The mighty momentum handbrake

Growing your dream natural health practice asks you to show-up to get all the things done…over and over and over again.

The experience of crippling perfectionism can side-swipe this process like a surprise hail-storm on a lovely Sunday picnic.

It starts with one essential aspect or task lagging because it’s “not quite right”. If not diverted early, this spreads to other areas of business too.

This type of perfectionism can incessantly whisper in our ear “This isn’t enough!”. (Imagine Gollum sitting by your side).

You want to produce something meaningful, valuable, and impactful that helps the people that need your skills and craft.

You probably also want to be acknowledged, respected, and treated with care in response to what you share.

It makes sense to be wary about whether these things will actually happen in these times of short-attention spans and sometimes brutal online dialogue.

BUT! If you don’t move vigilantly with these things you've gotta do, the mighty handbrake toward realising the vision can be cranked on, and momentum sent spinning.

In IT systems, programmers need to know if there’s a glitch before the program becomes too big to find the problem.

So IT pros work in agile, iterative (step-by-step) chunks. They have short-term goals to move toward the broader longer-term goals.

“Fail fast, fail often” is a mantra guiding them to produce in smaller segments, testing the success (or failure) of that segment, which are then refined before moving forward.

The lesson here is: SMALLER CHUNKS.

So often the big grand plans can feel like looming burdens staring-down our capacity in a battle of the fittest.  

Combine that other factors like comparison-itis, juggling the family, tending to other parts of life.  It can all amount to feeling too much.

When we pick up a leaf out of Life’s book to observe its living and adaptive ways, we see that SLOW AND SMALL SOLUTIONS are a common.

Think of a tree. It produces thousands of seeds at the time of flowering, casting them in the wind, under the wings of birds, and on the backs of possums.  A tree takes thousands of chances to ensure its legacy continues.  It’s a given that many of those seeds won’t propagate and grow into another tree.  Failure is built into the tree’s design.  

The tree knows it has rightful place and responsibility to cast its seeds.  Tree doesn’t second guess its validity to propogate more trees.  Nor does it compare itself to the other trees in the forest, holding back because that big beautiful gum over there is already taking up the prime canopy position in the forest family.  Tree casts its seeds, knowing the saplings will find their niche to grow and develop, and will possibly take up the sunny canopy position one day.

These two examples teach us a couple of things that can be helpful for soothing bouts of crippling perfectionism.

Plan for failure
Ready yourself to not get it ‘right’, and try to rock the flail with a sense of play.

Keep strong connection with your visions and dreams
Let the brilliance of your heart’s desire be a beacon as you step through the trial and error.

Review your progress
Schedule in regular times to look back at what you’ve posted, written, shared, offered. Celebrate the positives, acknowledge the challenges, and take note of how to refine in the future.

Create criteria for what “good enough” means to you
Taking the approach of perfectly imperfect, what standards do you want for your content so you know it’s hitting the mark enough as you develop?

Have a clear self care plan
You’re planning to fail… so what happens when you do? Make a list of the things that help you be embodied, present, connected and loved. And make sure you turn to this when you need it!

Everyone’s different, and we all have our unique needs to refine how we show-up… again and again and again.  

Come join me in the coaching space to dial-in your capacity to fail fast and often as you manifest your vision of sharing your natural health craft authentically.  A few private 1-to-1 coaching spaces are available now to slide into over the summer.  And a new offering of small-scale bespoke group coaching is launching in January 2022.   DM me to explore what might work best for you.

Your coach,

x Erin