[Personal Development Series] Why Your Business Won’t Grow Unless You Do Leave a comment

This is Part 1 of my 5-Part podcast series for perfectionist entrepreneurs. It’s all about why personal development is the secret to building your business and my simple personal development process that works for perfectionists who are building businesses.

In this episode, we’re starting with the fundamentals so you can clear up any confusion you’ve had about why your business isn’t growing (even though you’re always thinking about it). I’m sharing why business brings up perfectionism and what that looks like, how to think about entrepreneurship so you can stop feeling disheartened unnecessarily and how my clients and I use personal development to build successful and fulfilling businesses.

If you’re a perfectionist and you’re building a business, you want to listen to this episode today.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Introduction
Hi and welcome to another episode of The Perfectionism Project. A podcast full of perfectionism advice for entrepreneurs. My name is Sam Laura Brown, I help entrepreneurs release their perfectionism handbrake, so they can get out of their own way and build a fulfilling and profitable business. I’m the founder of the Perfectionists Getting Shit Done group coaching program, which is otherwise known as PGSD. And for even more perfectionism advice to help you with your business, you can follow me on Instagram @perfectionismproject.

Sam Laura Brown (Custom Introduction)
So this is a bit of a different introduction to what they would normally be but I just wanted to let you know what you’re about to hear because what I have done and I’ve just finished recording the episode you’re about to listen to and I’m coming back to do the intro. What I have done was I am doing this series, this five-part series on personal development as a perfectionist entrepreneur and how to grow your business through personal development and doing that work which is what I’ve done and what I help my clients to do inside PGSD.

And over the years I’ve just really learned how to how I work and how to work with myself and doing things in my own way and what I was doing so I came up with the idea for this series I’m really excited to share about it and then I was writing down some notes I was like do you want to actually be the most helpful thing for me to figure out my outline would be to just record an episode and talk and figure it out through talking and so I did that and then as I did that I was like well this is the episode because if I just use this episode to try and create an outline I’d basically just come back and try and record the same thing that I’m literally recording right now.

So the way I start this episode is literally just me talking to myself basically and then as I go on I’m like thinking actually this is the episode then I kind of shift how I’m talking but I just wanted to let you know that and I hope as well this just gives you like all I want to do with all I do is give you so much permission to do things your way and to experiment with that there isn’t this right or wrong way of like okay if you want to create a five-part series for your podcast which is just something I made up to do in the first place but if you wanted to do that you then have to like figure out the perfect topic and then you have to write this perfect outline and then you have to record these perfect episodes and then like that’s just not my process for me it’s like okay I ask myself what topic do I really want to talk about what topic do I feel like if I created a series on this topic I just be compelled to share it with everyone who listens to my podcast who’s an email subscriber who’s following me on Instagram who I know in real life like what topic am I just so connected to and just want to talk about.

And like what basically not what do you want to listen to but like what is the thing I’m connected to and through me being connected you then connect into that I’m thinking about the person who I help inside PGSD and having more people like that come into our PGSD community and if I was recording for someone like that they want to hear the thing that I want to talk about as a connected coach who’s connected to personal development and entrepreneurship imperfectionism and why all these things matter so much to be able to get out of your own way.

So I just wanted to share that that my process isn’t what’s the strategic topic I should talk about and then how can like what’s the formula for me to talk about that in the right way it’s the self-trust that I have developed through doing the personal development work that I talk about in this series so I hope just by me naming that and exemplifying that that it really just all of it I just really hope to give you so much permission you might not do things the same way I do them that’s totally okay I’m not saying do it the way I’m doing it I’m saying being the same kind of thought pattern where you trust yourself and where you’re able to say well actually this would be the easiest way for me to create it and it’s not that it’s not hard to do it.

Because it is also still emotionally hard when you’re going all in on something now perfectionist brains are like whoa I don’t want to go all in because then if I go all in and it didn’t work I can’t say well you know it would have worked if I tried harder or it would have worked if I wasn’t so busy so like there’s that vulnerability that that emotional safety is required to be able to to do things your way and to just show up and do it but I also love asking myself if this was easy if I was just allowed to do it my way what would that look like and this is the answer to that like what I create and what I share I always hope to be the answer to that of like I would just let myself talk and then my plan was if I just am talking I’m like I really am not clear on what I’m saying I just don’t ever use that recording but then as I was recording I was like this would be so helpful for them to hear I’m probably just going to try and recreate the same thing if I recorded it again because I think this is a great structure of just whatever flowed out of my brain.

So with that said I hope you enjoy part one of this series five part series on personal development as a perfectionist entrepreneur and why you want to be focused on your own personal development to build your business if you’re a personal development junkie this series is a hundred percent for you a hundred percent and if you aren’t really sure what personal development is what mindset is and coaching or anything like that this is a hundred percent for you you are going to get so much benefit from this if you’re a perfectionist and you’re building the business you want to listen to this series in full so an episode will be released every other day and then when the fifth episode is released we’ll be opening the doors to PGSD for one week only so you want to get ready to join us inside if you have any questions dm us email us let us know so we can help you get inside this is really this is the work this is the thing this is the unlock this is what makes the difference I really want to invite you into this. So anyway with that said I hope you enjoy this episode.

Sam Laura Brown
Okay so I just want to riff on personal development for perfectionist entrepreneurs and why that is the way to build your business so I’m just thinking about someone who doesn’t know anything about personal development or perfectionism or entrepreneurship they have a business or they want to have a business but I’m going to be talking to the person that is new to all of this rather than assuming that they already understand certain things so the first thing I think I would want them to understand is entrepreneurship and why entrepreneurship like inherently what entrepreneurship is because when you understand that then it makes sense why perfectionism and personal development like why perfectionism comes up and why personal development is required.

So entrepreneurship let’s see what the definition is. Entrepreneurship, the activity of setting up a business taking on financial risk in the hope of profit it’s the process of designing launching and managing a new business or venture involving identifying opportunities mobilizing resources and taking financial risks to create value often through innovation for profit or social impact it’s about turning ideas into reality whether it’s a tech startup a non-profit or a new process within an existing company. Interesting. I’m going to screenshot that so I think I would start with like what entrepreneurship is and what it is not and I’d say what entrepreneurship is not is easy and what entrepreneurship is not is a right and so on this the front of it being easy if we look at business and we think it is in lots of ways easier than ever before because there’s so much glamorization around entrepreneurship and familiarity, like we hear so many stories of success so there’s a vision painted that there wasn’t ever painted before there is and like just being able to like for me for example I started my business because I could really I could see what was possible from listening to podcasts about business owners I was like oh I could have an online business I didn’t even know that was a thing so you get to see examples that people in previous generations didn’t get to see you get to have hear interviews with them there are people teaching different skill sets within entrepreneurship.

So in many ways it feels easier than ever and I feel like this kind of creates this sense of entitlement but entrepreneurship is not easy you need to do so many different things wear so many different hats and I find for example with parenting I do much better when I’m in the reality of raising little ones parenting is hard and I can do hard things there’s so many things required there’s logistics there’s emotional regulation there’s overcoming your own shit that makes it hard to show up like there’s so many things and with entrepreneurship there are so many skill sets within entrepreneurship and people talk about this right like for example for me as a coach that I have a skill set within coaching.

But that doesn’t entitle me to a successful coaching business because to have a successful coaching business yes I need to deliver coaching but I also need the skill sets of marketing and sales I need to have an operational skill set I need to have financial skill sets like there’s so much more to having a successful coaching business than being skilled at coaching and so I think this is really important at the outset to understand that if you want to be an entrepreneur that is harder than working for someone else not easier I think we have this mentality that it’s easier it’s going to be easier to work for myself because then I get to make up you know I get to decide things I get to do my own schedule I get to be in control. But you’re also responsible for absolutely everything whereas if you are an employee for someone else you by nature of being an employee even if you’re a high level high up employee you don’t hold all the risk you don’t have to do every single element of the business like even if you’re the CEO if you’re not the owner of that business you don’t actually have the risk of building that business you have the risk of losing your job but you don’t have the risk like the financial risk and all of that kind of thing you don’t have any guarantees.

Whereas for example if you’re an employee you get this is what your pay will be whether it’s commission or whatever there’s a pay structure in entrepreneurship everything has to be made up everything has to be decided it’s all on you and it’s just really important to understand that because I’ve just seen so many perfectionists go into entrepreneurship with the mentality of it being like school that if I just get the right answer then I will get the A plus and I can have this easy business with all this flexibility and this like lifestyle and freedom and I get to set my own hours and I get to make more money than like listen to that like I get to make my own hours I get to work with whoever I want to work with I get to make more money that is that is going to take work to do that that is going to take effort to do that, but we can end up in this mentality like the glamorization of entrepreneurship especially this mentality that entrepreneurship like if you have a laptop you can have a successful business.

Well, yeah, you can but that doesn’t mean you will there are elements that go into having a successful business and what I really want to talk about in this series is why personal development is absolutely essential to business growth and why as a perfectionist entrepreneur there’s specific personal development work you need to do to be able to be successful and enjoy that success and not just be outwardly successful but feel like shit and not just be inwardly successful but have no results to show for it because if you’re listening to this you want to you’re the kind of person you want to have an income from your business you want it to be more than a hobby you want it to be more than a hobby.

So I start with that with entrepreneurship and what that is and the nature of entrepreneurship and that entrepreneurship is hard and that it’s harder than working for someone else and just kind of like check your motives that I deeply believe like anyone who comes to me if they say like I want to start a business I deeply believe like if you have that desire and if you have a willingness to figure it out and figure yourself out a hundred percent, do it mainly also a massive reason why I think that is I love the personal development that comes with business and I love the way it’s grown me and I’ve needed to evolve and it hasn’t most of the time is not comfortable at all so if you love the personal development if you love growing and evolving and you know that that can be uncomfortable which maybe you don’t answer about that in this series as well.

But like you just have to understand inherently that entrepreneurship is a risky endeavor so if you need certainty if you need guarantees if you need proof it is not the path for you can you learn how to be how to become someone who can show up even when there’s no proof and no guarantees and no certainty yes that is part of the work we do in PGSD but if you’re like I cannot go down a path where a reward isn’t certain get a job get a job I say that with love get a job even then it’s not certain you can be fired but I think entrepreneurship if you aren’t willing to believe in something that isn’t yet in existence you will have a miserable time in entrepreneurship because that is the essence of entrepreneurship the essence of entrepreneurship is to create something that hasn’t existed before; therefore, you can’t just always be looking at the past you can’t always just be looking for proof you can’t be looking for certainty there is none there is none you’ve got to generate your own certainty in the kind of person that you are and that you can figure things out but also certainty that you can withstand or like stay standing when times get shit.

Because there’s no guarantee of like okay just find the perfect niche and then boom you’ll have a successful business forever more that is not how it works so I think it is really important to be said that can anyone be an entrepreneur yes should everyone be an entrepreneur I don’t think so and this series and my podcast is really for the person who wants to be and also I want to caveat that with when I started my business I was not the person that you’d be like oh they should totally have their own business they’d totally rock that out and have it have an amazing business I had so much self-doubt I was so in my own way the perfectionism made it absolutely feel impossible to grow but I had the willingness to figure it out to study myself and to change and become someone different.

But if you don’t want to do that if you just want to be like no I have to have it be certain not the path for you so now I want to talk about what I talk about next is I think really what perfectionism is and how business and entrepreneurship brings up perfectionism because I think that is the next step to understand so some of my story with it as well and this is really like PGSD and everything I do is birthed out of my own experience so I want to share my experiences and stories for me I was introduced to entrepreneurship through listening to podcasts and hearing people talk about online businesses it was a few more years until I really heard about like what it is to be a coach and I was like oh my god that is me but before then I just heard about people having blogs and things like that and I started thinking just from being exposed to it like oh maybe I could do that.

And I don’t know what topic I’d write about I was 22 at the time like I don’t know what it would be on but something about this is really intriguing and I figured out over the years it wasn’t because I was like oh great I can have like location independence or time independence I really have been the person who and I still think this like I could be very happy working for someone else like I’m not the person who’s like I have to work for myself I have to be my own boss I have to really like just be self-employed that’s my only option I can be very happy I think working for someone else in my own experience like as long as there’s sufficient connection like I’m connected to other people I love being like making work friends and all of that like I don’t have an issue with authority or working for someone else there’s in lots of ways perfectionist brain loves being told like here’s what success looks like and here’s how to succeed and you’re just responsible for this one part so there’s that.

But when it comes to how I started and how I really felt compelled it was because I felt like I came across the world of personal development through a book that my brother recommended to me called The Go-Giver and I read that book and I was like holy shit this is incredible like it introduced me to the whole concept of personal development I was already familiar with shows like Oprah I’d always been obsessed with celebrity interviews and things like that but I just like hearing about personal development and that you can change yourself intentionally and kind of this idea like you’re not just who you are and that’s who you’ll always be like you can choose who you are you can create results in your life like just all of these ideas about personal development I was obsessed I just was like oh my god this this is the best thing ever to find out about. And that’s why I started my blog really on the topic of personal development is what is it what I’ve always been talking about.

And that’s as a coach what I do is I personally develop myself and I support others with personal development through shifting beliefs through being able to create emotion and allow emotion and process emotion and through being able to show up and take action and not do things you don’t want to do and all the different things like that and create new results I have been obsessed with that for for as long as I’ve known about it and when it came to actually having my own blog I understood because I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts and I’m a smart person I understood what needed to happen intellectually but emotionally it was impossible is how it felt like it was emotionally the thought of and for me this was the biggest hang up.

The thought of showing up and putting myself out there and like doing what I was doing in public and for a blog like that’s really the only way to do it you can have a private you know private journal and private writings but for what I was doing the only way to do it was to have to build an audience to have traffic to have people interact with what you’re doing and I was so embarrassed by myself deeply embarrassed that I thought I could even have a blog or have an opinion that I could share and I wasn’t even sharing anything crazy at all I was just sharing like here’s a link to a blog post I liked here’s a link to a youtube video I liked and found interesting.

But I was just the thought of my friends and family who are all really supportive and loving the thought of them like either snickering at me or even just asking me like oh what is this that you’re doing made me just want to go up into a ball and die it was just such this intense fear of expressing myself as who I really was which I was still figuring that out but to me writing about personal development felt like the truest way I’d shown up ever. At the time I was a uni student I was doing a law degree I was doing a finance degree I was doing a diploma of French as well those things were all interesting to me but they didn’t feel like me so even though I had perfectionism come up in school and studying it wasn’t the same flavor because if I failed at law for example then sure that was a hit to my identity as a smart person but I didn’t feel like I’m a lawyer like that’s me it would just be like oh that’s embarrassing because I thought I was smart and this result is saying otherwise.

The same with the finance stuff the same with the French stuff like with all of it it was just a threat to my identity as a smart person but when I started entrepreneurship and so many of the clients they help I’d say pretty much almost all of them are doing something that feels like them whether they’re an artist or a performer or a writer or a coach or a designer I work with a lot of creative entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs who feel like they’re doing something that is true to them and that just brings such a layer of vulnerability on top of this fear we have of not being smart enough and people finding that out especially when you’re being praised for being smart or for having a lot of potential like there’s if you have perfectionism come up at university or in school or in a job or in relationships and things like that and I’ll talk a bit more about what perfectionism is in a bit.

But if you find it hard to show up in the world when you’re doing something that feels deeply personal and like an expression of yourself it’s going to be very hard to succeed and for me that was how I felt it felt so painful to think that there I was starting to be me in the world and that the people who love me for how I’d been in the past might not love me anymore and that made me hide that made me not tell anyone about my blog that made me have a private Instagram page that I definitely didn’t want anyone in my real life to find out and then someone from my primary school who I’d been good friends with liked one of my posts on my Instagram accounts I didn’t have a panic attack but I was about as close to having a panic attack as you could be without having one.

That I just remember this like wash of shame I was standing in my room I was living with C’s parents and C was there obviously as well at the time and I just remember this like just such deep shame and embarrassment that someone I knew personally had found it out and of course they’d be thinking what a laugh this was like this is ridiculous because that’s what I was thinking so I’m just projecting it but it’s brought up so much that had never been brought up in study and had never been brought up in a job or it had but because there was the external deadline and very clear expectations and here’s what to do and here’s what success looks like that I could just kind of like soldier through it but in business it’s a different game as I was talking about it’s a different game so in business when I didn’t have external deadlines and I didn’t have a clear like there’s so many ways you can do things in business which is part of the beauty of it but because there’s so many options it’s very easy to be confused about things.

And so I just had what I call my perfectionism handbrake just like come on in a way I’d never experienced it before and ultimately for me the personal development required to be an entrepreneur it became very clear to me early on that unless something changed I would not be able to have a successful business because I was again hiding my business I would like post a blog post and then not post for months at a time like that isn’t a way to build a successful business and I wasn’t doing anything else either it wasn’t like I was busy doing something else and I didn’t have time to do blog posts I mean I was working and I had life happening but I wasn’t taking sufficient action in my business.

And so for me having then the like bringing into this the personal development or like the perfectionism piece that to me it wasn’t immediately clear what personal development I needed to be doing what became clear was something needed to change because I was not on like I talked about in a previous episode about a trajectory mismatch I was not even close I was not even close to being on the trajectory I wanted to be to be able to one day have a full-time income like the math was not mathing it just wasn’t wasn’t going to be working out and I had I then like set to work to figure out why and at first I thought I have a motivation problem and I would write blog posts about I just need to try and figure out how to stay motivated and doing all of the things to try and keep me motivated buying new equipment updating branding and graphics and like all of these ways to try and make myself feel motivated to do something that felt deeply scary.

So I tried that, and I was still very sporadic and I had absolutely nothing for sale like I was making zero dollars because there was no way anyone could pay me there was there was actually no way someone could pay me money I didn’t have ads on my blog I didn’t have anything for sale like it was just me trying to figure out how to even show up let alone sell like at first I just had to figure out how do I even show up and market like how do I even show up and post and how do I do that not just for a week every day and then fall off like how do I actually just show up and tell people about my business because if I can’t do that then it doesn’t really matter if I have anything for sale or not like I need to figure that piece out.

And so I then started to figure out and like just through sheer necessity started to figure out okay what what is going on with me basically like what is happening that I want to have a business with a full-time income I’m listening to all these success stories I’m so inspired by them I’m a smart capable person what is it that’s happening here that means that I can’t actually do the things I need to do that’s making me be so sporadic that’s making me show up perfectly or then not show up at all and hide and it’s making me edit and edit and edit and edit and just like try and polish and polish and polish and polish—so time-consuming to do that so exhausting I was just like what is going on and I just started researching and learning and really taking a personal development approach to business because I’d consumed a lot of the how-to strategic things but I really for me like and for the clients I help I it that wasn’t the piece that was the hard piece for me the hard piece was how do I get myself to actually follow through when emotionally it feels so hard to do it.

That I can’t actually get myself to like push the buttons on my computer because of the emotions that I’m feeling, because I can’t be with those feelings, get past those feelings, they keep stopping me, like what is going on here? And so I started to, as I mentioned, do a lot of research into mindset, personal development, coaching, I came across coaching and life coaching and shifting belief and so many different approaches to getting different results in your life ultimately. And what I started to piece together is really what perfectionism is. And once I started to have that language, that was when I could start to wiggle things and create the momentum.

Until then it was, I didn’t have the language of perfectionism, it was just like, I had this motivation issue. Even though I’m actually a pretty motivated person, I personally, I help people who do identify as being lazy, but I never, ever thought of myself as lazy, I wouldn’t let myself rest, like I would do a lot of procrastination and avoidance, but I could tell it wasn’t from this place of laziness, it was from a place of fear, it was a place of just this fear ultimately that if I try my best, my best won’t be good enough and that will be so painful and so shameful that I’d rather not try at all. So for perfectionism and really just understanding what perfectionism is, perfectionism, because I never identified as a perfectionist, I was like, I’ve had stuff in the boot of my car, the trunk of my car for years, like stuff that I just need to take out of my boot and put inside the house and I would drive around with just stuff in there that like, just unmade decisions of where am I going to put that.

For years and it meant I needed to put groceries in my boot, I couldn’t do it, I was so inconvenient to not be able to use a very important piece of my car, but like how could someone who is like that be a perfectionist and really starting to understand how perfectionism and this fear, really like perfectionism is just a group, it’s like the name we give for a kind of thought pattern. So it’s not this diagnosis, it doesn’t have to be a label, but I just found when I had a word for the kind of thoughts that I was thinking, like my present day thoughts that were making me get in my own way and seeing the perfectionism of really ultimately for example with the car, that it felt so uncomfortable, like I didn’t have an issue with like focusing or paying attention or like being able to do it, like I had no issue with that, my issue was if I feel like I’ve actually got my life together, then I have no excuse for not being successful. So I would just subconsciously have my life be chaotic and inconvenient in certain ways to just keep me distracted and give me an excuse as to why it felt okay that I wasn’t as successful as I wanted to be or I didn’t feel as good as I wanted to feel and this happens so often if you look at a morning routine for example, like when someone wants to go to bed on time so they can wake up early and exercise, that it’s not that hard to do intellectually, like we all understand you just when it’s the time you go to bed and then you wake up when your alarm goes off and then you exercise. But emotionally it can be so hard to do that because of the story that if I then go to bed on time and wake up early then xyz then I should be happier, I should be fitter, I should be more successful.

And we’re so scared of being the perfect circumstances and still not having the results we want because of what that will mean about us, because of what we make that mean, that we withhold the perfect circumstances so we have an excuse of like well yeah I would be more successful if I could just get to bed on time or like feeling so good of like well yeah I’m successful I don’t even get to bed on time, like imagine just how much more successful I would be, like that is one of the key thought patterns of perfectionism is we have all these ways that we let ourselves off the hook so that if we aren’t getting the results we want to get we don’t have to blame ourselves, even though perfectionists we blame ourselves for everything and anything, but ultimately we want to have this emotional out of like well yeah I’d be more successful if I had a great morning routine and I woke up on time, yeah I’d be more successful if I wasn’t working this job, yeah I’d be more successful if da da da, like we love that and I noticed for me as a university student.

I’d always do things at the last minute and that was really because when it was the last minute I shifted out of this thought of like if I have time to get this perfect I should get this perfect and then that feels so overwhelming that I just would procrastinate and then I went into a different thought at the last minute which was this has to get done and it’s okay if it’s not perfect because of course it’s not going to be perfect it’s the last minute I barely have any time and that took the pressure off because my thinking had changed in a way that made it finally feel safe and tolerable to show up.

That I wasn’t expecting perfection from myself at the last minute but I expected perfection from myself in advance and so I was just starting to understand all of this avoidance, all of this getting in my own way, how that was perfectionism and these perfectionist thought patterns and then over years of me understanding that and beginning to help people with it, identifying the five key perfectionist patterns of overthinking, procrastination, burnout, all or nothing mindset and fear of judgment and just seeing how all of those things were things that I and my clients were doing to avoid this feeling of pain and shame that would come if your best isn’t good enough. There are all these different ways that we avoid having to find out that our best wasn’t good enough because that is the painful thing that we are trying to avoid.

We feel unlovable if we really tried our best and it wasn’t good enough so we have all of these ways to not try our best. Being undecided, toing and froing with decisions, procrastinating, overthinking because when you’re overthinking, everything takes way longer and you can’t actually show up as much as you need to show up because everything takes at least quadruple the time it otherwise would. These are all the different ways that we let ourselves off the hook and build in an excuse subconsciously for ourselves which is well yeah but I would be more successful if I didn’t procrastinate.

I would be more successful if I could even remember what my goal is but I can’t because I’m so busy with this other goal, all of that stuff. So I started to really piece together, oh this is perfectionism and then what happened is I started to as I learned more and more and more about mindset, shifting belief and creating belief and using belief to create results and how your thoughts are a self-fulfilling prophecy. All of these different concepts about that as well as time management as well as goal setting like theories from everywhere.

I love understanding the first principles like the basics of how something works and hearing it in all different contexts and then distilling that down and so I started to really understand that what I would have to do is work with my perfectionist brain instead of against it because if I was trying to fight my perfectionist brain and if I shamed myself for being a perfectionist that wasn’t going to help and in this series I’m going to talk really specifically about what personal development needs to look like as a perfectionist entrepreneur, like what are the topics, what are the shifts, like what is that but the key thing I realized was that if I kept thinking the same perfectionist thoughts that I was thinking, I would never have a successful business or if I did somehow manage to do that, I would be very burnt out and resentful and probably burn the whole thing down.

And that the key was instead of making myself wrong and trying to be better and trying to improve myself and trying to change, instead it was working with myself and with my perfectionist brain and taking into account how my perfectionist brain does things and thinks about things and meeting myself where I was instead of trying to be someone that I wasn’t and so that’s what I’m going to be talking about in this series is how to work with your perfectionist brain, what that actually means, I’m going to be talking about and I have an exhaustive list of so many things I could talk about in this series but what I want to do is really distill it down to the things that I think are most important for you to understand and one of those things I’m going to be talking about because it encapsulates everything is why power planning is the ultimate personal development tool as a perfectionist entrepreneur.

That is an episode I’m really excited to record. I’ve talked many times about power planning in the context of showing up and following through and time management and getting shit done and taking action, all super important, all of that still holds true but the way I think about power planning and why I have been doing it so consistently even when I’ve had periods of resistance with it is because it is my ultimate personal development tool as a perfectionist entrepreneur.

It does the heavy lifting, it’s still hard, it’s still uncomfortable to be growing and evolving but it does so many of the things that we’re going to be talking about in this series. I’m going to do an episode on that. I’m going to be doing an episode on feeling safe to be seen and to show up in the world because that is so important and the personal development required to be able to become a person who feels safe to be seen and to be going for it in public, that’s one thing.

I’ve just got so many other things, what else? A big one as well I want to talk about is the personal development required like what it looks like to become someone who can believe in a goal or an outcome when there’s no proof of it. We perfectionists like we’re just all the time wanting certainty and entrepreneurship requires comfort with uncertainty and so there’s personal development that needs to happen so that you can become someone who can believe in things that have never been done by you before and so that or by others and so that you can have there be uncertainty without you and this is me speaking from experience without me when I’m in uncertainty as a perfectionist.

What happens is my brain wants to generate certainty to create relief and it will go into like well this certainly won’t work this certainly can’t be done and I get this like hit of relief when I go from uncertainty which brings up self-doubt which brings up a lot of uncomfortable emotions when I just go into uncertainty into certainty even if it’s certainty that I will fail ah I feel comfortable again I feel safe even if it’s so uncomfortable and I definitely don’t want to be failing so I want to talk about that believing when there’s no proof and being able to keep going even when things aren’t working.

Feeling safe to be seen as I mentioned I’m just looking through my list of other things that I want to talk about one thing I have written here which is really interesting is feeling safe in clarity because clarity is risky right it puts you on the hook if you’re clear on something then it’s very easy to as a perfectionist beat yourself up because if you know what to do and you’re not doing it that’s really painful if you’re clear on exactly what you want to create and your vision and you’re not able to create it that’s painful but if you’re so confused about what niche or what product or what business to do it’s comfortable in confusion so part of the personal development work is feeling safe in clarity so you don’t spend all your time procrastinati-learning because we procrastinati-learn as a way like we’re like oh I just need clarity I just need clarity I just need clarity but you the personal development you need to do is to learn how to generate clarity and to stay clear even as things change.

Like this is absolutely essential in entrepreneurship we want to be able to adjust decisions but we have to be able to make them to begin with and so decision making is a massive area that perfectionists like there’s personal development needed or you just won’t get off the ground or you will and it will be very painful and I have like disappointment and bouncing back from failure not beating yourself up as a method to stay accountable that if you just if beating yourself up is the way that you keep yourself on track it’s very problematic and very painful and you essentially have an abusive relationship with yourself.

And it is really hard to do really meaningful work in the world and just to be enjoying your life when you are being abused by yourself but it’s very common for perfectionists to for us to beat ourselves up and shame ourselves as a way to try and motivate ourselves to be better and do better and get better results so we can be loved another thing I have too is like being different or like doing something different to what’s expected because as a perfectionist there’s this like people pleasing wanting to fit in wanting to do the right thing and kind of follow the the path the right path and it really is so hard to succeed in business if you don’t develop out of that.

I have a list of other things too so I just wanted to chat through it and really go through like on what entrepreneurship is what personal development is and what perfectionism is as an introduction so that we can then have a discussion with that shared understanding about why this matters so much and what it specifically looks like and then I want to share about my favorite tool and a couple others as well probably I’ll share three favorite tools as well which would the growth goal obsessed with a growth goal, power planning and clean rest, and combined they really do the personal development work and I’ve always loved with personal development like I love self coaching journaling all of that but my favorite personal development work is to be doing things out in the real world and observing myself and studying that and then shifting instead of trying to just shift my thoughts without taking any action and then take action I love an action action not action first but like how would I even describe it sort of like a a very practical approach to personal development.

Because I believe that your results are going to reflect your personal development and so we want to have you not just feeling different but creating different results in your life and becoming a version of yourself that is more trusting more connected more aligned more yourself more brave more rested more relaxed more courageous that is the work that we’re doing and I always love like okay if you want to personally develop let’s set a goal that will personally develop you like the growth goal and then you go out there and and start working towards it and then stuff’s going to come up and then we do the work on the stuff that comes up instead of like okay let’s just intellectualize it we perfectionists love to intellectualize things and I really don’t believe that personal development is an intellectual pursuit.

I think if personal development feels like an intellectual pursuit and you’re someone who you understand a lot of principles about personal development like you could let’s say like write an article or record a podcast episode about what it is but if your life like if from the outside you haven’t personally developed then you don’t understand really what personal development is because there’s like the mechanics of personal development and there’s doing personal development there’s like a willingness and a like a discomfort that you have to be willing to feel in order to personally develop and there are so many personal development junkies in the world who from the outside they haven’t changed in the last decade and for me like the one of the things I’m most proud of is if I look back a decade ago I feel like such a different version of myself.

So much more confident so much more courageous so much more resilient so much more connected like there is so so much has shifted I’m not better but I’m more connected I’m more me I’m showing up more how I want to be showing up in the world that’s what we do inside PGSD it’s not let’s understand it it’s like let’s do it let’s have this is my favorite thing when people are like doing the PGSD work they’re like in inside the program they’re applying the principles they’re going after their growth goal they’re getting coached on what comes up and self-coaching on what comes up along the way their power planning like all of that and then people in the life are like what what are you doing like you have changed and I’m in awe of it and what has been happening like I love those stories the most when people in your life are like what’s going on with you like you’re really showing up differently or like oh you previously passed you would have reacted this way now you’re reacting that way.

Like it’s shifts that we want to create it’s just so satisfying to do that to just be able to become the master of yourself and it is this infinite game that it’s not like this end destination to get to but there are so many things that my present day self does on autopilot that was my past self’s dream to do and I could have never even fathomed doing or if I did I’d have to be so motivated to have so much willpower to try and get myself to do it and now it’s just who I am that’s because I love taking a practical approach to personal development that it’s not just intellectual it’s not just consuming knowledge and understanding it’s actually like let’s have you go out there and personally develop yourself.

And business is just my favorite way to do personal development it brings up so much to the surface that doesn’t get brought up in other contexts it gives you such an incredible playing field to be able to do this work it just really nothing will develop you the way that personal business does with the caveat of parenting as well is definitely personal development for sure that is required but I just love like my my love of personal development really began with entrepreneurship and so I love supporting entrepreneurs coaching entrepreneurs being an entrepreneur taking a personal development approach to growing the business that doesn’t mean I don’t think about strategy that doesn’t mean I don’t learn skills learning skills is part of personal development like but it’s personal development first; it’s really how do I need to shift myself and change how I’m thinking and feeling to be able to create a different result.

Instead of okay what’s the right decision what need should I do that is our perfectionist brain talking and like if I just get the right answer then I’ll get an A plus like it’ll work without me wasting effort and without me doing something embarrassing or failing but we really want to step into like the personal development of I’m willing to decide a niche and show up and try it that is personal development instead of oh okay my personal development is I’m going to try and decide the perfect niche that doesn’t require personal development that’s you just like giving into your perfectionist urges to get the right decision.

The personal development is I’m going to make a decision and I’m actually going to follow through on it and experiment with it and I can adjust it if I need to but I’m I’m going to make a decision instead of being undecided that’s one of the key ways as a perfectionist you need to personally develop to be able to get your business off the ground and be on track for a full-time income in your business so I’ve started recording this just to get my ideas flowing this might actually end up being one of the episodes like the introductory episode to the series I shall decide at a future point as I continue to work on this but I just find for me like this is part of my my own personal development is just like learning what my way is and letting myself do things my way and instead of like trying to spend hours and hours and hours like writing some kind of outline.

For me just like talking it out is how I get my best ideas out and so instead of I have to outline it first to record I was like I’m going to record so I can create an outline and then as I’m recording like okay well this kind of is the thing that I would just then write down and try and say again the way that I’ve said it so with that said if you were listening to this I decided for it to be part one of the series I am so so so so excited to be putting together a series on specifically on personal development I feel like it’s every like everything I’ve ever talked about on my podcast all comes back to what I’m talking about here which is personal development as a perfectionist in business and how personal development is the way to build your business and working with your perfectionist brain instead of against it like doing that specific personal development work that is required as a perfectionist and an entrepreneur but as a perfectionist entrepreneur that’s all I’ve ever really talked about but I’m so excited to distill it into a series that I can point people back to for years to come.

I’m also so excited to do this because I’m going to be inviting you into perfectionist getting shit done to join us inside the program and do this personal development work so that you can get out of your own way and so that your business can grow we’re opening the doors for one week only starting on the 30th of January so you want to be inside you want to get yourself inside pgsd to do this work every month every quarter every year that you put off the personal development that you need to do as a perfectionist entrepreneur, you are delaying having a real business it will keep being a hobby it will keep being something you’re trying so hard to do but just spinning your wheels and going back to procrastinate researching and procrastinate learning and trying to get it right and trying harder and maybe I need to learn from this person like we just got to take a personal development approach and then the rest flows when you’re the personal development work you figure out the strategy so much more easily than if you’re trying to get the right strategy so you can feel more confident for example.

So I’m just really excited for this series it just is like I mean I just think of my 2013 self who started my blog as a personal development blog and now being able to over a decade later put together such hard-earned lessons and just distilling it down for as a perfectionist entrepreneur especially like if you’re new to business or in the early stages of your business this series I’m I mean it can be applied to anyone but I’m really talking to the person who isn’t yet making a full-time income from their business but wants to be one day if that is you if you’re in that stage of and I really think like going from not making an income to making a full-time income is the biggest leap once you are able to make that full-time income whether that’s fifty thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars or whatever you want that to be for your own personal income.

When you are able to do that once you have that identity especially when you take a personal development approach and you do the self-image work required to be able to actually keep sustaining the results you create so it’s not just a fluke it’s so much easier to keep making money once you’ve made that first amount but I am so passionate about helping perfectionist entrepreneurs in particular because perfectionism was the thing for me that just was making me get in my own way and stopping me from being successful even though I had so much potential and if I hadn’t figured out what I figured out over the years I wouldn’t be able to have the business that I have I probably wouldn’t have any business at all and so I believe deeply and this is really the mission that like me helping perfectionist entrepreneurs get out of their own way makes the world a better place. There are so many entrepreneurs who have such incredible ideas but because of perfectionism they aren’t able to actually put those ideas out into the world they aren’t able to withstand criticism or refund requests or people laughing at them or failure and setbacks or being really successful and then people in their life not understanding them.

So it’s this is my contribution my unlock for you is like getting you out of your own way getting your perfectionist mindset working for you instead of against you doing that personal development work so you can go on and make such a positive impact on the world with your business so that’s why I’m here doing what I’m doing I also love it and obsessed with these topics as you can probably guess since I’m talking about the same topics I was talking about in 2013 and I still have an endless amount of ideas and things that I want to say on it so like this is my my jam my thing that I feel so connected to and I’m just going to be creating a series that is going to be insanely helpful and then inviting you into perfectionist getting shit done to do this work and to have this support and to really be not just understanding personal development but like be personally developing and having your business grow as a result of that so with that said I hope you enjoyed this episode and I will talk to you in the next one.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode and you want me to be your coach and you want to be doing this work on a deep level with like-minded perfectionist entrepreneurs then I want to invite you to join us inside perfectionist getting shit done aka pgsd it’s my coaching program for perfectionist entrepreneurs and we do this personal development work that I have been talking about in this series you get the tools the structure the support that gets your perfectionist brain working for you instead of against you; it is a lifetime access program it is absolutely incredible. So supportive—just everything you could want as a perfectionist entrepreneur so I want to invite you to join us inside the doors are opening on the 30th of January at 6 am Eastern time and close at 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Friday the 6th of February so to find out more today and join us inside the program go to samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.