64. Redefining Perfection

"I am so afraid of disappointing the people that I love. I often forget that I am someone I love too, and I need kindness just as much as I believe the people I love do."  Nikita Gill.

Perfectionism is not a clinical diagnosis. It's not a pathology. It's a character trait and we can learn to relate differently to our perfectionistic thoughts.

If you have yet to listen to Episode 63, listen to that one first. This episode is all about how we can use our strategies of thinking in ways that are helpful and separate healthy striving towards an ideal from thoughts that we can feel safe and be protected by doing things "right." Finally, we will conclude with creative strategies that you can use to relate to your thoughts differently.

What can you do today to help yourself ease up on perfectionism thinking?

• Focus on Progress, growth and mastery towards an ideal.
• Use incompleteness as a strategy for excellence, not anxiety (chop wood & carry water).
• Mindfulness.
• Use gratitude strategically (21 day gratitude journal, daily 3 gratitudes).
• Say “I love you” in the mirror each morning.
• Use creativity as a safe place to practice imperfection.

Transcript

"I am so afraid of disappointing the people that I love. I often forget that I am someone I love too, and I need kindness just as much as I believe the people I love do." And this quote comes from Nikita Gill. She's an Irish Indian poet and playwright, and her words start us off this week all about having compassion around perfectionism. Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman podcast, exploring the art and science of creativity. And this is your podcast. This is for women like you who want to elevate their creativity and really apply creative thinking in your everyday life. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Doctor Amy Backos. I'm a licensed psychologist and a registered and board certified art therapist with almost three decades helping women with their creativity and authenticity. 

Here at The Modern Creative Woman. We are obsessed with helping you build your creativity through conversations and creative insights. I'll give you the science and the art of becoming the woman you've always wanted to be. Let's get started. 

Welcome in! I'm so glad you've joined me on this audio creativity journey today. If you have yet to join the Modern Creative Woman membership, I really want to encourage you to check it out. We have some incredible classes and you have access to all of the archives, and that's about two and a half years of content workbooks, slides, videos. It's a really powerful program, and what makes it even more special is the vibrant community inside the membership. There are some truly inspiring women and I would love for you to come join us. 

This episode is picking up on what we started last week around perfectionism. And if you have yet to listen to that episode, I want to encourage you to go back and listen to that one first. We talked about adaptive perfectionism and maladaptive perfectionism, and I want to remind you that perfectionism is not a clinical diagnosis. It's not a pathology. It's really more of a character trait. And so I want to speak today a little bit more about what that means and how we can use our strategies of thinking in ways that are helpful and separate these helpful ways of thinking from the unhelpful ones. Finally, we will conclude with some really creative strategies that you can use to relate to your thoughts differently. 

Remember, perfection is a state of being free from flaws or defects, and none of us will ever be there. It's impossible. Perfection also relates to trying to achieve the highest possible standard or excellence in any particular area. I really think about four areas where we might feel the urge to apply perfectionist thinking. One is around flawless, like removing errors, defects, shortcomings, and that kind of thing works. Maybe when I'm editing I can remove grammatical errors, but maybe not. Maybe there's a typo in my book. Perfection can also relate to having things complete, being fully developed, nothing missing, nothing that needs to be improved upon now. Completion might be we finish a project at work, we complete a writing assignment. But there's so many things that are incomplete. Laundry will never be complete, dishes will never be complete, and most importantly, our values will never be complete. We will always strive for our values. They're not a destination. They are a process. I always place my health value as most important. Because it supports all my other values. If I am healthy in my mind and in my body and in my heart, then I'm able to focus very easily on all the other things that are important. My health value will never be complete. It will never be perfect. The third area around perfection is excellence, reaching the utmost level of quality or performance. I'm watching the Olympics. These are athletes who have achieved excellence there, surpassing just the ordinary standards or expectations around sport. They have achieved excellence. And the final one is impeccability. And that's really demonstrating this standard that's beyond reproach. It might be, um, someone arguing in court, a case that doesn't have any faults or weaknesses, and the other side is unable to refute it. You might have an impeccable, presentation that you've included all the areas that were requested by the people hosting a conference. Impeccability is really providing everything that's possible to provide. 

And remember that ideal your vibrant vision or your image of how things could be motivates us. And there's some research that says perfection can even motivate us. And you know how I feel about motivation. I think it's. Something that shows up. We can't rely on it. It helps us continue working. But our vision, our image, our striving towards an ideal can in fact give us motivation. However, the striving towards perfection can also lead to unrealistic expectations when we perceive it as an attainable or necessary goal. Right? The vision we like to hold. But when we think we must get there, it causes so much stress. 

I have a vision of quality health. I want to be strong. I want to be healthy. But if I must achieve it and it has to be perfect, it's not going to work. It's going to give me a lot of stress. I want to remind you, as we're talking about this, it's not a disorder. Perfectionism is a personality trait and that can be modified. Perfectionism behaviors can be adjusted. Perfectionism thoughts can be related to differently, and that's the really exciting part, that you can tease apart an anxiety coping strategy from your accomplishments. The idea that you can use your perfectionism traits for good effect should feel liberating. 

The Science

There are six strategies that tend to highlight perfectionism strategies, high standards, and I think of it as unrelenting standards. That there's almost no way to achieve them for ourselves internally or for others externally. It also consists of self-criticism. If you speak harshly to yourself, you don't have to. You can change it. Perfectionism also includes a fear of failure, and often people are imagining what others will think, or they are freezing up and not taking a chance because they fear there's something that will happen if they fail. Perfectionism strategies also include all or nothing thinking, black and white thinking. It's a cognitive distortion that doesn't include the whole picture. Next is procrastination or procrastination. Waiting till the last minute or starting too early and not spending enough time on a project or all strategies. And finally, an overemphasis on control strategies. 

There is an abundance of research about how to support perfectionist thinking to feel better about it, and you can imagine some of them. I would think a lot of them are what we talk about inside the modern creative woman. So let me give you the what the research shows can help. So the science is pretty clear that cognitive, behavioral, and behavioral approaches can help us relax. Unrelenting standards a self-compassion practice where we begin to see ourself as deserving and worthy, and just as worthy of love as everyone else. Mindfulness, of course, helps here. Meditation practice can help because it's a deepening practice. It's not a mastery practice making contact with the present moment. And then, of course, setting realistic goals, figuring out how to use mistakes for learning. There's an abundance of research as well around gratitude. That gratitude allows us to see the bigger picture, and that helps a lot with perfectionism when we think about acceptance and commitment therapy. It includes focusing on values as a direction, not a destination. I want to be a kind and loving partner is a direction. I can't check it off a list and I can't do it perfectly. Values offer us guidance. 

And finally, also in the domain of acceptance and commitment, therapy is diffusing from perfectionistic thinking and diffusion means we stop believing what our brain comes up with. We see our thoughts for what they are. Just thoughts. They're not facts. When we begin to have a perfectionistic thought. It comes from an anxiety or a worry, and it's a way to cope with feeling uncomfortable. Somewhere along the line, we might have learned that if we do something right, quote unquote right, we will avoid punishment, will avoid someone getting mad at us. We'll avoid being embarrassed in class for not knowing the answer. We will avoid a social stigma. And the more we try and do things right, the more we end up focusing on this imaginary thing in our head of right. And we tend to even make more mistakes because we're focusing on trying to do it right, to feel safe and comfortable instead of trying to do something to learn. 

You're probably familiar with that research around growth mindset versus fixed mindset. And I had a lot of experience with this teaching at the university. Some students would come and ask for feedback on their paper. They would say, “I thought I was a good writer. And I realized that maybe something needs to be different now that I'm in graduate school. And I noticed that this one section seemed to have a lot of problems. Can you help me understand this because I don't understand what needs to go here.” That's growth mindset. They're open to feedback. They're requesting the feedback that will help them learn to be a better writer. And then another kind of student would come to my office, and they wanted to focus on arguing the grade. They would say, “I deserve a higher grade. I'm a good writer. I don't think this is wrong. I handed it in. I did a good job.” And they were very interested in convincing me that I was wrong about giving them whatever feedback I gave. They were very interested in only the grade. They weren't interested in learning how to write that section better, or learning what they needed to know to be successful on writing these different kinds of papers that are required in graduate school. They just wanted to be right. It felt so uncomfortable that they perceived they were wrong, incorrect. 

And at some point I would say, do you want to keep arguing about the grade and focus on right and wrong, or do you want to learn how to do this? And we can look through your paper again, and I can help you with some of the details. And over time, most people came to see that the goal was to grow, not to get a perfect score. 

Sometimes people would be very upset that they got a 92 or an 85, and those are all good grades. They would be so focused on this number. Why did it get a 92 and not a not 100? And they were focused on the wrong thing. Instead of learning. They were focused on this number. That's fixed mindset. And that kind of focus is really perfectionism. Trying to control the situation, trying to be right so they didn't feel anxious. 

I have a few strategies that you can use today to help you shift into a more relaxed state. So I have five ideas that you can implement and I'll put them in the show notes. Focus on progress. Growth and mastery is the first one. Making progress towards your value is incredibly important, and noticing how it feels to make that kind of progress will help you focus less on making perfect progress, Growth and mastery are ways of thinking about your work in very meaningful ways. If you go to yoga class and you decide you want to master a particular position, that's very challenging for your body, that's a mastery based goal. You're moving towards the ideal of practicing yoga. You can't have perfect yoga, but you can develop mastery in a position, and focusing on those smaller, deeper mastery goals really pulls us away from perfectionist thinking. The second strategy is to use incompleteness as a tool for excellence, not anxiety. Now, incompleteness allows your brain to keep working on a problem, and a lot of creative people will use this strategy. Let me give you some examples. If you have a project at work. Brain, scientists would say, spend a little bit of time for five days working on it, and your brain will work on it while you're sleeping, while it is undone. It's a strategy of undone that gives you greater depth and access to your creativity. If you have a plan to complete a particular project and it requires maybe a writing project or a collaboration project at work. Doing an hour a day for five days taps your brain for five full days. Instead of doing it all on Friday, your mind will have had the opportunity to mull it over for five days, and your final project will be far superior than if you had just written it all in one day. Now, the same holds true for those perfectionists who try to get out of this procrastination piece, and they get it all done on day one. They have the same problem the paper, the report. The project's not as good because they did it all right away in one day, instead of allowing their brain to think about it. The science behind that is unfinished projects kind of niggle at our brain, and our brain keeps working on them while we sleep, while we're moving about through other projects, things that are unfinished maintain the attention of our brain, so it doesn't require any more hours of work on this five hour project. But when you spread them out over time, you have to tolerate the discomfort of an unfinished project. But the benefits are huge. 

So someone struggling with perfectionism might procrastinate it or procrastinate the project. But using that ability to tolerate unfinished projects as a tool for excellence will have you writing better reports, turning in better projects. The third thing that you can do today is around mindfulness. Making full contact with the present moment. It's always there for you. You can get at it, but it requires us to pay attention and mindfulness. Making contact with the present moment might have us aware that we feel uncomfortable, and we're using a control strategy to feel better, when in fact they shouldn't go together. Mindfulness allows us to separate them. 

The fourth one is to use gratitude strategically. You know, I love gratitude. It's a powerful tool to feel better, to make more contact with the world, to see the big picture and appreciate those around us. You can get access to the 21 Day Gratitude Journal from the modern Creative Woman, and you can use. A daily three gratitude practice. I found so many articles that just three gratitudes a day will improve your life satisfaction, and what it requires is writing down three things you're grateful for every day. Not just thinking them, but writing them down. You can put it on a post-it note and throw it away if you want, but the act of writing them do it before you go to bed, or first thing in the morning will change you qualitatively. 

And the fifth suggestion is to get up in the morning before you do anything else. Go to the mirror, look yourself in the eye and say, I love you. And if you can love yourself when your hair is disheveled, your eyes are still have closed. You're feeling sleepy. You'll start to learn to love yourself throughout the day. It's a powerful tool to embrace yourself in imperfection. 

I want to share a reframe that might help you. When I was growing up, I heard a lot of practice makes perfect. I heard it from my piano teacher, my guitar teacher, my band teacher. Practice makes perfect. Like I could make perfect notes if I just practiced more. And we know it's not true. We can achieve excellence. There are musicians who have achieved great excellence, but perfect. It just doesn't exist. So when it came time to talk to my son about practice, I said, practice makes better. Practice makes things better, makes your performance better, makes your learning better. And that's the only thing we can really strive for is better. And he came home from school one day and said, some teacher told me practice makes perfect. I always thought it was practice makes better and we had a really good conversation about it. It really does take the pressure off when you're not going for perfection. At some point I tried to remove the word from my vocabulary. There's a few words that I avoid using because they are not helpful, and perfection is one of them. 

The Art

Let's talk about the art of imperfection. A few years ago, I started taking wheel pottery classes, and it requires quite a level of precision that I have never applied to clay before. I've taken lots of sculpture classes. I love working in clay. Yet to work on the wheel was a series of many, many failures. Collapsed pots and bowls and I knew that I wouldn't come home the first day with something that looked very attractive. And yet I felt the urge to keep trying, and I wanted to create something that I could use, I think, in the past. I would have felt maybe more frustrated. I would have felt curious about it, but more frustrated that it wasn't working out the way I thought it would. When we strive in artwork to achieve excellence, we want to focus on what is meaningful, creating depth or a mastery type of goal. To be able to make a vase or a bowl or a mug is a mastery goal. and that is a worthy pursuit. It is not helpful to think of having perfection in the making, or being able to do it on the first try. Those kinds of goals lead to frustration, self-judgment, and what we've done in that process is tie our self-worth or validated feelings of ourselves to some kind of external thing that really is outside of our control. We have to learn how to do it. We aren't simply gifted with an art talent. We have to practice. Practice makes better. 

So when you find yourself in a situation that you could learn something new, I want you to take it. It might feel frustrating to learn how to knit, and in fact, it always does in the beginning. It might feel frustrating to sign up for a painting class. However, the mastery goal that you can accomplish gives you so much more satisfaction than striving for perfection ever could. When we get wrapped up in striving for perfection, we've just confused two things that don't really go together. One is feeling better and avoiding anxiety. That's the first part, and we pair it with the idea that if we do something on the outside, if we do it, quote unquote right, then we won't feel anxious. And the more we practice doing things imperfectly, the more we can separate those two concepts. When we have perfectionistic thinking, we have somewhere along the lines paired it together that we can feel better, we can feel safe. We will not be judged. We will not be embarrassed or ashamed if we do it right. And we need to separate that idea. With the striving towards mastery in art. There is no perfection. It simply doesn't exist. So when we focus on mastery of a skill or improvement on a skill, we are taking steps towards our values and towards deep satisfaction.

It allows us to see the whole big picture, because imperfection and mistakes really are a part of life, and they're not dangerous. They may have felt dangerous in childhood to. Make a mistake. It may have felt shameful, but there's no harm in imperfection and there's no harm in making mistakes anymore. And the more we can experience making a mistake, letting go of control, allowing the paint or the clay to be a part of our experience instead of controlling it, we can feel more and more at ease and have to rely less on an external project to feel good and feel safe and to lower our anxieties. I will really want to encourage you to try something that you don't know how to do. You can take a class. You can figure out some YouTube videos to learn a new skill. You can have a challenging conversation with someone. Whatever you do, to experiment with the possibility of not doing it right. 

We'll help you in all areas of your life. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free and it comes out when some men and I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine. Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level and want you to know you have options inside the membership. And if you're interested in a private consultation, please feel free to book a call with me. Even if you just have some questions, go ahead and book a call. My contact is in the show notes and you can always message me on Instagram. Do come find me in the Modern Creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at Doctor Amy. Because if you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I want to give you the scoop on how you can support the podcast. You can be an ambassador and share the podcast link with three of your friends. You can be a community supporter by leaving a five star review. If you think it's worth the five stars, and you can become a Gold Star supporter for as little as $3 a month, all those links are in the show notes. Remember to grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. The link is in the show notes and you can find it at Modern Creative women.com. Have a wonderful week and I cannot