Often it’s overwhelming when you want to make a positive change in your life. As women, we tend to put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get things right. We want and often wait to have things set up perfectly before taking the first step and never get around to making the changes we want to make. 

We get blurred vision when we put our perfectionism first and find it hard to start. We need to focus on progress, not perfection when making a positive change in life. 

“The goal is progress, not perfection.”

The formula is to help you shift your focus to progress, not perfection, is the Good, Better, Best approach – I use this, and my perfectionist clients swear by it! 

This approach reduces our overwhelm when we want to do everything all at once. It’s a challenge to prioritise everything you want to do feels essential to start. The Good, Better, Best approach helps you take a flexible and realistic approach to make small, manageable, and consistent steps forward in different areas of your life. 

So, how to use the Good, Better, Best approach:

1. Choose the areas of your life where you want to focus on improving. 

Example; Improving your diet, career, and family life. 

2. Write down the actions that make up a Good effort, a Better effort, and your Best effort towards implementing them into your daily life. 

Example; 

Improve my diet: 

A Good effort is when I choose to make and eat a green smoothie for breakfast x5 days out of 7. 

A Better effort is when I choose to make home-cooked dinners x5 out of 7. 

My Best effort is when I choose to continue eating healthy over the weekend. 

Improve my career: 

A Good effort is when I choose to read x1 articles a week published within my industry. 

A Better effort is when I choose to attend x1 networking events a week and engage in conversations within my industry. 

My Best effort is when I choose to write an article within my area of expertise each week and publish it on LinkedIn. 

Improve quality time with family:

A Good effort is when I choose to turn my phone off during dinner time. 

A Better effort is when I choose to take one full day off from work (including emails) a week to spend time with my family. 

My Best effort is when I choose to take ½ day off to rest and recharge by myself, so I feel calm and energised during quality time with my family. 

How the Good, Better, Best approach works:

Coaches and athletes use the Bronze, Silver, and Gold performance tracking system, which helps athletes track progression over a specific training block and set realistic expectations on what they can and cannot achieve. The emphasis is that during a training block, you cannot expect to accomplish a Gold level performance every session, no matter how much the athlete might want to do so. The approach helps keep expectations realistic for the athlete; it allows for a flexible approach, increases self-compassion, and maintains a consistent approach to training.

Using the Good, Better, Best approach works best when you know what you can do to make positive changes in your life. The more specific you can be with the action steps, the less overwhelmed you will feel about starting. In addition, having the steps written down in front of you removes the thinking. So, on a busy work day, you need to revisit your Good, Better, and Best steps and choose the one that will work best for you during that day – this is how you keep a consistent approach and where the magic happens. 

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and can’t think of the steps you can take for good, better, and best, then I am here to help you with that! So please get in touch today and let’s have a chat. Talking out loud about what’s going on can make a world of difference, helping you go from stuck to motivated to start!