“Hello, my name is Sean. I’m a recovering perfectionist. And I’ve been clean for 23 months now.”
Let’s be honest. Perfectionism is like a mental disease. It will ruin your business, and possibly your happiness. It has the power to destroy your dreams, cause you unnecessary overwhelm and heartache, and make you quit seeking whatever it is you’re after.
Plus, I can tell you from personal experience that I didn’t start achieving any of my significant goals until I gave up the ridiculous notion that I should be perfect in all I do. So please, if you want better results, stop pretending you have the ability to be perfect.
I know a lot of people are very proud of their perfectionism, just like I was. We tend to want to wear it on our sleeve like a badge of courage. In reality, it’s an excuse we like to hold onto that makes it okay for not achieving our dreams. It’s a coping mechanism, actually. It allows us to rationalize our poor results.
Here’s what that rationalization used to sound like for me: I don’t get my goals because I’m a perfectionist. So I set goals that can’t be achieved, and that way I’ll always keep striving to be better.
That makes a lot of logical sense. And that’s actually what I used to teach my students 5 years ago – you should never get your goals if they’re high enough. Again – my emotional coping mechanism. As though it’s noble to not achieve your goals.
What I realized 23 months ago, however, is that as a perfectionist, NOT achieving your goals becomes part of the goal setting process. In other words, I can remember setting a really high goal, missing it, and then coping with it under the guise of perfectionism. I would set another really high goal, miss it, and cope again, pretending it’s noble to be a perfectionist. And this cycle of goal-missing would continue.
The problem was I never actually got any of my goals, so I started to identify myself as a person who misses his goals! In the immortal words of the robot from Lost in Space – “DANGER! DANGER!”
And then what happened after that was truly sad. As I lowered my goals, to things I actually could achieve quite easily, I still wouldn’t allow myself to achieve them because, remember, I’m someone who doesn’t achieve his goals. So I would unconsciously sabotage myself to match my belief about being a goal-misser.
What I now realize is that tiny successes lead to small successes, and small successes lead to medium successes, and medium successes lead to large success, and large successes lead to really big successes, and successes make you happy!
It’s incredibly important that you allow yourself to experience success at the smallest levels so getting your goals becomes part of the process, instead of the opposite.
And there’s something even more important that I’ll touch on tomorrow…
