Practice, Don’t Perform
Practice,
don’t perform.
When you make this mindset shift, it changes everything and your approach to your business, building influence, serving people, and inviting people along for the journey that you are on.
If you feel like you are performing, then your nerves get to you. Perfectionism gets to you. And you feel like you have no room for error. Performance is something that has to be polished in order to be good in most of our minds.
Practice, on the other hand, it’s something that is looser and we have the opportunity to try and fail and try again because it “doesn’t count”.
Do you remember being a kid and trying to show your friends or family some cool trick you learned? If you ever messed up you’d just say, “That one didn’t count, I was practicing!”
Heck, even doctors “practice” medicine!
When we allow ourselves to be in the posture of practicing when we are building our brand, our business, or our influence, then we take away the power of perfectionism.
We give ourselves permission to be imperfect, and to try and fail in different ways, which teaches us more than performance ever could.
And what we discover as a result of practicing publicly where people can see us trying and failing and figuring things out, is they become invested in our story.
They saw us start and they saw us grow and they saw us win.
Our victories mean so much more when we practice publicly, because people come along for the ride; which becomes an invitation for them to root for us, and then become our fans, and then eventually become our advocates.
Practicing builds an emotional connection with the people who are watching us, the same way that we develop an emotional connection with the main character of a movie or a TV show.
Because we care about who they are, where it where they are from, what they have gone through, it makes us want to see what happens next for them.
Even if one of the seasons of a show is lousy, we stick with it, because we are INVESTED in seeing this person win and succeed at the goal or pursuit that they have.
In the same way, when you get people invested in your story, they will stick with you through your rough seasons because they want to see YOU win!
I want to encourage you to shift your mindset in your business, or in your craft, from performance to practicing.
And that tiny shift will result in you developing and growing and getting better and better at a vastly greater pace than performance ever could take you.