We know, we know…us high-achievers all grew up thinking the strategy for achieving excellence in our lives and work was to strive for perfection in everything we do.
How will people measure our success, if not by how perfect our life, our work, our families, our bodies look?
There is no more important a brain hack than this one folks – perfectionism as a strategy for success (a feeling that is rewarded by external praise, validation, attention), is one broken-assed strategy for peak performance.
Why?…because it actually doesn’t work.
Perfectionism is a strategy for success based on the act of setting impossibly high standards that we rarely ever meet.
And due to that fact, we deny ourselves the opportunity to solidify the victories that come with feeling good about our progress or growth. And therefore, deny ourselves the building blocks for confidence.
The older we get using this strategy, the more fear of stepping outside our comfort zone (where growth occurs btw) we develop. The more risk we are faced with, the more anxiety we experience (“what if I make a mistake?”) as a result.
So…how do we hack this mindset?
We need to realize that seeking perfection keeps us on the sidelines, traps us, keeps us stuck, playing small, up against our glass ceiling of growth, unfulfilled, and never realizing our potential.
We need to redefine the goal to be progression, not perfection.
Do the best you can with what you got (the capacity you have today) – after all, that’s all we can ever do, isn’t it? Is there such thing as more than your best?
And expect to make mistakes because that’s what happens outside the comfort zone, taking risk and growing.
And those mistakes are valuable feedback, not failure. As long as you ask yourself why you made the mistake than you’re guaranteed to learn from it and thus, grow from it.
