Getting to Good Enough

Perfectionists tend to want to have all their ducks in a row before getting started on a new project. That tendency can be paralyzing. And it's so unnecessary. In this episode, Shannon and Janine talk about how just starting where you are can benefit you in so many ways.

Discussion topics include:

• Why things don’t have to be perfect in order for you to get started

• That just by starting and moving forward, you create momentum

• How you don’t know what you need to know until you start

• The paralyzing effect of perfectionism

• Some current examples from Janine and Shannon’s lives of how they struggle with this

• How thinking of doing something as a practice or experiment can take the pressure off a new project

• Starting a new system now and worrying about the backlog later

• The impossibility of setting up a perfect system before you start

• How stopping things that aren’t working out for you is smart

Last week Janine and Shannon talked about creating helpful habits. This week, we look at the other side of the coin--letting go of bad habits. Shannon shares her view that all habits (even bad ones) are the result of good intentions and talks about how we can use that information to kick bad habits.

Discussion topics include:

• The inherent value of bad habits

• Peeling back the many layers of a bad habit to find the need it fulfills

• Figuring out how to fulfill the positive intention in a more beneficial way

• Being kind to yourself as you work on letting go of bad habits

• Creating a helpful habit that is incompatible with the bad habit

• The double-edged sword of habits becoming so automatic

• Becoming conscious of your unwanted habits and breaking their spell

• Shannon’s three-step process to letting go of a bad habit

• Remembering that your bad habits don’t define you

When it comes to living an easy life, helpful habits are everything. In this episode, Shannon and Janine discuss why good habits are important and how to create them.

Discussion topics include:

• How automating the mundane tasks frees your brain for more important things

• The challenge of creating and maintaining new habits

• Janine’s misguided compulsion to start creating new habits on the first day of the month

• The unwritten rules and beliefs we all have about habits

• How a good enough mindset can help in creating new habits (hint: take teeny tiny steps!)

• Some strategies for remembering new habits

• The power of chaining habits together into a routine

• Shannon's gentle method for creating new habits

• Sticker charts -- they're not just for kids!

Tune in next week for our episode on overcoming bad habits!

The bedrock of all the advice we offer on this podcast is, "Know what's important to you." In this episode, Janine and Shannon discuss how to get in touch with your values so that you can more easily embrace good enough.

Discussion topics include:

• The importance of knowing your core values

• Evaluating what’s important to you

• The secret sauce of the process: Repeating the question “What else?”

• Using your core values to help you decide what good enough means to you

• Trying a Word of the Year exercise

• How getting clear on your why makes everything easier

• Getting in touch with your body’s “yes” and “no” signals

• Shannon’s “Boring Change” technique for making ridiculously easy changes

Shannon and Janine are among the millions of people who enjoy doing genealogy research. In fact, as a genealogy blogger, Janine devotes a significant amount of time to it. In this, our second Good Enough In Practice episode, we discuss Shannon's challenges with her genealogy research (which involve an enviable literal treasure trove of original documents given to her by her mother) and discuss some strategies to help her get past the perfectionism that's stopping her from proceeding with her research.

Discussion topics include:

• How a lot of people get hung up on perfectionism in genealogy

• How genealogical standards can feel intimidating

• How the discovery of Shannon's treasure trove was both wonderful and stress-inducing

• The responsibility Shannon feels to the rest of her family feels to care for these documents correctly and share them

• The importance of knowing why genealogy research (and anything else) is important to you

• Some practical advice for dealing with these precious documents (keyword: checklist)

• Creating a "good enough" standard to make source citations easier

• Getting past the overwhelm of genealogy research

• Janine’s “good enough” research log

Bonus! We get an update on Shannon's morning routine at the end of the episode. She shares how her good enough attitude and the minimum standards she has set have helped her establish and stick with a great morning routine.

Comment from Shannon: Right after we recorded this episode, I purchased archival documents boxes and folders and started sorting my documents into them. It was a perfect rainy day Sunday activity and I no longer feel overwhelmed!

This week, Shannon and Janine interview the amazing writer Alexandra Franzen, author of the upcoming novel So This Is the End: A Love Story. We've both had the opportunity to work with Alex and know her to be a talented, thinking individual, so we were thrilled when she accepted our invitation to be on the podcast.

Alex offers all sorts of insights on things like perfectionism, good enough, confidence and the benefits of growing older (and she's in her thirties). Her wit and wisdom enhance our ongoing discussion of perfectionism!

Discussion topics include:

• How it can be easier to let go of perfectionism when you feel more confident in your abilities

• How perfectionism made it hard for Alex to decide her novel was finished

• The role of experience in allowing yourself to be good enough (more experience = less perfectionism)

• Figuring out when something’s done

• Setting personal criteria for what's good enough (Spoiler alert: it’s empowering!)

• Moving through life with a full cup (and watching it overflow)

• Some of the more enjoyable aspects of getting older

• Alex’s parting question, “If you had 24 hours to live, what is just one thing that you’d absolutely want to do on that final day?"

Alex's novel, So This Is the End: A Love Story, will be published in hardcover and Kindle editions on October 15 by Mango Press.

Setting priorities makes sure that we get important things done and don't spend our time putting out fires or doing things that don't contribute to our goals. In this episode, Shannon and Janine talk about various methods for prioritizing and how, once again, it all boils down to knowing what's important to you.

Discussion topics include:

• Various matrixes to help you prioritize

• Making time for the important, not just the urgent (hint: it’s worthwhile to prioritize setting up systems that will eventually save you time)

• Eating the frog

• The birthday present Shannon gives to herself every March

• A daily routine that helps you maintain your priorities but still go with the flow

Shannon’s progress toward creating a great morning routine that involves picking her top priority for the day

• How knowing what’s important to you helps you do everything more easily

• Prioritizing and budgeting (time and money)

Check www.gettingtogoodenough.com for Janine's quick sketches of the matrixes we talked about.

Asking for help can be so, well, helpful. Yet many people (Janine and Shannon included) have difficulty asking for help. In this episode we explore how life can be better when you seek help. This episode includes a special (surprise!) guest appearance by Mike, Shannon's husband, who is an asking-for-help ninja. He shares some of his insights on the whys and hows of seeking help.

Discussion topics include:

• How perfectionism can get in the way of asking for help

• The ins and outs of asking for directions

• Shannon and Janine’s adventure in asking for help when they had car difficulties in Utah

• Why it’s a good practice to ask for help even when it's difficult

• Mike’s strategy for asking for help (hint: it’s always a conversation, not just a question)

• How just by asking Mike finds out that he needs help with things he doesn’t even know about

• Mike's view that he doesn’t just ask for help, he gets clarification of the problem.

• A couple of approaches that might make it a little easier to ask for help.

• Shannon and Janine’s promised experiment with asking for help

We make thousands of decisions a day. Some are easy. Some are hard. And some are harder than they need to be. In this episode, Shannon and Janine talk about making decisions a little easier.

Discussion topics include:

• The difficult decisions brought on by modern television viewing

• How having many options makes it more difficult to make decisions

• Using your limited to decision-making capacity for important decisions

• How perfectionism hampered Shannon’s car-buying ability

• Shannon’s closet-clearing strategy (Janine thinks it's brilliant)

• The coin-flipping method of decision making (it’s fun and sneaky)

• Strategies for restaurant-related decisions

• The secret decision-making formula: know what’s most important to you about a decision and use those parameters to narrow the options and make a choice.

It's your turn! In this episode Janine and Shannon answer questions from listeners.

Discussion topics include:

Empowering:

• Becoming empowered by the people who teach you

• Finding someone to work with who supports you and helps you feel good about your efforts

• Doing the best you can (without being perfect) so that you can be a model for someone else

Planning:

•Staying on top of all the areas of your life

• Janine and Shannon’s favorite paper planner for busy people (spoiler alert: it’s Planner Pad)

• Shannon’s Bullet Journal (and why she likes handwriting her planner)

• A holistic approach to keeping track of stuff in your life

Prioritizing:

• Questions to ask yourself to help you decide what to work on

• Setting an achievable goal and a stretch goal

• Feeling vs thinking about your projects