The Price of Perfectionism
What's the role that perfectionism plays in our lives? I mean, it can be a really good thing but it can also really hold us back. Let's dive in today to see how we can overcome perfectionism so that way we can step into the best fullest versions of ourselves.
In this podcast episode:
Catch up and Updates
What is Perfectionism?
Therapy
Allowing things to be messy
Not people pleasing
Setting boundaries
One step at a time
Transcript of the Episode:
Welcome to the very first episode that I'm actually recording in 2023! I like… cannot believe that we get to say that it is actually 2023. And today's episode is all about perfectionism. And I'm just going to be 100% honest here. For this year, I had this goal or dream or whatever, of us putting out these podcast episodes in other places, more than just the podcast space, maybe going into YouTube, making some actual videos of them. And because I'm doing something new, my perfectionism got to me. I've been sitting here for half an hour trying to figure out the best way to make this video look nice, and everything work correctly. And as you may know, I don't have a degree in audio, visual anything. So being a business owner, I learned a lot about these things. But I don't know, I don't know how to do this.
Catch up and updates
So as we take a step forward into our lesson, our podcast episode today, just remember that you and I are on the same page, or in the same place. And if you're listening to this, then this is the perfect time for you to listen to it. It doesn't exactly matter when you decided to tackle your perfectionism, which is probably why you clicked on this episode, because it is titled The Price of Perfectionism. And if you loved it so much, you wouldn't be like, let's dive into that and like de-colonize, or de-structure or de-condition it. I love it, it works for me, I'm going to keep going.
But you didn't. You chose to be here with me today. And so I'd love for you to hold that space for yourself to become uncomfortable. And allow yourself to grow. And allow the space here with you and I to help our relationship grow. So that I can support you in becoming a better teacher and a better person overall. And when I say that, we're going to get uncomfortable, I'm going to share things about myself. And I hope that it resonates within you and you are more than welcome to share things with me either through email or social media slide into my DMs. But as long as we remember that the whole point of getting better, the whole point of even taking a step forward is not to stand still.
And it is in that moment, when we shift our weight off of one foot, and we accelerate our body movement, we're throwing our equilibrium, off balance. That is what we are doing. The momentum comes from feeling out of balance and not 100% secure and not 100% safe before we land on that next foot. Now, if you've been walking for a while, it probably doesn't feel that big of a deal in your body as you are doing the physical movement of walking. But anytime you do that, theoretically with something new, it is very much like you're a baby and you're just taking that first step to do the physical movement of walking. So allow yourself to be a little uncomfortable because that's where the growth is.
All right, so with that it is January and I love to every so often catch you up with what's been going on in my life with Allied and again allow this space to be a little bit of a personal one. So this may or may not come as a shock to you but in 2023, Allied is purposely slowing down a little bit. And that feels really really really scary to say. My goals for 2024 are huge. And I really want to be able to be present for them.
So this year, what we've got going on January 11, we are hosting an incredible, incredible live training with Chelsea Schumaker, who's going to help us really understand how to advocate for our learners, and their need for physical movement in their PE classes. If you want to learn more about Chelsea, and really the why behind this whole presentation and see, you know what you can gather from learning from her, go to our last podcast episode, I believe it's episode 117. And I would do that like now, because we're under a little bit of a time crunch because a webinar is this week.
And then of course, after that January 25th through 27th, we have the international O and M online symposium. I'm recording this at the very beginning of January, and we already have 400 people signed up, oh, my gosh, you guys. I really want to see if we can get to 500, like we did last year, and just really reach as many people as possible with this incredible and epic event. It's really hard for me to put it into words what it means to be at the symposium. And not only take the ideas, you know, during that year, but to use them year after year after year, and to connect with people all around the world, without me having to leave my house. There's nothing else like it. You can't get this level of learning and this level of camaraderie without having to go overseas. And I'm just honestly so grateful for the opportunity to be there and to be your guide for that.
In March, we're going to launch Clarity again and but we're going to do it in a much different way. And I'm really excited to share more information about that. We are restructuring our Clarity membership to offer our members much more. What I want for our Clarity membership is for anybody to be able to easily access all of the lesson plans, all of the materials. And now we have over 200 lesson plans. So it gets to be a lot, it's a big library. And I want to help you to be able to consistently teach impactful lessons no matter how much of a time crunch you're under. And we have some new fun things that are coming down the pipe for that, but I'm gonna let the Clarity members know first and then we'll talk a little bit more about that after the symposium.
And this summer, I'd like to host a leadership retreat for people who are really invested in orientation and mobility as a profession and watching it grow. I hope to do this in conjunction with AR and OMSA. But we'll see… We'll see what happens. So I'm putting it out there, right, you watch me fail all the time and this is just another iteration of that. If the Leadership Retreat doesn't come to pass, or, you know, we don't make the moves that I think that our community can make this year, then it'll still happen. It'll just be on a different timeline. And that's okay. And I want you to watch me fail, so that you feel more prepared, better able to make those challenging moves and to take that step forward.
What is Perfectionism?
And so that leads us to our topic for today. And our topic for today is on perfectionism. We know that being a perfectionist works and we are living in a capitalistic society, we're not going to say that we're not. And we're not going to say that hustle culture isn't real. And we’re also not going to pretend like there aren't benefits to being a perfectionist.
I am a classic perfectionist here, okay. What you may not see as like mediocre, I'm often perceiving it as like, Oh, that's not good enough. We could do better. But when I do that, I also have to think how much am I hindering myself. If you're listening, you probably feel the exact same way as I do.
Let's dive into what perfectionism is and this is by brown.edu and this is my favorite definition because I think it really shares what perfectionism really is. And it says
Perfectionism is a set of self defeating thoughts and behaviors aimed at reaching excessively high, unrealistic goals.
Again, a set of self defeating thoughts and behaviors aimed at reaching excessively high, unrealistic goals. None of that sounds good, excessively high, unrealistic goals. We don't live in a culture or a society that says, lower those goals, honey, that's too much, and nor what I want us to. Sometimes our goals have to be unrealistic. Problem is what happens within ourselves before or while that's happening.
Let's be honest, we don't live in a culture that says, let's set realistic, lower goals. How do we even know what's realistic? How do we know what we can achieve or what we can't achieve? And if we do set these lower goals, are we missing the mark in and of itself? I think setting high goals is great. The problem comes in with what we tell ourselves about ourselves. What we make it mean when we don't hit those goals.
A 2019 study by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill explored the increase in perfectionism in birth cohorts, this is from 1989 to 2016. I don't fall in there. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. But obviously, there's a growing rate of perfectionism. And they actually defined three different types of perfectionism, Self-oriented, Socially-prescribed and Other-oriented perfectionism.
Self-oriented perfectionism is defined as attaching a rational importance to being perfect, having unrealistic expectations of oneself and holding punitive self evaluations. Socially-prescribed perfectionism exists when individuals believe that their societal context is excessively demanding. Others judge them harshly and that they must be perfect to get approval from others. And then, Other-oriented perfectionism happens when individuals impose unrealistic standards on those around them and evaluate them critically.
If you are an Enneagram one, like I am, so I'm going to speak on this one, my inner self critic, will get to you too. It will say, you're not doing this correctly, you're not doing this perfectly, you need to do better and be better at all times. Oh, my goodness, how much does that affect our lives, like for real? On the positive, it allows us to be more productive, it might allow us to reach for goals that we wouldn't have reached for without it, it might feed into that driver that we have, that says that we are not good enough. And if we do x, y, z, we can become good enough. So we're feeding into something within ourselves.
Perfectionism isn't bad. The negative part comes, and I'm not saying negative as in bad, I'm saying negative as in like subtracts from your quality of life; It comes when it creates anxiety, extra stress, and self criticism. It's a negative self evaluation that we either give ourselves, we think other people are giving to us, or we give to other people. And that plays a huge part in how we act. Because if we are criticizing ourselves, we won't take as many risks.
Let's think of the Wright Brothers, when they decided to build an airplane. Had they stopped at the first try, second try, third try? We wouldn't be able to go visit family and friends across the world. Within a day, within a few hours, sometimes they kept going. And they had to put all of their self criticism away and keep trying. But oftentimes, in our day to day lives, it's the small things, the small decisions that we decide not to do. Remember, we typically get a 30% show break to our webinars and our live events. It's pretty good. I'm happy with it. But what's going on with the other 70% of people who register for something, and then don't show up. We've all been there. And because I have been there. I know that a lot of times.
It's really the things that we're telling ourselves in our head that stop us from going. A lot of times we say things like, what if this doesn't work, and we're putting so much pressure on this one hour or few days of our lives or we're about to potentially change everything. Oh, this is gonna be the one thing that makes everything else better. There is no one thing. Or we say I can't miss a student, because I will look like a bad teacher.
When we care so much about what other people think about us, we don't stand in integrity with what's actually best for ourselves in our students, you can make up the lesson. I know, t's not the easiest thing to schedule makeup lessons, I'm not saying that. But you can, you can make it up, you can plan around it. You can take a webinar while you're eating, you can do the symposium while you're eating, and take that as your lunch break. Or they say I don't have enough time, I don't have enough money, I don't have enough XYZ. I don't have enough, like, as though more is going to come if you keep doing the things that you're doing right now. Because that's actually not how things work, what got you here will not get you there. How you've been behaving up until now is different than how you're going to need to behave to be the person that you want to be. So making the same decisions from who you were up until now is not going to help you get to be the person that you want to be. But the first step in that is believing in yourself. And that means you have to quiet the self criticism and quiet expectation on one other thing to do everything for you.
If you get one idea from a presentation, one idea from a day at the symposium, you are golden, because you could take that one idea and use it to transform your teaching all together, or starting to do the presentation walkthroughs for the symposium. And this is one of my favorite times of year because I get to see the behind the scenes of what's percolating before you guys take it and run with it, I get to see the presentations before they're at their peak. And I get to see the combinations of ways that people are thinking about things with active learning and O and M together. Or Melody Brown is gonna be talking about words that matter. And she actually has a background in psychometry. I had asked her what psychometry was. She'll get into it more at this symposium. But what she does is she's looking at how your brain functions, and then how your body moves, and combining those.
And so oftentimes, we hold ourselves back so much, because we don't think that that one thing is going to solve everything, when its job isn't to solve everything. Its job is to help you take one step forward. Because that is how we can combat perfectionism. That is how we get better. We don't get better by jumping out of an airplane and building or shoot on the way down every single time. We get better by slowly taking one step forward. We don't have to go from here to Africa in one shot, we can literally get on, you know, just take the step to book the flight, then get on the plane, then do this, then one step at a time. It doesn't happen overnight. And if we can just relax our expectations of ourselves, the expectations we think other people have of us and the expectations that we have of other people. Well, life just gets to be more fun. And that will help you lead to a more balanced life.
And who doesn't want that? Because the biggest reason teachers leave is due to burnout. So while yes, I will teach you all the O and M skills. It's great. You'll also hear me talk a lot about burnout and overcoming overwhelm. Because that's what's gonna keep you in this field. And you can't be great in this field if you leave. You can't be great if you're burnt out. You can't be great if you wake up every day upset at yourself for not living up to these unrealistic expectations that we have.
So then the question becomes, okay, I see the issue Kass, thank you. It's been about half an hour of my life. While we're here with you, how do we get better? How do we take that one step forward. And if you're like me, even just talking about relaxing these things, or just you just rest, just relax, whatever. It's scary, it's so scary. Because you've gotten to where you are by hustling. And I know that because I hustle. And I spent many years hustling. And I can also say that even in this season, or it's the beginning of January, and it feels like the rest of the world is running towards their goals. And I'm like, Man, can I just have another cup of hot cocoa, I really enjoyed drinking hot cocoa, by my tree. Can I just keep doing that? I did take down my tree. But I just want to go slowly. And it feels like the rest of the world is going so fast. And running and reaching towards their goals. And I love that. And I'm there with it. And I'm also really scared to slow down this year.
So here's what I'm doing. And I hope that you take some of these ideas, and you join me in them.
Therapy
Oh, my gosh, the first one doesn't get spoken about enough. And that's therapy. Are you on therapy? Are you in therapy yet? I remember my best friend for a while. She was in therapy. And I was like, oh, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. But I can't afford it. Well, that sounds like a great idea. But where would I put it? I don't even have the time. And now I'm like, my therapist could not take a week off. What are you doing? Why are we not meeting? I can't. Talk therapy, any kind of therapy that you can get into, I highly recommend anything. It's crucial for everybody's mental health, your physical health, go to the gym, mental health, you need some form of therapy. I don't care how good your friends are. You need some form of therapy.
EAS, something I leaned on a lot when I had a full time job. I took as many EAS sessions as I possibly could, if you can, if you're even thinking about it, I urge you to seek therapy. The people who are Type A. It's kind of like, Have you ever tried to teach a learner how to lean back vestibularly, leaning backwards is so scary. It's so scary that teaching our learners to lean backwards is often the job of the OT. That's how scary it is. You and I can cross streets for a living, we can walk upwards on a down escalator, which is for some reason, my most fearful thing, I can be on any intersection, but escalator skills, I dread them, I dread them, I dread them, I dread them.
Anyway, we're certified to do really scary stuff. And yet the OT typically teaches our learners how to go backwards, just move their body backwards, because it is that scary and it is that… just deep in our sensory nervous system. And if you're a perfectionist like me, you may also feel that deep sense of fear. That's okay. therapy can help you get through it.
Allowing things to be messy
The fear of failure is hard. Allowing yourself to not be the A player in all areas. So like I'm this total perfectionist. And yet, when I'm in a group of people I fall, I don't get recognized very much no matter how hard I work, because I'm pretty quiet and and I do things with honey and not vinegar. So I don't typically rub people the wrong way. And it looks like progress is slower. It's not… it's sustainable, but it looks like progress is slower. And oftentimes, that means that I try to work harder, and I try to gain the recognition. But I just have to remember that no matter how hard I hustle, no matter how hard I try. It's okay If I don't get the recognition, it's okay. If I'm not the A player in the room, it's okay. I'm okay. Because my self worth is not tied to whatever happens at a staff meeting. It's not. Although it's really hard. It's not.
Not people pleasing
And with that, the fourth one I would say is letting people think what they are going to think about you not being concerned about what other people think. Not people pleasing, allowing them to be wrong. Can you allow somebody to be wrong about you? When you cancel a student because you want to attend a training, and they passive aggressively say something on Facebook, can you allow them to be wrong about you and not have to defend yourself? Do your job, make up the lesson, but know that you taking time out for training, or for other purposes, is often needed.
Setting boundaries
And then the last one is to set boundaries with yourself. We talk a lot about work life boundaries. But we don't always talk about the boundaries that you're going to have with yourself for yourself. So for example, maybe a boundary that you need to start implementing is to stop scrolling during your lunch breaks and use that time to plan or maybe a new idea or boundary that you have with yourself is you actually write down all of your ideas and you trust yourself that they're going to be good enough. You can keep a note on your phone in like the notepads section. However, you want to do it if you keep a notebook with you. But again, it's it's like all or nothing thinking that we can do if we have this great idea on a Sunday afternoon. But we don't want to turn it into a work session. Can you jot the note down somewhere else.
One step at a time
And actually, this one came into my head, but it wasn't on the outline. It's something I struggle with, if you've ever seen my calendar, which many of you guys have, create whitespace. Can you create whitespace and allow yourself time to just be starting off with just a little bit of time.
So those are my ideas, y'all. I think perfectionism is really, really big to start talking about, it's really big to hone in on who you want to be, who you want to become, the teacher that you want to be. And envision that teacher. Now, the gap between where you are right now and where you are going, doesn't need to be a huge stressful one, that you're beating yourself up all along the journey. And that's all the perfectionism is doing. It's not necessarily the driver, your excellence is the driver, your productivity is the driver, your amazing teaching skills, and your drive. Those are the driver. Those are what's making you take steps forward.
Your perfectionism actually isn't helping you, it's holding you back with the self criticism, or perceived criticism from others or your criticism onto others. So one thing I really like to do every day is I sit down and I think about my goals. And then I just kind of think backwards, what do we need to do to get those goals done, and make the decisions from that person, not from the person who's scared, but from the person who's already doing it? And who's doing it in a way that's not burnt out? That's not overwhelmed. That's not saying hey, how can I get over this perfectionism? But who has already started to take steps forward towards it? And no, we're not getting meta, like, be more perfect so you can get out of your perfectionism.
Now, that's not the point. The point being what would the person that you want to become? What would they do? What would they value? How would they make it happen for themselves and for the people around them? That. That right there. That's your key. That is your step forward, as much as you can live from that person. then you'll just take one step forward, one step at a time.
So as we wrap up this episode, I'm so glad that you stuck it out with me. Remember to come to the webinar on January of 11. I think that's in two days, one day, one day. If you are listening to this on the 10th. That presentation will be dropped as a podcast episode like we've been doing kind of recently, next week on the 17th. But it will only be open or available until that Friday, and you can't get CEU credit for it. If you just listen to the podcast episode, so register for the webinar, come join us the replay will be live until Sunday the 15th.
And then Tuesday, the 17th will drop that webinar as an episode here. So you can listen to it and take in all the goodness, you won't be able to get CEU credit for it though, if you do it here as a podcast episode. And then and then and then, and then the 25th is a symposium. So regular registration for the symposium closes on January 19, January 19, January 19, I do not want you to miss it.
We have opened up a late registration that will open on the 20th. It's more expensive. It's totally your call what you want to do, and that will stay live until February 6 to eighth. And then the symposium videos will close on February 24. So that's what you have to look forward to. I cannot wait for you to be here at the symposium with us. It's going to be absolutely amazing. And yeah, it's gonna be great. If you have any questions shoot me a DM. I mostly hang out on Instagram @alliedindependence but you can find me on Facebook or LinkedIn.