Curveballs, Keyword Planners, and Clarity

Mannnnn! I needed this week's classwork, and didn't even know it! 

Life has thrown some curveballs at me over the last month. I have epilepsy, and out of no where, my brain decided it was going to stop accepting my seizure medication and have 6 seizures within a month's time. This caused a very uncomfortable chain of events: 

• Neurologist tells me to increase my seizure medication, which have side effects that exacerbate ADHD symptoms. 
• Neurologist tells me to talk to my psychiatrist about changing ADHD medicine since stimulants can increase seizure threshold. 
• My psychiatrist can't see me for a month, but messages me telling me to come off ADHD meds until we can meet again.
• ADHD symptoms are now quadruple the norm.
• I begin my semester of school and immediately drop two out of the three classes I had signed up for because my brain is not currently on board with doing normal brain things.

Even one class feels like a big ask for my current brain chemistry state, but I chose the class that sounded most interesting and would potentially help my career goal the fastest.

Web Business Creation. 

As a personal trainer and nutrition coach, I stopped working for the big box gym almost two years ago because they were keeping more than half of what the client pays. As a 41 year old, I've never made "adult money". Thankfully, my husband is an excellent provider. But he also supports my love for fitness and nutrition and the fulfillment it brings me to help others with their fitness and health goals. Upon leaving to build my own business, I've dabbled in some strategies, but have still not been successful at making an "adult salary".

Week two of Web Business Creation has required me to ask questions that I have not been able to narrow down in the last two years of being an entrepreneurial fitness professional. There are, legit, so many different products, services, niches that I could put my energy into under the holistic health umbrella. And as mentioned before there's the ADHD which manifests itself very aggressively with analysis paralysis, executive dysfunction, and decision fatigue. 

I've decided that the best approach for this web business creation class is to let go of my usual go to of coming up with the "perfect" business decision, and rely on a ton of prayer....and also the numbers. 

I could not be more thankful for the tool that was introduced, this week: The keyword planner in Google Ads. 

This first project, The Decision Matrix, is an absolute gift that I had no idea existed! 

I could not be any more thankful that I don’t have to just guess my way into a business idea. I can look at real data: search volume, competition, growth trends. Then I can let the numbers guide me instead of trying to guess at which instagram business coach is right about which business strategy to use. Can you even comprehend how discouraging that is, to have my algorithm be throwing all these coaches of coaches onto my feed contradicting each other, saying their way is THE only way!? To top it off, they each want me to pay them THOUSANDS of dollars to learn their method! I'm so thankful for the step by step that this class offers!

This week also reinforced the idea that the “easy” option is not always best. Sometimes the business with higher competition is actually more profitable if the demand and intent are strong enough. 

So, my big takeaway for this week: creating a successful online business is going to be a process of testing, using tools like Google Ads to back decisions, and being willing to start small and build. 

It feels good that I can actually see a path forward, and I feel hopeful!