Every Monday, I set aside for marketing.
Today, I was really excited.
I had made some tweaks to my group coaching program to make it faster, and more valuable for everyone in it.
And then I faced a significant challenge.
I couldn’t attend the upcoming meeting of a nonprofit board I was supposed to present it to.
So I had to pitch this new offer via video.
I’ve done lots of videos before.
So I wrote my outline, fired up the camera and…blech.
The more I talked in the video, the less I liked it.
I was less than 3 minutes in and had already done a half dozen retakes.
And you get that familiar pit in your stomach.
“This isn’t going to work”
“How am I spending so much time on this”
“Maybe there’s another way”
Everything in me told me to stop.
Maybe that’s you, too.
Maybe you have a good fundraising idea…and then you tell a few people or go to write that email, and decide it won’t work.
So you put that one on the shelf, pick up another, and run excitedly with that one for a week or two…
Or maybe you dive into your other responsibilities and think “you’ll get around to it later, when you’ve had some time to think….”
Until you put that one on the shelf, too.
With not a single one of those projects ever seeing the light of day, or meeting the real test:
The first time you put it out there and get rejected.
See, we are our own best arguers.
We have decades of experience arguing with ourselves.
Whatever we come up with as the reason it will work, we can easily come up with another, better reason it won’t.
It’s not until we put it to the real test – offering it to someone else and having them make a decision on whether it’s right for them, that we actually know.
So I remembered a paper I put on my desk.
And I completed the video.
I edited a few sections.
And I sent it off.
Will it work?
I’m going to find out.
Instead of sitting here with another good idea to add to the stack.
Because none of your ideas will make a difference while they’re just sitting there.
And if you want this on easy mode, you can watch my video this week.
On how you can get your project validated by people before you launch.
So you can finally get that great fundraising idea off of your stack of ideas and out in the world.
Who knows, it might change it.
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