There’s nothing that stops prosperity flowing faster than perfectionism. If you constantly put off movement forward in any goal you really want, if you think your work isn’t good enough, if you look around you and see that you started many things but haven’t been able to complete many, you are likely suffering from analysis paralysis. Procrastination is always fear. Pause here and think about one thing you want to achieve that you have procrastinated about. Substitute the word “procrastinate” with the words “I’m afraid I am not good enough to succeed” and you’ll see how procrastination and fear are interchangeable.
A client we’ll call Jessica asked me help her turn her struggling life coaching business around. I asked her what the first logical step would be towards turning things around and she said, “I feel that if I just cleared out the clutter then I’d be able to focus on a project I know would help my business grown.” I asked her to look at the clutter in her office and tell me what she felt as she looked and she said, “I hear my mother’s voice telling me that it won’t be done until the last paper clip is put in it’s place.”
My student Sienna some years ago took years to complete her certification in EFT. When we set up a tapping session to get her to move forward she would cancel at the last minute. This happened month after month. When we were finally able to tap we discovered that she felt I would tell her that she wasn’t good enough to pass evaluation. She said, “All I can do is compare myself to you and how good you are.” This is the natural (yet destructive) tendency to compare ourselves to the person we are learning from. Logically it doesn’t make sense that a student just finishing a workshop would be able to do what someone with tens of thousands of hours of experience but it happens. As we tapped we uncovered deeper layers of this issue and found that Sienna’s mother had compared her to her brother throughout childhood.
Other ways that our parents program us to stop moving forward due to perfectionism include either an overly critical parent (Could you be any lazier?), the parent that tells you aren’t quite enough (If you tried harder you could have gotten an A+) and the parent that didn’t pay you any compliments at all. List those times you can remember and tap on them. Next think of the next step you need to take today to move forward in some area and tap on the fear that you aren’t ready, that it’s not good enough, or that you’ll be judged.
Expansion and growth and yes, success requires us to move out the familiar and possibly make mistakes. Stop beating yourself for not being better than you are – stop engaging in perfectionism, in other words – and simply start accepting where you are right now. I don’t know a better tool than EFT to do just that.