we're going to be judged anyway. I love colourful clothes and wearable art. I'm sure some people will see me and think I look like a ridiculous walking rainbow, but others will think how wonderfully colourful and happy I look. Attract (or polarise) your audience by showing up as you really are. You'll be much happier for it, because your clients will be people who are attracted to the same vibe.
Having a personal brand doesn't mean having no privacy. This is one of the most common objections I hear. When we think of personal brands, we may think of Instagram influencers flooding the world with selfies and model poses. By ‘personal brand’, I mean showing up as yourself, allowing the world to see the massive value you offer, and not dimming your light.
Decide now, as you embark on building your personal brand, what parts of your life you're happy to share and what parts you'd prefer to keep private. What works for someone else might not work for you. It's up to you to decide how much of yourself you want the world to see. Back in 2016 I had to deal with a cyber stalker. The experience totally shifted my relationship with the internet, social media and how much of my life I shared. I am very open and will share pretty much everything about my business and happily answer anyone's questions. I make myself readily available online to talk about business and some of my hobbies. I have two children but they're rarely in my social media. You won't find a tour of the inside of my house, or where I'm on holiday until I've left the location, and you'll very rarely see me sharing my experiences with friends or family. My social media is for business and I am very purposeful about that. People buy my expertise, and they need to know I have credibility in that area before they do, but at no point in our transaction do they buy me. Building a personal brand does not mean you need to show your personal life. It means you can decide which parts you're happy to share so your clients can get to know you, leaving everything else for your wonderful private life.
For example, I show all around my office; my dog frequents my account because she's always at my feet; I share what I'm working on and what roadblocks I come up against so I can also share how I overcome them. I share my goals and sorrows where they relate to business, but not the rest of my life. Your clients don't care about that. They care about how you can fix the problem they're trying to solve and how equipped you are to do that.
I've talked about the merits of starting small and starting with one thing. This is easier not only for you but for others too. If family, friends and colleagues want to recommend you, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. This means understanding exactly what it is you do and who you do it for, so you need to communicate clearly and explicitly who you serve and what you stand for.
When people speak about you when you're not in the room, what will they say? The personal brand you've crafted and projected — that's what will do the talking for you.
03 Time management
Perhaps the seed to start your own online course was planted long ago, or maybe it's a new idea. Either way most likely you're not someone with a surfeit of time and no idea how to use it.
‘I'd love to do this. I just don't have the time’ is the number one objection I hear. In reality, you have time for everything that's most important to you. We're all time poor because we humans always want to do more than the time we have available, so we find ourselves in this perpetual cycle of disappointment, running faster and faster as we try to do everything, yet our goals keep eluding us.
To master time you need to spend it doing the things that bring you the most joy and the most money, and either outsource, automate or simply eliminate the rest. I talk a lot about this in my book One Life: How to Have the Life of Your Dreams, where I recommend a structure to time audit your life. Many of us fall into the trap of spending far too much time on the things that don't matter and not enough time on the things that do.
Spending time on packaging your knowledge and expertise and creating an online course is such a good use of your time. It will help other people with what they seek to learn, while also returning a financial reward and helping create a legacy for you. But it's not enough that I believe it for you. You have to believe it yourself so you prioritise this work and get it done. And when you hit the mental roadblocks, your belief must be strong enough to help you push through beyond your comfort zone because you know it's worth it. If it's not worth it to you, then you'll never have time for it, because something more important will always come up. Your most important value will always hijack your time.
Overthinking
Hello there, my overthinkers and perfectionists. Yes, you need to put great thought into what you're going to do and how you're going to do it, but there's a line beyond which you have to say f*#k it and just go and do it. No more thinking. Time for action.
At the beginning of this year, clients of mine finally launched their first six-week course. They'd been planning it for over a year. About six months before they launched it was clearly ready, but there was always something else that needed to be revisited, a delay on getting filming done or a worksheet that should be revised. When they launched, they had students join their program from their first webinar, and they were understandably ecstatic. That win gave them confidence to go on and relaunch. They grew quickly, and now they're racing ahead with their online programs and building a healthy revenue stream.
That money could have been flowing in six months earlier, though. Now, when it comes to creating new content for their courses, they find the time and get it done because they know they can do it and they know it's going to yield a positive result. I want you to know that now. Take action and launch. Don't waste months — in some cases, years — while finding excuses not to take the action that's going to deliver the result you want.
Finding time
It's not all mind games, of course. There's still the very real barrier of the massive commitments you have in your life already and the challenge of how you can practically carve out the time to pursue this new adventure. You will find you can get it done in a limited time. You just need to choose your path of stolen moments. I'm a batching fan. In fact, to write this book I took myself off to a far-away place and set myself up alone with no distractions so I could focus solely on the writing. It works better and faster for me if I can get into the right frame of mind and go all in, which is why I record my courses in one hit. I put myself in that zone and I go for it. I may feel tired, self-doubt, scared, even bored, but I am committed to the end result, which is so much more important to me than any mood that washes over me while I'm working on it.
The alternative is stolen moments, which may be your only option if you can't or don't want to bail on normal life for a week. This means carving out small, batched moments when you can be super purposeful with your time. If this is real for you, if you're determined to get this done, you need to allocate at least 30 to 50 hours to getting your first online course and business ready for the world.
Grab your calendar and block out the time now, whether it's a full week or a four-hour block every Tuesday afternoon for the next few months. Put it in your calendar and then protect those times. Don't let anything get in the way. Treat the time with as much respect as you would an appointment with your child's orthodontist with a non-refundable appointment fee.
Later I'll show you what to do to ensure that the time you spend is purposeful and conscious and gives you the maximum return. There's no space here for procrastination. In this limited time you must get in and get a result. Then, in a few months' time, you'll have your prize, a fully launched online program.
You have to be conscious and committed in how you spend your time, or your whole life will end up being filled with the unimportant. Every time you make a time decision, you're
