FEAR, FAILURE, AND FORWARD PROGRESS

Last week I had the opportunity to speak on a subject that truly lights me up. Yes, I get fired up about communication and helping you find your voice and clarify your message, but I also get lit up by talking about the fear of failure and how it can stop us dead in our tracks. The topic of my speech was perfection paralysis, and I am so excited to share some insight from it with you over the next couple of weeks!

Let’s talk about perfection for a minute. Perfection is a made-up notion that is completely unattainable. Ideals of perfection are subjective rather than objective. This means that there is no black and white way to measure it. Since there is no way to measure it, there is no way to attain it.

As a subjective ideal, your notions of perfection are influenced by your own feelings, principles, experiences, biases, culture, values, and personality. But how can you define perfection? Is it simply the absence of mistakes? Whose metrics are used to measure whether mistakes are or are not made? If there are mistakes but the result is still desirable, wouldn’t that still be “perfect”?

How many of you have ever put off trying something or even decided not to do it because you were afraid of what people would think? (If you are not raising your hand or nodding your head “yes”, you are my hero!)

The fear of falling short of perfection can hold you in place or even prevent you from getting started. That fear is like the Devil’s Snare in Harry Potter…the more you fight it, the tighter it holds on to you. It is only when you relax and stop fighting that you are released. When you take action and stop feeding your perfection paralysis, you are released from it!

When I (finally) started this blog 15 months ago, I was terrified. I had planned to launch it about 3 months earlier and just keep stalling. I was struggling hard in the devil’s snare of perfection paralysis and imposter syndrome and the harder I struggled, the tighter they held on. I was scared my content wouldn’t be good enough and no one would read it. What if I couldn’t keep up with publishing one article every week. Afterall, I work full time, I have kids and a spouse and a life and house…one article a week might be too much! What if my writing was boring? What if I ran out of things to talk about? What if it fails? What if, what if, what if…

Then I kicked myself in the rear and said, but what if it takes off? What if everyone loves it? What if I DO meet my weekly commitment of 1 new article? What if I succeed?

Then the devil’s snare relaxed, and I hit “publish” on my first post. 66 weeks later, here we are! I have successfully published a new article every week and am building my content library daily! I have even added a YouTube channel and weekly video post to my social media accounts.

When we decide to do something different or something new, it is easy to get lost in those “what ifs” and fears of inadequacy and failure. Those are valid fears, but they make lousy excuses for NOT FOLLOWING YOUR HEART.

What you are really saying to yourself when you have those fears is that you don’t think you can do it. And guess what, you will prove yourself right. Every. Single. Time.

But what if the real fear is that you will be wildly successful? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Success is scarier than failure, especially if you have never seen that success before. Success feels like new territory, and it can be scary to navigate.

If we try something and miss the mark, we might feel let down or like we let other people down, but guess what, that failure was actually a success! It was a success because you put forth the effort to do the thing, to push yourself, to try something new. Maybe you didn’t do it as well as you had hoped. Who cares, you DID it! And guess what, now you can use that experience to be better the NEXT time you do something. People will cheer you on, even when you can’t cheer yourself on.

The pressure to do everything perfectly is magnified when it comes to trying something new, like starting a business. At least in our minds it is. I know a lot of you reading this are business owners and you all had to start somewhere.

How many of you have said to yourself at some point in your business journey “I need to learn _________before I do _________” or “I’m not good enough yet to do ________” so I’m going to avoid it?

I think we have all said or thought these things. Especially in a time when catered social media is all around us, bombarding us with images of perfect influencers. It can be hard to push through when we feel inadequate, even more so when we are just starting out and there are so many others out there that are where we want to be. We start comparing ourselves to them and wonder why we can’t be that “perfect”.

It is in our nature to compare ourselves to others and think that we aren’t good enough to start or do something new. It is often said that comparison is the thief of joy. I’m going to add that ideals of perfection are the thieves of success. Not so much that those ideals “steal” your success, but that they completely withhold it from you in the first place.

The critical thing to remember here is that everyone starts at 0, and no one gets to 100 without completing steps 1-99. You absolutely cannot compare your step number 1 to someone else’s step number 87. Because what you don’t see on those “perfectly” curated social media accounts are the 17 retakes and 25 rewrites and the years of dread and growth and learning that had to occur to get that person there!

Remember, perfection is an idea, not a fact. It doesn’t exist. Action exists, decision exists, progress exists, but perfection does not. Those that you “see” as perfect, started in the same place as you, at the beginning!

The fact is that most people aren’t looking for perfection, they are looking for authenticity. For humanness, for someone they can relate to. No one can relate to perfect, so stop trying to be perfect. No one, I repeat, NO ONE expects perfection from you, and if they do, they don’t need to be taking up space in your life.

I love this quote by Robert Glover: “In general, people are not drawn to perfection in others. People are drawn to shared interests, shared problems [and experiences], and an individual’s life energy. Humans connect with humans. Hiding one’s humanity and trying to project an image of perfection makes a person vague, slippery, lifeless, and uninteresting.”

Think about that. Perfection makes a person uninteresting. HUMANITY is imperfect. Your imperfections make you INTERESTING. Stay imperfect and stay interesting!

Thanks for stopping by! If you are tired of letting flawed ideals of perfection get in your way, reach out to me. Book a call or reach out to me on social media - I would love to work with you one on one and help you get out of your own way and on the path to achieving your dreams.

I currently have openings for new communication and mindset coaching clients and would love to help you build your skills, change your mindset, and change your life! Head on over to my resources page now! I can’t wait to connect with you!

I hope to see you soon!

Ciao for now!