Ep. #10: Perfectionism - how to get it DONE!

Slayer dives into how stepping away from perfect and learning to bomb things changed her life. Learn tips on how to start putting YOU first, get things done, and learn to love what you are doing, no matter what it is. Without learning how to prioritize herself and her job, she would not have been able to start living the life of her dreams. Only through learning to love where she was at and how to manage her mind and days was she able to create the life that led to her healthier lifestyle and taking off in her RV to travel the country with her heart singing.

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Do you know that there is something magical inside of you, but you don't know how to uncover it. The Heartsing podcast is dedicated to just that helping you put yourself first and figure out what lights you up. I'm your host, Addie B AKA Slayer of Namaslayer. And through my journey of losing nearly a hundred pounds, uncovering the magic of my soul and building the life of my dreams.

I'm leaving no stone unturned in the process of self discovery, and I'm here to share it all with you. So let's get started. Welcome to episode 10 of the Heartsing podcast. Devil digits. Baby seems crazy. I'm your host, Addie B a K Slayer. And today we are going to peel back some of my imperfect layers. Like you haven't seen enough of those yet,

but I'm going to open this one up to discussing with you my bouts with perfectionism and procrastination, which had a direct correlation to my 300 pound ball of anxiety. I was in that you can hear all about back in episode one, I'm going to be talking about the relation to weight loss, and also my history with my career in property management. But I promise you,

the content is relevant regardless of your career status and is the key to putting you first. So you can give more of your magic to the world. Let me know in the comments, what resonates with you. And I also wanted to thank you all for the amazing reviews you've left on the podcast. It really does help it get noticed and well, it just lights my fire to read them.

So please keep them coming and sharing. It's really appreciated more than you can even imagine. Now, back to perfectionism, which often goes hand in hand with our fear of failure. And it was so hard for me to admit I was afraid of anything. I mean, I am the strong one and vincible the one with her stuff together, taking care of everyone and everything.

I don't fail. I can do it all. And taking ownership that I am creating my life in realizing what my limiting beliefs are about myself and how they stop me from achieving goals. I wanted, it really was a game changer. And I feel like I say, game changer, 500 times an episode, I might need a new term, but what can,

what can I say? I don't know if there's a better way to say it. Let me know if you have one today, I am going to leave you with some tips. I picked up along my journey and dealing with both perfectionism and procrastination. I hope they help you on your quest in putting yourself first in my corporate Addie world, where I recognized my perfectionism for what it is,

was in the property management industry. And for almost 30 years, I started when I was 19 and I worked my way up to managing my own site. I was like 24. I did thing, all kinds of things along the way. I wrote a policy and procedure manual, and I set their systems up as a roving trainer, but mostly as an onsite property manager.

And I did what I was taught at worked hard relentlessly terms like do it right, or why bother or do or die. These were my mottoes early in my career. And as I grew, I developed more compassion and vulnerability as a leader, but rarely for myself in my head, that motto was still there for me, for everyone else. I had morphed into this more compassionate person,

but not for myself. I had worked my way up. I was on this huge site, 1500 homes, a hundred employees, 400 acres on a beach front site in Hawaii, which manifested my vision board. But that's another story. And after that, I ended my nearly 30 year career as a regional property manager for a large company in Arizona. And there was so much,

I loved about everything throughout my career. I loved all of the people stuff. Mostly helping people find their homes, my peers, the culture, coaching employees, helping them rise, creating system, building teams, all of these things jacked me up. And there is definitely a certain breed of person that survives and thrives in this industry. We're all a little nuts.

We love people and serving and we leave our blood on the desk. It's like do or die. We can't let anyone down. It's becomes like a culture almost. And you know, these are people's homes and we must take care of them even while they're screaming at us writing bad reviews because their neighbor left the trash outside the door or calling us names because they couldn't pay their rent.

That list could be endless, but it doesn't matter because we just do our jobs to make them happy, regardless, and rise up and take care of them with a smile on her face and, and go beyond our ability. And you know, then the next person that comes in the office, we don't let them see that stress. Everything's all happy.

People always think that property management looks so fun. They say things like you get to be in those pretty offices and show people apartments, or you just sit in the office having fun all day. Yeah. And that my friends is because we're good at our jobs. We can get yelled at in one moment and turn around and help someone feel loved and find their new home in the next.

And we're very good at adapting and masking our emotions at learning, not to feel them or manage them. And we often drink them or eat them or overwork them. I bet you can relate to this in your life, whether you're not you're in property management, where do you mask your emotions? It doesn't matter what it is though. What emotion of,

how much is going on. You know, in that next moment, you can be you're up. And Adam, a resident walks in and you're smiling big smile on your face. Nevermind those 500 emails pinging in the inbox reports that need to be done. The new software training you're supposed to be on. It's not all or nothing kind of world, which quickly leads to the overwhelm and the sad buffering of emotions,

right? We are also the Jack of all trades master of none, but what we want to be because many of us are perfectionist. So we want to be able to master all of these things you have to do to be a good property management. It's literally impossible. And I don't know very many property or regional managers that would not classify them themselves this way.

In fact, I think most of us wore perfectionism as a badge of honor. We don't want to fail. It's got to be perfect or why even try. And we have that deadline to me gain, get it done, right. We can do it all the residents, our customers of course come first. But our teams, our bosses, and then us last on the list,

kind of like at home, I can remember many long nights staying at the office to finish up paperwork, get that report in because I spent time helping people or got distracted by people. Usually one weekend when I was a regional manager, I worked on these horrendous reports for our client for three days straight over the weekend. And it was at one point,

my daughter walked by my desk and said, Ooh, are you going to shower? And that's an extreme example, but just another one in my life where I was telling myself, I just didn't have time for all these things having to do perfectly everything else, other than taking care of me. And it was true though. I would say, just look at my life.

I have to do these things. I have to, my job, pay my bills, support my family. And when we get home from work, we then take care of the kids first. And the hobby, the housework whatever's left is for us. We're the servers of the world. We're here to try to make everyone else happy. And that's great if we're not forgetting to make ourselves happy first,

can you relate? I'm sure it's not much different at your job or your home. I look at how long I went through life, excelling everywhere, but at the one goal that was always elusive to me, my health, which is essentially a direct reflection of me, our health is our habits, which comprises half of what we do in a day.

And about 90% of our thoughts. So exactly that goal, that should be the one priority for all of us, because really what is our life without our health? And yet, why would I fail repeatedly at it? Exactly. Because of putting myself last, putting this goal last, telling myself that it was more important to be perfect at all things other than putting me first.

And that of course eating my way through all those cookies. The residents brought him office because I quit chain smoking. I no longer knew how to deal with all of those emotions. Probably didn't help achieving leaving my blood on the table for everyone else. And so much of this at work. I mean, it's where you spend a good portion of your time.

And if you're a homemaker, if this applies to you too, I stayed home with Millie for 10 months when she was born. And I am here to say, hardest job ever stay at home moms. You first, you got to take care of you in there somewhere, especially with, at home schooling right now and what everyone's going through. Stay-at-home parents,

you got to put yourselves first, somehow. So how does attacking your perfectionism help you do this? How does it help you get to healthy? Get better at your job? Perfectionism by definition is defined as one striving to complete every task perfectly. But as one of my favorite authors, John Ackoff says on this matter and in his book finish, which is a must read for anyone that struggles with achieving goals and perfectionism,

he says, perfectionism is never finished. That's the lie. There's no such thing as perfect. You can always improve. So perfectionism draws an ever moving, ever expanding finish line that you never reach. You get to be finished and imperfect or almost done and perfect. Don't you just love that. And by nature, we want to be finishers, right?

So we want it to be imperfect. Then we want to just get it done. This became my new mantra. And in fact, it's what I named the weekly workshops in the MEfirst guide course, because this is where I see my clients office often stop going toward their goal, having to show up and get it done, makes it happen. We get to be in perfect and just get it finished.

And as we grow and move forward, versus never even starting and being stagnant or regressing, and the same principle can be used at work. If you're like I was in, you were one of these people that says I work better under pressure. And you wait until the last minute because you know, of course it'll get done then. And you do it great in a shorter amount of time because you work better like that.

Then you probably have some procrastination issues that stem from perfectionism, just like I did. We often procrastinate things that we consider hard or that we just don't know what to do or where to start again. The, get it done. Method comes to the rescue. I laser focus to get it done. And this was another game changer. I think I learned this listening to the life coach school podcast with Brooke Castillo.

I have a planned focus time each day. And most time the hard thing gets put in that focus time. I do it first before I can get distracted by the day and you shut everything down and you go all in on this project. You don't look at your phone emails, talk to people. You put your head down. If you're somewhere with customers or employees like an onsite office,

you schedule a time. You can close your door, put a sign up that says, Hey, if you enter, you will die or something equally as repelling, let it be known. It's your time to get it done. You set boundaries, a word that is foreign to many of us, but remember we train people how to treat us. There's no open door during,

get it done. One of the biggest changes I made was to help, to help with focus time was to turn my email alerts off. I already had everyone trained that I didn't answer emails in my time off that they'd need to text me if I was needed. So it wasn't a world crisis. If I didn't answer immediately. And I know many of my colleagues that were beyond their emails,

answering them at all hours. If you're listening now, change that you can set the expectations and train people how to treat you. And if you are already, you know, you're already training them. So why not be intentional with it and create the relationship you want. And that puts you first. Don't let them put you, make you put yourself last and don't give me the,

you would rather keep up business. Because when you do this, you are pulling your attention from something else. Another intention you had maybe being present with your family or taking time for you and just being still imagine that. And if you aren't getting pulled, then you need to become a better planner. So you can live intentionally and create the life you want.

But that's another episode. Two. I'm never going to run out of content, man. Total squirrel. Okay. Sorry. I guess I just want to save the world from email hell. It's very hard to have a peace of mind and focus on things. If you're constantly reacting to emails in our brains, get pulled in distracted, and this goes the same for all the alerts on your phone.

Turn them all off, bury that app that your finger goes to. When you open the phone automatically back, a few pages in your apps, just put it back there. So you have to intentionally go look for it, to check in. So when the hard thing is on your calendar during focus time, you know, you know that you're sitting there to get it done without distractions,

and guess what? You get it done. Fit's not perfect. It doesn't matter. You have those two hours of focus and you will get it done act as if it's due already. You know, if it was due, you would have it done. Instead, we allow ourselves to get distracted and feed into that perfectionism. When you wait until the last minute you can't spend endless hours tweaking it,

you have to submit it no matter what. So you're already at that point, not worried about it, promise yourself, you will get it down and the time you sign it, and if you're getting it done early and you insist on going back to it, you'll still have some time to do so. So you can get in your little ball of perfectionism that,

but it will really help a most times. You're not going to go back to it. It helped me be more productive throughout my day too. I set up segments to communicate emails in this hour calls in this meetings in this time. And I do this in my business now trying to batch activities together, like all my coaching calls in one day business items on another filming and script on another.

And all of this helped me step away from perfectionism because I was taking action on that thing that I was avoiding. And it also helps my monkey brain because they don't multitask contrary to what every single person in property management, things we do not multitask well, your brain, as soon as you think of something else is diverted. When you take action, you are no longer paralyzed by that fear or the fear of the unknown or not knowing where to start being so overwhelmed by the task.

Because there seems like there's so much often, you know, once we get it out of our heads and plan, it, it's really not that bad. We make it so much worse than it is. Do what I call a brain dump. And you sit and list everything that needs to be done associated with the task and break it out into your focus,

time into smaller chunks if you need to. So it's not just a big, huge, daunting task. I've prepared the budget for X, Y, Z. Then you're like, oh man, you don't even know where to start. You don't have what you need. So you get a broken out and the task is finished. Income only of XYZ.

You can be prepared for the time, you know, ahead of time. It's so much more doable and it makes you feel so much more empowered. And then you take action on the goal and you get it done. You step away from the overwhelm at coffin finish. He also talks about this concept of bombing. And I loved it so much. I made a bomb box and the Namaslayer me.

First guide planner, I designed the idea is that you plan what you are not going to do for the day. What, how crazy is that right? Plan to fail? I'm like this guy is nuts back when I was first trying to figure out how to manage all of this, right? My all encompassing job and getting healthy. I heard this and I would write down three things.

I would bomb each day. Intentionally decide not to. I mean, you guys, my inbox was full like 5,000 things I needed to do. So clearly I'm picking three piece of cake and I wasn't going to get them all done. So I now plan to feel what I didn't expect was how empowering this was failing ahead of time. Think about it.

What do you really have to do? What are you spending time worrying about doing that you don't even really have to do? Maybe you don't have to do it yet, or maybe it never has to be done. Maybe it's going, can be one of those emails that just drops off into the abyss. And here you are worrying about it in the back of your mind.

And yeah, we're bombing. What should be our number one priority ourselves was totally me. I was so wrapped up in trying to be the perfect regional manager to the perfect daughter, helping her mom, trying to figure out how to be the perfect mother across the ocean that I have lost myself in all of these two dues. I learned that it was not my bosses fault or the systems or the circumstances of my mom's illness are my daughter.

It was my fault. I was creating all of this in my mind. I remember that when we were away at a company event and I'm sure there were some drinks that were involved as goes without saying at an event like this. And I was venting to one of our leaders, cause I had the drinks about how frustrating the systems are and we couldn't get things done and no one cares and this and that.

And you know what he said to me, he said, you care too much Addie. And he just kept saying it over and over again. You care too much Hattie. And I can't tell you how this commitment stuck with me. And initially I was really hurt. I thought he wasn't hearing me. I have looked up to this person for quite some time and really took it to heart.

It bothered me. He didn't care about these things as much as I did it bothered me until I figured it out. It was in the process of figuring out what to bomb. Then I realized what he was telling me was that I was caring about the wrong things. I was worried about all of these things. I could not change focusing on things that did not matter.

I was caring too much about all of that. I wanted to do things perfectly. So I was bothered when I couldn't and here as Althoff tells us nothing is perfect ever. Perfect. Anyway, I started looking at what was requested of me from survey results, budget, HR items, contests leading my team, engaging with clients. The list was endless.

I sat and I asked myself, what could I not do? What was truly essential and had to be done? Yes. These were expectations set out that all of these things had to be done, but I truly could not do them all in no human on the planet could, by the way, if we're all honest with ourselves, but I would try like how,

but it was just killing me. And I was also feeling like I was failing because there just wasn't humanly possible. And it's taken down many great warriors before me. And it will, after it led to that 300 pound Bala misery, you heard about in episode one, two, the breakdown where I left work, went home, ate, drank, and binged game of Thrones for three days.

Something had to give because I was shutting down, I was stressed, anxious. I was losing it. Totally. I was like Xanax or meditation. That was this time period. And initially I thought the solution was just that I couldn't do this job that I had to get out. I'm so glad that I didn't, that I stayed the course. And I learned all of these lessons and turn that situation that was full of anxiety and oh,

into one full of love. And that I enjoyed, even when it was a task, I didn't like I have figured out how to do that. I was creating it. And then how you know, I learned to bomb things. So this concept of initially not being perfect of failing on purpose of choosing to bomb something, another game changer, right?

Boom, what did really have to be done? What on your list really has to get done? And we make a choice each day to show up to our jobs, to be in the relationships we're in. We think we do not have a choice that we have to have a paycheck or that we have to do these things to have one. But do we,

what if you didn't do it, would you die? Is it life and death? Would anyone notice if I didn't do half the things I was doing, do we just lie to ourselves? About half of it? I narrowed my list down. What could I bomb? And still do a good job, not be perfect at everything, but meet expectations and get more time to spend trying to heal myself.

I tended to want to focus on things at work like surveys and team functions and contests because they were more my jam and in my eyes more fun, right? They were also easier and existed in my zone of genius. People in communications and gay Hendricks talks about this in his book, the big leap, your zone of genius is your area of flow.

It's things that people will say to you. You're good at. And you'll blow off with a, it was nothing, you know, that was easy piece of cake. And they're like, wow, you did that really great. Those are your zone of genius things. I know. I love to focus on building teams, leading others, helping people grow and succeed.

I know I made to communicate to reach people, motivate and inspire. This was always the case. And recognizing that helped me see why I was struggling with some of the tasks so much such as budgeting while I can build a spreadsheet, as well as anyone, I can write a budget, manage finances. When I get in a spreadsheet, I can find some joy there,

but it doesn't light me up. I don't walk away and think, oh boy, I just inspired the world of my spreadsheet or I'd feel so amazing after doing that. It just has never been like therapeutic for me. You know? And my fellow, one of my fellow regional cubby buddies, Sarah, she would laugh at me and torture and my torture because she was all about the spreadsheets.

Like she loved getting in there and I thought, oh my gosh, how great would this be? You do my spreadsheets. And I'll do your team events and surveys and stuff like that. Although I think she liked those too, but all of the HR issues, I got them. No worries. I'll take all of that. You take all my spreadsheets where I have to sit here by myself and not talk to anybody and really be in depth focus if only,

right. What do you think your zone of genius is? What are you the go-to for? This is something that is really good to get to know. I started look at where I could apply my zone of genius and trying to stay in it as much as possible. But I had an awareness that I didn't have before. So I was able to see those ways that it could stay in my zone more than I had before.

So it made me happier at work too. I was able to bring that to my peers and to what I delivered to the table for my clients and my team. I started then to work on my productivity more and seeing that I was striving for, I saw myself in my personal life looking for perfect in my, and those goals shoe, you know,

I couldn't go swim without doing 200 labs. And you know, now I was like, oh boy, what if I just go and do 60, you know, and enjoy myself and call it a day or I could just do the mini habits concept and tell myself, Hey, I'm just going to go walk for five minutes a day and become a person who gets too excited to exercise every day.

And Goswami over time just getting it done and bombing things added up to more time for me. I ended up when I left my career in a better place than I've ever been in. I started my own company at the same time. Of course, helping others get stuff, Dom and bomb stuff. Step away from perfect. I like to say technically I was working last and produced more value,

crazy leveraging my zone of genius, learning to focus on what is important and more importantly, how to focus, limit the distractions and the noise. Trying to focus on what I enjoyed about the job, not what I didn't enjoy. And therefore I created more of it. And I learned to bomb things. What is not going to get done anyway, bomb it.

And then I lost a hundred pounds left in my career, but on the best possible terms, I found happiness there. I bought an RV and I set off on the adventure. I created from my future self, traveling the country and running my business. So I leave you with these thoughts today and probably way too many tips in there, but this one on replay,

maybe ask yourself, what am I doing? That is a distraction from what really needs to get done. And am I afraid to set goals? Because I'm afraid I will fail my not starting something because I'm afraid of failure. Am I not showing up for it? Because of that, get honest with yourself. Once you own that you are creating your world and you start to see yourself from the stance of an observer where you're looking on yourself,

you have the power, you can create whatever you want. And as always, I will not leave an episode without asking, are you meditating yet? Listen, psychology today. When I looked up perfectionism, they have this to say about meditation. Instead of checking your phone, laptop or other electronic devices, prolong use can lead to anxiety and depression during work breaks,

or at the end of the day, meditate meditation can recharge your willpower comes you down and clarifies. Your thoughts gives you peace. Meditation has been shown to reduce anxiety and stress and can change the structure of your brain if done consistently. So there you go. You guys, even though psychologists agree, start meditating, all right, until next time, my which is in bitches,

step away from that perfectionism and procrastination, get it done and see what you can bomb while you're out.