Many people struggle with Perfectionism.

Personally, I suffered from it for years. I'd tweak and rewrite work reports over and over. I had my own deep buried self-belief that this was the way to be successful. When in reality I was wasting a lot of time and effort.

Perfectionism is the enemy of done.

But what changed for me was an insightful coaching breakthrough. My coach helped me uncover that trying to reduce the time spent 'perfecting' things was a shallow response.

What I needed was to challenge my mindset by proving the beliefs I held were not true. Which meant experimenting with something that I felt was unthinkable but was a surefire way to expose the reality of my thinking.

And as soon as that clicked, I started to understand that believing my perfectionism was key to my success was THE problem.

Here's the baby steps I took to challenge that belief:

Practice deliberate mistakes

For a period of one week I made deliberate but harmless typo's in 8 emails I was sending to different seniors at work.

I know. Seems ridiculous right? But I bet there are many perfectionists out there that would feel a deep sense of shame or horror in doing exactly that. Like me they probably thought they couldn't bring themselves to do it.
My reputation! The quality of my work! WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK?

And you know what happened?

Nothing. Nothing at all. None of the terrible consequences I imagined came true.

And this tiny change has had an enormous positive impact on so many areas of my life. Try it - I double dare you..