The Truth About Fake It Till You Make It | Why Taking Action is Necessary to Grow Your Confidence
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If you’ve ever caught yourself waiting for the “perfect” moment to launch, post, or raise your prices, this episode is your wake-up call. You’ll hear from Victoria why waiting until you feel ready is the very thing holding you back and how taking imperfect action is what actually builds the confidence you’ve been waiting for. This episode is the reminder that progress doesn’t come from overthinking, it comes from doing.
Victoria shares how to spot the sneaky ways perfectionism disguises itself as productivity, and how to replace it with momentum-building habits that grow your confidence, your business, and your impact. She continues to share real life examples from launching BrandWell without a perfect plan to her husband paying off debt one small step at a time. From these personal stories, you’ll see how action leads to clarity, courage, and ultimately, success.
If you’ve been sitting on that website redesign, waiting to raise your prices, or convincing yourself you need to “feel confident first,” consider this your friendly nudge of encouragement. Confidence isn’t a prerequisite for action, it’s a result of it. So, hit play, take one small step, and start building the proof that you can do hard things. Because perfectionism won’t move your business forward… but progress will.
Perfection is the Enemy of Progress
Victoria doesn’t think that entrepreneurs can afford to be perfectionists. Perfection wants you to sit until all the stars align. Where entrepreneurship requires you to move forward before you feel ready to do so. Perfectionism is about control. Entrepreneurship has more to do with courage being willing to show up imperfectly. Messy action is not only okay in business, it’s absolutely necessary if you want to grow.
Action Breeds Confidence
Victoria shares a life lesson that she’s been learning over and over again: action breeds confidence, not the other way around. The confidence comes once you take action, no matter how small, no matter how messy. This is proof to yourself that you can do the hard things, and that proof is what actually builds your confidence.
A great example of how action breeds confidence is with Victoria’s husband, James. When he was twenty three, he had a lot of undergraduate debt from student loans he had taken to go to college. On top of that, he had plans on going to PA school, which is a very expensive program. While James and Victoria were dating, he had planned on stacking up his student loans and then would work towards paying his debt down once he had a good salary from being a PA. Victoria’s dad provided James with an alternative option. He handed James the book, Total Money Makeover, by Dave Ramsey, and encouraged James to consider paying off at least his undergraduate debt before going to PA school. In all honesty, James didn’t touch this book for six months, but one day he decided to give it a chance. He paid off his first loan, the smallest one, and that action yielded not just the confidence that he could do it, but it yielded momentum. James picked up a second job, and he paid down the next loan, and then the next. Eighteen months later, James had paid off nearly fifty thousand dollars in student loan debt. But if he never took action, it would have felt too difficult.
Another great example where action breeds confidence is shown is with Victoria’s kids. Her oldest daughter just started kindergarten and she’s learning how to read. As they work on sight words, she will fail over and over again, until all of a sudden, she’ll get one right! The way her face lights up when she gets one right is that confidence that inspires her to want to keep going. It’s that confidence that builds the momentum. Think of when kids are learning how to walk. You expect them to practice, to fall, and to get back up and try again. That’s how confidence is formed.
Perfectionism Disguises Itself as High Standards
Perfectionism is sneaky because it can disguise itself as high standards, or it tells you that you’re just being thorough, careful, or detail oriented. What it’s really doing though is paralyzing you. Perfection whispers “don’t do it till you’re ready”, but ready never comes. The longer that you wait, the more your confidence actually shrinks.
Constantly Refining
Over the years of owning BrandWell, Victoria shares that she has shifted her offers, updated her process, hired people, let people go, raised her prices, lowered her prices, and then raised them back up again. She’s changed her marketing strategy, pivoted the types of clients that they serve, and this is all normal. You have to just be willing to show up and revise, improvise and figure it out as you go.
Ways Perfectionism Holds Business Owners Back
Website: Victoria can always tell when a client is heading down the “I’m never going to launch this” path. It always starts with small things, but before you know it the site has been “almost done” for six months. The longer you wait to launch your site, the longer you are delaying sales, delaying inquiries, and delaying opportunities that your website could have gotten you.
Lack of Data: Everything is in your head about how you think it could be better. It’s not actually being made better because of the feedback of the actual customers who are going to be buying it. Victoria’s advice here, if you’re stuck in the “just one more tweak” mode, launch the thing. Get the idea live, collect real data, and see how people interact with it. You will learn more from one month of a website in the wild than you will from a year of tinkering around with it behind the scenes.
Content Creation: You overthink what to say, you worry about how you’ll look on camera, you compare yourself to other creators, so you never hit publish. It’s all about consistency more than anything else. If a post flops, take note, pivot, do it differently next time, but that post is dead in forty eight hours anyways, so don’t stress too much over the final product. This doesn’t mean to be sloppy with it – launch something that you’re proud of, but it doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be proud of it.
Raising Prices: Victoria is guilty of letting perfectionism get in the way of her raising prices. When she finally raised them before she felt “ready”, she learned more about what it takes to serve clients at this price point in nine months, than she did in the three years considering raising her prices. Don’t wait until you feel like an expert before charging what you should be charging. Expertise comes from serving clients, not waiting around.
Delegating: So many of you don’t like to hire because you are a perfectionist and you want to hold the control. Here’s Victoria’s secret to why she’s so good at delegating: she hires perfectionists. Perfectionists think that no one else can do it as well as they can, so they hold onto tasks that keep them stuck in the weeds. If you hire people who thrive off of those little details, as the CEO, you don’t have to get stuck constantly tweaking and refining. You get to set the expectation, you get to cast the vision, you oversee for quality and then you move on. Don’t let perfectionism keep you from ever outsourcing tasks in your business because you cannot do it all. At some point you are going to drastically stifle your growth if you continue to try and do it all.
Three Ways to Overcome Perfectionism in Business
Shift Your Mindset From Final to First Draft: Everything that you put out is a first draft. You can refine it later. It doesn’t matter how many years you’ve been in business, everything new that you put out, consider it a first draft.
Adopt an Experimenter’s Mindset: Start asking yourself what you can test, instead of what you can perfect.
Celebrate the Progress, Not the Perfection: Celebrate the small tasks you’re doing that are making steps forward. Remember, your customers don’t require perfectionism, they require a solution. Progress over perfection doesn’t mean sloppy, it means smart. It means knowing when something is good enough to serve your people, and then trusting that you can always go back and refine it down the line.
You Don’t Have to Feel Confident to Take Action
Just show up. Serve your people and listen to their feedback. Be willing to change, take criticism, and allow it to make you better. Keep failing forward. Action breeds confidence and you don’t have to feel confident to take action.
Key Quotes
“Action breeds confidence. You don't have to feel confident to take action.”
Victoria Marcouillier
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