In Part 4 of the Unfreeze Yourself Series, I explain why perfectionists burn out and how to follow through on your business plans without burning yourself out.
If you’ve ever wondered how to show up consistently for your business without exhausting yourself or neglecting your life in the process – then this episode is for you.
Perfectionists Getting Shit Done (PGSD) is opening for enrollment on 17 June 2026 for one week only. This 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.
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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
Okay, now it is time for part four of the Unfreeze Yourself series. This is a five-part series for perfectionists who are building businesses to have you go from stuck and frozen to showing up, taking action, and building a full-time business, doing all the things you know you need to do without burning out. So, so far we have covered how to have a business strategy that works for your perfectionist brain and why you need a full-time business plan so that you know exactly what you’re doing.
You also need to have flexible weekly plans that you can actually follow through on that are full of the tasks and the projects that will get you to the goals that you have, that will get you to the full-time business. Whether you’re building a full-time business this year or it’s going to take you a few years if you’re a little bit earlier on in your business journey, your calendar every week is full of the tasks that will actually move the needle for you in your business and get you to those goals. So then what comes up for us perfectionist entrepreneurs is the question of, okay, how do I actually follow through with my weekly plans without burning myself out? Like it’s lovely to have a full-time business plan that works for my brain.
It’s lovely to have a way of planning out my week that works for my brain, but what about actually following through on that plans? What do I do when I have resistance to the plan? Like when it’s Thursday, it’s 2 p.m. I had planned to write out an email with my new offer and then I just don’t want to do it. I feel scared. I feel resistant and I end up going to decide to do something else.
What do I do if that is me? So that’s what I’m going to be talking about in this episode because I have the answer for you. If you have so many struggles with following through, then it’s really important to understand that this is just because you haven’t learned how to work with your perfectionist brain instead of against it. Perfectionist Getting Shit Done, which is the business program for perfectionists who are building businesses, inside PGSD, everything is designed to teach you how to work with your perfectionist brain instead of against it so you can build a full-time business without burning out.
And it’s really important to know that follow through, you need to also do that in a way that works with your perfectionist brain. Once you know how to do that, you can follow through with plans. I used to be the person who could not follow through for more than a few days or a few weeks at best without burning myself out.
I would either just be so exhausted or I just forget what my goal was and be focused on something else. So I now know how to stick with things. I’ve developed the skill of following through from working with my perfectionist brain and that’s something that I’m going to teach you as well.
So let’s talk about what actually happens for perfectionists. So let’s say again, it’s Thursday, it’s in the afternoon, you have something in your calendar and you feel resistant to it. So what we perfectionists tend to try and do in that moment is motivate ourselves to follow through, force ourselves to do it, guilt or shame ourselves into doing it.
Maybe you go and look at something inspiring or something that’s just really going to ignite you to do it but you don’t actually know how to follow through on something without forcing yourself. Like sure, there’s times you’re inspired, they’re lovely, there are times you are motivated, amazing but that doesn’t happen very often. So what you find is that you’re mostly just trying to force your way through and at some point that doesn’t keep working because it’s so tiring to be in that forcing energy all the time.
And the burnout is created from if you aren’t able to follow through with your plans because your perfectionist brain is scared, then what happens is you just have decisions and tasks just pile up, then at some point you just feel so guilty and so behind that you in a spurt of motivation get a bunch of work done but it’s so exhausting that you burn yourself out, you just neglect your personal life, you stop exercising, you stop drinking water, you stop talking to the people in your life who are really important to you like you’re just a bit more snappy, like you’re just really trying to get everything done so you can catch up. That burnout is a symptom of you in the moment when it comes time to follow through with the plan, not actually having been taught how to work with your perfectionist brain so you can follow through on that task that you put in your calendar. This is a task that is going to get you to your goals that you have of a full-time business in a way that you actually like.
So it’s a plan you want to follow, not a plan you should be doing or you’ve seen others doing. You have your full-time business plan that you love, you have your weekly plans that are realistic and you also really love them. So now when it comes to the moment of following through, what you want to be able to do is power yourself up so you can actually follow through because whenever there is uncertainty, wherever there is potential for judgment, fear of failure, pressure, there’s vulnerability, your perfectionist brain is going to create resistance.
So if you don’t know how to overcome that resistance without burning yourself, you’re just not going to be able to build a full-time business no matter how great your strategy is, no matter how beautifully you’ve made your plans. Follow through is absolutely essential and if you have been feeling stuck and frustrated in your business, it’s because you don’t know how to work with your brain to get yourself to follow through in a way that you actually like and is sustainable long-term. So you don’t need better work-life balance, you don’t need better boundaries or more motivation, you just need to know how to power yourself up.
So I want to tell you a little story about this, but the power up process that I’m talking about here is what you’re going to learn inside perfectionist getting shit done so that you have your full-time business plan, you have your weekly plans that allow you to achieve that and then you actually follow through on them.
So there was a time where I was writing emails for a launch for perfectionist getting shit done. I knew what my goal was, I had my business plan, I was already full-time at that point, but I had clarity, I had direction, I had my power planning and then what I noticed is that instead of writing the four emails that I had planned, I wrote two emails and then I found myself in the kitchen deciding, you know, I’m just going to have an early lunch, I just want to allow myself to have some food, get re-inspired and I’m going to go back and finish the emails.
But I wasn’t actually hungry, I was just experiencing that perfectionist resistance to completing what I had planned to complete. So what I did instead was that I did the power up process to be able to actually follow through with the plans that I had. So instead of having an early lunch and then most likely having an inspired idea to do something else, I stayed at my desk, it took me six minutes to do the power up, I did that, I finished the rest of the emails and then I had lunch knowing that all four emails that I had planned to write were written.
So where we perfectionists go wrong with follow through is thinking I should just naturally be able to follow through, where as I mentioned your perfectionist brain is actually going to generate a lot of resistance, that’s not a problem, you just need to know what to do with that. So instead of getting powered down and shut down and frozen, you can power yourself up and follow through, do the things you need to do to build your full-time business and have a full-time business.
So it’s not about having more motivation, it’s about knowing exactly what to do when the time comes to follow through and you don’t feel motivated to do it, how to support yourself to do it by powering yourself up so you can get those important things done and then switch off because everything you needed to do has been completed.
So now we’ve talked about knowing what to focus on to build your business, we’ve talked about how to make plans you can actually stick to, we’ve talked about following through with your plans without burning out and in the final part of the series I’m going to be bringing it all together to show you how these three elements fit into the five-step PGSD process that you will be able to master inside perfectionist getting shit done. This is my proven process to go from being stuck and frozen and in your own way to having a full-time business.
I have walked over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs through this process, I would love to walk you through it as well because you’re smart, you have potential, you just don’t know how to get yourself to do the things you know you need to do to build your business and inside PGSD you become the person who actually gets it done in a way that you like without burning out. So I will talk to you in part five.
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.