The Kolher Principle: Good, Better, Best: Finishing Well

If you’ve ever looked at something you created and thought, “It’s fine… but it doesn’t look impressive enough,” you’re not alone.

I’m Cheryl Paris, and I’m exploring a common thread that ties together work stress, anxiety, and perfectionism: our tendency to value polish over truth. A polished presentation, a neatly crafted email, a confident reply, or an attractive wellbeing program can all give the impression of quality. However, presentation is not the same as substance, and when we confuse the two, we start doubting our own judgment and reward appearances instead of true value.

We examine how “high standards” can trap us: rewriting, rehearsing, checking, and then doing the invisible second job of making everything appear effortless. This shifting goalpost keeps you in a constant state of work without allowing you to truly land or succeed.

I also delve into the fears underlying perfectionism—the belief that if you can achieve perfection, you can ensure your safety. The issue is that you can be fully prepared and still face criticism; not all criticism reflects your true worth.

Then, we move into practical territory with a simple framework that you can start using today: good, better, best. These are not measures of your self-worth but levels of investment based on time, energy, and the needs of the situation.

I share four questions to help you choose the right standard, along with the ABGW method: Awareness, Balance, Growth, and Wellbeing. This approach aims to alleviate the pressure of work feeling like a judgment of your value.

If this resonates with you, please subscribe, share it with a friend who might also be over-polishing their work, and leave a review. What’s one task you’re ready to finish at “good” today?

The contents of this podcast are for informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. If you have a specific health concern or condition, please consult a qualified Healthcare professional for more details. Check out herguru dot uk forward slash disclaimers

Transcript

A Comment About Not Being Polished

SPEAKER_00 0:21

This great story teaches us something about being human. I'm Cheryl Parris and this is Work Stress Anxiety. Together, let's borrow a little wisdom from a story to help us navigate a very modern world.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

So why is it that apparently, if a deep voiced man doesn't announce the name of your podcast over dramatic music, there is every possibility that nothing intelligent is about to happen. You know the sort of thing, you know, a swelling soundtrack and unnecessarily serious voice and enough production to make an ordinary conversation sound well boring. And I probably wouldn't have thought much about it if I hadn't nearly missed a comment on threads. That's right, someone left a comment suggesting that this podcast couldn't be any good because it wasn't polished enough. And I nearly didn't see it, but somehow that made it even more interesting. This tiny judgment was just sitting there quietly shining a light on a much bigger assumption. I thought, if something is genuinely good, surely it ought to look good as well. Now I could have become defensive about it, but unfortunately, they were right about one thing. That's right, work, stress, anxiety isn't particularly shiny. There's no expensive studio here that I'm sitting in, no elaborate soundscape, uh no production team buffing every syllable until it's gleaming. Most of the time, it's just me, a microphone, and something I believe might help you, occasionally accompanied by the distant possibility that I might have pressed the wrong button. I appreciate that. So, yes, the podcast, of course, could be more polished, but that leaves us with a much more interesting question. I think. Would more polish make the podcast more honest? Hell no. Would it automatically make it more useful? Um, probably not. Would it make it more human? Definitely not. It might make the packaging more impressive. I appreciate that. It might make the whole thing sound more expensive, but expensive sounding and valuable are not necessarily the same thing, and yet we sometimes make that mistake constantly, not just about this podcast and other podcasts, but with people. Perhaps you've noticed how quickly we trust the person with the smooth voice, the intimate presentation, or the professionally rehearsed answer. We assume polished means competent, confident means knowledge. A tidy appearance

When Presentation Becomes A Trap

SPEAKER_01 3:45

means someone has everything under control. And then sometimes, yes, they do. Sometimes they have simply become very good at wrapping the parcel because the wrapping tells us how something has been presented, it does not tell us what's actually inside. A polished presentation can still contain a terrible decision. A confident manager can still create an unsafe team, and a beautifully branded workplace well-being initiative can still sit rather proudly behind impossible workloads, poor communication, and a culture in which everyone feels safe enough to say that they're struggling not. But because it looks professional, we are encouraged often to answer our reaction before we question the thing that's being presented. You know, you may already know that peculiar feeling. Everything looks perfectly reasonable on paper, but somehow inside you keep, you know, tightening the policy, sounds supportive, the email contains all the approved, compassionate phrasing. Everyone else appears to be nodding, so you begin wondering whether you are just too sensitive or too demanding, or simply the only person who hasn't actually understood the presentation. And once you start doubting your own responses, then Polish can begin to feel less like uh well, a preference, but more like protection, maybe, or perfectionism. Oh isn't it always somebody admiring their own high standards? Someone is wearing that respectable outfit, and that can look extraordinarily competent from the outside whilst becoming exhausting to live inside. So you check the email again, you rewrite the opening sentence, you rehearse the meeting before it happens, and then you repeat it afterwards, you do the actual job, and then you perform a second invisible job, making sure no one can see how much effort the first one required. Because apparently, competence only counts when it looks effortless, and the better you become hiding the effort, the less likely anyone is to notice that that effort is costing you. You know, the strange thing is all that polishing rather produces the relief it promised. You finished the report, and now the wording couldn't be tighter. You completed the presentation, perhaps the slides could look better. You know, you did something well, but immediately notice how someone else has done it more impressively. The finish line, ha, it's disappeared. It's being quietly dragged away, which means perfection often offers us a rather seductive, slightly sinister arrangement. Perfection allows you to avoid failure indefinitely, providing you with all the willing to avoid completion. There is always one more adjustment available, one more piece of research, one more qualification

Perfectionism Moves The Finish Line

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before you feel entitled to speak. And because you are simply improving, you never have to discover what might happen if you allow the imperfect work that you've been doing to be seen. But perhaps the problem isn't that you haven't polished yourself enough. Perhaps we've been asking ourselves the wrong question. Instead of asking how do I make this look completely polished? Maybe the real question is what would make this genuinely useful, honest, and fit for purpose? Because if shiny is not proof of goodness, how do we know when something is good enough and when it genuinely needs to become better? The question kind of takes me away from the microphone and onto my allotment, which poor thing has been suffering with the hot weather we've had for the last what month or so in the UK. It kind of takes me to this guy called John Kohler who

Gardening Lessons On Learning

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taught me something rather important about good, better, and best. Now, for those who don't know, John Cola is a YouTube influencer extraordinaire, you know, and that question takes me, like I said, to John Cola. I've watched his growing, I think it's called Growing Your Greens videos for years. I have to give it to him. I a great deal of the credit that I have experienced from growing my own vegetables is down to John Cola. He showed me things to try, uh things to avoid, and most importantly, how to keep learning. And of course, not everything I've tried works. Some things have worked beautifully, some things have been come to absolute nothing, other things I grew so enthusiastically that I became to suspect that they were planning to overtake the allotment, and none of those things mean I failed as a person. They because they've given me so much information about the soil, the weather, the plants, and occasionally the creatures eating my plants. And for me, that's where the distinction matters because experiments and tests create very different emotional experiences. A test asks, Did you get it right? An experiment asks, What did you learn? One creates a verdict, the other creates information, and perhaps you have noticed how easy an ordinary piece of work can begin to feel like a test. Not simply because um it's just something you have to produce, but whether you it kind of proves whether you're intelligent, competent, or worthy of being taken serious seriously. You know, once the work becomes a verdict on you, polish begins to feel much more important because somewhere along the way, this piece of work needs improving, can become there is something wrong with me. The report isn't simply unfinished, you feel unfinished. The presentation doesn't really need refining, you feel exposed, and that email that just isn't being reviewed, it can feel as though you're being inspected all along. Logically, those are completely different things, but emotionally they can make us feel entangled with them. If mistakes have previously brought criticism or humiliation or unpredicted consequences, work stress, uh your body can begin preparing for that beginning. That your logical mind has checked what is has actually happened. You notice that your shoulders start tightening and your stomach, you feel that shift in it, your mind starts searching for everything that could go wrong. You know, am I being dramatic here? It is trying to prevent a familiar experience from happening again, and that scrutiny that's hard. But the thing is, you can develop a very simple plan to remove every possible flaw. That hidden belief often sounds something like this. If I can make everything perfect, I can make myself safe. If there are no mistakes, no one can criticize. If I anticipate every objection, no one can come and catch me unprepared. If I look completely polished, know nothing, no one will discover that I am an ordinary human being who cannot know everything. It is an understandable plan, but unfortunately, it has one fairly substantive design flaw. I think you can do excellent work and still be criticized, you can be prepared and carefully prepared and still be misunderstood. You can have you can behave professionally and still encounter someone who is determined to find fault. Not every criticism is evidence, not every confident opinion is correct, and not every person judging your work has earned the authority that your nervous system gives them. But when you have learned to measure safety through approval, as lots of us have done in the work environment, their reaction can still feel like the final result. You became prepared, dependable, and very good at spotting problems before anyone else noticed them. People praised the results, they may have even promoted you because of something like this. What they could not see was the amount of fear, checking and exhausting required to produce all of this. So naturally, you keep using the strategy even when it stopped being kind to you. One of the things I find fascinating is how a strategy can protect us in one environment and then imprison us in another. Perhaps being exceptionally careful once helped you avoid criticism. Perhaps anticipating what everyone needed kept the peace. But a response that once reduced danger can quietly become the pressure you now need to relieve yourself of. And this is why telling someone to just stop, I think is particularly unhelpful. Two people can receive the same information and experience it completely different. One barely notices it where the other one feels their entire body brace, and that's not because one person is stronger than another, you know, one's strong, the other's weak. They bring different histories to the situation, different responsibilities, different pressures, and the meaning also changes because human beings we're not standardized products, even though I'm sure some managers wish we were. And once we acknowledge that, that this one size does not fit all, we realise it does actually start looking a bit ridiculous. You know, nature doesn't seem particularly interested in producing one immaculate final version, it responds to conditions. Just you just need to look out the window and see the variations in how trees grow and adapt. And you know, a plant grows differently in different soil, it's not

Using Good Better Best At Work

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uh experiencing a crisis of confidence, it's just responding to the environment it's actually been given, not some imaginary conditions that are printed on the seed packet. And that kind of brings me back to something I learned from John Kohler good, better, best. The way I understand it, sometimes you can do something good with more knowledge, time, and capacity, you may be able to make it better, and occasionally the conditions allow you to offer your very best, but best may not be available today, and that doesn't make today's good worthless, no. So if perfection is not the standard and best is not always required, how do you decide what this particular moment actually needs? And I think that's where good better best becomes something you can use, not merely because it sounds good. Look, I am always interested in the practical, so good better best is not three different types or versions of you, they are three possible levels of investment. You are not a good person on Monday, a better person on Tuesday, and the final worthy version by Friday. No, these words describe what a task may need, but not what you are worth while completing them. So let's begin with goods because good has been treated rather unfairly, I think. For me, good does not mean careless or unsafe while you know everything else goes on around you. To me, good means responsible, it means useful, it means competent enough to do the job that needs to be done. A good email communicates the necessary information, it doesn't need to become, I don't know, the finalist in the book a prize. And once good exists, you have something real to assess everything against, and the imagined perfect version cannot teach you very much because it only exists inside your head where it has access to unlimited time, energy, and resources. That I appreciate that's very convenient, and the evidence may not show that one small improvement would genuinely help. Better, I think, asks what one change would make a significant meaningful change. Perhaps the email needs a clearer deadline. God, I hate emails that don't have a deadline in them, it drives me potty. Or perhaps the presentation needs one example. Better is not changing seven perfectly acceptable words because your anxiety has developed strong opinions, that distinction can save an astonishingly amount of time. And then we have best. Best may be beautiful, best may also be expensive, not financially, but with your time, concentration, and energy. And if producing your best version of a routine task leaves nothing available for your health, relationships, or genuinely important work, was best really the required standard? After good, better, best comes the question that matters most. Which version does this situation actually require? A safeguarding decision may deserve your very best attention. A routine update, I don't think it does. An important presentation may need refining. A message confirming Tuesday at two doesn't require your best work. You can begin making that decision with four very simple questions that you can ask yourself, which brings to mind one task that you might have been delaying doing, and just ask yourselves this question. What would make this responsible, useful and complete? That is good. What one change would meaningfully improve it? That is better. What would excellence look like if the resources, all the resources were genuinely available? That is best. And finally, which version does today actually require? You don't have to trust your answer immediately. You can treat all of this as an experiment. One experiment will not erase an old protective pattern, I admit. But it will be it will help you begin to create another possibility. You know, awareness is at the heart of the ABGW method because awareness notices the standard you are imposing. Balance considers your actual physical and mental capability, the capacity you have.

ABGW Method And Tiny Challenge

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Growth treats the task as an experiment rather than an examination, and well-being asks whether the outcome is sustainable, not simply whether it looks impressive from the outside. And little by little, the work that you do can stop feeling like evidence in a case against you. Yes, could this podcast be more polished? Absolutely, and I will continue my best to improve it when those improvements help you listen, understand, and use what I'm saying. But I'm gonna be honest with you, I will not pretend its value begins only when it becomes more shiny because I would rather offer something useful to you and usable than trying to perform perfectionism. And perhaps the same could be true of something you've been creating. So here's your tiny challenge for today if you're prepared to accept it. Choose one task and decide whether it needs to be good, better, or genuinely your best. Complete it at the standard the situation requires and then allow it to be finished. You do not need to become someone else before you your work can have value. Good is not failure, good is where better begins. Remember every step, good better, best is a step towards a brighter, more balanced future. Trust in your journey and remember progress is progress, no matter the pace. Yes. Could this episode have been better? Probably. But I wanted to get the message out. Bye for now.