I'm in Christopher Watkin's studio for his Letting Agent Podcast, and he doesn't waste a second.
"Why are letting agents such perfectionists? Talk to me, Neil."
"Why is everybody such a perfectionist, Chris?" I say.
He pushes straight back. "Do you think everyone?"
"I think a lot of people." And plenty of letting agents in particular.
That episode went out in August 2019, and most of it still holds.
My answer to Chris started with something agents are good at. They've got an attention to detail, which is useful in that job. Add a fear of rejection and a fear of failure, though, and it starts to work against you. Chris called it fear of criticism. Whatever you call it, it holds you back from trying new things.
Everyone else's highlight reel
I told Chris I thought perfectionism was on the rise, and social media had a lot to do with it. We can see what everyone else is doing, all day long, and "we're all looking at a highlight reel of somebody else's life."
Filtered images and the best bits only. As I put it on the show, "it's like we've Photoshopped the entire world and stuck it on the internet pretty much."
Try comparing yourself with that. It's hard. So the voice in your head says "I can't do this well enough, so I won't do it at all."
At the time I was writing a book called Done Beats Perfect, and the phrase had been my tagline as a speaker for a few years. I still stand by it.
Embrace the suck
There's a phrase I picked up from a bunch of my American friends. I think it comes from American sports. Embrace the suck. I explained it to Chris like this: "Whatever new thing you try to do, you will suck at it. Do it long enough that you suck less."
And eventually you get good. I asked him, "The first time you tried to tie your own shoes, did you succeed?"
"No, you didn't," he said. Then he added a couple of his own. Driving a car. And for the agents listening, their first free valuation.
Nobody nails any of those first time. "You keep going, and you get good at these things."
Leave the first one up
Chris told me he recommends people deliberately set out to make a bad video. I liked that, because it's close to how I coach people on video.
"If you're not embarrassed by the first video you publish six months from now, you waited too long."
And then the important bit. "Don't delete it, leave it there so people can see you're a human being." You should be able to scroll back and go, "Oh, I can't believe it was that bad." That's how you see the progress.
I owned up on the show. "My first video, I'm not even in. I didn't want to be on camera." I know that might be hard for some people to believe. Chris said his early ones were atrocious, and that he'd been putting it off for a long time first. "I was putting it off 18 months."
Same goes for writing. "You can't edit a blank page." If you haven't got anything down yet, there's nothing to make better. So what's step one? Do that, then step two.
Watch the full chat
Turn one day into day one
I left Chris with my biggest tip. So many people say they'll get round to it one day. "I'll make a video one day." Chris summed it up. "Never get there, do they?"
"Take one day and turn it into day one."
"What can you do today that moves you in the direction towards where you want to be?" It doesn't have to be the finished thing. It might be getting your diary out and blocking in the half a day you're going to work on it (I wrote more about that in Schedule time to work on your business). Or it might be recording a video on your phone that you aren't ready to post yet. Commit to making one every day and within two weeks you'll have posted one of them. "It's still progress."
First published August 2019 on Christopher Watkin's Letting Agent Podcast.
