[Personal Development Series] The Ultimate Personal Development Tools For Perfectionist Entrepreneurs Leave a comment

This is Part 5 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, I’m sharing the 3 simple personal development tools that bring together everything that I’ve taught you in this series. These personal development tools get your perfectionist mindset working for you, instead of against you, in an incredibly simple weekly practice. Tune in to discover what the tools are, why they work and how my clients and I use them 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. 

And if you want to dive deep into this work with me as your coach and alongside a community of like-minded perfectionist entrepreneurs, you want to join us inside Perfectionists Getting Shit Done (aka PGSD) this week. Doors are now open for one week only with enrollment closing at 11:59pm EST on Friday, 6 February. Join us today at samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.

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The doors to PGSD are now open for one week only. Join us today by signing up at samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.

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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
Okay, so this is part five of the personal development series for perfectionist entrepreneurs. This series is all about how to use personal development to build your business because the perfectionism, which is not a problem, but the perfectionism, the perfectionist thoughts that you have been having have been making it really hard to show up and to take action and to do things and to follow through and to actually be showing up how you wanna be showing up and to be all in on your business and be committed and to figure things out and to troubleshoot. And so to be able to have you be successful and have not just a successful, outwardly successful business that’s making good money, but to have a business that is also in alignment with the values that you have as a human, like that you actually feel good about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.

And also that you feel successful. You’re not just are accomplished, but you actually feel successful. You can actually connect with that feeling.

You don’t just feel like, okay, well, I achieved a goal. What’s the next one? I achieved a goal. What’s the next one? Like how we tend to do things as a perfectionist.

Nothing’s ever good enough for our perfectionist brains. We wanna have you, we teach you in PGSD how to not just be successful in business, but to actually feel successful and to rest and to rest without guilt and to have a personal life that you love as well, like that you enjoy, regardless of how much, it’s okay if you wanna work a lot, it’s okay if you don’t wanna work a lot, regardless of what that looks like and how many hours you wanna work, that you actually have as well a personal life and that you have a really healthy relationship with your business and with yourself. You’re not just constantly resenting the business and your clients or customers.

You’re not constantly nitpicking yourself, beating yourself up, trying to motivate yourself to finally be better, to finally be good enough. The work that we are doing in PGSD and that I’ve been talking about in this series is so important, is so, so, so important. And I just really want for you nothing more than to be able to not just be successful, but enjoy that success and enjoy your life and to be able to be in a relationship with yourself and with your business that creates energy rather than draining you and feels connected rather than like you’re always at odds with yourself and with your business.

So in this episode, I wanna invite you in to Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. At the time of release, the doors are open for PGSD. And I couldn’t be more excited to share that and to begin welcoming in new PGSDers into our community and the doors will be open for one week only.

So 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on the 6th of Feb, 2026 is when we are closing enrollment and we are strict with our enrollment periods. So you wanna get yourself inside PGSD, you wanna join us to do this personal development work as a Perfectionist Entrepreneur. And in this episode, I really wanna share with you about why power planning is the ultimate personal development tool for Perfectionist Entrepreneurs.

And I also wanna share about the growth goal and clean rest. We teach you those in PGSD and they are what I live in my day-to-day life in business. They were developed out of sheer necessity.

I’ve shared in this series about the crippling level, the debilitating level of perfectionism that I had when I started my business, that to feel like myself in the world and to present as myself in the world and to just be trying something that was risky, especially when I had the identity of being the smart, responsible person who just does what’s expected of them, it brought up so much perfectionism because I felt unsafe in that and the perfectionism was coming up to try and keep me safe, to try and keep me from showing up and risking mistakes and risking being laughed at and risking rejection and risking failure and risking success. And maybe that would have me feeling alienated from people in my life. And so I had to, from sheer necessity, after I figured out, okay, I’m a perfectionist, I’ve talked about that epiphany of like, oh, this is perfectionist thinking.

I didn’t realize I was a perfectionist because I didn’t think I was perfect enough to be a perfectionist. And once I realized that and I started to really deep dive into so many different teachers, people like Brene Brown, who I love, and Dr. Carol Dweck, just so many different teachers who teach either directly, like explicitly on perfectionism or indirectly, I just started hearing about all these different things I needed to be doing and that became really overwhelming. And had me in this mentality of like, I just have to do better and be better and just kind of have to try and not be a perfectionist and I just didn’t have a practical way to apply in real life and in my day-to-day life. All of the things that I needed to incorporate to be able to release my perfectionism handbag, like all of this personal development work that I’ve been talking about in this series, I didn’t have a practical way to have that all incorporated and to like have, like I love having a daily or a weekly practice, like I’m someone, I love a routine, I love a rhythm, I just love having that kind of structure, I just love flexible structure, become obvious as we talk about the tools as well, I love flexible structure and I just really wanted something that was clear, I wanted to be clear on like this is this, if I do this, this will have me doing the personal development work needed.

So I’m gonna start by talking about power planning and then the growth goal and clean rest will naturally come up, but power planning really is the core tool that we teach inside PGSD, it’s the core tool that I developed after learning so many different things about mindset, perfectionism, about time management, about business mechanics, like how it works to build a business and create results in a business and not just like be working, but like be creating results, just really having an understanding of so many different areas that I needed to figure out for myself. How do I actually with the week that I have, like I wanted to be connected to my week, power planning really is a tool for connection with perfectionism and the same as a growth goal and clean rest. Perfectionism is really this fear of disconnection, this fear of being disconnected from the people that we love, from the tribe, from our community, like this fear of being and this shame that we feel will come with believing that we’re not adequate, that we’re not lovable, that like that no one wants us, that no one wants to be around us, like that shame, that disconnection, shame is the fear of disconnection, that is with perfectionism, what we’re trying to avoid and ironically, there’s so many ironies with perfectionism, one of them is that ironically, like we are trying so hard not to be disconnected from what matters most, which is being loved, being accepted, like and this goes back to you, like back in like caveman days of you needed to be part of the tribe or you would die, like it’s just that survival instinct of like being part of a community is part of survival.

And so it feels very risky and we’ve talked about this as well, like to be doing something that’s not guaranteed to work, that risk, that’s like a risk to us not being part of the tribe or like if you’ve been loved for being smart and responsible and now you’re doing something that seems dumb and irresponsible, that’s gonna feel like a risk to your survival because it’s a risk to you being accepted by your community, especially if you haven’t always been like the entrepreneurial person who’s showing up and putting themselves out there and being different and being unique, that it will feel so risky to start showing up as yourself and having a business and just like doing things differently to how they’ve ever been done before or done by you before and so when it comes to like the connection and the disconnection that the irony is we’re so scared of being disconnected that we disconnect ourselves on purpose so we can say, oh, it’s not that they didn’t like me, it’s that they don’t really even know me, like I didn’t even reply to their message at all, like I didn’t even show up as my real self.

Like I know for me when I’ve been in situations where I don’t feel like I’m showing up as like me, the personal development lover who like wants to talk about mindset and like all these different things, the universe, the manifestation, all of that, then I feel like if I’m not liked by someone, I feel like, well, yeah, but they don’t really know me. It feels so much more vulnerable to be like, oh, they really know me and like my quirkiness and they don’t like that, they don’t like me, like my truest expression of me. And when it comes to the, to having this like ability to be connected because our brain is just like, we need to disconnect, we need to like distance ourselves or like just go into people pleasing.

And when we’re people pleasing, we’re not really connected, we’re so focused on ourselves and being liked, even though people pleasing obviously manifests as us like ignoring ourselves to try and please someone else so they can like us, so we can feel like we can like us. But when we’re people pleasing, we’re just so disconnected from the other person because we’re so busy thinking about like, I want them to like me, I don’t wanna disappoint them. It’s all about us through the lens of, and through the guise of like, no, we wanna make sure they’re happy.

No, we wanna make sure we’re happy by having them be happy so we can feel like we can be justified being happy. So perfectionism is really, and this is one of the most recent breakthroughs I had around perfectionism about just how much perfectionism is us like disconnecting on purpose so that we feel like disconnection is in our control rather than it being something that happened to us because we’re unlovable. Like, oh, we didn’t get rejected, we just never showed up or because we chose not to show up because we were so busy with other things.

That feels so much more safe than like, and I fully showed up and like, they didn’t wanna connect with me. And so part of what we wanna do, like part of the antidote, if you will, to perfectionist thinking is connection and being and staying and feeling safe to be connected, connected to ourselves, connected to our bodies, not just intellectualizing things, but being connected to what’s going on in our bodies and our feelings, being connected to our vision, our mission, our goals that we have, like the big picture, being connected to that. Even if you’re full of self-doubt, being connected to what that could look like, even if your mission is just, I wanna make a full-time income from my business, being connected to that, being connected to possibility, being connected to nature and like your body in a more physical, like exercising and like moving your body and taking care of yourself, connecting to your desires instead of what should I do, what do I want to do? Perfectionists, we just go into like, what should I do? What’s the right answer? Instead of like, what do I want? So we wanna really have tools that support connection.

That makes such a difference with perfectionism. If you’re a perfectionist entrepreneur and you want to have a successful, fulfilling business, then connection is what to be focused on. Creating connection, connection to your week, connection to your results.

And that’s a vulnerable thing as well for perfectionists. We wanna just like, if you find you set a goal and you just forget to look at it or you like put plans in your calendar and you forget to look at it, it’s just like that’s that disconnection where it feels vulnerable to be connected. So we just forget and get busy with other things.

And so we wanna have, and this is what I like figured out without even having yet the language for it at the time, that I needed a way to be connected to all of it. And my power planning is what connects me to it all. My power planning, and if you’re not familiar with what that is, power planning is a flexible planning method that I developed that works for my perfectionist brain and then I shared it with other perfectionist clients and it works so well for them.

And then through getting, through helping so many perfectionists and teaching them power planning and then incorporating their experiences too in my own experiences now after many, many years of power planning. Power planning is in your calendar, there’s three steps. There’s your power hour, little tweaks and your weekly review or your self study at the end of the week.

And when you’re doing your power hour, you’re connecting to what your goal is, your growth goal. You’re connecting to what your plan is for the quarter. You’re connecting to your actual week that you have, like your real life.

You’re connecting to reality. Instead of like, we wanna be so disconnected and like just kind of imagining like I’m always motivated and I’m just gonna wanna like wake up every day at 5 a.m. and exercise and then I’m just gonna go straight into like the really scary things to do in my business and then I’m gonna go to my job and then I’m gonna come home and then I’m gonna eat healthy and then I’m gonna go to bed on time. Like that is not being connected to the reality of where you are.

Like if that isn’t close to your reality, we don’t wanna have you have a plan that has you fundamentally not be able to follow through on it and just like maybe you can follow through on that kind of plan for a couple of weeks but then you’re gonna fall off. We wanna have you have your, your tools, your power planning, your calendar be there to support you. Be there to really be a tool for kindness and not for whipping yourself.

Not for like trying to just will yourself to finally be better so you can finally stop shaming yourself and nitpicking yourself. That your power planning is how you connect. It’s how you connect with the reality of where you are right now in your thoughts and your beliefs and your feelings and like your circumstances of what’s going on in your life, how much energy you have, what appointments you have, like all those different things.

The reality that you’re a human that needs rest for your brain and your body too but if you’re like me, like I don’t really use my body physically much. Like I’m not doing manual labor. Today I have been, this is my fifth episode I’m recording on my fourth episode and I also had a coaching call this morning where I coached a client.

So my, like I’ve been talking all like six or seven hours. So like that is physically demanding I guess. I’ve just built my tolerance up for that, that I could do that but if you have a like physical stuff, like I am also a mom to four and I’m breastfeeding and I have like physical demands as well inside my week and I’m currently not getting a full night of sleep any night as part of being a mom of four little ones and so it’s like taking all of that into account.

We wanna have you be connected to your power hour, the process you go through and maybe it takes 90 minutes, maybe it takes two hours. That’s okay. Doesn’t have to be an hour but over time you will get it to be about an hour that you’re really connecting with your goals for your business and your personal life as well, yourself, what’s actually going on in your real life, like putting flexibility into your week as well, having buffer time so that if something changes, you’re not then like going to this all or nothing mindset of well now I can’t really throw on anything because if you’re planning in a way where like if there’s one little hiccup, the whole plan’s thrown, it is not helpful.

It is not, you’re not gonna be able to do it and that’s what has people like if you like use a calendar and you follow through for two days or like one day and then you’re off it, you just, you’re not actually using your calendar as a way to connect. You’re trying to disconnect. You’re just, well you’re trying so hard to connect and trying to be perfect so you can feel connected but you’re actually disconnecting from yourself and we wanna have you connecting and that’s why the power hour process is the way it is.

Then we have your little tweaks. So throughout the week, I’m just realizing my voice is starting to get husky from all this talking but I’m gonna keep going. So with your little tweaks and they can be big tweaks at times but what we do after you do your power hour, you take a screenshot of your calendar and this comes back to the self-study we’ll talk about for step three.

You take a screenshot of your plan, not from a place of like now I have to force myself to do it but like let’s just remember what the plan was so in the future you can reflect on what you’d planned. Then as the week goes, we have you stay connected to your plan and to your goals and to yourself and to your week. So you will update your calendar to reflect, roughly speaking, doesn’t have to be to the minute but roughly speaking, how you actually spent your time.

So if something doesn’t get done, you delete it. If you did something else instead, you insert that in. If you did things at a different time, you shuffle it around and then by the end of your week and this also keeps you on track so that the more you develop your skillset around being able to change your plans but keep them workable which is so important in entrepreneurship.

If you can’t stick to a plan when there’s a hiccup, you will not be able to have a successful business. There are always gonna be hiccups, things you didn’t anticipate. That’s just the nature of building a business and so part of this as well, there’s so many skillsets you learn from power planning and from these tools.

Part of it is like adapting. You need to have that. If you are so all or nothing with like if a plan can’t happen perfectly, it doesn’t happen at all, you will not get anywhere with your business and it will be very frustrating because you have so much potential and you’re so smart but just because you don’t have this ability to adapt and be flexible and keep things workable and stay connected, your perfectionist wants to disconnect you.

Well, if I can’t do it perfectly, I’d rather not do it at all but you develop that skill so then by the end of the week, what you’ve got in your calendar is a reflection of what actually happened in your week and then we have you go through a process, your weekly review but it’s really more of a self-study where you reflect on the difference between what you had planned to do and what actually happened and the way that this is structured isn’t, it’s not like, I mean, there’s a way that as a perfectionist, we can be so scared of reviewing things because we just go right into beating ourselves up and obviously in PGSD, it’s for perfectionist entrepreneurs so we anticipate and when I created everything, I really am anticipating how your perfectionist brain works and okay, if we do some kind of review, your brain is gonna wanna go into, here’s what has to be better, here’s everywhere where I was imperfect and so the process of the weekly review, the self-study is designed to really support you to be able to do a review in an effective way that doesn’t then send you into a shame spiral if you didn’t follow through with any of your plans and we’re not aiming for 100% follow through, we’re aiming for 80% follow through. Some weeks, like shit happens and you have to change a lot. Some weeks, you might get in your own way.

The key is what do you do when you get in your own way? Do you go into a shame spiral which only makes you get in your own way more or are you able to witness that thanks to your power planning, shift the way you’re thinking and keep showing up and not go into the perfectionist disheartenment and feeling so discouraged and feeling so frustrated and just like I know better, I should do better. We never say that in PGSD, you know better, you should do better, no. That’s not how it works.

Knowing isn’t the whole answer. You have to have self-awareness and then you have to personally develop so you can actually do better, if you will, so you can actually show up differently. So with your power planning, with my power planning, just to speak in the first person, power planning is my greatest self-awareness tool.

I constantly now, because I’ve been power planning for so long, I have a MacBook, so I use iCal, I am constantly studying myself and my patterns and I can see at a glance now, if I look at my calendar and I color code it and I share in PGSD what color coding system I recommend, I color code it so I can see at a glance if my perfectionism hair break is on or if I’m showing up in a connected, committed, convicted way and in that sufficiency cycle. I can see if my perfectionism hair break is really on. I can see it very clearly, including if I wanna skip my power planning, including if I wanna skip my weekly review and my little tweaks or I have actually skipped those things.

That happens from time to time. I get so much awareness from that. I’m always doing my little tweaks, like I’m always updating my calendar daily to reflect what actually happened because at this point, I’m just so addicted to having the awareness around where my time is going.

Doesn’t mean, like I have so many days that it just, all it says is clean rest. Like I don’t have, I just wanna make sure you know, it’s not like, okay, every minute you have to put in your calendar what happened, but roughly speaking, how I have shown up in the last five years is reflected in my calendar where I’ve decided to spend my time is reflected in my calendar. I can see that and I can study and I can track it as well with revenue.

I can see like, this is a time when the business was really thriving and here’s what my power planning looked like. Here’s what I was doing with my time. Here’s how I was thinking.

And then here are the times when I wasn’t making as much and I was struggling and here’s where I decided to spend my time. And that allows me to so much more easily get back into what works for me because I can just see it at a glance. I’m also, we talked about clarity.

I’m so clear. Like when I’m doing my power planning and I mentioned how I did my quarterly power planning, which is the advanced version, I just wanna be clear, is the advanced version. Like once you learn how to power plan out a day and a week, then you can start planning out longer periods of time and like you just need to really have a skillset around workability and being able to keep your plans workable.

And just me having the circumstance of having my growth goal and my power planning and my clean rest, I could be in easily in a thought that is so helpful for me, which is I know what I’m doing. I’m clear on what I’m doing. I know what I’m achieving and what my goal is.

I know my plan to get there and I have a realistic, flexible, workable plan that will get me to my quarterly milestone that will then get me to my goal. And I know how to self-coach. I know how to do the personal development work in PGSD.

There’s a self-coaching masterclass plus just from hearing me coach on all the calls. And when you sign up, you get instant access to the PGSD private podcast and you’ll be able to hear all of our PGSD coaching calls. They’re all named as though they’re podcast episodes.

So if you’re struggling with, for example, if you’re really struggling to feel motivated, there’s an episode that has, you can search the keyword and find the exact coaching on that specific thing that you need help with. But you will just, from hearing me coach, you will learn how to coach yourself as a perfectionist. You will just absorb that unconsciously while also getting so much help from hearing other perfectionist entrepreneurs with the same struggles as you, the same kinds of goals. the same, like they also think, oh my God, Sam’s in my head.

So you think very similar to them. To hear them getting coached, you will just naturally start to shift how you think about things. You will naturally start to hear, not just my advice, like I share advice on this podcast, but the coaching that I share, like the actual shifting of the belief.

You will start to hear that. If you don’t already hear it, I’m just listening to this podcast a lot, you will really be able to adopt and unconsciously just begin thinking in such a more helpful way. But having the self-awareness for me from the power planning and just being able to study myself and to see when my perfectionism handbrake is coming on, and then from that place, then I can go and use the other tools or other coaching or self-coaching as required.

But having that power planning allows me to see everything, allows me that end to be clear. So it’s like serving so many different purposes at once. It allows me to be clear and to not be in this endless to-do list and always trying to do more.

And one other thing I think is so powerful about power planning is the feeling of completeness. And this is something that I think we all just crave as humans. And there’s this, it’s called the law of accumulation.

Like we love feeling like things are complete and accumulating and that we’re getting momentum in PGSD. I’m not even talking about in this episode, but we teach you a framework called the momentum project that supports you to create momentum. Even if you don’t have much time to work on your business, like how to actually create momentum so you’re not just in task thinking, you’re in project thinking and specifically in a way that works for your perfectionist brain.

So with PGSD, well with PGSD, but with power planning, you just get such a feeling of completeness and momentum that is so, I would say impossible to even feel when you are working from a to-do list. Or like say a lot of PGSDers before they joined PGSD, maybe they are time blocking and creating this super like rigid calendar for themselves that they struggle to follow through on. A lot of them also just like working from a to-do list and will go and like highlight the top priorities for the day and then just be doing that.

And obviously like then as you work, you’re just writing more and more and more on your to-do list. And so as you, you always feel behind, this is part of it. Like it’s a systems issue.

Like you don’t have the system of power planning to support you with it. So you just constantly feel so behind because literally the circumstances you have a to-do list and as you work, you add more to it.

If not physically, then definitely mentally. You’re constantly, even as you’re being productive, you get further and further and further behind. And that’s the nature of business.

There’s always more to do. There’s always ideas. Like you’re an entrepreneur.

You’re going to have lots of ideas. You’re going to have lots of great ideas. And so you need a system.

And I’ve talked about this recently. Like you don’t have a mindset issue. You have a systems issue.

Like power planning is the system. The growth goal is the system. The clean rest is the system.

That when you don’t have that structure and that tool to support you, that it is so, it can be just like, oh, there’s something wrong with me. Like, I just need to just change how I’m thinking. Like, yeah, we want to, we’ve talked about it in this series.

We want you to shift your thinking. That’s part of it. But part of it is you also need a system to support the thinking that you want to be in.

And having your power planning, and like, we want to be in you being able to see sufficiency and to have there be completeness and to have there be a sense of progress. That’s so important. A perfectionist brain isn’t going to default to any of those things.

It’s just going to generate you feeling behind and feeling like the more you do, the more there is to do. Like you’re, you’re just not making any progress. And like, where did the week even go? Like I was busy the whole week.

What even happened is because there isn’t a system and having the power planning is that system that allows you to create a feeling of completeness, even when any, everything isn’t done. And business is a long-term pursuit. Like it’s a long-term thing to build the business.

It doesn’t just happen overnight. You need to have stamina. You need to have sustainability.

And to do that, to be in the belief of like being able, we talked about this in part three, being able to believe more than you disbelieve. That requires allowing yourself to actually see the momentum that is building before the results come. Having a system that allows you to create a feeling of completeness, even when everything isn’t done, to create a feeling that everything is accumulating.

Instead of just feeling like the more you work, the more behind you get, because when you work, you have great ideas and then you add that to your list. And now you’re more behind than ever before. So we really, you just want to see power planning.

Yes, it supports time management and being able to actually follow through with your plans and all of that. And I’ve done other episodes on that and that’s not the angle that I want to talk about it with in this episode, though it’s so powerful as well. Like time management, mind management.

This episode, I’m really talking about how power planning is for your mind management and how it supports you with clarity and will show you where you’re being unclear and where you’re confused and where you need to get back into clarity. And to be able to see on your power planning, when if you’re spending an inordinate amount of time learning something, you’ll be able to be onto yourself in a way that you just can’t when you’re not able to see things that clearly. I love my power planning for being connected with myself, being connected with my goal.

So I’ll talk about the growth goal, being able to create belief while also resting and part of, and I’ll talk about clean rest, but like such an important part of business building as a long-term gain is being able to do it in a sustainable way and in an effective way. And if your brain is tired, you will make poor decisions. You will market in an uncompelling way.

You, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this for you, but I’ve definitely noticed like if I’m not rested, it is so much easier for me to be in unhelpful thoughts. Like for me to be in a thought pattern of like, it’s not going to work, I’m going to fail, all of that kind of thing. It’s so much easier when my brain is tired, it goes to that so much more easily than when I’m rested.

That’s when it’s so much easier to be able to actually be in belief. When I’m tired, my brain goes into disbelief. And of course it does, because if I’m working from being tired all the time, that I’m not actually showing up in a way that will create the results.

So I subconsciously know that the things I’m doing aren’t actually going to get me where I want to go. So it’s then easier to be in disbelief when my actions, even if I’m doing all the right things, the way I’m taking action isn’t giving me any confidence that I’m going to get there. So when it comes to just being able to be connected to yourself and to be able to be taking care of yourself with your calendar and the way that you plan your time and seeing it not just as time management, it really is mind management and supporting your personal development.

And if you are just constantly trying to work all the time, so this is me talking about clean rest now, if you are constantly working all the time and in this mentality of I rest when everything’s done or I rest when I’m at my goal, first of all, you might have noticed that you’ve achieved goals before, but you then didn’t start resting or you rested for a week and then you went back to feeling behind. So it’s not true. You will let yourself rest when everything is done.

But, and this is something I’ve been saying a lot inside PGSE recently, like rest, rest. And it’s not just like, it has to be physical rest. Like in a lot of my clean rest time, I’m looking after my four kids and Steve will be at work.

So like, I’m looking after them solo and that’s very demanding, but my brain has rest from the business. It’s about rest for your brain and resting without this guilty feeling of, I should be doing something productive because when we’re in the thought pattern of, I should be doing something productive right now and I’m not, so I’m wrong. So I need to go and do something productive to try and get out of this feeling of guilt.

When we’re in that, that is a very tiring thought pattern to be in. It drains our energy. So if you get rest and you don’t feel restored, it’s because of how you’re thinking when you’re resting.

And that’s what we teach you how to do in PGSD is how to get clean rest is what I call it. But rest is the fuel. Rest isn’t the reward.

It’s like when you go on a road trip, you don’t at the end, fill up the tank with petrol or gas. You do that at the beginning. That’s the fuel.

But the way that we as perfectionists, because it feels like a threat to our survival to rest, because we should be doing something productive and we’re only loved when we’re productive. That’s how we think that we end up in this mentality of like, oh, I’ll rest when I finally feel good, which will be when I’ve gotten everything done, which never happens because you’ve got a business and endless ideas and endless list of things to do. Or when I get to my goal, which also doesn’t happen because if you’re a perfectionist, by the time you’re at least 50 or 80% of the way to the goal, you’ve already set the next goal.

So you actually have to learn. And this is a tool of clean rest. And when you’re power planning, you will put your clean rest in your calendar.

And like recently, for example, at the end of December or mid-December in PGSD, and as soon as you sign up, you can go and watch these replays to plan out the year, to plan out 2026. But we went and we, I went through a process of like planning out your clean rest for 2026. It’s so important.

And also PGSDers like, oh my God, this feels so amazing to actually have a clean rest plan for the year. And that’s something you have to do before you plan in what action you’re going to take. You have to plan in, here are all my fuel stops.

Here’s when I’m going to the gas station or the petrol station or the servo as we call it in Australia. Here’s when I’m going to get petrol. Here’s all the fuel that’s coming.

You will have so much more motivation and energy when you see, especially physically in your calendar, it’s already decided you’re clear on it. It’s not just, I’ll see what happens. When you see all the fuel stops coming up along the way throughout the year, you will have so much more energy.

And when you see that every week, there’s a fuel stop coming up for me. There’s rest for my brain. If you have a hard time following through on your needle movers and the courageous things you need to do or the tedious things you need to do, it’s because you’re scared that if you do them, you’ll just pile on more, more courageous things, more tedious things.

You don’t want to do that. You want a break. So rest is the fuel and you will plan in your clean rest in your calendar when you’re power planning.

And then the growth goal. So we teach the growth goal in PGSD. This is one of the first things you’ll do.

And this for me, again, like I’ve talked about in other episodes, the story of clean rest and just me trying to work all the time and just getting to my like enough is enough moment. I’m like, Hmm, maybe me telling myself I should work all the time just has me feeling guilty when I’m not working. And then when I am working, there’s no urgency because I’m working all the time.

And I’d also like resent catching up with friends, anything that would take me away from work because I should always be working. But then also because I’m always working, there’s actually no urgency to finish anything right now because I could do it tonight or tomorrow or tomorrow night or the next morning. So for me, it was just a process of like, okay, I need to actually get rest for my brain as a fuel and I need to have limits on my work time.

I actually need constraint on my work time because when I’m trying to work in this unconstrained way and when I’m trying to solve for lack of belief with more time, it doesn’t work. I’m spinning my wheels. I’m exhausted.

I’m not getting the results I want to get or I’m getting them and I’m a zombie for a week. And so I need to solve for that. So clean rest, I’ve now been doing for more than 10 years.

In 2014, I started clean rest and it is such an essential piece of like, if you relate to what I’ve been talking about in this series, just through the act of clean rest and how sometimes that will feel restless and uncomfortable, like you will do a lot of work on untangling your productivity from your self-worth instead of just like intellectually thinking about those topics. Like you will actually do the actual personal development required to untangle your self-worth from your productivity. And to be working in a sustainable way, you will actually do the real personal development work required.

And we support you with that and teach you in that and what to anticipate when you start clean rest and what that looks like and all the different things. We give you full support on that in PGSD. And then the growth goal is the final thing I want to talk about in this episode.

And I really want to invite you into PGSD. So I’ll talk a little bit more about PGSD as well. But the growth goal was developed out of necessity that I’m the kind of person that, and same with our PGSDers, I want to be someone who’s up to something.

I want to be someone who’s achieving something I’ve never achieved before. I want to be someone who is learning and who is growing and who is developing and who is being able, like my favorite thing is when I can look on a year ago or two years ago and be like, oh my God, I feel like such a different version. Not like that I’m better, but that I’m doing something now with ease that used to scare the shit out of me.

That for me is such a satisfying feeling to see my capability increase, to see my capacity increase. My capacity has increased in insane ways in the last handful of years. Like just the things I’m able to do now and just like being able to run a business and be a mom of four and be breastfed.

Like I just, the capacity I have now, myself as a mom of one be like, holy shit, how do you even do that? And a lot of it is this personal development work we’ve talked about in this series that I do all of this. I practice all of this and I’ve got the compound effect of it so that I have such increased capacity, increased emotional capacity, ability to like stay emotionally regulated. Like there’s all of that.

So anyway, with that, I want to be a person who is doing things, rising to an occasion, feeling challenged. I feel very fulfilled when I have a challenge and I rise to it. I don’t feel as fulfilled if it’s and people teach this and it’s not wrong, but it’s just not the approach that I personally resonate with, which is like just set really small, realistic goals because as a perfectionist, this is kind of the theory.

As a perfectionist, you’re going to have super high standards for yourself. You’re going to put so much pressure on yourself. So why don’t we just have you set a really small, realistic goal and you just achieve that.

And then over time you achieve more and more and become more and more skilled and like you will achieve what you want. And I get that. I get the theory of that.

But for me, it is not motivating to have a goal where I don’t have to grow in order to achieve it. I want to have a goal and the growth goals, a goal for 12 months. So we want you to have time to grow.

It’s not like, okay, grow this month, grow this week. We want there to be time for you to grow into the version of you who can achieve the goal. But for me, when people have taught this approach, especially for perfectionists, it’s often given of like just do small, realistic things.

But I want to be a person who can figure out how to grow and evolve and do something big. And I just want to learn how to take the pressure off and do that in a very intentional way and do that personal development work rather than set a small goal so there’s no pressure. I want to be able to feel, in PGSD we teach you the level at which to set your growth goal and then how to break it down so you can grow into it.

But I want to have a goal that doesn’t put an insane amount of pressure on me that I can’t actually handle even thinking about it. It just feels so out of this world. It’s so unbelievable that I’m just in so much hope and optimism and like, oh my God, I’d love to do that.

Just kind of so disconnected because it’s so big or so overwhelmed because it’s so big. I want to have a goal that I can be engaged with and connected with but does scare me a little, does make me a bit uncomfortable, would require me to grow and evolve in order to achieve it. And then I love the growth goal the way, and relating it back to all that we’ve talked about, is that having the growth goal for me meant I had to release my perfectionism handbrake at least to some degree in order to achieve it.

Because it wasn’t going to be sustainable to achieve it. And with this as well, that it’s kind of like when you have the growth goal, at first you will just approach it with your perfectionist thoughts, obviously. You haven’t yet shifted those thoughts.

So you will approach it like a perfectionist and it will be uncomfortable. And then that discomfort will invite you to shift into a different way of thinking about the goal. And you might approach it, but then it turns out the way you did it isn’t sustainable.

So then you learn, okay, now I need to shift the thinking here or like, look at this piece so I can actually do that again and do it sustainably. So it’s, the growth goal is really a tool to grow into the next version of yourself. And to do it in a way that works with your perfectionist brain instead of against it.

And part of that is like, you will witness your perfectionist brain doing its thing. And that can be uncomfortable. And part of like, PGSD and PGSD, we are a community of people who we want to feel uncomfortable.

We want to be doing, even though it sucks to be in it, but like, I enjoy doing uncomfortable personal development work because I love that feeling of growing and evolving and changing. And so with the growth goal, that’s it. It’s going to be uncomfortable.

You are going to have unhelpful thoughts that have always been there in the background, but hide when you’ve got a really vague goal. Or if you have a goal that’s like way too big or way too small, you will, or you have like 17 goals. Like if you have like three goals for every different area of your life in business, if that is you there, there’s going to be thoughts that come up into your awareness that have been hiding due to vague goals or having too many goals.

But then because they come up, you can actually shift the thinking. So I love having a goal that brings up the thinking that is standing in the way of the goal. So I can actually shift the thinking.

If you have a goal, like is the theory with having a small goal. If you have a goal that doesn’t bring up the thinking, you don’t get to shift the thinking. And what I was most interested in was how do I have a goal that like supports me to accomplish things and to be successful and to make a full-time income.

And then more than that, while also doing the personal development work required and setting the goal that required me to grow and was structured in a way that allows me time to grow into the goal and to grow into that person meant that practically speaking, it puts me in that personal development work. It’s no longer an intellectual pursuit. Like I actually have to grow and be willing to be uncomfortable and like, and be in that process of evolution.

And it’s not for everyone, but if you resonate with what I talk about in this podcast and if you’ve made it this far in this series, it is for you. It is something that you’re intrigued by. You want to be as uncomfortable as it is.

You want to be growing and evolving and like to be able to, as the cliche saying is to be comfortable in discomfort. That’s what we teach you inside PGSD because growing a business is uncomfortable. Growing as a human is uncomfortable.

Getting out of the perfectionist thoughts that you’ve been thinking for decades is uncomfortable. Our brains are designed to think the same thoughts over and over and again, not because they’re true, but just to conserve energy. So that if something happened and we needed to use energy to get ourselves to safety, we’d have the energy.

So our brains are wired to just think the same thoughts. And great, let’s just have you actually be wired to think more helpful thoughts over and over again. But I want to have a goal that grows me and I want to have a weekly practice, which is power planning, to stay connected to the goal, to myself, to my values, to what’s important to me, to what’s actually going on with my week, to where I’m getting in my own way so I can see it and then actually get out of my own way.

And to have clean rest as the fuel, to have rest for my brain, to do the practical work like, oh my God, through clean rest, I’ve had to do the practical work of not believing that I’m only lovable if I’m being productive, that I’m only worthwhile. I have to be doing something all the time. I don’t believe that anymore because of clean rest.

It’s not like I changed my thoughts and then I started clean rest. No, clean rest was the teacher. Power planning is the teacher.

The growth goal is the teacher. And then in PGSD, so we teach you the growth goal. You get instant access to all of it, all the lessons on the growth goal, power planning, clean rest, the PGSD private podcast.

You can come straight away to the weekly coaching calls that we have. You don’t have to attend live. Great if you can.

If you can’t, you get everything you need from the replays and from everything else. It’s designed so you don’t have to be there live. It’s not for everyone to be able to or to even want to be there live.

There are so many PGSDs who are lurkers and who just want to lurk and learn from watching others and the coaching they get. And so the program is designed to really support you no matter what your learning style is because I want to get as many perfectionist entrepreneurs as possible out of their own ways. Not just the ones who can attend a call at a certain time or not just the ones who just want to like only self-coach and not be coached.

Like I just, I really want to help you get out of your own way and do this personal development work. So inside PGSD, you get instant access to those lessons and you can start right away setting your growth goal. And as well, if you’re in this January enrollment, I recommend as well that you do, you’ll be able to find it in PGSD, the two workshops I taught in December on the like annual review and then the annual planning that we did for 2026.

It’s just such a great time to do that and that will support you with everything we’ve talked about. And to come to the coaching if you can or listen to the replays, like that’s where you get support where you can bring like, here’s what was coming up for me. Like this week I noticed this because of my power planning or this is what’s coming up for me about my growth goal or this is what’s coming up when I rest.

And you hear others get coached on all those exact same things. And like they will say things on coaching calls you didn’t even know you were struggling with until you heard someone else say it. And you’re like, oh my God, that’s me.

And also just like the shame that is removed. And there’s a saying that I heard recently, I read an email about this, that it’s like shame dies when stories are told in safe spaces. That’s what PGSC is.

Like that is at the core of what we do too, of like just hearing other perfectionist entrepreneurs struggling with the same things, feeling so much less alone and just like, oh, it’s not just me that like makes this, has this amazing idea and then procrastinates on it. Like it’s not just you, there’s nothing wrong with you. We’ve just got to get you the tools and support you with the personal development so you can do the things you want to do.

We’ve helped so many others do it. We can help you do it. So in PGSD, you have that, the PGSC process, which includes the growth goal, power planning, clean rest, and as well as the other personal development work I’ve talked about, safe visibility, self-coaching, how to self-coach.

What else did I talk about? I think there’s something major that momentum decisions, momentum projects, the self-image work. That’s what I was thinking about, self-image. There’s that, and it’s all laid out so you can go through the process.

You don’t have to do it all at once. We know you’ve got a life. We know you’ve got things going on and you get lifetime access to the program as well.

So it’s not going to take you a lifetime to make the changes and to be able to show up. But like there are so many PGSDers who still love being on the coaching calls, love being a part of the community, just because of how supportive it is and how it helps them implement and show up and be themselves. And we have your persistence log in the PGSD forum.

So we have PGSD-ers who’ve literally been updating that every week for years. Not everyone does it. You don’t have to, but they share in that their weekly review and self-study and what’s coming up for them and document their journey and document their persistence.

And really it’s just zooming out for a second. We’ve been talking about in this series, and then I’ll wrap up. We’ve been talking about in this series, building your business through personal development and this specific personal development work that you need to do as a perfectionist entrepreneur, that you want to do.

It’s not just you need to do it. You want to do it. You don’t want to keep beating yourself up.

You don’t want to keep procrastinating. You don’t want to keep overthinking and nitpicking. You don’t want to keep having an idea and not being able to follow through on it.

You don’t want to keep having to work in a job that you don’t want to work. You want to be able to have a full-time income. You want to be able to show up and deliver amazing things to your clients and your customers and see your ideas come to life and to have a challenge that you rise to.

You want that. And PGSD, what we support you with, what we teach you, is practically how to do that personal development work so your business can grow and so you can grow. How to be comfortable in the discomfort of being an entrepreneur, especially being a perfectionist entrepreneur whose brain just wants everything to be perfect and nothing to be imperfect and wants certainty and wants everyone to be applauding you all the time.

There’s a certain kind of personal development work required to be able to have a good time in business when you’re a perfectionist entrepreneur. I have figured that out. I have taught it to many people.

I would love to teach it to you. I would love to support you with it. I would love to be your coach inside PGSD.

So doors are open right now and are closing at 11.59 p.m eastern time on the 6th of Feb. As soon as you sign up, you get instant access to everything inside so you don’t want to delay. You want to get yourself inside ASAP.

This personal development work isn’t a nice-to-have and once I figure out how to do everything right, then I might do that. This is the method for building your business, is growing yourself as a perfectionist entrepreneur, is working with your perfectionist brain instead of against it. So you can stop spinning your wheels, you can get out of the shame spirals and you can show up and you can make plans and you can follow them and you can set goals and achieve them in a sustainable way that you actually like, that’s actually in alignment with your values while taking care of your life, still being able to spend lots of time with your kids or your partner, your friends, hobbies.

You might actually start hobbies in PGSD, a lot of PGSDers come in with no hobbies and just feeling so behind even though they’re trying so damn hard and we just shift that in PGSD. It is such an incredible program, it is such, like it is my life’s work at this point to to be able to share this and I learned, I learned it the hard way and through so much time and effort spent just like banging my head against the wall and trying to figure out what was going on and then trying to figure out how to make it practical and how to make it work and then I taught it to other people, other perfectionist entrepreneurs and then got their feedback and saw how they interacted with the growth goal and power planning and clean rest and then kept updating it, making it as helpful as it could possibly be. So I want to invite you in, doors are open now, join us inside, samlarbrown.com.pgse is where to go to sign up.

I can’t wait to to be welcoming in our PGSDers, obviously the time of recording this is not actually open, I’m recording this in advance. I can’t wait to welcome you in and have you be part of our community and just teach you this personal development work so your business can grow and you can feel successful and you can stop feeling behind and it just it matters so much, your success matters so much to me and helping you do that in a way that feels good and feels like you is what I’m here to do in a world that’s saying be better and be different and and just like just stop caring what people think and just remember done is better than perfect. I actually want to share with you what works and get you working with your brain instead of against it.

So samlaurabrown.com/pgsd is where to go to sign up and I hope you’re having a beautiful day. I hope to see you inside the program and I will talk to you in the next episode.

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.