In Part 1 of the Unfreeze Yourself series, I’m sharing why knowing what to do isn’t enough and the real reason so many perfectionist entrepreneurs struggle to take consistent action to build their business.
If you’ve ever felt frustrated because you know exactly what you should be doing in your business but just can’t seem to get yourself to get yourself to do it consistently, this episode is for you.
Perfectionists Getting Shit Done (PGSD) is opening for enrollment on 17 June 2026 for one week only. This enrollment is your final opportunity to secure lifetime access to PGSD when you sign up. To find out more about PGSD and be the first to know when doors open, sign up for the waitlist today at samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.
Listen To The Episode
Listen to the episode on the player above, click here to download the episode, and take it with you or listen anywhere you normally listen to podcasts – just find Episode 606 of The Perfectionism Project Podcast!
Subscribe To The Perfectionism Project Podcast
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts (iPhone only)
- Google Podcasts (Android only)
- Stitcher
- Castbox
- TuneIn
- Overcast
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
This is the Perfectionism Project, the only podcast created specifically for perfectionists who are building businesses. I’m your host, Sam Laura Brown, perfectionism expert and entrepreneur. I teach perfectionists how to plan properly, consistently follow through and rest without guilt so they can build profitable and fulfilling businesses without burning out.
I’ve helped over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs do exactly that inside my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. If you’re tired of procrastinating, overthinking and half finishing your ideas, you’re in the right place. Now, let’s dive in.
Sam Laura Brown
Welcome to part one of the five part Unfreeze Yourself series. I am so excited to be sharing this series with you. So in this series, we are going to get started with talking about why it is that you know what you need to do, but you’re not actually doing it.
When we don’t understand this, we try to force ourselves to follow through on our plans. We try to motivate ourselves. Maybe you try and go to a cafe, or you buy some new equipment, or a new planner, like you’re trying to get yourself to do stuff.
You’re capable, you’re successful in other areas of your life. And yet when it comes to business, you aren’t able to consistently complete the things that will grow your business, complete the task, complete the projects, move it forward. You’re not able to do that.
And it’s really, really, really important that you understand exactly why and what to do about it. No one else has ever told you this. No one else is going to ever tell you this.
This is something I really had to figure out the hard way. But now after coaching over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs, and also being a perfectionist entrepreneur myself, and having the struggles of knowing what to do, but not doing it, having that at such a deep level, for so many years, and then overcoming that, I’m the best person to be teaching this. I’m so happy that I can teach it to you, so that you can get out of your own way too, and do the things that you know you need to do, so that you can stop feeling behind, so that you can stop feeling like there is something wrong with you, because there isn’t.
So this series is a five-part series, and there’s going to be an episode released every other day. And then on the fifth day, we are going to be opening enrollment for my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. It is a business program for perfectionists, that is going to teach you how to build your business in a way that works for your perfectionist brain.
So if you love this series, I’m also going to be inviting you to work with me inside the program. Regardless, you’re going to get so much from this series, all about how to unfreeze yourself, and go from someone who’s stopping and starting, who has goals and plans, but can’t consistently follow through, to someone who is consistent, someone who takes action, someone who shows up fully, and instead of having a hobby business, they have a real business. So let’s start by talking about why it is that you aren’t doing what you know you need to do.
So I want to tell you a little story about me as a plant mom. So as you might already know, I am a mom of children. I have four under five.
But before I had my kids, I loved looking after indoor plants. And I still do, but it wasn’t always that way. I used to be the person who couldn’t keep a plant alive to save my life.
That is literally what I would tell other people. And you would look around my house and see dying plants. And it was so, so frustrating, because I really wanted to have beautiful indoor plants.
And it just wasn’t happening. I would get excited, I’d go and buy a plant, I’d come home, I’d water it a little bit, I’d stop thinking about it, it would start looking like it was dying. Then I would start watering it again, but it was too late.
And then I’d go and get a different plant. And what I really want you to understand is that business is simple, just like keeping a plant alive is simple. To go from someone who couldn’t keep a plant alive to someone that could, all I did was change one thing.
I went from not consistently watering the plant to consistently watering the plant. I got really clear about when I need to do that. I made it really easy for myself.
I learned how to follow through on that. And I now have beautiful indoor plants that whenever anyone comes over, they’re always commenting on how amazing the plants are at our house. And it’s so simple.
Whenever they say, how do you do? I say, I water them. That’s literally what I say. I water them once a week.
Business is the same. It is not complicated to build a business. But our perfectionist brains think it is because of one problem.
That problem is that you are building your business in a way that doesn’t work with your perfectionist brain, which is why it feels so complicated. And such a great example of this is one of our PGSDers who now has a successful business that pays her over six figures per year. When she came to PGSD, she had a YouTube channel and she’d had it for about eight years.
She had what she would say in her words was a hobby business where she posted, she was really thinking about it all the time. She was trying to get it to succeed, but she posted very sporadically on YouTube, even though she had a video that had 1.2 million views, she was posting inconsistently. And then also on Instagram, she was posting inconsistently.
She felt really unclear about what to do and when to do it. And ultimately, she just felt like, why isn’t this business growing? It felt really hard and it felt really complicated, but ultimately she knew that she had a follow-through problem. She knew what to do, which was post on Instagram, post on YouTube, sell her services that she offered, but she wasn’t actually doing it.
And for ages, she thought that it was because something was wrong with her, but actually it was just because she was building her business in a way that didn’t work with her brain. So I want to talk to you about three different areas that we are going to be covering in this series. So number one is business decisions.
This is the first place where perfectionist entrepreneurs get stuck and freeze. So I’m going to be sharing with you in part two, how to make business decisions in a way that works with your perfectionist brain instead of against it. So you can actually make those decisions and build your business.
So that’s things like your niche, your pricing, what you’re selling, which platforms you’re marketing on. Those are the things that you want to be crystal clear about. But if you try and make those decisions in a way that works against your perfectionist brain, instead of with it, you are going to have such a hard time making any decisions.
And it might take weeks or months or even years to be able to make decisions that you’re happy with. Number two that I’m going to be talking about in part three is about planning and how you set yourself up for the week. How are you organizing yourself? Because when it comes to your business, you are your own boss.
You need to self-manage. And this isn’t a skill that we’re taught in school or when you’re working for someone else, because you don’t have to know it then. The professors and the teachers keep you organized.
Your boss keeps you organized. They tell you when to work. They tell you what to work on.
When it comes to business, it is different. So you need to have a structure for your week. You need to have a plan for your week that works with your perfectionist brain instead of against it, so you can actually follow through on that plan.
Something that comes up so often, I’m thinking about a PGSDer that recently joined. And when I was talking to her, she was saying that before PGSD, she would feel good and plan. But then when the day came to actually follow through with the plan, she wouldn’t follow through with it.
Even though she knew that that thing she had on her plan needed to be done and she wanted to be able to be the person who could do it. She just simply wasn’t able to get herself to do it. And it had been like that for years.
And it was so hard for her because she is someone who is really capable, has had success in the past and was just like, what is going on? Because I used to be the person who could follow through. And now I’m not. And part of the reason I’m so excited for this Unfreeze Yourself series and the Unfreeze Yourself course that is going to be getting added to PGSD, I’m teaching it live in July, is because I have had not only in the beginning experiences of being stuck and frozen in my business, but also after I’d already had success in my business, after I’d made $600,000 in a year in my business, I also had a period of being stuck, of being frozen.
So I know what it’s like to be stuck before you’ve been successful. And I know what it’s like to get stuck after you’ve been successful. The process to get unstuck is the same.
And so just knowing for me how painful it was, especially after being someone who could follow through and then finding myself not following through and having to do the work to get myself unstuck, which is really simple, I’m going to walk you through it. Having to do that just really taught me why this work is so important for perfectionist entrepreneurs and that it’s not about what income level you’re at. This skillset of being able to get yourself unstuck and unfreeze yourself matters at absolutely every level of business.
The other thing I’m going to be talking about, this is going to be part four of the series, is I’m going to be sharing with you about follow through and the skill of follow through. Because what happens for us perfectionists is we try to follow through by forcing ourselves to do things, pushing through, often to burn out, trying to keep ourselves constantly motivated, and that simply doesn’t work. So I’m going to be sharing with you how to actually follow through in a way that works with your perfectionist brain instead of against it, so that you can get shit done in your business and actually build it without burning yourself out and without sacrificing the things that matter most to you.
And in part five of this series, I’m going to be telling you all about what it’s like inside perfectionist getting shit done and the full process that you learn inside PGSD to be able to go from stuck and spinning your wheels to having a full-time business and one that is actually fulfilling.
So whether that’s something that you achieve within 12 months or if it takes you longer, depends on when you’re starting, you will be able to get yourself unstuck following the process that I’m going to be sharing with you in part five and build a business that can actually replace the income that you have or means you don’t have to be living off your savings or a spouse supporting you or an inheritance or however you’re financially supporting yourself right now. I help perfectionist entrepreneurs build fulfilling businesses that they love without burning out and I want to teach you how to do that too.
So in part five, I’m going to be laying out the full process and I also want you to know a couple of important things. Number one, so Perfectionist Getting Shit Done aka PGSD, is my coaching program. It’s a business program for perfectionists.
This enrollment that will be starting on the 17th of June for one week only is the last time that you will be able to get lifetime access to the program when you sign up. So if you want to secure lifetime access to PGSD, which includes weekly group coaching, at the time of this recording, I am the one leading all the coaching calls. I am the one doing all of the written coaching personally.
So if you want to work closely with me and you also want to have lifetime access to PGSD, this is absolutely the best time to sign up and not only have a process to follow that will take you from being frozen and inconsistent and stopping and starting to being someone who is showing up and actually building their business, but you will have lifetime access to everything that’s inside the program.
The other thing I want to make sure you know is that in July, I will be teaching a course called Unfreeze Yourself. And in that course, I am going to teach you step by step and we are going to support you every way we know how to be able to go from being frozen to unfreezing yourself because that can happen in little ways, it can happen in big ways.
And I have learned so deeply how to notice when I’m frozen and then get unfrozen. And I really want to teach that to you. And I have a lot to say on that, it’s not going to fit on the podcast, it needs to go inside perfectionist getting shit done.
So I’m really excited to be adding that to the program. So you want to join us during this enrollment to not only secure lifetime access before it’s no longer available to new PGSDers, but to also be able to be there live or watch the replays for the Unfreeze Yourself course that I am going to be teaching. So that is all for part one of this series.
The reason that you haven’t been able to build your business isn’t because you’re not smart enough. It’s not because you don’t have enough knowledge. It’s not because you’re not good enough or that you’re not cut out for business.
It’s simply because you haven’t learned how to create a business strategy in a way that works for your perfectionist brain. You haven’t learned how to plan your week and organize your week in a way that works for your perfectionist brain. And you haven’t learned how to follow through and keep yourself going in a way that works for your perfectionist brain so you can get shit done without burning out.
Outro
If this episode resonated with you, you want to be inside Perfectionist Getting Shit Done, aka PGSD. PGSD is the business program for perfectionists, and inside you’ll learn business strategy, weekly planning, and how to follow through with your plans in a way that works for your perfectionist brain, which means you’ll be able to build a fulfilling full-time business without burning yourself out. The doors are opening on the 17th of June for one week only, and this is your final opportunity to join PGSD with lifetime access.
To join the waitlist and find out more, go to samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.