This essay originally appeared in my weekly Leadership Letters email.
If you’re a listener of my podcast, Beyond PRO, you know that I’ve introduced themes to each month’s content. It’s an experiment of course, but my hope is that it’ll offer a deeper dive into the topics you care about. (If you’re a listener — please let me know if you like this new format!)
This month, we’re talking about how to do more brave things. This is on my mind as my current cohort of the Leadership League Mastermind recently declared their bold-ass moves for the program, and are already underway making it happen.
I’ll update you on their progress later on, but for now, I wanted to share something that really feels pertinent to this idea of doing more brave things.
And it’s to stop being so precious with your work.
As I explore my own tendencies toward perfectionism, I am now more acutely aware of how smart, thoughtful women (and a few good men) consistently get in the way of their own greatness by trying to ‘get it all right’.
They twist, turn, contort, flip and spin their ideas (and decisions) over and over again in search of rightness. They want to know this is going to work. They don’t want it to fail. They become paralyzed with fear.
It literally stops them in their tracks. Full stop.
And yet deep down, I know these women get that it’s a fool’s errand to chase perfection and guarantees. But still they try. Again and again, beating themselves up along the way.
Ironically, what they berate themselves for is rarely the failure, but rather the inaction that’s caused when they’re deep in analysis-paralysis and striving for a level of perfection that can never be attained.
Last week I spoke on a panel in front of about 117 women in business after the screening of Dream, Girl – a beautiful documentary about women entrepreneurs. At the end of the evening, the moderator asked each of us:
“If you could go back to the beginning of your business journey, what advice would you give yourself?”
*Photo credit: Startup Calgary
My answer was simple:
Think less. Do more.
If you want to do brave things with your work and life, you’ve got to get outside your head and start making moves. They can be small baby steps or giant leaps, but you must commit to taking action every single day (or at least most days!) in service of your dreams.
I know you’ve heard this before, but I’m saying it again in case you’re the person feeling stuck in the mud and in desperate need of this reminder.
So please do remember: when you’re taking action, you don’t have time to think about all the ways you’re not getting it right. You simply DO.
When you’re stuck in your head, you lose your capacity to stay grounded to your why and chart out a clear progress path. All you’ll see is barriers and ways you might fail, and all you’ll hear is why you’re not enough and how everyone is so much better at this than you.
Good enough is great
I know what you’re really thinking though. You put a high value on quality and you don’t want to put out shoddy work. You want to leave no shadow of a doubt that you know your stuff.
So you wait, you research, you tweak and you hold back because “it’s not quite ready yet” – which is really code for “I’m scared to death this isn’t good enough so let me avoid all the fears by justifying why I need to get one more thing in place first.”
Am I right?
In his book, “The Pursuit of Perfect: How to stop chasing perfection and start living a richer, happier life” Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D. describes the difference between what he calls, Perfectionists and Optimalists, and their relationship to progress and feedback.
“The perfectionist wants to look good, and therefore she tries to appear flawless by deflecting criticism. The picture that the Perfectionist has of herself – the only picture she tolerates – is of flawlessness, and she goes to great lengths to convince others that the way she views herself is indeed correct.”
Translation? Nothing short of perfect is possible, and anything less than this is unacceptable and will be immediately criticized.
Her solution? To wait until such time as she reaches a standard no good woman can meet.
Result? An immense sense of stress, dissatisfaction and feelings of not-enoughness because nothing she really cares about ever comes to fruition.
Now —
“The Optimalist, by contrast, is open to suggestions. She recognizes the value of feedback – whether it takes the form of failure or success when she attempts something or of praise or criticism from others. Though she may not like it when her flaws are pointed out, she nevertheless takes the time to openly and honestly assess whether the criticism is valid and then asks herself how she can learn and improve from it.”
Translation? She stops chasing perfect and starts taking action, regardless of whether it works or not.
Her solution? She takes the information she gleans from experimenting and uses it to guide her next steps.
Result? She learns from both her failures and successes and remembers that good enough is the pathway to great.
Treat your work like an experiment, not a test
Here’s the truth: unless we’re in the business of saving lives, nothing is high stakes enough to justify waiting over taking action. If you’re a brain surgeon operating on my head, then yes, please strive for perfection. Otherwise, it just doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.
And…let’s be real…nobody is paying as much attention as you think they are (they’re too mired in their own perfectionistic worries).
Almost nothing you do in your business is undoable, which means that you don’t have to get it right the first time (or the twentieth). And you don’t have to do it like the woman with 10 years more experience than you does it. And you won’t be relegated to wear an entrepreneurial dunce cap if you mess up.
It’s all an experiment, not a test. There are no report cards home or red pens marking up your page. There are simply things that work better than others, and your job is to practice enough to know the difference.
Bravery requires messiness
If you want big things this year, you’re going to have to get comfortable and vulnerable enough to mess up. The two simply go hand-in-hand.
But it’ll never be as bad as you think, and if you allow to, it will help you be a better leader and a better business owner. And over time, your courage will turn into confidence, and your ideas into results.
