Doing the Same Thing Won’t Get You Different Results

"Everything in your life is a reflection of a choice you have made. If you want a different result, make a different choice."

~ Unknown

At some point in your life, perfectionism (in one of its many flavours) has worked for you.

It was an effective strategy for getting what you wanted. It may still be, helping you get sh*t done and allowing you to hide your vulnerabilities.

The problem, as I see it, is then not with perfectionism itself but with a lack of an alternative. Because untempered perfectionism leads to overwhelm, exhaustion and burnout, speaking from experience. So if you can't do anything different, you end up systemically repeating what you think is effective but isn't actually getting you anywhere. You get caught in a vicious cycle without even realising it.

This is why I love embodied coaching - it's quicker, stickier and deeper, revealing our patterns and helping us develop range in our strategies so that we have choice about how we respond to situations.

So much of the personal development world focuses on awareness.

It's an important first step but, if you can't embody a new way of being and deploy alternative strategies, it's a frustrating one. To build range, you have to practice something different. You have to do something different, consistently over time so you get better at it.

It's a step I see so many people skip. They have an insight. They become aware of a pattern. They intellectually know what they're doing and what needs to change. But nothing does because they haven't embodied this learning; they haven't practised. And practise is hard. It's hard to remember and to learn something new. It's hard to make mistakes and to fail. It's so much easier to return to the same thing you've always done. Especially as a perfectionist because your perfectionist brain hates doing things badly!

The second trap I see people falling into is confusing practice with application.

Practice is important to build skills. It has two elements: you can control the variables and it’s low stakes. Application is then using these skills in real-life. Application, without practice, means we don’t get any better. Practice without application is pointless.

We need both, but so often we rush into application without taking the time to build the basic skills with practice.

Changing your relationship with perfectionism isn't easy but it does happen with practice.

What are you practising at the moment? Because we’re always practising something.