One of the most challenging issues I find business owners face, especially in regards to themselves as owners is perfectionism.
It’s your business, your baby; you live, eat and breathe it, and so you tend to get overly hard on yourself.
If you notice that you are being self-critical of yourself– and spinning in an endless cycle of blaming yourself – it’s time to take a step back and think about how you can coach yourself out of that downward spin.
Before I move on to the three things that can help you get out of that deadly spiral of defeatism.
I want to give a couple of quick examples of being self-critical.
Telling yourself, “Oh Man, I REALLY blew that interaction with a client; what is WRONG with me!” and “I can’t believe I missed that deadline to get that ad into the paper. I NEVER miss deadlines.”
There is a very fine line between healthy striving for perfection and self-defeating perfectionism. From the perspective of your employees (if you have them), it’s even harder to cope with someone who has to have everything perfect, and even harder to deal with when their boss gets stressed about perfection, whether it’s their own or someone else’s.
For people who aim for the sky, failure of any sort can be a tremendous blow and can lead to depression and other negative mental thoughts, which can be self-harming.
You can identify to yourself when you are being overly self-critical when you find yourself doing the following three things:
- One. Needing to be in control and being obsessive about it, and needing to micromanage projects.
- Two: Having a fear unto obsessiveness of making a mistake, ANY kind of mistake.
- Third but certainly not least: Constantly asking for reassurance from others, “Do you think we will get the numbers?”, ‘Do you think this will bring in sales?“. And owners do ask those questions of people they work with and employees. If you are a sole proprietor, that is even more of a burden to bear because you generally don’t have anyone qualified to ask for that reassurance.
When you find yourself doing these things, and you may need to consciously think about identifying when you do these, you need to take a step back, and again you need to reassess.
You are doing more damage than good to yourself.
Inside every person striving for perfection is the lizard brain, which is the little voice inside you screaming: “Everything is on fire, Only I, PERFECTION MAN (or WOMAN)! can put out the flames!”
You need to learn how to rein in and control that lizard brain.
Here are some steps that I have found to help tame that obnoxious little beastie.
Step One is Self Compassion and learning to be more self-confident.
Take a hard look at your past successes and cut yourself some slack.
No one reaches the finish line 100% of the time; this is an unrealistic goal. It really IS!
That doesn’t mean setting a lower bar for yourself. It just means you need to be more confident that when you DO fail at something, you can tell that pesky little internal lizard brain that you did the best you could with the tools you had at the time.
I’ll give you a broad example of this: I’ve seen so many perfectionists beat themselves up because a project has failed, but it was because the success was reliant on someone ELSE who dropped the ball
OR
The person was not provided the tools or skills they needed to accomplish success.
The perfectionists still beat themselves up as if it were their fault.
As a side note, Self-confidence is also something you can learn from being a part of Toastmasters.
People are not born self-confident; it’s a learned skill, just like being a leader.
Step Two is understanding your crutches.
It’s not enough to tell yourself, “I NEED TO STOP BEING SO HARD ON MYSELF.
Those are just words. Empty words.
Take a step back and ask yourself, and I’d really like you to think about this: What story or stories are you telling yourself that is getting in the way of your progress?
What stories are you using as a crutch to beat yourself up?
Is it that memory of a parent or boss who was a great parent or boss but ONE time they slipped because you had stretched their patience to its absolute maximum or they were having a really, really bad day and being human, said something they regretted and that ONE thing stuck in your memory and became self-defeating?
That story or stories you subconsciously tell yourself are roadblocks, and until you can understand them within yourself, they will always be roadblocks.
Step Three is to embrace your inner critic; that darn pesky lizard brain has two additional distinct faces aside from the one trying to play Fireman Dan all the time and obsessively putting out fires.
The two additional faces are the analyst and the advocate.
The analyst face looks for the unhelpful statements that you keep repeating to yourself, to use my earlier example, “Oh Man, I REALLY blew that interaction with a client; what is WRONG with me!, and then adjusts them, so instead of “Oh Man I REALLY blew that interaction with a client, What is WRONG with me!” adjust it to be “Yes I DID screw up that interaction and made a mistake, but I’m going to help fix it and see if I can get the client back and this is what I am going to do………”
What is your positive spin and goal going forward? Make that the self-edit/self-adjustment.
The advocate is the self-compassionate face, the one that says, “I’ve gotten through similar obstacles in the past,” I know I can do it; if I don’t make it this time, I won’t stop trying.”
Look at your advocate and give your advocate advice as if you were giving it to a good friend who has self-doubt. Look at yourself in the mirror and talk to it as if your reflection was that friend. What would you say to them?
You might notice all three steps revolve around having compassion for yourself.
Encouraging yourself to have self-compassion isn’t letting yourself off the hook for mistakes and missed goals.
It’s about encouraging a healthy mindset to rebound from setbacks so you can build resilience and move on to a more productive work and personal life.
There is a great book by Spencer Johnson called Who Moved My Cheese that was required reading at the Culinary (and many other colleges, apparently) and describes how one reacts to major changes in one’s work and life.
To appropriate that theme a little bit. I encourage all of you that lets the lizard brain take over, feed him, or her, some cheese; they love cheese.
String cheese and self-compassion cheese are the best. As an added bonus, dairy helps put out hot flavors, essentially quenching the lizard brain’s constant need to put out the fire.
