57: Celebrate the Small Stuff: Progress Over Perfection

In this episode, I discuss the importance of celebrating progress over striving for perfection. I talk about the challenges of balancing productivity with the desire for perfection and emphasize how recognizing and celebrating small achievements can lead to greater overall success. Additionally, I convey the firm’s mission, values, and rebranding efforts, stressing the importance of authenticity and continuous improvement. Tune in for a quick confidence booster and some practical advice on navigating your business goals.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Purpose
• 0:36 Progress Over Perfection
• 3:32 Rebranding the Firm
• 7:53 Values and Mission
• 9:02 Celebrate Small Wins
• 11:11 Conclusion and Call to Action

Transcript

 I am Beth Whitworth race car driving quilt making CPA firm owning wife, mom, and boss. I'm here to help you build a business you love by sharing all of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the excellent sides of working in this industry. It's not always easy, but after many years, I can finally say it's worth it.

Let me guide you on your journey to accounting with confidence.

Hi, and welcome to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. I'm your host, Beth Whitworth, and today I'm doing a very quick confidence booster episode to talk about a little bit about how to make progress on things and not. Be bogged down by perfection, so progress over perfection. So I will tell you that for me, I have never considered myself to be a perfectionist, even though I am in the accounting field and.

Trained to be very detail oriented. I'm probably more of the person who, uh, procrastinates and then does maybe B level work at the last minute. And I find that sometimes that is. A blessing that I don't have that perfectionism brain, but also sometimes it still is overwritten by the procrastination brain.

So it's a probably a good thing. I'm not a perfectionist, but why I bring this up. Right now is that we are currently in the last quarter of the year and there are some projects and some goals that I had set for the year and I feel a little bit like I am maybe behind on them and I sometimes find it hard to see what I have accomplished.

So what. I actually have gotten done in the last eight or nine months versus focusing on what isn't done, and it's very hard for me sometimes to recognize the fact that progress. Progress and progress should be celebrated as opposed to not even trying. So for me, this progress over perfection has more to do with feeling that something is absolutely complete.

So I finished every single piece of it to until it's done, and I get bogged down in thinking that something isn't done, and that sometimes is a distraction for me. I tend to be someone who beats myself up a little bit about not being as productive in a day as I feel I should be. But overall, I have still gotten so.

Much accomplished. So this is what I just wanted to talk a little bit about today. 'cause I know I'm not the only person who struggles with celebrating success, who struggles with those feeling like there is no progress unless the progress is complete or not being able to finish something because you're afraid of the result.

So right now, the firm is going through a complete. Rebranding exercise. So when accounting with confidence started, I assumed that this was going to be what I did after I was done doing accounting work. You know, it was kind of my side gig that I was gonna do this podcast and maybe I was going to do some speaking or some training type of events, and.

It ends up that I am growing my accounting firm and sharing all of these processes that I am putting in place and these things that I'm doing to break the stereotype of typical CPA firms. I'm doing all of this while I am podcasting and sharing that with you. And so this summer we finally kind of figured out that accounting with confidence is the new brand of our firm.

And we are working towards merging the two. So the accounting firm and accounting with confidence will be one and the same. And as I'm working through the steps to merge two websites and merge two. Email lists and rebrand with new logos and new taglines, and just getting that whole vision, mission, and purpose out in the world of why I am combining the two.

I one, have a little bit of that. It needs to be perfect before it's, it can be released, and that is not the case. I don't have to have every single piece in place in order to make this announcement to my clients and my team and all of my listeners, all of that. Is not something that has to be perfect. I just needs to get done.

So I have been working hard on getting the website kind of where I want it to be, focusing on what it is that we do now. Which is work with small businesses to make them successful. We work with individuals to help them reach their goals, and we do coaching on both of those platforms relating to business success, financial success.

All of those things, and in creating this podcast, it's for all of those things. It's for other accounting firm owners, it's for other business owners. It could be for an individual who wants to hear things about mindset. So we made the decision to make the merger. It sound sounds so like major, like we're in some sort of, I don't know, very large setting here and we are not, you know, it is one small business and one small business becoming one vision for me.

So as I thought of this and I had. Some concerns about not finishing it by the beginning of November because I, I'm dragging my feet out of a little bit of fear. I don't know what I'm fearing except that what is the reaction going to be? Are people going to understand that what we do as a firm. Is accounting with confidence and that we are also trying to empower others to do things with confidence.

So that is really all it is, and it has circled me back to, am I procrastinating to the last minute to do B work? Maybe am I waiting to have everything perfect before I announce what's happening? Maybe a little. But mostly I think the whole journey has been really rewarding in making me think about why these two brands belong together.

Why Accounting Solutions Group of St. Louis and accounting with confidence. Are one and the same. And that comes from our mission, our values, the all of the things that we are working to stand for. And we just want to be more, I guess, authentic in what we're doing. And we want everybody to know that our values of we serve, we solve.

We do, we learn and we care are all things relating to both our team internally and our clients and others in the world. So that is something that has been very important to me and something that I have pushed to make more apparent and more in line with how we do things because couple things you know that happen in your life.

Many things that happen in your life, you have to go back to those values. And you know, one of our core values is that we care. And so when bad things happen, we care and we wanna do whatever we can. When good things happen, we want to. Celebrate. We wanna celebrate those things. We want to essentially reassure people that they're doing the right thing or if they're struggling, that we can help them get back on track.

So all of those things are part of our firm. And to circle back to whether this is progress over perfection or is this really more of a celebrate. The steps, celebrate the small parts. Celebrate everything that you have had to do to get to this point in the project. That's where I am. I need to be someone who says, okay, well.

I haven't released the website, but I have edited all of these things and I have put together these pages and I have thought through all of, you know, what I want to have happen. Those are steps, those are things to be celebrated as making progress. And progress should be celebrated. Not just perfection, not just completion.

You should celebrate any time you have the chance. I'm not great at it. I need people to hold me accountable, to not focus on what's not done and focus on what has. Been done, and I share that with everyone. Whether you are struggling because you feel like you can't get caught up because you've just been so busy, whether you're struggling because you've had, you know, a personal setback or you know, something happening health wise, whatever those things are, those little steps as you move past, it should be celebrated.

So celebrate the small stuff, I guess that. Maybe that's the name of this episode, but it's just a little confidence booster for me to share that as we struggle through all the hard things in life and all of the big dreams we have to try to accomplish, and we put. Time constraints on those things. You know, if you're making a smart goal, it's gotta be time bound to not put so much pressure on yourself that you never feel successful, because I can guarantee you that the progress you have made on any of your goals is something to.

Celebrate and it is success. Okay, that's all I have today. It's a just a short confidence booster episode. I'm going to still work very diligently on getting some more episodes in the pipeline and make sure that I am on track for continuing to get a weekly podcast out. So. Thank you all for listening, and again, if you have any feedback or if there's something that you want me to celebrate with you, go to where you're listening to this episode and um, leave me a comment or post in the text, Beth and I would love to hear about it.

So, okay, everybody, that's all I have for now. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. My hope is that my experiences can help you navigate the realities of owning and operating your business. Please subscribe or follow the podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform so that you never miss an episode. Feel free to leave me a text by using the, send us a text message link in the show description and let me know how I'm doing.