227: Practice Makes Progress
Brought to you by Pet Sitters Associates
Summary
Have you ever said the phrase, “practice makes perfect”? We should absolutely strive for perfection and use it as a motivating force through tough times or while we build a skill. The problem comes in when we only seek perfection and accept nothing else. Or when we believe we (or those around us) must be perfect at all times. A much more freeing and liberating mindset is, “practice makes progress”. In our business and personal lives, the reframe from perfection to progress allows us to be more creative, try new things, and build better relationships.
Topics on this episode:
Making muffins
Dangers of perfection
5 benefits of reframing
Ask a Pet Biz Coach
Main takeaway: If we have the mindset of practice makes progress, we HAVE to admit that we’re better than we were yesterday.
Links:
Pet Sitters Associates: use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
Check out Start. Scale. Sail. and use PSC20 for 15% off
Give us a call! (636) 364-8260
Follow us on: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
Subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, & TuneIn
Email us at: feedback@petsitterconfessional.com
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
perfection, practice, perfect, progress, pet, client, pet sitters, confessional, associates, builds, day, talk, skills, pets, mindset, impact, learning, business, overcoming, self assurance
SPEAKERS
Collin, Natasha
00:17
Hi, I'm Meghan I'm Collin. And this is Pet Sitter confessional an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter.
Collin 00:30
Well, hello, every buddy, we hope you have a wonderful Halloween weekend. We want to thank our Patreon supporters and pet sitters associates for making today's show possible. If you want to learn more about becoming a Patreon and all the things that come with that, head on over to pet sitter confessional comm forward slash support. So I was making muffins with our kids recently and had a very interesting exchange. Lilian and Noah basically got all of the ingredients added, mixed, and the muffin pans grease by themselves. I commented on how hard all of that work was, and that I was really proud of them for their work. Noah responded with, well, my teacher says practice makes progress. So we're getting really good. And Lillian threw in there. Yeah, we've made muffins like a million times. So beyond the fact that our family tends to make a lot of blueberry muffins. Apparently, this really struck me, because I'm not sure if you grew up like this, but I grew up internalizing the phrase practice makes perfect. And I think how we internally complete the phrase practice makes, really says a lot about us. See, I was told that if I had just done something enough times, I do it flawlessly. Eventually. Practice makes perfect is a phrase meant to encourage others through hard times and through difficult skills. We all want to be good at something. We all have some drive to do something with excellence. That's not a bad thing. Having that desire. To do something with excellence is not bad. And it's especially true when it comes to skills or abilities. Just think about athletes and how often they talk about being one day fast enough or one day strong enough, one day they'll have it for us one day all no dog behavior and won't make a mistake. One day all practice putting a harness on and it won't slip off. I just need to study more. And it's need to get another certificate trained under a specialist or do whatever. See the massive problem with practice makes perfect is that it sets ourselves up for failure. Here's a secret you probably don't want to hear. Nobody is perfect. Yo Yo Ma Tom Brady, Simone Biles, Rembrandt. All of these people broke new ground in our totally world class, but not perfect. Perfection does have its place. It gives us something to work towards. It gives focus and clarity. We practice because we want to do better, we want to become better. The problem happens when perfection turns into a habit of how we automatically do things. Or I think even more insidiously, we start to anticipate we'll do the skill from the beginning perfectly. When we believe that perfection is the only way we flat out stop trying new things. Because how would we know if we'd be perfect from day one? Why would we even bother if we're going to have to get better at it. If perfection is the goal, then we hold ourselves to that standard before we even start, why even try? It stunts our potential and our ability to recreate ourselves when we need that so much. seeking perfection can also be a form of procrastination. I'm raising my hand right now. Especially if we have an all or nothing thinking style. If I can't do it perfectly, then there's no point in doing it at all. Like I mentioned earlier, perfection hides a sense of inadequacy and insecurities of not feeling good enough and fear of negative judgments from others. It also adds performance anxiety, which can impact creating easily and effortlessly seeking perfection distracts from allowing new inspiration to enter unhindered and giving us the potential to breathe. We don't give ourselves slack. We don't allow ourselves to get messy, to make mistakes, to try new things. And so we feel like we have to do everything perfect all the time, and end up not being as creative as we'd like to be. We stopped being able to think of new ways to make a blog post or new things to talk about on social media or try new styles or a new feature comes out in the software that we're using. And we don't really want to try it because we're worried that we'll use it imperfectly. seeking perfection impacts our self confidence, especially when it comes from a self critical space because we start judging ourselves too harshly. Overcoming this perfectionism mindset takes time, we start to believe the lie that we should and have to and must be perfect. And that comes from a lot of things that buy insecurities, especially as independent business owners, where we feel like we've got to know at all we've got to be doing it all wearing all of the hats. And if we mess up, not only are our livelihoods possibly impacted, but the clients that we love so much, and if we have staff their livelihoods as well, striving for nothing but perfection can isolate us from people as others may feel that they can't live up to our standards and move on to people who are less exacting. It impacts our relationships with staff, friends, and family when we approach absolutely everything with an overly critical and must have perfection mindset and attitude. Something that doesn't impact your relationships, pets letters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members pet such as Associates is here to help. for over 20 years, pet sitters Associates has provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. If you work in the pet care industry or want to make your passion for pets into a profession, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote today. At pets@llc.com. You can get a discount when joining by clicking membership petsitter confessional and use the discount code confessional checkout to get $10 off today, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again. I pets it llc.com. All of that was a lot of lead up on the detriment of solely focusing on perfection and believing the lie that practice makes perfect. That's why no his comment about his teacher was so impactful. To me it was a blunt reminder that it doesn't have to be that way. Because I felt every single one of those negative effects that perfection mindset has that I just talked about. That's why the phrase practice makes progress is incredibly liberating and freeing. It sounds so simple, but it can completely change our outlook and how we interact with our daily lives, how we approach the tasks and problems as they come about and how we create. So we've talked about the negatives. So I'd like to now focus on the five ways that reframing from perfect to progress helps us. And the first one is it helps you see progress. in tough times, especially after a failure, it can be easy to say we're no good that we're bad at our job that it's always been like this. But if we have the mindset of practice makes progress, we have to admit to ourselves that we're better than we were yesterday. Because we've practiced since then we've done more walks, we've interacted with more clients, we've sent more invoices, we've done another taxis and often when aiming for perfection, we can discount the small steps as irrelevant, and those tiny wins as unimportant. Recognizing the importance of those small steps and wins contributes to boosting our confidence and building our self assurance in our abilities. Number two, you know what works, and what doesn't. Practice and experimentation go hand in hand, when we recognize we won't be perfect from the outset, we are free to try new things and continue to adapt. Because our goal is not perfection. It's those steps that we need those small steps, our goal is to be a little bit better than we were yesterday. The third positive outcome of this shift is you do get better. See, practice improves us. There's really not a whole lot more to say. On top of that you do get better. That's the whole point of this. And we can view everything in life as practice for something. Next, we can practice getting up in the morning and making our bed we can practice going through our checklist before we go to our first client. We are practicing the walks and we are practicing. That's one of the words that I love most about when you go to a doctor, you go to their practice, it seems a little silly, you'd hope medicine had it all figured out. They don't. They are practicing. They're implementing their knowledge and learning from that. And so to do we get to do that every single day that we go out there, and we run our business and we care for pets. We have knowledge that we are putting into practice. And then the cycle has to continue where we learn from that implementation. And we start to do things either differently or better or in new ways. And it's also important here to take a sidestep and remind ourselves to not compare our progress to somebody else's. We are all on different paths. We all come from different backgrounds, we all have different goals and places that we're headed. And we are going to learn in different ways. And so when you are going through that learning process of improving your skills, your business, your habits, yourself, when you are going through that process, looking at others to see where they are, is one of the best ways to set yourself back and knock you off track. So know that everybody else is learning. Remember, nobody's perfect. So we are all learning. And we're all in this together. And as we're learning and as we're growing, we're doing the fourth outcome here, which is building new habits. In order to get better at something, you have to commit to it for a period of time, you have to keep the long term in view, and remind ourselves that the journey on the road includes the practice, we change and our skills change with us. And then finally, all of this builds up to the biggest one here is that it builds our confidence. When we are free to try new things, and focus on the progress instead of the perfections. We don't have to be confident at all to start anything. A big hang up for starting something or working on a skill is the belief that we're not good enough. We think we have to build up the confidence before we try. I do that all the time where I'm need to do something new that I've never done before. And it's a little scary. And I'll convince myself, well, I need to build up the confidence to start it. That mindset comes from practice makes perfect. When I think more in line of practice makes progress. I know I can start that at any time. Because I know I'm not good enough at it right now. But I'm going to work on it and I'm going to get better each time I try. When we reframe perfection to progress. confidence builds, when we do these little acts and start to achieve small successes. They all help increase our self assurance in our talents in faith that things will work out in our favor. Practice in progress come first and with it, confidence grows. I'd love to know if you've ever struggled with practice makes perfect, and how that's manifested itself in your business and in your life. And especially if you've been able to overcome that and approach it in a new way. You can send feedback to feedback at Pitzer confessional calm or get connected with us anywhere on social media. On today's Ask a pet biz coach segment with Natasha Obion. She answers the question, how do I get better at sticking to deadlines? Yeah,
Natasha 12:37
so that's the same thing I talked about having that time block schedule. So right. So first thing I'm going to do with all these are all the things you need to get done. So I'm going to take 10 minutes and write a list of all the things I need to get done this month. Okay, month of August, I need to do all these things. Go ahead and look at the entire calendar. First thing you want to do on the calendar is mark off all the days you want for yourself. So I'm like these days I want from that's what I do, I look at the whole calendar, and then I mark off the days that I want first, right always take the days you would need first. So I like all my kids practice is days I want off, I crossed those off first. And now I only can schedule myself with a client or with an activity on open available days. So I take that to do list and I write days of the week where something is going to get done. So if I have 10 things on my to do list, I'm not going to try to do them all on one day, I'm going to write the advance, register for this, check out this. Open up an online store, just talking about things I've done this month. Work on my QuickBooks is only going to be one thing out of this calendar that I'm going to do each day. And it always gets done because I don't overload it. start treating your calendar that way you want to look at your calendar differently because you have control on the moving parts. When people tell me that they don't take a day off. I said you don't take a day off because you don't look at your calendar and take that day off. Because now when a client books me I'm gonna say well, I can service you Monday through Thursday. But I already took a day off on Friday through Sunday. So I'm going to get someone else to help me Friday through Sunday because I already told myself I was going to be off. And that's how overcoming the fear of hiring happens because you chose you first and everything else needs to get filled. That's how we start to live a balanced life
Collin 14:34
if you'd like to work with Natasha and have her help you in your pet business, head on over to start scale sale calm and if you want to end up working with her use the code pse 15 for 20% off. We really want to thank our sponsors, pet sitters associates and our Patreon supporters for contributing to us as the price of a cup of coffee every single month to help us make the show to do the interviews and to put everything that we can into it. It really means a lot that you are listening and that you're sharing the show and we hope that it's been impactful to you. We've kind of another show on Wednesday and we'll talk to you then.
