Category: Life Lessons

A Parent’s Perfectionism And A Hard Lesson Learned

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A Parent’s Perfectionism And A Hard Lesson Learned


Early on in The Strategic Coach® Program, we introduce a concept called The Gap, a state of mind highly common among ambitious entrepreneurs — and one that can cause a great deal of harm.
Quite simply, The Gap is the space between where we are currently in any given situation and where we want to be — our ideal. As we move toward our goal, we mentally measure our progress, and here’s where it gets tricky.
Most of us measure forward, looking ahead at the ideal goal and seeing that we’re always falling short. Any tendency toward perfectionism makes it even worse. At Coach, we learn to measure backward from where we are now to where we first started.
Measuring backward, we can immediately see the progress we’ve made. The feeling of accomplishment, even in small steps, keeps us moving forward with confidence rather than falling into The Gap and its accompanying feeling of failure. Measuring backward is how goals are reached and fulfilled! It sounds so logical and so simple. Why don’t we measure backward all the time instead of choosing the perfectionist’s route to our ideal outcome?
Once we truly understand how easy it is to put ourselves — and those around us — into The Gap, and how great life outside The Gap can be, there’s no measuring forward again — as Chad Johnson shares in his honest and deeply humbling story.
A quick, and heartbreaking, trip into The Gap.
Chad Johnson is a remarkable entrepreneur in The Strategic Coach Program as well as one of our exceptional associate coaches. He is also a devoted husband and father of 11 children. It is from his family life that he shares an unforgettable story about how quickly The Gap can propel us into thinking we’ve failed. This experience provided him with a powerful life lesson that will resonate with many.
As a Strategic Coach client and coach, Chad is well aware of The Gap and its pitfalls. Yet, one day he found himself heaping all the negativity of The Gap on his children in one unthinking moment.
Chad explains, “In reality, we fall in and out of The Gap all the time, depending on how we measure our progress — and we put others around us in The Gap, too, which is an unforgivable thing. In the story I’m going to share, I, sadly, had no awareness that I was actually doing this to my children. Their faces told me that I was.”
Smooth sailing on a family project until perfectionism showed up.
Chad and his family live on a farm in north central Oregon. On the property, there was a 6,000 square foot barn, where they had remodeled the upper level into a great family space with a gym, an office, and a library. Down below on the main level, it was a true barn, with a tractor, other farm equipment and implements, and a lot more “stuff.”
As Chad tells it, “One Saturday, I said to the kids, ‘We’re going to do an ‘80/20’ on the barn today.’”
“An 80/20 meant that we were going to go in there and make a great improvement,” Chad explains. ”We’d put the bikes away, organize everything, sweep out the mangers, and so on — but not to the point of 100 percent perfection. I know that aiming for 100 percent can easily lead to falling into The Gap.”
Divide and conquer was the strategy.
Chad and the kids broke up into two teams, an upstairs team and a downstairs team, having discovered over the years that divide and conquer works well for getting things done in a large family.
“We turned on the music, set a timer for two hours, and decided we were going to bang this out before lunch. When the timer went off two hours later, I headed down the stairs with my upstairs team and saw my downstairs team looking up at me. I’m not sure exactly what was going through their minds, but I’m sure they were excited to show me what they had accomplished.”
As Chad reached the bottom of the stairs, something caught his eye. It was a small section where they stored the odd pieces of wood that didn’t fit along the wall where all the other lumber was kept. To Chad’s eyes, it looked like these scraps of wood had just been pitched into this four- by six-foot space.
The one thing.
Chad continues, “I called them over and, without even thinking, started to pick on the one thing, the one thing out of 3,000 square feet — the one little spot that wasn’t perfect. I started to berate them about not caring, not being able to do quality work, about just chucking stuff into that space.
“Immediately, I saw them go from being so proud to show me the work they’d done to something I wasn’t expecting. They had been so pumped, thinking that I was going to love what they’d accomplished, but in the space of a minute, I took them to a place of utter failure. I deflated them completely.
“It was crazy because they’d done far more than I’d asked. They’d far surpassed the 80/20 we try to aim for. Everything had looked beautiful in the barn except for that one thing. And to see myself suck the life out of them was a moment I’ll never forget.”
Chad’s children turned and walked toward the house. That’s when it really hit him. He wondered what he had been thinking. His aim was always to build his children up, but he realized that in that moment, he had just destroyed them.
Chad admits, “I had put them in that place where you’re not enough, you’ve failed, and you should be ashamed of yourself. All of this, when they had done such amazing work! And yet, my tendency was to find that one thing.”
Aim for perfection, and you invariably set yourself up, instead, to fail.Click To Tweet
Asking for forgiveness.
Chad called out to them and asked them to come back. He says, “They turned around, expecting more abuse, probably.”
As Chad apologized and asked for their forgiveness, he told them what was true — that they had far surpassed his expectations, that what he had called them out for was such a small thing compared to all the great work they had done. He continues, “I told them I was proud of them, and I saw them come back to life.”
Always on the perfectionism lookout.
We all go into The Gap, the by-product of our high ideals and perfectionism. The important thing is to recognize you’re there and get yourself out as fast as you can.
As Chad finishes his story, he tells us, “This experience showed me that I was not only putting people I love deeply into The Gap. I was also doing it to people like my team, who I care very much about and who look up to me and depend on me.
“These are all people who don’t have the benefit of knowing about The Gap, or how to get themselves out of it, and I wasn’t conscious of that. But that moment in the barn with my children taught me an important and powerful life lesson I’ll always remember.”




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How To Be A Successful Entrepreneur

There’s no point in being an entrepreneur and doing it half-heartedly. If you don’t go at it full-bore, you get caught between two worlds with none of the advantages of either. In order to be successful, you need to shift your thinking and behaviors about who you are and what your intended future will look like.
There’s no alternative.
Back in 1978, just four years after I’d gone out on my own, I went bankrupt because I just hadn’t learned yet how to be a successful entrepreneur. I went to see my bank manager, who was a very nice man, but he’d been a banker for 30 years, and it was the only world he knew. In our meeting, he said to me, “Why don’t you stop this nonsense? You’re a writer, you’re an artist. Why don’t you go back and get a job?”
“Because there’s just no possibility of that,” I answered.
“Well,” he said, “I guess that’s the difference between an entrepreneur and someone in my position: I believe there are always alternatives.”
I replied, “No, there’s no alternative. Whatever pain or hardship I have to go through, I’ll go through it until I’ve learned whatever I need to learn in order to become really successful.”
Arriving at this decision signified a real shift in my thinking, because from that point forward, I simply couldn’t be distracted. I wasn’t open to alternatives—I was going for it.
“There’s no point in being a half-hearted entrepreneur.” – Dan SullivanClick To Tweet
Make the commitment — and don’t look back.
I’m reminded of the Greek generals who, on reaching enemy shores, sent their men into battle and ordered their own boats to be burned. They said, “The only way we’re sailing back to Greece is in their boats.”
That’s a very entrepreneurial attitude. What the generals did was cut off the alternatives. They decided in the literal sense of the word “decide,” which shares the same Latin root as “homicide”: “to kill.” When you truly decide, you kill off the alternatives. They’re no longer available to you.
Many human beings never make a fundamental decision about anything and thereby deprive themselves of the enormous motivation and focus that come from fully committing yourself to an endeavor.
It’s not about you anymore.
One of the key things I learned since making those first two decisions—that there was no alternative and that I would persist until I’d learned how to be successful—is that it can’t be about you.
If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, your business has to be about using your talent to help someone else move toward their goals so their life becomes better. Then, as a result of creating that value, you’re rewarded.
This is where the money proposition comes in. It’s a loop: You create value, you’re rewarded, you create more value, you receive a bigger reward. And it all comes down to mastering the right attitudes.
If you want to know how to be a successful entrepreneur, start with making these three resolutions:

Decide that there is no alternative.
Commit to going through whatever it takes to learn how to be successful.
Realize that it’s not about you.

When you have these attitudes, the world suddenly looks different. It’s not about your security; it’s about their opportunity. There’s a simplicity that enters your life when you realize that.


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