Ep. 187 - A Guide for Recovering Perfectionists: How to Let Go Without Lowering Your Standards

If you identify as a recovering perfectionist... or suspect you might be one, this episode is for you. You’ll recognise the pressure to get everything right, the over-editing, the time guilt, the anxiety before and after you speak, and the quiet belief that if you just try harder, you’ll finally feel calm.

This episode is a practical, compassionate guide to understanding how perfectionism really operates in your life - not as a flaw, but as a learned safety strategy rooted in high expectations, people-pleasing, and fear of judgment. You’ll see how it shows up through overthinking, harsh self-talk, unrealistic time standards, and the constant feeling of being “behind.”

More importantly, you’ll learn how to recover without losing your integrity. You’ll be guided through tools to shift from perfection to progress: prioritising output over over-polishing, time-blocking with boundaries, journaling to reality-check your standards, and building trust in yourself and others.

This episode helps you trade pressure for calm, and finally breathe again.

If this episode resonated with you, don't leave it as another podcast insight.

Whether you're navigating a leadership challenge, struggling with confidence, feeling overwhelmed, or simply looking for a fresh perspective, coaching can help you move forward with greater clarity, confidence, and calm.

If you're ready for that next step, book a session at www.rhiannonbush.com.

No discovery call. No sales pitch. Just coaching.

I'd love to work with you.

Transcript

Guide for Recovering Perfectionists: How to Let Go Without Lowering Your Standards

EP #187

“Do I need a life coach?” You’re listening to Episode 187, with Rhiannon Bush

Welcome to the do I need a podcast. The podcast for professionals who are smart capable and tired of holding back here we dive into the real conversations real struggles and real coaching helps you find your voice and own your space and now here's your host Rhiannon Bush. 

Well hello my beautiful friends. Welcome back to another week. Can you believe it's almost the end of January so it's the Australian open time as in the tennis in Melbourne it's nearly at the finals and whenever the Australian Open on Australia gets a heat wave and it is hot it is hot my friends and it's wonderful. It's so good. We've just got a basket in it because we have a very very long winter I'm just looking at my window and I can see neighbours and their kids scooter Ing in the streets and it's just been an absolutely magic day. Awesome so everyone's out and about we're doing things we're watching tennis we're watching cricket we're watching all the sports and actually the other day we had friends down this weekend. We saw Foo Fighters on Saturday night which was absolutely amazing. David Grohl is just absolutely amazing like so talented and just the quality was incredible and it was an amazing concert and I've travelled around a lot in terms of living in different places and seeing a lot of music. I love live music so seeing it in many other places so to see something of that scale and that quality here at home was truly magic. We also had a really really good friends from Hobart come up Sally and Michael with their kids and my goddaughter Lucy and Cooper who I like you know an adopted son anyway and it was just incredible in terms of the weather and the time spent with them and it was a very very cut filling weekend so yes summer is in full swing and it's magical absolutely loving life and in amongst that has been work and juggling school things and and well not the kids being at school which has been juggle and may be back at work and things like that which is just been it's always a challenge but it's also really really great and in amongst that I have been doing some research and some thinking about professionalism it is something I have absolutely suffered from in the past. I can still hand on heart say I am someone that still has the tendency to strive for perfection with my kids. I'm always like kids practice makes and they're like perfect and I'm like no better practice makes and my son will argue like perfect. I'm like no better because I really just want them to understand that by attempting things and practising and repetition we strengthen our skill set we get better. We get the feedback we move onto the next thing instead of trying to make things perfect all the time which doesn't exist I think the school system does tend to try to ingrain so the way that perfectionism sometimes still shows up for me but I've definitely made ample improvements is I think the biggest one for me is having really high standards and people often say to me and your standards. They're too high like in a lot of workplace that I've had over the past 1015 years. I've dealt with a lot of subcontractors and it's a very interesting relationship. I have been a subcontractor. I have managed subcontractors and when it comes to my standards they're very high and it's also the same. You know we had a babysitter a few months ago for an event and that some friends and us were going to and we couldn't find any family look after the kids and we were like oh how was the babysitter? Was she good? And I was like yeah she was great but she didn't do the washing up and everyone looked at me like I'd grown two heads they were like but no she's not there to do the washing up and I'm like yeah but she's essentially getting paid to sit and watch my TV once the kids are in bed which is really really early so wouldn't you just I value and find other things too like washing up and people just looked at me like I am crazy but when I babysit when I was 1617 that was exactly what I did, I would find other ways to add value. I'm not gonna go to the extent of cleaning somebody's toilet but the kitchen the cooking and just making sure that's all tidied up and put away happy to do it. So that is what I mean by high standards. Does this appreciation? Generally speaking that a babysitter will not do your washing up once the kids are in bed? They will sit and watch TV but if you are someone like me as a recovering perfectionist it's like while you're getting paid to sit and watch TV couldn't you just do washing up so it was really interesting experience and I sort of felt very put back in my place at that time my friends exam. It's ridiculous that expectation like is it though so that's high standard is one of the ways and subcontractors. When now I'm managing them is very much in that ballpark. I'm like well actually. I'm your customer so treat me well and if you make my life harder, I'm gonna find everybody except for you to give work to so but it also is a two for a relationship and some some hills there die on another hill are you got to pick another way that my perfectionism would wear it? Ugly head in life with the amount of time I would spend on a task so I've mentioned time sheet a lot in the podcast and how valuable I find time sheet and it's something that I still do today because of the value that I get out of it knowing where my time has gone I love it. It is something though that I then used to add pressure to myself in the way of performance so if I have a day where there's kinda two hours where I was in a bit of a fuzz hole and I couldn't kind of get clarity on what it was that I was trying to do or I wasn't feeling energetic enough to really focus. You know I feel guilty almost for not allocating those extra hours you know to the business because I understand that businesses are there to make money and if I'm not there actually providing outputs then what it is what is it that I'm doing and this was one of the things that came up again where it's like oh yeah but I buzz around and I'm very very effective and efficient in my role and I know that but where is that line between? Oh yeah you can every now and again two hours whatever but there are other times when that's not acceptable so just being really kind to myself around here you're allowed an off day you're allowed and instead of sitting there trying to slog through it sometimes you better off getting up shutting the computer down going for a walk and maybe that will spark the creative juices to actually then produce an outcome so Hi-Standard spending too much time on things that really just don't take that long either because I'm trying to make it perfect or because I'm not feeling energised enough to pump it out as fast as my expectations to tell me that I should the other thing is the back I find create is not being very forgiving so when you have high standards and you set those expectations for yourself and for others then all of a sudden you're really hard on yourself and you're really hard on other people you judge very harshly and aren't very lenient in the way of off days or needing help or not meeting your standards encroaching we often talk about respect and respect is a very precarious value because it is so so biased. We all have very strict rules around what we call respectful what we mean when we say respect how we feel and know that we are respected by other people and doing that to others so respect is a really precarious situation and so is honesty because honesty is the same. Well how honest can you be? Do you need to be there's black-and-white honesty and then there's all the shades of grain between where you are dishonest by emission or not saying anything so honesty and respect are two values that are really really biased and if someone ever says to me respect is my top value. I'm like okay alright let's unpack this a little bit because it's often in the case that their ego is protecting themselves and demanding respect from other people or they have very very high expectations around a very strict rules around how they feel respected and therefore how they give respect because often the way that we behave towards other people is the exact way we expect others to behave towards ourselves and the way that we treat ourselves as well as they're very very *NSYNC so they are some of the ways that perfection for me was showing up in the world in my life and the pressure that that was creating and then off the back of the pressure was guilt if I couldn't meet those expectations all of a sudden it was. I didn't do it. I wasn't good enough. How could I not have been better? How do I know all the things that I know? And I still can't get it right? It was really hot and judging it wasn't fun. It wasn't fun and like I said there are times I slip back into this but I catch myself a lot more easily now and I have mechanisms which I'm about to share that help me to identify that it's happening and overcome it. A lot of the thoughts that stemmed from the way that my perfectionism was showing up in the world which included overthinking and over analysing sorry before I move on overthinking things like oh did I say the wrong thing? Did I say the right thing and I would over analyse situations I would also over analyse my writing so in an email I would read it 50 times before I'd send it and then I would go back into my sent items and I would reread it just to make sure it was okay and this amount of fixating and time spent on that was absolutely Ludacris and some of those thoughts that I started to pick up one that I was having that didn't serve me with things like oh I can't relax until my inbox is cleaned up. I can't relax until my house is clean. What are they gonna think? If I don't get this perfect? It's a spelling mistake in an email. How could I have done that? That was so dumb? How do I not know better? Or what's wrong with me when I can't manage to do this task in this amount of a lot of time or I just can't cope with all of this these things going on I just I need it all to stop and then I would buffer by watching TV or reading a novel however it was I was by eating chocolate that was some of the Kobe mechanisms that I had so the thoughts associated with perfectionism were absolutely awful and after getting a lot of coaching around and working through self coaching by myself on it a lot of it was tied to people pleasing a lot of. It was tied to expectations that I'd set for myself all felt others had set expectations around that for me when I was younger and so I had fear being reprimanded and I had fear getting in trouble and I had fear other people thinking or feeling a certain way about me and I lacked the control and I felt like it was in my control to be a perfectionist. Make sure everything was perfect because if it was perfect then they wouldn't hate me or they wouldn't tell me off. I wouldn't get in trouble and as I'm getting older I'm letting go of a lot of that but it still does rear. It's ugly head and every now and again I catch myself but I'm like wow what if I could just assume that everyone just really had my back? What if I just assumed people were going to really like me and resonate with me and what if I didn't care if I didn't care what anybody thought? What would I do differently and that was coming into the action section which I'll tell you all about in just a moment the feelings around it often were overwhelmed like I would walk through my house and I would see all the mess and realise that I wanted to get to bed at a certain time. The time constraints added a lot of pressure because I would look at things and go I don't have time to do it. I don't have time to get that assignment done. I don't have time to get that proposal to that client. I don't have time to get back to that client today. I don't have time to goes on and on and on and I think that started when I first left home because my parents live at home and 18 I took off and I left from to Sydney when I was in Sydney then I came home for visit I all of a sudden was extremely confronted by the fact that I would see my parents for maybe four or five weeks in an entire year and that made me really sad. So when I was at home I would make every effort to not sleep in and get up and be with them whatever they were doing even it was just sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast was sitting having a coffee or going for a walk. I would just wanna be with them all the time because I found that transition so hard but a lot of that is a lack of control. We all grow. We all changed and yes I could've lived in Tassie but I wasn't my best self in Taz at that time in my life for many many reasons and so clinging to what was because it was safe and it was secure was really. It was hard to let go and it was hard to have that transition where all of a sudden I didn't have control as as much as I had of how often I got to see my family so my time constraints definitely started around that time in my life and then when I got my first corporate role where I had to timesheet all of a sudden it was like okay. I've spent five hours doing that thing that is that is not good enough. I say not my boss me. Peyton say I've done less hours than I actually had but it was a deadline I couldn't meet anyway that's how fixated I got on it. So overwhelmed was one of those things and very much around time constraints. The other feeling predominantly that I would have around perfectionism was anxiety anxiety sitting in two camps as pre-anxiety post anxiety pre-anxiety is where you're looking ahead at something going oh purely uncertain about that and you are anticipating an outcome that's making you feel a certain way. I'm doing a Keynote talk what if I completely watch it or I'm gonna present this in front of my boss and my boss is gonna be really really harsh critic and I feel anxious about it. I'm nervous about what he's gonna say or she's gonna say so it's when you are anticipating an event and you are anticipating all of the negative feelings that come up with it. We were watching Alex Harold climb the skyscraper in Taipei on the weekend skyscraper live absolutely amazing and it always amazes me when I watch him climb because I've also watched the documentary where he climbed El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. He is so calm and methodical about how he climbs. It's beautiful to watch him climates like poetry. There's no there's no rush. He seems just in such a peaceful place and when I was watching him it was just this. He was talking about mental preparation where you're doing a lot of visualisation a lot of meditation and he said you do that because then you anticipate all the negative feelings ahead of time and then you can learn to cope with them so if you feel them in the actual moment you can just manage it better. That's a really beautiful way of putting it so anxiety pre-anticipation of an event so I would anticipate things and feel really overwhelmed. I would anticipate my next day at work going I've just got so much to do. How am I gonna do it? All? The other one is post where you do something and then you stress about it which is no point right because it's it's done the ship sailed but it's where you sit there going oh my gosh we had that meeting and I said that should've said that. How am I perceive? What were the optics of that? Am I gonna get in trouble? Should I have said anything? So you're worrying about something that's already happened. You've got no control over fixing it and that is a posting you're reflecting worrying and there's nothing you can do to change it anyway so it's absolutely pointless so they were the two predominant feelings that I would get when I was in my real perfectionist state, I learnt to cope with perfectionism and manage it better. One was time management which might counter intuitive given time with something that I labelled as a pressurised but time management really helped me because I would with experience and understanding my ways of working and understanding when I was most optimise my day like I've said again multiple times I'm a morning person I'm really good in the morning like that time is my best concentration time so knowing that about myself I could time block 23 hours if I had to do really concentrated work like proposals like client roadmap like you know notes and things that I needed to do in my coaching business where I could sit down and just smash it out and get it done also though putting caveats around that to go I've got three hours. I've got three hours to do all of that so here I go and I need to keep moving because I know if I linger too long on something if I fix it for too long guess what? It's not getting done so I became a lot more effective and efficient because it's like well our clients billing for this time so I gotta go. I gotta get it done and then odd. Spelling mistake happens. I'm really over the spelling mistake thing and I look at some of my emails at times on my oh there's another spelling mistake. I don't care genuinely can say Hannah I don't care about an old spelling mistake and if anyone else does well that's a good problem. No it's not professional but it's not like it's informal documentation or formal ways of writing. It is just a spelling mistake in an email. I think we can all move on. It's kinda like if you're doing colour numbers and then you can go out of the line a little bit are you gonna really throw the whole thing away because you've gone out of the line a little bit some people if you're that person then maybe you're a perfectionist and maybe this podcast is extra applicable to you. Might be causing yourself a tonne of unnecessary stress or stress that you can diffuse through these sort of techniques the time management time block three hours to do all of these things. Great go and if you don't get through it you put it in next time block it's more important to prioritise those tasks to go. These are the things that are really really important. These things can wait but if I can get them done in this three hours then tick I'm gonna do it focus on output not time. Also I stopped rereading things so whether it was big proposals to pitching for for new clients whether it was emails whether it was things that I've done I would allow myself one reread one and once I've done that made the necessary edits send done moving on because the amount of time I would fix it on spelling emails paragraphs in the too hard basket as a project manager like I'm not a project manager really but I can with the experience that I have. I have found extremely synced ways of writing emails in a way that people read it and they know exactly what they have to do. They've got extra context if they want it but they know exactly what the question is or what action is required from them and then all of the information beyond that it is beautiful. I've gotta think Iman Choudhury for that. I got to work with him for a little bit of time and he was amazing to work with. He was a very very experienced project manager program manager and he really taught me this like very for way of emailing but one rewrite one re-read one and you don't go into items and have a look. You just move on move on move on the other thing I did was journal and we've talked a little bit about journaling I don't do it as a religious kind of practising my life. It's not a regular thing but in a state of overwhelmed I journal because what I find is if I get repetitious events putting it down on paper gets it out of my head and gives me that different perspective either do that or I go to my coach or my counsellor and I find it really really beneficial just to get it out because when I get it out, I can see that I'm being a logical that it's actually not true or other perspectives about it then if it was just floating around in my head so one of the things if I don't do enough for my kids that's another thought that I've often had around and being you know overwhelmed and being perfectionist, it's like I'm not doing enough with my kids but if I actually wrote that down in the lease which I have and I can see all the things I do for me versus all the things I do for the family versus all the things I do with the kids and for the kids it meant and actually that exercise taught me that I wasn't really doing enough for myself which was probably why I was spiralling and getting frustrated and really upset because I wasn't getting the space that I need to function well and be optimise in my own life I was instead of filling everyone else's cups but not my own so that was a really valuable exercise. I highly recommend it especially if it in a workplace you're feeling you are really like sort of doing your own head in that's how perfectionism feels to me. It's like you are circling around something looking for every scrutiny thing that you can find and it's almost like you're looking for a mistake. You're looking for problems and you just don't need to do that to yourself. You really don't because other people will do it for you especially if you're in an office and working environment you know other people will pull you up for that so you need to be accountable to a certain standard of yourself again write your standards down journal them because when you can see your standards all of a sudden it's like oh actually that's ridiculous or actually maybe that needs to be bumped up a bit and maybe I can see my bosses point on my colleagues point that I haven't really been doing enough and pulling my own weight or my expectations of myself are ridiculous. No wonder I'm spending so much time on these things. How can I rectify that? So journal? Get your thoughts out on paper quantify use data don don't do a finger in the wind. Use data okay? Another way which I find factor helps is to keep great people around you friends colleagues great people that you are psychologically safe with that you trust and that bring you back down people that will call you for your shit but not judge you for it and not reprimanded you for it or not keep you in a state of flux or fixation or overwhelmed having really great people around you instead of people that you fear judgement from or you fear their perception or you think they've got some kind of power over you. And it will not get you to where you wanna be. It will not feel supportive. It will not enable you to go one read through. Great that's good enough let's go and by the way if I've just said not good enough and you should've flinch and get really uncomfortable then you definitely need to implement what it is. I'm telling you because that's another thing right? And people go hot. If you feel discomfort around that to shore sign there's some work to do around this but having good people around you is so so important people that you can vent to people that you can go hey look I'm just not sure about this. Could you check it out for me? People that you just assume? Have your back no matter what? And people that are your cheerleaders because especially as you start to transition out of perfectionism you need those people around you you want that little bit of reassurance externally to be like okay the world didn't end because I only reread that email once the world didn't end because I wrote that proposal and then I did one review and then I sent it and the more you do that the more you see the world not going to end you're not gonna be reprimanded. You're not gonna be judged. People aren't gonna come for you will tell you off for it the more you'll be able to do it which means the more time you'll save and then you can slowly take time. You can slowly let go of your perfectionism. The benefits of letting go of perfectionism really really important. It might seem more obvious but it's being calm. It's going about life gently. It's creating more space. It's being methodical without being frantic because you aren't triggering your Mila all the time into fight flight and stress which will kill us faster than anything. Apparently it's just being a lot more calm when you're more calm. Guess what? You don't make us any mistakes you don't frantically run around and be spontaneous. You have an ability to think much more calmly quietly strategically and make much more sound decisions so essentially that is the benefit of letting go of your perfection is a man instead just becoming a calm normal human being who makes mistakes average. Let's call it average. Let's aim for average instead of everything being perfect. We aim for we're doing the best we can. We're gonna be average and average is good enough so I can spend more time on outputs doing what I need to do progressing forward and creating more space and time in my life for the things that matter to me take that on board. Have a look at it if you're feeling discomfort around perfectionism or the thought of just being average then this is definitely for you. Have a look. Have a listen and I would love to hear from you if you have any feedback at all. I'll see you next week.

If you've been nodding along episode you have to come check out The Confident Communicator. It's my monthly coaching program where we don't just talk about these ideas. We apply them. We practice them and we take your confidence to the next level during the Rhiannon bush.com/join I'd love to see you inside and work with you personally join me there.

Please note, this transcription may not be exact.