Getting to Good Enough

Giving yourself permission to fail can make it easier for you to succeed. This week Janine and Shannon take a deep dive into this liberating concept, one that was pretty foreign to happy-go-lucky Janine.

Discussion topics include:

• Janine’s “good enough” perspective on failure

• Whether failure is within your control

• How, for perfectionists, failure can feel more imminent and threatening

• Changing your perception of what is failure

• The value of viewing everything as a practice

• How those who embrace the mindset that it’s okay to fail are more likely to succeed

• The impact of shifting your definition of success

• How Shannon applied this to her first solo climb of a mountain

• Setting yourself up so that trying = success

• Giving yourself permission to fail enough times to get you where you want to go

• How choosing to stop doing something is a success, not failure

• Making an agreement with yourself to do something that’s doable to make success easier

Money. It's not a topic many people feel comfortable talking--or even thinking--about. It can be particularly hard for perfectionists to address issues with money. In this episode Shannon and Janine talk about some strategies for getting past perfectionistic barriers to having a good relationship with money.

Discussion topics include:

• How money can be fraught with emotions

• How perfectionism can prevent you from doing the things that could help you feel more comfortable and confident around money

• Shannon and Janine’s favorite financial tool, You Need a Budget (YNAB)

• How even Janine has gotten a little perfectionistic with YNAB (but she’s using it anyway)

• The fact that sometimes you have to just start something and use it before you can figure out how best to use it for you

• Avoiding perfectionism when it comes to your taxes

• Trying not to sweat the small stuff around taxes

• How money stuff doesn’t have to be hard--especially if you keep good-enough records

• Keeping track of passwords, so you can easily log in to your financial accounts

• Shannon’s love for the password manager, LastPass

• Creating a plan for sharing passwords and other information in the event of a tragedy

• How there’s no one right way to do money and taxes

• The importance of knowing why it’s important to you to improve your relationship with money

Visit our show notes at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for links mentioned in the episode.

There's so much to be grateful for. And expressing that gratitude not only helps you, it helps others. This week, Janine and Shannon talk about the importance of gratitude and ways to express it.

Discussion topics include:

• The gratitude that Shannon and Janine feel for you, our podcast listeners

• The value of keeping (and reviewing) a kudos file

• The impact of expressing gratitude to others

• Shannon’s quick-thanks method that allows her to express gratitude without letting perfectionism get in the way

• The Getting to Good Enough mugs! (Let us know if you’d like to buy one)

• Not letting perfectionism extinguish fun impulses to express thanks

• Janine’s method for saving money on greeting cards (she thinks it's brilliant)

• Organizing thank-you cards to use later

• How Shannon uses the app Postagram to send postcards on the fly to her mother

• Finding things to be grateful for in your life

• Creating a habit of coming up with a gratitude list

• The effect of perfectionism on gratitude

• Being grateful for the "good enough” things in your life 

Thank you so much for listening! Visit the show notes at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for links.

Janine lives by the words "Let it be easy." But can something be too easy? Shannon and Janine discuss that possibility and how it relates to various aspects of life, including genealogy research.

Discussion topics include:

• Is it possible for something to be too easy?

• How technology has made it possible for genealogy research to be too easy

• How rigor can contribute to reliable genealogy research

• A clue that something maybe too easy: it’s not contributing to a strong foundation

• How accepting genealogy facts without analysis can lead to big problems

• How adding challenge to something makes it more attractive to Shannon

• The effect of Shannon’s concussions on what feels easy (or difficult) to her

• The challenge of finding things that are both doable and a challenge

• Finding the sweet spot where it feels doable, but still counts

• How even though it's possible for something to be too easy, Janine stands by her "let it be easy" motto

This week we're debuting the A/V Club, in which Janine and Shannon will periodically talk about things we enjoy watching and/or listening to. This first A/V Club is a discussion of the podcasts we listen to. But first we kick it off with an unrelated anecdote about accidentally eating dog food.

Discussion topics include these podcasts:

• Stand Out (from the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals)

• Generations Cafe (genealogy podcast from Amy Johnson Crow)

• Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

• Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend

• Happier with Gretchen Rubin (it inspired this podcast!)

• How I Built This

• The Tim Ferriss Show

• Everything Is Alive

• The West Wing Weekly

• Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me

• Dirty John

• S-Town

• My Dad Wrote a Porno (please don't judge)

• Slow Burn

• The TED Radio Hour

And we wrapped it up with a little discussion of not letting perfectionism get in the way of listening to podcasts.

Visit the website at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for links to all the podcasts!

Do you have fun at work? We sure hope you do. If work can sometimes be a drag, this episode is for you. This week, Shannon and Janine talking tips and strategies for making work fun. Because, in Oscar Wilde's words, "Life is far too important to take seriously."

Discussion topics include:

• How are perception of our work has everything to do with how much fun our work is

• How perfectionism can play a role in making work not feel fun

• Janine’s experiences with making organizing fun

• The prescient Oscar Wilde quote on Shannon’s high-school yearbook page

• Letting go of perfectionism to try to make work more fun

• Gamifying your work

• Sharing your work achievements to make them more fun

• How working with someone else—even if you’re working on different things—can make boring work more fun

• The importance of setting boundaries at work to create space to have fun

• Freeing up some personal capacity to have fun by doing rather than thinking about doing 

• How fun is in the eye of the fun-maker (and it’s good to know what your idea of fun is)

• The mean trick played on Shannon’s coworker

• The role of rewards in making work fun

If you feel you operating at 100 percent capacity, you're not doing yourself any favors. This week Janine and Shannon discuss personal capacity and how making sure you're giving yourself plenty of room capacity-wise can help you be happier and less stressed.

Discussion topics include:

• How personal capacity is like the memory capacity of your computer or phone - when you fill it up, everything slows down

• The fact that it's unreasonable to expect that you can function at 100 percent capacity

• How unnecessary thoughts can take up valuable personal capacity

• Letting go of worry so that you can use that energy for more important things

• The many things that factor into personal capacity, including having a realistic perception of how long something will take

• Managing your own expectations of what you can get done in a given amount of time

• Setting yourself up for success with a realistic task list

• Ways you can expand your capacity (hint: stop overthinking and close up your loops)

• Getting stuff out of your head and onto paper (or pixels) to free up your brain

We're thrilled to welcome Laura Roeder, founder of MeetEdgar, the social-media marketing application that changed the way many people post to social media. Shannon and Janine talk with Laura (a naturally good-enough person) about how she deals with perfectionism on the part of her team members and customers, how to know when something is good enough to launch into the world (before it's perfect) and the difference between thinking about your goals and actually working toward achieving them. Laura offers lots of great insights!

Discussion topics include:

• The fact that Laura is naturally a “good enough” person but can get perfectionistic in her area of expertise

• Dealing with team members who are perfectionists

• Knowing when something is good enough to release into the world

• Recognizing that most situations aren’t life and death

• The value of “done for now”

• How Laura deals with perfectionists among her customers (hint: she tells them what to do!)

• Understanding the questions behind the questions

• The elusive nature of data (and how hard it is for us to draw conclusions from it)

• The value of leaving evidence so that you know you’re at good enough

• How perfectionism can stymie people

Feeling satisfied--even when something isn't perfect--allows you to embrace a good-enough mentality. This week, Janine and Shannon discuss the importance of finding (and recognizing) satisfaction. Feeling satisfied doesn't lead to complacency--in fact, it's life enhancing.

Discussion topics include:

•Janine’s shocking (to Shannon) inability to tell a joke

• How feeling satisfied is an important aspect of a good-enough mentality

• Looking for places to feel satisfied without perfection

• Paying attention to what you can do instead of what you can’t do (and feeling satisfied with that)

• Shannon’s post-concussion challenges and how she is trying to feel satisfied with what she is able to do

• Gratitude vs satisfaction

• Setting yourself up to feel satisfied by putting the brakes on perfectionism

• Applying this concept to your task list (hint: include tasks instead of projects on your list and keep the list short)

• How being satisfied with less than perfect doesn’t make you complacent

• The fact that feeling satisfied can actually enhance your productivity

• How you can feel satisfied with something while also looking to improve it (which Janine is proving with her new yoga practice)

• Cultivating the habit of finding satisfaction in where you are, rather than waiting for satisfaction to find you

Perfectionism can get in the way of starting or enjoying hobbies. This week Shannon and Janine talk about  their hobbies (and attempted hobbies) and share strategies for getting past perfectionism so you can enjoy your hobbies.

Discussion topics include:

• How every hobby Shannon’s had has been marred by perfectionism

• How perfectionism can get in the way of starting and enjoying a new hobby

• The fact that new hobbies usually have to be bad before they can get good

• How Shannon inspired Janine to start knitting fourteen years ago (spoiler alert: only one of them is still knitting)

• Process versus results in doing hobbies (like knitting)

• Janine’s 12-year adventure with Barbara Walker’s Learn-to-Knit Afghan

• Why starting a hobby by shopping can be a mistake

• How Shannon is managing to stick with her latest hobby: Learning Portuguese

• How guided lessons can help provide structure to make learning a new hobby fun

• Figuring what counts as engaging in your hobby when you’re starting out

• How frequent practice can make learning a new hobby easier

Visit the website at www.gettingtogoodenough.com for links and photos!