Ready, Fire, Aim

I’ve had several coaching calls lately where my sweet little clients want everything to be perfect before they hit the “Go” button. They want “it” to be perfect. They want everything figured out. They want assurance that it’s all going to go to plan.

Yeah….. that whole planning thing…. see, planning is great. You need plans. As Eisenhower said, “I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” At some point, you have to actually DO something. At that point, the plan is a useful guide, but the eventual outcome will always look different from the original plan.

Here are some things I hear which tells me that people are spending too much time with the aiming and planning part:

-My elevator pitch isn’t perfect so I can’t go to any networking events.
-I have to wait until after Mercury in Retrograde is over to launch my product.
-My website isn’t complete yet. I don’t have all the pages.
-The workbook isn’t perfect. I have to keep working on it until it’s perfect.
-The book needs to be ready to publish. It’s not ready yet.
-Well, I realized I needed these other parts, so I have to hold off until I have every part in place.

The key is to ready, fire, aim. The perfect situation is not going to happen FIRST before you can take action. The world is ever-evolving, and you need to adjust. But since things will keep evolving, and you need to keep adjusting, there will never be the time where it all stands still, just in time for you to fire.

So, you fire, and then adjust (aim). Fire again. Aim. Fire again. And so on.

It’s all about taking action – one step at a time.

What does that look like in the real world?

-Go to networking events, and tell people who you are and what you do. As you get feedback (blank stares or lights in their eyes), continue to tweak.
-Make the website public and take off the “Coming soon” landing page, even if all the pages are not completed. You can add more pages later.
-Hit publish on the sales page, even if you don’t think it’s perfect.
-Publish the video, even if you don’t like the bags under your eyes, or the lighting isn’t quite right.
-Do the webinar, even if you’re not an expert with the tool.
-Launch the program, even if the workbook isn’t completed (or, heck, even started!).
-Write the blog post, even if you’re not sure if your message is spot-on. You’ll get there.

You can’t actually do any aiming or tweaking until the thing has been fired. If you keep it all in your head, that’s where the majority of it stays. You swirl and swirl and swirl around the project, the thing, the plan, and it can’t make any progress… because you can only go so far in your head.

Stop the swirl. Get something out there. Tweak. Try again.

That is what will move you forward.