Is It Keeping You From Reaching Your Dreams?!

Journey Live From Manila

I was watching “ Journey Live From Manila” and the new singer Arnel Pineda was fantastic! If you closed your eye’s, you could swear it was Steve Perry, in some songs. Anyway. I guess I’m still stuck in the ‘80’s, but I wanted to know what happened to Steve Perry. So, was looking online and reading this post here http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/stop-the-presses/journey-steve-perry-64-hardest-retiring-man-show-182834075.html

And Discovered Steve Perry suffers from “Perfection Syndrome”! (Perfectionism, in psychology, is a personality trait characterized by a person’s striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high performance standards, accompanied by overly critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others’ evaluations.[1])
I struggle with this, especially, making episodes of the Get A Clue Marketing Show! How about you? Do you struggle with Perfectionism? Well, it’s good to know we’re not alone…Listen to what Perry says in this interview clip when asked about doing another album.

“”I don’t want (any new album) to have pressure,” Perry told Billboard in a late 2011 interview, “because I’ll worry about it sucking, and then what am I gonna do? I’ve got all this pressure… that I just don’t want on me, so I’ve allowed myself the ability to sketch and write as I go, and I’ll do it at my own pace.” Talking to the Associated Press around the same time, he said, “”I’m so hard on myself. I play these sketches in my computer for friends and they say ‘Gee whiz, the vocal’s beautiful.’ I hear, ‘It needs to be better.'”

 
Perry is apparently still blocked from completing the songs he’s been working on by his perfectionism. He said a year and a half ago that he’d put down dozens of tunes on his laptop in demo form, but “they’re just sketches.” Though he’d like to finish them with other musicians, “the only thing that would stop you from hearing it would be me because I’m my own worst enemy… If I don’t give myself the right to suck, I won’t write music… I’ll say, ‘Gee, my voice is a little out of tune here. I’ve got to sing this again. This bugs me, that bugs me.’ And (friends) say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t hear that.’… I have been known to walk past some emotional moments reaching for things that I think could be better… I have to be careful because some of this stuff might be good enough as it is and I don’t even know it.”

He conceded that he’d made a retreat out of fear of getting back into an unfortunate cycle. “You can’t embrace your whole life if you’re shut down. I found out that I can’t just run away and shut down. I’m losing the rest of my life doing that,” he told McNeice. “So I started giving myself a chance to write music again. And that meant that I had to dream again. And if I get into the fantasy of dreaming again I’m going to have the blues again. And if I’m going to feel the blues, then I’m going to be depressed. And then if I’m going to be depressed, I’m going to write music. And if I write music, then I’m going to feel good again. And if I feel good again, I’m now back again on the roller coaster. So I thought in my mind it was better just to run away and not feel any of it.”

So, it’s a vicious cycle of getting up, then shutting down again. It’s sucks the life right out of you. I can vouch for that. What about you? Do you self edit yourself or do you just blert out whatever you want, when you want?
I have to think about what I’m going to say, before I say it, or I end up hurting somebody’s feelings. I find myself always criticing myself and the results…nothing really gets done and instead, of just going for it, I hold off because of ultimately, it isn’t good enough or people will “think” it’s crap, when it’s never the case! Just like Perry said.
Bottomline: If you suffer from being too analytical, or “perfectionism”, it’s time to Give yourself permission to Do It Anyway! Say to yourself, It’s good enough and run with it. I got to tell, it’s hard for me, it seems it takes me “forever” to write a post, write my scripts and then, finally, post it to the world. BUT that’s all changing NOW! You have to say, “Now That’s Good Enough!” Do a quick proof read and spell check and Post the freakin’ thing!

That’s good enough. Overcome And Move Forward!