PERFECTIONISM & ME

After writing about my personal development journey earlier this week, I thought I would dive a bit deeper into the perfectionism side of things.  I only truly realized I was a perfectionist about a year and a half ago.  I came across it via The Perfectionism Project, a fabulous podcast that really resounded with me.  I then started looking into the work of Brené Brown, who is a psychology researcher, author, podcaster and much more.  Her work is really where I have gotten a lot of my insights about my perfectionism from. 

LIVING GRACEFULLY

I've always struggled with setting an intention for how I want to live my life.  A happy life?  A meaningful life?  It wasn't until I came across the idea of living gracefully that anything really resounded with me.  Gracefully to me means having a more positive impact than negative,  inspiring myself and others by my actions, being true to myself and being at peace and content with my life as a whole.

In a lot of ways, living gracefully is the opposite of perfectionism, which is why tackling perfectionism was an important task to bring me more towards my graceful ideal.  It involved learning to feel comfortable in my own skin, be proud of myself, and practice massive self-acceptance and self-love. 

"Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgement, and shame." p. 75

I pride myself on being a fairly honest person.  Aside from the occasional white lie, I tend to be very honest with people and don't spread lies or rumours.  What I realized though embarking on this journey is how dishonest I've been in so many ways.  I've pretended to be someone I'm not in countless interactions.  I've morphed away from my true self to fit in, to play small and to make others feel better about themselves.  Being honest wasn't true until I started showing up as my authentic self and stopped changing to suit other people.

LIFE PARALYSIS

This is the idea that we stay frozen or stuck in life, missing opportunities and putting off following dreams because of our fear of imperfection and judgement.  For me, this was fear of failure and experiencing shame and disappointing others.  I've lived a very "admirable" life so far, doing well in school, pursuing University and then a master's degree, flying under the radar just enough that what I was doing was approved of but never big enough to be criticized or for me to risk failing.

There came a point when the disappointment I felt at holding myself back became too much to bear.  I was resentful of people who got to live life on their terms and I started to feel guilt at how safe I've always played it.  I knew that I needed to outgrow my fear of putting myself out there and that it would require me to step outside my comfort zone. 

MY PERFECTIONISM

Perfectionism for me was encouraged in school, as I was praised for getting good grades.  I remember the exact point in high school when I shifted from being an average student to a student who excelled.  The first few times I brought assignments and tests home and got praised for them made me feel the most loved.  But then this became the standard, set by myself and those around me to always do the best at school.  There stopped being pride in me doing well and why I didn't get 100% started to be the criticism.  This became such an internal dialogue for me that even in University I would feel relief at doing well, but never pride in myself unless it was an A+.  I was never good enough.

I also valued exhaustion and busyness as a status symbol.  I've bragged about how busy I am and how tired I am by how hard I work all the time.  I gained so much pride in myself for being and looking as busy as everyone else.  Even though I couldn't tell you what important things I was doing with that time, nor how I enjoyed the things I was creating.  For me, it was all about being perceived as a hard-worker and always reminding people about how busy I was. 

This desire for external approval seeped into other areas of my life too.  Most notably in people-pleasing.  I've liked to be perceived as helpful to everyone, self-sacrificing and always saying yes to any request for help.  This started to be a way in which people manipulated me to always help them out- and I went along with it willingly, because the milli-second of gratitude I received in return contributed to my sense of belonging and approval.  I did not have appropriate boundaries and lived in constant fear of no longer being desired.  Later, when I realized I deserved more gratitude than was given, that I was being manipulated by some people and that it wasn't 2-way help, I became very resentful. 

One thing I've learned about perfectionism that has helped me overcome my own is that from a psychology point of view, your past experiences change your brain development and influence how you act now.  This was helpful for me because as I dove into working on perfectionism I felt like there was something wrong with me.  Why was I this way?  But the truth is, that the way I was raised, by family and society, and my past experiences created my perfectionism.  I developed perfectionist tendencies to cope during times when I felt unloved and when people and society told me I'm not good enough.  The fact that these tendencies are still active in my life today has more to do with the fact that I haven't done anything about them- yet -and nothing to do with me being a "bad" person or having the "wrong" mindset.  This realization gave me all the power to change my mindset, start making more positive experiences for myself and re-wire my thinking so that my brain can develop away from perfectionism on default.

WAITING FOR THE RIGHT TIME TO LOVE MYSELF

Conditional love is something that I have experienced a lot.  Both perceived from other people (hello people-pleasing tendencies), but also inflicted on myself.  I told myself that when I started feeling better or mastered a habit or finished a project, then I would be worthy of self-love.  I didn't consciously think this of course, but when unpacking the hurdles between where I was and self-love I realized that I was waiting until I proved I was deserving of self-love before I would give it to myself. There were conditions attached to my willingness to love myself.  It's no wonder that I felt everyone else had conditions too. 

One of the biggest feelings that held me back was shame.  Shame is a complex feeling that essential means "I am bad".  It can show up in a spectrum of extremes and the day-to-day, "micro" feelings of shame I experienced were probably the worst to overcome.  I felt guilty that I wasn't living up to other people's expectations of me: I'm not good enough & shame.  I always felt behind my unrealistic expectations of myself: I'm not good enough & shame.  I find myself judging others- shame.  I get called out for something I've done wrong- shame.  It was all over the place and instead of feeling it and realizing that it wasn't necessary for any of those situations… I put so much time and energy into making sure it didn't happen next time. 

 I also spent a lot of time engaging in "numbing behaviour".  For many people, this can be over-eating and over-drinking, but for me, it was mindless scrolling on social media and binge-watching TV.  I didn't know how to feel unwell without self-criticizing the feeling, so instead I would avoid it and numb it by spending excessive time on social media.  Unfortunately, numbing works- it makes the negative feelings feel less bad- but it also makes the positive feels reduced.  Because it doesn't discriminate between positive and negative feelings, life can begin to feel a bit dim.  Also, when I realized that numbing wasn't helping and stopped using these things to numb my emotions, my emotions became a roller coaster.  I felt my positive emotions much more fully, but also my negative emotions too.  It became challenging to be aware of this but not able to control my experience any more.  This is where self-compassion and self-love became a critical component of my journey.

MY CURRENT REALITY & WHAT I SPEND TIME WORKING ON

SELF COMPASSION

It has been key for me to start embracing my strengths AND struggles.  Reinforcing the belief that there is nothing wrong with me, even when I struggle, even when I feel un-well has been important.  Also, embracing my true strengths- not the things I wish I was good at -has allowed me to be more me, and learn to be proud of the person I am rather than the person I wish I was.  You can always change and grow into someone different if that's truly what you desire, but for me wanting to be different was out of fear and dislike for who I am, not motivated by healthy growth. 

Self-compassion was the first thing I needed to learn how to do.  Once I'd learned about all the perfectionist tendencies, I began criticizing myself for having them- it became another thing that made me "not good enough".  I'm a naturally self-aware person, so this meant that it was easy to see how much I was holding myself back, but I didn't know how to overcome those tendencies quite yet, so I was stuck with the awareness but not the tools and self-criticism began.  By having compassion with myself, letting it be okay that I was feeling helpless and minimizing the increase in "I'm not good enough" evidence, I was able to make progress on overcoming some of my perfectionist tendencies. 

With practice, I've been able to default to self-kindness over self-criticism more often than not.  This involved deciding to try and be kind to myself instead, whenever I noticed myself being critical.  And over-time the repetition has allowed me to more naturally be kinder to myself and not criticize myself nearly as much. 

HAPPINESS VS JOY

I've spent a lot of time thinking about happiness.  I think that it is something people promote a lot, using "happiness" as a metric to determine the quality of your like seems to be popular.  Instead, I've been focussing on joy and contentment.  Joyful moments can be created for myself and don't rely on circumstance as much as happiness does.  I have more control and joy feels like less of a metric of comparison.  Contentment for me is the ultimate feeling.  It's neither positive nor negative, happy nor sad, it's just a feeling I experience when I'm at peace with life and have faith that I'm moving in the right direction.  Joy and contentment are the main positive emotions I aim for these days. 

TIME OFF

Adequate rest and playtime is something that is talked about a lot in the perfectionism world.   I was programmed to achieve, achieve, achieve that even in my "rest" and "fun" time I had the intention of productivity and accomplishment.  I love cycling and what started as a hobby became an opportunity to achieve during my time off.  I felt good about accomplishing certain activities not just because of the endorphins but because of the approval of others.  This is not true rest nor play.  When I started making sure that my time off was truly productivity free, I started seeing resting and playing without guilt as productive.  Having proper time off makes me way more productive during my work time and thus increases my productivity. 

I do activities such as yoga, reading, watching TV, hobbies, and catch up with friends during my time off which brings a nice balance of rest and play to my work schedule.  The intention behind these activities is to do them without feeling guilty for not spending that time working.  By being deliberate and setting aside time to do the things that are fun and restful, I can show up as my best self in all areas of my life.

WHAT GROUNDS ME

I also think it's important to make time for my health and wellbeing.  I now make sure that I have healthy food on hand, that I make time to go shopping each week for said food, that I take time to meditate each morning, exercise regularly and keep my environment clean.  These are just a few of the aspects of my lifestyle that keep me grounded, but are things that I quickly disregarded with a perfectionist mindset in favour of being busy. 

The final thing that grounds me is a sense of love and belonging from others.  As a perfectionist and mega people-pleaser, I would search for love and belonging everywhere I went.  I've learned, however, to focus on getting this from a select few people and not worry about the rest.  Everyone in my life does not have to love me unconditionally, and I don't always have to feel like I'm belonging in a crowd.  As an introvert, I naturally seek out meaningful friendships, so I am lucky that I do have a few incredible loving friendships.  The rest aren't bad, but I'm no longer worried about having superficial friendships.  I don't need to be there for everyone all the time and I don't need to rely on the masses when I've got my few dependable ones.  It hurts less when a friend isn't there for me or I feel like I don't belong because I know there are a few people who love me unconditionally and that's enough. 


So that's the long version of the perfectionism story.  I bet there will be more editions to come, as I've learned that perfectionism is always changing how it shows up in my life.  Once I've overcome one aspect of it, another can sneak up.  But this is just part of the journey and I always want to be growing, so I'm okay with it.