00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 143, "Stuck in Perfectionism." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:22 

Well hello there, my amazing friends. So glad to have you here with me today. Thanks for joining. If you are new, welcome to the podcast. Glad to have you here. I hope that you find here, whether you're new or whether you're returning, I hope you find information that helps you make adjustments to how you're thinking and how you're living so that you can create more of the life experience that you want to have. Because that's what we're here to do, not to become a perfect being, but to move closer to really what we want to do. 

00:56 

Our discussion today is actually called "stuck in perfectionism," and I will tell you that I've been doing some work on this because I've realized that I have a lot more perfectionist tendencies than I thought. I used to think I wasn't a perfectionist because I'm not like super crazy about my house. Like there's always dust in my house. I'm not crazy about that kind of stuff, but I'm finding that more and more I've had a lot of perfectionist tendencies based around how I thought I should be showing up and what I should be doing and how I should be. I've been doing some work and I will tell you, full disclosure, I am still working on this concept. But I wanted to share some things with you that are making a huge impact on how I am approaching my life and how I am looking at what I need to accomplish and what I want to accomplish. It's reframing my thoughts around the kind of human that I want to be and the kind of human that I feel that God has created me to be. So I'm not perfect at not being perfect yet. I still am working on it. But here's some great stuff that I want to share with you. 

02:19 

So the first thing I want to talk to you about is that perfectionism is what we call an "indulgence." Alright, this is a thought that seems very productive but that actually keeps us stuck. It actually does not move us in the direction that we want to go. Now it seems very virtuous, doesn't it, to think that I want to be perfect. It seems very virtuous. We want to be so good. We really want what's best. We want to do what's right all the time. But actually these thoughts hold us back, and we're going to talk today about why they hold us back so much. Perfectionism doesn't actually mean that we're perfect, that we actually do all the things perfectly. It means that we think we should be perfect. And there's a big difference there. I think all of us know that none of us are ever going to be perfect, and yet it's fascinating that so many of us have these ideas that we should. In fact, I find it even more fascinating that so many of us will identify with being a perfectionist, and we hold that as a badge of honor, as though that is something to be proud of and something to be very happy that with, that we're a perfectionist. But I want to offer that there's a different way to think about this and I want you to pay attention today. 

03:47 

Being a perfectionist is actually not a very productive thing for us to do, and it's actually holding us back in a lot of ways and we're going to talk about why. So when we think that we should be perfect, it's because we don't think that we're good enough as we are. We've never done a good enough job. We should be better than we are. We will always be feeling bad about ourselves and we're constantly shoulding on ourselves. And this is not a healthy place to be. Now, do we all have room for improvement? Absolutely. Do we all have places that we can grow and increase? Without a doubt. But when we are constantly never satisfied with where we are, we're living in this place of unfulfillment and this place that holds us back. 

04:46 

So for let me give you an example really quick. I live in Utah. If I was planning a trip to New York City and I was going to drive, that's going to be a three or four day drive depending on how many miles a day I want to go. But if I get in my car on Monday morning and I start driving and I get tired and maybe I stopped at a few places on the way to eat or maybe there were some national sites that I wanted to see that I haven't seen before, and I stopped that Monday night and get me a hotel room. Would I be beating myself up for the fact that I wasn't at New York yet? I wouldn't. I mean hopefully I wouldn't. Hopefully I would be going "oh wow you know what, we stopped at this place today and it was amazing and we stopped here and it was so incredible. And that hamburger that we had at that little diner was just incredible, one of the best I've had." And we would feel really good, like "hey, look, we're a third of the way there, we're a fourth of the way there, we made some some good mileage today." We're really happy about it. And then the next day, same thing: we would get up, we would go, we would maybe stop and visit places, we would see things, we would stop at a hotel. We wouldn't spend every night beating ourselves up over the fact that we weren't in New York yet. We would be happy that we're making progress, happy that we're moving there. 

06:07 

And this is where when we get stuck in perfectionism, we get stuck in a place where we think we should already be in New York. Like, as soon as I get in my car, I should be in New York. And we forget that this is a journey. We forget that getting to perfectionism is a lifelong, and even beyond this life, journey for us. And if we're constantly thinking we should be perfect today, we're not enjoying the trip. We're not enjoying all the amazing things that we were able to stop and see today, and that incredible hamburger. So we're getting stuck. We're constantly shoulding on ourselves for not being where we think we should be, for not being at our end result. 

06:53 

And this means that really what we're doing is we're constantly living in the future rather than living in our present. And we think that life will actually be so amazing when we're finally doing everything perfectly. And we think, "okay, on Monday, I'll be a completely different person who can magically do this. So I'm gonna wait to start this new thing until Monday. I'm gonna wait to start eating healthy until Monday, because I've already eaten a cupcake today. So I can't start eating perfectly today. So I'll wait until Monday. After the weekend, when I've had time to do all the stuff and eat all the things I want to, and then on Monday I'll start eating perfectly." We think we're just gonna be a different person who's going to wake up and magically be able to do that. 

07:41 

And here's part of the thing about being a perfectionist. We become addicted to the drama of anxiety, and relief from that anxiety. We create this. So for example, we recognize something and we feel bad that we're not doing it. I'm not eating really, really healthy. So I feel bad and I create this desire to want to change and then I create this perfectionist ideal and I make a plan. And here's what's fascinating about being a perfectionist. It does feel good. Right then, when I create this perfectionist ideal and I make a plan, I get a dopamine hit. I get a dopamine hit that says, "bam, this is going to be awesome. When I'm eating healthy every day and when my energy goes up and when my health gets better and when my weight goes down, I'm going to feel amazing." So we create this dopamine hit with our thoughts of what it will be like when we are running this perfect plan that we've created. We hit it until Monday or Tuesday comes or Wednesday, whatever. And we actually end up not starting it or we quickly fail. And then we plummet, like on a roller coaster ride, and then we feel bad all over again. And so to help ourselves feel better is to start this process all over again. We feel bad. We want to change. We create a perfectionist ideal. We make a plan. We get that dopamine hit. We ride it for a bit and then we quickly fail. We plummet. So we keep doing this. We are thinking that when we are perfect, that we will get this dopamine hit or thinking of when we will be perfect gives us this dopamine hit. And we can become addicted to this dopamine hit of making perfectionist plans. 

09:40 

But here's the thing: it never pans out. Very often we're too scared to fail because guess what? Perfectionists don't fail. And if we're ever going to have a plan and move forward with it, we have to know that we're going to fail...because perfectionists always do everything right. As if there is a "right," "right" just really doesn't exist. And when we think that there is always a right way to do things, which this is part of my perfectionist tendency, we end up under-living. We're not creating. We're not experiencing. We're not growing. We're not stretching. We're not tapping into our potential and we are not contributing to the world in the way that we are capable of doing because we think there's always a right way, and we are waiting for the right way to manifest itself. 

10:39 

So the work that we do here with coaching, this is very intense work because it requires that we are constantly working on our thoughts about ourselves, we're constantly working on our self-worth and our self-value. We're constantly having to identify patterns that we are not aware of. And this is work to become aware of the patterns. And then we have to have the courage to address those patterns and figure out how to fix them. And so this is the intense work that I do with myself, with my coach, and this is the intense work that I do with you, helping us become aware and then moving to create something different. 

11:23 

Perfectionist thinking creates a very dissatisfying feeling. And it keeps us stuck because we end up settling for dreaming instead of actually doing. And here's a huge consequence of perfectionist thinking. We become out of integrity with ourselves because we learn that we cannot rely on ourselves to do what we say we're going to do. We end up making plans that really we kind of know that we're not going to keep, but it feels good to make them, so we get that dopamine hit by making these perfectionist plans. But this is the thing, just like with a drug fix, over time the hit that we get from the drugs becomes less and less and less. We become desensitized and we need more and more of the drug to get the same feeling. Ends up being the same thing here with our dopamine. Over time the dopamine stops working because our brain knows we won't actually do it. So with our perfectionist brain we create these plans and at first we get these huge dopamine hits, but over time as we keep making plans and not doing them and keep making plans and not doing them, over time that dopamine hit gets less and less and less. Our brain becomes very desensitized to the excitement of the new plan. 

12:51 

So when we talk about integrity, we're not talking about that it's really a moral thing. We're talking about that we just don't have trust with ourself to do what we say we're going to do. Integrity is creating self-trust, self-respect, knowing that we will follow through. And we get out of integrity with ourself when we are in perfectionist thinking. So another huge consequence of perfectionist thinking is that we don't actually get things done because we're not realistic. We become addicted to the fantasy of perfectionism, but we are unwilling to accept the reality. So we often do this. A good example is with our to-do list. We may plan a lot of things. So I may sit down Sunday night and plan out my week, do my weekly planning, and I will put all of these things on my calendar and I just go, "Bam! I'm going to have a week. I'm going to do all this." And I get this huge dopamine hit that says, "yes, look what I'm going to do." But if I've planned too many things, I'm inevitably going to fail. If by Monday at 12, I'm already behind, my perfectionist brain is going to start wanting to shut down and say, "oh, now we can't do anything. Now we may as well just give up." 

14:14 

So I could have just scheduled, let's say, four really great things and accomplish them during my week and gotten the dopamine hit at the end of the week when I finished it. And I could go, "what? That was a great week. Look what I got done." But instead, I choose for the dopamine hit up front and I plan 18 things. And I end up feeling like crap at the end of the week when I realized that I didn't accomplish them. So setting and accomplishing four things would have given me a dopamine hit at the end of the week. But my perfectionist brain doesn't really like only setting four things. Because it's too small, it's not big enough, it's not perfect enough. It will seem boring and pointless to my perfectionist brain to just put four things on my to-do list for the week. So I end up setting 18 things to do and I end up not doing any of them because I get too overwhelmed. And I get too hung up on...I make the first mistake Monday morning, I don't get done the first thing I had, and then I just throw in the towel. 

15:27 

So another thing that we oftentimes do when we have perfectionist thinking is that we withhold perfect positive feedback from ourselves. We don't celebrate our wins unless we achieve perfection, which guess what? We rarely, if ever, do, right? We tell ourselves that we can't feel good until we've achieved perfection. But we're constantly just setting ourselves up to fail. And because of that, we keep living in this place of "meh," right? Like this place of settling. I love that word in middle age because I think we've all done that a lot by middle age. We just start settling. We keep making unrealistic plans because then we can have those positive emotions about ourselves, that dopamine hit. This artificial high of perfectionist thinking becomes our driving force rather than the real high of actually accomplishing things. So we live in this place of "meh" rather than this place of energy creation, where we're accomplishing things. 

16:39 

So here's a signal that I've noticed in my life that is a signal that I'm moving into perfectionism. I set a lot of goals. I dream a lot of dreams. I have a lot of plans, but they're always on hold. I will create these plans, but I never start them or I start them and quickly get burnt out or start them and the first roadblock I come to, I back off. So it's like we're always waiting for tomorrow when we can do it perfectly. So we keep putting off these plans. We dream these dreams. We set these goals, but we keep waiting until the perfect time to really make sure we can make sure that they happen. We think that we believe, but we really don't believe because deep down we know that we're not on board. And I'm calling myself out on this because I see this in myself a lot. I'm always thinking of the end result, but never, I can't say never, but it's difficult for me to get to the concrete steps of what it's going to take to move in the direction of creating that end result. We're afraid of the failure  required every single day because, guess what? Again, failure is not perfection. And this messes up our distorted view of ourself and it makes us vulnerable to the judgment of others in our brain. 

18:14 

So we're either failing ahead of time by not even getting started or we're failing once and then we're giving up. We move into this "all or nothing" thinking phase with perfectionist thinking. And this is because we don't know how to moderate ourselves. We don't know how to move ourselves into a place of failure and growth and failure and growth and failure and growth. We just think we go from nothing to complete success. This is a hallmark of perfectionist thinking. We're always worried that we're going to make the wrong decision when we're living in perfectionism. Again, this black and white thinking, we always want more because we think that more is better or we're going to put ourselves on total restriction and rejection and shutdown. This is part of being stuck in perfectionism. It's either one or the other. It's either black or white. It's either end of the spectrum, but we're not comfortable with anything gray in the middle. 

19:17 

And so we get into this place of indecision where we're not moving forward. Because moving forward requires stepping into that gray. It requires stepping out of the black and the white. But we end up not ever starting because we're afraid to fail. And this is a big place of our procrastination that perfectionists often get into. We will give up at the first hint of failure. And perfectionism and anxiety go hand in hand. The more perfectionist I am, the more anxiety I will tend to feel. And we create this anxiety because we don't think that we're good enough. We think we're never going to make it. We think people will judge us and criticize us. We're constantly thinking that we're not enough. When we're finally be proud of ourselves, we can finally be happy when we're perfect. 

20:20 

But again, this is unrealistic because we will never be perfect here. Our own self-criticism is really kind of the seat of our perfectionism. If we are criticizing ourselves all the time, then what we want is a break from the criticism. So we will start fantasizing about being perfect. And this is very sneaky, because we don't see it as perfectionism. We probably would never label it as perfectionism in our own brain. We see it as really great things that we want to do with our life. We think that "I should never get angry with my children or my spouse. I should work out five times a week. I should eat vegetables with every meal. I should lose 25 pounds and then I'll be healthier or I'll love my body more." We're constantly thinking that there will be better than here. That if we are perfect at doing it, then everything else in our life will be perfect and we will be happy all the time. But the concept of happy all the time is a societal flaw. It is something that society feeds us that completely is wrong. There's no way that we can or that we really want to be happy all the time. 

21:44 

But in this pursuit of that, we will make elaborate plans as a perfectionist but we will never follow through. We'll have a setback and we'll quit. We're always looking for tomorrow to be better than today. I can start it perfectly tomorrow after I have not eaten a cupcake for breakfast. If we're tomorrow-focused rather than today-focused it's an indication that we may employ perfectionist thinking. So look at that in yourself. Are you always thinking that you'll start it tomorrow, "when I can start with a fresh slate, when I can start with everything clean"? 

22:21 

Very often when we're in perfectionist thinking we also think that we need to be perfect in order to be worthy or in order to be loved. We're constantly judging ourselves for being human and we're not compassionate with our humanity. We think that we're not smart enough. We're not thin enough. We're not fun enough. We're not clever enough. Maybe we're not whatever enough. But fear of being seen as not good enough by ourselves and by others is another big hallmark of perfectionism. When I'm cataloging my own faults, I will also assume that others are doing the same of me, that they're cataloging those same faults along with me, that they're judging me for the same things that I'm judging myself for. But here's the thing: when I see that I'm judging myself, I am constantly, most likely, judging others for the same thing. 

23:20 

So my perfectionist journey, I think, really began as a missionary. Before my mission, I was pretty "go with the flow," pretty okay with a lot of imperfection in my life. But as a missionary, I got this idea that I had to be perfect, and I really tried to be a perfect missionary, and my companions are probably, if any of them are listening to this ever, they would probably roll their eyes and go, "yeah, not even close girlfriend." But I got this idea in my head that I had to be perfect, that I had to be doing everything perfect, that I needed to be solemn and thinking higher thoughts all the time. I don't know where all this came from, but I came home from my mission and I was putting all of this pressure on myself to be very perfect. 

24:11 

And then I got married and there was a tough situation from the very beginning, even when we were dating, it was just one of those things that I don't know why we got married, but we did. It's a whole other story, but as we both really struggled to love each other and to invest in our marriage, I got this idea in my head that I had to be perfect to be loved by my spouse. And so I tried and tried and tried to be more and more perfect, but of course the more I did that, the more I also expected him to step up and be more and more perfect, because the more I was judging my own imperfection, the more I started to judge his imperfection. And it created this terrible place for us to be. And I can it helped to create in our marriage very shallow relationships, because I didn't want him to see the real me. There was a lack of vulnerability and intimacy because I didn't want to be seen in my imperfection. And good relationships require that we show our imperfection, that we allow ourselves and our spouse or our child, whatever relationship we're looking at, that we allow ourselves to not be perfect. And we grapple with self-worth, because when we think we're perfect, then we think we'll finally be good enough that someone can finally love me if I'm perfect enough. 

25:47 

So we end up living in this fantasy world, but never moving closer. I kept thinking if I was perfect that this, I had this fantasy life that, that everything would be happy all the time, right? There's that idea again that when I was perfect enough that everything would be good, but I'm never moving closer to that because I couldn't handle the imperfection in me or my spouse that it would take to get there. So this is a process for me of that I've been working on for quite some time, of really learning to let go, and this is ongoing. And I'm sure that this is going to be something that is going to infiltrate my life on and off for the rest of my life. I don't think it's something that I'm finally going to be perfect at it, right? 

26:37 

So here's another hallmark of perfectionist thinking: it is very self-focused thinking. Meaning, I'm constantly thinking that I'm never good enough so I tend to beat myself up internally over the things that I'm not doing right. I always feel unsuccessful. I always feel like I'm not doing enough or doing it good enough and I'm always judging myself for decisions that I don't feel are perfectly made. And when I'm constantly in this place of looking at myself and judging myself, then what it does is it keeps me from being others-focused. I become too hyper focused on myself. Always thinking that if I'm perfect enough that I can avoid the criticism of others. Working to be in a space where others can't or won't criticize me because I'm doing it perfectly. Well, what's there to criticize if I'm doing it perfectly? So if I can give up these elements of perfectionist thinking, then I can create a space where I can focus on other people. I will look for ways that how can I help them even if it's way less than perfect help. I will start thinking "how can I serve them and not worry about whether it's exactly what they need or not." 

28:04 

I just think about how many times I've been too consumed with my own insecurities that what I have to offer is not good enough and so I haven't done anything at all. I've been too afraid that I will be judged for what I have to offer rather than just offering what I can. So being a perfectionist is a very self-focused place to be. It keeps us from contributing to the world in the way we are capable of and the way that we were possibly meant to. 

28:43 

Alright, so moving into this space of recognizing my perfectionist tendencies, of being able to start stepping back from that and allow more imperfection into my life, has been really quite liberating and quite exciting and very uncomfortable, might I say. But next week we're going to talk a little bit more about how to move out of perfectionism. If a lot of what I've talked today about, you've gone, "oh yeah, I kind of see that in myself, I can see where I've done that." You're going to want to join me next week to talk about moving out of perfectionism. These are the discussions that we have that make growing up so amazing that we can start to see these things in ourselves more so than we could when we were younger. It's pretty amazing and I would love to invite you to do this work with me. Either just really focusing on your own or get in touch with me, and let's work together because this is amazing work. And it is work that is changing my life for the better and putting me in such a better place. And I know that it will do the same for you. 

29:50 

Alright, my friends. Let's talk podcast! If you have not left me a review, go ahead and do that. Will you please take a few minutes to leave me a review on iTunes? Subscribe if you haven't so that you never miss an episode, and find people in your life that you know would benefit from this information and let's share this podcast with them. And let's help make the world  a better place one person at a time as we become more self-aware and start choosing more intentionally the kind of life we want to live and how we want to be. Alright, that's gonna do it for me. Have an awesome awesome day, my friends and I will talk to you next week. Bye. 

30:32 

Thank you so much for joining me today If you would love to receive some weekend motivation be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.