Iterating = Freedom

Special shoutout to Abe Sorock for being the first to tell me I need to learn to iterate 😄

If you’ve interacted with me at all this year you’ve probably heard about my personal growth spurt. I cannot stop talking about it!

And what’s so exciting is it’s really low-hanging fruit. Like just reach out and grab kind of low. You can reach out and grab it too.

If you’ve been thinking about making a change in your life, please message me. I’d love to encourage you along the way!

Some quick context:

• I’m a perfectionist

  • It used to kill me but now I’m learning how to wield it like a superpower

• Learning about myself through the lens of the Enneagram personality tool has been the highest ROI thing I’ve EVER done.

• I quit my job to become an Enneagram coach because I want to help everyone experience the same life change that I have. Seriously, please message me, no strings!

• Perfectionism in my life usually looked like:

  • Working on something really hard but fretting over minor issues until the last minute

  • Too exhausted from fretting over so many minor issues, I might submit a project early and cross my fingers that the feedback was no changes were needed because it was perfect

  • If changes were needed, my default coping strategy was to argue with you about why you’re wrong and it doesn’t need to change 😅 (sorry about that)

Earlier this year, learning about my personality type and digging deep, I started focusing on my oversized reactions to feedback. I realized I had been believing this lie:

If you don’t do something right the first time, you have to do it again, and if you have to do it again that means you failed.

This lie popped up everywhere I looked:

• Driving somewhere new and taking a wrong turn (bad!)

• Misreading the recipe and doing things in the wrong order (bad!)

• Ordering the wrong thing and having to return it (bad!)

• Tackling a difficult problem for work and not solving it on the first try (bad bad bad bad bad)

I couldn’t live like that anymore. It was exhausting, it was not fun, I was never satisfied.

And then it was Loquat season.

Loquats are a kind of Japanese plum that taste a bit like a peach. They grow on trees all over Los Angeles. Mostly nobody picks them because their seeds are huge and inconvenient. Every May they rot on the trees and then they fall and rot on the sidewalk.

Last year at the end of its short season, I wanted to see if I could do anything with this interesting fruit, I made exactly one jar of loquat jam. It was so delicious that by the end of the night I knew I wanted to plan to make more next year. I kept a mental map of all the loquat trees in my neighborhood.

This year, maybe I was too enthusiastic but my husband and I picked enough loquats to make 20+ jars of jam. I peeled loquats for days and my stained fingers were a testament.

Jam boiling away on the stove, I confidently expected this year’s batches to be equally as good as last year’s.

Actually, they were better. Every. Single. Batch. came out better than the one before.

Normally my Inner Critic would have something to say about that:

“Why wasn’t last year’s batch this good? Can’t you see you must have done something wrong in the last one if this one came out better? You should feel ashamed that you didn’t get it right last time. Don’t enjoy how good this batch is — focus on what you must have done wrong last time. Lament!”

While that voice did try to pop up, its didn’t stick with me this time. The work I had been doing on myself must be working. I felt like something had been cleaned out of me, a malignant smudge of grime that used to always mar my accomplishments.

Standing in the kitchen amid my sequentially improved batches, I thought to myself: I’ve always tried to be perfect on the first try but maybe this is what the road to perfection actually looks like? Tweaking things a little at a time so that every outcome is even better than before?

And it dawned on me. This is iterating! I’m iterating!

I was so excited in the kitchen when this happened. I actually laughed with delight and shouted to my husband, “I did it! I’m iterating! I’m creating something consistently better each time without being angry at myself!”

Iterating means I can be happy with a first try, and I can feel safe to try again if I want. Chances are that the more I try, the more the outcome will improve.

Iterating is safe. Iterating is freedom from mistakes and criticism.

Made a mistake? That’s OK, just iterate.

Received negative feedback? That’s OK, I’m iterating and I can take the feedback into account on my next go around.

Old lie: If you don’t do it right the first time, you have to do it again (and that means you failed)

New truth: Iterating is the process of making something more perfect, which is what I’ve always wanted!

Want to chat, no pressure, about changes you want to make in your life? Schedule a 30 minute call with me. I’m rooting for you!