Delegation for Recovering Perfectionists

An excerpt from Start Right Where You Are by Sam Bennett

As the creator of The Organized Artist Company, bestselling author Sam Bennett’s mission in life is clear: to assist people in getting unstuck by helping them focus and move forward on their goals.

That is also the intention of her new book Start Right Where You Are: How Little Changes Can Make a Big Difference for Overwhelmed Procrastinators, Frustrated Overachievers, and Recovering Perfectionists, which is based on the premise that small shifts in the right direction can yield big results in the realization of our creative dreams.   We hope you’ll enjoy this short excerpt from the book.

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Like many recovering perfectionists, I’ve found learning how to delegate to be a steep and rocky path. I truly believe that self-sufficiency is a virtue. And since my brain is so good at finding what it’s looking for, I notice every single time that idea gets proved right, and so I always have lots of evidence for why it really is better if I just handle everything myself.

This kind of thinking, friends, is the devil in disguise.

My self-reliance came in handy when I was a latchkey kid in the seventies and in adulthood when I was an independent artist. Then, in the first years of running the Organized Artist Company, I found myself learning everything I could about websites, copywriting, graphic design, small business administration, webinars, teleclasses, and contracts and agreements, and then I really geeked out on internet and email marketing. Whenever one of my entrepreneurial friends complained about how her website was being held hostage by her designer, or how an assistant had screwed up the PPC (pay-per-click) ads again, I secretly felt very smug. At least if mistakes were made in my business, they were all mine.

Now this is where my vanity shows up — in not wanting others to know I made mistakes. If I had other people helping me, they would see my errors and misjudgments. Working alone, I could keep up a pretty good façade of shiny excellence.

But as the Organized Artist Company became increasingly successful, I realized I was doing a disservice to the people I was trying to serve by attempting to do everything myself. I was limiting my growth and the depth of my work. After all, the time I spent posting the webinar I’d just recorded was time I was not spending talking to new clients, developing new workshops, or writing books.

I had built a business with my own two hands, and I ended up with a business that I could hold in my own two hands. Cozy, but limited in scope.

Once I was willing to face down my ego and admit that my vision of self-sufficiency was a delusion and a trap, my business took a quantum leap forward, and revenue doubled. Little change, big difference.

I realized that I had been listening too much to the complaints of other business-owner friends of mine about how hard it was to find good people. One friend was going through at least two new assistants a year. Each time she was convinced that the new person was the answer to her prayers, and each time she ended up disappointed. She didn’t want to look at how her own behavior might be contributing to this cycle, so she just kept repeating it.

Once I turned my attention away from other entrepreneurs’ tales of victimization and instead focused on the fact that I genuinely love working with other people, my team started to take shape. After all, I’d spent my entire life in the theater, and that’s what theater, and particularly my subspecialty of improvisational theater, is all about — utter reliance on your fellows. I realized that I could hire people who shared my values, who would laugh at my jokes, and who had skills I couldn’t even dream of. The next time I heard a friend singing the blues about an unreliable team member, I simply thought to myself, “That’s not my story.”

I have also used the thought “That’s not my story” to fill events when everyone says it’s impossible to fill an event these days, and to sell books when everyone says that publishing is dead. That may be their story, but it’s not my story. Try it for yourself. “Change is hard”? That’s not my story. “Teenagers are impossible”? That’s not my story. “You can’t get a well-paying job that’s flexible”? That’s not my story.