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The Confident Mother

Helping ambitious women in technology fully unlock their leadership potential

8th September 2015

How to focus on the details not perfection

A funny thing happened today. I sold the first copy of my book. Not THE first copy ever … the first copy today. But the first copy at the wrong price. Now before you all rush on over to buy your discounted copy, let me just point out that I have now fixed my mistake. The mistake was in my favour, not yours.

When I first started planning my book, the marketing, the launch … I knew it made good sense to offer my community the opportunity to pre-purchase the book before the publication date. One of the mistakes that I actively encourage mums in business to avoid is Create Before You Sell. There is no point spending hours perfecting your amazing course stuffed with valuable content or your incredible workshop with an inspirational agenda if you don’t know that you can sell it. For many of us, the Create stage is the exciting part. However sometimes what you think is the perfect course or the perfect membership site is not quite what your clients want. Which means you then need to amend, adjust or even abandon.

However when it comes to writing a book, it’s a little bit different. You can’t completely pre-sell before you create. There’s a certain element of faith that goes into a book. Faith that the book will sell because it helps women to create that feeling of confidence. Faith that women will see how the book will help them to celebrate and love life as a woman and as a mother.

But as soon as I could, I made it possible to pre-purchase, the incentive being a discount if you purchase before midnight on 16 September. Except that I made a mistake on the back-end and put the wrong date as the discount expiry. Hence today’s first purchase was at the wrong price.

Two years ago, this mistake would have really infuriated me. I would have brooded on it for days. I am was a perfectionist. Anything less than perfection in myself was simply unacceptable. My perfectionism meant that I held everybody else to pretty impossible standards too.

One of the other mistakes that I talk about with my clients is You Want To Be Perfect. Being perfect is fantastic.  But quite frankly it’s impossible. When we hold out and wait for ‘it’ to be perfect – ‘it’ being your workshop, your course, your book, your blog post, your career change, your life, your relationship … Perfectionism has become procrastination.  When you aspire to be perfect, you are holding yourself to standards that you can never achieve.

This is a quote from The Confident Mother sample chapter which is an interview with Miriam McCaleb:

Trying to be perfect is harmful. It’s hard for those of us who strive to make As and A+s. I aim for a C in my mothering, because it gives me permission to respond to what’s happening in front of me and the interactive sloppiness of real life.

We don’t have perfect interactions with amazingly scripted children. We have mucky faced challenges thrown across our paths all the time. You can spend your energy rolling with it or spend your energy making it a vision of perfect.

Bear that in mind. It is good to focus on the details but don’t worry about perfection. Spend your energy wisely. Spend it on the details. (And accept that you will make mistakes sometimes).

 

 

Article by Sherry Bevan / confident mother, Procrastination, The Confident Mother Leave a Comment

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