The perfect myth that is keeping you trapped
A few years ago I wrote a blog post about letting go of perfectionism but wanted to address the topic again today as it is an area that I’m still asked about a lot when people are working on building confidence.
The competence/confidence loop
A great way to build confidence in a particular area is mastering a skill and building your competence levels. Action breeds confidence and keeping practicing and getting better means you are seeing progress and your belief in yourself and your abilities increases.
The problem often comes though in knowing when ‘good enough’ is good enough! For example, you might want to be starting your own business. At what point are you ready to ‘launch’? When you have researched your market and have a waiting list of clients? When you have your website designed and fully optimised? When you have 10 products ready to sell? When you have 5,000 followers on Instagram? When you have found a business coach or mentor or mastermind group? When you know you won’t fail?
How will you know you have achieved your goal?
Defining clearly your measures of success upfront will help you stay on track and know when you are ready, but you need to question whether your measures of success are reasonable, or if they are actually stopping you from making the progress you ultimately want.
Using the previous example, do you need a waiting list of clients before you launch, or could you launch when you had the first product ready and build from there? What is your real motivation behind this goal - is it having a business that is making money and evolving as it goes, or is it having a waiting list of clients? If it is the former, you might want a waiting list, and this may be your ideal, but would using this as a measure help or hinder you in achieving your ultimate goal of having a business?
Wanting to be ‘perfect’ isn’t necessarily wrong but it may not always be attainable - especially as everyone’s definition of perfection is different so there isn’t a way you can objectively say something is perfect. Instead, you can spend your time chasing this ideal that doesn’t exist anywhere other than in your own head.
You then hold yourself back, using the excuse of not being ready, because something isn’t perfect. Instead of building your confidence, it has the opposite effect as you have tricked yourself into thinking you are taking action, but by focusing on the unachieveable, you will never feel ready.
This ‘perfect’ thinking can affect and hold you back in so many areas of your life. For example you may feel you can’t:
talk about the idea you have until it is fully formed and risk assessed
launch the product until you feel every aspect is ready
ask the question as you need time to find the perfect way of phrasing it so you don’t feel you sound stupid
try the dance class because you don’t know if we will be able to do it
go for the promotion because you might not get it
tell someone you love them because they might not say it back
share your dream of starting your own business because your friends may not understand and challenge your life choices when they are different to theirs.
Brave, not perfect
As Reshma Saujani describes in the brilliant book Brave, Not Perfect, we often let the fear of doing something new (and not being able to do it perfectly because we totally forget there is a learning curve to everything and we are not born knowing how to do, well, anything!) hold us back from even trying. However, if we can take a step back and gain some perspective we can ask a more empowering question: “What might the cost be if I don’t do this?” Reshma says we then need to follow up with: “And which option scares me more?”
Letting go of this need to always be perfect can be really freeing. It allows you to try, it allows you to make mistakes and be able to learn from them, it allows you to keep building your confidence by taking the actions that move you forwards, without fear of your own judgement.
So, my final question to you today - are you still going to live your life wanting to be perfect? If you answered “no”, I’m so proud of you, but just ponder on this for a second and ask yourself: Is that true or do you think that is the perfect answer to give?
I would love for you to get to the point you can say, “I am confident in who I am and what I can achieve. I want to live my life trying my best and to keep improving.”
It isn’t always easy. To do it, I believe you need to keep taking action that moves you towards achieving your desired end result(s), strive for excellence but realise there is always something else to learn, or improve on, and really embrace the good is good enough philosophy, and that done is better than perfect.
