How To Escape The Stop Start Cycle Leave a comment
The Stop Start Cycle is when you know what to do to build your business and you start doing it – but then you stop doing it before it’s done and move onto something else.
When you’re in the Stop Start Cycle, you have an inspired idea > feel excited > start taking action > have a different inspired idea > feel excited > start taking action on the second idea > and on and on. Lots of ideas, lots of action, nothing finished. But there’s nothing wrong with you!
In this episode, I share what’s really going on and how to escape the Stop Start Cycle for good so you can finally build momentum in your business.
If you’re a perfectionist building a business, you want to listen to this episode today.
READY FOR MORE?
The Power Planning Course is now open! If you want to learn how to plan properly as a perfectionist so you can consistently get your most important business tasks done without burning out, sign up for The Power Planning Course today at samlaurabrown.com/planning.
Perfectionists Getting Shit Done is opening for one week on 8 April 2026. If you’re ready for coaching, accountability and support to take consistent action and grow your business successfully – and sustainably – join the waitlist for PGSD at samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.
Listen To The Episode
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
This is the Perfectionism Project, the only podcast created specifically for perfectionists who are building businesses. I’m your host, Sam Laura Brown, perfectionism expert and entrepreneur. I teach perfectionists how to plan properly, consistently follow through and rest without guilt so they can build profitable and fulfilling businesses without burning out.
I’ve helped over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs do exactly that inside my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. If you’re tired of procrastinating, overthinking and half finishing your ideas, you’re in the right place. Now, let’s dive in.
Sam Laura Brown
Okay, so I want to do an episode today about what I’m calling the Stop Start Cycle. And this is something that I have seen in myself. This is something that I have seen in my perfectionist entrepreneur clients.
And I want to share about it with you because if you are in the Stop Start Cycle, you might have a lot of shame. And this can be a really challenging cycle to be in. If you also at the same time as being in the Stop Start Cycle, if like the people that I work with, if you are also someone who is smart and responsible and capable and you have success in your career and other areas of life, if you are in this Stop Start Cycle in business, then it can feel really shameful to be showing up in a way that doesn’t feel like how you actually are and it feels like it doesn’t match the potential that you actually have.
But you can be in this cycle for years, for years and years and years, and never get out of it if you don’t identify what’s actually going on. So I really just wanted to do an episode about what this Stop Start Cycle is, what it actually looks like and the solution to get out of the Stop Start Cycle and what doesn’t work. So I actually just wrote an email about this and I’m thinking I might just read the email because it’s going to articulate a lot of what I want to say and then I might just share some other thoughts on it if they come up.
But this concept of the Stop Start Cycle, like with everything, has been born primarily from my own experience and frustration and exasperation with seeing myself and my perfectionist brain be in a pattern, in a perfectionist pattern that has been very painful to be in and then making sense of it and then sharing things that help with that with my clients and them being helped by that and being able to get out of that Stop Start Cycle. If you’re in this cycle, I will tell you how to get out of it and that’s literally what I do all day, every day inside PGSD. But I’m going to read this email out and then just chat to you about it if there’s anything else I want to say or elaborate on because this is so core and will help release a lot of shame.
There’s nothing wrong with you if you’re in the Stop Start Cycle. So, this is the email. I want to share about something that I’ve noticed in my perfectionist entrepreneur clients and in myself too.
I’m calling it the Stop Start Cycle. The Stop Start Cycle is when you know what to do to build your business and you start doing it but then you stop doing it before it’s done and move on to something else. It looks something like this.
You have an inspired idea, you feel excited, you start taking action on that idea, researching, planning, doing. You have a different inspired idea, you feel excited, you start taking action on the second idea, you’re researching, planning, doing and on and on. When you’re in the Stop Start Cycle, you stop one thing but start another and you always have a good reason as to why it’s smart to move on to something else instead.
For example, you have an inspired idea about how to grow your email list but once you start taking action on that, you have an epiphany that you should start a podcast and then once you start taking action on that, you realize it should actually be a YouTube channel instead and then once you start taking action on that, you decide that you need better branding so you make a great first impression. Lots of ideas, lots of action and nothing finished and there’s nothing wrong with you. This is just your perfectionist brain trying to keep you in the safety of doing and avoid the vulnerability of completing.
When you’re busy jumping from one idea to the next, you feel productive and hopeful. You get to hold on to hope that you can in fact be perfect one day. If I could just be a little more motivated and organized, we tell ourselves, I will finally feel like I’ve got my shit together.
It’s at this point in the conversation that most people would tell you there’s no such thing as perfect so just put it out into the world but you already intellectually understand that and yet you’re still stuck in the stop start cycle. At times, you’re motivated enough to just do it whether that’s hitting publish or making an important decision but then you can’t get yourself to just keep doing it again and again which is why you don’t have momentum. There’s something that most people don’t understand about perfectionism that’s really important to know.
Perfectionism is less about doing things perfectly and more about avoiding doing anything imperfectly. By not finishing things, we never have to do anything imperfectly. We never have to find out that our best wasn’t good enough and that we’ve been wrong about our potential all along.
We already know there’s no such thing as perfect and yet we can’t bear to see ourselves do more than a few things imperfectly. The way to break free from the stop start cycle is to learn how to follow through without force. Not by motivating yourself to just do it which is literally step one in the stop start cycle but by working with your perfectionist brain that is scared shitless to do things imperfectly even though you intellectually understand that perfect doesn’t exist.
This was such a big problem for me that I had to figure out a whole process for myself. I was sick of starting 12-week fitness programs only to abandon them at the start of week five. I was sick of committing to writing a blog post every week only to post three weeks in a row and then stop posting altogether.
I now have a top rated podcast, this one, 600 podcast episodes and a steady stream of clients who come from that podcast because I figured out how to get myself to follow through not just once but consistently. Not from pressure or force but from self-support. I followed through when I felt like it and also when I didn’t.
Not by being disciplined but by understanding and working with my perfectionist all-or-nothing brain instead of against it. I didn’t tell myself done is better than perfect. I learned how to identify the difference between doing something sufficiently and doing something optimally and figured out how to put sufficient work out into the world again and again.
So now I want to tie this all together. With this stop start cycle there’s something that happens after you start taking action that I didn’t mention above. Overwhelm.
After you start planning, doing and researching you get to a point of overwhelm. You come up against a question that you don’t know how to answer like what platform to choose or a tech setup that feels above your head or you realize that the thing you hoped would take a few hours is actually going to take a few weeks or even a few months and you don’t like feeling incapable. That’s not who you are.
You’ve been successful in your career. Others consider you as responsible and accomplished. I mean you know how to do stuff.
So your perfectionist brain gives you an inspiring new idea so that you can be back in the beginning stages full of hope, optimism and potential or it tells you that now is not a good time for that idea anyway and just like that you’re at the beginning of the stop start cycle. If you have been stuck in this cycle you don’t need more ideas or more motivation. You need a way to follow through.
You need a way to keep going when it gets uncomfortable, to know how to stay with the plan when a new idea comes along, to know when it’s legitimately time to change the plan or whether that’s self-sabotage and to know how to finish what you start. This is exactly what I teach inside Perfectionist Getting Shit Done aka PGSD. Inside PGSD I’ll show you how to use a simple process called power planning that allows you to get clear on what to focus on, follow through consistently and rest without guilt so that you can build sustainable momentum.
Instead of starting, stopping and starting again you will actually complete things. You will have sustainable momentum and your business will finally start moving forward. If you’re tired of being in the stop start cycle and you know what to do but you’re not doing it, PGSD is for you.
The doors are opening on the 8th of April for one week only and it says click here to sign up for the waitlist for PGSD. I’ll leave a link below it’s samlaurabrown.com/pgsd. It also says any questions now is the best time to reply and ask. So if you do have a question you can email support at samlubound.com. I’ll reply to you personally or DM me I’m @Perfectionismproject on Instagram.
So I hope that is incredibly helpful to hear because I know for me when I have been in that stop start cycle and it has come up at different stages for me in business. But being in that stop start cycle when I’m just like starting something and then I noticed three weeks later I’ve completely forgotten about that thing I started and I’m on to something completely different. And I’ve been at times where I’ve done that for a couple of years and be like wait I started so many things but I haven’t actually made progress because of that stop start cycle.
If that is you, if you can relate to that to what I shared I really want to invite you into PGSD to learn power planning and to learn how to work with your perfectionist brain instead of against it because there is nothing wrong with you. You just haven’t got the structure, the support to be able to follow through with your plans. And this is something that is so important that I didn’t mention in this email because the email is quite long as it is.
But when it comes to this having, if you don’t have something like power planning that really gives you flexible structure for your week and you have your growth goal which gives you direction and you have clean rest which allows you to actually rest your brain even if you have a busy life so that when it is your business time you can focus on what matters and actually get it done and you have more capacity to feel uncomfortable because you’re rested and you’re not just feeling like you’re on this constant hamster wheel.
When you have that direction and that structure and that rest and also the support of PGSD coaching, community, being around other people who get what it’s like to be someone who is smart and ambitious and full potential but has a hard time finishing things consistently and like taking consistent action if you’re just always working those parts of motivation and it just keeps fizzling out. Having power planning as the core tool to support you and ground you is going to make such a difference if you are working from a to-do list, if you are doing like classic time blocking where it’s like work on website and just like all the different blocks in your calendar.
It’s typically very over scheduled, very optimistic, you fall off after a couple of days, there’s no flexibility, it’s very rigid. We’ve had PGSDers who have all different kinds of post-it note systems, elaborate notion tables, like iPhone notes like you write all the priorities out and then you highlight the first couple of them and you get started on them. Those tools make it really easy to be in the stop-start cycle and for me the biggest breakthrough came when I was like oh it’s not me, I’m not the problem even though I’m so frustrated with myself being the stop-start cycle.
It’s not actually me that’s the problem but I’m currently not actually working with my brain, I’m currently working against my brain. I need to have some way of organizing myself so that I can actually follow through because me trying harder at this to-do list and trying harder to be motivated all week hasn’t been working. I’ve tried that for years, I’ve tried all the different productivity methods and systems and I put together what really worked well for me and added in the power planning has the flexibility which is really important that you can adjust plans and not fall off, our perfectionist all-or-nothing brain as soon as we get behind just wants to completely disconnect from the plan or just overwhelm ourselves with a million different things to do and then by the end of the day you feel more behind than when you started.
Because as you were working like oh and I should do this oh and I saw this person on Instagram doing this and I should do that too and oh like there’s just awful good stuff that gets added and it is very disappointing to be in that for a period of months and years especially when you have a business that you want to be building and you know like you know you have the ability to be someone who could do that but then you see yourself and witness yourself in this stop-start cycle and you can start to wonder once you’ve been in that for a while like you know am I really capable? Am I actually going to be able to do it? Is it just a pipe dream? Is this just completely unrealistic and it’s not actually possible for like an everyday person like me to be able to do it and I feel like for me when I started my business I was starting behind everyone else in the sense that I had such a debilitating level of perfectionism.
I couldn’t share what I was doing with anyone in my real life that just felt way too crazy to do. I would just be laughed at and I was laughing at myself already so that would be way too painful but to really be able to get out of that level of perfectionist thinking and then find myself taking action but being in this stop-start cycle and then being able to get out of that stop-start cycle so that I could actually do things consistently and troubleshoot them and stick with them long enough to actually get them working because that’s the thing with the stop-start cycle.
When we have an inspired idea, get started, take a little bit of action that is so rarely enough action to be able to get the result or even get momentum so our brain goes well that’s not it I should do this other thing instead so you need to be able to not just start things but continue on with them and if you find yourself jumping from thing to thing to thing that again it’s not that there’s something wrong with you, you just aren’t working with your perfectionist brain and aren’t taking into account the fact that your brain goes into that all-or-nothing mindset.
It is scared to find out that your best isn’t good enough or that only your best is good enough. There’s a lot of things to be taken into account so that you can actually follow through and so you can have new ideas and either save them for later or actually have the discernment and ability to decide I am going to switch my plan and that’s not self-sabotage and then follow through with it, put it out into the world, take care of yourself while you’re doing that, do that consistently, take care of the other things in your life.
Most of our PGSDers have a job, they have kids like myself I have four under five like having other things in your life as well your business most likely isn’t the only thing you’ve got going on and so being able to break free of the stop-start cycle in your business is what will allow you to create momentum in your business and also most likely you are doing this stop-start cycle in other areas too whether you’re doing it with hobbies whether you are doing it with fitness and health maybe you start eating healthy and you’re inspired to do that but then you stop after a few days like if you solve this in your business if you become the person which is literally what we do in PGSD, who can create sustainable momentum who can take consistent action without burning out who can show up and do what they said they would do who can rely on themselves you will clean up this stop-start cycle in other areas of your life as well and I saw that for me once I really started to clean this up I transformed how I was in so many areas of my life I became so much tidier so much more organized just so many things shifted outside of my business from me becoming a person who could actually follow through with things.
So I really want to invite you to join us in PGSD when doors open next week join the waitlist and if you have any questions ask them but this is exactly the work that we do and you are able to get out of this stop-start cycle quite quickly it’s not like this takes months and months and months of work like I have this pretty dialed in at this point given how long I struggled with it then I figured it out for me then I started teaching it to people I’ve now had a thousand people a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs go through perfectionist done and it is refined at this point so just know that you don’t have to be in this cycle for much longer you can get out of this stop-start cycle and actually have momentum and feel the wind at your back so with that said I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode I hope it’s been incredibly helpful and I will talk to you in the next one.
Outro
If you enjoy this podcast, I recommend signing up for the waitlist for my program called Perfectionist Getting Shit Done, aka PGSD. This is a program designed to help you get out of your own way in your business. You’re going to learn how to release your perfectionism handbrake by setting a growth goal for your business, planning properly as a perfectionist with power planning, and getting regular guilt-free clean rest.
You’ll learn the skills required to get out of your own way and be supported every step of the way to do it. To find out more about the program and join the waitlist today, go to samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.
