What I'm Learning About Letting Go of Perfectionism
I recently found out that I am a perfectionist.
I actually thought of myself as pretty laid back, able to just put stuff out there without worrying about it being perfect, knowing failure is part of the process and willing to jump into things before I knew if I could do them or not.
But at the same time, I kept jumping from project to project, never quite feeling able to commit to things long term. I would post a lot and then delete the posts later, and I was constantly changing my Instagram bio — trying to nail down my “niche” which, when it comes to personal social media, is just a fancy business way of saying “trying to figure out how to summarize my purpose in life in under 80 characters” (no pressure).
I also noticed that I was generally stressed out. I had a primary care doctor, dentist, physical therapist, massage therapist and trauma therapist all repeatedly telling me that my body was tense, my nervous system was overactive and my muscles didn’t know how to relax. They all encouraged me to learn how to rest and relax, for the sake of my own health, but I didn’t know what else to do. I already strictly took evenings and weekends off work “to relax.” I already practice boundaries and say no to lots of things that I wish I could do and feel like my people pleasing has really decreased. I’ve learned not to feel everything everyone else feels in a co-dependent way, while still trying to be an empathetic and compassionate person. I took a week long tropical vacation, I work out, I eat well, I’ve spent years working through past things that might contribute to my current stress with a therapist. What else could I do?
I believe it was John Mark Comer who mentioned he struggles with perfectionism and described it in a way I hadn’t heard before, and I could completely relate. I started looking into it more, discovered The Perfectionism Project, and realized that I’m not as comfortable with failure as I thought I was, and I’m more addicted to keeping up a perfect self image than I wanted to believe. While I’m always excited to jump into a new thing, as soon as I start to feel like it’s not working as well as I’d hoped, I move onto the next shiny object in order to keep myself in the low-risk stage of a project, never fully succeeding, but never failing either. I loved the metaphor Sam from the Perfectionism Project gave — entrepreneurship is like deep cleaning a room: it gets worse before it gets better. And I was quitting in the dip, when everything felt chaotic and I was worried my vision would never become a reality, because that feels better than truly working hard, enduring and risking the possibility of still failing. My identity has been so wrapped up in succeeding and making sure people think I’m amazing, that I haven’t let myself endure through too much risk.
I’ve been binging the Perfectionism Project podcast this week and have felt less overwhelmed, checked things off my to do list that have been on there for months, and feel more clarity about my direction while simultaneously feeling less pressure to need clarity.
Here are a few of my key takeaways from the podcast:
Part of letting go of perfectionism is building self trust AND self trust doesn’t mean trusting that you will definitely make “the right” decision;
It means making a choice and then trusting yourself to be able to handle whatever results or negative emotions come up if you fail. You build self trust by not beating yourself up when you fail and by reminding yourself that you can get through this even if you’re disappointed of have regrets. If you believe you can tolerate failure, you’re more able to make decisions without fear and actually enjoy your life while still being wise and productive.
We use Overthinking as a way to feel productive without the risk of actually trying and failing.
If we overthink, we can procrastinate AND we can blame our overthinking/exhaustion/overwhelm if we fail instead of risking admitting that we took action, set truly achievable goals, worked really hard and still failed. Unachievable to do lists are more comfortable, because, of course we won’t succeed, but at least it’s not of our lack of intelligence or talent that caused us to fail — “we failed because we were overwhelmed.”
It gets worse before it gets better and “It’s not working” is a normal stage of every worthwhile project.
Every entrepreneur goes through the initial excitement and optimism and then the dip where they’re feeling tired but not yet seeing results. If they endure the dip, success is usually on the other side. I’ve been taking the feelings of the dip to mean that a project isn’t right for me, or it wasn’t a good idea, or it failed, instead of recognizing that as very very normal, getting comfortable with the feeling of failure and getting creative to try again, try another way, endure in the same way, etc until I see the results I want.
There is so much more I could share, and Sam has a lot of tips specifically around creating content that I know you will love if you are an influencer or any type of creator. Highly recommend a listen! Happy Monday :)