Do you remember the DARE programs that started with First Lady Nancy Reagan in the 1980s (or as my kids tell me…in the ancient times:)? There motto, “Say No to drugs”. Those DARE programs are still around in some format in schools, still trying to tell our kids to “Say No to drugs” and I am not sure that its working out as well as we would like.
Saying “No” to perfectionism is also not working. I know we all want to “Say No”, yet then we all fall back into our same old ruts with it. We want to be the ideal. We think that if we are not working towards this ideal than we will not be making progress. We think that we are “lazy” or “don’t have a passion” for what we are doing if we aren’t striving towards perfection.
Listen…perfection is not just armor against shame as Dr. Brené Brown has so aptly demonstrated for us in her shame research over the last two decades. Perfectionism is a coreset. It is a self-inflicted restraint that we place on ourselves to look and be the way we think others want us to be, while it slowly takes our breath away and our own inner strength to be authentic in the face of what culture, society, or our family tell us to be.
So what are we to do to stop this beast? First of all, you must change your mindset about what you are doing. We will not be able to “stop” perfectionism’s pervasiveness in our society, nor remove it from the habitual way in which we approach our lives. What we can do is start to be more aware of it and make adjustments for how we will show up in the different areas of our life that perfectionism has taken up residence.
“That sounds hard Dr. Natalie!” Indeed, it is hard and the effort we exert to do this work will help us strengthen our resources in many other ways. Think of it like this, perfectionism becomes the rumble strip we work with in order to strength train our healthy emotional wellness skills. This is the mindset shift I am referring to. Instead of thinking of perfectionism as an enemy to get rid of, think of it as a set of weights that you are using to strengthen your muscles around new skills you are building. When perfectionism shows up, you can choose to use or not use the new skills you’re building to let go of the old perfectionism pattern.
If this sounds interesting to you…please join us for our next FREE Summer Workshop with Dr. Natalie LIVE, coming up on Tuesday July 20 at 7pm CST. Click Here to register.