This week was all about preventing paralysis, physically and psychologically.

I have a detrimental relationship with perfection—I strive to catch up with it, yet it doesn’t even care to look back and see if I’m keeping up.  How boorish!  Now, I know intellectually that perfection doesn’t actually exist so it’s actually only myself I’m running with out there.  But I still never seem to be in the lead!  And the irrational hope of attaining perfection, paired with the rational awareness that I never will attain it, sometimes leaves me paralyzed with inactivity.

Our task this week in 9 Weeks… is to build our website.  Oh, man!  So much to fix!  I don’t know where to start!  So many things far from perfect!  (Gasp) 

What pictures do I use?  I need new promo shots! 
Can’t do it! 

A bio?!  What do I say?  I’m not interesting! 
Can’t do it!  Can’t do it!

I gotta join Reverbation and a daunting plethora of other sites, create a profile, upload music and then place their widget on my website?!  It’ll take forever to perfect!  I can’t do it!  What’s a widget?  My fingers and hands and arms are so sore from clicking and typing and scrolling!  I can feel my tendons thickening to immobility!  I for sure have carpal tunnel syndrome.  In fact, I’m quite certain I have plantar fasciitis too from trying to catch up with perfection and running to and fro the fridge continually checking out what could be magically new in there!
Can’t do it!  Can’t do it!  Can’t do it!

All this computing and internetting and perfecting… I’m struck with paralysis of the physical and psychological kind: Perfection paralysis.

How to prevent paralysis? 
As Ariel Hyatt says: Eat the elephant one bite at a time.

Okay, now I’m listening; biting and eating I understand.  I get it: One bite at a time; one site at a time; one step at a time.  Don’t let doing it perfectly supersede doing it at all.  Okay.

And stick your arms in ice water every now and again.  Give them a healthy stretch every hour.  If it gets really bad, massage the pain with Rub-A535 with Capsaicin.  And while chasing perfection, wear supportive shoes instead of novelty slippers—or better yet, just let perfection go, let it run off into the distance and do its own thing while you do your own thing at your own pace.  Yeah.

There.  Paralysis prevented.  Perfect!

 🙂 Love KAT