In the previous step, you nurtured your network into a community supporting and endorsing you. Your work to simplify your expertise has given you valuable insight into what you want to focus on and the best people to work with, and developed a pipeline of opportunities. This step will help you evaluate those opportunities for alignment with, and contribution to your decided direction, and ensure they move you forward, compounding your success.

If you’re not sure what to decide for this step, use your best guess and move on. Your perspective will develop and you can always update previous answers as you go, so don’t feel too constrained by what you’ve already written either.

Rather than waiting for opportunity to find you, using your experience and the steps here to help you define the work you want and pursue it helps put you at an advantage by focusing your time and building credibility through your sector’s network.

When the opportunities coming your way feel more like working for someone else on their thing, than a partnership where you are responsible for outcomes and can utilize your particular perspective, it’s time to begin building the opportunities yourself. Whether that’s in partnership or as an independent endeavor will largely be driven by the resources needed.

Carefully vetting clients and their projects will help ensure everyone is aligned before starting and expectations are met. Alignment on direction, stage of maturity, authority and resources you’ll be afforded, and the proposer’s willingness and authority to begin and approve decisions throughout, are starting examples of qualifying criteria that will help you avoid diverging during the project.

As your expertise gains prominence and authority, opportunities will come your way that may be meaningful, but not necessarily aligned with your approach. They’re a good idea, just not your great idea.

Many of us developed our unique perspective by taking these opportunities and realizing what was missing, and what was needed.

Now, with the challenge to connect more people with your vision, and drive action, each commitment takes on a new criteria: how this will contribute to my agenda.

Time on less-aligned commitments is time not invested in more rewarding endeavors. The opportunity cost is more examples of success that clearly demonstrate your idea’s value and credibility.

There are some simple questions you can use to interrogate new opportunities. Does the opportunity align with, and contribute to, my singular approach? Will I be able to share it as an example of how my expertise has benefited others? Or are they just looking to utilize my capability for their methodology?

Make your qualifying meetings more focused and effective by publicizing the nature and level of work you take on. By circulating your projects and successes through popular channels, you’ll help set expectations and pre-qualify requests and proposals you receive. You’ll also receive more proposals that are a good fit.