Speaker 1: When you focus on the work for the work's sake.
Speaker 1: When you make it about information not evaluation, mean you
Speaker 1: don't make it personal about you. Ironically, that's when the
Speaker 1: best work gets done.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 2: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 2: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 2: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 2: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 2: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking
Speaker 2: our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort
Speaker 2: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 2: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 2: how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3: Perfectionism isn't about being perfect, it's about never feeling good enough.
Speaker 3: And I think that's a really important distinction. And here's
Speaker 3: another tricky part. It often disguises itself as something positive,
Speaker 3: like being hard working, detail oriented, or driven. But when conscientiousness,
Speaker 3: which is a good quality that many of us have
Speaker 3: tips into self criticism. When our striving turns into self doubt,
Speaker 3: that's when it becomes a problem. And that's why I
Speaker 3: was excited to talk with Ellen Hendrickson, clinical psychologist and
Speaker 3: author of How to Be Enough. She unpacks the sneaky
Speaker 3: ways perfectionism shows up in our lives, whether it's turning
Speaker 3: fun into a chore, a classic of mine, over evaluating everything,
Speaker 3: or setting impossible standards. We also dive into how perfectionists
Speaker 3: handle mistakes. Some like mister Rogers, embrace them with grace,
Speaker 3: while others like Walt Disney, obsess over every tiny flaw.
Speaker 3: And we explore why procrastination is only about time management,
Speaker 3: it's also about emotion management. If you've ever felt like
Speaker 3: you're falling behind, not doing enough, or just not enough,
Speaker 3: stick around. This episode is for you. I'm Eric Zimmer,
Speaker 3: and it's time to feed our good wolves. Hi, Ellen,
Speaker 3: welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be back.
Speaker 3: It has been I don't know when we say, six
Speaker 3: or seven, a long time, but I remember your interview
Speaker 3: well and we've re released it in the interim because
Speaker 3: it was on a topic that a lot of people
Speaker 3: identify with which is social anxiety. And now you're back
Speaker 3: with a new book, which is another topic that I
Speaker 3: think a lot of people can identify with, which is perfectionism.
Speaker 3: The book is called How to Be Enough Self Acceptance
Speaker 3: for self critics and Perfectionists. And we'll talk about that
Speaker 3: in a second, but before we do, let's start, like
Speaker 3: we always do, with the parable. In the Parable, there's
Speaker 3: a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
Speaker 3: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 3: are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 3: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 3: other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and
Speaker 3: hatred and fear. And the grandshot stops. They think about
Speaker 3: it for a second. They look up at their grandparent
Speaker 3: and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says,
Speaker 3: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 3: by asking you what that parable means to you in
Speaker 3: your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, I was struck by the fact that in the parable,
Speaker 1: both of the wolves are wolves, that they look similar,
Speaker 1: but they're so fundamentally different. And something that I've learned
Speaker 1: through researching and writing this book is that perfectionism can
Speaker 1: be good but can very easily tip over into something
Speaker 1: really maladaptive and problematic. But it often looks the same
Speaker 1: on the surface, so helpful perfectionism at its heart a
Speaker 1: personality trait called conscientiousness, which is the tendency to do
Speaker 1: things well and thoroughly, to be responsible, to be dutiful,
Speaker 1: to care deeply. It's all these wonderful things. I call
Speaker 1: it the least sexy superpower. But you know, as far
Speaker 1: as as far as a personality trait like certainly the
Speaker 1: one to choose for both objective and subjective success in life,
Speaker 1: but it can very quickly tip over into maladaptive perfectionism.
Speaker 1: And there we end up with two pillars. One is
Speaker 1: self criticism and that I think needs no definition, but
Speaker 1: you know, in maladaptive perfectionism is particularly harsh and personalistic.
Speaker 1: And then the other pillar is something that you know,
Speaker 1: even as a clinical psychologist, it was a term that
Speaker 1: was new to me. And that's over evaluation. And we
Speaker 1: can talk more about that, but essentially that is when
Speaker 1: we start to conflate our worth with our performance when
Speaker 1: we are what we do, and so there, you know,
Speaker 1: forgive my grammar but it's when I did good equals
Speaker 1: I am good, or I did bad equals I am bad.
Speaker 1: You know, really similar fundamentals but really different outcomes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love a couple of things that you said there.
Speaker 3: The first is this idea that it looks similar but
Speaker 3: is actually different, And I think that's an important point.
Speaker 3: And conscientiousness is a great personality trait. It seems to
Speaker 3: be one that I am particularly high in, at least
Speaker 3: later in my life. And yet, as you say, it
Speaker 3: can go too far. And I think that's what's interesting
Speaker 3: about nearly any trait that we have, is there is
Speaker 3: a case where there's too little of it or there's
Speaker 3: too much of it, and those are problematic. Right, too
Speaker 3: little conscientiousness is no good, Right you don't care about
Speaker 3: what you're doing, you just aren't paying attention, or you
Speaker 3: just let everything go. Too much of it and it
Speaker 3: cripples you. And so what we're looking for is somewhere
Speaker 3: in between. And I think that's one of the things
Speaker 3: the book does a nice job of pointing out, is
Speaker 3: that these traits towards perfectionism aren't necessarily bad. It's that
Speaker 3: how we use them and what proportion we keep them
Speaker 3: in and I always think that's a helpful perspective to take,
Speaker 3: because when we think that there's something wrong with us,
Speaker 3: or the way we are is wrong, then that's a
Speaker 3: different message than the way we are is fine. We
Speaker 3: just might need to turn the knob down a couple
Speaker 3: of notches on it from time to time.
Speaker 1: I think you've hit on a really important point that, yes,
Speaker 1: on many of these things, we can change things. We
Speaker 1: can turn the knob down, or maybe on other things
Speaker 1: we might want to turn the knob another way or
Speaker 1: turn a different knob. But yes, there can be some change,
Speaker 1: and there can also be some acceptance where we just
Speaker 1: make room for the trait that we think is not
Speaker 1: helpful or problematic but in fact might be just something
Speaker 1: that almost everybody struggles with or something that is just
Speaker 1: how we're wired. So yes, absolutely we can change, and
Speaker 1: also we can accept, not like in a resigned way,
Speaker 1: but truly accept like, oh, this is just part of
Speaker 1: who I am, or I come by this honestly, you know.
Speaker 1: And we can certainly talk more about that, especially as
Speaker 1: applied to self criticism later.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The one other thing that you say early on
Speaker 3: is we're sort of trying to set up what perfectionism
Speaker 3: is You talked about this sort of hypercritical self relationship
Speaker 3: and this over identification with meeting standards. But you say
Speaker 3: perfectionism isn't about striving for perfection, but about never feeling
Speaker 3: good enough. Say a little bit more about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely so.
Speaker 1: I'm a clinical psychologist at a anxiety specialty center, and
Speaker 1: I would say the majority, almost the vast majority of
Speaker 1: clients who come in with you know, anxiety or depression
Speaker 1: have perfectionism at the heart of the overlapping center of
Speaker 1: the ven diagram of their challenges. But nobody says, hey, Ellen,
Speaker 1: I'm a perfectionist. I need help with perfectionism. Everybody comes
Speaker 1: in instead and says some variation on I'm not good enough.
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm falling behind. I should be farther
Speaker 1: ahead in life. At this point, I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: always failing. I have a million things on my plate
Speaker 1: and I'm not doing any of them well. So there's
Speaker 1: never a sense of striving for perfection. It's always a
Speaker 1: sense of not measuring up, of not being enough.
Speaker 3: Let's move on. You have a chapter that talks about
Speaker 3: the many salads of perfectionism. What do you mean there?
Speaker 4: Sure?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so like you said before, my last book was
Speaker 1: on social anxiety, and I think that book was easier
Speaker 1: is not the right word to use, but it was
Speaker 1: different to write because I think there are I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe like four or five different sort of phenotypes of
Speaker 1: social anxiety. And with perfectionism, though it's so heterogeneous that
Speaker 1: you can line up one hundred people with perfectionism and
Speaker 1: I will show you one hundred different ways of being perfectionistic,
Speaker 1: it really comes out in so many ways. Because getting
Speaker 1: back to that pillar of over evaluation, we can over
Speaker 1: evaluate anything like our performance could be like, for example,
Speaker 1: like the Striver's student who derives their value from their grades.
Speaker 4: It could be an employee who sees.
Speaker 1: Their quarterly evaluation like as a referendum not only on
Speaker 1: their work, but on their character. It could be the
Speaker 1: athlete who only feels as good as their last game,
Speaker 1: the musician who only feels as good as their last performance.
Speaker 1: We can overevaluate our social behavior, hence you know perfectionism
Speaker 1: being the heart of social anxiety, So we could over
Speaker 1: identify with did I say something.
Speaker 4: Weird at that party? Was I awkward?
Speaker 1: We can overevaluate our reflection in the mirror. The number
Speaker 1: on the scale anything. And so I think when I
Speaker 1: talk about the many salads of perfectionism, it gets to
Speaker 1: the heart of how whatever we again over evaluate and
Speaker 1: wherever we think, we have to perform as superbly as
Speaker 1: possible to be sufficient as a person.
Speaker 3: First thing is, I would not have identified myself as
Speaker 3: someone who is a perfectionist, and I don't know that
Speaker 3: I would after reading this book, but I saw a
Speaker 3: lot of myself in it in different places and in
Speaker 3: different ways. And I'd like to talk a little bit
Speaker 3: more about the domains of perfectionism. But let's stay with
Speaker 3: this term over evaluation for a second. It's a great term.
Speaker 3: It also implies that there's a point where evaluation is good,
Speaker 3: and then there's a point where evaluation becomes over evaluation,
Speaker 3: which seems like it might be a difficult thing to discern.
Speaker 3: So how do we go about telling when evaluation is positive? So,
Speaker 3: for example, if you and I got off this call
Speaker 3: and I went back and I looked at it, and
Speaker 3: I thought, well, I could have said this there, and
Speaker 3: maybe I could have done that, and boy, the lighting,
Speaker 3: we could have changed the lighting a little bit. It
Speaker 3: might have looked a little bit better, right, useful but
Speaker 3: there's a point where that would become unuseful. And maybe
Speaker 3: as a way of talking about over evaluation, you can
Speaker 3: take us back to the analogy used to open the
Speaker 3: book between two famous entertainment people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Of course there's going to
Speaker 1: be some overlap. I talk a lot in ven diagrams,
Speaker 1: don't I sell some overlap in that ven diagram of
Speaker 1: you know, ourselves and our performance. Of course, we're going
Speaker 1: to be proud of, you know, our accomplishments. Of course
Speaker 1: we're going to be bummed if something we did didn't
Speaker 1: work out.
Speaker 4: That makes sense.
Speaker 1: We're not going to completely separate those two circles. But
Speaker 1: I think when they're almost completely congruent, like whether almost
Speaker 1: completely overlapping, and yeah, that absolutely gets us into trouble
Speaker 1: because then there is no room for mistakes, there's no
Speaker 1: room for We can talk about this too, the typical
Speaker 1: advice around perfectionism, which is, you know, you can to
Speaker 1: stop when things are good enough. If we feel like
Speaker 1: we are our work, we're not going to settle for
Speaker 1: subpar or mediocre outcomes, because then we're subpar or mediocre.
Speaker 1: So what we can do to try to separate that
Speaker 1: is to try to focus on the work for the
Speaker 1: work's sake. And Okay, I'm gonna give you a very
Speaker 1: long answer because I'll tell you a story and then
Speaker 1: i'll get into your question about Okay, well Disney, mister Rogers, Okay,
Speaker 1: but first let's talk about Kareem abdul Jabbar and John Wooden.
Speaker 1: So there, John Wooden was the legendary coach of UCLA
Speaker 1: basketball for many, many years, and when Kareem of doul
Speaker 1: Jabbar was there, the team just had the spectacular record
Speaker 1: and to the point where two researchers, doctors rolland Tharpe
Speaker 1: and Ronald Gallimore, decided to sit in the stands for
Speaker 1: every practice of the season to find out like what
Speaker 1: is the secret sauce, like how does coach wouldn't do this?
Speaker 1: And what they found is that he very seldom praised
Speaker 1: or rebuked his players. Instead, he would basically tell them
Speaker 1: what to do. As a former high school teacher, he
Speaker 1: would do that he would teach, and so he would
Speaker 1: say things like pass from the chest, or take lots
Speaker 1: of shots where you might get them in games, run,
Speaker 1: don't walk, pass the ball to someone short. And it
Speaker 1: was all about the information as opposed to the evaluation
Speaker 1: that it was about the task, not the player. And
Speaker 1: so what Coach Woulden had I think stumbled upon was
Speaker 1: that when you focus on the work for the work's sake,
Speaker 1: when you make it about information not evaluation, when you
Speaker 1: don't make it personal about you, ironically, that's when the
Speaker 1: best work gets done. So there, I think that's one
Speaker 1: way to kind of separ out that over evaluation and
Speaker 1: simply get back to evaluation.
Speaker 4: Let's look at this work, see what is good for
Speaker 4: the work.
Speaker 1: Okay, then I will get into Walt Disney and mister Rogers.
Speaker 1: So there, this is a nice parallel to the opening
Speaker 1: parable with the two wolves because they look the same
Speaker 1: on the surface. So both Walt Disney and mister Rogers
Speaker 1: creations are beloved, immortal, and they had really similar personalities. Actually,
Speaker 1: they both had really high standards, were pretty intense guys,
Speaker 1: had really driving work ethics, focused on the details. But
Speaker 1: they really lived those traits and values really differently. And
Speaker 1: so for example, let's take how they focused on mistakes,
Speaker 1: because I think that gets into the over evaluation. If
Speaker 1: you are your work, there's no room for mistakes, right.
Speaker 1: So in the book, I tell the story of mister Rogers.
Speaker 1: You know, at the beginning of his show, he does
Speaker 1: his signature of changing out of his blazer and his
Speaker 1: dress shoes to a cardigan and sneakers, and as he's
Speaker 1: buttoning up the cardigan, he realizes that the buttons are
Speaker 1: one hole off, and the crew, knowing his standards, totally
Speaker 1: expected him to call cut and to refilm. But instead,
Speaker 1: on camera he just ad lib re buttoned the sweater
Speaker 1: and made a remark about how mistakes happen and moreover
Speaker 1: it they can be corrected. So he folded mistakes into
Speaker 1: his high standards, and so by contrast, I also tell
Speaker 1: the story of Walt Disney's micromanagement of the making of
Speaker 1: Snow White. So there, he just can't bring himself to
Speaker 1: trust this world class team of animators that he had
Speaker 1: so carefully hired, and he makes them redo just tiny
Speaker 1: details like the Queen's eyebrows are too extreme, Grumpy's finger
Speaker 1: is too big, have the hummingbird make four pickups instead
Speaker 1: of six. And at the premiere he tells a reporter,
Speaker 1: you know, all I can see is the flaws. I
Speaker 1: wish we could just yank it back and do this
Speaker 1: all over again. So instead of its kind of flexibly
Speaker 1: folding mistakes into the process. Walt Disney just rigidly tried
Speaker 1: to avoid mistakes. So because again, if you are your work,
Speaker 1: of course you're not going to make any room for
Speaker 1: error or believe that they can be corrected.
Speaker 3: And you talk about in mister Rogers's case, he uses
Speaker 3: something called guided drift. Say a little bit more about
Speaker 3: what that is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I love that concept.
Speaker 1: So Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and he
Speaker 1: studied at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and his mentor there,
Speaker 1: William Orr, instilled in him this principle, so guided drift.
Speaker 1: So if you can imagine sort of like logs floating.
Speaker 4: Down a river.
Speaker 1: The logs can go wherever the current takes them, but
Speaker 1: they are bound by the banks of the river. And
Speaker 1: so the analogy or the metaphor is that, you know,
Speaker 1: stay true to your principles, you know, stay true to
Speaker 1: your integrity, but be flexible within that, be open to
Speaker 1: the serendipity of life, be open to where the current
Speaker 1: you know, takes you within the confines of your own values.
Speaker 3: I love that idea, and I'm going to apply it
Speaker 3: in a very different way for a second, but I
Speaker 3: talk about this with coaching clients and people I'm trying
Speaker 3: to teach to make change in their life, is that
Speaker 3: you have to do two things sort of simultaneously. One
Speaker 3: is you have to be sort of rigid about the fact,
Speaker 3: like I'm committed to this, I'm going to find a
Speaker 3: way to do it. But then you have to be
Speaker 3: extraordinarily flexible in how you do it. And I love
Speaker 3: that idea of guided drift because in this case, the
Speaker 3: river banks are moving my body on a regular basis
Speaker 3: as important to my mental and emotional health. That's the bank.
Speaker 3: But how I might move my body how much each day,
Speaker 3: how I might need to be flexible, that's the drift
Speaker 3: within that river. And when you try and make it
Speaker 3: only one way, the logs can get stopped and get blocked.
Speaker 3: They need to be able to go around obstacles.
Speaker 4: Absolutely. We can think about that in so many ways.
Speaker 4: Like we can think about I don't know, like a.
Speaker 1: Social engagement, So like is the point to sort of
Speaker 1: rigidly perform, you know, telling funny stories for our friends
Speaker 1: and to get approval, or is the point to connect?
Speaker 1: And like, there's so many different ways we can connect.
Speaker 1: We don't have to, you know, just tell the same
Speaker 1: funny stories, or to perform in a certain way. So yeah,
Speaker 1: you can apply this to almost any domain of life,
Speaker 1: which you know, as we're talking about flexibility, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of an appropriate example.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about the seven domains of perfectionism for a second,
Speaker 3: because I think this is useful for us to get
Speaker 3: a sense of the different places and ways this can
Speaker 3: show up for us. So we talked about one of them,
Speaker 3: the hypercritical self relationship, We talked about the over evaluation.
Speaker 3: Tell me about the next one that's on this list,
Speaker 3: which is orientation.
Speaker 4: To rules for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so those of us with perfectionism orient to rules.
Speaker 1: We want to know the rules so we can follow them.
Speaker 1: And ironically, if they're no rule, we will often set
Speaker 1: up personally demanding rules. We'll make them up and then
Speaker 1: we'll follow those. So think about, you know, making up
Speaker 1: rules for healthy eating, or making up rules like we
Speaker 1: were just talking about exercise, making up rules for how
Speaker 1: we're going to move our body. So rules are not
Speaker 1: necessarily bad, you know, we should pay our taxes, you know.
Speaker 4: Et cetera.
Speaker 1: But it's when the rules become rigid, so we apply
Speaker 1: them no matter the situation, like we try to follow
Speaker 1: our healthy eating rules even on Halloween or two they're
Speaker 1: all are nothing. So with that over evaluation, if we
Speaker 1: follow the rules acceptably, we are acceptable. But if we
Speaker 1: mess up, if we slip up, we break the rule
Speaker 1: or bend the rule, and even the slightest way, it
Speaker 1: renders us on acceptable. So in our healthy eating example,
Speaker 1: I ate a cookie, so I'm bad. I was bad today.
Speaker 1: And then the third way rules can get in our
Speaker 1: way in perfection is when we impose our rules on
Speaker 1: their people, and that can get in the way of
Speaker 1: our relationships. So the classic example I hear from you know, couples,
Speaker 1: both in the office and just in my life and
Speaker 1: honestly in my own house is how to load the
Speaker 1: dishwasher correctly? Like, what is the right way to load
Speaker 1: that dishwasher?
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is amazing that this is such a thing.
Speaker 3: I mean, my partner and I have it now. We
Speaker 3: have decided that it is utterly irrelevant and so there's
Speaker 3: no point in caring. But yet, I mean I opened
Speaker 3: the dishwasher and I think, why did she load it
Speaker 3: that way? For sure? For sure?
Speaker 1: No, Yeah, and like my partner and I have figured
Speaker 1: out if Okay, if you're loading the dishwasher, then you
Speaker 1: do it your way like this, it's your task, you
Speaker 1: do it however you want. But you know, there are
Speaker 1: many households where that isn't the case. I had a
Speaker 1: client who was trusting enough to admit that she was
Speaker 1: controlling how her husband made mac and cheese for their kids.
Speaker 1: She's like, you can't just dump the pasta back in
Speaker 1: after you drain it and then.
Speaker 4: Put in the cheese and the butter.
Speaker 1: You gotta keep the pasta in the calendar and then
Speaker 1: you know, put in the butter and the cheese and
Speaker 1: make that the sauce and then put in the pasta.
Speaker 1: And so I'm not saying this to throw harder the bus.
Speaker 1: I'm saying this to be validating that this is what
Speaker 1: happens in households, you know, across America, and that it's
Speaker 1: sort of the classic you know, would we rather be
Speaker 1: right or would we rather get along? And you know,
Speaker 1: there's not a perfect answer. Sometimes it is better to
Speaker 1: be right, sometimes it is better to get along. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I'm saying this to be relatable and validating that rules
Speaker 1: loom large in the minds of people with perfectionism.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The problem with the dishwasher thing, like letting you
Speaker 3: do your thing, is that I'm going to come in
Speaker 3: after you and need to put dishes in during the
Speaker 3: day and it's going to be all jacked up at
Speaker 3: that point, and you know what kind of moron loads No,
Speaker 3: I'm just kidding.
Speaker 4: Do you have a camera in my house? Just sounds familiar. Yeah, right.
Speaker 3: It just cracks me up that like this is such
Speaker 3: a common thing and that we actually care when you
Speaker 3: look at it from that perspective. How trivial a matter?
Speaker 3: You know what could be a more trivial matter than that, really,
Speaker 3: and yet we're going to cause tension and discomfort and
Speaker 3: problems in our most important relationship. It's just like you,
Speaker 3: I'm not singling people out. I'm just saying, looking at
Speaker 3: it from a certain angle, you're like, this is insane.
Speaker 3: This also brings up a point that I think is
Speaker 3: important about perfectionism, which is that we apply it to
Speaker 3: ourselves for sure, but we also apply it to other people.
Speaker 3: And you're sort of talking about that. So maybe we
Speaker 3: can put a pin in that and we'll come back
Speaker 3: around to it. Because I want to stay within the
Speaker 3: domains here. The next domain is focusing on mistakes. Let's
Speaker 3: talk about that.
Speaker 1: Sure, Yeah, So, as we alluded to a little bit before,
Speaker 1: let's tie it together with the over evaluation. If we
Speaker 1: think we're not doing something correctly, then that renders us incorrect. However,
Speaker 1: so I think I make a distinction with over evaluation
Speaker 1: between lowering your standards or stopping when things are good enough.
Speaker 1: I don't think we have to do that actually, Plus
Speaker 1: that doesn't go over well, and making room for mistakes.
Speaker 1: Those might sound like the same thing, but I think
Speaker 1: they're really different. For example, okay, I'll tell you a story.
Speaker 1: So I had a client who's a pediatrician, and she
Speaker 1: had been a pediatrician for twenty five years. Was by
Speaker 1: her report, as far as I could tell, very good
Speaker 1: at it, had risen in the ranks in her clinic.
Speaker 1: But she came in and in the last week had
Speaker 1: made a mistake that she had misdiagnosed a little girl
Speaker 1: who came in with what turned out to be appendicitis.
Speaker 1: She was okay, ended up having to go to the
Speaker 1: emergency room, but was okay. She misdiagnosed that as constipation
Speaker 1: and had sent the family home and just came into
Speaker 1: session just lamb basing herself saying, Oh, I'm a terrible doctor.
Speaker 1: I should retire early. Maybe I should get my brain examined.
Speaker 1: Something's wrong with me. And I think it would be
Speaker 1: inappropriate to tell her to lower her standards, like, of
Speaker 1: course you're not going to say, ah, I did well
Speaker 1: enough today taking care of people's lives whatever.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: No, we're not going to do that.
Speaker 1: But mistakes are inevitable, especially over twenty five years of practice.
Speaker 1: And so I asked her, Okay, if you had a
Speaker 1: colleague who had been in practice for twenty five years,
Speaker 1: what percentage of diagnoses would you expect to be like
Speaker 1: a reasonable number of misdiagnoses. The answer can't be zero,
Speaker 1: but even one percent gives you way more wiggle room
Speaker 1: than zero percent. And so making room for the inevitable
Speaker 1: mistakes because we're human and that's sort of the package
Speaker 1: deal of being alive and doing any kind of work
Speaker 1: is really different than lowering your standards.
Speaker 3: I think that's really good distinction. It takes me back
Speaker 3: to rules for a second, because I do find at
Speaker 3: times that making rules for myself is really helpful. It
Speaker 3: guides me. One of my goals is to move my
Speaker 3: body for thirty minutes every day. It doesn't matter how
Speaker 3: but just somehow that's my standard. That's my rule. However,
Speaker 3: my belief is that eighty to ninety percent success at
Speaker 3: that is good enough, because what that means is, you know,
Speaker 3: if I move my body in that way ninety percent
Speaker 3: of the days, but I'm able to do that week
Speaker 3: after week, month after month, year after year, that little
Speaker 3: bit that I'm not doing comes out in the wash.
Speaker 3: It just doesn't matter. However, if I expect that I
Speaker 3: have to do one hundred percent, when I don't, I
Speaker 3: get discouraged. And one of the things we do know
Speaker 3: about motivation is it tends to go up when we
Speaker 3: feel good about ourselves and when we feel like we're capable,
Speaker 3: and it tends to go down when we feel like
Speaker 3: we're not good or we're not capable of doing it.
Speaker 3: So this idea of like rules can be useful, but
Speaker 3: they've got to have some degree of flexibility and adaptability
Speaker 3: to the I love the word you just use the
Speaker 3: inevitable things that are going to come up, Right, It's
Speaker 3: inevitable a doctor practicing long enough is going to misdiagnose someone.
Speaker 3: It's inevitable if you're trying to eat, right that there
Speaker 3: are going to be times that you don't. It's inevitable.
Speaker 3: If you're trying to exercise really regularly, they're going to
Speaker 3: be days or even periods where you don't. Those things
Speaker 3: are inevitable, and the question becomes, how do I respond
Speaker 3: wisely when the inevitable happens? And this is where I
Speaker 3: see so many people get lost on their attempts to
Speaker 3: make change in their life. And it's a perfectionist thing.
Speaker 3: It's like either I'm doing it all or I'm doing
Speaker 3: it none. And what you're arguing for is this place
Speaker 3: in between there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, so I think you're tapping into some self compassion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when we inevitably make mistakes screw up, you know, like
Speaker 1: if we don't exercise even though that's really important to
Speaker 1: us because we're exhausted or injured, or just don't have
Speaker 1: time that day, or it's six degrees outside, Yeah, then
Speaker 1: I think, okay, here, let me back up, all right.
Speaker 1: Self compassion, according to the researcher doctor Kristin Neff, consists
Speaker 1: of three things. So there's self kindness, non judgmental mindfulness,
Speaker 1: and connection to the larger human experience. But the perfectionistic
Speaker 1: brain does none of those things. So we're wired to
Speaker 1: be self critical instead of kind to ourselves.
Speaker 4: We're wired to be a little bit judgmental.
Speaker 1: We zero in on flaws and details instead of being
Speaker 1: non judgmentally mindful, and instead of like our inevitable shortcomings
Speaker 1: connecting us to the larger human experience, we see you know,
Speaker 1: our struggles or our mistakes, or that we focus on
Speaker 1: that missed ten percent as a shortcoming that sets us
Speaker 1: apart as inadequate, rather than a common experience that connects
Speaker 1: us to everybody else in the same vein as doctor Neff.
Speaker 1: So when I was learning to be a therapist, I
Speaker 1: was taught that self compassion was talking to yourself like
Speaker 1: a good friend.
Speaker 4: But my perfectionist to.
Speaker 1: Brain thought that that meant that I needed to generate
Speaker 1: this like steady stream of articulate and effective self compassionate hype,
Speaker 1: and that was just way too high a bar. So
Speaker 1: over the years I have learned that self compassion, you know,
Speaker 1: absolutely can be words, but it can be one word.
Speaker 1: It can be like easy or a couple words you're okay.
Speaker 1: But even more than that, self compassion can be actions,
Speaker 1: So it could be in our exercise example, going to
Speaker 1: the gym because we know from experience that that's going
Speaker 1: to make us feel better. But it could also be
Speaker 1: allowing ourselves to skip the gym, allowing ourselves a day
Speaker 1: off from exercise because what we really need is an
Speaker 1: extra hour of sleep, or because it's six degrees outside right,
Speaker 1: And so self compassion is turning towards our pain and
Speaker 1: suffering and asking what do I need? With Karen understanding,
Speaker 1: and that can be not doing all that we expect
Speaker 1: of ourselves. So kind of the old version of my
Speaker 1: perfectionistic brain would have seen ninety percent as like, come on,
Speaker 1: where is that extra ten percent? I did that before?
Speaker 1: Why can't I do this again? Whereas I'd say, now again,
Speaker 1: I wrote this book for me. I'll see it as
Speaker 1: of course, this is ninety percent, like everybody does ninety percent.
Speaker 1: This is how it works. That there are going to
Speaker 1: be exceptions and days where I don't hit it out
Speaker 1: of the park, but that doesn't mean that I have
Speaker 1: struck out right.
Speaker 3: And that section in the book has one of the
Speaker 3: funniest lines in the book. One of things Kristin Neff
Speaker 3: suggests is laying a hand kindly upon your heart telling
Speaker 3: yourself this is hard, you know, and you're like, I'm
Speaker 3: right there with you. I may lay a hand kindly
Speaker 3: upon my heart and tell myself this is hard, but
Speaker 3: self criticism will ride up behind me in a hockey
Speaker 3: mask and yell in my ear, no, it's fucking not.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is a documentary. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I love that idea, though, because I do think
Speaker 3: that we often set the bar for self compassion too high.
Speaker 3: And I like what you said there, because it can
Speaker 3: just be a word or two, but it often is
Speaker 3: in what we don't say to ourselves, right. Self compassion
Speaker 3: often manifests in I don't have to say lovely things
Speaker 3: to myself, but can I not say the shitty things
Speaker 3: to myself?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 3: That is self compassion sometimes, And I often talk about
Speaker 3: how when I'm in a negative mood space, I can't
Speaker 3: often get to positive. Can I aim for neutral?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Right? Can I aim for just not so negative?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 3: Because I just think that's a much easier bar. And
Speaker 3: I also think that with all of this stuff, however
Speaker 3: we talk to ourselves at our head, we have to
Speaker 3: believe it to some degree. So saying oh I'm amazing,
Speaker 3: I'm wonderful, when we don't feel that often just backfires.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because there's part of all of us inside this
Speaker 1: that's a lie. What Yeah, now, what are you talking about? Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure, exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The other thing back to the rules for a second,
Speaker 3: in self compassion. But I think there's another thing here
Speaker 3: that we've sort of gone around a little bit, and
Speaker 3: you sort of alluded to with this ninety percent or
Speaker 3: eighty percent success rate. Part of that is self compassion,
Speaker 3: but part of that is also just an understanding of reality.
Speaker 3: And I think that's important when it comes to perfectionism,
Speaker 3: is understanding reality. Mistakes are inevitable, all these things, and
Speaker 3: so if we can have a more realistic expectation to
Speaker 3: start with, we need self compassion even less, right, because
Speaker 3: we won't see the day that we didn't move our
Speaker 3: body for whatever reason. We won't see it as a
Speaker 3: mistake that we then have to say, oh, I'm going
Speaker 3: to extend self compassion to myself because I made it's
Speaker 3: just simply like, well, of course that happened. Of course
Speaker 3: it was going to happen sooner or later, So today
Speaker 3: happened to be the day.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, I mean, mistakes are only a problem if
Speaker 1: we think they shouldn't be happening, right, like, okay, So
Speaker 1: here I'll tell you a personal story. This happened just
Speaker 1: last week actually, so for the first time in twelve years,
Speaker 1: I double booked a patient and then just like did
Speaker 1: my other meeting and left her hanging on zoom like
Speaker 1: I completely missed this visit, and again, it hadn't happened
Speaker 1: in twelve years.
Speaker 4: I felt horrible when I.
Speaker 1: Realized it happened, and I, you know, immediately apologized and
Speaker 1: did what I could to make it right. She was understanding,
Speaker 1: and she's like, oh, I thought you had an emergency,
Speaker 1: like I just kind of rolled with it. So thank
Speaker 1: god she was understanding about it. But I, again, I
Speaker 1: felt terrible that I had left this person who's mental
Speaker 1: health care I am in charge of hanging. It was terrible,
Speaker 1: and I tried to make room for it and thought like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, over twenty years of clinical practice, if this
Speaker 1: happens once a decade, that's about right, you know, like
Speaker 1: that's kind of how it works. So this is my quota,
Speaker 1: and this is how it goes. And I don't say
Speaker 1: that too excuse it or to say it's okay, but
Speaker 1: I do say that to make room for like, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course this is gonna happen. And you were talking
Speaker 1: about self criticism and trying to you know, not say that,
Speaker 1: you know, the really horrible shitty things to ourselves, and
Speaker 1: I agree with you that, yes, that's.
Speaker 4: The change lever we can pull.
Speaker 1: We can try to be kinder to ourselves, to be
Speaker 1: if not like validating or understanding, then you know, at
Speaker 1: least neutral, And we can also pull that acceptance lever
Speaker 1: of maybe my brain just says shitty things to me, yes,
Speaker 1: but I don't have to listen to it and like
Speaker 1: that for me, you know, I have just come from
Speaker 1: a long line of perfectionists, and I am just wired
Speaker 1: to be a little more self critical than the average bear.
Speaker 1: And so through experience, I have learned that whenever I
Speaker 1: do anything involving in a microphone, that when I log off,
Speaker 1: my brain's just going to start going and be like,
Speaker 1: why did you say it that way, like or oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, you said way too much any personal things,
Speaker 1: or you know, no one's gonna resonate, just my brain's
Speaker 1: just got to start going. And I've found that it's
Speaker 1: just part of the script that, like when you go
Speaker 1: to a restaurant, there's a script like you sit down,
Speaker 1: you look at the menu, you order, your food comes,
Speaker 1: you eat, you pay, you leave. In my self critical world,
Speaker 1: you know, I send something out into the world and
Speaker 1: my brain criticizes it and myself and then we move
Speaker 1: on and either it's fine or I learned from it.
Speaker 1: If for whatever reason I didn't fulfill my intention or whatnot.
Speaker 4: You know, that's okay.
Speaker 1: So I've learned to sort of take this dance towards
Speaker 1: my own self critical brain. Like I listen to the
Speaker 1: music at a coffee shop, like it's there, you know,
Speaker 1: I can hear it, but I don't have to get
Speaker 1: yanked around by it. I don't like stand on the
Speaker 1: table and you know, dance to the beat.
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah, I wanted to pause for a quick
Speaker 3: good Wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and
Speaker 3: a mistake I see people making. And that's really that
Speaker 3: we don't think about these new habits that we want
Speaker 3: add in the context of our entire life.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit
Speaker 3: in the life that we have. So when we just
Speaker 3: keep adding I should do this, I should do that,
Speaker 3: I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't
Speaker 3: really thought about what we're not going to do in
Speaker 3: order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for
Speaker 3: you to think about where is this going to fit
Speaker 3: and what in my life might I need to remove.
Speaker 3: If you want to step by step guide for how
Speaker 3: you can easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf,
Speaker 3: go to good Wolf dot me, slash change and join
Speaker 3: the free masterclass. When I think about it, it's amazing
Speaker 3: to me the sorts of things that will pop into
Speaker 3: my head that I recognize as like dominant parts of
Speaker 3: my thinking thirty years ago, but they're not gone. They
Speaker 3: will show up, and I laugh at them, largely because
Speaker 3: I now can see just how wildly over dramatic they are,
Speaker 3: Like just how completely I mean, I don't know. A
Speaker 3: small mistake gets made, my brain starts saying I wish
Speaker 3: I was dead, and I'm like, well, okay, settled down,
Speaker 3: Like that's ridiculous. So I can kind of laugh at
Speaker 3: it now because I recognize it's just some sort of
Speaker 3: like you said, some sort of script popping up in
Speaker 3: response to a particular stimulus that I don't have to
Speaker 3: give a lot of importance to I don't need to
Speaker 3: be like, oh my god, am I Am I suicidal?
Speaker 3: Because no, of course I'm not right. It's just a
Speaker 3: voice that says something and learning to just accept it.
Speaker 3: And for me, like I said, laughter is really helpful
Speaker 3: because I'm like, it's so disproportionate to what's actually happening.
Speaker 3: It's what tells me that it's like my eight year
Speaker 3: old self talking.
Speaker 4: Right for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, I think those of us with some perfectionism, like
Speaker 1: we talked about before, are conscientious and that means we
Speaker 1: take things seriously, but that means we take our own
Speaker 1: thoughts and feelings seriously as well. And so you know,
Speaker 1: part of my job in the clinic is to help
Speaker 1: people with perfectionism take their own thoughts and feelings a
Speaker 1: little bit less literally that you know, just because we
Speaker 1: think like oh I wish I were dead, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean we're suicidal. That it could just be a
Speaker 1: thought that we can like let pass by us, like
Speaker 1: sushi it or revolving restaurant, you know, or like yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe that is something that we thought a lot when
Speaker 1: we were twenty five, but you know it's just yeah,
Speaker 1: so absolutely, like just because we think it or feel
Speaker 1: it like, just because we feel incompetent doesn't mean we
Speaker 1: are like that we can't do this thing that we
Speaker 1: want to do. Or just because we feel dissatisfied with
Speaker 1: our lives doesn't mean that we're actually falling behind. So
Speaker 1: a mentor helped me by saying, like, yeah, take your
Speaker 1: problems seriously, but don't take them too serious. Like hold
Speaker 1: your problems as if you're holding a small animal, like
Speaker 1: a hamster or like a little bird, and so you
Speaker 1: have to hold them, you know, firmly, like you have
Speaker 1: to take it seriously so that they don't run away,
Speaker 1: you know, but if you hold them too tightly, you're
Speaker 1: going to make a big mess. So that holder problems
Speaker 1: lightly has been very helpful to me, and I try
Speaker 1: to pass that on to clients as well.
Speaker 3: So I have a question for you that I think
Speaker 3: about a lot. And this is a slight deviation, but
Speaker 3: I'm curious how you think about this, because with thoughts
Speaker 3: and emotions, there seem to be two sort of approaches
Speaker 3: in psychology that I have seen. I'm overgeneralizing here, but
Speaker 3: one approach is the little bit more acceptance and commitment
Speaker 3: therapy type thing, a little bit more Buddhist type thing,
Speaker 3: which is, your thoughts and feelings are just things that arise,
Speaker 3: you know, that come out of causes and conditions. Don't
Speaker 3: let them run your life, don't pay a ton of attention.
Speaker 3: The other seems to be sort of the psychoanalytic approach
Speaker 3: or the depth psychology approach, which says, everything that you
Speaker 3: feel is a message, right, and you've got to pay
Speaker 3: attention to what these things are telling you. And I
Speaker 3: find that I end up needing to use both those approaches,
Speaker 3: but I often don't know when to do which that's.
Speaker 4: A great question.
Speaker 1: So maybe I'm coming down on one side of your
Speaker 1: question by invoking acceptance signifented therapy, where the gurus there,
Speaker 1: you know, say, essentially, do what works for the context.
Speaker 4: Okay, and context can.
Speaker 1: Be what we kind of literally think of as context,
Speaker 1: like the situation at hand, but context can also be
Speaker 1: like our genetics, our history, like everything that's brought us
Speaker 1: to the present moment, and like, let's do what works,
Speaker 1: let's do what's functional for the situation the context at hand. So, weirdly,
Speaker 1: even though that's an act concept there, maybe what works
Speaker 1: is some depth psychology. Maybe what works is yeah, some
Speaker 1: analytic stuff. So You're right, it is hard to know
Speaker 1: what's correct per se. But I think that brings us
Speaker 1: back to our conversation about flexibility, and we'll try something.
Speaker 1: If we find that that's not what we needed, we
Speaker 1: can do something else that's okay, it's not you know,
Speaker 1: a one and done exam for like, Okay, decide right now,
Speaker 1: what's going to work?
Speaker 2: Go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that leads us into another domain that you talk
Speaker 3: about of perfectionism I think is worth talking about, which
Speaker 3: is emotional perfectionism. And this is an idea that only
Speaker 3: kind of came across my radar semi recently. Tell me
Speaker 3: what emotional perfectionism is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's being appropriate in one's felt or demonstrated emotions.
Speaker 1: So it's essentially when we've learned that emotion is a
Speaker 1: response to a particular situation as opposed to how we
Speaker 1: actually feel inside.
Speaker 4: So an example might be.
Speaker 1: That I say that customer service is entirely predicated on
Speaker 1: sort of this performative emotional perfectionism, like service with a smile,
Speaker 1: Like the salesperson is acting how they should or how
Speaker 1: is appropriate as opposed to how they might really feel
Speaker 1: about the situation. So sometimes that's appropriate, right, Like in
Speaker 1: a job interview, of course we're going to act excited
Speaker 1: about the prospect of working there. At a funeral, of
Speaker 1: course we're going to act, you know, sad or concerned
Speaker 1: or whatnot. But if that becomes our go to, If
Speaker 1: how we feel both inside and what we show on
Speaker 1: our face is determined by the situation as opposed to
Speaker 1: how we feel, then it can come off as feeling
Speaker 1: to us like empty or fake or phony. And then that,
Speaker 1: you know, over months and years and decades, can leave
Speaker 1: us sort of emotionally bereft.
Speaker 3: I think about emotional perfectionism also in the sense of like,
Speaker 3: I shouldn't feel X right, And I think this gets
Speaker 3: us into a lot of trouble. And I think everybody
Speaker 3: has their own variation on it, right. Mine tends to
Speaker 3: be these days something like you've been talking to people
Speaker 3: about these ideas for a decade, you've done eight hundred interviews,
Speaker 3: you've been in recovery for thirty years, Like why do
Speaker 3: you feel that way? Like you know better, you can
Speaker 3: do better, and that is just a really unhelpful way
Speaker 3: of thinking. But I think everybody has their own variation
Speaker 3: of that. You know, of I should be better than
Speaker 3: this by now, or I shouldn't respond this way, or
Speaker 3: I shouldn't respond that way. And I think when we
Speaker 3: look at behavior, it's really helpful to say like, Okay,
Speaker 3: I probably shouldn't act that way. You talked about mister Rogers.
Speaker 3: He has some line. I won't get it right, But
Speaker 3: basically everybody has all kinds of feelings and that's fine, right.
Speaker 3: What matters is what we end up doing with them.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, you're getting into the difference between feelings and behavior. So,
Speaker 1: for example, so I had a client who came in
Speaker 1: for fear of public speaking. So at work, his boss,
Speaker 1: in his evaluation said, basically, you need to take more space,
Speaker 1: like we need to hear more from you in meetings.
Speaker 1: You know, you need to volunteer for conferences and presentations.
Speaker 4: We need to hear you talk more.
Speaker 1: And my client had sort of this idea that not
Speaker 1: only did he have to perform well so be articulate
Speaker 1: or like have a big impact on his audience, but
Speaker 1: he also.
Speaker 4: Had to feel confident while he did it.
Speaker 1: And so when he inevitably, you know, felt anxious before
Speaker 1: a presentation or kind of questioned himself before he spoke
Speaker 1: up in a meeting and was like, oh.
Speaker 4: Is this is this relevant?
Speaker 1: Do people really want to hear this like he had
Speaker 1: done it wrong because he had deviated from that emotional perfectionism.
Speaker 1: I need to feel confident, you know, before I speak,
Speaker 1: And so we really worked on trying to shift from like,
Speaker 1: well feel it. And then the thing you can control
Speaker 1: is your behavior. You can't control how you feel. If
Speaker 1: you could do that, you would have done that by now.
Speaker 1: You know, anyone who has ever been told, you know,
Speaker 1: just relax, you know as it knows that you can't.
Speaker 1: You can't control how you feel. But what we can control.
Speaker 4: By and large is our behavior.
Speaker 1: So, you know, regardless of how my client felt, he
Speaker 1: could make a comment in a meeting, he could get
Speaker 1: up and you know, introduce the next speaker. He can
Speaker 1: control his behavior even if he feels like his organs
Speaker 1: are rearranging themselves inside him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a really good example. Let's talk about something
Speaker 3: that at first glance doesn't look like it's related to perfectionism,
Speaker 3: which is procrastination for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so procrastination. It took me a very long time
Speaker 1: to realize that procrastination is not a time management problem,
Speaker 1: that's really it's an emotion regulation problem. So Yeah, perfectionism
Speaker 1: absolutely drives perrocrastination. Aversive tasks require quite a bit of
Speaker 1: like self regulation, you know, like we have to focus,
Speaker 1: we have to like, you know, sort of figure out
Speaker 1: what we're doing, and you know, self regulation deteriorates under
Speaker 1: emotional distress.
Speaker 4: So therefore, you know, if.
Speaker 1: We're setting these perfectionistic standards, you know, we are setting
Speaker 1: personally demanding standards that might even be like too high
Speaker 1: for anyone to reach, but then we feel like we
Speaker 1: have to reach it or else we're inadequate. Like, of
Speaker 1: course we're going to feel distressed and overwhelmed, and then
Speaker 1: that is going to put mood repair front and center.
Speaker 1: In order to do the aversive task, we need to
Speaker 1: make ourselves feel better. So then procrastination steps in as
Speaker 1: a coping mechanism. So it's a one two punch because
Speaker 1: procrastination not only allows us to avoid the task that's
Speaker 1: making us feel bad, you know, overwhelmed, incapable, inadequate, but
Speaker 1: we immediately replace it with something that makes us feel better.
Speaker 1: So like I'm going to scroll through social media, or
Speaker 1: like I'm going to deep clean my apartment and feel productive,
Speaker 1: or I'm going to grind through my email and like, oh,
Speaker 1: this needs to get done, you know, so you can
Speaker 1: feel virtuous.
Speaker 3: Until you are on the other side of it, and
Speaker 3: now you feel worse about yourself because you procrastinated and
Speaker 3: you dread the task more than you did before. It's
Speaker 3: this really weird thing because the minute that you do
Speaker 3: say yes, essentially oh, I'll do it later, and you
Speaker 3: go do something else. There's an immediate feeling of like, oh, okay,
Speaker 3: that feels good, but like drugs, it wears off and
Speaker 3: then you're like, oh boy, I think I may have
Speaker 3: made this worse. And I think that's so true. It's
Speaker 3: not about time management but emotion management. And when I
Speaker 3: talk about or work with people on procrastination, really any
Speaker 3: kind of trying to change your behavior. I think there's
Speaker 3: two key components. The first is what I refer to
Speaker 3: as structural, meaning do I know what I'm going to do?
Speaker 3: Is the task broken down small enough? Do I know
Speaker 3: how to do it? Have I set up my environment
Speaker 3: so I don't get distracted? It's all it's structural things,
Speaker 3: and that can often go a long way, And there
Speaker 3: is still the moment where even if I know what
Speaker 3: I'm supposed to do, even if the task is small.
Speaker 3: I'm at that moment of choice, and then you're right,
Speaker 3: that is all about my emotion management. It's all about
Speaker 3: what am I saying to myself, what am I feeling?
Speaker 3: And what can I say to myself that will just
Speaker 3: get me over that hump. And I think that's why
Speaker 3: buying more and more planners or you know, buying a
Speaker 3: system to stock procrastination can be helpful, but it's often
Speaker 3: only half of the problem, or sometimes it's way less
Speaker 3: than that, and everybody's a little bit differently. So I
Speaker 3: think always getting the structural out of the way first,
Speaker 3: because that's the easy part. It's easy relatively to figure out,
Speaker 3: like Okay, let me take this big task, break it
Speaker 3: into little tasks, et cetera. It's harder to manage your
Speaker 3: emotions in that moment. But ultimately that is, like you said,
Speaker 3: what we have to be able to do. You also
Speaker 3: talk about something you call it procrastination, par fait, say
Speaker 3: a little bit more about what that means to you.
Speaker 1: So in perfectionistic procrastination, we layer on all these sentimentary
Speaker 1: layers of negative emotion that then we have to regulate
Speaker 1: and work through, and so it could be unrealistic standards.
Speaker 1: So you were talking about the structural issues, and I
Speaker 1: agree that that quote unquote should be easy. But I know,
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes if I'm not sure what the first
Speaker 1: step is, I'll think to myself, well, I should.
Speaker 4: Know the first step. Why don't I know how to do?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: You know, but like I think we can use some
Speaker 1: self compassion, We can use some you know, like of
Speaker 1: course I don't know the first step. Why should I
Speaker 1: know how to update my website? You know, to get
Speaker 1: around that? Okay, yes, so yeah, unrealistic standards.
Speaker 3: This is the year I should have said not easy,
Speaker 3: easier perhaps than emotions.
Speaker 4: Yes, it gets thorny.
Speaker 1: Right, So there's the unrealistic standards of like I should
Speaker 1: know how to do this, or I should do this
Speaker 1: all in one go, or I, you know, need to
Speaker 1: do this like so thoroughly, that like to the standard
Speaker 1: that no one would ever expect of me. So that's one.
Speaker 1: Next is there could be this layer of fear of failure.
Speaker 1: So you know, remember that like those of us with
Speaker 1: some perfectionism put a lot of pressure on ourselves to
Speaker 1: do things well and correctly, and so the prospect of
Speaker 1: making a mistake, you know, either in outcome or in process,
Speaker 1: you know, as a callback to our conversation about like,
Speaker 1: oh I did it, but I didn't feel confident. You know,
Speaker 1: like if there's any aspect of us possibly failing to
Speaker 1: meet our standards, then of course that's going to cause
Speaker 1: some distress. There's procrastination related self criticism, like maybe we've
Speaker 1: procrastinated already, and you know, we instead of doing our work.
Speaker 4: Like baked the loaf of banana bread, or.
Speaker 1: Just scroll through Instagram for three hours, or you know,
Speaker 1: played boulders Gate three for eight hours, you know like that.
Speaker 3: Then then we have what is Balderskate three.
Speaker 1: It's a video game. So I have two teenage boys,
Speaker 1: so I'm plugged in. This is a very popular game.
Speaker 1: I have an acquaintance who calculated that all of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four she spent two weeks of you know, like
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, like the time she could have spent
Speaker 1: sleeping or awake playing balder Skate three. So anyway, okay,
Speaker 1: so we might use that to procrastinate, and then we
Speaker 1: feel guilty like, oh my god, I wasted two weeks
Speaker 1: of my life playing this video game, and so now
Speaker 1: we have to regulate that guilt or self criticism, And
Speaker 1: then of course there's just kind of general self criticism,
Speaker 1: like when we're procrastinating or when we feel incompetent before
Speaker 1: a task, you know, we may say like why am
Speaker 1: I so stupid? Stop being lazy? Why ah I can't
Speaker 1: do this, I'm so disorganized. You know, there's just the
Speaker 1: general self criticism that then in addition, we have to
Speaker 1: regulate all of that negative emotion. So yeah, perfe all
Speaker 1: the way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love it. I often think about like upward
Speaker 3: and downward spirals, and what we're talking about here is
Speaker 3: sort of a downward spiral. You start layering these different
Speaker 3: things on and each one takes you down a level
Speaker 3: and a level, and then you feel bad about what
Speaker 3: you did, and it just circles. Let's just talk quickly
Speaker 3: about a couple of strategies for releasing past mistakes. So,
Speaker 3: if you're somebody who does tend to amplify your past mistakes,
Speaker 3: you think about them a lot. What can we do
Speaker 3: to start letting go of some of those one or
Speaker 3: two or both of those.
Speaker 4: So one of the things we can do.
Speaker 1: I took this from doctor Russ Harris, who's the author
Speaker 1: of The Happiness Trap, and he's a big wig in
Speaker 1: acceptance and commitment therapy. And one of the techniques that
Speaker 1: I really like is called physicalizing. And this gets a
Speaker 1: little woo woo, so stick with me here, But it
Speaker 1: starts with imagining like negative emotions like guilt or shame
Speaker 1: over mistakes as a physical object within your body. So first,
Speaker 1: like bring your mistake to mind, and it's likely going
Speaker 1: to be a physical experience. So maybe like you'll feel
Speaker 1: the heat start to rise, maybe you'll feel like some
Speaker 1: pressure behind your eyes, whatever that feeling, that physical feeling
Speaker 1: is imagine it as an actual, like physical object. So
Speaker 1: and you can drill down on the details, so like
Speaker 1: think about like what color it is, is it transparent
Speaker 1: or opaque? Is it heavy or light? So for example,
Speaker 1: like I had a client who regretted dropping out of school,
Speaker 1: like thought that that was a mistake, and the object
Speaker 1: that he envisioned was this like kind of sopping black
Speaker 1: sponge in the center of his chest. Okay, So then
Speaker 1: once you've got that sort of pictured like in your
Speaker 1: mind's eye, like placed wherever you feel it in your body,
Speaker 1: then what do you want to do is to make
Speaker 1: room for it within your body. So you inhan and
Speaker 1: as you inhale, you sort of like create some space
Speaker 1: around that object, and then like just to continue breathing
Speaker 1: in and out, and as you breathe in, like create
Speaker 1: that room opening up, allowing that object to be there.
Speaker 1: You're not trying to get rid of it. You're not
Speaker 1: trying to squeeze it out. You're creating some space for it.
Speaker 1: And ironically, you know, this can't be the outcome, it
Speaker 1: can't be what we expect to happen. But what often
Speaker 1: happens is that when we make room for feeling bad,
Speaker 1: we often feel less bad because by you know, as
Speaker 1: I said before, like mistakes are only a problem if
Speaker 1: we think they shouldn't be happening, and so by allowing it,
Speaker 1: that feeling will often diminish. And I really like that
Speaker 1: because it's sort of a body based way to make
Speaker 1: room for the negative emotions of like guilt or other
Speaker 1: emotions that go along with making mistakes. So that's been
Speaker 1: helpful both to meet and clients.
Speaker 3: So listener and thinking about that and all the other
Speaker 3: great wisdom from today's episode. If you were going to
Speaker 3: isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what
Speaker 3: would it be? Remember, little by little, a little becomes
Speaker 3: a lot. Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action,
Speaker 3: and I want to give you a tip on that,
Speaker 3: and it's to start small. It's really important when we're
Speaker 3: trying to implement new habits to often start smaller than
Speaker 3: we think we need to, because what that does is
Speaker 3: it allows us to get victories. And victories are really
Speaker 3: important because we become more motivated when we're feeling good
Speaker 3: about ourselves, and we become less motivated when we're feeling
Speaker 3: bad about ourselves. So by starting small and making sure
Speaker 3: that you succeed, you build your motivation for further change
Speaker 3: down the road. If you'd like a step by step
Speaker 3: guide for how you can easily build new habits that
Speaker 3: feed your good Wolf, go to good Wolf dot me,
Speaker 3: slash change and join the free masterclass. I think that's
Speaker 3: a great technique, and I think think it's a good
Speaker 3: place for us to wrap up. You and I are
Speaker 3: going to continue in the post show conversation for a
Speaker 3: little bit talking about two things that we did not
Speaker 3: get to. One is comparing ourselves to others, which is
Speaker 3: a common theme and a real challenge, and the other
Speaker 3: is my favorite in this book, which I relate to
Speaker 3: which is why do we turn fun into a chore?
Speaker 4: Oh you're speaking my language?
Speaker 3: Yes, In the post show conversation, we're going to cover that. Listeners,
Speaker 3: If you would like to become part of our community,
Speaker 3: which would allow you to get this post show conversation
Speaker 3: and all the others as well as a special episode
Speaker 3: I do each week, And you would like to support
Speaker 3: us because we are a small podcast that can really
Speaker 3: use your support, go to one ufeed dot net slash
Speaker 3: join Ellen. Thank you so much for coming on. I
Speaker 3: thought the book was excellent and I really enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 1: Oh, thank you so much for having me on again.
Speaker 1: It's always a delight to talk to you.
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