How Perfectionism Is crippling your business growth
“Perfectionism is a curse… and we allow it to hold us back in business. Most concerning, is that there are so many signs that you maybe don’t even realise you are doing it in your business.”
(If this topic is resonating with you, please watch the video below as I expand on each of the points in greater detail.
Please forgive the quality of the video – it’s a download of a Facebook Live that I do every Monday morning at 9am and you can’t reproduce it any better than this! If you like this kind of business and marketing content, please tune in on the Divine Creative page and be part of the conversation.)
Below are the main reasons why you shouldn’t allow perfectionism to bleed into your business:
1. You get caught up in the trap of ‘paralysis by analysis’ – you spend too much time on menial tasks trying to get them ‘perfect’ when you should be focusing on tasks that are of a higher value to your business and in tune to your growth. Where focus goes, energy flows. If you are spending too much time on all the little tasks in your business rather than focusing on the big picture, how can your business possibly grow? The only person who even notices all the little details will be you. Successful business people with great balance in their life… are not micro-managers.
2. You become too hard on yourself and damage your self esteem, which in turn damages your ability to make decisions. Aiming for perfectionism is a great way to halt any progress in your business growth as nothing will ever be perfect enough for you to move forward to the next step. It is however, a great way to get stuck in a never-ending loop!
3. You can’t make everyone like you, so don’t try. Understand who your core audience is, who you help, how you change their life and focus on them. Perfectionism is trying to get everyone to love us, and it just burns us out.
4. When you base your success on what others think of you, it holds you back and you are too slow to market. You can have the best idea, but if somebody beats you to market, then it doesn’t matter who thought of it first. Nobody cares if your idea is absolutely perfect. When I released my online course it was still being built and I didn’t pretend otherwise. The early adopters will love being part of the ride with you as you test, take it to market, refine and develop. It will bond your audience even closer to you as they feel part of the journey.
5. You don’t try new things that might help your business/productivity because you’re afraid to fail. “At it’s root, perfectionism isn’t really about a deep love of being meticulous. It’s about fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of disappointing others. Fear of failure. Fear of success.” Michael Law
6. You can lose your authentic voice because you are so concerned what people think of you/how much they love you and your product, that you hide behind the veneer and don’t present the real heart of what you do. You miss the opportunity of true connection when you are perfect because your audience can’t relate to you. Nobody is perfect, so why do business owners think that their audience would relate to somebody pretending to be perfect? Real will always win over a glossy veneer any day.
7. You can’t grow your business if you believe that you are the only person who can deliver the work or sell the product. Perfectionism stops business owners from growing their team because of the mis-belief that nobody is good as them.
8. Our 80% is quite often another person’s 100%. So the extra 20% you put it in is completely unnecessary! Wasted time, wasted effort, and nothing to gain from it. At the end of the day, the only person is actually notices all the extra effort is you!
9. You need 20 points of contact with a prospect to get a response, so imagine how slow you are reaching your audience if every point of contact has to be perfect!
10. Perfectionism is a form of how we control ourselves, and masks the real issue which could be anxiety, self-limiting beliefs, fear, not being connected to the brand or your audience… there are so many things that perfectionism masks and being kept busy in the busy-ness of execution hides what is truly going on for us.
“We have a beautiful saying at our place… “perfectly imperfect”.”
Basically you are good enough right now. Doing a video wearing that gym gear and all sweaty faced, or speaking off the cuff without a perfect power point presentation, standing up in front of an audience who really will benefit from your knowledge, or hiring that person who can do the menial jobs…. You’re never going to be perfectly ready. Sometimes you just have to leap and do it anyway.
When perfectionism is managed well, it enables us to put out exceptionally good work that benefits everyone. But there’s a fine line between a great job and going way over the top and slowing down your growth, minimising your message and achieving true connection with your audience.
Identify now perfectionism is messing with you today and if you ever want to talk about it, beccause believe me, I’ve used every trick in the book to slow down my growth through micro-managing and redoing things that are already good… I’m always happy to chat!
Melissa
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PS – if you want to talk about content creation, your website, your social media presence or anything related to getting your profile out there… make sure you get in touch.