 Even when it comes to creating content, something that is typically seen as more of an artistic process, especially in the way that I talk about it, which is authentic creating, there is still a sequence that I recommend. And I wanna share that with you in this video. It's something that I've noticed that I do, I've done for years actually, but never really talked about. And I'm hoping that by following the sequence, you will be able to have more enjoyment of the creating process and more success in getting it out there. All right, so first, the inspiration from this short framework came from listening to Cal Newport's podcast. It's called Deep Questions. And I really enjoy his podcast. And one of the frameworks he shared for how to work on a project, a lot of his listeners are academics, but there are other professions who listen. And so he shared this project called Friction Flow Finalization. I think I'm getting it right. You'll see it in my blog post below. It'll say a little bit more about it. So Friction Flow Finalization, friction is kind of like the initial stage. It might have been flow friction finalization. Anyway, those three words were in there, but it's this idea of you have to wrestle with the creating of the project, and then you have to make it, you have to improve on it and then finally make it ready to put out there. So that's the idea that he shared. And I really liked that sequencing of working on a creative project. So I decided to make my own version of that framework. It's a little bit more uplifting, hopefully. And I call it play, polish, promote. And this is really how I do just about everything in my business, play, polish, and then promote. So let me explain each one. And by the way, if you don't do one of these three, if you don't do, if you skip one of these steps, chances are you're either not going to enjoy the process or it's not going to have the kind of impact that you expected or you hoped. So play is the first stage. And in that stage, I encourage you to focus on a heartfelt connection with your audience's energy and with your own passion for your own ideas. So it's this play, is this dance between unfettered expression of your truest self, your truest creativity, just play like a child. So unfettered expression. But just like you're playing like a child, as a child, you're playing with another child, you're also sensing into their energy and seeing what would be fun to continue doing. So that's the dance of this first phase of creation, play. Your open-hearted expression, not judging, not evaluating. So if you are writing, for example, then you do a lot of free writing in this first phase of play. You don't say, okay, I got to write a blog post, it's got to be good, it has to stick to this one topic. No, the play means you may have a topic that you start with, but you're playing with that topic. You're saying, okay, here's what I think is important. Here's what's been, you know, meaningful to me about this idea. Here's an example, a story from my life, an example from my clients or whatever it is you're playing, you're just, you're not giving yourself any kind of rules to follow in this first phase of play. If you are making a video and it's the first time you're talking, which by the way, this is the first time I am talking about play. This is the first time I am talking about play, polish, promote on video. So I am in a more playful state. I'm not having to feel like, oh, did I, am I too long-winded on this first stage? I don't care. I'm playing here. And if this video works, then in the future when I make another version of the video, I will notice what aspects worked and maybe focus a bit more on that and the things that didn't work, maybe I'll cut that out. So play is, you're not constrained. You're not constricted. It's not contracted. It's more open, expansive playing. Okay, so play again is the dance between this open expanded expression, but also you're playing with your intuition about your audience's energy. What do I mean by that? I mean, if you, some of you know your audience much better than others. If you don't know who your audience is, you can just pick a friend, a supportive friend, somebody who you think, okay, this friend might actually be interested in what I'm talking about here. So I'm going to imagine that supportive friend and feel into what that friend's personality is like, their wants and needs, their worldview. I just kind of feel into who they are so that I'm like playing to that person's energy. If you know your audience well, then of course you're playing to their energy. So the play phase is, you know, you do it on one day and you sleep on it before going to the next phase. Now, very importantly, you need to set a time limit to your play. Okay, George, that doesn't make sense. Play, art, you know, creativity, flow. It's supposed to just go as long as it goes. Okay, most of us don't have that luxury. Maybe you have a very privileged life and you don't need to make any money and you don't need to do any household chores. Then yeah, you could spend all day playing with one project and all night or whatever, and you don't have any appointments, no obligations, and that's great. Most of us don't have that privilege. I don't. I have to pay the bills. I have to make sure I show up for my clients. I need to make sure I get enough sleep so that the next day I can show up for my clients. Well, you know, I have obligations, social business obligations, self-care obligations. So I need to set a time limit in my play stage. So what I mean is when I'm drafting a blog post for the future, I give myself a half hour these days, half hour, 30 minutes to just play with that blog post idea. I just, oh, I'm going to just write whatever. There's no judgment, no mistakes are possible. It's just play, half hour. And you must say half hour. That sounds like a really short amount of time. You know, I teach a class called authentic content flow. And I have had, you know, more than a hundred people take that class. And, you know, this, and I just taught it earlier this year. It's very interesting in that class. I did two exercises. Each time I gave the students only seven or eight minutes to write an article. And you might say, that's crazy. Well, here's the surprise. Many of them, most of them were able to write an article in seven or eight minutes. Now it's not the most polished article in the world, but it's the play phase. They were able to draft an article in under 10 minutes. Many of them went on to just go ahead and publish it, maybe with a little scrammer and spelling check. You are a genius. You just need a timer. I've seen that again and again. You are the one stopping yourself. I mean, your own self doubts, inner criticism, judgment, and that's not a small deal either. So it's really play is the invitation to just set aside your inner parts, the parts of yourself that are critical, judgmental, evaluating, okay. Doubting, set that, those parts aside. So, okay, you can work on the next phase. Right now I'm just going to take the more playful part of me to use. You see what I mean? So seven, eight minutes, 10 minutes, 15, I give myself 30 minutes. So I'm not as smart as most of my students, honestly, because in my seven, eight minutes, I was barely able to, I give myself 30 minutes. So I mean, typically. So anyway, 30 minutes to write or, you know, 10 minutes to make a video or whatever it is. So you kind of set a time limit. This one is going to be about, you know, upwards of 20 minutes this video, but you set a time limit to play. Okay, that's the first phase. And then you sleep on it. So a following day or a few days later or a week later, you come back and you go to the next phase. The next phase is polish. So you've already drafted some ideas. Okay. You've already made, you know, made the video. And I should say video making, you know, you might do multiple takes. So like one take might be the play take where you're just talking it out. You're recording just to experience the feeling of recording, but you're just talking things out. And then the next phase, you might then, you know, you might then publish it, but what we'll talk about that. So the next phase, the first phase is play. The second phase is polish. Polish is where you can bring back your evaluating parts, your, you know, more thoughtful, you know, left brain parts of, hmm, how can I chop some of these ideas that are not as necessary? How can I add more to make this more interesting? How can I re-sequence things? So the polish stage is the part where you're like, you know, you've got some building, the building blocks came with the play part. And now you're just like making the building blocks and, you know, in a better order to make it look better polish. Okay. To make it, to make it more presentable, make it more pleasant, make it more understandable to your art, to your ideal audience. So that's the polish stage. All right. And finally, the promote stage is where I see a lot of you just don't spend enough time on. I mean, you, you might have this fantasy that you could just play with your ideas and put it out there and it'll go viral. People will see it. And if you've done that by now, you know, that's probably not true. We need to promote our ideas, no matter how good we think they are, no matter how good we think they are, ideas deserve to be promoted so that people actually have the chance to engage with it. If you don't promote, they don't even have the chance to see it. So what does promoting mean? What social media channels do you use? Do you use Facebook? Do you use Instagram? Do you use YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest? Do you have an email newsletter? Do you, um, you know, typically share your, your content with a particular group of people? Maybe they should, you know, you all share content. So wherever you consume content and share content, that's where you should aim to promote your content, making sure, make sure you have some kind of checklist, which I do. I have a checklist of promoting. Okay, this place, that place, this place, that place. So have a checklist in the promotion. Make sure each one is checked. If you know how to run Facebook ads or Instagram ads or YouTube ads, that's great because then you can put a bit of money behind getting it out to, to the right people. And so that's what I encourage you to do, right? Play, polish, promote. If you skip any of these steps, the creation isn't as fulfilling or as, yeah. So if you skip the play part, a lot of you are too harsh on yourself. Many of you are. This is why you're being stopped from creating content consistently because you think you have to make something good. I don't. You know, I often, you know, it's funny. I hear sometimes hear people say, oh, I'm, I'm trying to take inspired action. It's funny because I say I'm actually always trying to take uninspired action because I'm uninspired most of the time. I'm not inspired most, I get inspired sometimes in a shower, I'll have an idea or when I'm walking the dog, I might have another idea when I'm walking on some, some project, I might have a night idea for another project, but that's really rare. You know, I, I work uninspired most of the time and that's what I expect. So for example, before I started making this video, I wasn't inspired. I didn't feel like making this video. I mean, if you were, if I had, you know, if money were no issue, if I had no obligations at all in the whole world, if I, if the whole world were, were, have been served by what I could do, like if I could make no impact on the world anymore, I wouldn't make this video. This is, I'm not doing this for fun. I mean, at the beginning, now it's kind of fun. Now that I'm, what, 10 minutes into it, 15 minutes into it, now it's kind of fun. Right. Now I'm kind of enjoying it. But at the beginning, it's, it's, it's kind of fun, uninspired action. But still, I get myself into doing it because I have to play mindset. So even though it's not, it's not something I would typically do. I would play video games instead. Right. That's more fun. But play is the respect for a deeper level of fun. Right. A deeper level, what I mean by deeper level of fun is spiritual fun, spiritual fun is growth. It's the fun that I hope you will sense into. It's subtle. At first it's subtle and then becomes more of a reality in your life. Like, okay, I choose a deeper fun instead of the shallower fun of video games and watching video, you know, watching other people on videos. My videos aren't that fun. But thank you for watching. But it's, you could watch much more entertaining videos of this, but shallower fun is consuming content only consuming content playing, playing video games. Other people have already created stuff for you to consume and enjoy. That's shallow fun. And we do that sometimes to escape. Escapism is helpful. I escape every evening when I'm, you know, having dinner. You know, I watch Netflix or whatever. That's escapism. You know, you need that during the day, but some, some time in the day, but then fun that actually moves your purpose forward. That's the deeper level of fun that in the first five years, that's the deeper level of fun that in the first five to 15 to 30 minutes is not fun, but it's still a deeper level of play. You're still like, Hey, I'm just going to wrestle and play. I'm not going to judge myself. I'm going to see what comes out. I'm going to challenge myself to see what comes out. So play is important to have that. Sense of challenge, the sense of challenge, not as in suffering challenge, but as in let's play a game type of, type of challenge again that I might not win or I might win, but I'm not, I don't care about winning or losing. I am playing. So that's the first, that's why we need to play. We need to have that mindset before we get to the Polish stage policy. So many of you start with that. I'm going to make something good. And if you can't, if I can't make something good, that's why you don't show up. You're so judgy of yourself. Stop judging yourself. Just let it go. I mean, or practice setting aside those parts of yourself. That's what I do all day long, setting aside that part of myself and then bringing it back only at the right time. So. So polish is that, that phase. If you don't polish, of course, if you only play all the time, you don't polish, then you're not respecting your content enough. You're not respecting your audience enough to save their time. Right. So for example, this video is going too long. This is not a Polish type video. This is a play type video. Right. So this is going a bit too long here. If you want to see more and more polished videos, if you go to go to my Instagram, my shorter videos on Instagram are more polished because I've already played with this. I typically make a Facebook live video first and immediately I go make an Instagram shorter Instagram live video, which is more polished because I've already practiced here on Facebook live. Some of you are watching this on YouTube. Anyway, so polish is important as well. And then promote, like I said, it's important. Otherwise. People aren't going to see it. If you can learn. Facebook ads, Instagram ads. It's so much. It's so much easier to just get your content out to the right people. Of course, I teach courses on this on this kind of stuff. I do it myself. Very frequently. So anyone play, polish, promote, go ahead and try this. Try this out starting tomorrow. Next week, whenever you're going to create again, play, polish, promote, and let me know how it goes for you. I always look forward to hearing your progress. I always love celebrating your progress with you. And if you have any questions, of course, comment below as well. Those of you don't know me. I am George cow. Okay. Authentic business coach. And I look forward to seeing you in another video. Take care.