The Hidden Cost of Perfectionism: Why You Never Feel Good Enough with Ellen Hendriksen

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
When you focus on the work for the work's sake.
When you make it about information not evaluation, mean you
don't make it personal about you. Ironically, that's when the
best work gets done.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,

(00:38):
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking
our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,

(00:58):
how they feed their good wolf.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Perfectionism isn't about being perfect, it's about never feeling good enough.
And I think that's a really important distinction. And here's
another tricky part. It often disguises itself as something positive,
like being hard working, detail oriented, or driven. But when conscientiousness,
which is a good quality that many of us have
tips into self criticism. When our striving turns into self doubt,

(01:27):
that's when it becomes a problem. And that's why I
was excited to talk with Ellen Hendrickson, clinical psychologist and
author of How to Be Enough. She unpacks the sneaky
ways perfectionism shows up in our lives, whether it's turning
fun into a chore, a classic of mine, over evaluating everything,
or setting impossible standards. We also dive into how perfectionists

(01:49):
handle mistakes. Some like mister Rogers, embrace them with grace,
while others like Walt Disney, obsess over every tiny flaw.
And we explore why procrastination is only about time management,
it's also about emotion management. If you've ever felt like
you're falling behind, not doing enough, or just not enough,

(02:09):
stick around. This episode is for you. I'm Eric Zimmer,
and it's time to feed our good wolves. Hi, Ellen,
welcome back to the show.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be back.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
It has been I don't know when we say, six
or seven, a long time, but I remember your interview
well and we've re released it in the interim because
it was on a topic that a lot of people
identify with which is social anxiety. And now you're back
with a new book, which is another topic that I
think a lot of people can identify with, which is perfectionism.

(02:42):
The book is called How to Be Enough Self Acceptance
for self critics and Perfectionists. And we'll talk about that
in a second, but before we do, let's start, like
we always do, with the parable. In the Parable, there's
a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which

(03:03):
represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and
hatred and fear. And the grandshot stops. They think about
it for a second. They look up at their grandparent
and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says,
the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
by asking you what that parable means to you in

(03:24):
your life and in the work that you do.

Speaker 4 (03:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
So, I was struck by the fact that in the parable,
both of the wolves are wolves, that they look similar,
but they're so fundamentally different. And something that I've learned
through researching and writing this book is that perfectionism can
be good but can very easily tip over into something

(03:50):
really maladaptive and problematic. But it often looks the same
on the surface, so helpful perfectionism at its heart a
personality trait called conscientiousness, which is the tendency to do
things well and thoroughly, to be responsible, to be dutiful,

(04:10):
to care deeply. It's all these wonderful things. I call
it the least sexy superpower. But you know, as far
as as far as a personality trait like certainly the
one to choose for both objective and subjective success in life,
but it can very quickly tip over into maladaptive perfectionism.
And there we end up with two pillars. One is

(04:33):
self criticism and that I think needs no definition, but
you know, in maladaptive perfectionism is particularly harsh and personalistic.
And then the other pillar is something that you know,
even as a clinical psychologist, it was a term that
was new to me. And that's over evaluation. And we
can talk more about that, but essentially that is when

(04:54):
we start to conflate our worth with our performance when
we are what we do, and so there, you know,
forgive my grammar but it's when I did good equals
I am good, or I did bad equals I am bad.
You know, really similar fundamentals but really different outcomes.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
Yeah, I love a couple of things that you said there.
The first is this idea that it looks similar but
is actually different, And I think that's an important point.
And conscientiousness is a great personality trait. It seems to
be one that I am particularly high in, at least
later in my life. And yet, as you say, it
can go too far. And I think that's what's interesting

(05:34):
about nearly any trait that we have, is there is
a case where there's too little of it or there's
too much of it, and those are problematic. Right, too
little conscientiousness is no good, Right you don't care about
what you're doing, you just aren't paying attention, or you
just let everything go. Too much of it and it
cripples you. And so what we're looking for is somewhere

(05:56):
in between. And I think that's one of the things
the book does a nice job of pointing out, is
that these traits towards perfectionism aren't necessarily bad. It's that
how we use them and what proportion we keep them
in and I always think that's a helpful perspective to take,
because when we think that there's something wrong with us,
or the way we are is wrong, then that's a

(06:20):
different message than the way we are is fine. We
just might need to turn the knob down a couple
of notches on it from time to time.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
I think you've hit on a really important point that, yes,
on many of these things, we can change things. We
can turn the knob down, or maybe on other things
we might want to turn the knob another way or
turn a different knob. But yes, there can be some change,
and there can also be some acceptance where we just
make room for the trait that we think is not

(06:49):
helpful or problematic but in fact might be just something
that almost everybody struggles with or something that is just
how we're wired. So yes, absolutely we can change, and
also we can accept, not like in a resigned way,
but truly accept like, oh, this is just part of
who I am, or I come by this honestly, you know.

(07:10):
And we can certainly talk more about that, especially as
applied to self criticism later.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
Yeah. The one other thing that you say early on
is we're sort of trying to set up what perfectionism
is You talked about this sort of hypercritical self relationship
and this over identification with meeting standards. But you say
perfectionism isn't about striving for perfection, but about never feeling
good enough. Say a little bit more about that.

Speaker 4 (07:36):
Yeah, absolutely so.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
I'm a clinical psychologist at a anxiety specialty center, and
I would say the majority, almost the vast majority of
clients who come in with you know, anxiety or depression
have perfectionism at the heart of the overlapping center of

(07:58):
the ven diagram of their challenges. But nobody says, hey, Ellen,
I'm a perfectionist. I need help with perfectionism. Everybody comes
in instead and says some variation on I'm not good enough.
I feel like I'm falling behind. I should be farther
ahead in life. At this point, I feel like I'm

(08:18):
always failing. I have a million things on my plate
and I'm not doing any of them well. So there's
never a sense of striving for perfection. It's always a
sense of not measuring up, of not being enough.

Speaker 3 (08:34):
Let's move on. You have a chapter that talks about
the many salads of perfectionism. What do you mean there?

Speaker 4 (08:40):
Sure?

Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, so like you said before, my last book was
on social anxiety, and I think that book was easier
is not the right word to use, but it was
different to write because I think there are I don't know,
maybe like four or five different sort of phenotypes of
social anxiety. And with perfectionism, though it's so heterogeneous that
you can line up one hundred people with perfectionism and

(09:03):
I will show you one hundred different ways of being perfectionistic,
it really comes out in so many ways. Because getting
back to that pillar of over evaluation, we can over
evaluate anything like our performance could be like, for example,
like the Striver's student who derives their value from their grades.

Speaker 4 (09:21):
It could be an employee who sees.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
Their quarterly evaluation like as a referendum not only on
their work, but on their character. It could be the
athlete who only feels as good as their last game,
the musician who only feels as good as their last performance.
We can overevaluate our social behavior, hence you know perfectionism
being the heart of social anxiety, So we could over
identify with did I say something.

Speaker 4 (09:45):
Weird at that party? Was I awkward?

Speaker 1 (09:48):
We can overevaluate our reflection in the mirror. The number
on the scale anything. And so I think when I
talk about the many salads of perfectionism, it gets to
the heart of how whatever we again over evaluate and
wherever we think, we have to perform as superbly as
possible to be sufficient as a person.

Speaker 3 (10:09):
First thing is, I would not have identified myself as
someone who is a perfectionist, and I don't know that
I would after reading this book, but I saw a
lot of myself in it in different places and in
different ways. And I'd like to talk a little bit
more about the domains of perfectionism. But let's stay with
this term over evaluation for a second. It's a great term.

(10:33):
It also implies that there's a point where evaluation is good,
and then there's a point where evaluation becomes over evaluation,
which seems like it might be a difficult thing to discern.
So how do we go about telling when evaluation is positive? So,
for example, if you and I got off this call

(10:53):
and I went back and I looked at it, and
I thought, well, I could have said this there, and
maybe I could have done that, and boy, the lighting,
we could have changed the lighting a little bit. It
might have looked a little bit better, right, useful but
there's a point where that would become unuseful. And maybe
as a way of talking about over evaluation, you can
take us back to the analogy used to open the

(11:15):
book between two famous entertainment people.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Of course there's going to
be some overlap. I talk a lot in ven diagrams,
don't I sell some overlap in that ven diagram of
you know, ourselves and our performance. Of course, we're going
to be proud of, you know, our accomplishments. Of course
we're going to be bummed if something we did didn't
work out.

Speaker 4 (11:38):
That makes sense.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
We're not going to completely separate those two circles. But
I think when they're almost completely congruent, like whether almost
completely overlapping, and yeah, that absolutely gets us into trouble
because then there is no room for mistakes, there's no
room for We can talk about this too, the typical
advice around perfectionism, which is, you know, you can to

(12:00):
stop when things are good enough. If we feel like
we are our work, we're not going to settle for
subpar or mediocre outcomes, because then we're subpar or mediocre.
So what we can do to try to separate that
is to try to focus on the work for the
work's sake. And Okay, I'm gonna give you a very

(12:22):
long answer because I'll tell you a story and then
i'll get into your question about Okay, well Disney, mister Rogers, Okay,
but first let's talk about Kareem abdul Jabbar and John Wooden.
So there, John Wooden was the legendary coach of UCLA
basketball for many, many years, and when Kareem of doul
Jabbar was there, the team just had the spectacular record

(12:43):
and to the point where two researchers, doctors rolland Tharpe
and Ronald Gallimore, decided to sit in the stands for
every practice of the season to find out like what
is the secret sauce, like how does coach wouldn't do this?
And what they found is that he very seldom praised

(13:04):
or rebuked his players. Instead, he would basically tell them
what to do. As a former high school teacher, he
would do that he would teach, and so he would
say things like pass from the chest, or take lots
of shots where you might get them in games, run,
don't walk, pass the ball to someone short. And it

(13:24):
was all about the information as opposed to the evaluation
that it was about the task, not the player. And
so what Coach Woulden had I think stumbled upon was
that when you focus on the work for the work's sake,
when you make it about information not evaluation, when you
don't make it personal about you, ironically, that's when the
best work gets done. So there, I think that's one

(13:46):
way to kind of separ out that over evaluation and
simply get back to evaluation.

Speaker 4 (13:50):
Let's look at this work, see what is good for
the work.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
Okay, then I will get into Walt Disney and mister Rogers.
So there, this is a nice parallel to the opening
parable with the two wolves because they look the same
on the surface. So both Walt Disney and mister Rogers
creations are beloved, immortal, and they had really similar personalities. Actually,

(14:15):
they both had really high standards, were pretty intense guys,
had really driving work ethics, focused on the details. But
they really lived those traits and values really differently. And
so for example, let's take how they focused on mistakes,
because I think that gets into the over evaluation. If
you are your work, there's no room for mistakes, right.

(14:36):
So in the book, I tell the story of mister Rogers.
You know, at the beginning of his show, he does
his signature of changing out of his blazer and his
dress shoes to a cardigan and sneakers, and as he's
buttoning up the cardigan, he realizes that the buttons are
one hole off, and the crew, knowing his standards, totally

(14:58):
expected him to call cut and to refilm. But instead,
on camera he just ad lib re buttoned the sweater
and made a remark about how mistakes happen and moreover
it they can be corrected. So he folded mistakes into
his high standards, and so by contrast, I also tell
the story of Walt Disney's micromanagement of the making of

(15:20):
Snow White. So there, he just can't bring himself to
trust this world class team of animators that he had
so carefully hired, and he makes them redo just tiny
details like the Queen's eyebrows are too extreme, Grumpy's finger
is too big, have the hummingbird make four pickups instead
of six. And at the premiere he tells a reporter,

(15:41):
you know, all I can see is the flaws. I
wish we could just yank it back and do this
all over again. So instead of its kind of flexibly
folding mistakes into the process. Walt Disney just rigidly tried
to avoid mistakes. So because again, if you are your work,
of course you're not going to make any room for

(16:03):
error or believe that they can be corrected.

Speaker 3 (16:05):
And you talk about in mister Rogers's case, he uses
something called guided drift. Say a little bit more about
what that is.

Speaker 4 (16:13):
Yeah, I love that concept.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
So Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and he
studied at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and his mentor there,
William Orr, instilled in him this principle, so guided drift.
So if you can imagine sort of like logs floating.

Speaker 4 (16:32):
Down a river.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
The logs can go wherever the current takes them, but
they are bound by the banks of the river. And
so the analogy or the metaphor is that, you know,
stay true to your principles, you know, stay true to
your integrity, but be flexible within that, be open to
the serendipity of life, be open to where the current
you know, takes you within the confines of your own values.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
I love that idea, and I'm going to apply it
in a very different way for a second, but I
talk about this with coaching clients and people I'm trying
to teach to make change in their life, is that
you have to do two things sort of simultaneously. One
is you have to be sort of rigid about the fact,
like I'm committed to this, I'm going to find a

(17:19):
way to do it. But then you have to be
extraordinarily flexible in how you do it. And I love
that idea of guided drift because in this case, the
river banks are moving my body on a regular basis
as important to my mental and emotional health. That's the bank.
But how I might move my body how much each day,
how I might need to be flexible, that's the drift

(17:41):
within that river. And when you try and make it
only one way, the logs can get stopped and get blocked.
They need to be able to go around obstacles.

Speaker 4 (17:52):
Absolutely. We can think about that in so many ways.
Like we can think about I don't know, like a.

Speaker 1 (17:57):
Social engagement, So like is the point to sort of
rigidly perform, you know, telling funny stories for our friends
and to get approval, or is the point to connect?
And like, there's so many different ways we can connect.
We don't have to, you know, just tell the same
funny stories, or to perform in a certain way. So yeah,

(18:17):
you can apply this to almost any domain of life,
which you know, as we're talking about flexibility, you know,
sort of an appropriate example.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
Let's talk about the seven domains of perfectionism for a second,
because I think this is useful for us to get
a sense of the different places and ways this can
show up for us. So we talked about one of them,
the hypercritical self relationship, We talked about the over evaluation.

(18:45):
Tell me about the next one that's on this list,
which is orientation.

Speaker 4 (18:49):
To rules for sure.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
Yeah, so those of us with perfectionism orient to rules.
We want to know the rules so we can follow them.
And ironically, if they're no rule, we will often set
up personally demanding rules. We'll make them up and then
we'll follow those. So think about, you know, making up
rules for healthy eating, or making up rules like we

(19:12):
were just talking about exercise, making up rules for how
we're going to move our body. So rules are not
necessarily bad, you know, we should pay our taxes, you know.

Speaker 4 (19:21):
Et cetera.

Speaker 1 (19:21):
But it's when the rules become rigid, so we apply
them no matter the situation, like we try to follow
our healthy eating rules even on Halloween or two they're
all are nothing. So with that over evaluation, if we
follow the rules acceptably, we are acceptable. But if we

(19:44):
mess up, if we slip up, we break the rule
or bend the rule, and even the slightest way, it
renders us on acceptable. So in our healthy eating example,
I ate a cookie, so I'm bad. I was bad today.
And then the third way rules can get in our
way in perfection is when we impose our rules on
their people, and that can get in the way of
our relationships. So the classic example I hear from you know, couples,

(20:07):
both in the office and just in my life and
honestly in my own house is how to load the
dishwasher correctly? Like, what is the right way to load
that dishwasher?

Speaker 3 (20:16):
Yeah, this is amazing that this is such a thing.
I mean, my partner and I have it now. We
have decided that it is utterly irrelevant and so there's
no point in caring. But yet, I mean I opened
the dishwasher and I think, why did she load it
that way? For sure? For sure?

Speaker 1 (20:32):
No, Yeah, and like my partner and I have figured
out if Okay, if you're loading the dishwasher, then you
do it your way like this, it's your task, you
do it however you want. But you know, there are
many households where that isn't the case. I had a
client who was trusting enough to admit that she was
controlling how her husband made mac and cheese for their kids.

(20:52):
She's like, you can't just dump the pasta back in
after you drain it and then.

Speaker 4 (20:55):
Put in the cheese and the butter.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
You gotta keep the pasta in the calendar and then
you know, put in the butter and the cheese and
make that the sauce and then put in the pasta.
And so I'm not saying this to throw harder the bus.
I'm saying this to be validating that this is what
happens in households, you know, across America, and that it's
sort of the classic you know, would we rather be
right or would we rather get along? And you know,
there's not a perfect answer. Sometimes it is better to

(21:18):
be right, sometimes it is better to get along. But anyway,
I'm saying this to be relatable and validating that rules
loom large in the minds of people with perfectionism.

Speaker 3 (21:27):
Yeah. The problem with the dishwasher thing, like letting you
do your thing, is that I'm going to come in
after you and need to put dishes in during the
day and it's going to be all jacked up at
that point, and you know what kind of moron loads No,
I'm just kidding.

Speaker 4 (21:41):
Do you have a camera in my house? Just sounds familiar. Yeah, right.

Speaker 3 (21:43):
It just cracks me up that like this is such
a common thing and that we actually care when you
look at it from that perspective. How trivial a matter?
You know what could be a more trivial matter than that, really,
and yet we're going to cause tension and discomfort and
problems in our most important relationship. It's just like you,

(22:05):
I'm not singling people out. I'm just saying, looking at
it from a certain angle, you're like, this is insane.
This also brings up a point that I think is
important about perfectionism, which is that we apply it to
ourselves for sure, but we also apply it to other people.
And you're sort of talking about that. So maybe we
can put a pin in that and we'll come back
around to it. Because I want to stay within the

(22:26):
domains here. The next domain is focusing on mistakes. Let's
talk about that.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
Sure, Yeah, So, as we alluded to a little bit before,
let's tie it together with the over evaluation. If we
think we're not doing something correctly, then that renders us incorrect. However,
so I think I make a distinction with over evaluation
between lowering your standards or stopping when things are good enough.

(22:52):
I don't think we have to do that actually, Plus
that doesn't go over well, and making room for mistakes.
Those might sound like the same thing, but I think
they're really different. For example, okay, I'll tell you a story.
So I had a client who's a pediatrician, and she
had been a pediatrician for twenty five years. Was by
her report, as far as I could tell, very good

(23:13):
at it, had risen in the ranks in her clinic.
But she came in and in the last week had
made a mistake that she had misdiagnosed a little girl
who came in with what turned out to be appendicitis.
She was okay, ended up having to go to the
emergency room, but was okay. She misdiagnosed that as constipation
and had sent the family home and just came into

(23:35):
session just lamb basing herself saying, Oh, I'm a terrible doctor.
I should retire early. Maybe I should get my brain examined.
Something's wrong with me. And I think it would be
inappropriate to tell her to lower her standards, like, of
course you're not going to say, ah, I did well

(23:55):
enough today taking care of people's lives whatever.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
You know.

Speaker 4 (23:58):
No, we're not going to do that.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
But mistakes are inevitable, especially over twenty five years of practice.
And so I asked her, Okay, if you had a
colleague who had been in practice for twenty five years,
what percentage of diagnoses would you expect to be like
a reasonable number of misdiagnoses. The answer can't be zero,

(24:20):
but even one percent gives you way more wiggle room
than zero percent. And so making room for the inevitable
mistakes because we're human and that's sort of the package
deal of being alive and doing any kind of work
is really different than lowering your standards.

Speaker 3 (24:59):
I think that's really good distinction. It takes me back
to rules for a second, because I do find at
times that making rules for myself is really helpful. It
guides me. One of my goals is to move my
body for thirty minutes every day. It doesn't matter how
but just somehow that's my standard. That's my rule. However,
my belief is that eighty to ninety percent success at

(25:21):
that is good enough, because what that means is, you know,
if I move my body in that way ninety percent
of the days, but I'm able to do that week
after week, month after month, year after year, that little
bit that I'm not doing comes out in the wash.
It just doesn't matter. However, if I expect that I
have to do one hundred percent, when I don't, I

(25:44):
get discouraged. And one of the things we do know
about motivation is it tends to go up when we
feel good about ourselves and when we feel like we're capable,
and it tends to go down when we feel like
we're not good or we're not capable of doing it.
So this idea of like rules can be useful, but
they've got to have some degree of flexibility and adaptability

(26:06):
to the I love the word you just use the
inevitable things that are going to come up, Right, It's
inevitable a doctor practicing long enough is going to misdiagnose someone.
It's inevitable if you're trying to eat, right that there
are going to be times that you don't. It's inevitable.
If you're trying to exercise really regularly, they're going to
be days or even periods where you don't. Those things

(26:28):
are inevitable, and the question becomes, how do I respond
wisely when the inevitable happens? And this is where I
see so many people get lost on their attempts to
make change in their life. And it's a perfectionist thing.
It's like either I'm doing it all or I'm doing
it none. And what you're arguing for is this place

(26:50):
in between there.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
Yeah, absolutely, so I think you're tapping into some self compassion. Yeah,
when we inevitably make mistakes screw up, you know, like
if we don't exercise even though that's really important to
us because we're exhausted or injured, or just don't have
time that day, or it's six degrees outside, Yeah, then

(27:12):
I think, okay, here, let me back up, all right.
Self compassion, according to the researcher doctor Kristin Neff, consists
of three things. So there's self kindness, non judgmental mindfulness,
and connection to the larger human experience. But the perfectionistic
brain does none of those things. So we're wired to
be self critical instead of kind to ourselves.

Speaker 4 (27:35):
We're wired to be a little bit judgmental.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
We zero in on flaws and details instead of being
non judgmentally mindful, and instead of like our inevitable shortcomings
connecting us to the larger human experience, we see you know,
our struggles or our mistakes, or that we focus on
that missed ten percent as a shortcoming that sets us
apart as inadequate, rather than a common experience that connects

(27:58):
us to everybody else in the same vein as doctor Neff.
So when I was learning to be a therapist, I
was taught that self compassion was talking to yourself like
a good friend.

Speaker 4 (28:09):
But my perfectionist to.

Speaker 1 (28:11):
Brain thought that that meant that I needed to generate
this like steady stream of articulate and effective self compassionate hype,
and that was just way too high a bar. So
over the years I have learned that self compassion, you know,
absolutely can be words, but it can be one word.
It can be like easy or a couple words you're okay.

(28:33):
But even more than that, self compassion can be actions,
So it could be in our exercise example, going to
the gym because we know from experience that that's going
to make us feel better. But it could also be
allowing ourselves to skip the gym, allowing ourselves a day
off from exercise because what we really need is an

(28:54):
extra hour of sleep, or because it's six degrees outside right,
And so self compassion is turning towards our pain and
suffering and asking what do I need? With Karen understanding,
and that can be not doing all that we expect
of ourselves. So kind of the old version of my
perfectionistic brain would have seen ninety percent as like, come on,

(29:15):
where is that extra ten percent? I did that before?
Why can't I do this again? Whereas I'd say, now again,
I wrote this book for me. I'll see it as
of course, this is ninety percent, like everybody does ninety percent.
This is how it works. That there are going to
be exceptions and days where I don't hit it out
of the park, but that doesn't mean that I have

(29:37):
struck out right.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
And that section in the book has one of the
funniest lines in the book. One of things Kristin Neff
suggests is laying a hand kindly upon your heart telling
yourself this is hard, you know, and you're like, I'm
right there with you. I may lay a hand kindly
upon my heart and tell myself this is hard, but
self criticism will ride up behind me in a hockey
mask and yell in my ear, no, it's fucking not.

Speaker 4 (30:01):
Yeah, this is a documentary. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:04):
So I love that idea, though, because I do think
that we often set the bar for self compassion too high.
And I like what you said there, because it can
just be a word or two, but it often is
in what we don't say to ourselves, right. Self compassion
often manifests in I don't have to say lovely things

(30:25):
to myself, but can I not say the shitty things
to myself?

Speaker 2 (30:29):
Like?

Speaker 3 (30:29):
That is self compassion sometimes, And I often talk about
how when I'm in a negative mood space, I can't
often get to positive. Can I aim for neutral?

Speaker 4 (30:40):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (30:41):
Right? Can I aim for just not so negative?

Speaker 2 (30:45):
Like?

Speaker 3 (30:46):
Because I just think that's a much easier bar. And
I also think that with all of this stuff, however
we talk to ourselves at our head, we have to
believe it to some degree. So saying oh I'm amazing,
I'm wonderful, when we don't feel that often just backfires.

Speaker 1 (31:02):
Yeah, because there's part of all of us inside this
that's a lie. What Yeah, now, what are you talking about? Yeah,
for sure, exactly.

Speaker 3 (31:09):
Yeah. The other thing back to the rules for a second,
in self compassion. But I think there's another thing here
that we've sort of gone around a little bit, and
you sort of alluded to with this ninety percent or
eighty percent success rate. Part of that is self compassion,
but part of that is also just an understanding of reality.
And I think that's important when it comes to perfectionism,

(31:32):
is understanding reality. Mistakes are inevitable, all these things, and
so if we can have a more realistic expectation to
start with, we need self compassion even less, right, because
we won't see the day that we didn't move our
body for whatever reason. We won't see it as a
mistake that we then have to say, oh, I'm going

(31:54):
to extend self compassion to myself because I made it's
just simply like, well, of course that happened. Of course
it was going to happen sooner or later, So today
happened to be the day.

Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah. No, I mean, mistakes are only a problem if
we think they shouldn't be happening, right, like, okay, So
here I'll tell you a personal story. This happened just
last week actually, so for the first time in twelve years,
I double booked a patient and then just like did
my other meeting and left her hanging on zoom like
I completely missed this visit, and again, it hadn't happened
in twelve years.

Speaker 4 (32:21):
I felt horrible when I.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
Realized it happened, and I, you know, immediately apologized and
did what I could to make it right. She was understanding,
and she's like, oh, I thought you had an emergency,
like I just kind of rolled with it. So thank
god she was understanding about it. But I, again, I
felt terrible that I had left this person who's mental
health care I am in charge of hanging. It was terrible,
and I tried to make room for it and thought like, well,

(32:44):
you know, over twenty years of clinical practice, if this
happens once a decade, that's about right, you know, like
that's kind of how it works. So this is my quota,
and this is how it goes. And I don't say
that too excuse it or to say it's okay, but
I do say that to make room for like, yeah,

(33:06):
of course this is gonna happen. And you were talking
about self criticism and trying to you know, not say that,
you know, the really horrible shitty things to ourselves, and
I agree with you that, yes, that's.

Speaker 4 (33:18):
The change lever we can pull.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
We can try to be kinder to ourselves, to be
if not like validating or understanding, then you know, at
least neutral, And we can also pull that acceptance lever
of maybe my brain just says shitty things to me, yes,
but I don't have to listen to it and like
that for me, you know, I have just come from

(33:42):
a long line of perfectionists, and I am just wired
to be a little more self critical than the average bear.
And so through experience, I have learned that whenever I
do anything involving in a microphone, that when I log off,
my brain's just going to start going and be like,
why did you say it that way, like or oh
my gosh, you said way too much any personal things,
or you know, no one's gonna resonate, just my brain's

(34:04):
just got to start going. And I've found that it's
just part of the script that, like when you go
to a restaurant, there's a script like you sit down,
you look at the menu, you order, your food comes,
you eat, you pay, you leave. In my self critical world,
you know, I send something out into the world and
my brain criticizes it and myself and then we move

(34:25):
on and either it's fine or I learned from it.
If for whatever reason I didn't fulfill my intention or whatnot.

Speaker 4 (34:31):
You know, that's okay.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
So I've learned to sort of take this dance towards
my own self critical brain. Like I listen to the
music at a coffee shop, like it's there, you know,
I can hear it, but I don't have to get
yanked around by it. I don't like stand on the
table and you know, dance to the beat.

Speaker 3 (34:47):
So yeah, yeah, I wanted to pause for a quick
good Wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and
a mistake I see people making. And that's really that
we don't think about these new habits that we want
add in the context of our entire life.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
Right.

Speaker 3 (35:03):
Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit
in the life that we have. So when we just
keep adding I should do this, I should do that,
I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't
really thought about what we're not going to do in
order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for
you to think about where is this going to fit
and what in my life might I need to remove.

(35:25):
If you want to step by step guide for how
you can easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf,
go to good Wolf dot me, slash change and join
the free masterclass. When I think about it, it's amazing
to me the sorts of things that will pop into
my head that I recognize as like dominant parts of

(35:45):
my thinking thirty years ago, but they're not gone. They
will show up, and I laugh at them, largely because
I now can see just how wildly over dramatic they are,
Like just how completely I mean, I don't know. A
small mistake gets made, my brain starts saying I wish
I was dead, and I'm like, well, okay, settled down,

(36:07):
Like that's ridiculous. So I can kind of laugh at
it now because I recognize it's just some sort of
like you said, some sort of script popping up in
response to a particular stimulus that I don't have to
give a lot of importance to I don't need to
be like, oh my god, am I Am I suicidal?
Because no, of course I'm not right. It's just a

(36:29):
voice that says something and learning to just accept it.
And for me, like I said, laughter is really helpful
because I'm like, it's so disproportionate to what's actually happening.
It's what tells me that it's like my eight year
old self talking.

Speaker 4 (36:43):
Right for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:44):
No, I think those of us with some perfectionism, like
we talked about before, are conscientious and that means we
take things seriously, but that means we take our own
thoughts and feelings seriously as well. And so you know,
part of my job in the clinic is to help
people with perfectionism take their own thoughts and feelings a
little bit less literally that you know, just because we

(37:06):
think like oh I wish I were dead, Yeah, it
doesn't mean we're suicidal. That it could just be a
thought that we can like let pass by us, like
sushi it or revolving restaurant, you know, or like yeah,
maybe that is something that we thought a lot when
we were twenty five, but you know it's just yeah,
so absolutely, like just because we think it or feel
it like, just because we feel incompetent doesn't mean we

(37:26):
are like that we can't do this thing that we
want to do. Or just because we feel dissatisfied with
our lives doesn't mean that we're actually falling behind. So
a mentor helped me by saying, like, yeah, take your
problems seriously, but don't take them too serious. Like hold
your problems as if you're holding a small animal, like

(37:48):
a hamster or like a little bird, and so you
have to hold them, you know, firmly, like you have
to take it seriously so that they don't run away,
you know, but if you hold them too tightly, you're
going to make a big mess. So that holder problems
lightly has been very helpful to me, and I try
to pass that on to clients as well.

Speaker 3 (38:08):
So I have a question for you that I think
about a lot. And this is a slight deviation, but
I'm curious how you think about this, because with thoughts
and emotions, there seem to be two sort of approaches
in psychology that I have seen. I'm overgeneralizing here, but
one approach is the little bit more acceptance and commitment

(38:30):
therapy type thing, a little bit more Buddhist type thing,
which is, your thoughts and feelings are just things that arise,
you know, that come out of causes and conditions. Don't
let them run your life, don't pay a ton of attention.
The other seems to be sort of the psychoanalytic approach
or the depth psychology approach, which says, everything that you
feel is a message, right, and you've got to pay

(38:52):
attention to what these things are telling you. And I
find that I end up needing to use both those approaches,
but I often don't know when to do which that's.

Speaker 4 (39:04):
A great question.

Speaker 1 (39:05):
So maybe I'm coming down on one side of your
question by invoking acceptance signifented therapy, where the gurus there,
you know, say, essentially, do what works for the context.

Speaker 4 (39:18):
Okay, and context can.

Speaker 1 (39:20):
Be what we kind of literally think of as context,
like the situation at hand, but context can also be
like our genetics, our history, like everything that's brought us
to the present moment, and like, let's do what works,
let's do what's functional for the situation the context at hand. So, weirdly,

(39:41):
even though that's an act concept there, maybe what works
is some depth psychology. Maybe what works is yeah, some
analytic stuff. So You're right, it is hard to know
what's correct per se. But I think that brings us
back to our conversation about flexibility, and we'll try something.
If we find that that's not what we needed, we

(40:01):
can do something else that's okay, it's not you know,
a one and done exam for like, Okay, decide right now,
what's going to work?

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Go.

Speaker 3 (40:10):
Yeah, that leads us into another domain that you talk
about of perfectionism I think is worth talking about, which
is emotional perfectionism. And this is an idea that only
kind of came across my radar semi recently. Tell me
what emotional perfectionism is.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
Yeah, it's being appropriate in one's felt or demonstrated emotions.
So it's essentially when we've learned that emotion is a
response to a particular situation as opposed to how we
actually feel inside.

Speaker 4 (40:46):
So an example might be.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
That I say that customer service is entirely predicated on
sort of this performative emotional perfectionism, like service with a smile,
Like the salesperson is acting how they should or how
is appropriate as opposed to how they might really feel
about the situation. So sometimes that's appropriate, right, Like in
a job interview, of course we're going to act excited

(41:10):
about the prospect of working there. At a funeral, of
course we're going to act, you know, sad or concerned
or whatnot. But if that becomes our go to, If
how we feel both inside and what we show on
our face is determined by the situation as opposed to
how we feel, then it can come off as feeling

(41:32):
to us like empty or fake or phony. And then that,
you know, over months and years and decades, can leave
us sort of emotionally bereft.

Speaker 3 (42:03):
I think about emotional perfectionism also in the sense of like,
I shouldn't feel X right, And I think this gets
us into a lot of trouble. And I think everybody
has their own variation on it, right. Mine tends to
be these days something like you've been talking to people
about these ideas for a decade, you've done eight hundred interviews,

(42:24):
you've been in recovery for thirty years, Like why do
you feel that way? Like you know better, you can
do better, and that is just a really unhelpful way
of thinking. But I think everybody has their own variation
of that. You know, of I should be better than
this by now, or I shouldn't respond this way, or
I shouldn't respond that way. And I think when we

(42:47):
look at behavior, it's really helpful to say like, Okay,
I probably shouldn't act that way. You talked about mister Rogers.
He has some line. I won't get it right, But
basically everybody has all kinds of feelings and that's fine, right.
What matters is what we end up doing with them.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
Right, Yeah, you're getting into the difference between feelings and behavior. So,
for example, so I had a client who came in
for fear of public speaking. So at work, his boss,
in his evaluation said, basically, you need to take more space,
like we need to hear more from you in meetings.
You know, you need to volunteer for conferences and presentations.

Speaker 4 (43:23):
We need to hear you talk more.

Speaker 1 (43:25):
And my client had sort of this idea that not
only did he have to perform well so be articulate
or like have a big impact on his audience, but
he also.

Speaker 4 (43:37):
Had to feel confident while he did it.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
And so when he inevitably, you know, felt anxious before
a presentation or kind of questioned himself before he spoke
up in a meeting and was like, oh.

Speaker 4 (43:47):
Is this is this relevant?

Speaker 1 (43:48):
Do people really want to hear this like he had
done it wrong because he had deviated from that emotional perfectionism.
I need to feel confident, you know, before I speak,
And so we really worked on trying to shift from like,
well feel it. And then the thing you can control
is your behavior. You can't control how you feel. If
you could do that, you would have done that by now.
You know, anyone who has ever been told, you know,

(44:10):
just relax, you know as it knows that you can't.
You can't control how you feel. But what we can control.

Speaker 4 (44:18):
By and large is our behavior.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
So, you know, regardless of how my client felt, he
could make a comment in a meeting, he could get
up and you know, introduce the next speaker. He can
control his behavior even if he feels like his organs
are rearranging themselves inside him.

Speaker 3 (44:34):
Yeah, it's a really good example. Let's talk about something
that at first glance doesn't look like it's related to perfectionism,
which is procrastination for sure.

Speaker 1 (44:47):
Yeah, so procrastination. It took me a very long time
to realize that procrastination is not a time management problem,
that's really it's an emotion regulation problem. So Yeah, perfectionism
absolutely drives perrocrastination. Aversive tasks require quite a bit of
like self regulation, you know, like we have to focus,

(45:07):
we have to like, you know, sort of figure out
what we're doing, and you know, self regulation deteriorates under
emotional distress.

Speaker 4 (45:17):
So therefore, you know, if.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
We're setting these perfectionistic standards, you know, we are setting
personally demanding standards that might even be like too high
for anyone to reach, but then we feel like we
have to reach it or else we're inadequate. Like, of
course we're going to feel distressed and overwhelmed, and then
that is going to put mood repair front and center.

(45:42):
In order to do the aversive task, we need to
make ourselves feel better. So then procrastination steps in as
a coping mechanism. So it's a one two punch because
procrastination not only allows us to avoid the task that's
making us feel bad, you know, overwhelmed, incapable, inadequate, but
we immediately replace it with something that makes us feel better.

(46:02):
So like I'm going to scroll through social media, or
like I'm going to deep clean my apartment and feel productive,
or I'm going to grind through my email and like, oh,
this needs to get done, you know, so you can
feel virtuous.

Speaker 3 (46:12):
Until you are on the other side of it, and
now you feel worse about yourself because you procrastinated and
you dread the task more than you did before. It's
this really weird thing because the minute that you do
say yes, essentially oh, I'll do it later, and you
go do something else. There's an immediate feeling of like, oh, okay,
that feels good, but like drugs, it wears off and

(46:35):
then you're like, oh boy, I think I may have
made this worse. And I think that's so true. It's
not about time management but emotion management. And when I
talk about or work with people on procrastination, really any
kind of trying to change your behavior. I think there's
two key components. The first is what I refer to
as structural, meaning do I know what I'm going to do?

(46:58):
Is the task broken down small enough? Do I know
how to do it? Have I set up my environment
so I don't get distracted? It's all it's structural things,
and that can often go a long way, And there
is still the moment where even if I know what
I'm supposed to do, even if the task is small.
I'm at that moment of choice, and then you're right,

(47:18):
that is all about my emotion management. It's all about
what am I saying to myself, what am I feeling?
And what can I say to myself that will just
get me over that hump. And I think that's why
buying more and more planners or you know, buying a
system to stock procrastination can be helpful, but it's often

(47:39):
only half of the problem, or sometimes it's way less
than that, and everybody's a little bit differently. So I
think always getting the structural out of the way first,
because that's the easy part. It's easy relatively to figure out,
like Okay, let me take this big task, break it
into little tasks, et cetera. It's harder to manage your
emotions in that moment. But ultimately that is, like you said,

(48:01):
what we have to be able to do. You also
talk about something you call it procrastination, par fait, say
a little bit more about what that means to you.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
So in perfectionistic procrastination, we layer on all these sentimentary
layers of negative emotion that then we have to regulate
and work through, and so it could be unrealistic standards.
So you were talking about the structural issues, and I
agree that that quote unquote should be easy. But I know,

(48:32):
you know, sometimes if I'm not sure what the first
step is, I'll think to myself, well, I should.

Speaker 4 (48:37):
Know the first step. Why don't I know how to do?

Speaker 3 (48:39):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (48:39):
You know, but like I think we can use some
self compassion, We can use some you know, like of
course I don't know the first step. Why should I
know how to update my website? You know, to get
around that? Okay, yes, so yeah, unrealistic standards.

Speaker 3 (48:50):
This is the year I should have said not easy,
easier perhaps than emotions.

Speaker 4 (48:54):
Yes, it gets thorny.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
Right, So there's the unrealistic standards of like I should
know how to do this, or I should do this
all in one go, or I, you know, need to
do this like so thoroughly, that like to the standard
that no one would ever expect of me. So that's one.
Next is there could be this layer of fear of failure.
So you know, remember that like those of us with

(49:17):
some perfectionism put a lot of pressure on ourselves to
do things well and correctly, and so the prospect of
making a mistake, you know, either in outcome or in process,
you know, as a callback to our conversation about like,
oh I did it, but I didn't feel confident. You know,
like if there's any aspect of us possibly failing to
meet our standards, then of course that's going to cause

(49:40):
some distress. There's procrastination related self criticism, like maybe we've
procrastinated already, and you know, we instead of doing our work.

Speaker 4 (49:49):
Like baked the loaf of banana bread, or.

Speaker 1 (49:51):
Just scroll through Instagram for three hours, or you know,
played boulders Gate three for eight hours, you know like that.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
Then then we have what is Balderskate three.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
It's a video game. So I have two teenage boys,
so I'm plugged in. This is a very popular game.
I have an acquaintance who calculated that all of twenty
twenty four she spent two weeks of you know, like
twenty four hours, like the time she could have spent
sleeping or awake playing balder Skate three. So anyway, okay,

(50:23):
so we might use that to procrastinate, and then we
feel guilty like, oh my god, I wasted two weeks
of my life playing this video game, and so now
we have to regulate that guilt or self criticism, And
then of course there's just kind of general self criticism,
like when we're procrastinating or when we feel incompetent before
a task, you know, we may say like why am

(50:45):
I so stupid? Stop being lazy? Why ah I can't
do this, I'm so disorganized. You know, there's just the
general self criticism that then in addition, we have to
regulate all of that negative emotion. So yeah, perfe all
the way.

Speaker 3 (50:58):
Yeah, I love it. I often think about like upward
and downward spirals, and what we're talking about here is
sort of a downward spiral. You start layering these different
things on and each one takes you down a level
and a level, and then you feel bad about what
you did, and it just circles. Let's just talk quickly
about a couple of strategies for releasing past mistakes. So,

(51:20):
if you're somebody who does tend to amplify your past mistakes,
you think about them a lot. What can we do
to start letting go of some of those one or
two or both of those.

Speaker 4 (51:32):
So one of the things we can do.

Speaker 1 (51:34):
I took this from doctor Russ Harris, who's the author
of The Happiness Trap, and he's a big wig in
acceptance and commitment therapy. And one of the techniques that
I really like is called physicalizing. And this gets a
little woo woo, so stick with me here, But it
starts with imagining like negative emotions like guilt or shame
over mistakes as a physical object within your body. So first,

(51:58):
like bring your mistake to mind, and it's likely going
to be a physical experience. So maybe like you'll feel
the heat start to rise, maybe you'll feel like some
pressure behind your eyes, whatever that feeling, that physical feeling
is imagine it as an actual, like physical object. So
and you can drill down on the details, so like

(52:19):
think about like what color it is, is it transparent
or opaque? Is it heavy or light? So for example,
like I had a client who regretted dropping out of school,
like thought that that was a mistake, and the object
that he envisioned was this like kind of sopping black

(52:41):
sponge in the center of his chest. Okay, So then
once you've got that sort of pictured like in your
mind's eye, like placed wherever you feel it in your body,
then what do you want to do is to make
room for it within your body. So you inhan and
as you inhale, you sort of like create some space

(53:04):
around that object, and then like just to continue breathing
in and out, and as you breathe in, like create
that room opening up, allowing that object to be there.
You're not trying to get rid of it. You're not
trying to squeeze it out. You're creating some space for it.
And ironically, you know, this can't be the outcome, it

(53:26):
can't be what we expect to happen. But what often
happens is that when we make room for feeling bad,
we often feel less bad because by you know, as
I said before, like mistakes are only a problem if
we think they shouldn't be happening, and so by allowing it,
that feeling will often diminish. And I really like that

(53:47):
because it's sort of a body based way to make
room for the negative emotions of like guilt or other
emotions that go along with making mistakes. So that's been
helpful both to meet and clients.

Speaker 3 (54:01):
So listener and thinking about that and all the other
great wisdom from today's episode. If you were going to
isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what
would it be? Remember, little by little, a little becomes
a lot. Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action,
and I want to give you a tip on that,
and it's to start small. It's really important when we're

(54:23):
trying to implement new habits to often start smaller than
we think we need to, because what that does is
it allows us to get victories. And victories are really
important because we become more motivated when we're feeling good
about ourselves, and we become less motivated when we're feeling
bad about ourselves. So by starting small and making sure
that you succeed, you build your motivation for further change

(54:46):
down the road. If you'd like a step by step
guide for how you can easily build new habits that
feed your good Wolf, go to good Wolf dot me,
slash change and join the free masterclass. I think that's
a great technique, and I think think it's a good
place for us to wrap up. You and I are
going to continue in the post show conversation for a
little bit talking about two things that we did not

(55:08):
get to. One is comparing ourselves to others, which is
a common theme and a real challenge, and the other
is my favorite in this book, which I relate to
which is why do we turn fun into a chore?

Speaker 4 (55:21):
Oh you're speaking my language?

Speaker 3 (55:23):
Yes, In the post show conversation, we're going to cover that. Listeners,
If you would like to become part of our community,
which would allow you to get this post show conversation
and all the others as well as a special episode
I do each week, And you would like to support
us because we are a small podcast that can really
use your support, go to one ufeed dot net slash

(55:45):
join Ellen. Thank you so much for coming on. I
thought the book was excellent and I really enjoyed this conversation.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Oh, thank you so much for having me on again.
It's always a delight to talk to you.

Speaker 2 (56:11):
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consider making a monthly donation to support the one you
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It's our way of saying thank you for your support.

Speaker 3 (56:27):
Now.

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