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Episode 9 · 2 years ago
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Episode 9 · 2 years ago
Episode 9: Imperfect Action
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Hello everyone, and welcome to the ninth episode of Naked Truth with Carmen and Olivia. I hope you are aldering well. How are you doing? Carmen, doing okay? Hello everybody. Today said a great day, and I like my great days. What have you been up to since last week? Whatever you up to? I work a lot lately. I go to the park. I'd love to be in nature, being a little bit with my kids. What's in science? Resting programs in Netflix and just resting a little bit. What it what you were watching on Netflix? Oh my God, a stranger things have you wanted? Yeah, I haven't seen them all because my partner and I struggle to watch things together because one of us will always get ahead. We're not very good at waiting, so he got like well ahead of me and strangest things. So I pretty much missed the first series. That's where I've seen like most recent one. I think for us it was really good because I see happens with many families in Netflix. You you watch your things and you find it really hard to find something in the family as a whole life. So my daughter found this one and she started watching it with my partner and then I started watching it and he became like a night ritual. So we don't see her. or She's eleven, so she goes with her friends. We had to see her in the week, being the day, sorry, and then when she comes back a round seven or six to playing with her friends, is it is it night ritual. And we started loving it. You know, we put some mattress on the floor in the living room, blinds down, so it becomes a little cinema and we all really liked it. It's amazing acting from these kids as well. HMM. It's so enjoyable, very enjoyable. HMM. Yeah, I've been in the last week or so, maybe a couple of weeks. I don't know why, but I suddenly felt this need to rewatch breaking bad. I watched it years ago and I haven't watched it since. So I've only ever watched it once. It's not like I've seen it loads of times, but although I remember the overall story arc, it's like I'm watching it brand new because there's so much stuff. That one is there, the one in people are in jail with us, so looking guy. No, it's the one where it's a science teacher that becomes a drug manufacturer and fire and like he's just really dull, live by the rules guy, like really like simple life, simple guy, and then he just turns into completely different person because he's running this drug manufacturing ring. Yeah, but it's like it's drama, but there's lots of comedic bits in it and I just forgotten so much of the little stories along the way. Like I was I know who who ends up alive at the end of this thing. So I know this is going to be all right, but I really can't remember what happens this bit. So yeah, that's been my no one. Yeah, it's been good. It's been nice to it has been years since I've seen it. But yeah, I've been putting off free watching it because there's they brought out like a feature length like sequel. I guess to it that I've never watched. I think everybody out last year and I didn't watch it because I was like, I can't really remember what happened to them at the end or whatever. So I thought I'm going to rewatch breaking bad so then I can watch the sequel and I wasn't expecting to have forgotten so much of it. So that's quite nice.
It's like watching it freshly again. So this week we all be discussing imperfect action, which is one of my favorite thing and if you do a google search on what that is. Well, first of all, action, I think we all know, the act of doing an imperfect action occurs when you create, collaborate and basically just get going on whatever you need to do, without waiting for perfect conditions, which can be easier said than done. It's a common what stops us from taking action? So yeah, in my view, probably steer, yes, stopping us from that see of failure. Many people even have fear of success, visible of being judge. I mean your name and you can write a few pages and a list of fears that many different people will have. And for me, I fear. There was a really interesting definition at words somewhere, I can remember, where these false evidence appear in reality and basically is the projection of something that in the majority of cases, passing, even happen. Yet just giving us all the stress and anxiety in the problem with thea is our daily companion, even when we look at other people and we think, wow, you know the way they carry themselves, to the very confident all that we carry so much fear within ourselves. That normally is the Eagle keep us in a in a place that we are say, you know so, keep us in the comfortable zone, and that leads to procrastination. So it could be that suddenly there is analysis paralysis where you have to get to do another sto analysis, testing case before the action, and another one and another one. And what is the limit? It could be a perfection analysis, and you know it has to be exactly perfect. And in as well, with perfection, what is perfection in my eyes could be very different from what is perfection in your eyes. So it will be better to do something and get to be back rather than trying this idea of a hundred percent perfect. Fact. Yeah, we could be as well. Logistics strice is like, you know, like I remember last week we had so many techi problems through the podcast, and it could be that the end we could just go and say allow our fears, because I remember was more in my site where I was, you know, I was processing or you put in here, and my fear, my subbotors were telling me, Oh my God, there is your podcast is gone. Olivia has to do her own. So you go to this stream where you create the film in your heads and if you believe it, I could say to you, our cup, I can't do this. But we persevere and we try another day and we try another day, and I was trying here with different things, with my partner. You would trying. So because we persevere and we do it. Did an imperfect action. We managed to release something this week and this yeah, with something different. So you know, mainly for me is the fear, the story with telling our heads and you needs to be challenged. HMM, and we need to push ourselves into imperfect action. So, Olivia, let's give the audience some ideas how they can push themselves into this imperfect action. Well, imperfect action means we have to walk right into that fear and just stop being afraid of what could go wrong and focus instead of on what could go right. So it's really it's just about just do it. Just go ahead. You know there's a fear there, but it doesn't matter. You need to just get started with it. So I think that's the the first step. Yeah, the second one, probably for me, is accepting the failure might happen and see us an opportunity to grow,...
...not excuse not to do something now. Have this growth mindset that you know by learning from perceive failures, because remember failures. They could be perceived failures, but they are not failures. M The only person in life would truly fails is the one, they say so professionalist, that never takes any action to work there was anything. That is a true failure life. Yeah, we just need to remember really that failure is not the opposite of success, is part of it. You can never be successful if you don't have failures in your life. So, just as said, failure as a growth for parture Atty. I'm big opportunities will always come to you above your current level of skill and and will push you out of your comfort zone. But again, that's what you need to grow. You'RE NOT gonna learn and grow and be successful if you don't push yourself just to stretch that a little bit further, try a little bit harder so you might have something to do and you think, I haven't done this before or I'm not good enough for this. Just push yourself outside that comfort zone and you will get something from it. Whether you fail like Carmen's, just talk to us through. That's fine. You will learn from that failure, but also you might not, it might just go really well. Yeah, it's a good one. And whenever you doing really break it down into steps, there's these saying that how will you eat an elephant? You can cut in you little pieces, so he's the same you have normally. Sometimes the lack of action is because it's so big. We need to do that. We discuss too much. So wonder for us to be able to do it. Just break it down into little steps and just so with the first one. And sometimes or many times, we don't even know if the first one we think is the way one. They doesn't matter. It is better to keep moving there not moving at all, and the first step will lead you to the next one, and the next one to the next one, and so and sometimes when the steps are wrong, the next one will correct you in the right direction. It will be more right. But it's that is really important to keep walking, MMM, actioning, keep this day in the next steps and have faith that you while you doing the first one, and if you don't know which one will be the second one, the second one will come to you while you doing the first one. So have hope that you will know what to do next, MMM, and you'll never truly be ready for anything. So don't wait where we spend a lot of our times waiting for the perfect time to do this, the perfect conditions to do that, and they're not going to come, or maybe they've already passed and we didn't realize that actually at the time they were are perceived perfect conditions. Imperfect action beats perfect inaction every single time. You're going to get stuff done. So just just go ahead and do it, try it, just take that first step. Probably the last one is normally, when we don't act, we go into procrastination and it's a very unpleasant place to be because you can spend days and weeks where you just can do it. So heap little list, size that the audience and do it. Is a very simple one to take you from that procrastination, the lack of action, into imperfect action. So when you have to do is to write down. You will have three columns, so you can use post it if you want. When the first column you will have a list of the weekly goals, second one will be the top three goals you need to achieve in weight and the third one will be goals completed. And Nick need...
...to be very, very strict to put in the second column, top three working progress goals. Only three. You can add the fourth and the fifth because you length when you keep procrastinating. So you have to be extremely straight about only three working progress and if you know how two percent sure which ones to put you can use the like a little matrix. When one of the access it will be important and the other asset access it will be edgecy so you need to write all guitars sus in the Matrix. So high importance and highercy these projects will have to be in the top three, low importance, lower than she. Forget them. You don't even need to think about them or do them at all. Just forget them because we is really important to focus in getting you out of the procrastination. So it just park them for a while and then you will have some that are high important but not urgent. Just review them every now and then and monitor the urgency levels when it becomes a little more urging and see where you have to put them. And the last one is where it's not important at all but it's very urgent. Again, review that high level of air density. Is it really so worthing? If and if it's not so important, do you have to do it. I think once you do this exercise, it will keep you progressing and getting you out of the procrastination zone. And I think one thing with this is perhaps in the in the at the beginning, put tasks that are streamly easy to do and tasks that can motivate your little bit or do things like write, at least every day or when you go to bed the day before, what you need to do throughout the day the next day, and highlight them as you go along. Like, for example, for me, I would put Gratu you when I wake up, walk in nature and once or even simple things like giving Olivia a code. I put everything, anything and I start a highlighting then in green when it's done, and he motivates me. It gets me out of this. God, what do you have to do? Because he's it happens to all of us, is very, very easy. Yeah, into the procrastination. And if you want a free software that can help you with doing those exercises of having, you know, things that are work in progress, all those different columns, or even doing the urgent important Matrix, I find Trello's really good for that. T are Doublelo and it's free and you can just it's like having post it, but it's kind of post it's on a on a computer system. So if you're someone who likes to work on a screen all the time, or perhaps you're always attached to your screens, you need it there. That's somewhere you could that's something I would recommend using. So, Olivia, what is your experience with imperfect action? Oh, I have lots of experience with imperfect actions. If I if I didn't, I wouldn't get anything done. So my kind of motto, or the saying I live by in life, or have to live by in life at the moment, is done is better than perfect. If I didn't follow that, there would be a hell of a lot I hadn't achieved. So, just to name a few things. So this podcast, this podcast, if if I was going to wait for it to be perfect, there's still wouldn't be an episode out because we don't have the music where recording in zoom, we don't have you know, there's certain things that other...
...podcasters have that we do not have. But it works and I would rather that we learn along the way and we've now we've got microphones and things like that. We've made improvements along the way, but we just got started and if we didn't take that imperfect action, this podcast wouldn't be here, people wouldn't be listening to us now. Another thing my website. I mean, if I'm going to wait for that to be perfect again, that would never be published. Thinking About University, my dissertation was like the poorest piece of work I did at university. It just didn't I did a I did like a practical dissertation. So it was a enzymatic method of measuring blood alcohol. Is What my dissertation was, and it just didn't work. Like the results just didn't work. So that's good because it gives you something to write about, but it's bad because I actually didn't know why it didn't work. So it was it was like my poorous piece of writing. I hated it, but, you know, I just had to get it done because I didn't get it done I wasn't going to pass my degree. And in the end, yes, it had the lowest score out of all my modules, but it didn't bring down my overall score. I still got a good pass, I still did well. I just had to battle through that kind of you know what, this isn't going to be perfect. It's going to be so far from perfect, but I just need a pass on it. That's what I'm aiming for, not for a hundred percent even blog post that I occasionally get round to writing. You just have to have a bit of a brain dump and then publish. You cannot overthink a blog post because again you'll just be writing, rewriting, editing, comparing it somewhere else, like no, just there your thoughts. Just write them down, just get it done. And it might sound like when I'm saying all these things, for that just seems so easy for you. You're just getting on with it, you're just doing stuff, but it isn't easy. I have very deep rooted beliefs in perfectionism, which is a work in progress. I am working on it and I have to battle against that way of thinking all the time. But ultimately imperfect action wins, and it has to win, otherwise nothing would get done. And the problem with perfectionism is we never really achieve it. If you're working on something, trying to make it better and better until it's absolutely perfect, what does that look like? How will you know you have achieved it? Now, if you ask me that about my website, when I was working on my website and you said to me, well, what's it going to look like when it is perfect? How are you going to know? I would come up with some arbitrary examples. So look professional, look engaging, people want to spend time reading my content, all that stuff, but that doesn't answer what it will look like. And that's because if I knew that, then it would already look like that, wouldn't it? I would have already done that if I knew what that perfect version of a website look like. And that's where I get stuck, is when you you're just trying to make things better and make things better and make things better, but you don't know what it is and then I get paralyzed and move into procrastination and don't do anything. Then it's me just sitting there like what is no point in me doing anything? So what I do won't be perfect and then that's going to be a failure, and then you just turn. Is that vicious cycle of all those negative thoughts. So if I let that, if I...
...let perfectionism and that procrastination rule my life, I would achieve nothing. No action would be taken at all, and so I'm very happy to take imperfect action, to just do it. Done is better than perfect. When it comes to the website, I it's there to prove you're a real person, really working as a coach and to direct people to you. If I was waiting for it to be perfect before I posted it, how many clients have I missed that could have found me and could have been contacting me because I was trying to achieve this unrealistic goal of the perfect website? That nobody in the world is even achieve the perfect website, so why would I be the person to do it? So those are my kind of how I do it. Is just too when I get stuck in that I recognize I'm procrastinating, I'm not doing things and that it things aren't good enough. I just have to remind myself done is better than perfect. Get it out there. You can always go back and tweak things improve things as you go along, but just get started, just get things out there in the world. So what about you, calm and what's your experience with imperfect action? Wait, first thing, I was listening to you and two wards came to my mind with imperfect action, and one is carriage and the second one is here m many times where I literally like you from very for me, from very early age, I being experiencing imperfect action and you had these two elements, or always carrot and fear. My first one, it was a huge one, was when I was toolpen I left my parents house. So I was living in a tiny village, thirty houses in northern Spain, and you know and environment where even when you go to the doctors, your mother speaks for you. You don't speak, you know, so you are not an independing adults when you are twelve, like I could see my child nowadays living in London and I managed to convince everybody to allow me to go to boarding school. So imagine this little girl that couldn't even speak for herself going to the big city on her own, living with nuns and all the girls. I was petrified. I was I cry for a month, sleeping with another three girls in my bedroom and quite quietly crying because I had so many fears and I was so scared. But I did coming to England. You know, I had a job in Spain. Everybody telling me you crazy, there's not many jobs. You got a job. With the hell are you doing? I don't know. I didn't even really think much about I just did it. I remember I spent the whole journey in their brain crying. So remember had this big glasses and he was the couple sitting down next to me. Snow Lady from my area, and I tried to cry. The tears were coming down like crazy and I try to be so quiet and probably, if he was a guy, will never realize. Obviously wasn't all the lady and she realized right away and he hold my hum old, old journey with her, saying I will look after you until you meet the person. He thought that you are meant to me, and I was crying because you have all these fears with this person will be dead to meet me. If know you have money back, can speak English? How I'm going to get a hotel? So you have all these crazy me going said, you know, I write in Heathrow. She helped me out. The Guy who was meant to collect me was there, but it was carriage makes with fear and I just went through it. Coaching diploma. I didn't have a clue. Really, it is life. Took me to this arena to have a diploma and coaching and because I always loved to help people and to develop people. Saying with you for the PODCAST. I love to talk, I love to teach, to talk...
...to mentor, I I love to to to give things that work for me. See people can use them and improve their lives. And, as you mentioned, it's a perfect now it's not perfect. The name says at all. The naked truth, you know, is no editing, is no music, but we do it. Hopefully will help the audience and we enjoy as we and I remember with linking posts in this area. I'm a finance and strategy person, I mean for twenty five years, and so you can have in your mind this idea of it. Just good with number us. Just, you know, please do not write. You cannot write. You, you know, very good with words and that could stop me, you know, but I thought, you know what, no, if I'm not good, then I can become better and then I can become good, but by not doing it I'm not going to become better at it. So I still remember my first post. I was petrified. I Click said post and I expected people to come back to me saying, you know, let's just stop it. You know, very good at it and it was the opposite. I mean it's not like people knew me and but I could feel like and I got few people saying wow, this was amazing. And then, as they do it more and more, I become better at it. Am I amazing? Right? Of course no, and that is not my intention. But the thing is I get better every day I do it. So for me, my whole life is about imperfect action, no matter what. So yeah, this is my life really, and I know you're big on your kind of your mantress to inspire people. So what have you got for us this week? So I'm one of them, you seem lately, because in these challenging times, I must said I'm so pleased. We are coaches and we have many tools we can using ourselves. But even so, you know, you have the tolls and, as we mentioned here many times, we having really bad days here and there. And I find this interesting mantra from a company called both hearts, and it says I am positively specting great results, no matter what I see from to me, the universe is rearranging itself to give me what I want, and this is really helping me. I don't read every day, to be honest. HMM, but in my very bad days where I just get up and I come I just feel like I don't want to do anything, just to read this. It keeps it puts me in a positive, you know, way of being. HMM. Second one is God does not call the qualified. He qualified the cold. Who says yes, it means that you know, go to the universe. You don't have religion. It will help you the moment you say yes to opportunities. Do you just need to say yes? And sometimes you say yes two things that I'm not good for you or they're not your pass but this is going to open another door that will direct you to your path. So it doesn't really matter any it will give you the resources you need. Another one is start with imperfect action and you will be given the knowledge, the resources and the support that you will need. And it's a little bit what we talked before. We doing breaking down your goal, so you things you have to do in little the steps and not knowing what is the second step, to just know the first one. Just do the first one as you go along, you learning a few things and then the second step will come to you. And the fourth one for me is what you mentioned. Alive imperfect action, bits in action every time. So we need to keep at it...
...and the days where we losing hope, go back to this manchion. You know you will get there, even if you see something totally different in front of you. Just be patient, have hope. The universe will help you. But sometimes as well, bear in mind that sometimes what we want it's not good for us. And sometimes when we don't get things, you need to think what is the learning here? Is it this my path? What can I do to improve the situation? Because you could be there the many times we want things that are not what we are meant to do. So when we fail, look at it from learning. What is my learning here? Where should I do but keep moving, keep moving all the time. MMM and I would just like to bring up one of the most wellknown advertising slogans ever that I think fits in so well with them. Imperfect action, is from Nike. Just do it. No, that's slogan works. That's why they're so successful. Just do it, whatever it is, do it now and hone it later. So those that would be my kind of last sage advice on imperfect action. Just do it. So I'd like to thank you all for listening and please do join us again next week. Now, next week we do actually have something a little different for you, which I'm not going to give you any details about, but just you know, stay tuned. That will be for our ten episode, so we'll have made it to double figures. Hm. But yeah, I know we need a cake, but just like you know, it will. It will come out on the Saturday rather than the Friday, so you'll have an extra day to wait, but it will be something a little bit different and very interesting. So if you'd like to connect with us, connect with us over at Instagram at Naked Truth pod and twitter at naked truth underscore pod, and our facebook page is naked truth with calm and Olivia. contact us by email at naked truth pod at gmailcom. Tell your friends about us, spread the word, stay honest, stay you and stay naked. See you next week. By right, everybody. By.
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