A recent attendee at my goal-setting and strategies workshops sent me an email asking for help. She’d created a comprehensive list of her projects and wasn’t sure where to go from there. Reading through it I completely understood why she had difficulty getting out of neutral. It looked overwhelming.

For example, under marketing she listed:

• design new brochure
• create media kit
• create website
• gather testimonials
• created postcard mailing
• hire a graphic designer
• contact media

…and that was just the beginning.

Here’s the big secret: break each of the items down into bite-sized, doable tasks and plug them into your calendar as appointments. If you were to start with the easiest, most achievable one first I’d recommend “gather testimonials”–a great place to begin. It’s manageable, concrete and will have you feeling stellar after receiving all the wonderful feedback from your raving fans.

To break that down even further:

• Step 1: from 10-11am next Monday, go through your records and jot down the names of all the clients you’ve worked for in the past 3-6 months (make up your own time frame here). That should be fun as you remember all the good work you’ve done and the exceptional results your talent produced.
• Step 2: Now that you have a list of 10-100 names, schedule time on your calendar to follow-up with each of those names, say from 4-5pm Wednesday. Make 5 calls to request testimonial letters.
• Step 3: To make this even easier on you and your clients, jot down what you remember about the job you did for them. Type up some phrases you’d love for them to say about you and suggest sending a couple of well-crafted paragraphs to sign off on. I promise you–if they were happy with you and your work, they’ll be very grateful to help you and even more grateful that all they have to do is sign something. It saves them time and makes them feel good.
• Step 4: Collect the testimonials you received and either reproduce them for your media kits or add them to an online pdf media kit on your website. Make sure you’ve gotten permission to use these kind words in your marketing materials.

Ta-dah! I promise you that once you’ve gotten through these steps, which as you can see will take several hours, you’ll be chomping at the bit to take on more. It’s through the practice of chunking your goals down into bite-size pieces that banquets are created.