create a video series
How to Dive Deeper
Each of these experiments will help you dive deeper into your new content and understand it in a richer way and give you new insights you might never have thought of.
Plus, you’ll see where the excitement and interest is from your community and confirm your decision to take it further or to let the idea go. Experiments help you decide where to put your time, effort and money next in your business.
YOU will also learn a lot from sharing.
So often when we think we are onto a new idea we want to keep it a secret. When you share and put this idea into a form (like from the list above) you then explore and play with different ways of describing it, asking questions about the topic in different ways, and you learn more, clearer ways to talk about your idea.
You become the curator of this idea.
You gather all things related to that idea and see how they can be put together, what other people think about the idea and what it will spur in them, or not.
One of my business coaching clients owns a family florist shop (in addition to several other online businesses) and she has always wanted to expand into providing floral services for local businesses – to become their preferred “go-to” florist for special events for their employees.
She knew it was a good idea for an additional revenue stream in the local market. And yet, it had a heavy energy and she had been dragging her feet for years. We figured out she felt like she needed to have a “sales conversation” and program all ready and put together. There was too much pressure to get it all perfect, right out of the gate.
We came up with the idea for her to experiment and test it out at her next local networking meeting in a fun and creative way. Her floral designers have created a pretty “Everyday Bouquet” as a giveaway for her to take them to the networking meeting.
This totally lightened her energy. She felt like it was fun, engaging and a light way to test out a concept to give herself proof of decision. She was immediately excited and energized about experimenting and seeing what kind of feedback and conversations evolved.
Now she’s taking the feedback from her experiment and creating a program for her Florist business around it – and she’ll have more reinforcement of her decision and information for creating her program.
What idea keeps haunting you?
What idea, concept or product would benefit from lightening up the energy and testing the concept with an experiment?
Let me know below…I’d love to hear!
