Give Yourself Permission to Make Mistakes

Give yourself permission to make mistakes

Are you a perfectionist? You need to make sure everything is just right before you are willing to say it’s done. If you have to, you’ll do everything yourself to ensure it’s done right. If this describes you, it may be time to lighten up and let yourself make more mistakes.

For one thing, you are likely alienating your team members when you take on their responsibilities. No one is perfect, and you shouldn’t expect them to be. Besides, if you take on your team’s work, you’ll be doing nothing but working all the time. Your team won’t grow because they can’t live up to your unobtainable standards. They will end up leaving because they’ll feel like they can’t do anything right for you.

When you put less pressure on yourself to make mistakes, you may find that you are making less of them. That kind of pressure to be perfect is taxing on your mentality. You have enough pressure without putting an unnecessary amount on yourself.

Your team will be happier as they will be able to get their jobs done. That’s what you hired them for so let them work. They too will make mistakes. You need to give them permission to do so, as well as yourself. The byproduct of you letting them make mistakes and not having everything be perfect is that you will not have to work as many hours.

Just because you are allowing a bit of imperfection into the process, doesn’t mean you have to settle for inferior work. You still need to require your team does a great job, but you will find strength in numbers. When done right, your team will become a well-oiled machine. When mistakes are made, the group can discuss what happened and how to try to avoid them in the future. But don’t be too hard on people about those mistakes. Acknowledge them and then figure out the best way to move forward. Your team members will respect you more when you approach mistakes in this way.

The fast-paced business environment actually has no room for perfectionists. Work needs to get done and trying to make sure everything is perfect will give the advantage to your competitors. They will get more products released quicker and will leave you wondering how that happened. It’s a race that perfectionism will cause your company to lose. Mistakes also can lead to opportunities that you would not have seen without making those mistakes.