Having lots of ideas is a sign of creativity, but it can also leave you feeling overwhelmed and unable to make progress. Instead of trying to pursue every opportunity at once, capture your ideas in a trusted system, prioritise what matters most and focus on one thing at a time. Giving your best idea the attention it deserves will move your business forward far more effectively than chasing dozens of possibilities at once.
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👋🏽 Hello! I'm Sumantha McMahon, and I've supported over 100 tutors and education business owners.
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Let's talk about one of my favorite topics, the busy brain, and the very particular kind of stuck that comes from having too many ideas. It's not about not having enough, it's usually because we're overwhelmed with them. And this is something I see, I would say, constantly, and it's something I know very well myself. You're not short of ideas, it's quite the opposite. Your head's full of them.
Sumantha (:
You could start a membership, you could run group classes, you could write a course, launch a podcast, build a team, niche down, add a new subject, try a new platform. The ideas keep coming, and every one of them feels exciting, and every one of them feels urgent. I call these the ideas that love to party. They turn up uninvited, they're tremendous fun, and they all start talking at once, and before you know it, your head is a crowded room at 11 at night when everyone is shouting to be heard.
Sumantha (:
And the strange thing is that this can leave you just as stuck as having no ideas at all. Maybe more so, because it's really paralyzing. You know, when everything feels possible and everything feels important, you can't tell what to actually do. You just flit from one thing to the next. You start things, you abandon them, you spend enormous energy, and then somehow nothing moves because your attention is split across a dozen half-formed possibilities.
Sumantha (:
And none of them ever really gets the focus that they need to come to life. A busy brain isn't a flaw. It's I don't know, maybe it is, but maybe it's something I tell myself to make me feel better. But I don't think it's a flaw. I think it's usually a sign of ambitious, creative, you know, capable people. But left unmanaged, it is exhausting and it actually keeps you from the very progress you're so hungry for. The work then is not to have fewer ideas.
Sumantha (:
You can't really help how many ideas you have and you wouldn't want to. The work is to stop trying to act on all of them at once, to take the party in your head and bring a little order to it, to choose, to say, these ones can wait, and this is the one that I'm giving my attention to now. As I've shown many of my clients, I actually use a task management system for this. I use click up, but you know, there are other things like Trello or Asana and so on. You could even use a spreadsheet, whatever works really, post-it notes, whatever.
Sumantha (:
point is what I do is I dump my ideas on there. So they exit my brain and I know I'm not going to forget about them. And I have this kind of masterboard where I have the priorities that I'm thinking about now, short term, medium term, and long term, and I place those ideas somewhere. So that I'm kind of deciding, well, what's the priority? What can wait? What feels like a really big job but not a job for now. And it makes me feel a lot better because I I think part of the reason why
Sumantha (:
It can be so exhausting. It's not just because you you don't know when to do things, but it's because you're trying to store them all in your brain in case you forget any of them. You know, an idea on its own is just potential. It doesn't do anything until it's chosen and given room and worked on properly. The business owner who picks one idea and sees it through will always get further than the one with 50 brilliant ideas and a different one for each week. So if your head is
Sumantha (:
really crowded for you right now, if it's full of possibilities, all clamoring for attention, I'd love for you to know that there's nothing wrong. You know, it's it's normal, I think, I hope. But you're not scattered, you're not flaky, you're not incapable. You simply have a lot going on and you haven't yet given yourself permission to let a lot of it wait. So pick one. Let the rest carry on partying in the background. They'll keep. And you'll see that things will finally really start to move.
