Are your ideas fighting one another for the spotlight ?

I was in a mentoring session recently with a client who'd built what looked, on paper, like a genuinely exciting quarter - a workshop, a promotion running alongside it, a partnership she was excited about, a new resource she wanted to launch. These were all great ideas, but they were also all a bit like individual divas, competing for the spotlight.

It's a pattern I see constantly with sparky-brained business owners — not too few good ideas, but too many all fighting for the spotlight at once.

If you have a Popcorn Brain in residence, this is likely to feel familiar - you're not in danger of running out of good ideas, rather, it's that no single one gets enough momentum to build before another one turns up demanding attention too.

You need a spotlight, not a Mirror ball.

A spotlight illuminates a single thing - and that thing stays visible long enough for people to actually notice, evaluate, make a decision and take action.

In contrast, a mirror ball throws sparkly light everywhere at once, fragmenting attention. It's delightfully dazzling to look at, but nobody can focus on any single beam long enough to do anything with it.

This isn't about you having bad ideas, not at all. It's about realising that your sparky brain tends to consider every good idea as equally urgent the moment it lands. Novelty is dopamine heaven, and so instead of that current great idea being allowed its time in the spotlight to actually contribute to your business, the mirror ball kicks in with the new concepts, and each one steals impact capacity from the others.

That's energy and attention diffusion, and it's exactly what mirror ball marketing produces, pretty much every time.

And the resulting lack of momentum is a trigger for the "see, not good enough" story to kick in again.

ADHD Business Groundhog day.

What we actually did in the mentoring session

The solution wasn't a folded arms, frown on face, “for goodness sake, do less” judgy and rather vague directive.

A sparky-brain needs more scaffolding than that if we're to come through unscathed and enthused, with no RSD arriving to drag you under.

So, we looked at everything on her plate for the quarter and picked the one thing that we agreed mattered most right now. The one thing that had a clear throughline to her core goals for this period (and we could check, because we'd written them down - imagine!!!) - the virtual workshop.

Then we moved one of the other activities she was super keen on out to a later date. Not cancelled or shelved, just uncoupled from so it was no longer competing for the same spotlight window.

A closer look at the partnership opportunity showed us it could be responded to with an email and a conversation for now, but it wasn't actually asking for significant attention for quite some time.

And the resource? We decided that was a perfect bonus for those who registered for the workshop, so her sparky brain was "given permission" to create that too, once the promotional campaign for bums on seats was finalised.

The key priority, the workshop, now had something it wasn't going to enjoy with the previous schedule - a proper runway. Six to ten weeks of build-up, rather than a mere three or four weeks that would have been the case with everything else running all in parallel. Now we had a true Spotlight that could be fixed on this one thing, long enough for people to actually have time to notice it, think about it, and act on it.

We didn't change her ideas - we just changed the sequencing of them.

That can be genuinely difficult to manage when you have a sparky or ADHD brain - Popcorn Brain doesn't hand you dated sequence, it just hands you all the ideas at once and expects you to sort it out yourself. This is one of the things I most often help my clients with.

Pause and ask yourself

If you've got more than one thing you're planning to launch, promote or have compete for attention over the next month or two, try the audit. Look at what's actually scheduled, side by side, and check in:

• Am I shining a spotlight or fragmenting attention with a mirror ball?

• Am I falling under the novelty spell?

• Could I make some timing changes?

This isn't the only pattern we need to tackle

This is one of three patterns I see often showing up together that look like totally separate problems but are actually holding hands and dancing around us. I'll be writing about the other two next and together they combine into what I call Perpetual Potential, the frustrating state so many brilliantly sparky-brained businesswomen get stuck in that I'll be unpacking and sharing ideas and resources to tackle it at my free live masterclass on Tuesday 13 October.

If the mirror ball feeling is a familiar one, you've probably experienced the other two as well. Watch out for the new posts, and pop over and book a seat for the Perpetual Potential Masterclass here.