Can everything be perfect?

Not surprisingly perfectionism is perceived as a good and desirable characteristic in the modern Western world, and being moderate in expectations and doings is deemed as a negative trait. Everyone expects you to be perfect: a perfect employee who gets all the work done in time and asks for more, never demanding a promotion or salary increase; a perfect kid, as the star of the basketball team and a brilliant student; a perfect husband who always comes home with flowers and diamond rings.

In this situation, you also expect yourself to be perfect to meet the standards put for you. You become a perfectionist.

When I say you “become” a perfectionist, it is to imply that you were not born one. It is not an absolute, universal characteristic. Rather, it is relative and is born of human conception. Perfection is an idea. It is an idea of a perceived ideal state of affair by a society. Perfection and imperfection are therefore merely attached values by that very society. And you are socialized into it.

Yet, you shouldn’t jump into the conclusion that perfectionism is bad per se. No. It is good to try doing your best. It is inherently good to give people what will make them happy.

However, what I am suggesting is that perfectionism can be dangerous is it casts a controlling net over your life. In this case, perfectionism leaves very little room for you to accept and love yourself unconditionally. You will start being harsh on yourself. You will accuse yourself even for some minor mistakes. Gradually your judgements about yourself will affect the way you perceive others. Everyone will seem just not enough.

However, the truth is we only have each moment of the Present Moment to live in. By being perfectionist, our mind will be forever planning and thinking about the future or lamenting about what went wrong in the past. Because of these tendencies, many perfectionists are unable to feel satisfaction because in their perception they never seem to do things good enough to warrant that feeling of contentment.

And the big paradox reveals itself:

“How can one have perfect peace, self-love and joy when one is a perfectionist?”

I experienced these feelings when I resigned from my job at a network PR agency. Those of you who have experienced the atmosphere of such agencies would perfectly know that it can be REALLY fast and chaotic out there. So, being home does make me feel like a fish out of sea.

I know that this is the case with many occupations and with many work environments; you simply adapt yourself to it. And at the end you feel too tired to start again.

However, there is no point in losing your orientation and feeling depressed. It is true that some people are natural born Polyannas with unlimited energy. Still, motivation to success is not a gift from above, rather it is a vital talent that you should develop. You can actively work on it as a part of your ‘self development plan’ following the five step guidline provided below.

1. Change Your Environment

Sometimes changing the environment works well when you feel trapped. The low mooded friends are the major obstacles to self motivation at this period of your life. These people whould continuously grumble and whinge. Or else there are those know-it-alls. For them, if you failed it is probably because you didn’t know how to handle things with your boss and find your way around. They would go on preaching you the “to-do”s of professional life. You don’t need either of these. Try to get away and make your mind up peacefully.

2. Focus on Your Dreams

In order to motivate yourself to success, you should know in what you want to succeed. Take into account your interest, traits and dreams. Do you enjoy the challange of creating the new advertisement campaign for the client who has been losing market to the competitor? Or, do you want to have regular working hours and a good income. Should you carry on with the carreer path you have been following? Maybe you are not motivated because basically you don’t like your occupation. Focus and listen to yourself.

3. Get Prepared

Once you are calm and focused on what you want to do for your life, get prepared for it. Equippe yourself with the required skills and knowledge. Introduce yourself to the key people. Being well prepared fuels your motivation

4. Boost Your Confidence

Trust in yourself. Think of what you have accomplished so far. Maybe you were asked to leave in your last job, or you resigned for not getting well with your directors. Everyone has been through such occasions in their lives. Instead of fixing your thoughts on what you have done wrong, remember those you contributed to the company and your clients. You have done that before, you can do it again.

5. Visualize Success

When you prepare to start again with your career, close your eyes and visualize yourself achieving something that you really wanted. Shaking hands with your new employer, holding the Oscar or having just made your first million. Try to experience how you would feel. Weird it may sound, yet I assure you that it works perfectly well.

1. Know what you know.

Or better what you don’t know. Imagine people you consider as effective speakers… They give us the impression of expertise. Don’t argue on subjects that you are not familiar with.

Neither would that be cool, on the other hand, to rain on people with unusual terms and concepts to look authoritative. Make it understandable. Looking snob can be an effective conversation ender.

2. Think before you talk.

Say what you mean and mean what you say. To achieve this golden rule, understand what you will actually be saying before it is spoken. Pause for a moment, analyze what you will say and evaluate whether it will sound like what you want to mean, or not. Once a word is spoken you can’t take it back.

3. Ask questions.

As we said before “if you don’t know, ask to learn”. But not only that, ask people’s opinions, or guide the conversation with clever questions. After all it is a conversation not a lecture.

4. Listen.

Remember how annoying it is trying to find a mute second to say something with motor mouths. Give people a break and listen to them. Actively… Don’t look at your watch or think of what you will say the next. Follow the speaker and try to understand what he really means. Otherwise you can turn into one of those couples continously arguing without noticing that both are saying the same thing.

5. Establish Eye Contact.

There’s a lot to say when it comes to directing your attention to your audience with an eye-catching gaze. Wether it is a large group you are talking to, or just a colleague in your team it’s important that you keep eye contact to be convincing and influencial.

6. Smile.

Don’t get angry with people for they don’t agree with you, it is a mature conversation. You can better express what you’re saying and look more approachable when you smile.

7. Use Your Body Language.

Gestures are among the most effective tools of communication. Body language can help you get your point across, it will be easier for people to follow. There are studies that have proven that gestures are directly connected to language and make the message of the conversation clear.

8. Do Some “Just Kidding”.

A little kidding around in a conversation can do wonders to lift the tension. Try it also when your audience seems to be bored. You can get the attention of the the crowd back, and it would be nices than going like “are you listening to me?”

9. Bear Low Sail.

Everyone makes mistakes. In a group, don’t shy away to ask if you’re pronouncing a word right. Make a joke out of it. Laugh at yourself if others do so. It will just warm up the conversation and you certainly will not look silly.

10. Enjoy it.

Self development needn’t be solely consist of lists and steps and rules… Being better in conversations is not only another level you will advance and get 100 bonus points. Don’t forget that you want to develop your communication skills, because you want to communicate with people. So enjoy it and don’t be harsh on yourself if you can’t keep one of these advices.

• Do you have an original idea that you trust in, but people around you resist to it? People with creativity usually don’t waste their time and effort trying to persuade them.  You too try to follow the beat of your heart. Don’t allow them judge you, be the one to judge the value of their feedback. Is it a good input to your work? Is it just cacophony? Listen to them, evaluate them, but do as you believe to be true.

• Don’t imitate any one. People will appreciate your innovation more because it is only and uniquely yours and that no one else would have thought of what you were thinking. Find your own style. That will show people how valuable you are.
• Make a wise time management. Do your regular job, spend time on your creativity and exercise regularly; take a walk or do some yoga. It will clear and relax your mind and allows for anything to pop up.

• Spend time with children. They have undisciplined, lively creativity that explodes in plays. Play with children, your kids or kids of your friends. There are things we should learn from them.
• Take your dreams seriously, you can even write them down. Your conscious mind would never have thought of such craziest ideas, but guess what they are a part of you, your innovative part inside. Re-thinking your dreams might spark that innovative side.

• Chose your job or license in the subject that you are most passionate about. It’s more unlikely for you to be innovative in a topic that has nothing to do with you.

• Work in your subject seriously and with discipline. Make sure that you know all aspects to it. Sometimes you can’t bring new ideas to a task, because simply you haven’t mastered its nature enough.

• Don’t blame the conditions. You don’t need a beautiful sea view or a cool typing machine to write a masterpiece poem. Neither could such tools and equipments make you a genius. Get rid of your loads as well as your prejudices and concentrate in your power.
• Lastly, don’t get desperate about inspiration. You can’t force it out. Be patient, it can hit you when you least expect it.

You need to acquire certain skills and techniques in order to manage time to accomplish your goals and projects. It is obvious that you can’t change your habits from night to day, but following the tips in our quick guide can make things way easier to you. So, follow up with the steps…

Set and define your goals –
What is your definition of success? What do you want in life to be happy? Get to know yourself and give sound decisions as for your goals. If you want to learn how to play cello, make sure that it is really something that will make you happy, as well as that you have enough patience, time and talent. Your mom might urging you to attend college but maybe your calling is for trade… you should know. From the most important decisions of your life (such as choosing your profession) to minor ones (loosing weight) first and for most you should set and define your goals at the begining and make sure that it is what you want to do and what you can and should do.

Determine the tasks –
Make a list of tasks to be completed to achieve your goals. It will serve as an alternative or supplement to memory. These could be grocery lists or project management lists. In either case, first get acquintance with all steps, parts and requirements of achieving your particular goal and determine the correct tasks. Going for shopping, you should know the full list of ingredients of your recipe, for a modern dance program audition; likewise, name the sort of classes you should attend, the techniques you should master even the people you should meet.

The traditionally, you write these on a piece of paper. Now, a great deal of digital equivalents are available, such as PIM (Personal information management) applications and most PDAs. There are also several free web-based task list applications. It would be wise you check some of these.

Pick the priorities –
Most of your lists won’t be a simple as a grocery list. They are often much more complex and multi-layered. In order not to get disoriented and feel desperate, you should pick your priorities and organize your tasks accordingly.

There are numerous techniques to  organize your priorities.

• ABC
• PARETO
• FIT
• POSEC
• EISENHOWER

ABC analysis is the most frequently used technique in business management. It is basically the categorization of the whole body of data into groups, marked as A, B, and C:

A – Tasks that are most urgent and important. (~today)
B – Tasks that are important but not urgent. (~this week)
C – Tasks that are neither urgent nor important. (~this month)

You may then rank each intra-group items according to priority and start with A1.

Allocation of time & Scheduling –
We’ve said start with A1. But, do start. Once your priorities are determined and your list is ranked, allocate a certain time for each task and schedule it. You may prefer allocating the longest time period for the hardest tasks and do it before everything else. Getting something done within your planned time, will make you feel easy and relieved.

Monitoring –
Working on a certain project or on a specific goal, you should monitor how well you perform on time management periodically. Getting to know doing what brings one success is hard, you should check on yourself time to time. Maybe you are most productive in the morning. Or maybe you speed up in time. Maybe it is hard for you to start, and some rewards are needed. You will figure out.

Time out –
Breaks and time outs are just as important as the time you allocate for your work. Allocate time for breaks wisely. If it was an extraordinarily unproductive day, or you need a very urgent task to do, it is not the correct time to go for a movie. But otherwise, try to relax, and enjoy your breaks, knowing that you deserved through a well done time management. Good job!

Yet, it is obvious that everyone needs good friends all through their lives: as a shoulder to lean on or to celebrate the big events with… you also would need good friends and a lively social life to have a higher quality life and to enjoy yourself. And yes, a major component of your self development plan.

If you don’t have much of a circle at the moment, you shouldn’t feel depressed about it. Most probably, the problem stemmed from, not your personality traits or your sad destiny, some minor details that you haven’t noticed until now. Some people make and keep friends without even thinking about it. Maybe they just picked up these skills automatically as they grew up. If you haven’t been among those, check our 5 step guide below to learn more on how to make good friends .

1. Spend time with people

It could sound strange, but most of the people who complain about loneliness don’t even realize that things couldn’t be the other way around because they barely see people. Try to visualize how many people you get in contact with in an ordinary day. If it is just the three guys closest to your cubical, there is a problem.

Your job may be stressing and tiring and at a long day’s night all you want to do is to lay down in front of TV. But keep in mind that an idle life will not only make you unhealthy and depressive, you can also lose the friends you currently have, let alone making new ones.

Join in a social club or the nearby gym; try shifting your reading routine to the library or your daily work-out to a recreational space in your neighborhood… spend more time amongst people. Maybe you will not even need to read the next 4 steps.

2. Be positive

It could be hard to cheer everyone up all the time. Neither do you have to be the funniest guy ever. Just be positive and show people that you’re content to be with them. The more rewarding they find you to be around, the more they will spend time with you.

3. Be a conversation starter

Being around people and having a cute smile are good to start with, but you can’t make friends, unless you talk to them. Don’t wait for them to make the first step. If you go one step further to them, it is very likely that they will approach you. Who knows, you can be missing a lasting friend due to the lack of a “hello”.

Some tips;

• Make eye-contact when you talk. You may look cool with your sun glasses but look approachable when it comes to meet someone new.
• Keep the conversation light. You don’t know this person very well; when you will complain about something make sure that you both agree on that.
• A good way to start a conversation is commenting about your immediate environment. Alternatively, you can make a compliment (relevant to your situation for sure) and ask for help. Afterwards, just follow up with a relevant question.
• Try to ask questions which he can answer in detail. Don’t ask, for instance “Do you like warm weather?” give him some space to talk with “What kinds of gifts do you normally buy for your mom?”
• Ask for a get-together. It could be just for coffee, or some occasion related to your common hobby. If you enjoyed chatting or liked something about this person, don’t leave everything to luck; create an opportunity to meet again.

4. Be a good friend

Don’t behave the way you don’t want people to behave when they are with you. In friendship, just in other forms of social relations, things are reciprocal. Be reliable, trust-worthy and kind. Be a good-listener and give advices when they ask for it. Above all, be there for them. You can’t always have fun together.

5. Choose right people to make friends with

Be sure about what you seek in a good friend and with what type of people you feel happy and comfortable. You tallest guy in the basketball team, or the most popular girl in office could be cool to hang out with, but that doesn’t make them the right candidates for a lasting friendship. Make sure that the person you invest your time –at least- is kind and understanding to you.

BONUS!

Don’t shy away connecting people in your office, in school, in a social gathering etc etc. Keep in mind that they are just people like you and they also need friends. If the steps given above didn’t satisfy your quest you can check How to Make Friends Worth Keeping e-book by Alex Vaselevski where you can find specific and practical action steps to help you take action and get instant results. What’s more, you will also get two e-books for free (”How to Overcome Anxciety” and “The Spiral of Influence”… It’s worth having a look.
After applying these steps to your life, you will see my friend, that it is much easier than you have thought, to spice up your social life.

1. Starting up – overcoming anxiety

“Pragmatism concerns itself not with what you should feel as a speaker not with what is rational or logical in a speaking circumstance,” says Arthur H. Bell in his book Butterflies Be Gone: A Hands-on Approach to Sweat Proof Public Speaking, “but instead with what you do feel.
Don’t act to be a great speaker if you are not.” If you lose your vision each time you have to speak in front of an audience, don’t pretend to be a confident speaker. Examine what it makes you feel and just be yourself. Public speaking is nothing more than speaking to more than one person. Don’ make a great deal out of the fear of making mistakes. Public speaking coach Richard Zeoli reminds that anyone whether he is the president of US or any ordinary person, is prone to make mistakes. It is a part of being human, and your audience is composed of nothing but persons just like yourself. Moreover, it shouldn’t be ignored that when you make a mistake no one cares, even understands, but you do.

2. Preparing your presentation

There are some rule of thumb requirements for a good public speech: you should know what you are talking about, trust in what you say and practice your speech over and over again. These are clear, but the organization of your speech is just as important.

Starting with questions is a good choice to open up the subject and pull your audience into it. When you ask questions at the beginning of your speech, people are more likely to pay attention and be active listeners to find answers. Roger E. Axtell indicates six questions to be asked in all speeches in his book Do’s and Taboos of Public Speaking: How to Get Those Butterflies Flying in Formation, which are Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? He advises his readers to use these questions regularly in business speeches as well as regular reports and correspondence. Since business presentations are usually meant to be informative, these questions can lead whole your speech.

In the light of these six question, Axtell says, you should organize your speech in four main parts: Headliner, opening, middle and closer… The headliner is the short description of your objective in giving this speech. In the headliner should involve your basic message and answer your six questions. Keep in mind that the first appearance on stage is the key to present a good impression and capture the attention of your audience.

3. Delivering your presentation

Keep in mind that the first appearance on stage is the key to present a good impression and capture the attention of your audience. Avoid long and boring openings that mention the names of all the notable persons in the audience. It’s boring and ineffective. Step in front and smile. Wait for a few seconds before you start. It will give you some time to relax and get rid of your excitement while the audience settles and gets ready to listen.  Always know your first words in advance. Never underestimate yourself and apologize for not being well-prepared or qualified. But, you can start with a joke to signal the public that it won’t be a boring talk. Humor is widely used in business presentations, go for it, but keep in doze. Don’t lose your credibility and authority.

Today, audio visual elements and props are amongst the main components of a lively and interesting public speech. You can complement your presentation with such tools. They will also enable you to use your hands and body more effectively, so you won’t need to be anxious about “where to put your hands”.

There is a catchy technique to color up your presentation even further called the Columbo technique. In this, you leave one of your most critical and surprising points to the last, then go like “Oh, Just one more thing,” and deliver your biggest point. It will be most effective just before the coffee break, so that you will come back with the issue which has already caught everybody’s attention. Always leave your audience wanting more, let them ask questions and follow up with you.

Successful public speaking will certainly help you climb the career leader faster than  your colleagues. There are more and more tactics and tricks you can check to develop your public speaking skills. You can make use Darren La Croix – Public Speaking World Champion’s manual Get Applause Now! for a full package of public speaking tips.

The more you practice, you will see that the more you advance your public speaking.