I'm taking my own advice today.
Or at least starting to which is better than being paralyzed in my thoughts and not taking action; but not as good as just taking the needed action and moving beyond the paralysis.
I've been stalling in a "gotta figure it out" mode for a few months now and no progress is being made. I keep telling myself that I'm "thinking it through" but I'm really just stalling on making a decision. Or stalling on sitting down and crunching some numbers to develop a plan. Or stalling on making changes that will help me but will put me out of my comfort zone for a while.
While baby-stepping back into a healthy, productive rhythm today, it was such serendipitous timing to receive a link to this article about the 70-20-10 Rule in my inbox. Basically, the 70-20-10 Rule teaches that you should focus on knocking out a bunch of work - even if mediocre in quality - so that you don't get bogged down in the perfectionist zone and end up knocking NOTHING out,
Oopsy. It's like Inc. has been following me around.
In the article they describe an anecdotal experiment of a ceramics class divided into two groups. One group is to focus on quality of the ceramic pot they create, the other group is to focus on quantity of ceramic pots they can make. The moral of the story is that the group that just cranked out pot after pot ended up producing the highest quality because they didn't sit around trying to think up the most perfect method - they just dug in and figured it out by trial and error. From the article:
"This approach works because it forces us to push aside perfectionism and act in the real world, and experience (failure included) is often the best teacher."
Where do the numbers 70-20-10 come in? Basically this rule works out fairly consistently no matter what you are doing. 70% of your work will be mediocre, 20% will be horrible, and 10% will be awesome.
So get started, stop waiting. Getting started will get you over the hump faster than trying to brainstorm the perfect solution...which will never come because there is always more we can learn and perfect about whatever we are doing. I have a client who is developing a wonderful business idea and I've said almost these exact words to her about her service offering and pricing and packaging. We can talk about it a little bit but let's get it out there and get it launched and you can start bringing in money and improve your service/product by incorporating feedback from your customers - just like all good companies do. I'm also up front in sharing with my clients that this is one of my personal struggles as well so I'm more than happy to help them over this hump because it helps me get motivated, too.
This concept is also demonstrated in the book Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better by Pema Chodron. This book is actually her 2014 commencement speech given at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and based on a quote by Samuel Beckett:
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Her speech captures so well the feelings that so many of us perfectionists struggle with. We very often get caught up in this space of needing everything we do to be perfect so we pause and think and pause and think out of fear of being imperfect and perceived as a failure. When in fact, our lack of action actually accomplishes that failure for us! Here are some excellent quotes from the speech that hit my emotional heart strings:
"This is the thing: I have been in this space of feeling like a failure a lot of times, and so I feel like a pro in this space actually. And I used to be like anybody else when I was in this space. I'd just kind of close down, and there was no awareness or curiosity or anything. I carried a lot of habitual reactivity of trying to get out of that space of feeling like I had failed." Oh goodness - I get teary-eyed at the "close down" part. I've been feeling that for part of the last few months. Just unable to move forward, being frozen in "I don't know what to do right now to solve this" instead of just trying something. And the last part about awareness is also very telling. Instead of practicing my coaching skills on myself, I just tuned out and didn't try to put any solution forth, didn't stop and listen to my brain and dissect the excuses, didn't try to be aware at all.....Which is funny since my "word for the year" last year was "Awareness."
"The alternative is that out of that space of failure comes addictions of all kinds - addictions because we are not wanting to feel it, because we want to escape, because we want to numb ourselves....Out of that space comes a lot of ugly things. And yet out of that very same space of vulnerability and rawness and the feeling of failure can come our best human qualities of bravery, kindness, the ability to really care about each other, the ability to reach out to each other." Numbing. How often do we decide to take a break from our struggles and problems and just watch TV for several hours, or do some retail therapy, or eat an entire bag of potato chips. I've been guilty of all of those things at various time, sometimes all three in the same few hours of "taking a break!" But the sad truth is that while those activities can cause a little dopamine hit for a moment, it doesn't actually move us out of the problem zone. We leave that break time still a hot mess. By taking action and trying a solution out - any solution at all - I'm attempting to care for myself which will also produce a dopamine hit. And if the solution isn't an immediate success I can always try something else, moving myself a bit further out of my problems. So again, the 70-20-10 rule kicks in when we simply take action and not waste our time in the numbing zone.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I'm not yet taking huge action but I count my baby steps as steps forward. It was in that moment of awareness when I named my struggle (named it again - because I struggle with this a lot) of perfectionism and living in the "trying to" stage that I actually began to take the baby steps. I picked something to do (this blog post) and put effort into it. This blog took me two days to finish through multiple writer's block moments but I'm finishing it fairly quickly on the second day. Each step forward, each push or attempt will build up momentum that will continue to grow until I reach the goal and find a new obstacle to overcome.
Let's all move forward. Stop waiting. Take action.
Ready, set, GO!
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