Holiday Tip #8: Expectations of Self
I created the Holiday Tips series for ambitious high achieving women trying to juggle everything this holiday season -- closing out the fiscal year at work, coordinating holiday events, hosting, cooking, cleaning, communicating, shopping, wrapping. The mental load is extra heavy this time of year, and I'm hopeful these holiday tips will help make things a little lighter for you.
Connect with me on Instagram @execcoachleanna or LinkedIn to tune into the full series.
Hey everyone, Leanna Laskey McGrath, the Executive Coach for Moms here with another holiday tip. Today I want to talk about our expectations of ourselves. I think as high achieving ambitious women, we have always expected ourselves to perform at a very high level, and we've proven that we can.
Therefore, we expect A+ work in everything we do, and this goes far beyond just the holiday season, but since we're talking about the holidays, we're just gonna focus on that for today. There are so many different things to do with the holidays. There's planning the events, executing the events, hosting, making all the logistical plans, doing the presents wrapping coordinating cooking all of the things. There's so many different things to do, and I think that we are holding ourselves to an extremely high standard in all of those areas. And so what I recommend is B- work which I know [00:01:00] feels like what?
How could I possibly, but hear me out for a second. I think there are some places where you might decide that A+ work is required, that you want to give that level of effort, and that is great. You should definitely do that. And I'm also gonna say that there are probably some areas where B- work or even C work would be okay.
Whenever we were in school and we were getting graded, we only had a certain number of subjects. And now that list has grown exponentially and we're talking about holidays and that's on top of all of the other things we have to do. Like wrapping up the year at work and. All of the day-to-day stuff that we still have to do that doesn't go away just because it's the holidays.
So when we have that really long laundry list, we can't expect that we earn an A+ in every single area. It's not possible. And so what we have the ability to do is to decide, here are the areas where an A+ is extremely important to me. And if [00:02:00] you are taking a look at what are your expectations of yourself, and you realize that, oh, there are 35 different areas where I expect myself to do A+ work, maybe that's an opportunity to step back and reevaluate your expectations of yourself I think it's so important to remember that it does not have to be perfect to be amazing. That is a thought that I remember a lot. It does not have to be perfect to be great. So where can you lower the bar a little bit? Maybe it's on cooking. Maybe you decide to do a store-bought pie, but maybe that gets you to be able to do the A+ work in something else that matters more to you. It is okay. It is okay to not be perfect in every area. The world will not fall apart. And I think it's also important to remember that our bar is so high for ourselves that even if we lower it a little bit , we still produce really, really amazing results.
