What to Do When You Have No Money, No Plan, No Coach, and No Mentor
When you’re pursuing a difficult goal but don’t have a plan, coach, or mentor to help guide you as you pursue that goal, you don’t have many options. In fact, you really only have one option when you don’t have any money to hire someone to help you either.
The only option you have is to start with a minimum viable change or MVC for short. A MVC is the smallest possible change you can make while still making a difference. This change must have at least three characteristics:
- Easy to execute.
- Impactful in some type of visible or measurable way.
- Builds momentum.
It must be easy to execute so that you remove all excuses stopping you from starting. It must be measurable so you can know if you’re making progress and how fast or slow progress is taking. Then finally it must build momentum so over time the speed of progress increases and in turn your motivation to stick with executing the MVC also increases.
For example, I have a goal to write a book to help parents and young athletes. To get there I defined my MVC to write in this blog every day. I knew not many people would read my blog at first, but that didn’t matter on day one.
- I knew my MVC would force me to stay consistent and eventually I would find a voice.
- Once I found a voice, my writing would improve.
- As my writing improved, people would start reading my blog more.
- Getting more readers would then turn into people to share and subscribe to my coaching programs, Twitter and Facebook page.
- By maintaining trust with integrity, relevance, insightfulness, and generosity, my audience then would grow.
- With the growth of that audience, I would then have the momentum needed to support publishing a book.
This process meets all three of the characteristics for an MVC. Starting a blog with WordPress is super easy and free. Publishing a blog every day is measurable in an impactful way since you can track traffic and subscribers. Lastly, momentum builds as writing articles each day drives more subscribers, which drives more shares, which drives more subscribers.
When you work to execute an MVC instead of worrying about all the things you don’t have, you take the first step to helping yourself. What’s more, people want to help those who help themselves. So, start by helping yourself and eventually more doors will open with help from others.