The Growth Mindset Destroyer: Starting Perfect
Welcome to the #culturedrop. Every Tuesday, Galen Emanuele emails tools to advance leadership skills, team culture, and personal growth. No spam, just great content. Sign up now to get it in your inbox.
If you’re starting a new role, changing your career, implementing a change as a work team, or setting a new personal goal, this one’s for you.
When you start something new, whether that’s starting a new job or habit, embarking on a new hobby, or literally trying to accomplish anything at all — the most detrimental thing you can do when starting out is have the expectation that you will start perfect.
It’s natural for us humans to want to be great at whatever we’re doing. The heart of growth mindset, though, is understanding that you will not begin perfect. You have to start wherever you are (even if that sucks) and grow from there.
Detach from the idea that you can start perfect.
The expectation that you will start perfect at anything will prevent you from becoming great at whatever you’re trying to do. The reason is because the learning and growth that would normally take place as you fumble through becoming better at something is replaced by frustration and stress instead. Creating rigid, unrealistic expectations for yourself only stunts your growth and progress.
“Creating rigid, unrealistic expectations for yourself only stunts your growth and progress.”
The less grace we give ourselves when trying something new, the harder it is to move through the natural process of learning and improving. Accept the reality that no one is perfect at anything when they’re just starting out, and just allow yourself to suck at something.
If we don’t do this then self-doubt creeps in and makes us question ourselves. It discourages us from sticking with things, trying new things, and makes us feel shame and guilt for absolutely no reason.
“I should give up. I’m not good at this. I’m embarrassed. I don’t have enough discipline to become great.”
These statements are the result of a fixed mindset that insists we are to be perfect at something the first time we try it.
There is nothing shameful about doing your best to improve at something you’re new to.
“There is nothing shameful about doing your best to improve at something you’re new to.”
Think of it this way…
Imagine if you had never played piano before in your entire life, and you decide to give it a try. You find a piece of classical music, and sit down to play it. You hop on the internet to quickly try to learn how to read music, and then try to play the song.
You wouldn’t be able to play it at all. If you did this, you’d very slowly hit a bunch of random, wrong notes and would not produce anything that resembled music.
Imagine if after five minutes of that you got frustrated and thought to yourself, “I can’t play piano. I’m done with this, I suck at it!”
Yes, obviously you would be terrible at the piano. How in the universe could you expect that you’d be able to be as good as you’d like to immediately out of the gate? It’s ridiculous. And if you quit trying to learn the piano after that experience because you were convinced you weren’t good at it, that would be a thousand times more ridiculous.
I know that sounds silly, but it makes my point so obviously.
In anything that you do in life, you have to be willing to start wherever you are and go forward from there. It takes vulnerability, grit, resilience, patience, and the ability to shove your ego in a closet and ignore it.
There’s no way around the desert, you have to crawl through it.
“The expectation that you will start perfect at anything will prevent you from becoming exceptional at whatever you’re trying to do.”
Part of my background is that I taught and performed improv for many years, and teaching brand new improvisers was always my favorite.
The path of improvement in improv is not a straight line, The learning curve is steep, slow, winding, and elusive. It takes an incredibly long time to become highly skilled and competent at improv.
I always coached new improvisers that they could not “will” themselves to be great — they had to detach themselves from how skilled they would like to be and just accept where they are at every given moment; good, bad, or terrible. Being preoccupied with yourself being “great” at improv prevents people from doing what it truly takes to be great at improv, which is to be present, listening, tuned into your partner, and inspired.
I always coached people to have a zen mindset about progress where you have to look at where you are and acknowledge that you are better than you were, and not as good as you will be. And no matter how long you have been doing improv, or how good or bad you are, that is always true.
Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.
— Arthur Ashe
You won’t start perfect at anything. Detach from the idea and desire that you will. Simply start from where you are, give yourself some grace, and go from there. One clumsy foot in front of the other.
Related Articles:
Want more?
This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop
MORE
