We seem to strive to be both perfect AND present, and yet we know that perfectionism can seriously get in our way.
I had everything planned… I thought
I was with six people from my client’s working group. We were all standing around a small conference room table. I had spread out a map of their campus on the table. I also had colorful laminated cutouts, to scale, for soccer fields, baseball and softball fields, tennis courts, and the like.
This was going to be an exercise for us to explore potential new ways to support outdoor sports and recreation. We had only just started to put the cutouts on the map, when my primary client looked at me and said, “We need another practice field for football.”
Would it all fall apart?
I felt immediate panic. I didn’t bring a cutout for a practice field. I hadn’t anticipated this. In that split second, my self-talk judged the whole thing as a failure and a waste of time.
However, externally, I wasn’t getting any indications of judgment. In fact, the group was getting really into the exercise.
After a deep breath, my creativity kicked in, and I simply took a sheet of my note paper, tore it into generally the size of a field, and wrote “football practice” on it. My client took it happily and started playing with where to put it on the map.
A “quick fix” became a real improvement
Gradually, I noticed that my quick fix for my oversight, actually made the exercise better – because everyone then felt empowered to tear paper into whatever element they could dream up. We had horseshoe pits, pavilions, and grandstands!
My value wasn’t in being perfect, but in supporting my client’s experience
If I had held too tightly to the pressure I had put on myself to be perfect, to anticipate all questions, to be fully prepared, then I would have truly panicked and gotten defensive. But by accepting that I wasn’t perfect, and that my value wasn’t in being perfect, but in supporting my client’s experience, we actually had an incredible session.
Mindset exercise
So here’s an exercise to help you with your mindset muscle:
- Today, identify a project that you are working on.
- Then, reflect on how much pressure you feel to “get it right” and “be perfect” and “be fully prepared”.
- Then, every day this week, write down one or two examples of how this pressure gets in the way. Perhaps it makes you less ‘present’, makes it harder to listen, makes you afraid of feedback.
- At the end of the week, review your list, and reflect on how you feel about the project, and how you feel about the pressure of being perfect versus present.
