The Get it Right Attitude

You probably know the ‘get it right attitude’. It’s the one that is backed up by clichés such as ‘if a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing properly’! It’s the attitude that prevents so many of us doing so many things.

It goes along the lines: there’s no point in starting because I won’t be able to do it properly and people will find fault with it!

It’s also the attitude that gets in the way of actually finishing things – because if you finish something it won’t be perfect and people wil find fault with it and therefore you’ll have failed!

But… if you don’t finish it it’s still work in progress, so you can’t be criticised.

The cost of the ‘get it right’ attitude

This is one of the topics which we play with on our NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner programmes. And in the exercise we first look at what it’s cost us up to now in terms of missed opportunities. Then we look at what would happen if we could dump the attitude instantly and finally we explore practical steps for changing this attitude i.e. how we can replace it with a more life-enhancing one .

(Each of these will be covered in these articles)

There is certainly a cost to the Get it Right Attitude – no question about this. Having such an attitude inhibits us. It makes us over-cautious. It makes us risk-averse. It makes us play safe. It makes us stay in our Comfort Zone rather than move into our Stretch Zone.  (More on that in this article).

Let’s start an experiment today

Let’s explore an abbreviated version of our NLP course exercise. We’ll do this over two or three articles – to allow you time to think about and take some action in between articles.

(By the way that’s an advantage of being a Blog subscriber. I don’t know if you’re like me but when I used to read self help books which would ask me to do more than just read – i.e. to stop and do some action or some thinking – I’d ignore their carefully planned exercises and furiously read on looking for the gems of knowledge that I ‘knew’ would change my life. I now know that knowledge doesn’t do much life-changing – action is what works. Anyway, the advantage of being a Blog subscriber is that you are given a natural break between articles to think about things or to do things. Which is why so many of my articles are multi-part.)

Now back to the experiment: it’s a valuable little process and, while doing it via a few blog articles won’t have quite the depth and richness or the interaction of the course exercise, it will certainly get you started. And if you follow the steps thoroughly it could produce quite life changing results.

(1) What has it cost you so far?

First the uncomfortable bit. This is the Away From Motivation piece. It’s a useful first stage in any personal change process because it works to motivate us to move away from ways of thinking and acting which hold us back or impoverish our experience of life.

And the Get It Right Attitude certainly fits this bill.

Here’s what to do. Over the next day or two think back over all the times in your life when the Get It Right Attitude has got in your way. When the attitude has been a bit like a ball and chain attached to your ankle – holding you back, inhibiting you, en-caging you, etc.

For example

• What opportunities would you have grasped?
• What great ideas occurred to you that you could have pursued – instead of stifled?
• How would your career have progressed differently?
• How many people would you have got closer to – and how many would you have not wasted time with?

And so on. It’s not a particularly comfortable process, I agree, but if you see it as part of a process of bringing an attitude to an end that puts a different frame around it.

In Away From Motivation we are using unpleasant emotions to move us away from things we’ve had enough of.

Does that ring a bell?

(Next time we’ll begin to look towards the future and how you want it to be.)