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Perfection in Business? It’s not real
When I first started my business, I made so many mistakes. More than I could even count. But I don’t regret any of them, because they’ve been a great learning experience both for myself, and now, also for you!
Today I’m sharing all about how I tried way too hard to appear legit in my business right off the bat – causing me to waste a ton of time trying to fix everything at once and make it all perfect.
A few mindset shifts, and practical steps later, and I’m ready to share with you exactly how you can avoid this same mistake. You’re listening to episode 076 of the Chasing Simple podcast, and I’m your host – Amanda Warfield. Let’s dive in!
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Grab your FREE Ticket for Chasing Simple: The Summit!
- Tune in to Nicole Boucher’s Episode on Experimenting in Business
- Listen to Jessica Rasdall’s episode on Using Story to Deliver a Transformation
- This week’s action step: Come join us for Chasing Simple: The Summit. Learn from some amazing speakers on how to uncomplicate your life and business, and then chose one topic to move forward with focusing on to improve just one area of your business!
- This week’s book recommendation: Sunflower Sisters by Martha Hall Kelly
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!
Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate.
When I first started my business, I made so many mistakes more than I could even count, but I don’t regret any of them because they’ve been a great learning experience, both for myself. And now also for you today, I’m sharing all about how I tried way too hard to appear legit in my business right off the bat. Causing me to waste a ton of time, trying to fix everything at once and make it all perfect. A few mindset shifts and practical steps later. And I’m ready to share with you exactly how you can avoid the same mistake. You’re listening to episode 76 of The Chasing Simple Podcast. And I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. Let’s dive in.
So back in episode nine, I shared briefly about nine things that I really struggled with when I first started my business. And one of those things was trying way too hard to appear legit. I got entirely too caught up worrying about how I was being perceived. And I was spending hours and hours researching the best way to do literally anything and everything I was trying to do.
And then I would work at it until it felt perfect. So I spending tons of time researching, researching, researching, researching, and then working on it for hours and hours and hours until I felt like, yes, I can put this out. It seems legit enough. I would also take on projects that were way, way, way too large.
So for example, email marketing, I can vividly remember sitting on our back porch in Washington with my laptop and my phone. And I was reading blog post after blog post about email marketing and taking pages and pages and pages of notes. I still have it the notebook that I was taking the notes that I’m sure I could pull it out and tell you how many pages, but pages and pages and pages of notes only to look over all of those notes and feel completely overwhelmed by everything that I still needed to learn that I still didn’t understand.
Let alone do. My problem was that I had always been a big believer in just doing something right the first time and getting it done right the first time. So you don’t have to go back and redo it. And while that might be the right mindset for cleaning your home. So for example, putting something in his exact spot versus just dumping it in the general area, it goes in and then having to come back later and actually put it away.
It works great for that. Do it right the first time and never have to redo it. Until you pull it out again, but it doesn’t work in business. And this finally came to me when I was redoing an email funnel for the fifth time, I realized that no matter how much I learned or how much time I spent on a project or how much research I did, I was only one person running an entire business on my own.
I could spend weeks on a project, get it to a point where I felt it was complete only to learn something else three months later and feel the need to scrap what I done and start all over. Not only that, best practices change, new technique has come out for whatever reason. When I first started, I felt like if I could just learn it all, I would be able to set up my business and then just make money without ever having to work.
And I guess there is, there are certainly some people that kind of teach to that mindset of, oh, passive income. You can sit on the beach forever and it’s just not realistic. And I think that I had that mindset of I’m going to set it up once and never have to set it up again. But not only do I learn more about the specific, like, let’s say the, the email marketing funnel.
Not only did I learn new things? Did I end up switching providers did new best practices come out. It’s ever evolving online businesses ever evolving. Not only does that constantly change, not only am I only one person and big businesses have literally, multiple people doing just one of those things. So they’ve got multiple, multiple, multiple people working just on emails, email funnels, not only that, not only those do things, but also my business has grown and evolved and changed since the first time I set it up. So when I first set up this email funnel and I set it up for. I don’t remember what my very first opt-in is.
I would have to go back and look, but I set it up for a capsule wardrobe. Opt-in I don’t teach capsule wardrobes anymore. So that funnel is null and void because my business has pivoted so many times and they’ve been so many iterations that it wouldn’t have been possible to set it once and forget it. It took me years to realize that that I was every part of my business. Every single piece would be a constant evolution And don’t get me. First impressions are important, but you don’t have to have things perfectly done right away. Again, you’re just one person. Giving myself permission to experiment and have fun in my business was the biggest game changer for me. Episode 15 with Nicole Boucher is all about the importance of experimenting. And I will link to it in the show notes, if you want to check that one out too, but basically anytime I do anything now, literally anything in my business, I just tell myself that it’s a data gathering experiment and this mindset has really helped me lift a lot of pressure off myself. So whether I’m setting up my brand name or I’m creating content, or I’m putting a new product out. Telling myself that it’s just an experiment has lifted so much pressure off of myself.
I also got really intentional about only learning about one thing at a time. So meaning that when I feel there’s a new area of business, I want to learn about, or I feel like I have a hole than I need to fill a gap. I find someone to teach me about it. I find an expert. I invest. So that I can get the full picture instead of trying to pick through a million blog posts and podcast episodes. And then that’s my focus until I’m done working through an implementing what I’ve invested in. So for example, when I decided that I wanted to start speaking to my business, I felt like it was the next right step for growing my audience, getting in front of more people and really helping impact other.
They felt like it was the next right step. I decided. To join Jessica Razzles Speaking Strategy Academy, which she’s also been a guest on the podcast Episode Three, How To Deliver a Transformation With Story, which I will link to that as well in the show notes. But I joined her Speaking Strategy Academy, and then I spent every single Friday morning back when I was still working Fridays, I spent every single Friday morning going through the course inside of it, learning, taking action, learning, taking action. And then, once I felt like I was at an okay level of knowledge, not an expert, just knowledgeable and the ongoing action steps had become a habit. So the continually researching and finding new opportunities to pitch myself to the continually tweaking my, my talks and all those things. When that kind of stuff, those ongoing action steps became a habit. Then I invested in the next thing, but only then I made sure that I felt like I had a foundation to continue growing the speaking side of things. I had a firm foundation then I moved on to. Okay. What else feels like? I could definitely learn more about my business. What feels like I’m not knowledgeable enough that I don’t have a firm foundation in.
And of course I realized that instead of trying to do all the things in any given project, it was a lot more effective. If I simplified what I was putting on my plate. So instead of trying to learn literally everything about speaking and pitching and securing opportunities, I went through and I got the basics. Then as I did the work and I got my hands dirty and I really started doing each of the things that Jessica was teaching me to do, then I was able to improve and tweak my processes, but I had to get my hands dirty first. And I had to have that for a foundation in order to get my hands dirty first. So I jumped in with a simplified action plan instead of okay. I have to figure out, speaking out to figure out pitching, I have to figure out finding opportunities. I have to figure out security and opportunities. I have to figure out how to write the best. I just one step at a time, one thing at a time, did it, got my hands dirty, tweaked and improved. Moving on to the next step.
Now, if you feel like this is also something that you struggle with, if you feel like you are constantly, always trying to fix everything at once, you’re overwhelmed by all this stuff in your business that you don’t know and don’t understand, and all the things that need to be updated and you realize that you need more help uncomplicating your life and business. You need more help simplify, and what’s on your plate, I want you to come join us for Chasing Simple The Summit. You’re going to learn from some amazing, really, truly amazing speakers on how to uncomplicate your life in business. And then you can choose one topic to move forward with one topic to focus on in order to improve just one area of your business at a time.
That’s your action step for this week. I want you to head to Amandawarfield.com/thesummit. No spaces. Amandawarfield.com/thesummit. Go sign up, get your free ticket. This is a free event. I want to see you there so that you can start uncomplicating your life and business and stop trying to fix it all at once.
And this week’s book recommendation is Sunflower Sisters by Martha Hall Kelly, I think I’ve recommended both of her other books in this series. She calls it a series because they’re all based on the same genealogy at different points, different timelines in history. You definitely could read them in any order truly, but this one was set in the Civil War. It was set in the north, in the Civil War, which if you’ve listened to this podcast, you know, that I love Gone With the Wind. But it is a very biased viewpoint in that book. And so reading this one was phenomenal. I loved getting to read about the civil war from the total opposite viewpoint. It was so good. Loved it. Highly recommend it. if you’re also a historical fiction, nerd, you, you would love this. All right friend, go grab your free ticket for Chasing Simple the Summit. Again, go to Amandawarfield.com/thesummit and grab that free ticket.
And I cannot wait to see you there.
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