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In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how perfectionism can hold you back from launching your business and start building for the future.
People have used perfectionism as an excuse for not getting started for far too long in the world of online business.
We love seeing people move forward, and getting over this “excuse” is critical for so many people just to make those first $10 or even $100.
You will learn
- Why the little things might not really matter to your audience.
- A story of how not being “perfect” can still play out ok.
- Why you should not make the changes first.
- Practical ways to overcome perfectionism
- Why you need to only focus on what you’re the very best at.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle
S&J, I sold three courses at 97 dollars so far and counting. I can’t thank you guys enough. This is a complete game changer for me in believing in my product, voice and message. Now I just have to tweak my Facebook ads to get the pearl website click down. I already paid off my coaching call. You guys rule. I’m so stoked right now and I cannot wait to see what’s next. Thank you,
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Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey ya’ll! On today’s podcast, we’re going to help you stop pursuing perfection and move forward in your online business.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Great to be back with you again this week. We are going to tackle a subject today that is kind of a universal struggle for everybody that gets into online business; we hear so many people talk about this topic that we thought it would be great to just go into a full-blown podcast about it and see if we can help people move forward in their online business and that topic is perfectionism. It’s trying to make everything just right, getting everything perfect before you launch. Writing the perfect email before you put it into your auto-responder sequence and how perfectionism is actually really, really bad for your online business and you’ve got to deal with this if you are ever going to be successful online. But before we do that, Jocelyn is going to read a success story from one of our audience members.
JOCELYN: And by ‘some people’ in that little speech, he means me.
SHANE: Jocelyn is the perfectionist; I have never struggled with perfectionism but Jocelyn does. We’ll talk about that later.
JOCELYN: Okay, so today’s success story is from Chris and we actually spoke to Chris not too long ago. He was one of our consulting clients and he says, “S&J, I sold three courses at 97 dollars so far and counting. I can’t thank you guys enough. This is a complete game changer for me in believing in my product, voice and message. Now I just have to tweak my Facebook ads to get the pearl website click down. I already paid off my coaching call. You guys rule. I’m so stoked right now and I cannot wait to see what’s next. Thank you, Chris.”
SHANE: Chris runs a website for musicians over at Manifest.com and he was selling a product to the wrong audience when we talked to him on our consulting call and we helped Chris kind of sort out how he could create an e-course and go after a little bit different segment of his audience. He wasn’t getting a lot of sales and he was selling something for very, very cheap. I think it was like – how much was it? 17 dollars or 27 dollars?
JOCELYN: Yeah, something like that. It wasn’t a lot.
SHANE: So we basically told him, you have a very valuable product, you just got to put it together in a little bit different package, we raised his price to 100 dollars and it’s awesome to see him actually making real money online. We’ve been getting tons of success stories from our audience members; people like you that are out there, taking action and doing the things that we say to do in our podcast. We are getting emails every day of people making their first money online, people making hundreds of dollars selling new courses and even people writing and talking about sacrifices that they made to generate some more money to go buy the tools and things that they needed and we wanted to hear more from you guys. We love these success stories, we love hearing the action that you are taking and even the sacrifices that you are making to make your online dreams possible. We have actually started a wall in our office where we are printing these out and we are framing them or sticking them up in different places in our office so we can see all of these success stories that are coming in. We would love for you to send us your success stories over at Flippedlifestyle.com/contact. You can go there and just tell us how any of the tips or tactics that we talk about on our podcasts have helped you take your online business to the next level.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we are so excited about our wall; we can’t wait until we get lots and lots of these stories.
SHANE: I want to run out of wall in here basically, like where we have to move to a different room with bigger walls.
JOCELYN: Yeah, that would be good. We love hearing from you guys and it just really motivates us and keeps us going and just lets us know that we are on the right track with how we are helping you.
SHANE: It also inspires other people; like we have had a lot of – actually since we started doing this a couple of weeks ago, people have written in and said, ‘Wow, that’s awesome to hear that someone else had tangible success.’ I think a lot of people who have podcasts and things like that or even made it online, kind of share some big numbers sometimes. We’ve done that in the past but sometimes that can almost make it unbelievable to people so we love sharing real people in the trenches right now making their first sales, making their first money because that’s going to drive people to do better in their own online business because they are having those same successes or they are looking for those successes. So make sure you head over to Flippedlifestyle.com/contact and tell us your success story and we would love to not only share it online but put it up on our wall of success.
JOCELYN: All right, so we are going to jump into today’s topic and it is a fitting one for me because we are talking about the pursuit of perfection. This is something that I totally understand because I am what a lot of people would call a perfectionist.
SHANE: Truth. #Truth.
JOCELYN: And you know, if you walked in my house, you may not believe that because it’s just a little messy right now but, about a lot of things in my life, I am a perfectionist. I want everything to go a certain way; I am also what some may call a control-freak, just saying.
SHANE: Some. I’m gonna stay out of this one, because I’m gonna get in trouble there in this episode, so I’m just gonna let Jocelyn bury herself. I won’t say anything for few minutes here.
JOCELYN: He’ll just silently agree.
SHANE: I’ll silently nod and agree. Yes, I am nodding.
JOCELYN: Maybe dangerous sitting across from me in this episode; but, as I was saying, I do always strive to be a perfectionist. I do – when I was in school, I always wanted to get straight As, I always proofread things as I write them which drives Shane crazy.
SHANE: Especially when you are proofreading what I am writing over my shoulder; she even does that sometimes. She’ll come in and be like, ‘You spelt that wrong, you did that wrong –’ I’m like, ‘I’m just trying to finish. I just want finish this letter, leave me alone.’
JOCELYN: I know, but then you never proof read it later. So, I always like to proof read things as I write, I very rarely have mistakes in my stuff when I get to the bottom because I’ve already proofread it as I went along. I stress about crazy, minute details that most people would not stress over. So, if you are a person like that, I totally get it, I am right there with you. In some ways, perfectionism can be a good thing; I like to call it ‘attention to detail’.
SHANE: Right. The problem with perfectionism and I do not struggle with this as much; I’m more of a et-all, I’m more of ‘throw mud on the wall, see what sticks’, ‘just get something done’, ‘release it’, that’s a whole other episode we are going to talk about how that can be a bad thing too. So, I’m gonna – we’ll beat me up later, we’ll beat Jocelyn up today. But basically, perfectionism in online business can be a really bad thing because people use it as an excuse not to move forward. They are always wanting to tweak their logo and get new colors, or they are always going to look for a new color scheme or a new theme for their website and their pictures aren’t exactly perfectly centered where they want them or should they use two sidebars or one when they are designing their website or whatever. When you are making a product, does my cover-page look exactly like I want? Do I want to use Roman numerals in my table of contents or do I want to use actual numbers? People use that kind of as an excuse not to move forward because they might be afraid to actually put themselves out there, to release their product, to show people their website. The problem with perfectionism is, it’s only really perfect for you and perfect is kind of a myth because what you think as perfect is not necessarily what your audience thinks as perfect or what you stress out over is not what your audience is stressed out over. They probably don’t care about all these little things that were holding us back in our business. A great example of this is recently at our live event; Jocelyn got totally freaked out over this one little thing. We just had a live event in San Diego, we brought 20 people in from all over the world, we had people fly in from Australia, Miami, New York, Canada, just people from so many different backgrounds and all over the place to come together and get help with their online business to go to their next level. Jocelyn was in charge of lots of the planning for this event and she had it so down to a [Inaudible ] Everything, all of her ‘I’s were dotted, all of her ‘T’s were crossed. Everything went totally flawless the entire weekend until we had a little brunch and we were actually taking all of the participants out on a yacht cruise. We had chartered a boat for about four hours in the afternoon and we had to walk from the restaurant where we were having brunch down to the boat dock. Well, the boat was actually parked in front of the Sheraton in San Diego but what we didn’t know was what Jocelyn?
JOCELYN: There were two Sheratons in San Diego.
SHANE: There were two Sheratons in San Diego. So, Jocelyn had picked out this restaurant to have brunch at and we thought we were going to have to walk about 200 yards to get to the boat dock. Well, it turned out we had to walk about half a mile to get to the boat dock from breakfast but everyone was in really good spirits after the brunch, everyone was laughing about it, they thought it was funny and I think people actually enjoyed that they got to have a little walk after we had brunch before we got on the boat. Everyone got to kind of talk to each other and everyone was having a really good time except for my beautiful bride, Jocelyn, who was totally stressed out the entire way.
JOCELYN: Yeah, it was just sort of a series of events that happened all at once; I was supposed to meet a person from Task Rabbit and the grocery store did not give her everything they were supposed to give her so she had to go back. She was in the lobby of the Sheraton but it was the other Sheraton and it was just a lot of things that were just all, you know, coming together and it just really stressed me out.
SHANE: Jocelyn actually had tears in her eyes but the funny thing was, nobody at the event knew what she had ordered from Task Rabbit and nobody really even knew that we didn’t plan to walk that far if we had never said anything. We could have just kept going and nobody even cared. Nobody noticed, nobody said a word about it. When we got feedback after the event, that subject was never brought up and my point in telling this story is this: that perfection is a myth, it’s in your own head and it stresses you out and it makes you not go forward in your business. It makes you not launch a product, it makes you hold off another month on your website, it’s not quite right to show the world yet when really, all your audience wants is your content and your solutions to their problems. They don’t really care about this perfect idea that you’ve put into your head.
JOCELYN: And the wonderful thing about this is like Shane said earlier, I mean, nobody knows what your perfect is.
SHANE: That’s right.
JOCELYN: That’s something that you have to remember when you are in online business. Nobody knows that you want your e-book to look a certain way and it doesn’t. Nobody knows that you think your logo should be this and it’s really something else. Nobody else knows that; all they know is what you put out there and it’s pretty good so just go with it. That’s something that I really had to learn along the way and I’m still not 100% there yet but I’m getting better about it.
SHANE: Another great example of this is what the original name of our website was going to be. We have Flippedlifestyle.com that’s really what we are known for now. We have the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and everybody knows, you know, Shane and Jocelyn is the Flipped Lifestyle. But the funny thing is, the original name for our website, and I think we’ve mentioned this before, was supposed to be Bolddreams.com and that was the perfect name. When I found that domain name, it was for sale, somebody wanted 1000 dollars for it, we really didn’t have the 1000 dollars that we wanted to spend on the website at that time and I said, ‘Oh I would love for our website to be ‘Bold Dreams’. That’s the perfect name and just anything else is not going to be good enough.’ We tried to negotiate with this guy and he was trying to sell it, I was trying to talk him down a little bit and he really wouldn’t budge and we thought why are we going to spend 1000 dollars? But I was so depressed and so disappointed and we came up with ‘Flipped Lifestyle’ the name fit, it really stuck, my mom actually told us that we had flipped out and lost our minds and we kind of threw that into Flipped Lifestyle. It became what it is today but our ‘perfect’ was Bolddreams.com but now, I don’t think anyone could imagine our brand being anything but Flipped Lifestyle.com. It just makes so much sense in all of our messaging and everything that we do. The point is, our ‘perfect’ wasn’t everybody else’s ‘perfect’. So the little things that hold us back that we are trying to get perfect in our online business, really are not as big a deal as you think they are.
JOCELYN: A lot of times, especially the people we have writing into us every day, waiting for ‘perfect’ is just an excuse. Most of the time, it’s not perfection that you are really after, it’s procrastination. It gives you an excuse to not get something done or that it’s okay that you don’t have your product done or your website done or your landing page done or whatever it is that you are holding off on. If you are saying that it’s because it’s not perfect, you probably have another excuse. It’s another reason, it’s fear holding you back –
SHANE: Right.
JOCELYN: – or something else. So probably perfectionism is not necessarily the reason you aren’t getting things done in your online business.
SHANE: We still do this and someone actually called us out on a little perfectionism the other night; we were working with a consultant who was helping us create auto-responder campaigns. They are helping us basically set up all of the emails that people get after they sign up for our email lists on a certain website. I had written out the sequence all the way to the point of right before I was going to pitch a product and I was like telling around on the call I was like, ‘I love where this is, I love where this is, I love where this is, I love where this is, but I just want to get this pitch perfect, I just want this to be right here, it should be the fifth email or the sixth email.’ Our consultant basically told us, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be out there. You have to have some kind of baseline, you are going to have to put it out eventually and see if it works and then you can tweak it. But we always try to tweak things first and get it perfect first and the point is, we all have to just put ourselves out there. Whatever you are working on right now, today, your online business, you need to put it live to the world whether it’s perfect or not so you can see how people can respond to it and then you can make the changes. Don’t make the changes first.
JOCELYN: The funny thing that we see over and over again is that most of the things that people get hung up on claiming perfectionism won’t even necessarily make you more money or affect your bottom line. I mean, people get bent out of shape about not posting on their blog enough, not having the perfect pictures, not having a picture to go on Pinterest; I don’t post enough on social media, I don’t have a YouTube channel, all of those types of things.
SHANE: It goes back to a point that I tell a lot of people when they are first starting out, they’re trying to design their website or their logo or things like that because I always ask them, have you ever totally bought a product because you looked at someone’s logo and you thought, ‘Man, that logo is so good and they put so much work and detail into that logo, I’m just totally giving these people 97 dollars. I have to buy this product. I mean, if the logo is that good, how good is the product?’ No. I mean, you want a certain level of professionalism but little things like that, like the size of the font on your sales page or the colors you use in your headlines and things like that are not actually going to make you money. What’s going to make you money is creating a product and putting it out there. If you don’t have anything for sale, you don’t have any way to make money and if you are waiting for ‘perfect’ in your product line, then you’re never going to have anything to sell so you are not going to make money online. So the moral of the story here in this part of the podcast is, just don’t get hung up on these little things that don’t make you any money. Get things out there, get things done and make things work.
JOCELYN: Another thing to remember is that imperfections actually can be a good thing because it makes you human. None of us are perfect and when people who visit your website or whatever medium that you are using to communicate with them, if they see you make a little mistake, it’s not that big of a deal. I mean, if you listen back to our podcast, we make mistakes all the time.
SHANE: All the time.
JOCELYN: And we have an editor, which is good, but we still do crazy things all the time and that’s just part of life. That just makes people know that you are a normal person and I always tell people all the time, they say, ‘How do you record a podcast and how do you actually put it out because I don’t think I could ever do that.’ I always say to people and this is the honest to goodness truth; that if I ever listen back to any of our podcast, they would probably never make it on the air.
SHANE: Jocelyn is not allowed to review our podcast – like I listen back to them sometimes right before they come out just to make sure that everything is edited correctly and things like that, but Jocelyn refuses to touch the podcast. We kind of decided early on because she would want to re-do every single one of them. We would have to stop and go re-record things because she just would not be happy with how she spoke on them.
JOCELYN: Right, so that is exactly why we don’t do that and you know, it’s just like our courses and things like that. We don’t pay tons of money to have big, elaborate intros that are all flashy and beautiful. We don’t do that. We are just normal people who are not afraid to show people that we make mistakes and I think that’s what draws people in to what we do. Just keep that in mind as you are doing thing on your website or your brand that that could work the same way for you as well. We even mess things up in our communications to our audience. The other day I was sitting on the couch and Shane was working on an email and the next thing you know, comes through a message that says, “From Shane and Joklyn” – he spelt my name wrong. I mean, really?
SHANE: Yeah, I totally spelt Jocelyn’s name wrong but the funny thing is, Jocelyn laser, like a heat-seeking missile, saw this one word in this entire email but it’s not like– I don’t think – probably no one else on the email list actually even noticed it at that point because when you read words, you just kind of skim over it and you see it and you know, you see ‘Shane and Jocelyn’ so, I doubt that anyone – no on emailed us and was like, ‘I am unsubscribing right now because you misspelt your own name.’
JOCELYN: But somebody helped me out here, somebody who write into us and tell me that you noticed that because –
SHANE: No, don’t do that because then that proves her wrong and you’re feeding her perfectionism, we can’t do that right now.
JOCELYN: Yeah, that’s true. We are getting ready to talk about ways to overcome it.
SHANE: But the point is, it just makes you look human. You’re going to make mistakes no matter how hard you try so you might as well just roll with it and as mistakes happen, you can fix them or touch them up or change things going forward. Another crazy thing about not making things perfect is you can have huge, unintended consequences that are extremely positive. Another example with email happened to us a few weeks ago; I was creating an email that I was going to send out to everybody on the Flipped Lifestyle list. I can’t remember what it was, I think it was just like a broadcast email saying we had a new podcast out or something like that but I had actually typed the email in like a Word document or like a Google doc like I usually do that in case our email editor program loses it or I disconnect from the internet or something while I’m actually creating the message. I accidentally went back into what we used to send emails out and I sent the email without putting anything in it. So, all it said was, you know, when you default open up the email writer or the email word processor, it just says “Hi name, click here and start typing your message.” So I sent that to everyone on the list, you probably got that if you were on our email list and it just said, “Hi your name, click here and start typing your message’ because that’s what it wants me to do when I’m actually creating the message. So I immediately was like “Oh no, I just sent that to thousands of people.” So, I sent another email out and said, “Oops, messed that up, ha ha! I sent an email out and forgot to type anything in it, sorry guys.” Didn’t think anything of it, sent the broadcast out and there it was. I then got an email a little while later from an audience member and the subject said, “Your mistake was exactly what I needed.” I wanted to read a part of this email to you to show how a crazy imperfection and a total mistake actually helped someone. So, basically this audience member writes in and says, for quite a few weeks I’ve been meaning to write to you and Jocelyn with a question but something was holding me back. Maybe it was just fear at asking for advice and that’s not one of the strongest points that I have. I know you guys are Christians therefore what I’m going to say is not going to be much of a surprise to you. My wife knew that I wanted to contact you but that something was stopping me. I told her that I prayed about it because I kind of wanted to know if that was the right thing to do. I didn’t want to waste your time with an email. It was so funny when I received your faulty email that said, ‘Hi Eric, click here and start typing your message’ I knew that you had made a mistake but it was exactly what I needed to hear. I kind of took it as a sign and I sent you this email in response to that.” Then he goes on to tell about his story and about what his online business is and he’s got all these great ideas and things that he needed for help but if I had never made that mistake, if I had never had that imperfection and I allow that imperfection out there, if I had tried to sweep that under the rug and if I had never acknowledged that I had made a mistake that I’m human, then he would have never got that coincidence, that perfectly timed email that helped him right where he was. So, don’t assume that you are going to do something wrong and it’s going to have a negative impact. Everything that happens in your business can be a positive thing just like that email that I got from Eric. I made a mistake, I was imperfect but my imperfection was exactly what he needed. Maybe somebody needs to see that in your brand to let them know, ‘Hey this person is just like me, this person is who I want to talk to, this person is who I can go to if I need help.’
JOCELYN: That email was a really cool experience for me because you know, I’ve talked about this whole podcast how perfectionism is a problem for me but when I saw that, I was kind of like wow, this is not such a bad thing always. So, that is what we really want you to get out of this podcast and the next few minutes, we are going to share some tips about how you can overcome the pursuit of perfection. All right, the first thing is something that is so vitally important to me and that is to have an accountability partner and luckily I have one that’s sitting right across the desk from me here.
SHANE: I’m right here baby, yeah, I’ll balance you out; how about that?
JOCELYN: Yeah, so you do need somebody that balances you though it may be a spouse, a significant other, it maybe a parent or a friend, anybody that you know who may be is not a perfectionist; probably someone who is not a perfectionist in the least because that is what you need to overcome this feeling that you always have to do everything exactly the way it should be done in your mind.
SHANE: And you have to have someone that’s not scared to tell you when you are being trapped in the muck and mire of your perfectionism. Jocelyn and I are very blunt with each other to fault sometimes but I am not afraid to say, ‘Jocelyn, let’s just get this done, it’s over, you’ve done a great job.’ Like our live event, if we hadn’t had that exact, half-mile worked out, we might not have showed up for the live event if we had been like, “Let’s just go, let’s just get on the plane and go.” So make sure your accountability partner is someone who is not only not a perfectionist but is someone who will tell you to your face when you are trying to procrastinate due to this perfectionism. The second tip is to set deadlines and to meet them no matter what. You really want to have things on your calendar that have to be finished by a certain date and like you have to launch them or you are going to fail at something. The best way to do this is to sell things to customers. If you let your customers hold you accountable, if you will pre-launch or pre-sell a product that you got this idea for, and you tell a group of customers even if it’s a trial group, that you are giving this product to you for free for testing, if you tell them, I am going to produce this for you in 30 days and you have to give that to them, you are going to be forced into actually producing something, creating it, and it’s not going to be perfect but you’ve got to give it to them on a certain day so you can’t go back and you know, tweak everything and make everything look beautiful and make everything look exactly the way you want it. You’ve got to deliver it. So, don’t just set things on your own calendar; you are going to have to – this goes back to accountability a little bit. You are going to have to let these things go and give something to a customer at some point. You need to put yourself out there, try to pre-sell something, try to set an established date where your audience knows that this is going to come out. It can even be for ten people, friends and family that you have picked to evaluate your product for you before you actually launch it to a real group or a real audience but you tell your customers that you are going to deliver this on a certain date and meet that deadline no matter what. Even if it’s not perfect, you are going to have to let things go and hand them the product that you eventually wanted to sell.
JOCELYN: And the third way that you can overcome the pursuit of perfection is to delegate or outsource things that somebody else can do. What we mean by that is that you focus on things that only you can do and most likely that’s your content creation and then you outsource things that other people could do for you such as your logo creation, your website creation, maybe it’s to create an image for Pinterest or for the top of your Facebook page. Whatever the case may be, you need to let somebody else do these things. This is so hard for me to do because I mentioned before, I am a control-freak, I like things the way that I want them done and sometimes when we outsource things and they are not exactly the way that you would do them but they are pretty good. It’s just like, we do this in several areas of our business, we outsource our podcast editing and our podcast show notes, we outsource –
SHANE: Images for our show notes. That’s one of the biggest things that – I had to actually argue with Jocelyn about this when we first started outsourcing our podcast show notes. Jocelyn loves creating the images for our Q&A. She’s really good at that but she is a perfectionist. She will sit for two hours to create one little picture with the title of a Q&A to find the perfect image to go with it, to get the colors just right and she really wanted to hang on to that and not let it go because she was not happy with what was being outsourced. We finally just had to say, that’s something that bogged her down. Anything you find yourself spending too much time on or you are trying to get perfect, and that perfectionism really grabs a hold of you, you need to outsource that. You got to get somebody else to do it because that’s a trigger point and if you are going to trigger two hours on creating one image when you could have, you know, created two other podcasts, or created another product that you could sell, you got to get those things off of your plate.
JOCELYN: As you go on, it does get easier to let these things go. You will realize as you move ahead in online business that there are some things that you just cannot do. If you are trying to do everything, you are probably making no progress. So just keep that in mind as you are moving forward and just trying to get things done. You can do this, you can let it go, it’s really okay.
SHANE: You can start small, you can start with something like the images, you can start with something like your show notes, something where someone is making an outline of what you talked about in your podcast but you are going to have to find a way to let go of perfectionism or you are not going to move forward in your business. It’s eventually going to create a roadblock and that’s going to stop you from succeeding and we don’t want that. So go back and think about all the things that slow you down, that hold you back in your online business. What are you trying to get perfect right now? Make a deal with yourself that you are going to launch that product, put out that blog post, upload that podcast, whatever it is, you are going to get your message out to the world whether it’s perfect or not this week and see if that doesn’t make you move forward in your online business.
JOCELYN: We’ve done this before on another show but if you need an accountability partner, go to our show notes, this is Episode 39 so you just got to Flippedlifestyle.com/podcast39 and type in the comments. Let us know what you are going to do in the future. What are you going to stop having a roadblock on? What are you going to let go of perfectionism to do? Let us know and that will be part of accountability for you.
SHANE: We also have an accountability group in our Flip Your Life program. If you are part of our Flip Your Life program for creating your digital products and learning how to do this online business stuff, we have a huge community of people in our Facebook group and they are always joining in and providing accountability for each other. So, if you need that extra boost, if you need more help with this, if you don’t have anyone around you, I know where we live, we don’t have a lot of entrepreneurs and online business owners like walking up and down our streets every day. We have to seek those people out online. We do have an amazing community in our Flip Your Life program that would love to work with you and help you overcome some of these problems. If you want to learn more about that, you can do so at Flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. All right, before we go, we like to share our ‘can’t-miss’ moments every week. These are things we got to experience because of our online business that we would not have got to do if we were still working for other people or if we had never started selling stuff online and I believe that we definitely have the same ‘can’t-miss’ moment this week.
JOCELYN: Oh yeah, and that is our live event. We talked about it briefly earlier with the crazy things that I am concentrating on instead of the wonderful things that actually happen but in my opinion, the live event could not have gone better, aside from the crazy madness of the walking.
SHANE: Yeah, our live event was amazing, we hosted it Jill and Josh Stanton of Screwtheninetofive.com and we brought these people in from all over the world. We were so amazed by the response of people just coming from everywhere. We had people that were young, people that were older, one couple even brought their son who was a high school student because he had an idea for an online business and they wanted him to see that there was another way out there to make a living instead of just go to college, get a job and work for somebody else. We started the day off with this amazing breakfast, we spent a day masterminding with this group of individuals at the top of this tower in San Diego where we could look out the window and see the whole city. It was just so inspiring and then we got up the next morning and had brunch, we went out on a yacht and just everything was awesome. It was so much fun, there was so many breakthroughs, we have seen so many things happen since we’ve come back and watching all these people take action on what we talked about that day. The live event just went as good as we could ever – and that’s something that we never would have anticipated two years ago or three years ago when we started online business. I actually looked at Jocelyn on the plane on the way back, and I was like, ‘Did that really just happen?’ I was like, our life is so weird now. It was just so awesome seeing these people have amazing experiences in San Diego.
JOCELYN: Best weekend ever.
SHANE: Best weekend ever. It was awesome and we are actually going to do it again, we don’t know exactly the dates yet. It’s probably going to be in October 2015. We are going to do a fall event probably somewhere on the East Coast but we are going to post a ton of pictures on this episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast so you can see all the things that we did in San Diego and check out our ‘can’t-miss’ moment in the live event.
JOCELYN: If you are interested in coming on our next live event, you can head on over to Flippedlifestyle.com/podcast39 and in our show notes, we will have a link to a waiting list where you can get more information as soon as it is available.
SHANE: All right guys, that’s all we have for this week; go out there and use the tips that you learnt in today’s show and fight perfection. Don’t let the pursuit of perfection be what holds you back from making money online, from starting your online business and going out there and living the life of your dreams. It’s a myth, you can’t achieve it anyway so you might as well just put something out there. Get something done and take your online business to the next level. Until next week, we will catch ya’ll on the flip side and thanks for listening.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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Mark Bebout says
Shane & Jocelyn,
This podcast came just in time! I was literally sitting at my computer struggling to find the right font for one of the main images on my site when my phone buzzed with a new email.
I read the subject line: “How to overcome one of the biggest challenges online… (learn more)”.
I opened the email and there it was. Exactly what I needed to hear, at exactly the right moment. I have been working on making this image perfect for my website for the past couple of days and frankly, I’m still not very happy with it. I’ve started over so many times I’ve lost count.
Then I read your email. “One of the biggest challenges online is perfectionism…It slows us down, and keeps us from fullfilling our online dreams!”
Holy cow did I ever need to hear that. I’ve been working on this site for months, and have never really been happy with the result. I think I’m on the 3rd version of the website and it has never been seen my anyone but me! Talk about the definition of crazy!
Thanks to your podcast today, I’ve resolved that I’m making my site live today and I’m going to have the site design completed by the end of this weekend!
I’ve recently realized that I while I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my adult life, I have never had an online business and I’ve managed to let the fear of failure keep me from moving forward. Of course, my fear has been masked as perfectionism for months because apparently that makes me feel better about my lack of progress.
Thank you both for your encouragement, and for taking on this issue head on! Keep up the great work!
Mark Bebout
The Business Buying Coach
thebusinessbuyingcoach.com
Rene says
OMG. This podcast was made especially with me in mind, right ?
For me, it has to be perfect, really perfect. This holds me back all the time. It takes me longer to get things done because it must be done right. I had no idea I was just using it as an excuse to procrastinate even more. Well, no more. But, let’s not get reckless here. I will work to get things completed and not continue to postpone them. I know I will be listening to this particular podcast over and over again, because it really speaks to me. Thank you very much for making a podcast on this subject. I love it. I hate it too because it speaks directly to me. Ouch. LOL.
Joey says
Same here! I’m a typical perfectionist (more like sick, I guess), obsessed with perfecting smallest details nobody cares about. I come from web design background, and keep tweaking text colours, padding and margin to a single pixel level. I even go into WP theme files and clean up all the redundant codes that are not used. It hit me hard when Shane said that all this is an excuse to procrastinate… I think it’s quite true. I still haven’t created any product, but was thinking about switching to a new WP theme and tweaking all again from scratch, haha. Thanks for this episode!
anika says
No no no… Rene and Joey, you’re wroong…
Shane & Jocelyn are talking about ME here, lol! – …btw how did you know I’m exactly like ‘that’ ? :D!
I struggle with the ‘Perfectionist Syndrome’ on a daily basis (especially when I’m designing graphics for my websites or pins for Pinterest where I want them to be soo perfect…) -Joey you know what I mean 😉 – However, I trully believe that we should always try to find some balance in this type of situations and NEVER LOSE SIGHT of our end goals. This is the only way that works for me…
Just stay *focused* guys and keep moving forward!
Thanks S&J for providing great content (as always),
Take care!
Mike says
This is exactly what I needed to hear! Thanks so much for taking this topic head-on and being so candid (as always).
I’m definitely in the perfectionist/procrastinator camp, and this episode came at a great time. The subject of “progress vs. perfection” was a big part of the discussion in my mastermind group last night. I just forwarded the link to this episode to the rest of the group.
Thank you both SO much for all you do and share. You’re both an incredible inspiration.
Mike in Nashville
Shane Sams says
Thanks Mike! Be on the lookout, we may do a live event in Nashville very soon!
Mike says
That would be great. I wish I could’ve attended your live even in SD. I’m actually heading out there next week for the 1 Day Business Breakthrough with Pat and Chris, so my conference funds were tapped. 🙂
I’d love to get to one of your events later this year!
Mike
Jose says
I just keep giving myself permission to write a crappy first draft.
What was the music website of the first example? Manifest.com didn’t yield any results. It may be in a similar niche I’m looking into.
Jocelyn Sams says
It was supposed to be manafest.com. 🙂
Loni says
Man! I heard you guys on Pat Flynn’s podcast and I’ve been hooked ever since. I was having such a hard day trying to figure out next steps for my budding brand and this podcast hit the nail on the head for me. THANK YOU! THANK YOU!
You guys rock- I’m so happy you made $0.11 on that fateful day. You haven’t just changed your lives, but you’re touching each and everyone of ours too.