­­­­­­­­­­­5 Tips to Get Unstuck in Your Thought Leader (Author) Journey

I’m going to talk today about five tips to getting unstuck in your thought leader journey, and also mention a summit I’ve got coming up.

Tip one is to invest in your training so that you can get further, faster. (Obviously, this relates to doing a virtual summit). Because if you don’t invest in your training in some way, even if it’s a free day, you won’t be able to get to your goals fast enough. It will take ages and it will be ad hoc learning. You won’t be condensing, like what we’re doing in this Authorpreneur Summit day. We’re going to condense your learning.

And we’re going to make sure that you get the right mindset around marketing and media exposure and doing your own stories so that you don’t spend ages listening to that hubbub on the internet. They’re all just marketers doing it a certain way for small businesses – and that’s totally different to what we’re talking about now.

Learn from the Right Experts and Learn the Right Strategies

Tip two is to learn from experts. This is what I’ve done over the years. I’ve learned from Neil Patel when I wanted to know about SEO and digital marketing. I looked at everything he was writing about online (slight exaggeration there) and did some of his courses.

So even if my budget wasn’t there, which it might not be for you, it’s easy to learn from experts for free these days, from the content that they put out. This education is quite good often, and sometimes you can just buy a little marketing planner or books they’ve got.

As well as buying, you can put out workbooks yourself, for your own audience.

Tip three is about learning the right strategies.

We want to learn from aspiring niche leaders. Like, learning marketing from people who are talking about how to build a presence online as a soloist, not as a company of 10. They’ll show you how to do things that will move the needle, not get caught up in the latest hack or an algorithm change or any of that.

What You’ll Learn in this Summit

So it’s ideal to be learning about how to create a good book, how to grow your media presence, how to connect with others so that you can joint venture, and how to write your own personal story. We’ve got someone (Belinda Pollard) talking about how to structure your personal stories and bring that into your book… or your other content as well. What a great topic to attend.

Tip four is: remove your upper limits by tapping into creativity.

So, if you want to remove your own upper limits, make sure you tap into your own creativity and your own ideas. These days it’s all about using AI, and that can help you get unstuck a little bit as well. But I think that once you turn your creative tap on, and you start playing around, your ideas flow more easily.

So often we get stuck in our analytical mind and our ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ kind of competitive mindset, and we are worried about how we don’t measure up. But if you turn on your creative tap, as I call it, and use mind mapping and visual tools, then you won’t have that problem of not having anything good to say. Okay?

Tip number five is: commit to your goal and then the milestones for that goal.

So what I mean is, if you’ve got a goal to write a book within six months, don’t just leave it as that. Because sometimes we can like put things off that are hard; we don’t know how to get going. So you have a milestone of month one, I’m gonna have my outline written and I’m gonna work on my preface and my synopsis of why I am writing this book and what are the reasons people will read it.

So the whys are for me and the reasons are for them. And then milestones all along the way until you get to about months four or five, where you’ll be editing the work. You’ll look over what you’ve said and get an editor on board to do that final language check.

As well, you’ll ask yourself, what new habit can I integrate to make sure that this project of mine, ’cause it is a project, gets done?

So if it’s say, an online course that you’re building, these are steps you might write:

1. I’m going to finish the Fast Start Guide to Creating a Course by Thinkific, which is free.
2. Then I will download a sheet or worksheet or perhaps the Mega Book and Course Planner so that I can have prompts to help create the modules and know what the lessons are to be called. Good first step.
3. Then I’ll try to get into the habit of making a video a week or at least doing a bunch; maybe making three videos in a day and then sending them for editing.

It’s all about creating the momentum that you need. So you will mark out the steps in your diary.

Here, what I do for myself is I spend one hour every morning trying to create. It might not be content for social media. Today I am doing that, but it might be, say, write a chapter… or half a chapter or something.

How you can stop analysing

Or I’ll get onto someone else’s project and I’ll ask, okay, how can this be better? With this, I’ll open up my creative mind and ask myself questions.

A good way to stop yourself over-analysing is to ask a better question, and another way is to draw. It doesn’t matter how bad your drawing is. Mine’s pretty shocking, I admit, but I’ve done a lot of mind mapping using the colours and the imagery. Mind Mapping™ does help you unlock something in your mind and make it easier to flow, because our minds actually like that radiant thinking, which is flowing outwards, and it also has connections, the neurons have connections.

For example, when you say a word like pineapple. You’re not thinking of the letters p-i-n-e-a-p-p-l-e. You’re actually thinking of the thing, a pineapple. You’re thinking of eating a pineapple. You’re thinking of cutting a pineapple. You’re thinking of the shape of a pineapple, and this is how our mind actually works.

Say you get a concept for a book, then you can drill right down to little things until you are at the level where you’ve got ideas for different parts of your chapter. So, that’s a little bit about getting into your creative side.

Make sure you bookmark the Authorpreneur Summit, Down Under. Sign up for a free ticket while they’re still there. And I’ll see you there on the day, 2nd of September 2023.

My Personal Brand, the book, is due out on 21st August!