In this episode you will learn what the Ultimate Perfectionist Fear is, how I came to discover it and the signs that it’s stopping you from taking consistent action in your business. You will learn why it’s not your fault that you have this fear and how to take it into account so that it doesn’t keep stopping you from following through on your business plans.
Tune in to hear the simple and practical steps to overcome the Ultimate Perfectionist Fear. This episode is an absolute masterclass for perfectionist entrepreneurs so if you’re a perfectionist and you’re building a business, you want to listen to it now.
To learn the simple steps to plan properly as a perfectionist, sign up for my free training here: samlaurabrown.com/planningseries.
Inside Perfectionists Getting Shit Done you will learn how to follow through on your business plans even when your perfectionist brain tries to stop you. Sign up now and get instant access to the program 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 (Start of the episode)
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.
Today, I am coming to you with a masterclass on overcoming the ultimate perfectionist fear. So this is something that, I mean, I’ve been calling it the ultimate perfectionist fear in different places where I’ve been coaching and teaching things and content for maybe the last year or two, I can’t really remember exactly, but this is something that I have observed in myself first and then in my clients for over a decade. And I will share more about that in this episode, but this is something that I have always been privy to and I have just been understanding it and unpacking it and also figuring out what to do about it.
So in this episode, I’m really going to be sharing it all because this is ultimately what we do inside Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. We take into account that you as a business owner have this ultimate perfectionist fear that I’m going to talk about. In a second, I’ll tell you exactly what it is and we teach you what to do about it so that you can actually build your business without having to have that ultimate perfectionist fear go away.
So much of the advice around perfectionism is just stop being a perfectionist. Essentially, just stop having the perfectionist fear that you have and that is incredibly hard to do. The perfectionist fear we have, and I’ll talk specifically about what that is, it is serving a purpose to protect us.
It is very hard to let go of it, even if we know it’s making us get in our own way and even if we want to have a really successful business and we know that we aren’t doing the things we know we need to do to build the business and that is because we are getting in our own way because of our perfectionist thoughts and fears that are making us procrastinate and overthink and hold ourselves back due to fear of judgment. Even if we intellectually understand all of that, it is very hard to let go of a protective mechanism that has served us so well and so instead, what I have found through my own experience and then through coaching so many others, we’ve had over a thousand perfectionists go through perfectionist getting shit done, is that you don’t have to have this fear go away but you do need to understand it and you do need to take it into account so that you can get shit done in your business. So I’m going to guide you through this.
I’ve been writing notes and just kind of like brainstorming all the things I want to share with you and I’m probably not going to talk to them like I’ve got them there top of mind but I’m going to be really teaching you all about this fear so that you can understand yourself so much better and then you have the path for exactly what to do. As I mentioned, perfectionist getting shit done, PGSD, this is exactly where we teach you this and support you with this and give you the full process. So if you resonate with this, you want to get inside perfectionist getting shit done to be able to go through this process but in this episode, I’m going to lay out what that looks like for you which is going to be such a relief and give you so much hope because I can be sure that you have not heard this before.
I had to figure this out all on my own. It is honestly a miracle that I did. I have been dedicated to figuring this out.
This has been like the number one question in my life that I’ve been solving for for over a decade and studying and putting my mind on and witnessing in others. So I’m so excited to be sharing it with you today in this episode. So what is the ultimate perfectionist fear as I like to call it? It’s the fear that I’ll try my best and it won’t be good enough.
So you know that saying, it’s better to try and fail than to have never tried at all. We without perfectionist fear don’t believe that. We understand it but we don’t think it.
Instead, we think it’s better not to try than it is to fail and when it comes to business, this is very problematic because when we’re not trying in order to avoid failure, then we’re also avoiding success. So as you can see, if you have this ultimate perfectionist fear, it is going to be very hard to be successful because then you are left trying to be successful without doing the trying part. Very, very, very hard.
So this fear, I’ll try my best and it won’t be good enough. If we look at what’s the hidden end of that sentence, as I like to call it. I talk about this a lot in PGSD, particularly on coaching calls.
We have a thought and then there’s a hidden end of that thought and that hidden end is very influential in terms of the feeling it creates, the actions and inactions that follow from that feeling and the result, yeah, that follow that feeling and then the result that is created by that set of actions and inactions. So what is the hidden end of I’ll try my best and it won’t be good enough? So what? So what, what we think is and then everyone else and myself will find out that I’m unlovable. What we’re trying to avoid is gathering any evidence for others and for ourselves that we are unlovable.
If we already feel inadequate, we don’t want any extra evidence on top. If we already think that other people don’t really love us or they only love us when we’re people pleasing and doing things that they want us to do and being convenient for them and reasonable for them and all of those different things. If we’re already thinking that this makes so much sense, right? We want to be connected as humans.
We want to be loved. We want to belong. This ultimate perfectionist fear that if we try our best, we won’t be good enough and then everyone will see that.
Everyone will see the inadequacy and find out where I’m lovable. It makes sense that when we have that thought pattern that we then don’t show up fully. We are procrastinating.
We are overthinking. Such a sign of this is if you are getting stuck on business decisions, that like niche for example or pricing or what to sell or who to sell it to or any of those things, particularly if you’ve been stuck on them for quite a long time and just learning more, researching more, going back to the drawing board. One of the reasons it makes so much sense, one of the reasons we get stuck on decisions is because when we make a decision, we’re ready for action.
And then if we take action, it might not work. It might not be good enough. We might find out, quote unquote, that we’re not good enough.
So it’s better than to be in our minds. It’s better to be stuck on a decision and not taking action because then we can say, well, I’m not successful because I just haven’t made this decision yet. I’m still figuring it out.
Then to be saying like it feels very vulnerable and painful to say, I’m really trying my best. I’m really going for it. I’m making decisions.
I’m taking action. I’m putting myself out there. I’m resting well.
I’m taking care of myself. I’m doing all the things and it’s not working. When we have a perfectionist brain, we are thinking that then there’s nothing else that can be done.
And then we get to, instead of being in this place of hope and optimism, that if we finally do our best, it will be good enough. Our hopes are dashed when we try our best and our best isn’t good enough. It dashes all of our hopes and it goes against and gathers evidence against our identity that we are smart and we are capable and we are successful and we are lovable.
We’re trying to gather up that evidence all the time. And you might already have a lot of evidence for that, particularly if like many of our PGSDers, I’d say all of our PGSDers, if you’re successful in other areas of your life, in every other area of your life besides your business, that you don’t want your business to be evidence that actually you’re not that successful person that everyone thought you were. And especially we are trying not to gather evidence that I’m not the successful, potential, fulfilled person that I thought I was.
That feels very painful. Whenever we have our identity shattered, going through an identity crisis, like that is so painful. So we are avoiding taking action so as to avoid finding out that our best isn’t good enough.
Again, very problematic from a business perspective. When we are either, there’s two ways it can really go. We either don’t take action because we don’t want to do our best and find out it’s not good enough or we believe we can’t do our best.
We have, as people talk about with perfectionism, such high standards that we’re like, I can’t even do what needs to be done so there’s no point even trying anyway. So either that or, and you can kind of go into both of these at times, we get frantic and take a bunch of action in an attempt to make sure we do do our best. So we’re like, okay, I’m actually really going to try my best.
I find for me, when I’ve gone through different stages, I kind of go between the two. Either like, okay, I’m really going to give it my everything and I go about it in quite a, not like frantic probably isn’t the best word, but kind of like ignoring my own needs as a human, skipping out on taking breaks and resting and sleep and just kind of like, I will just do this no matter what and just power through and push through and ignore myself in the process, like essentially abandon myself in the process because if I can finally do my best at this and have that be good enough, then I’ll finally feel good enough so it’s worth all the cost of that in order to feel better. Like we’re just trying to feel better.
We just want to feel loved. We just want to love ourselves. So we can go either into the avoidance, procrastinating, overthinking, all of that side, or into that frantic action that leads to burnout where we are ignoring our own needs in an attempt to do our best in the hope that we will do our best, it will work.
This is all or nothing thinking, by the way, that it’s either it’s your best or it’s your worst, that it’ll work or it won’t work. We perfectionists, we have that all or nothing tendency with our brains. So we go into this idea of if I just work and work and work and work and work and add more time to my work hours and all those things, then I’ll finally do my best, then I’ll finally be good enough, then I’ll finally feel good enough.
So when it comes to this, again, you might be more one side than the other. You might do a bit of both. But when it comes to this and why this matters is this stops us from actually doing our best because if we’re either working in this really rushed way that comes from and frantic way that comes from a place of inadequacy, or we’re not trying, we’re busy, but we’re not really trying at the thing we need to be trying, we’re not doing that needleweaver.
Our best can’t get better. Our best can’t get better. So even though you might be learning a lot about business and you understand a lot about the theory of business, you’re not doing the next things that you need to be doing.
Your business can’t grow. This is why it’s so important. No matter how good your sales strategy, your marketing strategy, your product, your pricing, like all the different components of a business, they are important.
But if this ultimate perfectionist fear is running the show, there will not be much of a show except you either frantically overworking and burning out and then needing to like retreat and recover and being in that burnout cycle. I was in that for many years. I’m not in that anymore.
Haven’t been for a long time. I get that in my bones. Or if you are in that avoidance, you know you’re not doing the things you need to be doing.
You write out the to-do list with so much hope and optimism. You want to think it’s a week’s worth of work. It’s probably about three months worth of work you’ve got on there.
And you just keep moving those important things. You push them off to the end of the week. Then you run out of time or you’re just too tired at the end.
So you push them to the next week. And that happens again and again and again. So it’s not like you’re not doing anything on your business.
You are trying damn hard and you take it seriously. But ultimately, and this is what happened for me, I was half arsing it, which was so frustrating because I was trying so hard. But this ultimate perfectionist fear that I had, it’s like the mother of all the perfectionist fears, that had me not actually doing the things I needed to do to grow the business.
And this is why if you feel like your business is a hobby instead of a real business, that is such, such a good sign that you have this ultimate perfectionist fear running the show. Because when that is running the show, we do treat it like a hobby, as in we don’t do the things that need to happen to be able to grow the business. Or we do them very sporadically, or we do them at the last minute if there’s a deadline.
But when we do stuff at the last minute, this is so important, this used to be me, especially with university, that doing things at the last minute, because it’s such a rush and sure like you might get a good grade or the client’s happy or whatever, but you’re not actually getting to improve your skillset, which I’ll talk about in this episode as well, because that’s, it’s really important to understand. Okay. If our fear is my best won’t be good enough, we need to understand like what it actually means to give your best and comparing that with going through the motions and how it’s actually possible.
And it is to make your best better because we perfectionist things our best just is what it is. Yes, you can get, you can learn new things, but ultimately my best is my best. And if it’s not good enough the first time it never will be.
And so I don’t want to ever really give it a full go, because if it’s not good enough, the first time I’ll never be able to improve it. I’ll feel so hopeless that I’ll never reach my potential and everyone will see what a loser I am, but your best can get better. Really important to understand that that’s part of being able to overcome the ultimate perfectionist fear and be able to grow your business instead of knowing a lot. Having so much potential, but then being stopped because that perfectionism handbrake comes on, which I’ll also talk about as we go as well.
So I just want to share a couple of examples of when this has come up for me specifically. There’s so many, oh my God, so many I could choose from. So as I mentioned, I first noticed this a long time ago.
I think it was even when I was a high school student, because I remember saying to one of my good friends who I’m still good friends with to this day about this, what was going on. And she was like, wow, you’re very self-aware of that. I needed my psychologist to tell me that that was something that was going on.
I’ve always been privy to this in my own brain. And so really it came up for me a lot at university that I would procrastinate until the last minute on assignments, on exams, it didn’t matter what it was. And I was doing a law degree.
I have a law degree. I have a finance degree. I have a diploma of French.
And really when I look back, part of why I was very interested in law and finance, I still find those topics interesting, but part of it unconsciously, the appeal was those are things that smart people study. And so I didn’t want to get any evidence that I wasn’t smart. And so what I would do to be able to avoid being tried my best at it, not being good enough, is that I would procrastinate until the last minute.
I would pull an all nighter. I’d drive in the hour drive to my university, including parking. It took a good while to get a good park.
I woke up. I’d go to the university library and I’d sit there literally with my, and that’s one of my friends I’d do this with, we’d go in together and have like all these snacks that we’d go and get from the shops on the way. And I’d sit there with my textbook, literally propping my chin up to keep me awake as I did the assignment or did the study, like the last minute study for the exams, like cram it all in.
And so with that, when I did do really well, and I often did, that I had that ego boost, I would never say it like this, but like, this is what was going on. I was like, and I didn’t even try my hardest. And you can reflect on when you’ve been in this, like I got this really great result and I didn’t even try and how that not even trying, we perfectionists, we say that like, yeah.
And just imagine if I did instead of like, yeah. And I didn’t even try because I was scared to try, but I’m glad I could wing it and get good results. We say it with this, like, and like even just to ourselves and just like, I didn’t even try.
So it’s like this idea of just imagine how well I would have done if I did try my hardest. Like I felt really smart. I felt really smart when I’d pull an all-nighter, there was one of the law exams in particular, at one of the first year subjects, pulling an all-nighter and like doing all the last minute study.
It was one of the torts, so like negligence and all of that kind of thing. And we had an exam, like did it all last minute, got a seven, like got a high distinction. I felt so smart to have nailed that.
Did I remember anything? Did I learn? Did I develop? I learned good cramming skills for sure. I learned how to rote memorize things for sure, but I didn’t actually get more skilled in the subject. Unfortunately in the subject matter, I couldn’t really tell you that much about it to this day, but I felt really smart.
It let me hold on to my identity that I’m someone who’s smart and just imagine how well I do if I tried. And then if I didn’t get a good mark, then I had an out. Well, I didn’t even try my hardest.
You can see how he’s the trying just to, in whatever way we can keep our hope alive that we are in fact smart and intelligent and lovable. So just imagine how well I would have done if I hadn’t done an all nighter. Oh yeah.
I didn’t do well, but yeah, I only did one night of study. What can I expect? So either way I got to feel smart and both ways I wasn’t improving my skills. Like I just, it just wasn’t actually helping me, but with the way that school’s designed, you can do that.
And like I did end up with a law degree, a finance degree, a diploma in French. It’s not that I like, and I went on to work in the corporate world for two years. It’s not that I didn’t remember anything at all, but I was just really trying to get through in a way that let me keep feeling smart with putting in as little effort as possible so that I could feel smart if I didn’t manage to do it.
If that makes sense. It’s not the best place to learn from, and I’m someone who loves learning as I’m sure you are, but this ultimate perfectionist fear was stopping me. It felt too scary to actually fully try.
And I’m going to talk about what to do about this in this episode, but it felt so scary for that to actually happen. The trying felt so vulnerable. And this is part of our perfectionist brain is that, as I said, it feels better not to try than it does to try.
We don’t want to be a try hard. We see effort as a sign of inadequacy, but that is a problem because in school you can be rewarded for that. In business, totally different game.
If you don’t actually try, you can’t win at it. You can’t succeed at it. Or you do in a way that you don’t like and you’re burned out and you’re resentful because there’s lots of people who have had, quote unquote, success or accomplishment, as I would call it, who feel very unsuccessful because they have just been working against themselves that whole time.
And we want to work with ourselves and support ourselves instead of working against ourselves. And instead of just being really good at pushing through, we’re not trying to push through. That’s not the solution.
Just push through the fear. No, you’re going to burn out. We don’t want to do that.
I’m going to show you what to do instead, but it’s really understanding this perfectionist fear. We don’t have to get rid of it, but we do need to understand it and take it into account. So another example, this is something that came up with selling.
So in business, again, I have so many examples I could share and so many client examples too, but I love sharing my own experiences as well, just so you can understand, first of all, why I am the perfect person to teach you what I teach you. And also, because when I’m in the experience myself, I just have all the nuance of it, all the distinctions of it. I’m so curious about myself.
I’m studying myself constantly. And so I can really just such a full picture of it with you. And it just helps normalize like, yeah, Sam experiences this too, and she’s doing really well and I can do really well as well.
So this came out with selling. So with perfectionist getting shit done, we were doing quarterly launches. So we would open the program for enrollment about every three months and invite people to join.
And we had a period where there were less signups for the program each time that we did a launch. And then what happened is that I pulled back with the selling. And also at the same time, I got really fixated on trying to improve the selling, but it was more in this going through the motions and try harder way and try and perfect it way instead of really improving my skillset, evaluating, figuring out exactly what was going on.
I pulled back because of that fear that if I did give it my all, it still wouldn’t work. We wouldn’t have more people signing up. And then now what will I even do because my best didn’t work, so nothing else will.
And so I had to untangle that for myself and we’ll talk through the process. It’s coming, do not worry. But I had to untangle that for myself because that was that perfectionist fear coming up of the fear of trying, because if I try, I still won’t be able to solve it.
It’s not even worth the effort anyway. And now I’ve got little ones. I have a five-year-old currently, two twin three-year-olds and a one-and-a-half-year-old.
I don’t have the thoughts of, I don’t have all this effort to be putting in, all of this trying to be putting in. And so I only want to try things. This is where you get, you’ll know if you think this, where we’re in this mindset of, I only want to try things that work.
One of our PGSDers recently, she was saying in an ask a question that she asked, she was like, I can’t afford to try things that won’t work. That’s that perfectionist fear. That’s this illusion we have as perfectionists, that if we somehow figure out the perfect thing that will definitely work, we can just do it and be successful and have everything we want.
And we’re not doing it from any kind of malicious place or just trying to think we’re better than anyone else. I’m trying to think of even the word for any kind of place of like we’re entitled to it, but it is actually entitlement. And this idea that we should be, if we’re smart, I’ve done a whole episode on perfectionist entitlement, something that’s really hard to spot in yourself, but that episode will be helpful.
And we coach in this all the time in PGSD, is that we have this idea that because I’m smart, I should just be able to do it. Because I understand it, I should just be able to do it. Well, no, you need the skills.
You need the emotional capacity. There’s more to doing something than having a theoretical understanding, but we get into this mindset and this is what is reinforced in school. Knowledge equals all you need.
Knowledge is power. Yes, when combined with skills and emotional capacity. But if you don’t have the skills and emotional capacity, I’ll talk about this a bit later too, to be able to actually do the things you need to do, you won’t be able to do them.
That perfectionism handbrake will come on to stop you, that perfectionist fear. And so I call it the perfectionism handbrake. If you haven’t heard me use that terminology before this episode, I call it that because it is like a handbrake.
When this perfectionist fear comes up, it creates resistance. If you think about a handbrake, right? You pull on a handbrake on a car and I looked at the definition of it as well. It’s like to lock the wheels and like stop the motion.
We’re trying to stop motion. Our perfectionist fear is trying to stop us being in motion so that we don’t find out we’re not good enough. It feels safer to be stopped than to be going.
And so you need to be aware when that perfectionism handbrake comes on, when that perfectionist fear comes up and it will, and there’s nothing wrong with you and it’s not a big problem, but you do need to take it into account. So I am going to talk about that now, about what the cure is, how to overcome the ultimate perfectionist fear. So a few things.
First of all, as I’ve mentioned throughout this episode already, we want to take that perfectionist fear into account when it comes to taking action. That perfectionist fear stops us from taking action or it could have you in that stop-start cycle. You’re motivated by that fear for a little bit that maybe I could actually do it perfectly this time.
Maybe I could actually do it my best this time. And then as soon as the moment comes when you realize actually I’m not going to be able to do it as good as I want, you stop doing it. You abandon it.
You get busy with something else. You run out of energy because you’ve just been working, working, working, and forgetting all your own needs. So that perfectionist fear stops us from taking action and doing the things we need to do to build a business.
So you need to be aware of that. As I said, no matter how good anything else is in your business, like the core components, we want to have all of that be there. But this isn’t just like a mindset thing.
This is you have a particular thought pattern that is creating resistance to doing what you need to do. And you currently aren’t able to overcome that resistance or remove it consistently enough to be able to build your business, to be able to publish a sales page or consistently market your business or send the email or pitch the clients or deliver the work on time without burning out and doing it in a mad last minute rush. Or people pleasing.
That’s another thing that comes from this ultimate perfectionist fear. That we really, because we want to be loved, we want to do our best, that you might completely neglect your own business in order to really try and make sure your clients are happy and you accommodate their every need. We still want to do great service for our clients, but there’s a difference between that and people pleasing, so they like you and so you don’t feel like a fraud.
That’s separate things. So we want to take it into account when it comes to taking action. So there’s one thing you really want to understand, which is that your best can get better through practice and because you might already like you hear that you’re like, yeah, but there is a difference between practice and going through the motions.
And so what comes up a lot that I have seen so often, if you’re feeling behind your business, this is definitely something to reflect on, is that we equate time spent doing something with us practicing it and improving. So if you feel like, I’ve had my business for three years and I’m still not making a full-time income yet, for example, if you’ve just been going through the motions rather than practicing, upskilling, trying, doing things, evaluating, all of that, I’ll give an example in a second.
But if you’ve just been going through the motions or doing a lot of procrasti-learning, like all of that, it doesn’t entitle you to being at a certain place in your business. And we can think this, I think, because of school, that they don’t let you just stay in the same grade just because you haven’t learned everything that you could. You get pushed up based on your age.
So like if you spend, for example, here in Australia, if you spend 12 years in school, now we have prep, but if you have grade one to grade 12, after 12 years, you will have finished school because they literally just don’t have the places in the schools to keep back people who, like they push everyone up so that everyone can have a spot in a school. So that doesn’t happen in business. And so you don’t just, because of time spent in your business, you don’t get to graduate to the next level.
So let’s say full-time income is the level you want to graduate to. Most of our PGSDErs want to be able to make a full-time income from their business. That is a goal that they have.
And whether that’s going to be happening in the next year or the next three years, that’s something they’re actively working towards and really wanting to achieve. But being in business for a certain period of time does not entitle you to that. But then we can go into these thoughts that we have, that we’re behind because we should be there by now because we’ve been in business for so long.
And what have I even been doing all of these years? Because I’m not at that and like going into all this shame as well, as a perfectionist brains like to do. But what’s going on is that we are, and there’s so many new skills to learn with business. It takes time.
I didn’t make my first dollar for the first three years and I was trying really hard, but I had nothing for sale because that felt so scary, this perfectionist fear. What if I have something for sale? I find out it’s such a flop like that. I had to develop myself up to become the person who could even have something for sale.
I had a lot of personal growth to even become someone who could put something out there for sale. So I get it. I’m not saying like you should be further along than when you are and like, you’re not trying hard enough and just take your business seriously.
Like no, you take it seriously. You’re really committed to it. All we’re talking about here is how to have that commitment translate into business growth.
Instead of it, you’re being committed and then you’re spinning your wheels. It’s not you, it’s the perfectionist fear. But when you take that into account and what to do with it, then you can grow your business.
You can actually do the things you need to do to grow your business. So we want to distinguish what’s the difference between practicing and going through the motions. So if you think about, and I play a lot of tennis and I love tennis.
So if you think about with tennis, I think we all understand that sport, even if you don’t really know much about it, that you don’t get better just by playing often. So say for example, imagine someone who plays once a week for 20 years, they could have very little over 20 years, hundreds of times playing tennis. They could have very little improvement just because when they go, they’re just going through the motions.
They are just, and I looked up the definition, so good, performing a task or obligation mechanically without real interest, enthusiasm, emotional investment, or belief in its importance. Now with this tennis example, they might be having fun and playing with their friends and it being social and all of that, but just going through like, yeah, I’m going to play and I’m going to hit my forehand the way I always hit my forehand. I’m going to hit my backhand the way I always hit my backhand.
I’m going to serve the way I always serve. If you approach it that way, you’re not going to improve, but your best can get better. It’s not static.
It’s not fixed. Practice is the actual application or use of an idea, belief or method, rather than just talking about it or theorizing it or going through the motions with it. So if you imagine someone who’s playing tennis every week for 20 years and every time they’re playing, and not from this nitpicky, like judging me, like, oh, everything about my game is so bad.
We tend to think like, oh, evaluating and reflecting so that I can improve means finding all the flaws and all the inadequacies and then optimizing them and perfecting them. That’s the perfectionist fear talking when we do it that way. Instead, we want to take a much more grounded approach that isn’t based in our own self-worth and trying to finally be good enough and finally be loved.
It’s all in like the vibe of it. The vibe of how to actually practice isn’t with the nitpicking and the self-criticism and being mean to try and motivate yourself to be better. It is being able to be curious, to be engaged.
So like right now, for example, when I’m playing tennis, I am working on my forehand. And every time, as I said, I’m working on it. I’m not just doing it.
I’m working on it. And sometimes, and I’ll talk about frustration soon, sometimes it is frustrating. Like this week when I play with Steve, we go at least once a week together.
And when I was feeding the ball to him, it was just going every which way. And normally it goes like at this point, normally when I feed, it goes to where it needs to go. And it just wasn’t.
And that was really frustrating. But then I was like, okay, what do I think’s going on? Is it that like the racket base is too open? I tried different things until I got that feeding inconsistent. It wasn’t just like, well, it is what it is.
It’s just, I just, I’m not good at tennis. Like all of this, all or nothingness. It was just like, huh, I’m curious what’s happening.
I’m going to hold space for that frustration because I want my best to get better. So if I just get fed up with myself or I just go through the motions and be like, yeah, that just happens to me. And that’s that.
I’m not going to have my best get better. I want to get more skilled at tennis. And that means that if you imagine someone playing every week, just once a week for 20 years with that approach of working on things and not from this, like, I need to be like the best tennis player in the world by next week.
Otherwise I’m not good enough. There’s an unhealthy way to practice tennis for sure. But if we think about the person who’s there and who’s curious and who’s engaged and who’s studying themselves and like, hey, maybe if I do it a little bit more like this, next time it might go this way.
Okay. I did that. I went a bit too far.
Okay. Next time, let me just try this way. Okay.
That seems to be working. Okay. But now I can’t hit it like that every time.
Like I keep trying to go back to the old way and like with habits, like in tennis, you can really get some habits. Like, okay. I didn’t even notice I’m bringing my arm in too close to my body.
I need to keep my arm extended. Okay. Now I’m getting in my head.
I need to get out of my head and just go back into my body and just let myself do it. Like there’s all of that. You’ll probably have an area of your life where you do actually have that more growth minded way of practicing where you are curious and engaged and like your best gets better.
Your best gets better. We’re in our perfectionist fear. We feel like our best is as good as it can get.
And so everything is a test of whether or not I’m good enough. And so if everything is a test of whether or not I’m good enough, I only want to take tests that I will pass. And so you might notice in yourself or in other perfectionists, you might know that we tend with this perfectionist sphere going on, not to try things we don’t think we’ll be successful at, which is why a lot of perfectionists will be like, I’m actually quite successful.
Like I remember one of my first one-on-one coaching clients a long time ago now that she was like, I’m actually successful in every area of my life. And I can also acknowledge that some of that is that I don’t try things I don’t think I’ll be successful at quite easily and quite quickly. And she was someone she was studying hard.
Like she was putting a lot of effort into her life and outwardly was someone who was really learning and growing and curious. But also when she was choosing what to learn and grow and be curious about, she was ultimately being limited by this perfectionist fear of, well, I don’t want to try something I really couldn’t, don’t believe I could be good at. Even if I had the desire to do it, if I think it would take a lot of trying, I don’t want to do that because then everyone will realize I’m not actually smart.
So it’s so important to look out for yourself. Like are you just even the opportunities you’re choosing or the strategies you’re choosing, you’re just choosing like, here’s what I think I could be successful at without trying. And just to reconcile it, if you’re familiar with me and I teach, I love the question of what would this look like if it was easy? Helps us uncomplicate things.
Our perfectionist brains, we love to complicate because when something’s complicated, we don’t have to do it or it takes longer to do it. We’re so busy with that we don’t have to be without feelings. But that doesn’t mean only try things that you’re guaranteed to succeed at very quickly and easily without effort.
That’s not what that question is. It’s just a question to help you uncomplicate. So we want to have that distinction between practicing and putting an effort in and then just going through the motions.
And recently on a PGSD coaching call, as in yesterday when I coached in PGSD, one of our PGSDer was in a place of just feeling really defeated. This tends to come up when we are perfectionists building businesses. At some point, you’ll go through a period most likely of feeling quite defeated from a thought she was in a situation, her business was profitable, she was doing well, she was helping clients.
Like outwardly, circumstantially, she was doing well. Her thought was this revenue is insubstantial. There’s no point trying anything differently because it won’t work.
From that place, she felt defeated. And then from the defeated feeling, she was just going through the motions. She’s doing her podcast every week.
She was doing her Instagram posts every week. She was doing her email newsletter once a month. And her revenue wasn’t changing because her willingness to put in an effort to really figuring out what was going on, like she’s saying, I’m not getting any sales for my podcast.
She hadn’t tried to figure that out. It was just, it’s not happening. So maybe I should quit instead of like, hey, let’s get curious about what’s going on there.
There’s so many ways to dissect that. I won’t go into it this episode. But just being in that place of like going through the motions, when that is happening, and you’re just like posting to post and posting for the sake of being consistent, for example, on social media, that is coming from a place of being scared that if you try, it won’t be worth the effort.
It won’t be good enough. You’re not good enough. You’re going to get proof of that.
And then everyone else and myself will find out I’m and that will be so painful. So let me just, let me just, and it’s so painful also to be getting led by this perfectionist fear. Let me spend in her case, four work days a week in my home office, going through the motions and feeling like a failure.
Doesn’t feel that great to have the perfectionist fear in charge. Another really important reason to be able to shift out of it. So the fear doesn’t have to go anywhere.
Really important. We don’t have to overcome perfectionism if you will. But what we do need to do is to be able to take it into account when you are doing things.
I’m going to keep saying that to keep reinforcing to you the importance of it. It doesn’t have to go, but there are some things we can do to really help. So number one, before we get into, there are three core things, but before that you want to identify for you why it’s worth trying your best, even if you don’t get the result.
And I just want to offer to you what is really helpful for me, which is that I like myself better when I’m trying. I like myself better when I’m making decisions. I like myself better when I’m like the, and not just like, I love myself more if I’m performing well, but like my, what I mean with this is my experience of my life is so much more rich and so much more alive when I’m going for it.
When I’m trying, when I’m putting in an effort, even if you just think about tennis, like for me, it’s so, like I enjoy so much more the times that I go with Steve and we’re trying to figure out, okay, what are we doing with this? And like from this place of like, I’m really excited to keep developing my skills. And then two months later, be like, look at us, like now our rallies are so different to a few months ago. That’s so satisfying.
I love that instead of like, oh yeah, here I am again, just doing the same thing. I don’t like that experience of my life when it’s the same old, same old experience. So that for me is a reason why it is worth trying, even if I’m not guaranteed the result.
Because in entrepreneurship, we are not guaranteed the result. It is high risk, high reward, and the risk means there’s uncertainty. There isn’t, okay.
And we often try to seek this. If you just do this, if you just post this many times and post this in this format, then you’ll definitely get a client. Like we’re trying to constantly seek that certainty, but it’s like, there’s low reward if you just do that in a way that everyone else does it because there’s low risk.
And I’m not saying like, you have to do risky things and like don’t learn from others. A hundred percent learn from others. A hundred percent learn those things.
But we constantly with our perfectious brain, we’re trying to avoid this uncertainty and it just, you want to have tolerance for the uncertainty, which I’ll talk about soon. Let’s go into the three things. So number one, so this is how, like what to do, practically speaking.
Number one, when it comes to planning out what you’re going to do in your business, you want to, you don’t, sorry, you don’t want to plan in a way that triggers your perfectionist fear or exacerbates it. So I’ll talk about what that means. So as we know, the ultimate perfectionist fear is that our best won’t be good enough and that if it won’t be good enough, it’s not even worth trying.
And so this kind of thinking freezes us up and overwhelms us. So if you think about, for example, a to-do list, a long to-do list, that is actually a symptom of the perfectionist fear. We are expressing with our long to-do list, I have to do everything this week to have any chance at success and being lovable.
Like that, this is my best. I’ve written out all the things I think would be my best and doing my best and let me see if I can do them. It’s obviously very overwhelming, tends to make us freeze, tends to not be a helpful tool.
Even though, I mean, I love the satisfaction of taking off a to-do list. An overscheduled calendar is also a symptom of the perfectionist fear. By not giving yourself enough time or space to do what you need to do, you are making that perfectionist fear or enough clarity, you are making that perfectionist fear feel more likely to come true because you can’t do your best.
You’re literally not giving yourself the situation where you can do your best. If you’re squeezing tasks in like, okay, didn’t get it done today because I procrastinated on it, I was scrolling, so I’ll try and get it done in the morning. Oh, wait, I didn’t wake up early.
I’ll do it the next evening. Oh, wait, I’m too tired. I’ll do it on the weekend.
Oh, wait, we went out with the family. If you’re living like that, which nothing wrong with you, it’s just that perfectionist fear is in control and we want to have you be bigger than the perfectionist fear. I can say, but we want to be you driving, not the fear.
So what we want to do is be able to have a way to plan that actually allows you to have the best setup possible so that that perfectionist fear comes up as little as possible. It’s not that it’ll be completely away, but the things that help us not have that perfectionist fear come up and be exacerbated is that we have, we know what we need to do to work on. We don’t have that overwhelming to-do list.
You know your needle movers. You know exactly what you need to work on. You know the goal you’re working towards.
You know what you need to do in order to achieve it. The next step, and it’s not, I need to do everything, including the stuff I’ve been procrastinating for a year and my new ideas. You know your needle movers, there aren’t going to be that many of them.
I teach you how to identify needle movers inside PGSD. It’s part of power planning that you identify your needle movers. So you need to have that clarity to know what to focus on.
It’s so helpful for our perfectionist brains that you actually know what you need to do your best at. You’re not telling yourself you need to be doing your best at all the different things. So overwhelming makes us freeze.
You also need to have a realistic plan that you can actually follow through on. Do not underestimate this. I know we can be optimistic at the start of the week.
We hope this is the week everything will be able to be turned around, but you need a plan you can actually follow through on. It’s very, very hard to do your best and improve your best when you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t have enough time to do it.
Everything is quite vague. Work on lead generation, work on website. It’s just all these different activities.
In power planning, you will be planning in your outcomes, the result of the action you’re taking. Teach you this in PGSD, not just like, I’ll be busy, like post on social media and all these different things. So what you want to do is you want to have a plan that works with your perfectionist brain rather than against it.
Because when it works with your perfectionist brain and takes into account the fact you have that fear going on, the fact that your brain tends towards all or nothing thinking, it tends towards a really optimistic way of planning. It tends towards wanting to overthink and procrastinate. You want to have a way of planning out your week and your business tasks so that you know what to work on and you can actually do it and you have enough time and space to do it.
And really important with that, with the time and space, I’m like, well, when I have lots of time to do something, I just procrastinate on it. It’s just because you’re not planning properly as a perfectionist. I will teach you how to plan in a way that works your perfectionist brain inside PGSD with power planning.
This isn’t about like, just give yourself like a whole week to do a thing that will take an hour. You need flexible structure. Flexible structure, really important.
It supports our perfectionist brain so much. So we’re not just trying to say like, just give yourself forever to do it. That won’t help you.
We’re not trying to say be super rigid and strict and like, just make sure you get it done no matter what. That won’t help you. We want to have flexible structure so you know exactly what to work on and that it’s flexible.
You can account for real life happening. You’re not derailed every time something unexpected comes up because life will life. We need a plan that works with life, not only when life isn’t happening.
So number two, so first of all, you want to be planning properly as a perfectionist. That’s power planning. You learn that inside PGSD.
You can learn that today. Sign up for PGSD now. Go and learn that today.
The first thing you’ll do in PGSD is the power planning course that takes, I believe, two hours and 45 minutes in total to complete. And then you have the workshop of me guiding you through your very first power hour. So you can be power planning today or if not today, depending on the time you’re listening to this, by this time tomorrow.
Super simple steps. Anyone can learn them. I’ve taught them to so many people.
I invented power planning for myself because I was so sick of not following through and I realized part of the issue, such a big part of the issue of following through for me and for the people that I help is that the plans I was following through on were pretty much impossible to follow through on. So I had to be able to better follow through. I needed a better plan.
I need to plan in a way that works for my brain instead of just having a pretty plan to look good on paper. So you need to have the plan you actually want to follow through on be a plan that helps you to follow through and makes it as easy as it can be. So then what you want to do as you’re going throughout your week and doing things, you want to notice when that perfectionist fear is coming up, when that perfectionism handbrake is coming on.
Because with power planning as well, it’s not just time management, but it’s a mind management tool. And one of the ways that it works is that you will see in real time when that perfectionist fear is coming up. When you’re working from a to-do list, it’s really easy not to notice when that fear is coming up.
But with power planning, part of how it works is that you will notice when that perfectionist fear is coming up. That awareness is super important. And you will get more and more skilled when you learn this.
And inside PGSD, you will get more and more skilled at noticing that after the fact, and then in the moment, and then you can even begin to preempt it ahead of time and avoid it altogether. So number three, you want to learn how to follow through with your plans, even when your perfectionist brain doesn’t want to. This is a skill set.
Because your perfectionism handbrake will come on, there will be resistance, and you need to learn the skill of both removing resistance, and when that’s not possible, overcoming the resistance so that you can do what you need to do to get better, to get better at marketing, to get better at sales, to do those things consistently, to put yourself out there, to be able to do the things you need to do, publish the sales page, reply to the email without waiting a week to, because you’re scared you won’t say the right thing. And then you’ve waited a week and now you’re like, oh my God, I’ve waited a week and now I feel so bad. All of that, you can actually just do the things you need to do to build the So let’s talk about what this looks like.
Number one, removing resistance. This is the skill of shifting your perfectionist thought to a powerful thought so that it feels safe to try and to give your best effort. So when the moment comes that perfectionist resistance, that handbrake is there, you can notice that and shift that perfectionist thought to a powerful thought.
Then if you can’t do that, because sometimes that will feel like a stretch, you want to be able to be able to complete what you need to do with that resistance there. So it’s less of an overcoming resistance and it’s more of a complete with resistance, like complete what you’re doing with resistance. Hold space for the resistance, if you will.
Allow it to be there. Let resistance come along for the ride. So you need the skill of experiencing, we can teach this in PGSD, the skill of experiencing a high level of emotion without disconnecting from what you’re doing.
So you need disappointment tolerance. This is the skill of experiencing disappointment instead of going to shame. So if you are scared of disappointment, which is a very common fear for perfectionists, because it makes sense, right? If we try our best and it isn’t good enough, we’re disappointed and ultimately we’re disappointed that we’re so unlovable.
And so instead of being with that disappointment, painful, we go into shame. It feels more comfortable that just being in this inadequate self-pity kind of place. We all experience shame as humans.
It’s all very normal, but we perfectionists tend to spend a lot of extra time in shame because we don’t want to feel disappointment. And we make disappointment, like when we feel disappointed, we make ourselves wrong. Instead of like, oh, I’m just still learning that skill.
We’re like, oh, it must mean I’m not good enough. Then we feel ashamed and inadequate. That doesn’t help us to learn new things.
You don’t tend to do your best learning. You’re either like in this kind of frenzy learning of like, and I just need to find the perfect answer so I can finally fix it all at once. Or you just completely change course and pivot and like try and do something completely different instead.
So you need to have disappointment tolerance. You need frustration tolerance. This is the skill of experiencing frustration without going into avoidance or like just kind of disconnecting and like just being able to be like, gah, like this is so frustrating.
Okay, let me regroup and try again. It’s really being able to have the ability to be with that frustration, to be with that disappointment or be willing to have disappointment come up and uncertainty tolerance. Because in entrepreneurship, we don’t know, like nothing’s guaranteed to succeed.
There’s always uncertainty, even with success. To what degree will we succeed? How much will we succeed? So you need to be able to have, to be able to have there be resistance and you just complete the thing, support yourself, not push through, power yourself up to complete it even with resistance there, that you have the ability to be with disappointment and frustration and uncertainty without going into the certainty of it’s definitely not worth trying or the certainty of this definitely won’t work or the certainty of I should definitely try something else. Just being in the uncertainty of I don’t know the degree to which this will be successful or I don’t know the degree to which this will fail, but I’m willing to try because A, I like my experience of myself and my life much better when I’m trying.
But also I want to build this business and I know that trying is part of the ingredients of success. It’s not just knowledge. I need skills.
I need emotional capacity, which you just talked about. I got to try, like I got to be willing to do stuff. So when you are able to, and just to recap, plan in a way that reduces your perfectionist fear as much as possible by not exacerbating the all or nothing thinking and by giving yourself too little time to do things or too unstructured of a plan.
If you’re just like, fuck it, I’m just so disappointed with myself at not falling through. I’m just going to wing it. It’s disappointing to wing it because you’re still not getting what you want.
So you want to plan in a way that works your perfectionist brain, power planning, super simple, three steps. You learn them in PGSD. You can learn them today.
Notice when the perfectionist fear is coming up, when you’re power planning, literally you will see this as part of the process. So powerful for awareness. And then you want to learn how to follow through with your plans.
Even when your perfectionist brain doesn’t want to, you will also learn this inside perfectionist getting shit done as well. So you either need to shift your perfectionist thought to a powerful thought, or you need to be able to hold space for the resistance by having a higher disappointment tolerance, frustration tolerance, and uncertainty tolerance. So you want to join PGSD.
If you found this helpful, you want to join the program because this is exactly what we do inside. It supports you to do this. It’s exactly what you’re going to learn.
And every day your perfectionist fear is running the show. Your business isn’t growing, but you are trying so hard. You are so committed.
You do not have an issue with not taking, like you’re not taking your business seriously. You are, but you’re spinning your wheels because of the perfectionist fear. So you want to plan properly, notice that perfectionist fear coming up and be able to follow through even when that perfectionist fear is there so you can grow your business.
Instead of going through the motions, you’ll be upscaling. And instead of being busy, you’ll be creating momentum. So I want to join you to invite, what am I saying? I can hear the kids home.
I want to invite you to join the program. You want to sign up. You want to be inside perfectionist getting shit done.
So you can actually do something about this perfectionist fear. It doesn’t go away on its own. It isn’t overcome by motivation and discipline.
You’ve got to understand it, take it into account, know how to shift it without belittling yourself for having it and take action. So that’s what we do inside PGSD. Go to the show notes, sign up today.
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.