If writing is not the thing you have a tortured, obsessive love-hate-love relationship with, I’d love it if you would substitute something that is.

You know, the thing that — when you actually allow yourself to think about having time to devote to it — makes you feel elated and miserable. Joyful and terrified.

Painting, photography, dance, playing the mandolin. I don’t know. But you do. The thing you’d be doing if you had all the time and money in the world and didn’t have to tell anyone about it. Yes.

Let’s pretend that you have to have an awkward, uncomfortable conversation or confrontation or something else that begins with “con” coming up.

And I’ll just go ahead and assume that you’re totally not looking forward to it.

Anyway, even if that’s not what’s going on for you right now, it will be the case at some point, because relationships between people? Sometimes hard and messy.

Just play along with me.

Obviously when a super-biggified “expert” screws up, it’s way more entertaining than when other people do. And god knows we all need someone else to slip on a banana peel once in a while or we’d never feel good about anything.

Today we’re talking about what to do when perfectionism strikes. The whole how can I write when nothing I say is good enough? problem.

This actually hadn’t been planned as part of the original series but last week a friend had a blogging emergency — Ahem, We interrupt this blogging series for a blogging emergency — so I decided we’d sneak it in.

Good thing too because it’s a pretty big deal. Perfectionism being, of course, an old friend here at The Fluent Self. Hello, I’m the one who took a year and a half just to get ready to start blogging.

Wow, it’s the shortest Ask Havi question ever!

If only the answer could be just as short … hahahaha.

“Um. How did you quit smoking?
(she asked quietly and sheepishly)

Actually, the subject header of this woman’s self-described quiet, sheepish email said “quick question”. Which gave me a good laugh, because there is just no way that how I quit smoking could be a quick question.

Gather round, guys. Pull up a chair. Because I have stuff to say.

It is the nature of roads that sometimes things will be blocking them.

Like this:
You have a plan.
You think it’s a genius plan.
You do the work to move through your fear, anxiety, etc about doing the plan.
You run with the plan …. and uh, oh, something is going weird with the plan.

This is a scenario I know pretty well. You know, from being alive and stuff. I imagine you do too.

We had some pretty intense discussion happening in the comments section of last week’s talking truth to fear post.

And not intense in a bad way. The opposite, in fact. Really good points being brought up, people showing up and respectfully debating ideas and, in some cases, respectfully disagreeing. I’m loving it.

These intelligent, compassionate conversations have been continuing in email exchanges and on other people’s blogs, and it was really cool to see how my thoughts inspired a ton of other blog posts which work with these concepts and take them in different directions.

One of the weirder things that’s coming up, though, is that several people have been writing in to thank me for getting them to face their fears.

Okay, this is the third and last in a series of three about how to annoy the people you want to help, which of course you don’t actually want to do. The first was Don’t speak their language and the second was Put them in an awkward, uncomfortable situation.

Okay, this is the second post in a series of three about how to annoy the people you want to help, which of course you don’t actually want to do. You can read the first one here.

The idea is this:

Sometimes when we want to help a friend or family member do something differently, or to help our potential clients and customers feel safe and comfortable receiving help, there’s stuff we do that scares them off and gets on their nerves.

Even though that’s not what we actually meant to do at all. Even though our intention is clean and loving and all that stuff.

I know you probably don’t want to annoy the people you want to help.

Or to scare them off. Or to do anything that would result in losing their trust completely.

But since a lot of us do that anyway, inadvertently, play along with me. Here are three ways to seriously annoy the people you so dearly want to help.

And — even though I’m talking about this mostly from a business perspective because that’s what’s on my mind — it doesn’t matter what kind of people come to mind for you. The people you want to help or support could be friends, clients, customers, students, someone in your family…