One More Edit: The Perfectionism Habit and What's Underneath It

Kristen Melville: Invisible Upside. I'm your host, Kristen Melville, a hypnotherapist, business coach, and RTT practitioner from Sydney, Australia. This is a place for the midlife business owner who wants to harness the power of their subconscious mind to grow the business they've always dreamed of. Welcome. I'm so glad you're here. Welcome to this week's episode of Invisible Upside. In this episode, we're going to dig into a terrible habit that so many of us fall prey to in business. I'm talking about perfectionism. And here's what it can look like. You're scrolling, half paying attention, and you stop on a post from someone else in your industry. It's a bit rough and ready, perhaps the lighting's not that great, there's a typo. It clearly took them about 10 minutes to make. And yet it's got more comments under it than anything you've posted all month, even though you've spent hours and hours laboring over what you've made before sending it out into the world. And in that moment, you feel frustration and perhaps a touch of envy. And maybe you wonder if you're even cut out for this. This is the curse of perfectionism and the just one more edit habit that can come with it. Here's what I mean. Something you made is basically done. The offer, the caption, the course module, the piece of client work, the post, whatever it is. And instead of it going out into the world, it gets one more pass, then another. A word gets changed here, a tweak there, a section gets rewritten for the fourth time, and ends up only incrementally better than it was in the first place. Meanwhile, the person you scrolled past 20 minutes ago posted something rougher than your first draft and it's already out in the world working for them. Perfectionism can be a huge drain on your energy and a time waster, and it can be a really difficult pattern to break. One of the best ways to go about doing that is to actually understand what's going on underneath it. Your conscious mind is the part of you that's weighing up whether the writing is good enough, whether the lighting is right, whether this is really your best work. It's about quality control. But it's not actually the part that's deciding whether the thing gets published or not, or how many passes you need to make before you feel ready to put it out there. So often that is being driven at level of the subconscious mind, usually as a result of experiences in your early life that created a belief that making mistakes and not being perfect isn't acceptable. So when something that's basically finished sits there getting that one more edit, what's actually happening most of the time is that a part of you has decided that finished but unpublished is the safest state to stay in. If it stays unpublished, it can't be judged and it can't fail. Unpublished can't get those two likes and confirm your worst fear about what people might really think. The edit ⁓ rarely has much to do with the work itself. Most of the time it's just a delay tactic based on fear. It can sound reasonable like I just want to get this right or I just want to take one more look at it. In that moment it may not feel like you're avoiding anything. It might even feel like you're being responsible or feels like quality control. I personally lived this for years. Back when I was creating what I've referred to previously as my half-built bridges courses and tools and coaching packages, finished and priced and sitting there that I never promoted. I was working constantly. I was just working on everything except the things that would actually put me in front of anyone. And at that time, I genuinely couldn't see that that's what I was doing. Perfectionism has a cost. Beyond the obvious missed clients and missed opportunity, there's a compounding effect underneath that, watching other people build an audience and a track record while you're still polishing something that nobody's seen. The person who is out there getting seen is getting better at it because they're doing it in public. They're learning from real feedback and actual questions. and visibility compounds. So every week spent in that one more edit loop is time lost and potential opportunities lost. So let's talk about why this response exists at all. Because understanding the logic of it, even roughly, tends to take some some of the shame out of it. Because if perfectionism is something you struggle with, it's not because of some terrible flaw. This isn't something everyone's just born with either. It usually gets built from specific moments or a string of experiences, usually much earlier in life. Something happened once, or maybe there are a few experiences where you were seen, judged, embarrassed, caught out. And from those experiences, some part of you decided that being imperfect or even just standing out wasn't okay, it wasn't safe. And what happens is that. Decision gets filed away in the subconscious mind and it runs an invisible program from then on that tries to shield you from that risk. And even if we have later experiences that contradict that belief behind the program, the program doesn't get updated. It's still sitting there running in the background. So that same part of you treats a quiet month in your business. The same way it treated whatever actually happened back then when that experience became embedded in the subconscious mind. It doesn't consider how capable and talented you are now. It just knows that exposure equals risk. And so it will steer you away from exposure using whatever means it can. And so that habit of just one more edit happens to be. kind of a socially acceptable one because from the outside it can look like care or quality rather than what it really is, which is avoidance. And it's really important to understand that no amount of conscious effort can remove that impulse. You can't fix it with a stricter deadline or a better content calendar or an accountability buddy because None of that deals with that underlying program. Willpower and these practical actions are conscious resources, but this decision isn't being made consciously. That's why you can know exactly what you should do and actually want quite badly to do it and still watch yourself not doing it and again. That's why these patterns can feel so frustrating, because our behaviors are at odds with what we actually want, and our behaviors are being run by these subconscious programs that we don't have any control over. So, what can you do with it practically? My first recommendation is to just start noticing it when you're falling into this pattern. It can be surprising how much of a difference that simple step of just noticing. Next time you catch yourself going into that one more edit mode, try asking a slightly different question than what you might usually ask. Not is this good enough yet? Instead, ask what happens if I post this exactly as it is right now? And sit with the answer to that for a second before you touch it again. How does that feel in your body? when you imagine it going out into the world just as it is. It might be that you feel a clenching in your jaw, perhaps a knot in your stomach, or you feel your shoulders tense up. Those are very useful signals because those physical reactions, however that feels for you in your body, it's often a well-practiced safety response. It's your body bracing and it's trying to protect you. From what it perceives as a threat. And the work here is to help that part of you understand the threat that it's responding to isn't the one that it thinks it is anymore. So rather than trying to override that fear response through sheer force, simply bringing the light of your awareness to it and accepting it as it is can actually be quite powerful in disarming the pattern. I want to give you one more way to spot this pattern of perfectionism because it doesn't only show up as the one more edit habit that I've been talking about. Sometimes it can show up as research. You need one more marketing course before you launch, one more market analysis before you set your price, or perhaps one more round of feedback from a trusted friend before you send out a proposal. All of that can feel like responsible preparation, and some of it perhaps genuinely is. But if you notice that that research phase never quite ends, if there's always one more thing to learn before you allow yourself to act, that's usually an indicator that the fear response of perfectionism is at play. Learning feels safe because it stays entirely inside your own head. Acting means it's out there in the world and it could be judged. I've heard a version of this from many people I've worked with. So many of us take way longer than necessary to create something because of worrying that it's not good enough yet. Or we set a goal and somehow never quite follow through on it, and not through any lack of wanting it. Helping business owners to understand the origins of these patterns in their own life is the actual work I do with clients one-on-one. I use a method called RTT, which works directly with those early experiences under hypnosis to disarm them and install more supportive subconscious beliefs. We're not covering the how of any of that today, that's conversation for another time. But if you're curious to learn more about that, I'll include a link for you in the show notes. This week I invite you to just notice where perfectionism might be creeping in for you in your business. Watch to see where you might be going into that one more edit mode. You don't need to do anything about it necessarily, but just look for where trying to make things perfect might be holding you back in some way. And look for those physical responses that I referred to earlier. That brings us to the end of this week's episode. I hope this has been helpful for you. Next episode, we're going to be talking about an excuse many of us give for why we're not consistently putting ourselves out there as business owners. So thank you for listening and I hope you'll join me for that. See you then.