Perfection, Fear & A Happy New Year

It's here! Another new year, a fresh start. Have anything you were waiting to release until today, the first day of 2019?

If you're either a self proclaimed or peer proclaimed 'high achiever' like me, you have probably suffered at some point with perfectionism. In fact, you may have even used it as a 'weakness' for a job interview thinking that it was a cleverly disguised strength. 

In the corporate world you were probably right, but in the realm of running a business, perfectionism is just another word for procrastination, and I'm going to just say it, fear. I'm saying this purely because I am so very guilty of it. 

When we are in preparation, consuming, learning and perfection mode, we can't fail. There is no one to judge you, it's SAFE, so a lot of us get stuck here. We convince ourselves that we need to learn more, know more, become a better expert before we can actually serve anyone, let alone sell anything. 

We negotiate with our minds, telling ourselves reasons why we should delay. 

Staying in this safe place isn't helping us or the people who are looking for the solution that we're sitting on. Learning more, getting more online tools, perfecting our website, sales pages, branding our sites, changing our about page, .... any work except that which leads directly to sales is an avoidance of being judged, it's fear.

So I will let you in on a major secret that I am still trying to grasp as a recovering perfectionist: it doesn't have to be perfect. If you're trying to make it perfect, you're missing something.

You can only improve and strive for "perfection" after you have results and feedback. Not before. Trying to get it all right BEFORE you launch or put it out into the world is just a big waste of time that you can't afford.

It's time to do that thing you've been putting off. See it for what it is.

No more pretending that you're still working on it, trying to make it better than anything the world has ever seen, tying to make it perfect. 

Let 2019 be the year that you embrace that done is better than perfect. It's done.