Perfectionists tend to want to have all their ducks in a row before getting started on a new project. That tendency can be paralyzing. And it’s so unnecessary. In this episode, Shannon and Janine talk about how just starting where you are can benefit you in so many ways.
Discussion topics include:
- Why things don’t have to be perfect in order for you to get started
- That just by starting and moving forward, you create momentum
- How you don’t know what you need to know until you start
- The paralyzing effect of perfectionism
- Some current examples from Janine and Shannon’s lives of how they struggle with this
- How thinking of doing something as a practice or experiment can take the pressure off a new project
- Starting a new system now and worrying about the backlog later
- The impossibility of setting up a perfect system before you start
- How stopping things that aren’t working out for you is smart
Link:
Shannon’s famous lemon-ginger-honey concoction (which she didn’t actually invent but is nonetheless very effective for sore throats)
I was excited to discover this site. I want to to
thank you for your time for this particularly fantastic read!!
I definitely enjoyed every part of it and i also have you book-marked to see new
stuff on your website.
“Start Where You Are” is a wonderful idea. I am currently going through a huge number of boxes that came out of my mother’s house and straight into a public storage unit. They have been sitting there for months, and I have not been able to accomplish anything with them. I haven’t even started because I knew the process would be overwhelming. Today is Thursday, and on Monday I started going through the boxes. I have brought 14 of them home and have been able to sort through a lot of items and declutter them. I have gotten the 14 boxes down to 2 boxes so far. I have discarded probably 3000 photos — these are the easy ones. If I don’t recognize the person, and there is no identifying information on the back, out it goes! Both my mother and my grandmother operated under the policy: If it moves, take a picture of it so there are huge numbers of photos. However, I am lucky that my mother sat both of my grandmothers down years ago and had them get out their ancestral photos. She said, “If you will tell me who these people are, I will write their names on the back for you.” I have a large cache of family portraits of my ancestors now. So the adage Start Where You Are works for me because I just had to dive in. This first round of decluttering is going well. We’ll see what happens when I get to photos of MY childhood.