Hula Hooping on the Roof

I never would have imagined the pandemic of 2020 would finally free me from my own perfectionism.

If not for the shutdown, I would have published my forthcoming book, The Productive Perfectionist: A Woman’s Guide to Smashing the Shackles of Perfection, in the summer of 2020. I was inches away in March of that year—when the world shut down.

I was distraught, worried that my book—which I’d been working on for five years—would never be published. It was meant to be my platform for launching a new business. Suddenly, I had lost control of my future.

All I saw was deep uncertainty. My body felt tense and heavy. I called my publishing consultant, Shel, and asked what he thought we should do. He said, “An eBook will be a great way for you to smash your shackles of perfectionism. Write it in twenty to thirty hours, and we’ll get it on the market quickly.”

This conversation made me more anxious. I had never written a book in less than five years, and he wanted me to do it in just a few months! Shel’s insight that the crisis could be just the opportunity I needed to free myself from perfectionism made me realize my real worry about publishing an eBook without years of review and editing: It could be crap.

Could the pandemic be my chance to face that old lurking fear of not being good enough without a lot of preparation? When tackling new projects, my preference is to be methodical, go step-by-step, and practice until I feel confident.

Instead, I had to move fast.

All of a sudden, during COVID, everyone began to adapt on the fly. The old standards of success were on hold—or maybe gone forever. When I stepped back and saw that the new normal projected “I don’t know,” I felt permission to throw stuff against the wall without worrying that it might ruin my reputation.

I needed to lighten up and get into a positive mood to enter the new world of experimentation. So, I dusted off my old pink Hula-Hoop and began a new routine of hooping every day on the roof of my Manhattan apartment building.

In the new COVID-conscious world, most people seemed paralyzed and unsure. But I felt silly and playful when I was Hula-Hooping on the roof. This form of self-care helped me lighten up.

Maintaining that fun mood of lightness when we were all afraid to leave the house took deliberate and focused intention. In the pre-COVID world, I would squeeze little bits of self-care into the corners of my life. But in the early days of the pandemic, I needed to make it central to my life. The new organizing principle felt foreign to me, and I felt a bit guilty while surrounded by so much death and bad news in the world.

Did the world need more depressed people? As I Hula-Hooped, I discovered that I could get out of my own way and had to if I wanted to help others.

Shel’s timetable was too far out of my comfort zone—but why not challenge myself to create a new eBook in six months? I was both terrified and excited.

I decided to test the idea. I took a deep breath and sent an email to my network to recruit fifteen to twenty self-proclaimed perfectionists who would participate in a complimentary pilot program to survive and even thrive in the strange “pandemic world.”

To my amazement, twenty freaked-out professionals from ages nineteen to seventy signed up. Then, of course, I had to create and teach the model. It would be based on the book I’d been writing for five years—the one that is now being released this spring—but also weave in the new, terrifying challenge of COVID and make it integral to the project.

Shel was right. I didn’t have the luxury of overthinking and continuously refining. As I reworked the ideas, I’d typically finish the modules just minutes before each meeting. I was always nervous as each session started, wondering if my ideas would resonate and be useful. The program involved developing, teaching, and discussing the four SANE steps to thriving during a crisis.