What is Your North Star and How Do You Get There?

Every creative business needs direction, and that’s where your North Star comes in.

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Hello friends, this is Lyric Montgomery-Kinard with Creatives on Camera coming to you from the Academy for Virtual Teaching, where we help creative entrepreneurs, those who serve makers with shops or with education. We help you to take the tech overwhelm out of video making because video making is vital to reaching your audience, to making that authentic connection to getting them into your shop, to helping them learn the technique. It's the way we serve our audiences.

I'd like to discuss with you today something that might seem off-topic, but it's actually at the core of what we, as entrepreneurs and businesspeople, do.

What is your North Star?

If you had an easy button and you could slam it and there were no obstacles, nothing at all in the way, what would your finished business, your ideal most perfect life with your creative business, what would it look like?

I want you to think about it for a minute, maybe put this episode on pause and close your eyes and imagine it. What would it have involved? What are all the big parts? What are all the amazing things?

And I want you to envision who you're serving specifically as well. That's what we're doing.

We are serving our audience. Who are they?

Now with this finished, amazing, perfect, successful business, what does that do for you? What does that do for us? What lifestyle or how does it help us live?

If you are making a certain amount of money, what comes off the table that you're worried about now?

If you are reaching enough people, what is different about your life? I want you to think in ideals. Are you busier than ever or are you more relaxed than ever?

Take time and really imagine as many details as you can about your biggest, most amazing finished business goal.

Now, it may seem scary. In fact, it should seem scary. It should be so big that you're like, “I don't know if there's any way I'm ever going to complete this”. It should be.

Think about the North Star. You can go in a direction. It can guide you. It's steady. It's constant.

Will you ever actually set foot on the North Star? No, you're not.

But you can get to mountaintops. You can get somewhere amazing.

Write it all down. Think about the most amazing goal, the most amazing outcome you have.
Define it clearly. Write down what it looks like, who you're serving, how much you're making, and what your life looks like.
Break down two or three key things that need to be in place to achieve this goal.

Do you need online classes that run on an evergreen format with an advertising funnel leading into them?

Do you need to have events in your shop?

Is your shop a certain size?

Do you have a certain number of employees?

If you're a designer, how much time do you spend designing, and how are your creations distributed to your audience?

What does the whole big thing look like?

What things do you need to have in place?

Just choose three of them that will get you to those goals.

You have a North Star.

You have a defined path to get there with those three systems, provided you have those three things in place. Now, I want you to look down at your feet and take inventory of where your business currently stands.

What resources do you already have?

What is already in place for you to get to that finished business?

Do you have a website?

Do you have an email list?

Do you have assistants or employees?

Do you have social media channels?

Do you have a YouTube account?

Do you have an online course platform?

Do you have marketing materials already in place?

Do you have a course that you're teaching?

Take good stock and take inventory of what you already have, because that tells you where you stand and what your next step needs to be.

Now choose one of those three systems, those three goals, those three things you need to put in place to get to your North Star and back it up to the easiest, tiniest baby step towards that goal. We're talking something that you can get done in 20 minutes. An easy success, an easy win because so often we get so caught up in how much there is to do and we get overwhelmed and there's too many things on my plate that we never take a step in that direction. We walk around in circles.

If you plan out one easy thing, the very first step, that's how you get to the top of the mountain.

None of us has seven-league boots. We can't fly to the top of the mountain. We have to walk there. And the way you walk there is one baby step at a time.

Thinking of that big finished business that you imagined, and then thinking of one of the systems that you have to put in place, and thinking of what you already have in place, what is the easiest action that you can take right now in that direction? AND DO IT. Promise yourself that you'll do it TODAY.

Baby steps are the things that will get you where you want to go.

Just take a baby step every day. I know you can do this. If you're creating online classes, maybe the baby step is pulling out your phone, cleaning off the lens, and talking to the camera. The easiest thing, choose the easiest thing. Talking to the camera can be just like, “Hey, this is the thing I teach.”

What can you talk about right now for three minutes off the top of your head without planning anything and just do it?

That's a baby step. That's showing up on camera. You don't even have to post it anywhere. You can delete it. Practicing is what is going to help you be comfortable on camera. Talking out loud to the camera is one of the ways you get better at being on camera.

If you don't have an email list yet, find a service where you can get an email list. That's it. Just research and write down one thing about email services. This might be the thing I'm going to try. You don't have to sign up for it or take any action. Write that down as your baby step next.

What I want you to do is think big, imagine big, and then don't overwhelm yourself with the amount of work required to get there.

Look down at your feet, pick up one of them, and move it forward one step. That's what I want you to do today, because that is how you succeed in your business. That is how you move forward instead of moving in circles.

We talk about this stuff all the time at the Academy for Virtual Teaching. We talk about what is your business, what are those steps, how do you get there.

I invite you to join us in our free membership. Listen to some of the guests that we have on our live seminars. You can ask them questions there. They're live on Zoom, and there's a lot of back-and-forth and participation.

Also you can check out our Video-Making Crash Course or our Virtual Teaching Masterclass where we hold your hand every step of the way through the whole process of building a business teaching virtually.

I look forward to hearing about your North Star. You can always send me an email at info@academyforvirtualteaching.com to share your thoughts.

Let me know what your dreams are, and then tell me that you took the first baby step.

You're amazing. You're creative. The world is a better place because of the way you serve your audience. Go do it, my friends.

If you have the time, leave a review, like, and subscribe, all that stuff. It really helps to get the word out to more people who need this. We lift each other, and everybody rises with this beautiful, creative, collaborative community that we have. Take care, and until next time, bye.

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