This is Part 2 of the Get Out Of Your Own Way Series (aka the GOOYOW Series). In this episode, I’m sharing the 3 simple steps to getting out of your own way in your business.
Tune in to discover the simple, incredibly practical process for releasing your Perfectionism Handbrake so you can follow through with your plans and do the things you know you need to do to build your business – without burning.
Tomorrow, in Part 3 of this series, I’ll be sharing a special opportunity to do the work of getting out of your own way inside Perfectionists Getting Shit Done. This is something that I haven’t offered since 2023 and don’t know when I’ll be offering it again. We get started on Monday, 17 August and you want to be part of it.
If you’re ready to get out of your own way in your business, you want to join my coaching program Perfectionists Getting Shit Done (PGSD today). Sign up now 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 620 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 (Start of episode)
Hello and welcome to part two of the Get Out of Your Own Way series. So we’re just going to dive right in. I’m going to assume that you have listened to part one of this series.
I will do a very brief recap just so you can get up to speed and just jog your memory about what was discussed in part one. But in this episode I am going to go into the three simple steps to get out of your own way and lay out that path for you. It’s simple to get out of your own way even if you have been struggling your entire life and your entire business life with getting in your own way and protecting your potential, holding yourself back, self-sabotaging instead of pursuing your potential, showing up consistently, putting yourself out there, doing the things you know you need to do, being out of your own way.
This three-step process is very very simple that I devised out of sheer desperation of needing to figure out how to get out of my own goddamn way. I will share that with you in this episode. So let’s recap.
Part one, three reasons you keep getting in your own way. One, we talked about that perfectionist fear, the ultimate perfectionist fear. You are scared that your best won’t be good enough and when we’re in that perfectionist mindset we think our best can’t actually get better.
We are so scared to find out our best isn’t good enough because if our best isn’t good enough as it can never get better we will just be helpless in despair like there’s nothing else we can do. If we try our best and it doesn’t work we have exhausted all options. So we do things to avoid trying our best.
We overthink, we procrastinate, we burn ourselves out in an attempt to try our best but do it in a completely unsustainable, overworking, completely neglect ourselves kind of way. We go into that all-or-nothing mindset and we are in that fear of judgment and people-pleasing mentality because we ultimately just want to be loved by others and loved by ourselves. In childhood perfectionist thinking makes sense.
It helps us be cared for when we aren’t yet able to care for ourselves but as an adult with a business perfectionist thinking makes us get in our own way and even though you’re a smart person, you love learning stuff, so do I, so do all our PGSDers but you haven’t got a knowledge gap. That’s not the issue that you have and you don’t have an issue with coming up with ideas. You’ve got endless ideas.
The issue is that your perfectionism handbrake comes on when you go to put yourself out there, when you go to finish something that you started or when you go to start something and you’re worried that it won’t live up to the vision of it that you have in your head. You don’t want to have to sit down to write an email newsletter and experiencing yourself overthinking it and not knowing what to say and feeling so inadequate because like oh my god I don’t even know what I’m doing. So you procrastinate, you put it off even though you know it’s important, even though you know you’re highly capable.
So that perfectionist mindset that we go into and that we have, there’s nothing wrong with you or me for having that mindset but it does need to be addressed. It does need to be worked with. It’s not something I get asked all the time on podcast interviews like how do you manage your perfectionism? It’s this bad thing you have to figure out how to get a handle on.
How do you overcome perfectionism? And all this talk of like perfectionism is toxic. Instead I think of it as perfectionism is just a group of thoughts. It’s perfectionist thinking and it’s thinking that I’m having today and when I shift my perfectionist thinking I can get out of my own way.
When I shift out of that thinking if I have to get it just right and I’m able to shift into the thinking that allows me to do the thing I know I need to do, I’m out of my own way. And I’m going to talk in this episode about three really practical ways to do that. Super super practical.
So there’s that number one. Number two is that you’re not clear on what actually matters in your business. Like what is the thing to do with your time and energy? You know what’s important what you need to do but everything feels important.
Everything feels like you have to get it done today or ideally it should have been done last week or maybe a few months ago when you first had the idea or probably actually two years ago when you first began thinking about it. So you feel so behind on everything that everything feels urgent and important now and then you feel so overwhelmed with what to even start on that you find yourself scrolling or you find yourself spending three hours trying to write say it is an email newsletter and just getting in your own head about it. Especially if like you’ve been putting off something for so long that you’re like well now I’m doing it it has to be good.
I used to do that all the time with my blog. Like I just wouldn’t post for months. I was working on it all the time in the back end but I wouldn’t post anything publicly for months and then I’d be this post has to be perfect because I haven’t done anything in so long that they’ve seen that I like have to make up for all that past procrastination.
So part of why you get in your own way is that you aren’t clear on what you need to do with the time and energy that you do have and what will actually be worthwhile versus what would be a waste of effort. So it’s very hard to follow through with plans and to show up and to put yourself out there when you’re not actually sure it will make a difference. Your perfectionist brain already doesn’t want you to put yourself out there and then if on top of that you aren’t sure if it will actually grow your business and it will actually make a difference it’s going to be super hard to do it.
So we’re going to talk about that today and then the third reason why you get in your own way is that you rely on motivation and inspiration to get things finished. You just haven’t learned the skill of how to work with your perfectionist brain to get things done and so instead because you don’t have that skill and have that knowledge and the tools for that instead you need to motivate yourself by buying a new journal or by buying a camera or some new software by updating your website and making the colors look better or by going to a cafe listening to something inspiring. As I said in part one I love inspiring stuff but if you have to be listening to that all the time and as soon as you’re not plugged into something inspirational you’re not able to finish something you will have a very hard time building your business.
I want you to know how to follow through with your plans even the courageous stuff even the tedious stuff even when you don’t feel like it in a way that you actually like. We’re building a business you love. I didn’t even mention this in part one but this is such an important part of what I teach.
We’re building a business that you actually like and that you feel successful when you get to your goals and along the way. So something that is going to be the thing that we’re doing starting on the 17th of August a question amongst what we’re going to be doing is it’s what circumstances would make you feel unsuccessful even if you achieved your goals. We want to know the answer to that.
We want you to build your business. You want to build your business in a way that is aligned with the values that you have, the contribution you want to make, the self-expression you want to have, the value you want to create, the strengths that you have instead of just constantly trying to be better and like improve your weaknesses. Like for me chatting in this way is a strength.
It’s one I’ve also developed and a skill I’ve had. I’ve had to do a lot of work to be able to have a podcast and post consistently on it like all of that. I started my podcast in 2017.
I was already four years into my business at that point and I’d learned at that point a lot of key lessons that I teach inside perfectionist getting shit done. So I’ve been able to post and share over 600 episodes and just allowing myself to chat and to trust myself to do that and not have to do best practices but you want to be able to build a business that you actually like. You like the day-to-day even though there’s some stuff you don’t want to do.
You’re not doing stuff that makes you feel like well I’m only going to do this because it’ll make me successful otherwise I’d never do it this way. For me and this is such a key part I’m going to talk about this today. Such a key part of what I’ve realized over the years that I’ve had a business is for me success like yes I want to achieve goals that I have and all of that that’s great but for me I feel the most successful when I like my week.
When I’m actually trusting myself in the day-to-day and my week reflects my values that I have time for reading that now as a mom I have time for my four little ones that I get to go on a walk with my dog Cotton that I get to share ideas on my podcast that I get to coach clients instead of as a perfectionist we have all these ideas of like well if I want to be the most successful possible I have to do this thing that this person says and that thing that that person says and I don’t really want to do it but I do want to be successful so I’m willing to do it and I can push myself to do it and like hopefully I’ll be happy when I get there.
For me I feel the most successful when my week is a reflection of who I want to be and I feel the most unsuccessful when during the week I’m not trusting myself I’m working against myself I’m squeezing stuff in constantly beating myself up constantly thinking that I’m failing that I’m behind like whether or not I feel successful is so much more about my experience of my week than it is about the bigger goals and the better my experience of my week the more I achieve and I’m going to talk about this in this episode because it’s so key so we want to not rely on motivation inspiration those things are amazing when you have them but instead I want to teach you how to follow through with your plans even when you don’t feel motivated and even when you don’t feel inspired because your perfectionist brain that is so scared that you don’t have as much potential as you believe you have and so scared to find that out is going to create resistance and is going to make you start things and then stop them or struggle to start things.
And so we’ve got to take that into account and you’ve got to know how to support yourself it’s not about forcing and pushing we already know how to do that it’s about supporting yourself to follow through on the things you know you need to do and to have a business and a business model I’m going to talk about more of this tomorrow in or not tomorrow in part three which will come out two days from now but to have a business you actually want to be building a business model that makes sense for you and your strengths and that is aligned with your vision and your values and then you want to be able to support yourself it’s just a skill you can learn the tools are simple.
I’m going to talk about it to follow through on that and to be out of your own way and then if you get in your own way I sometimes get in my own way but I know how to get out of my own way I know how to spot it when it’s happening and then just get back out of my own way my perfectionism handbrake comes on and then I release it and over the years it’s on for less and less and less time overall and then it comes on if I get scared and then I release it and I keep showing up that’s how I’ve been able to build my business that’s that’s been the unlock for me so and for our clients in PGSD as well which is why I really want to share this with you so with this episode three simple steps to getting out of your own way let’s go through it.
Step one is to set a goal that invites you to get out of your own way so inside perfectionist getting shit done this is the growth goal that you will set it’s one of the first things you’ll do inside the program so your growth goal is named as such because it is a goal that will invite you to grow it is very hard to get out of your own way when you are just setting little small realistic goals that you can achieve with your perfectionism handbrake on I know like if you looked up what the classic advice is for perfectionists on how to get out of your own way how to do what you plan to do it’s just set yourself small realistic achievable goals.
And I get why people say that because our perfectionist brains go into this all or nothing thinking and we can be so hard on ourselves and have such high expectations that we can just when we have that handbrake on set goals that just don’t make any sense for the actual life we have or the skills we have or where we’re at and put so much pressure on ourselves to achieve them and burn ourselves out in the process of that so people say okay just let’s do the opposite then the other side of the all or nothing let’s just have a small little realistic achievable goal and I love a good little actionable small realistic thing to do on a weekly basis so we’ll talk about that shortly when we get to what’s happening on the weekly level but what you want to have to be able to get out of your own way is something to work towards that literally requires you to get out of your own way in order to achieve it so if the goal that you have for your year for the next 12 months.
If that goal you can achieve without having to do any less overthinking any less procrastinating you can achieve it by continuing to burn yourself out and be all or nothing and people please and be scared of judgment if you can just keep being the same you and achieve that goal then sure it feels great to achieve a goal but ultimately and I talked about this in part one you will still be so deep in that pain of knowing that you’re not where you could be because you have achieved something that you could already achieve when you set the goal that’s why it feels realistic when a goal feels realistic it’s because the version of us setting the goal is already the version of us that can achieve the goal and so what you want to have instead and this is step one you want to have a growth goal you want to have a goal that invites you to release your perfectionism handbrake and to learn how to do that you want a goal that shows you where your overthinking and procrastination is going on that brings up and this is the uncomfortable part of it but it’s so necessary in our pgsd.
We love personal development so I’m going to assume you’re that person too when you have a growth goal part of the growth is seeing where you are getting in your own way and having a tool to help you see specifically where you are getting in your own way so you can release your perfectionism handbrake in that area when we have these small little realistic goals then ultimately it’s really hard to see where you’re even getting in your own way because you could just keep doing what you’re doing and doing it how you’re doing it and achieve your goal or do it just a little bit better or just a little bit faster instead we want to have a goal that invites you to think differently that requires you to shift the perfectionist thoughts you’re having and really is that invitation to learn how to achieve something you haven’t achieved before without burning yourself without your method of doing that of achieving that being I’m gonna pressure myself and force myself and hustle along and work like wake up early and stay up late and work weekends and work like all the time work work work like actually this is such a cool thing we do in pgsd and since i’ve been coaching clients.
I started doing that in 2018 since i’ve been doing that the first thing i ever introduced was we set the growth goal it’s not this like crazy big goal that makes you freeze it’s set in a very specific way that invites you to grow without spinning you out without having you yeah just basically as i said go into a freeze mode a perfectionist freeze but you need to have that invitation to grow you need to have that invitation from yourself to get out of your own way and to have that be something you can feel connected to and committed to and clear on and that ultimately say for example if you want to have a full-time income from your business that you know that growth call you’re working towards is either going to have you be able to quit your job or it’s a good step along the way to you being able to quit your job.
It’s meaningful when you achieve that you will be having more momentum like you just you need to have a goal you want to have a goal that invites you to grow and when also you have that goal you will be able to know what will actually move the needle so i talked about how one of the reasons you get in your own way is because everything feels so important and part of that is if you haven’t and there’s a lesson in pgsd on exactly how to set your growth goal and and the steps of that it’s a very simple process but exactly how to do that how to figure out the sweet spot for you with that goal how to break it down how to decide on your needle movers like that’s all laid out in there for you with your growth goal when you have that you can have your needle movers and so you know exactly what to do with your time especially in business there’s always a million things that could be done regardless of whether if you were working 24/7.
You’re still going to run out of time to do all the ideas that your brain gives you even if you have a team that’s still going to run out of time even if you have ai on it like there’s still not ever going to be enough resources to be able to fully execute on every idea you have today right away in the instant you want it done so how do you know what’s important how do you know what to spend your precious time and energy on they are your needle movers and they come from having a growth goal it is so much easier to get out of your own way when you know what that looks like when you have a goal that invites you to do that and you’re clear about what you actually need to do so you can get out of having to have all these long lists and like the mental load of all the things you think you should be doing all the ideas you have like i haven’t done that yet i need to do that or what am I going to do that and someone asks you like hey how’s that thing oh like all of that mental chatter instead when you have a growth goal and you have needle movers.
You are invited to get out of your own way you have really a practical tool in the growth goal and in needle movers to allow you to do that and to solve one of the big reasons that you’re getting in your own ways that lack of clarity about what you’re even working towards and what you need to do to get there so that is step one you set your growth goal you have a growth goal that invites you to grow that invites you to get out of your own way that invites you to pursue your potential instead of just spending all of your time protecting your potential so step number two is that you want to plan that you can actually follow through on for your week so we have your growth goal that’s a 12-month goal that invites you to grow in your business and to get out of your own way in your business and we also know your needle movers but then week to week you need a plan that you can actually follow through on that isn’t this like big unrealistic plan that you have for your week.
As we love to do with the good to-do list super long i i still love to-do but they create so much overwhelm for our perfectionist brains to-do list like classic time blocking that gets taught i’m going to talk about a calendaring method but it’s not classic time blocking we just put in chunks of time and you overschedule yourself and it’s just like work on website reply to clients and like just chunks like that because when we do things like that all of that popular productivity advice like how to get shit done in a week the way that that is taught doesn’t work for our perfectionist brains and for so many years i thought that it was me like why do i keep getting overwhelmed like it must be me i keep procrastinating.
I keep overthinking i get overwhelmed i don’t know where to start like but everyone says this is how to do things i learn like every different productivity method that there is i tried so many things and i kept getting in my own way i kept making unrealistic plans i kept not being able to follow through I have really good intentions at the start of the week and feel really behind at the end of the week even if I got things done I didn’t know exactly what I got done I didn’t feel a sense of momentum.
I didn’t feel a sense of accomplishment i just felt more behind than when i started the week because as i went through the week I had more ideas of things to do so my to-do list would just get longer or with my calendar i just stopped looking at it all together i put in like on monday I’d have all this planned out in my calendar for the week forgetting that I’m a human and I need to eat and I need to sleep. It would just be like everything in there it was impossible to stick to and so by wednesday I was forgetting to look at my calendar because i was so far behind that i it had no use to even look at it why would i look at a calendar that was completely unusable it’s like if you’re looking at a map for somewhere like that gives you directions for where to go but you’re in a completely different location you’re not going to follow that map.
And take those steps because it doesn’t make sense for where you are and that’s what kept happening for me for my week i’m like i can’t do that thing next because i didn’t like i know it says i need to work on that right now but i haven’t done the three things before that that mean i can actually do that so i just completely disconnect from my plan so you want to have step two is to have a plan for your week that you can actually follow through on so what i did and created this for myself is a process called power planning and i love as i said i love being organized.
So I love a good like color-coded calendar situation just the time blocking approach didn’t work for me it just had me having this overscheduled calendar that i’d forget about and then resolve the following monday to like be more disciplined to be more motivated and finally stick to it so what i did was i took all of the things that i had learned about how to get shit done all of the things that i had learned about my perfectionist mindset and the all or nothing thinking like why i was procrastinating and noticing okay if i do this thing this way that exacerbates my all or nothing thinking or that makes me overthink or that makes me procrastinate if i structure it this way and i created a way for me to actually structure my week that allowed me to follow through with my plans and i got out of the thinking of like it’s just me there’s something wrong with me and went okay what if i’m not the problem what if i just need to learn how like an approach that works for me and my brain and so when i created power planning it was literally just for me i wrote in my calendar power planning and I planned out the week.
And then I noticed that as I started as the weeks went on and I started to figure out what to do during that time that I was finally following through with things and then I started sharing it with my clients. I had PGSD already at that point in time and they found it super helpful and then I kept as I kept power planning i kept figuring out more and more about my perfectionist brain and how to get shit done and how to do courageous stuff and how to do tedious stuff and how to adjust when there are interruptions and how to know when to rest and when to push through and all of those different things and I updated the power planning process to reflect that i shared that with our pgsd’s they shared their experience and now six years on six years into power planning it is something that you just get to learn in pgsd that the process that works for your perfectionist brain to plan out your week so that you can actually follow through on it such a big revelation for me was realizing my follow-through problem was largely a planning problem that i was planning my week in a way that made it almost impossible to follow through.
And so when I changed how i planned my week my follow-through instantly improved i also learned and you’ll learn this in PGSD, in the moment where your perfectionism handbreak comes on to follow through with a plan how to turn it off and power yourself up and follow through but largely like 90 percent of my follow-through issue was solved by planning in a way that worked for my perfectionist brain so then the follow-through issues i had i didn’t have to manage them or like figure any of that i just literally those issues went away because i had a plan that worked for my perfectionist brain and didn’t invite me or make it super easy to go into procrastination overthinking so it’s called power planning there are three really simple steps to power planning.
You’re going to learn this inside perfectionist get it done your power hour at the start of the week well it could be at any time in the week but your power hour then you have little tweaks and your weekly review so what you’re doing with your power hour is you are creating a plan based on the reality of your week if you’re like me and you’re a mom of four you are taking that into account in your plan so for me for example there is a good chance that someone’s coming home sick from daycare for example so i have contingency plans buffer time like I know, and I’ve had so many weeks where no one was meant to be home during my work days and then everyone was home or one of the kids were home and i had to adjust and figure out okay maybe I’m gonna do some work in nap time or maybe I’m gonna take the whole day off and I have to.
I’m just gonna do my little tweaks and update my plan but you make a plan for your week based on the knowledge you have at the start of the week and based on what you can reasonably expect might come up to interrupt you but you have a plan that plays to your strengths that works with you like if you’re a morning person you’ll be working in the morning if you’re not a morning person you won’t be working in the morning and if you have to be working in the morning you’ll be doing it in a way that actually works for you and has the highest chance of you being able to follow through on it. I teach this in the power planning course inside PGSD. I’m not going to go into it in this episode we just do not have time but you will have plans for your week that are realistic that are based on your growth goal your needle movers and who you are the business you’re building the preferences you have the values you have and you will be able to be the person who gets shit done the entrepreneur who is getting shit done and we have so many incredible success stories from PGSDers with power planning.
Because it is such a revelation to go from working against yourself and using things like a long to-do list with highlighted priorities or asking AI like, here’s all my to-do list, can you tell me what to do? Like going from that to having flexible structure for your week. So this is really key. Flexible structure for your week that makes it easy to follow through on what matters, that makes it easy to not be overwhelmed, to just be clear on here’s what to do, I know it’s actually worth my time, I’ve actually given myself enough time to do it.
Through the process of power planning, you learn how to estimate how long to give things. So if you’re like, I don’t even know how long things will take. Yeah, that’s true for a lot of things at entrepreneurship, we’re always doing new things.
Sometimes things take longer than we thought, sometimes they’re quicker. You will learn how to estimate how long things take, you will have buffer time so that if something does take longer or if you do get in your own way and then need to get out of your own way again, you’ve got time for that. It’s not this constant rush, pressure, stress, let’s go.
It is you having a clear and calm plan focused on what matters that will have you actually building your business. It’s so good. I am still so obsessed with power planning, it is just like a core foundation in my life.
And as I said, for me, I’ve had so many breakthroughs about power planning over the years and realizations, but I realized quite recently, actually a few weeks ago, one of the reasons it’s such a powerful tool for me and for our PGSDers as well is because the degree to which I feel successful is based on my experience of my week. And if I feel very accomplished in the week, I feel successful and that helps me be even more successful because when I feel successful, it’s so much easier to show up than when I feel behind and when I feel like I’m failing. So simply having that flexible structure for my week, I can make my little tweaks, my little adjustments to my plan as I go so that if something comes up, the whole plan doesn’t get derailed.
I don’t fall off with my plan. I just adjust it and keep going. Sometimes they’re big tweaks.
There are big adjustments to be made, but I’m just able to keep going. But having that weekly plan that allows me to feel successful and feel a sense of completeness, even when everything isn’t done because everything’s never done in business, having that has me feeling successful, which then has me doing more of the things that has me be even more successful and accomplished. And so the better my week, the more I achieve my goals, the more quickly, the more easily.
And that’s why I love just being connected to my week and also with this too. So I’ve talked about power planning from the angle of it being a planning tool and helping you follow through, but it really ultimately is my favorite mindset tool. It’s my favorite tool for noticing perfectionist thinking coming up and noticing where I’m getting in my own way and getting out of my own way again.
It’s my favorite tool for being able to see what it looks like when I’m getting in my own way, what that looks like at a glance in my week and what it looks like when I’m out of my own way. And I’m constantly scrolling through my calendar. You can use Google Calendar or iCal, super simple.
Whole process is super simple. But when I scroll through, I can see everything, roughly speaking, that I’ve worked on in the last six years. You don’t have to get it down to the minute, but roughly speaking, when you do your power planning, you are keeping track of what actually happened and making little tweaks to reflect what happened in your week so that at the end of the week you can see where your time went and study yourself in your weekly review.
You do little check marks so you get the satisfaction of ticking off the to-do list without the overwhelm of the to-do list. But when I scroll through, I can see times where I was really out of my own way. I was trusting myself.
I was focused on my needle movers and I can see periods of time where I got in my own head and I just focused on all the back-end systems from a place of like being scared to show up and be visible or being scared to make a mistake with a launch and so I just focused on something else. And so like I can see at a glance based on the way I color code my power planning if I’m in my own way or out of my own way. And that’s come from really like the knowledge, the self-awareness that I get from power planning that I just simply did not have, could not have when I wasn’t power planning.
And our PGR students are always like when they have a week off power planning, they’re like, oh my god, I need to vacuum to power planning because it becomes such an incredible anchor and grounding tool in your life. And for me, I love that it’s super practical because it is a planning tool and it allows me to follow through and get the most important things done in my business. But it’s for me as a personal development nerd, my favorite thing about it is that it’s a mindset tool.
It allows me to study myself. It allows me to see where am I getting in my own way and what is the work I need to do on releasing my perfectionism handbrake. I can see if I planned to have say write an email in, it takes me say like 30 minutes to write an email to my email list and I can see that takes me an hour and a half or it used to be back in the day like I could see I’d plan for it to take an hour and it would take four hours.
I’m like okay something’s going on there because I had to extend out how long that took me and then drop and drag that other stuff somewhere else. And that can be challenging and painful but also I don’t want to hide that because that’s the beauty of it. And if you’re someone like we are in PGSD, you love self-awareness.
You love a tool like that where you get to see yourself and yes it’s uncomfortable but you actually get to really deeply understand yourself and connect with yourself and know what’s going on and not just be frustrated with having a long to-do list and not doing it but then trying harder and not doing it like just being frustrated but with no answers like at least when you’re power planning if you’re frustrated that you’re gay in your own way you’ve got answers. You can see exactly what’s going on. You know exactly what to bring to a coaching call or to self-coach yourself on so that you can get out of your own way.
So we have that growth goal that invites you to support yourself to get out of your own way and to achieve something important for your business. A 12-month revenue goal that is going to give you momentum and going to give you accomplishment but to do that in a way that’s in alignment with your values that doesn’t burn you out and you need an invitation to get out of your own way. A clear invitation like that you know your needle movers as well as a result of having your growth goal.
Then your power plan in your week. So you have your power hour, you have your little weeks. I’ve roughly mentioned it but you are making adjustments as you go throughout the week to reflect what happened so that by the end of the week you can see where your week went like what happened during the week and you get to study the before and the after of your week.
So you’ll have a screenshot of your week from the start of the week and you want to inside PGSD; you want to watch the power planning course. It’s one of the first things you’re going to do. Set your growth goal and learn power play and then in the next episode I’m going to talk about something really exciting that’s going to help make it super easy to do all these things I’m talking about.
So excited. So you’re going to plan out your week and follow that process for power planning so that you know how to really make plans. You can actually follow through on the mistakes the perfectionists make with planning the skill sets to develop that we help you develop in PGSD so you can follow through and so you don’t over schedule yourself and all of those things.
So you really want to get inside PGSD to learn that and to have the support with that as well. But power planning and having a plan you can actually follow through on even when your week isn’t perfect even when you’re not perfect is how to get out of your own way. That’s such an important step.
Step two. Step three. One of the reasons you get in your own way is because you are too tired to get out of your own way.
You are not even like you might be like I am not really up to much. If you’re the kind of person I help in PGSD you probably do have a very full plate of commitments. You have got a lot going on in your life and people also put things on your plate because you’re highly capable and you maybe are a bit of a people pleaser and you say yes when you would otherwise prefer to say no.
So you’ve got a full plate but it’s not that that’s tiring you or that’s not the biggest thing. The biggest thing is that 24 7 you are working in your brain to try to figure out how to stop being so behind your business. How to finally follow through on your plans.
How to finally be successful like it is a 24 7 in your brain. If you’re with your family you feel guilty that you’re not doing something for your business or you’re resenting them for taking time away that you could be working in your business or if you’re at your job like for me when I was in my accounting job or even before that when I was studying before I graduated I would just resent any time I was not working on my business even if I was seeing friends and literally wanted to do that. I’d be like oh but I could be working.
I could be doing something to move it forward. I could be figuring it out and I was too tired mentally because I was working all the time in my brain. I was too tired to do the courageous things and put myself out there consistently.
I was going into any work time that I have for my business. I was going into that mentally exhausted and just feeling so behind overwhelmed just feeling like I didn’t know which way was up and so the third step to getting out of your own way and you’re either going to love this or you’re going to hate it and both are okay. Whichever one it is for you is fine is getting guilt free clean rest.
Having time where you are mentally switched off from your business and I will teach you the skill of that in PGSD so if you don’t already know how to do that that is fine. You can learn that. I will teach you but this is how you fuel yourself because getting out of your own way requires courage.
Your perfectionist brain is so scared to find out that your best isn’t good enough. We’ve discussed that and so you will have resistance to support yourself through naturally. That’s going to happen.
That’s not a sign that you can’t be successful. That’s not a sign that you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s a sign you have a perfectionist brain that is trying to protect you.
That’s trying to protect your potential so you want to have you want to go into your work week into your any business time that you have. You might only have a few hours for your business each week. You might be working full-time in your business regardless of any business time you have.
You want to go into that with a rested mind and even like me in most of my non-business time I am parenting our four little ones. I have a five-year-old, twin three-year-old and a one-year-old and my husband Steve also works. He’s a paramedic so I’m spending a lot of time in my clean rest being busy with life but I rest my brain.
Again, I will teach you how to do this inside PGSD because it won’t come naturally to you. Your perfectionist brain is just like no I’m behind and especially if you’re someone there’s so many people like oh no I just I would rather get it all done then like I don’t like resting when everything isn’t done. I’d rather just work late or work the weekends and get it done so I can rest.
That’s just because you don’t know the skill of how to mentally switch off and so because you don’t have that skill no one has taught you it’s not your fault but because you don’t have that skill the solution is then let me just get everything done so that I can switch off instead of let me just create that experience for myself and then fuel myself up with the rest so I can do even better work the next time I’m working so then because you don’t have that skill what you end up doing is you either work until exhaustion so it’s like the middle of the night and your eyes are just too tired to stay open so like everything isn’t done but I like work till exhaustion or you might notice that I mean sometimes sure you do get the thing done and then you switch off and like you’ve worked extra time but that’s fine.
But ultimately I just want to invite you to consider that if you never get everything done it’s because you don’t rest because we go into this mindset and I get it I have been there my brain still wants to default to that so many times trust me but our brains are like I like it doesn’t make sense to rest until everything is done I’d rather have it all done than be resting and feeling guilty while doing so but then that stops us from getting everything done because then you’re working with a tired mind and a tired mind has to work overtime to achieve what a rested mind can and so things can’t get done because everything takes longer because you’re not as sharp you’re not as switched on because you’re constantly all the time in your brain trying to figure out how to fix your business trying to figure out how to get out of your own way trying to figure out how to finally do the thing you know you need to do is it this is it that maybe I could do this maybe if I price it like that maybe if I sell this many of this maybe this person said this or this person said that especially if you’re procrasti-learning. Haven’t even mentioned procrasti-learning yet in this series.
Procrasti-learning when you are learning as a form of procrastination just getting I mean I think I did mention actually in series in the first part of this series I just didn’t call it by its name but when we’re just doing a little more learning because we’re so scared to be doing we think let me just learn so I don’t have to do because it’s scary to do when you have a perfectionist brain so you really got to learn how to work with it how to support yourself when you have a perfectionist brain so clean rest is the fuel it’s the fuel that gets you to your growth goal it’s the fuel that allows you to do the courageous and tedious and simple things you need to do.
Because oftentimes for us perfectionists the hardest things to do is to just do something and let it be easy and to not overcomplicate it and not overthink it because then we feel like we’re missing something and we’re being irresponsible or reckless that surely it has to be harder than this but clean rest is the fuel and also clean rest helps you to untangle your self-worth from your productivity and from your business and when you untangle your self-worth from your productivity in your business you will have so much more courage because it won’t feel like every single thing you do in your business is a test of whether or not you’re good enough and therefore you’re going to protect your potential mode because you’re so scared to fail the test when you have a life outside of your business and you’re not just in your life thinking about your business but you actually are thinking about your life when you’re in your life in your personal life you’re connected with that you have other things that you’re up to outside of your business that excite you you have projects.
You have hobbies that you’re creating momentum with you have meaningful relationships that you spend time with then it’s just so much easier to have business be simple it makes it so much easier to get out of your own way and for me clean rest was again something I developed like the growth goal and like power planning out of just pure necessity that I was the person who was like I actually love working I don’t need to rest why would I want to rest and like that’s just not for me and I don’t even find it restful if everything’s not done to let me get everything done but this was in 2014 I started experimenting with clean rest as a uni student because I just noticed how much I was procrastinating on studying and getting in my own way with my studies and I just constantly felt like it’s okay if I don’t do it today.
I can do it tomorrow like I didn’t have any boundaries with my time it just felt like if I’m awake I should be studying and so I started experimenting with I’m not going to study at all on the weekend I’m going to have that time off I’m not allowed to study on the weekends I need to get it all done during the week and what I found is that I got so much more done because I didn’t keep kicking the can down the road and going I’ll just leave it till tonight I’ll do it tomorrow morning I’ll do it tomorrow night I’ll do it the next morning I actually had positive constraints on my time that invited me to get out of my own way you will see your theme here all of these things growth goal power planning clean rest the needle movers and knowing what they are powering yourself up to follow through that all invites you to get out of your own way and allows you to get out of your own way.
All of these things that I’ve discussed do the work of shifting your perfectionist thoughts and supporting you to follow through and supporting you to be the person that can make a plan and follow it even when life is life in or even when something unexpected happens or even when they don’t feel like it or even when it requires courage or even if it feels above their head or even if it’s scary you want to be a perfectionist who’s getting shit done you want to be out of your own way because that pain you feel is the pain of I know how successful I can be and I’m not being that successful that gap between where you are and where you know you could be that is so painful and every day that you don’t get out of your own way there is a cost and you want to get present to that there is a cost you are losing momentum with every day I can be painful to hear someone’s got to say it yes you have so much potential.
But that doesn’t matter when you’re in your own way if you want to fulfill your potential and have a business that is as successful as it could be you have to get out of your own way and you have to do that asap every day that you are in your own way is having a negative compound effect you know that theory of like the compound effect and how things like small things accumulate over time to have a big impact usually that’s talked about in the positive of like if you invest a dollar and then that compounds over time you’ll have a lot more money in the long run if you have interest on it but the negative compound effect every day you procrastinate every week spent getting in your own way is a week that you then have lost self-trust with yourself a little bit more you’ve lost a little bit more confidence you’ve lost a little bit more ability to believe that when you have an idea it’ll actually make it into reality and those things chip away and chip away and chip away that for every day and for every week that you aren’t getting out of your own way and staying in your own way and doing the same things you’ve always been doing.
You have even more to overcome to get out of your own way getting out of your own way is simple but it’s not going to happen by getting more knowledge it’s not going to happen by having a little spurt of motivation in January or having a few days of feeling super inspired I wish that was my wish that it would happen that way I had to learn how to get out of my own way I set a goal that invited me to do that and I knew what I needed to do to achieve that goal I figured out the needle movers. You learn this in PGSD. I planned in a way that I could actually follow through on so I could be out of my own way and I got clean rests as a fuel.
So it’s not your fault it is not your fault I want to be so clear on this it is not your fault that you’re getting in your own way it is not a sign that you are not capable of building a really successful business but you do have to do something about it it isn’t going to solve itself on its own your perfectionist brain is just so scared that your best won’t be good enough and that will keep being true until you reprogram your perfectionist brain using the growth goal and power planning and clean rest to feel safe to pursue your potential so I really want to invite you into perfectionist getting shit done I’m going to talk about it in the next episode about what we are doing inside PGSD together starting on Monday the 17th of August that makes it super simple even more simple to use the growth goal power planning and clean rest to get out of your own way so I will talk to you in that episode I hope you’ve really enjoyed this one and you’re finding the series super helpful hope you’re having a beautiful day talk soon.
Outro
If you struggle to build your business due to procrastination or overthinking, or maybe you keep burning yourself out, I want to invite you to join my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. Inside, I will teach you my proven process for getting shit done as a perfectionist entrepreneur. In case you didn’t know, perfectionists can’t follow the same productivity advice as everyone else.
When we do, we get in our own way. So let me teach you what works inside the program. It’s simple and anyone can learn.
To sign up today, visit samlaurabrown.com/pgsd. I’ll see you inside.