Curing Entrepreneurial Perfectionism

It almost goes without saying that, as entrepreneurs, we want to put our best foot forward. However, in our quest for excellence, it's very easy to get stuck in a cycle of perfecting and perfecting - our logo, our copy, our offer, our talk - to the point where, six months later, we still haven't gotten it out there.

We've all heard that the key to getting things done is to give ourselves a deadline, so we dutifully put them into our calendar. But the beauty and the beast of today's calendars is how easy it is to just drag things forward and find a new date. And then we have the negative effect of feeling bad about ourselves because we didn't keep our promise around our self-imposed deadline.

So if the cure to entrepreneurial perfectionism is not a self-imposed deadline, what is? Here are three:

1. Set an external deadline.
With external deadlines, we make a promise to somebody else. It's human nature, we just tend to hold more true to promises we make to others than we do to those we make to ourselves. This comes up a lot with students who are learning our Speak-to-Sell Formula and who want to get out there with their Signature Talk and Irresistible Offer™. Because those fall into the category of things they know are important but not urgent, it's easy to put them off, while they check their email again and respond to requests from other people.

However, when you commit to an external deadline, such as getting booked to be interviewed or to speak, and it gets announced that you're coming to the event or speaking on that telesummit, it tends to light a fire under you in a whole different way. You might have been dragging your heels for years on putting your talk and offer together, then suddenly, because of that external deadline, something you couldn't bring yourself to do gets finished in 48 hours!

2. Embrace the concept of "good enough."
Of course, we want to do our best work, but, because we are often our own harshest critics, many times our "good enough" would be considered excellent to other people. Plus, the truth is, what you need to take your program or product from an 8 to a 10 IS putting it out there, so that you can get feedback and see how it lands with your Ideal Clients. So getting that feedback is actually the key to getting from "good enough" to what you might consider perfect - if that even exists for the entrepreneur. ;-)

3. Do your tweaks after you put it out there.
Once you get that feedback from your Ideal Clients, do your tweaks. Actually plan on that timing. A company I know that helps entrepreneurs put small promotional books together came up with a similar strategy that I thought was brilliant. They interview the expert and put the book all the way together into its physical form, and then give it to the expert, allowing the person 90 days to submit edits. In their old system, they gave the expert a draft and gave them 90 days, but the books would never get done. Now they do.