Following on my last week’s learnings about ‘not being good enough’, this week, I was focusing on accepting that no one is perfect (not even me) and that we all make mistakes sometimes.
Be yourself and stop chasing perfection
No matter how much I’d love to be perfect and make sure that everything I do is perfect, perfection is a black hole of productivity and success. Perfection is just an illusion! Or as Brian Fanzo (one of my favourite social media influencers) says, perfection is a fairytale.
I’d love to say that I always aspire for perfection, but recently I’m realising it’s not true – because it’s not possible! Instead, I’m aspiring to be more authentic and honest. I don’t expect myself to know everything and I’m being clear about this to my clients and collaborators.
It’s important to allow yourself to fail and to make mistakes, because that’s the only way to learn, improve and move forward. Making mistakes doesn’t make us less professional or less capable of doing our work well, it only means that we’re human.
Lots of my wisdom this week came from a really inspiring presentation from Marion Foreman on Tuesday morning. You can listen to a recording from the event here. She talked about her journey of starting a business later in her life and dealing with difficult life decisions along the way. What resonated the most was her emphasis on being open and honest about everything and also the need of building resilience.
Be open to new things, but don’t lose your focus
This week, I really felt that I needed some time to reflect. There are lots of things happening and I’m really excited about the coming months, but I also think it’s important to pause and reflect every now and then to make sure you’re still going into the right direction.
I think it’s good to be open to new things and projects as they coming along, but you should never lose sight of your main target. It’s really easy to get distracted by shiny new things that are all around us and jump on every opportunity that’s presented to us. For me, the key to success is choosing the right projects to divide my attention between, and also delegating tasks that aren’t my main priority.
Book Corner
Last week I starting reading Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes – But Some Do by Matthew Syed as part of a new project with one of my clients.
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
“All of us are aware, in our different ways, that we find it difficult to accept our own failures. Even in trivial things, like a friendly game of golf, we can become prickly when we have underperformed, and we are asked about it in the clubhouse afterwards.”
It’s not the kind of book that I’d usually reach for, but in just a few chapters I’ve learnt a lot about learning from mistakes.
Has anything from this blog post resonated with you? Let me know in the comments!
