5 Ways to Stop Being a Perfectionist Entrepreneur

What would you do if you didn’t have to do it perfectly?

Launch a course?

Create a Youtube channel?

Produce a podcast?

We have so many wonderful goals we want to achieve, and they are usually in service of a greater good.

We want to launch a course because we want to make sure teachers have support for their grade 3 students. We want to have a Youtube channel so middle aged women can see that they can do yoga too. We want to produce a podcast so that other survivors of childhood bullying can thrive.

What stops us from achieving these admirable visions and plans? For many of us, it’s perfectionism.

We want to do these things, but we want to do them RIGHT! We don’t want to put out a podcast and then work on it each week to tweak it to make it better while we improve our interviewing skills. No, we want to have it perfectly produced and number one on the charts right off the bat.

So we research and tinker, and hold off until we can hire the best producer. We write drafts and study our mentors. We make plans and graphs. What we don’t do? The actual podcast.

Perfectionism has us stalled at the whiteboard. Forever planning and never implementing.

It’s fear, of course. It’s fear in disguise of having very high standards. Fear of being criticized. Fear of being “found out” as not smart enough. Fear of failure. Fear of the world finally pronouncing: “See. You’ve been wasting your time all along. We knew you weren’t good enough.”

Perfectionism holds us back from taking risks, moving forward, and doing the things we've always dreamed of doing.

Here’s five ways to build your business without stalling out in perfectionism:

1. Commit to progress not perfection.

   Tomorrow you will wake up with new problems to tackle. And that’s okay. That’s what being alive is. It’s simply progress.

2. Remember you don’t need to act only when you feel 100% confident.

   You can act when you feel shaky, uncertain and even trembling with nerves. Fear accompanies us on all our great adventures.

3. Aim to do B- work.

   Stop striving for the A+. Repeat after me: “Good enough. Good enough. Good enough.”

4. Offer compassion to yourself like you would to a friend.

   You wouldn’t criticize a friend who put out a brand new product. No. You’d be proud of them for sharing something they created. Show yourself the same compassion.

5. Often what we’re trying to prevent with our perfectionist tendencies is the feelings we imagine we’ll feel if we fail: shame, disappointment, or embarrassment.

   But if you can learn to feel ANY feeling, and not fall apart, well, that’s the ticket to success right there.

Being willing to make mistakes, fail, try again, and slowly improve is what it will take to pull off your amazing goals. Repeat after me: Good enough.