Successful entrepreneurs rarely overthink. So in today’s episode of The Perfectionism Project, I’m sharing why perfectionists overthink, the hidden costs that overthinking is having on your business and the proven path to stopping overthinking.
Overthinking isn’t just frustrating – it’s stopping your business from growing. But that doesn’t mean you need to beat yourself up for overthinking. Instead all you need to do is understand why it makes sense for your perfectionist brain to overthink things like social media content, your niche and your email newsletter. And then to start using the practical tools that will actually help you overthink far less. And that’s what I’m sharing in today’s episode.
Find the full episode transcript and show notes at samlaurabrown.com/episode481.
Other Things To Help You:
- Free training: How To Plan Properly As A Perfectionist with Power Planning
- Program: Perfectionists Getting Shit Done (aka PGSD) – samlaurabrown.com/pgsd
- Instagram: @perfectionismproject
If you’re ready to get out of your own way in your business, you want to check out my program Perfectionists Getting Shit Done. Click here to sign up today: samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Hi and welcome to another episode of The Perfectionism Project, a podcast full of perfectionism advice for entrepreneurs. My name is Sam Laura Brown, I help entrepreneurs release their perfectionism handbrake so they can get out of their own way and build a fulfilling and profitable business. I’m the founder of the Perfectionist Getting Shit Done group coaching program, which is otherwise known as PGSD. And for even more perfectionism advice to help you with your business. You can follow me on Instagram @perfectionismproject.
Sam Laura Brown
Today, I want to talk to you about overthinking. If you are a perfectionist, you are familiar with overthinking. So this is where we are thinking about something too much or for too long, and typically, where we are thinking about something to the extent that it is more harmful than it is helpful, but it is often so challenging for us to stop overthinking, especially when we’ve had success as an overthinker, but also when it just feels like the responsible thing to do, like if I don’t think about this thoroughly and get the perfect answer, I’m gonna make a mistake. I’m going to ruin my business or my reputation, like, we just really associate there being high stakes with every decision that we make, every step that we take, like we just want to get it right when we are in our perfectionist mindset with our perfectionism handbrake on.
But this has such a deep impact on our businesses, and it is so costly and so one of the reasons why I am so passionate about what I do with helping perfectionists and specifically entrepreneurs to get out of their own way is because if we are overthinking, and there are other ways we get in our own way too, like procrastination, for example, is another sign of perfectionism. But if we are overthinking, which is one of the five signs of perfectionism, it really stops our businesses from succeeding, and it stops our businesses from having the impact on the world that they can have. And so I love helping perfectionist entrepreneurs get out of their own way so that your business can make the impact that you want to make in this world, and so that you can also experience the success that you know you can experience like the people I help are people who are smart and intelligent and who know they have the potential to have a successful business, and yet they don’t, and yet they’re getting in their own way because of that perfectionism handbrake.
So I want to help you release that handbrake. And one of the things to look at when we’re doing this is how to stop overthinking. And part of that conversation is why stop overthinking, especially when our brain really loves doing it and it feels like it’s actually contributed to our success, rather than stopping us from being as successful as we could be. Like, how do we actually create safety for ourselves emotionally around not overthinking? And also, how do we get out of these platitudes that people say about overthinking and perfectionism, about like, just stop overthinking it. Just stop being a perfectionist. Just let go of perfectionism and like all of that. And I don’t think that’s helpful. That’s why I have a whole podcast and a whole program dedicated to getting you out of your own way.
Because when people talk about it like, just stop doing it. Just snap out of it. It is not helpful. Your brain is overthinking for a good reason. It feels safe to do that. And so what we need to do is understand the cost of overthinking and also understand why the approach that you have taken to stopping overthinking, why that hasn’t worked, and what you actually need to do. And I know we want that to be this quick fix answer that okay, just, you know, if you’re overthinking, just get up from your desk and take a walk and come back. Like, sure, sometimes that can be helpful. But what about all of the overthinking that you don’t even notice and like, what about when you are just so deep in it that you just end up not even coming back to it at all because you get so frustrated from the level of overthinking? I know all of this from so much experience.
Not only have I coached now over 1000 perfectionist entrepreneurs inside my program, and we talk about overthinking a lot, but also I have plenty of experience with overthinking times that I have overthought emails and podcast episodes and things that I’m selling like I have overthought everything in some way, shape or form at some time, and also it is something that I still do, and I want to really just with this episode, to just release any expectations that you might have, that you should never overthink. And any overthinking is completely wrong, because if you judge yourself for overthinking, you are going to create so much resistance to letting it go. You have to actually allow yourself to overthink without judgment to then be able to stop overthinking.
And so that is something that I haven’t heard really anyone talking about, especially not specifically as it relates to overthinking, that when we make ourselves wrong for overthinking, when we get frustrated with ourselves for overthinking the Instagram caption or the social media post or our messaging or our niche or like whatever it is, there might be two to three areas in your business that you tend to keep coming back to, like overthinking the patterns with that. We need to first of all release the judgment that we have for overthinking and release that frustration that we have by remembering it’s okay that I overthink like my brain is actually being smart. It’s doing its job. It’s protecting me. It’s keeping me alive because it associates overthinking or it doesn’t even feel like overthinking all the time. It just feels like the appropriate amount of thinking, but it associates overthinking with safety, because if I overthink it, then I’m gonna get it right and I’m not gonna make a mistake, and then I will be safe. I won’t be harmed, I won’t be criticized, I won’t be judged, I won’t be abandoned. I won’t be neglected.
And so it makes sense that your brain is overthinking. It makes so much sense that this is something that your brain does. And so what we want to do is just acknowledge that and not make you wrong for it. I’m not here to be like just stop overthinking. If it worked that simply, then maybe I would say that, but I don’t think it’s supportive or compassionate of ourselves to even take that approach. And I want to actually help you fundamentally change the way that you think. I want to help you get out of your own way. Successful entrepreneurs are people who get out of their own way, and so to be able to do that, if you’re thinking, I should already be out of my own way by now, or I shouldn’t have to work on this, or like this other person, I know they don’t have to work on this. Like, yeah, but this is your work.
This is part of your work, releasing your perfectionism handbrakes so that your business can grow. And part of that is overthinking. And so when it comes to looking at why we really overthink and why we don’t actually let ourselves just move forward, as I’ve mentioned, part of it is we want to be right. We don’t want to be wrong, but also we love being in the hope and the optimism, like when we’re in this overthinking mode, and we’re overthinking the email or the post or whatever decision it is that we’re making, we get to live in this land where there’s a possibility that I’m going to get it right and nothing’s going to go wrong, like I’m going to make the right decision here, everyone’s going to love me, no one’s going to be disappointed. I’m going to be successful.
And it feels so good to be in that hope and optimism, especially if you’re a smart person who deeply believe in your potential, then you don’t want to find out and risk finding out that you might not have as much potential as you think, or that you might not actually be capable if you just calmly and clearly decided what to do without ever thinking it and you took those steps you have to open yourself up to being willing to find out that you do, do still have skills to learn, and that maybe it’s going to take more time than you thought, like we really have to be willing emotionally to enter that vulnerability of being willing to find out that we aren’t good enough, and not from this place of it’s possible that you aren’t good enough, like fundamentally, as a human being, you are good enough, so to speak. And I never even talk about it that way, because it’s just something that never resonated with me.
And I don’t think it’s helpful though some people do like thinking in those terms, but I just think this whole idea of like, I am good enough is kind of inherent in that, that we’re saying it’s possible that I might not be good enough, but really just sort of like as a human being, your value isn’t in the work that you produce, the amount of tasks that you complete, the money that you make, even though we have so many societal messages that tell us that’s the case. But what we’re looking at, and this is a really important thing to do as an entrepreneur, it’s something that comes up on a lot of coaching calls inside perfectionist getting shit done, is that you really need to separate out yourself from your business and also identify that just because you’re a smart, intelligent person, and just because you might be skilled in what you do.
For example, I’m a coach, maybe you are an artist or a writer or a dancer or a real estate agent or an e-commerce store owner or whatever you are, that you might have skills in that particular area. But then, coupled with that, is the skill set around entrepreneurship. There are skills in marketing, sales, operations, finances, like there is a whole range of skills that fall under the umbrella of entrepreneurship. And just because you are smart and intelligent and you have a lot of potential and you are good at what you do, that doesn’t entitle you to entrepreneurial skills, and that you are probably lacking some of those entrepreneurial skills simply because you haven’t developed those skills. Like if someone’s never ridden a bike before, then they probably aren’t skilled at riding a bike, even if they are able to do other things. Because they have to practice that particular thing and develop that particular skill set to get more growth minded in business. This helps you release your perfectionism handbrake.
You need to really start thinking in terms of skill sets and not thinking in terms of what your potential is or how smart you are, because then we get into this perfectionist entitlement that if I am smart and have potential, then I should be able to do everything without practice, without experience. Instead, we want to have you really focusing on I am developing skill sets, and some of those skill sets will need work. And that doesn’t mean that I’m wrong as a person, or that there’s something wrong with me. It’s not actually the case that everything should be natural and effortless. I actually just need to develop some skills, and I’m gonna go and develop some skills. So it’s not just knowledge, either.
And this is where a lot of perfectionists get really stuck, especially because so many perfectionists I work with are people who have college degrees, university degrees, like I have a law and a finance degree that we are, especially when we’ve been really educated and we have a lot of knowledge, we can really have this entitlement to if I have knowledge, then I should have the skill, then I should be able to do it. But actually having this skill and being able to implement is a separate thing as well. So I just wanted to mention that, because if you are finding that you are overthinking, then part of it is that you want to be overthinking subconsciously. Like this is what keeps it going. When you are overthinking, you’re not taking action, because you’re thinking about what the plan is or what the decision is, or you’re going back and forth.
And if you’re not taking action, you’re not having to fail. Like overthinking really is productive procrastination, because when you are overthinking, you’re not doing, and if you’re not doing then you’re not having to fail. Of course, if you really think about it, you can definitely be failing, because if you’re spending all your time overthinking, then you’re not actually going to be creating the results that you want to create. But when we are in the perfectionist mindset, we are so much more comfortable with that, like passive failure than with active failure, because with active failure, when we actually give something a full effort and it doesn’t work, our brain interprets that as if there’s something wrong with us. I’m not good enough, and adds all of this shame to it, and this embarrassment and like the pain of that. And so what we do is we withhold effort, either through overthinking or procrastination, burning ourselves out.
We withhold putting in a full effort, because we’d rather fail passively, through not having made an attempt, and then we still get to like, well, if I did actually do it, or if I could just decide my niche, or if I could just decide on the perfect marketing platform, then I would be successful. It requires so much more vulnerability and emotional capacity to be willing to give it a go and to risk finding out that it might not work. And then also to not then make that mean something about yourself, and to go into this shame spiral, but to interpret that, we do a lot of this inside pgsd, to interpret that and learn how to train your brain to see that in a growth minded way, that actually this is just about a skill set, and not about me as a human being, and I’m someone who loves learning and I love developing my skills, so I’m willing to actually look and see what went on and see exactly where I need to increase my skill set and also where my sufficiency is in my skill set.
And so if you are discourting this overthinking, it’s really helpful to acknowledge like, Oh, my brain just loves overthinking because it’s protecting me from feeling like a failure. As you probably know, you are probably feeling like a failure because you’re behind, because you’re so busy overthinking. And so we want to get you out of that. But just understanding first of all why your brain is doing it is so helpful, and I find it so empowering to even just hear this explanation and be like, well, if Sam’s saying it like this, then it mustn’t just be me who’s doing this. There must be other people out there too who are doing this. And like, I just find that hearing things explained so specifically, the way that I’m experiencing them, just helps me release so much shame when I think that something’s just me and I’m the only one who’s doing that, like, oh, actually, this thing that other people’s brains do too, and there’s a solution, and that is something that I could definitely help you with, but to just really, really, really understand and that if you were overthinking, there’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t need to just cut it out. But what we want to have you do, especially if we want your business to grow is that you need to train your brain to think in a different way.
You need to start thinking in terms of skill set. You need to start being more growth minded, and I’ll talk about how to do that later on in the episode. But we don’t want to just think about you, to stop overthinking. No. Instead, we want to be more growth minded about business. And you will naturally stop overthinking or overthink less when you are not putting so much pressure on every single decision, when you’re not trying to find the perfect answer, when you’re not viewing business as this. Like if I just make this decision and if I plan everything perfectly, then it will definitely work. And then I’ll make the next decision, and I’ll plan it out perfectly, and then that will work. And like, if you want that life, you need to be an employee, where you live in that kind of like someone tells you what to do, and you do the things and you get a steady paycheck.
That is not what business is. We want to make sure that in business, you are approaching it with an entrepreneurial mindset, which is like, this is so fun that I get to try things, and some things will work and some things won’t work, and I’m challenging myself, and I’m growing and I’m learning new skills, versus when our perfectionism handbrake is on, we approach business with a lot of perfectionist entitlement, and I’m smart and I potential, so everything I do should work. I shouldn’t have to be doing this for so long, or for so hard, for so hard, so hard, and I shouldn’t have to be behind. I should be further along so many shoulds that come into it. It takes all the fun out of business and also all of the success. And if you do manage to be successful, you’re going to be so burnt out. And so I don’t want that for you. I want you to have a successful business that is fulfilling, that doesn’t burn you out, that has a positive impact on the world.
I know that’s possible because I’ve done it, and my clients have done it too, but when we live in a world where we just get told like burnout is the price of success, and like, some people are just overthinkers, like, Yeah, some people are over thinkers. But you can actually change your brain. It’s called neuroplasticity. You can change the way that you think. So just because you have always been an overthinker doesn’t mean you always will be. And I didn’t even have this bit in my notes, but this is just something to mention, and we have a whole self image module inside perfectionist getting shit done to help you with this. But if you have the self image that you are an overthinker, you have to do the work directly to change the way you’re thinking about yourself when it comes to overthinking.
If you think I’m an overthinker, and you would identify yourself that way, or maybe you don’t have it in that term in your head, but you’re like, I’m someone who really struggles to make decisions. I’m really indecisive. I am someone who I’m just trying to think of the other ways that we could think about it in our heads, like I just even it’s just like I’m just a person who really struggles to make progress, like it takes me a long time to do anything. I doubt my decisions, like all of that, you actually need to change the way you think about yourself when it comes to decisions, when it comes to your business. If you identify as an overthinker, or someone who needs a lot of time to make decisions, then you will create that reality for ourselves.
We always act in accordance with who we believe we are, and so you might have a little bit of time where you’re not overthinking as much, and it will feel so damn uncomfortable that you will go back into the overthinking just because that feels like who you are, and it creates that certainty, and even though it’s very frustrating to find yourself overthinking, maybe you’re writing your email newsletter and you wanted to write it in 30 minutes or an hour, and you’re two hours in and you’re still not close to having it done like it can be so easy when we’re in that self image to just really feel like, like this is how it’s always going to be but that’s not the case. And I mentioned that I still overthink, but I do not identify myself as an overthinker, and it does not happen nearly as much I’ve been able to create and build a successful business because I stopped overthinking to the degree that I was. It still happens, but it’s much less.
So we’re not trying to get to zero overthinking, but we do want to decrease your overthinking and increase your decisiveness and your willingness and courage to move yourself forward and put yourself forward out there into the world, and to have that emotional capacity to be willing to experience rejection, to experience embarrassment, and the irony of it is you, you will actually experience a whole lot less of those feelings when you’re willing to feel them, not only because when they come up, you’ll actually be able to just like feel them and move on, but right now, you probably feel very ashamed, very embarrassed, like all those feelings you’re trying to avoid. You are feeling them about not taking action, about not moving yourself forward.
So I want to talk specifically about the impact of overthinking on business and a few of the ways it manifests. So one is any decision that you make is incredibly hard to actually come to a proper decision about. So maybe you’re someone who, right now, you have a really hard time like making a decision at all, whether it comes to your niche, your messaging, what to offer, your pricing, operational decisions. We all tend to have our favorite areas. We love overthinking, but any decision is hard to make, so you either don’t actually let yourself get to a decision. I actually like to think of this as time consuming under thinking, where you never even get to the decision point. So you don’t get yourself to that decision. Or you make a decision, and then you just constantly change it and second guess it and question it.
So when you make a decision, you can’t actually trust yourself. You’re like, I hope I actually do this, because you don’t actually take your decisions seriously. You’re not committed to them because you’re not sure if they’re right, and so you want to make sure you get it right, that perfectionist thinking. And so every decision in business is so, so so hard to make, and this really slows the growth of a business down. It’s not that you have to make snappy decisions, like the way I love to make decisions. And if you know about human design, I’m an emotional projector, and I don’t need to say too much more on that. I’ve done a few episodes on human design on the podcast. I’m not an expert in human design, but the way that I make decisions is I will make a decision, and then if it’s a big decision, two days later, like, I’ll sleep on it for a couple of days. Two days later, I will then come back and review this decision and finalize it, like, I’ll just let myself sleep on it.
And about, according to human design, about 50% of people are like that, where you have this emotional wave, you make a decision, you have a high, you have a low, and you want to be in this ground and calm. Other people make decisions on their like, gut feeling, and there’s a few other ways too. Like, just think about decisions you’ve made that you’re happy with and reflect on them. You’ll be able to find a theme in the way that you tend to make decisions. I tend to make smaller decisions, much more quickly than that, but a big decision, I will sit on it for a couple of days and just let myself, like, subconsciously process it. It’s very different to overthinking that for two days and constantly questioning it. I just sit down, I do my self coaching on it, I make that decision, and then I review it. I let it, like, leave my conscious mind and let my subconscious work on it, and then I come back.
But if you are overthinking, you won’t actually be able to make progress. You might have found it really hard to implement. If you have done like, a marketing program, a sales program, a program to help you with, like operations or systems or things like that, you have probably found it really hard to actually get the ROI on that investment, not because that wasn’t a good investment, not because that’s not a good program or something to help you, but because of your overthinking and perfectionism handbrake that you haven’t actually been able to make the decisions needed to implement that advice and to continue implementing that advice. And this is why so many of my clients inside PGSD have made other investments and then come into PGSD, and they’re actually able to implement those things they’ve learned, and they just see their business grow so much, because once they have solved for the overthinking, the procrastination, the overwhelm, like all of those things that were making it really hard for them to show up for their business and themselves, they’re able to actually do the things that they know they need to do.
So that is one of the costs. Any decision is incredibly hard to make, and this also typically means excessive amounts of time are spent on marketing, or there’s no marketing done at all. So maybe, for example, a lot of my clients use Instagram to market their business, though many don’t and use other things as well, but just as an example, that you might spend, like, an hour writing an Instagram caption, and then probably, if you have, like, 80% of them never actually even get posted, because they’re still not good enough, and you just need to polish them and perfect them a little bit more, like just excessive amounts of time on writing and rewriting. So it’s not that it can’t take an hour if you want it to take an hour to write a caption, for example, but if you write it, and let’s say it actually takes about five to 10 minutes to write, and then you nitpick, and you’re like, just tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and polishing and polishing and polishing that isn’t adding extra value to the person on the other end of that post.
We are just doing that to protect an image that we have and a self image that we have. We want to think of ourselves as someone who’s smart and articulate and intelligent and someone who other people like, and so we just end up so spending so much extra time doing things that get So tying a lot of times where there is overthinking, there will be burnout as well, because it takes so long to do things, or things don’t get done at all often, like, the work gets 80% complete and then abandoned, or we don’t even get to start it because we’re so busy overthinking those initial decisions and then, because in business, there’s no right answer. It’s not like a math test in school where it’s like, there’s only one solution here, once you found it, you get it right.
You can’t take that thinking with you into business. You need to think about business in a fundamentally different way. There are 1000s of right answers, and so if you are constantly hunting for the right answer, you’re never going to find it. You’re always going to be chopping and changing. You’re not going to create momentum. You’re not going to create a successful business. What I love to do, and what I teach my clients to do, is you decide, and you can do this in a smart way, but you decide what you want to make work like for me, it’s been this podcast, and then you make it work. You’re not like, oh, but there’s this better way, or what’s the perfect marketing platform like this is the one that lends itself to the skill sets that I have, and also I want to develop the skill sets around it, and it makes sense for a bunch of other different reasons. And I’m going to get out of the drama about, like, should I have a podcast or not I have a podcast, and now I’m going to do the work to make it work.
And that doesn’t mean I’m going to be overthinking it, though I’ve definitely overthought my fair share of podcast episodes or, like, recorded things and gotten halfway and then not recorded it at all, or like, re recorded it. So there’s some of that too. That’s not a big problem, but it is a problem when that is the main way that we operate. For me, that happens less often than the times where I just show up, I write my outline and I just trust myself to say what I need to say and that you’re going to hear what you need to hear. So excessive amounts of time spent on marketing is going to be a massive cost or not marketing at all, which, of course, impacts the amount of money you’ll make. It impacts the amount of followers and audience you have. Like that has a fundamental impact on your business, and it is not a positive one, products or services, this is the next one.
Products and services, or services are launched much later than they could be, or they’re not launched at all. This is something I see so much like this is, again, one of the reasons I’m so passionate about helping entrepreneurs, because there are so many entrepreneurs who have an incredible idea, and either they’ve, like, executed about 80% but they just haven’t launched it, or they’re still busy trying to make the perfect decisions so they can get started with it, but they have something they want to make, or have made to help the world, but they are scared that it’s not going to be good enough. And they are scared to enter into that next stage where you have your idea actually meet reality. And it’s so powerful to have support, like inside pgst, to have support as you put yourself out there, because you will have a mixed experience with different people reacting to things, and you need emotional support for yourself.
And this is like it really helps you just lessen the pressure you have on everything being perfect when you know you have a safe place to land. If things aren’t perfect, if you don’t have a safe place to land. Then, of course, everything feels like it really, really has to be perfect. It’s just so valuable to know that if this, for some reason, doesn’t work out, I have somewhere I can go to get support, to figure out exactly why it didn’t work, to pick myself back up and keep on going. So so many perfectionist entrepreneurs will have a product or a service, an online course, a physical product, maybe they’ve made an app, like there’s something that they are either like 80% done with, or maybe even 100% done with, or they haven’t started yet, but they haven’t been able to actually launch out into the world. And specifically inside perfection is getting shit done. The get out of your own way challenge is really going to help you with this is the challenge that we have. You can do it anytime, once you’re inside pgsd and so many PGSDers have launched podcasts and products or services just from doing that. Get out of your own way challenge, but all you’re thinking is just a really big cost on business, and specifically it results in things being launched later or not at all.
Constant is the next one constant, procrastinating or procrastinate, researching for the perfect solution, versus taking action, creating momentum and learning through experience. So inside my program, I work with perfectionist entrepreneurs who know what they need to do when they’re not doing it. Yes, they still have things to learn, but for the most part, they know what, roughly speaking, they need to do to market their business. Like they’re not ready yet, typically, for the nuance and to, like, get nitty gritty, they just need to be posting consistently, or, like, actually have something that they’re selling, and, like, launch the thing. And so they have enough information, and now they have an implementation problem. Problem caused by perfectionism, which is making their business not make money, and also completely depleting their self trust. So if you find that you’re constantly listening to one more podcast episode, watching one more YouTube video, reading one more book, asking one more friend or family member, which I don’t recommend doing. It depends what you’re asking about, but I really don’t recommend asking family members and friends for what their thoughts are. That’s a different podcast episode, but you want to be taking action, creating momentum and learning through experience.
And when we are overthinking, we waste so much time and energy learning things we don’t need to learn, or a lot of times that we already know, but we’re just scared to implement, so we’d rather learn it again than actually learn it in our bodies through the implementation. And what I love doing is creating entrepreneurs and, like, supporting entrepreneurs who it’s not just like, oh, they know a lot about marketing, but you’d never know it looking at their business, because they have they aren’t marketing versus like, you can actually see how much knowledge someone has by looking at how they run their business from the outside. That’s what I love doing. That’s what I love supporting entrepreneurs with. Because so many people, when they come to me, they know what to do, like they are so frustrated because they have so much knowledge, but their business results don’t reflect that.
Releasing your perfectionism Handbrake is what will help with that. So also, another cost is creating really complicated back end systems and processes for your business that oftentimes don’t end up getting used. Maybe it’s like content calendars, or maybe you have set up something like Asana or clickup or some kind of project management system, notion, like you’re just trying to get so organized, but you’re not actually, like you’re overthinking the organizing of it. And so you end up creating a complicated system that you don’t actually end up using, or really it’s not even essential to what you’re trying to do. So you just end up abandoning it and not using it, or you do use it because you’re really rigid about it.
Some perfectionist get really rigid with things, and it actually just ends up taking up so much time. But this has such a big impact on business because you’re not actually able to run it as seamlessly and easily and effortlessly as you need to, which means that you are going to have to work, evenings, weekends, constantly be thinking about business, and you’re not allowing yourself to actually switch off. And another impact is you don’t see yourself as a real business owner because you’re not acting like one. And this isn’t to say that you’re not a real business owner, but you don’t feel congruent with that identity of being a real business owner, like having a real legitimate business, because of all the toing and froing arming and are overthinking like you just know that is not the energy that someone has when they are a successful entrepreneur.
And because you’re embodying that, you don’t feel like you have a real business, and then that means you’re not taking action that a real business owner would take, further perpetuating the reality that you don’t have a real business, like you end up in this situation where you’re not hitting your financial goals, where you’re not able to rely on having customers and clients come into your business, because you’re not doing the marketing, because you’re overthinking that, or the selling, like it takes you a week to write a sales page because you’re trying to get everything just right, and then maybe you don’t even put you don’t even post it because you’re scared, and so you get busy with creating an email is freebie, or whatever that is, that that impact of just not identifying and having the self image of being a real business owner is absolutely everything.
If you don’t think that you have a real business, you will not be able to create one. And so what I have found through my experience is that you have to do, and again, this is self image module in PGSD, you have to do that work on actually believing like I have a real business, and I can trust myself to make decisions, and I can trust myself to course correct and to pivot like there’s a lot of trust we’ll talk about in a second. There’s a lot of trust involved with stopping overthinking the financial impact of all of this, of course, not achieving your financial goals, or you do, and you’re completely burned out because of how long you have to work to be able to accommodate all of the time spent overthinking, as well as the time spent actually doing the things you can’t trust yourself to achieve your financial goals, and typically, you are questioning your marketing, your product, and really, just, like, not even doing it in a helpful way.
It’s just in this, like, general, like helplessness, like it should be working, but I don’t know why it’s not working, and I’m really frustrated and I’m behind and like that kind of thing. And it just means that financially, you’re then either needing to be supported by your partner, or you’re just in a very stressful situation, maybe you have to, like, mortgage or remortgage your home, or you’re needing to have a full time job or a part time job, because this overthinking caused by. Your perfectionist mindset means that you’re not able to operate your business effectively and efficiently. Then when it comes to the personal impact, which this is huge, you’re not able to trust yourself in your decisions, and it only gets harder and harder with each decision that you make.
Feeling creative doesn’t feel safe, because when we are typically feeling creative and feeling in flow. We’re not overthinking. And if you have normalized like overthinking as what creates success and what creates safety, then you won’t feel creative. When you’re like, you won’t feel safe to do your best work and to be creative, and you will actually stop yourself or overcomplicate things like you might have. Times you’re like, I have this post that I want to write, or this email or this call I want to make, and then you stop yourself, because you haven’t over thought it, and because you haven’t overthought it, it feels like it couldn’t work. And so then you’ve complicated and overthink it to try to make sure it’s successful.
And part of this, again, is this, like emotional regulation required, and we talk about all of this a lot inside the program, is that really allowing yourself to emotionally feel safe in calm and ease, especially if you had a chaotic childhood, or if you had a situation where you felt like you had to be hyper vigilant and always aware of like what everyone was doing, and you had to do everything perfect to make sure you’re okay. Then, of course, your brain’s doing what it’s doing. But also we want to have you feeling safe to be creative and to be in flow. And if you find it really hard to get in flow, or it’s really fleeting, or when you do get into that, you pull yourself out of it. It’s because it doesn’t feel safe. We need to do that work to have it feel safe.
Also, you feel like your business is being run by someone incompetent, even though it’s not like you might have skills to develop, but you will be feeling like your business results aren’t in your control, and you will be working late into evenings or on weekends, or you work your normal hours. Maybe you don’t have the choice, or aren’t making the choice to work evenings or weekends, but you just feel like you’re not actually making progress week to week. You feel like you get to the end of the week and you’re exhausted because you have been doing a lot of thinking, but you haven’t actually been moving the needle. You haven’t actually taken the steps needed to create that progress. And so it might just this is, again, you’re going to feel like I don’t have enough time. I’m not actually making progress. I’m behind simply because of the ripple effect of the perfectionist thinking and the overthinking it causes. And that what that has on your business.
So I googled what to do if you’re overthinking, because I have for many years been frustrated with the general advice on overthinking, but I just wanted to Google. And here’s some of the things that it said to do, interrupt yourself talk, shift your attention or feel from the problem to the solution. Remember you are not your thoughts. Stay in the moment. Change what you’re doing. I like get up and take a walk. Like we’ve all heard these different tactical like, tricks and tips to stop overthinking and to kind of, like distract yourself, or, like, snap yourself out of overthinking when it’s happening. Like these things like, go and take a walk, take a break, have a conversation with a friend, like, shift the way you’re doing it. So, like, instead of writing an email in a Google document, you know, write it in the notes on your iPhone.
And like, there are things like that that can be helpful, but what I’m most interested in as your coach is helping you fundamentally shift your default thought patterns. So instead of you identifying as an overthinker who needs little strategies to help you from time to time that sometimes work. I want to have like your default being that you trust yourself to make a decision, you trust yourself to create, and you trust that if it doesn’t go to plan, that you can be supported. You trust yourself to support yourself. You trust yourself to feel the feelings that might come up with things not working, that you are actually able to fundamentally, over time, change the way that you’re thinking, the way that you’re relating to yourself, the way that you’re operating, versus like little tactics and strategies for managing overthinking. I don’t want you to think about it in terms of like I overthink.
How do I manage the overthinking? But how do I become someone who doesn’t overthink like as a rule of thumb, as a default? I might overthink from time to time, but overthinking isn’t my go to because I trust myself to make decisions, to create, to feel my feelings, to be supported, to support myself. And so it doesn’t matter if every little thing is perfect, not because I’m thinking about some mentor, like Done is better than perfect, but because of the relationship I have with myself, where I actually fundamentally know. There are very few decisions in business that are make or break, and particularly if you’re in the early stages of your business, a lot of it is just about a willingness to show up and put yourself out there, to do it in a way that actually has a feedback loop.
We talk about feedback loops inside PGSD, because you need to not just have an approach of I’m going to try harder to be better, and I need to do it perfectly and get the perfect niche and the perfect messaging and the perfect offer or the perfect product, and then it’ll perfectly work. You need to shift into thinking about your business as a business in an entrepreneurial, growth minded way, and your overthinking will naturally subside. So where overthinking is trust is not. And this is you might have heard the saying where control is trust is not, and overthinking is us trying to exert control over the results, over our perception of ourselves, over other people’s perception of ourselves. And what we want to do is, instead, have you trust yourself, like, when our brain wants to go into control, we need to offer it, trust self, trust trusting in others.
And this isn’t like blindly or recklessly doing that, like it’s safe to trust yourself, and it’s safe to do that because you are allowed to pivot, you’re allowed to update your decisions, you are allowed to course correct. It is safe to trust yourself. And we want to have you not just hear that and like write it on a post it note and try to remember, but fundamentally, have a way to do that. So in perfectionist getting shit done. There’s a self trust module to really support you with that work. And I also want to mention the tools that I teach that support you with this so that you know what to focus on. Because I don’t want you to leave this and be like, okay, so I just need to, like, get up and take a look if I’m overthinking my email newsletter. I want you again to actually be able to fundamentally change the way that you operate and to begin normalizing ease and flow and creativity, and to know that you will sometimes overthink, but that is not your like Mo, that’s not your default mode. You might overthink, and then you bring yourself back to trust. So a few things, first of all, the growth goal.
So inside PGSD, one of the first things you do will be setting your growth goal, and we will support you with that inside the program. But having a really clear place that you are going is so insanely helpful. And I know it might not seem like goal setting that we were thinking are related, but so often we overthink and struggle to actually know what’s important and what’s not and which decisions matter and which decisions don’t, because we don’t even know where we’re going, and so we just feel like everything is important, everything’s make or break. Like this Instagram caption has to be perfect, but like when we zoom out and look at how does this contribute to my overall goal, we can see, okay, well, that one particular caption, if it’s not perfect, it doesn’t really matter. The most important thing is probably that it’s done, and that you keep going, and that you have a way to develop how you do that, and to assess, is this still a needle waiver for me, or is it not so?
So having a growth goal, a 12 month revenue goal that’s at just above what you believe is possible, and I won’t talk about it in this episode, but there are very specific reasons for that. If you have a SMART goal, like a realistic goal for your business, it’s not going to help your perfectionist mindset work for you instead of against you. We really want you having a growth goal so you can get your perfectionist mindset on your side. Another thing, power planning is one of the main tools that I’ve developed Empower planning is a really practical way to do the work on getting into a growth mindset of trusting yourself and reducing your overthinking.
So through the process of your Power Hour, your little tweaks and your weekly review, you will really begin to understand how to achieve your goal. You’ll be able to see where the overthinking is happening. You’ll be able to study yourself and do the self coaching, and also get support in pgsc on that as well. But you’ll be able to actually pay attention to and have awareness where overthinking is happening, and also subtle overthinking is happening, so that you can fundamentally change the thought patterns that are creating that specific overthinking. If we try to think about overthinking generally, like I’m talking about in this podcast, it’s much harder than when you have an actual tool to think about. Okay, what is my thought pattern specifically when I’m overthinking an email newsletter, and what are believable thoughts that I can be thinking that have me not overthink it, and there are other things to consider as well.
So you want to make sure that you have a practical process, and I have not found anything that’s even close to the power of power planning when it comes to being a perfectionist, having a productivity tool that’s also a personal development tool and that also supports you with releasing. Your perfectionism handbrake. Perfection is like when we follow the same productivity advice as everyone else. We get in our own way, the long to do list, the beautiful paper planners, like the post it notes, the whiteboards like the time blocking in the calendar, power planning has baked into it. All of the things that you need to be doing without you even having to think about it, has baked into it ways that help you trust yourself more, that help you not overthink, that help you be more growth minded and be more entrepreneurial.
It’s all baked into the process so you don’t even have to be thinking about it, and then also clean rest if you aren’t getting guilt free rest, and probably like you feel like you can’t, because you have to figure all these things out first before you can actually rest. And you always have so much to do in your brain. Your brain just can’t operate at the highest level when it’s exhausted, a tired mind really has to work overtime to create what a rested mind can so getting clean rest and like having your growth goal and power planning really supports you with actually doing that is going to make such a difference. So all of this is inside my program, perfectionist getting shit done, as I have mentioned, and I invite you to sign up during our next enrollment.
And also, I just want to mention, too, again, you are not alone. If you’ve listened to this and related to all of it, I get it my clients, like the other people inside PGSD, like we get it. And so it’s not that you have to always be an overthinker, and that’s all that’s available to you, but you are able to shift into someone who is growth minded and who is able to be, for the most part, decisive and self trusting and able to move yourself forward with occasional spouts of overthinking, versus it being your default, and then all the frustration and resentment and just behind this that is created by overthinking. So I hope you have found this episode incredibly helpful, and if you have take a screenshot as well and tag me on Instagram at perfectionism project. I hope you’re having a beautiful day, and I will talk to you in the next episode.
Outro
If you enjoy this podcast, I recommend signing up for the wait list for my program called perfectionist getting shit done, aka pgsd. This is a program designed to help you get out of your own way in your business, you’re going to learn how to release your perfectionism handbrake by setting a growth goal for your business. Planning properly as a perfectionist with power planning and getting regular, guilt free, clean rest, you’ll learn the skills required to get out of your own way and be supported every step of the way to do it. To find out more about the program and join the waitlist today. Go to SamLaurabrown.com/pgsd.