Have you heard the phrase, “Practice makes perfect“?
According to Wikipedia, practice is “the act of rehearsing a behavior over and over, or engaging in an activity again and again, for the purpose of improving or mastering it.”
I believe that women work more and harder at creating or having perfect work, than they do at actually delivering it.Perfection is a great concept when you are learning multiplication tables or theorems in geometry. However, while running a business, when do you stop perfecting your idea or product and send it to the marketplace?
Notice the examples used here above empirical—fact based—MATH! The answer will be the same EVERY time! Yet, this is not true with LIFE or in BUSINESS!! Life is a crap shoot!
Yes, you must continue to work on a concept until it works the way you want it to, but what is the ultimate price of that? What does that cost you?
Unlike our male counterparts, women not only strive for perfection in their work, with themselves, and with their families, they also strive for someone else’s approval—that a product, proposal, or job is good enough to offer, sell, or promote. As working women, attaining perfection often means our competitors, who just want the sale, get ahead of us. By no means am I telling you to market your idea or product before you’ve completed it, but getting it successfully to the market is the goal—right?
Does this sound like you?
- You’ve rewritten the product launch statement multiple times, but it still doesn’t sound right.
- Your latest book is ready to go. It’s written and edited, all the endorsements are listed, but the book cover colors aren’t jiving with you.
- Your company is being considered for an advertising contract worth millions of dollars, and you’ve made it to the final round. All you have to do now is give one more presentation to clinch it. You’ve changed the presentation four times, but you’re still not satisfied.
Why do we work so hard at perfection? Are we afraid of failure? Or, are we waiting for approval from the women around us—our cheering section—our girls?
Think about growing up as a little girl. What did you live for? Was it the approval of your mom or your dad? Some of us were showered with lots of approval and acceptance, almost to the point of being addicted to approval. That addiction to approval makes it hard to move forward unless it’s “perfect.”
In general, what is the price of perfection?
- Failure in business.
- Unrealistic expectations in our relationships.
- An inability to feel self-approval.
Let’s instead remove the self-pressure for needing or striving for the approval of others, in order to move to our next level of greatness! Experience a freedom that you may not have felt before. Instead of setting ourselves up for failure, let go of conditions that tell us we have to be “perfect” in order to find acceptance and be accepted. Go ahead and be the BOSS
Go ahead and be the BOSS babe you were designed to be!
If “practice makes perfect” continues to be a repeated mantra in your life, let’s have a conversation. Text CHAOS to (708) 501-7060.
This article was written by The BOSS Influencer, C. Lynn Williams
Lynn Williams is an MBA graduate, author, speaker, and educator. Her passion is helping parents seeking better relationships with each other, as well as their tweens, teens and adult children. To help working moms have better work-life balance, she created Finding Superwomanâ„¢. Her motto: Providing parenting solutions. Building solid foundations. Securing promising futures.
Learn more about C. Lynn Williams by visiting her website at www.clynnwilliams.com
Follow C. Lynn on Twitter @msparentguru