Episode 21: Start Now, Worry Later

In this episode we’re talking about, starting now and worrying later!

Far too often, I speak to brilliant people who’ve got fantastic products and services but they’re caught up in their own procrastination. 

They worry about making everything perfect and end up planning, planning, planning, and planning some more then nothing ever happens. 

This totally saps the energy out of everyone and it’s also going to sap the momentum out of you getting to where you deserve to be – especially when you’re thinking about launching. 

Here are the highlights from this episode:

{2:00} Why would they care about what I say?

{3:59} How people need to relate to you

{6:34} Practice makes perfect

{7:54} “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” 

{9:48} How I got my podcast started after 3 years 

{14:33} Testing your ideas

{17:02} Future pacing yourself

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Web: www.dawnmcgruer.com

Welcome to episode 21 of Dawn of a New Era – Chronicles of a Serial Entrepreneur with myself, Dawn McGruer, author, trainer, and speaker. I’m passionate about all things digital and the ever-evolving world of online marketing and social media. But most importantly, business is what I love, and I live and I breathe. And I’ve got multiple businesses, but I had to start somewhere. And in today’s episode, we’re going to start talking about something that really is probably the number one reason that I have managed to get to where I am. Although I’ve had struggles along the way, I think it’s been one of the biggest contributors to getting there as fast as I possibly could.

Now, this episode is all about, start now and worry later. Far too often, I speak to amazing people who’ve got products and services and they’re caught up in their own procrastination. They worry of making everything perfect and then planning, planning, planning, planning, and then nothing ever happens. Now, that’s just going to sap the energy out of everyone and it’s also going to sap the momentum out of you getting to where you deserve to be. And especially when you’re thinking about launching. Now, this is one of the biggest things that I see in today’s market.

Now, when I came out of corporate, one of the most difficult things for me was to make the transition whereby I was showing up in social media as an entity, as Dawn McGruer, as a brand, as my own physical person and not hiding behind a corporate identity. For many years I had been working for businesses, I was supporting their brand and I was just kind of, part of that mission and vision. I wasn’t the entire thing. And I think it was so difficult to kind of put my face out there because I was thinking, number one, why would anyone care what I’ve got to say? I was in this corporate cycle. So it was very difficult to think about going live, creating content that was from my heart, from my passion and not just talking about the brand all the time.

It’s so important on social media to show up as a person because people buy people. I see it all the time on LinkedIn where faceless corporate identities are push, push, push, marketing, marketing, marketing. They get absolutely no engagement because no one cares. It’s only when you attach the people, the team, the culture, the society of that business, that the business becomes an entire entity. And people don’t just want to know the features, they want to know the benefits. You’ve got to think about social media a little bit like reality TV. People are seeing your brand’s story play out. And showing up as a personal brand, you have to be authentic and you have to be prepared to, I suppose, peel those layers of onions off and become somebody who is visible, approachable, and somebody that people can really relate to.

A PR lady once said to me that lots of people struggle with really showing their identity. And I thought it’s not really my identity I struggle with, it’s the fact that number one, I’m not sure people are interested. And number two, I’m thinking, well, why would they be interested? Now, she described me as an onion with a lot of layers and I don’t know till this day whether that was a positive or a negative. Now, in the way that I am and my sunny disposition, I took it as a positive. And I thought, well, maybe that means I’ve got multi-facets and I’m an interesting layered person. Now, hopefully, that’s what she meant. But I think what she was trying to say is that, for people to relate to you, and to clients and potential clients to see who you are, you have to peel those layers off.

Now, this really comes back to the whole essence of do it now and worry later. Starting now and worrying later is honestly the best advice I can give you because when it comes to, for me, from showing up from a corporate and making this transition into a personal brand, I just had to, I suppose, rip the band-aid off as quickly as possible and get it done because we all have to do something once. So if you’ve got a feeling where you’ve come out corporate, or you find it difficult to show up as you, or even if it’s just going live for the first time, do it now and worry later. Perfection is not everything, but perception is. The fact that you’ve shown up, you’ve gone live, people will respect that. People will absolutely love what you’ve got to say.

I promise you because if you’re passionate, if you’re genuine and you’re honest and true and ethical, why on earth wouldn’t they? Because not everybody wants to show up and do public speaking. So one of the things that I found when I first got into public speaking, incidentally won Female Speaker of the Year in 2018, it wasn’t that easy for me to get into it. It wasn’t something that I was naturally aligned to because I’m a person of certainty and a person of control, and putting me in a situation where I can’t control it or I thought I couldn’t, made me uneasy, massively uneasy. And the thought of getting up on stage and talking to thousands of people used to scare the absolute living daylights out of me. And honestly, I don’t really know if there was a certain day that that changed.

I just kept doing it. And it got easier and easier until the point it got where I was actually loving it. And I always felt like I was in flow. Like I was in control. Like people were enjoying what I had to say, and I was enjoying them being there. And that’s really the difference. Now, if you’re going live, it’s the same thing. Once you realize that you’ve done it once and you’ve gone live and no one attacked you and you didn’t die and you do it again and again and again, you just get better. And you just learn from each one. It’s like when I deliver a training course, I test out the content first of all. I deliver it and it just gets better and better and better, the more people I meet, the more people I deliver it to.

And I can really hone in on making it the most immersive interactive experience, but if I only did it once or twice, I wouldn’t learn from it. So you don’t have to be perfect, but as I say, start now, worry later. Very rarely have I done anything in business that I actually regret. I test things out all the time. I rather jump in. And if anything, I’m probably the opposite. I probably do things too quickly sometimes. And that’s probably something that is a negative in the way that I approach things in my business. A lot of people have referred to me as pragmatic. And I think that’s a nice way of saying that I’m really impatient, I just want to get things done. Which is kind of true.

I went on the internet the other day and I was reading through quotes and I came across the war veteran, Zig Ziglar, who became a hugely inspirational salesperson. And I really loved the quote that he says, “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” And this is so true because if you don’t do something, how will you ever know? Right. So if you’re worrying about launching something and you’re putting this whole emphasis on it, then you’ll always be disappointed. So many clients I’ve met, they’ve come into my world and they say, I’ve been planning this out for three months. They hang their everything on it. And when it doesn’t have maybe the results that they’ve got in their mind’s eye, or it doesn’t have this huge, amazing ping on day one of launch, then they’re really disappointed. Sometimes just getting things out there and evolving it is a better way to do it. And I often see people approach the end of a year, right, and then they start going, well, what I’m going to do is, next year I’ve planned out what I’m going to do, and I’m going to do this, this and this.

And it had so much on that year ahead. They literally put everything in that, that year is going to change the world, change their life and change their business. Does it? No. And they’re hugely, hugely underwhelmed because when you’re thinking about your success, to hang everything on a 12-month plan in one year, it’s just insurmountable. And it’s just totally unachievable. Now, I’ve carried with me loads and loads of things on my to-do list like this podcast. Okay. So we’re putting on episode 21 now, and I think probably 2017, I first thought I need to do a podcast. So I carried that thought with me like a really heavy piece of luggage, dragged it along with me for three good old years until eventually, pulled my finger out and got it done. Now, the reason I got it done had a little bit of something to do with lockdown, not travelling everywhere and being a little bit more in a creative space, in a slower-paced world.

But you know what, I just thought if I don’t do it now, I’ll never ever get it done. Okay. So when you think about something as a task, something global like I’m going to launch my podcast. That in a sentence is just, you’ll never achieve it. It needs to be broken down into tangible actions that you can actually do to get it done. So when you procrastinate it’s because it feels like such a big project that actually, if you just broke it down into say 10 actions, it becomes far easier because what happens is, is you take our number one off the list. So what am I going to call my podcast? Done. Dawn of a New Era – Chronicles of a Serial Entrepreneur. I thought of a few titles, put them out there, got some feedback, job done. Then what’s it going to look like?

What’s the artwork for the podcast? I need to visualize the look and the feel of it. So I put it out, got our designers to work on it. They came back with some epic, epic mock-ups, chose the ones I liked. Again, put it out to the market, got all of my audience to help me with the title and with podcasts, because guess what guys, after all, they’re the people who are listening to it. So if you’re listening to it now, this is the sort of thing that when I connect with people on social media, and this is something that really does help me get started, is that I go out to my audience and I ask the question, number one, do you want a podcast? Number two, would you listen to it? Number three, this is what I’m thinking of it being about and calling it. This is what it might look like.

Then everyone feels that they’ve come along in the journey, in this immersive process and they’ve been part of it. So team Dawn isn’t just me. It isn’t just my team, but it’s me and all of my audience on social media and across all of my online channels. And this is something that really helps me spur on and push forward because there’s nothing better than accountability. And when you put on a launch date online, when you’re launching a podcast and then a million people see that, that’s definitely an incentive to pull your finger out and get started. But in all seriousness, when I started my podcast, I literally broke down the actions. Right. Every single time I tick one off, it was like a micro win. It was like, I was getting closer to achieving the goal and I could see myself moving forward because often the procrastination is not the thing. It’s not the launch. It’s the whole work that goes into creating that and getting it to a point where you can launch it.

So once I got all that done and I started planning out my episodes and I started recording them, I mean, the big thing for me, a big hurdle was just getting the kit right. Okay. Once I got the kit and it was all set up and I knew I didn’t have to set it up again and again, it was just there ready each week, it was dead easy because I love talking and I can talk a lot as you know in an episode. So for me to be able to share this way, it was something that I just actually started getting a real buzz from. And I actually, instead of thinking, oh my goodness, I’ve got to record my podcast episode, I started thinking, oh my goodness, it’s podcast day. And I actually give myself three days to record it in a week. Anytime between Monday and Wednesday, whenever I feel like recording it, I can do it.

I just know that Wednesday is my deadline so that my team have got time to turn it around, edit it, transcribe it, get the music on and create the social media posts. Yeah.  So for me, once it came to launch, all the groundwork had been done and the launch was really exciting because we had done quite a bit of prep of how we’re going to launch it. And I hadn’t pinned too much on it. It was something that I wanted to do. I knew my audience wanted it. And that was where I was at. I had no great ambitions, no great goals with it. And when it launched and it hit number 17 in the entrepreneurship charts in Apple, I was absolutely flabbergasted. I mean, I was just overjoyed. I mean, it was unreal. So for me, I wasn’t underwhelmed when I launched. That was blooming amazing.

It was something I never thought would happen. And then yeah, I had some expectations of opportunities that creating this branded content would achieve. But my goodness, so many other opportunities I could never have planned, thought of, or dreamed of have come out of this podcast. So my advice to you is start now, worry later. Don’t hang too much on something, just get it done, but test the market and see what people want. Don’t create from the inside, test it out and get collaboration and see what people want. If people want it, then that’s a really great reason to do it. And the thing is, you’ll feel supported along the way. And it will be 10 times easier to get started. Plus, you’ll have the accountability and you know that people are relying on it coming out that particular date and it gives you the momentum and incentive to do it.

Now, you know the three topics I always talk about; marketing, motivation and mindset. Okay. Passionate about all of them. They’re absolutely the three core pillars that you need in life to be successful. But when you think about Zig Ziglar and he said, “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” This is so true. I mean, I would say that when I started my podcast, they’re probably each episode, they get better and better and probably more comfortable. But I didn’t test it out in terms of record, record, record, I just went into flow and tested it. And the more feedback I got, the better the podcasts. The more feedback I got, the more topics I could cover that people wanted. If I tried to perfect it, I would probably be creating and creating and creating for much, much longer, but I’d have lost the whole momentum.

And I think it’s so important that for me, the whole motivation for this is that the opportunities that are coming out from it, they’re just unreal. The whole marketing of it, it’s a simple process, but one that works. And we use lots and lots of different channels to get the podcast out there. You can’t just create and assume that people will rock up and listen. You have to put some effort in. But the thing is, if I’ve got the motivation and I’m loving doing my podcast and I’m getting great feedback and opportunities from it, the marketing is right, so I’m getting the reach. I’m attracting listeners, I’m getting more and more downloads. Then what’s the mindset? Well, the mindset for me is number one, I ticked off a huge, huge goal in my whole business life. I really wanted to do this.

The second thing is, from a mindset point of view, I really enjoy doing the podcast. I speak about things that are current with me. So as much as it’s helping my listeners, I feel that it really helps me. And it gives me this buzz. So it’s something that also, because in my mindset, it was dragging me down it was on me to-do list, when I lifted that I just felt free. I felt like I had been released. So my advice is that if you are approaching, say the end of a year, end of a quarter or something and then you’re looking at the next time and the next milestone, I’ll start it next year. You imagine, right, if you got to the end of the year, and then you were like, oh, I’m going to do this in January.

You won’t know it, but it’d be hanging there. I mean, it could be subconscious. You could be consciously feeling dragged down by it and that you have a rain cloud above your head thinking, oh, I’ve got to launch this next year. So from a mindset point of view, actually doing it now, starting now and getting it done and worrying about it later is better for your mindset. Because if there’s something that’s weighing you down, you’re better just to get it out. And if it’s something, it could be a massive to-do list, delegate it. It could be personal goals that you want to achieve, start breaking down what the actions could be. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. It’s one that’s so dear to my heart, and I would love you to come and join me on the next episode.

So, do not forget, subscribe and just go to dawnmcgruer.com. And at the web page, you can see that we have all the episodes ready to download and there’s worksheets as well with some of the episodes too. So if you’d like to learn more and you’ve enjoyed this, I talk about some of these topics in far more depth in my book, Dynamic Digital Marketing. I share my story of how I started my business and also the eight powerful ways of how to market your business online and how to really master the world of online marketing and social media. You can grab it on the website. Just type in Business Consort to Google. That’s the Academy I own or check it out on Amazon.

So I shall see you next week on the podcast and look forward to hearing your feedback. So don’t forget, if you enjoyed it, leave me a review too. Take care. I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode and don’t forget, I’m going to be with you each and every week. So download and listen on dawnmcgruer.com or on iTunes or come and join us in our Facebook community too. All the details are on the website and I’ll see you next week.

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Dawn McGruer's Marketing * Motivation * Mindset Group

Speaker. Author. Podcaster. Strategist.

Multi-award-winning speaker, strategist & best-selling author of Dynamic Digital Marketing - Helping to inspire entrepreneurs to rise to meet today’s challenges and be powerfully present to shine online.

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