How to be a Recovering Perfectionist

!!!How to be a recovering perfectionist in five easy steps!!!

Oh, how I wish it were that simple. I mean, I’m an overachiever — if it were as straightforward as reading a blog post and painting by numbers, I would have done it years ago.

Being a perfectionist is complex (see part one and part two of this three-part series) and unravelling those patterns can be. So rather than pretend I have all the answers or that this is another you can get right if only you work hard enough at it, perhaps I can tell you about what helps me have more awareness and choice in my perfectionist tendencies.

These are written in no particular order other than how they occur to me. This is not a checklist! This is also quite a long article so please make yourself comfortable, grab a cup of tea and enjoy.

Awareness

I wouldn’t be an embodiment coach if I didn’t say something about awareness. It’s the foundation of making any change. Becoming more aware of my body and my emotions has been helpful but the game-changer for me has been becoming more aware of my thoughts. Learning to pay attention to the stories and thought loops that are on repeat in the background without me even noticing most of the time has been so powerful. Because those stories have power and those stories are often brutal.

It happened again just today. I’m feeling all sorts of not-nice things about riding a scooter here. I’m frustrated. I’m nervous. I’m craving my independence. I’m putting myself under so much pressure. And as I was talking to my partner about it, I slowly started to notice the backdrop to all this — that I have a story that I’m not coordinated, that I’m not good at ‘physical’ things, and that I won’t be safe. I don’t trust my body. Realising that’s the story that’s playing helps me make more sense of what’s going for me and allows me to tap into more compassion and more strategies for myself. Rather than focus on learning to drive my scooter, my attention is turning to how can I develop more trust in my own physicality. I’ve changed the exam question to one that I am excited to answer!

A Practice that Might Be Helpful to You Too

This comes from Authentic Relating and it’s known as Connect to Self. Close your eyes or soften your gaze and see how much you can notice about your own experience right now. What physical sensations can you feel? What information are you getting from your physical senses? What emotions are present for you? (top tip here — use actual emotional words like I feel sad or I feel angry or I feel joy. So often what we describe as a feeling is actually a thought or a story!). And finally, what are the thoughts and stories you have about what you’re experiencing? The practice here is not to change anything; it’s to pay attention to what is here, whether you think it’s nice or not, comfortable or not.

Try this if you’re an overthinker .

Acceptance

“The World is perfect as it is, including my desire to change it” ~ Ram Das

This might be one of the paradoxically hardest things I find about recovering from perfectionism. Surrender, softening, accepting… Even writing those words, I’m aware of the parts of me that judges that as weak, lazy, ineffective, dangerous even.

And yet, and yet, I’m increasingly learning those parts might be misinformed.

Welcoming everything, welcoming all the bits of myself and my experience that I don’t like and I wish were different, doesn’t mean I acquiesce or give up. For me, it means I am orientating to reality as it is. It means I stop fighting reality. I stop battling upstream and instead work with what is actually here. I start from where I am.

And it turns out that’s powerful. It turns out I have so much more energy when I stop battling myself. And that most of the things I don’t like aren’t nearly as terrible as I thought they were when I turn towards them instead of pushing them into the shadows, where they look even more like monsters.

Complete and finished are two different things.

A Practice that Might Be Helpful to You Too

This is a version of Yes pose from Embodied Yoga Principles . Sit so you can relax and gently round your spine. Take your arms out the side with the palms facing up, as if you were inviting someone to come in for a hug. You might even like to imagine a small child you like running towards — notice how you would welcome that child into your arms, regardless of whether that child was happy and smiling or in pain and crying. Take an easy breath in and, as you breathe out, say yes and see if you can relax your body a little more.

This one is a great practice for the overachievers and control freaks .

Appreciation

It seems to me that perfectionism is often driven by scarcity and dissatisfaction. When I’m in perfectionist mode, nothing is quite good enough. So I love the feeling of appreciation as an antidote to the shame and fear of the not-good-enough-ness.

A Practice that Might Be Helpful to You Too

It almost feels trite to mention the Japanese art of wabi-sabi — it’s in danger of becoming an overused metaphor. But there is something I find so soothing and joyful about finding the beauty in imperfection and impermanence. Maybe my imperfection and my humanity isn’t just something to be tolerated but something to be celebrated and enjoyed.

As the poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen said,

“Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.”

A Practice that Might Be Helpful to You Too

A trait of many perfectionists is that we are so focused on the goals that we forget to celebrate our progress. One easy way I like to do this is with a Ta-Dah! list. At the end of a busy day, I write down all of the things I did, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. Seeing all my achievements down on paper never fails to make me appreciate how much I am capable of doing, even on the days when I feel like I’ve got nothing done.

I also still do a little happy dance every time someone signs up to work with me!

Another good one for the overachievers and the perpetual procrastinators .

Stop Trying So Hard All the Time

If I had to sum up the benefit of practising cyclical wisdom in one sentence, it would be “there is a right time for everything”.

Cyclical living — being more in tune and attentive to my own rhythms — has been a permission slip to rest when I need to and to be all in at those times when my energy is high and I could conquer worlds.

Sometimes, that looks quite disciplined and structured. For example, I have Meeting-Free Mondays — I simply don’t say yes to meetings on Mondays (99% of the time!) because I’m often full of energy at the start of the week and I want to use that renewed focus and creativity on the things that matter most to me. I schedule my period in my diary so I can make sure I’m taking time off; actually, I’m increasingly taking a couple of days before my bleed off as these feel the hardest for me.

Other times, it’s much more intuitive. Like today. I got up early and went for a run, full of beans. But when I sat down to start working on this post, everything felt sticky and awkward; my body felt uncomfortable. So I took a break before I even started. I spent an hour in the hammock, chilling out and practising my Indonesian vocab. Then, when I started to get fidgety again (and my husband wouldn’t let me annoy him) I decided to open up the laptop again and I feel a sense of flow and ease.

A Practice that Might Be Helpful to You Too

If you’re curious about getting more in tune with your rhythms, I suggest you start with your circadian rhythm — the cycle of your day. A day is relatively short so it’s easy to start to spot the patterns and get feedback on what works for you. You might like to keep a diary for a couple of days, noting your levels of energy, focus and mood throughout the day, although most people I work with have a pretty strong intuitive sense of this already. For people who menstruate (and aren’t on hormonal contraception), you might want to do this every week over the course of your monthly cycle to see how your menstrual cycle relates to your circadian rhythm.

Then, it’s really a case of starting to adapt your schedule to your own rhythm. Have a lot of energy in the morning? Make sure you’re using this for the things that matter to you most — don’t waste it checking email and scrolling through social media. Feel low in the afternoon? Take a proper lunch break and maybe even a nap if you can, before getting back to work later on — I’m a huge fan of the ‘split shift’ in my working day.

If you’re also doing awareness-building practices like the one I suggested above, you’ll probably start to find it easier and easier to recognise your body’s subtle cues. Hint — getting fidgety, thirsty, hungry, or if you’re finding it hard to focus normally means you need to take a break and get that body moving

This is a good practice for every flavour of perfectionist !

Reveal Yourself and Your Experience

If cyclical living is my solution to my “trying too hard all the time” problem in my perfectionism, authentic relating has been my answer to the “I need everyone to think I’m perfect so I don’t get rejected” problem. Specifically, the practice of revealing my experience.

Right at the heart of perfectionism, there’s shame. As Brene Brown describes, we then carry around this twenty-ton shield hoping to protect ourselves but all we end up doing is isolating ourselves from the world. We desperately want to be accepted for who we are and yet we rarely allow the world to see us that way.

Revealing your experience is an invitation for people to join you in your world, exactly as it is. It’s a practice of making the hidden seen, the implicit explicit, and the unconscious conscious. Revealing my experience to myself, and then to others, builds on those practices of awareness and acceptance to say “this is me, right now, in all my humanity, strength and vulnerability”.

This is not easy. There is a part of me that is terrified of revealing myself in case I’m rejected. But the irony is, when I don’t reveal my experience, when I don’t admit my own truth, I’m rejecting me. So I lose either way. But when I lean into that vulnerability, when I take that risk, I never fail to have the sense that it’s okay. That I don’t need that other person to approve of me because I’m okay with who I am — I’m standing by myself.

Now, not everyone will get this. There will be people who tell you that you shouldn’t feel that way or who will try to ‘fix’ you. That is not your problem. Most likely, that person is deeply uncomfortable with those aspects and feelings inside themselves and they don’t know to deal with it. You do not need to be fixed, you are not broken, and it’s absolutely okay that you feel that way.

More often though, the experience I have when I reveal myself is warmth and open-heartedness. I know I love it when someone allows me to see them — it brings me so much joy to witness the aliveness in another person, no matter what flavour of aliveness that is. And nine times out of ten, I have a ‘me too’ moment. I realise that I am not alone in my experience. It’s not just me. I’m not broken or messed up or doing it wrong because this other human can relate to my experience. It turns out we’re all just humaning along together. The danger of silence and keeping it all in is that we start to believe we’re alone and we’re really not.

A Practice that Might Be Helpful to You Too

This is one of those practices that you kind of just have to do! I find the sentence stem “I’m noticing…” can help me name something that’s true in the experience I’m having right now. You can start with people who you feel safe with and start with things that feel easy to share e.g. a physical sensation or a comfortable emotion. You could even practice with yourself and a journal.

If you want more practice and support, please come along to Connection Cafe or one of my authentic relating workshops . These are spaces specifically designed to help you practice these skills in a safe and calibrated way so you can then apply these skills out in the wild!

A great practice for the people pleasers .

Two Final Realisations

So far, I’ve been sharing practices that have really helped me let go of some of my perfectionist tendencies. To finish, I’d like to share a couple of insights I’ve had along the way that I continually remind myself of.

“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.” ~ Alan Watts

I call myself a recovering perfectionist because recovery is a journey. It reminds me that this is not something I do once and I’ll get over. I have to keep up these practices. And I want to go one step further, inspired by this quote from Alan Watts. Life is more than a journey. The whole point is to enjoy it along the way. I guess that’s my way of saying don’t take this all too seriously. Being a recovering perfectionist can be fun. You get to have fun. In fact, being able to laugh at life and at your perfectionism is a good sign that you’re in recovery!

The second one is more of a warning. Perfectionism can be sneaky and I sometimes catch myself being perfectionist in my attempt not to be a perfectionist! Perfectionism is not something to defeat or overcome. Seriously, stop battling with yourself! The most important guide for me on this journey is being kind to myself, or at least not being mean. Perfectionism is a survival strategy. At some point, these patterns have kept you safe; they’ve been helpful otherwise you would have never have bothered. And let’s face it, perfectionism uses a huge amount of energy which you wouldn’t waste if it didn’t work for you at least some of the time. So please be kind to the parts of you that feel they need perfectionism for protection. Be gentle and allow your perfectionism to melt away. I’d love for us all to eventually put the shields down permanently but we can take our sweet time doing that. There is no rush.

A little note about trauma work

Healing some of my trauma has been critical for me. When my teacher first suggested it, I actually felt relief — it was like someone had told me that I wasn’t getting better at running because my ankle was broken. No matter how hard I had been trying, there was something holding me back, something that could be treated. I wasn’t broken but something in me needed to be healed.

“Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you, as a result of what happens to you.” ~ Gabor Mate.

I’m not a trauma therapist. I can recommend several though and my work is trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive.

You might be thinking “trauma is for people who fought in the war or had a difficult childhood, it doesn’t affect me.” But trauma lives in almost all of us in some way or another (even just from the society we find ourselves in) so please don’t neglect this aspect of your healing.

Originally published at https://www.thepracticalbalance.com on September 1, 2021.