The Perfectionism Cycle Killing Your Dog Training Business

I’ll be transparent: this post is a reaction. I saw something online that wound me up, and it reminded me of a pattern I see in almost every dog trainer who comes to me stuck. I call it the PDPM cycle. I nicked the idea from someone else, and if you read any philosophy you’ll know there’s no such thing as an original thought anyway.

Once you can see this cycle, you won’t be able to unsee it. And that’s the point.

P is for perfectionism

One of the catchphrases I repeat on my channel is that imperfect action beats perfectly prepared inaction. If you aim for perfection in anything, whether that’s a reel, an offer, a webinar, a sales page or a website, you will not get it done. Perfection doesn’t exist. Nothing you make will ever be perfect, so aiming for it sets you up to fail before you’ve started.

D is for doubt

When you inevitably fall short of perfect, you get filled with doubt. Human beings hate doubt. It’s one of those feelings we’ll do almost anything to escape. So you take your foot off the gas.

P is for procrastination

To get away from the doubt, you move sideways. You find other jobs to do so you feel productive. You start the Instagram reel, then the first YouTube video you promised yourself, then the email sequence, then the new website. Lots of task switching, lots of feeling busy. What you end up with is ten or fifteen half-completed jobs instead of the one or two important things you know you need to lock in and finish.

M is for motivation

Eventually you go looking for a jolt. You watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts, maybe sit through one of my webinars, hunting for the spark that gets you moving again. But hyper-consuming information gives you brain fog. A thousand conflicting ideas about how to build a sales page or shoot a piece of content just bury you deeper.

Then you get a surge of motivation, you go back to the task, and you carry all that overwhelm with you. You still believe it has to be perfect. The overwhelm feeds the doubt. And round the cycle you go, again and again, getting absolutely nothing done.

Why telling people your plans makes it worse

If you’re the sort of person with a head full of wonderful ideas who is always telling everyone what you’re going to do next, here’s the uncomfortable bit. You get as much dopamine from announcing the plan as you do from doing it. So once you’ve told people, your brain has already had its reward and you don’t need to do the thing any more.

When someone asks me what my big plan is, I keep it to myself. I’m not giving away the motivation I need to actually pursue it. Be a doer, not a sayer.

You have to be bad before you can be good

Nothing is perfect on the first iteration. Being genuinely good at something comes from repeated effort, feedback, and adjusting based on that feedback. Which means you have to be bad at something for a while if you ever want to be good at it.

I can now film a YouTube video off the cuff, run a three-hour webinar if it’s needed, and I recorded about 35 ads straight off my phone in a single day recently. At university I failed a whole year, an entire module, because I didn’t want to speak in front of six people. The difference isn’t talent. I got used to being bad at public speaking, bad at content, bad at reading a teleprompter and following a script, for a sustained period, until I wasn’t.

If you want that kind of accountability applied to your dog training business, it’s a big part of what we do in Vantage Pro Mentorship.

Key takeaways

• Perfectionism leads to doubt, doubt leads to procrastination, and consuming more content for motivation adds overwhelm that starts the cycle again.
• Imperfect action beats perfectly prepared inaction. Ship the first version.
• Stop announcing your plans. You get the dopamine hit without doing the work.
• Skill comes from iteration and feedback, so get the bad reps out of the way early.

If you’ve been circling the same projects for months and want a level of accountability you’ve probably never had as an adult, apply for a call and we’ll tell you honestly whether Vantage is the right move.