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Holiday overwhelm strikes!

Parties. Programs. Decorations. Shopping. Cooking. Travel planning. School’s out – childcare??

I hear you. The winter holiday season is rolling over me and I don’t even know where to start! There’s still unpacking to do from our move to Custer, so we have no room to put the tree up. I’m proud to have performed with the Black Hills Symphony last weekend, but that meant that last week was dedicated to that and nothing else. After all that, all I got done before going back to work Monday was 3 loads of dishes and 5 loads of laundry.

With all the daily junk happening, it’s really hard to dedicate time to work on my business. It’s really easy to get sidetracked. Client work is easy to get done, but prospecting is not! It’s easy to sit and tweak websites, play with plugins, watch webinars, play with color schemes.

It’s not easy for me to get myself out there and talk to people about my business.

I’m an introvert and I prefer to work on my own… problem is, I can’t pay myself for my work. I need client work in order to actually run a business here. If I know someone well, I open up and we can chat (or sit in comfortable silence) for hours, but I struggle to approach new people.

For the rest of the month, I’m challenging myself to prioritize.

I’m going to beat the overwhelm!

I’m going to do the important stuff, and then I’m going to let the unimportant stuff slide, even if that means letting someone else (or myself) down.

There’s a saying going around the Facebook mom-preneur groups I hang out in:

Done is better than perfect.

Perfectionism is a beast to deal with. In general, it seems that women are more affected by it than men, but that’s not what’s important. Perfectionism doesn’t mean that everything in your life is perfect… it means that anything that needs done needs to be done extremely well, or not done at all.

Wanting to do things well isn’t a bad thing at all. However, for the 40 million adults in America with an anxiety disorder, this means that it’s hard to get anything done. Can’t get all the windows washed in one day? Don’t bother until you have the time to do it right. Need to do some batch cooking, but have to clean the kitchen first, and while you’re at it why not deep clean the fridge too? Where do you even start? Before long, the to-do list gets so overwhelming that the anxiety shuts me down and nothing gets done because there’s just too much.

There’s another saying that goes along with it:

Be brave enough to suck at something new!

Everyone has been a noob at some point. Every “first try” has its problems, but that’s how we learn. We try, adjust, try again, adjust again, pivot if we need to, try some more, and keep moving forward.

Be brave, give it a shot, and it’s okay if it’s not perfect! Don’t let perfectionism get in the way of doing what needs to be done.

Happy Holidays to you and yours!