What Perfectionism Is Costing You

In this episode, Lauren Bernick explores the hidden costs of perfectionism, especially the fear of judgment, and shares personal stories of failing forward in comedy, podcasting, and life. She encourages listeners to embrace imperfections, take risks, and get into the arena to truly live.

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Transcript

Lauren Bernick (00:01.838)
Hi friends, in this mini episode of the Age Like a Badass Mother podcast, I want to talk to you about perfectionism and specifically what perfectionism is costing you. I think that obviously, women in particular struggle with being perfect. We try to look perfect, act perfect, have a perfect house, have a perfect, you know, career, we think that we can't put anything out into the world unless it's perfect. And there's a real price to that. 

You know, there was a social media post the day after the Oscars. I posted it, maybe you saw it in my stories, but it was about the horrors of how women in Hollywood are aging. You know, it called out three specific actresses for not aging because they look the same or same-ish as they did when they were big stars in the 90s. Well, who the hell put that pressure on them? You know, if they showed their age, they'd be condemned for that. If they get work done so that they are not showing their age, they get condemned for that. The other day, my friend from high school,

She messaged me and she said, you're just so perfect. Like when I see you on social media, you just look so happy and so healthy and you always look so pretty. And I was like, thank you. But I guess I need to post more on the days when I don't feel like posting because I have big puffy eyes and I need to wash my hair. mean, earlier today, before I took a shower, I did a cooking video and I just showed my hands cooking because I was like, Lord.

But maybe I should be posting that because I definitely, definitely am not perfect. I definitely don't want to contribute to that noise. But that's really not what I'm talking about today. You know, I mean, yeah, you don't have to be perfect. You just have to be comfortable in your skin. But I'm not talking, I don't really want to talk about that kind of perfectionism today, even though it's horrific. What I want to talk about,

Lauren Bernick (02:26.72)
is the fear of you putting something out in the world that you're afraid will be judged harshly. Maybe you think you're not ready, maybe you're afraid you're gonna fail. But let me tell you what perfectionism is costing you. It's costing you joy. It's costing you the feeling of being proud of yourself for putting something out there that maybe you will succeed. It's costing you, I mean, it's stopping you from living your life. And that's big.

I want to remind you, well, maybe you've never heard this quote, you probably have. Brene Brown talks about it a lot. And I think her her whole book, Daring Greatly is kind of based on this. It's a quote from Teddy Roosevelt from his 1910 Man in the Arena speech. And he says, it's not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles.

or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming. But who knows the great enthusiasms

the great devotions who spends himself for a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. Ugh, God, I...

I mean, that just resonates with me so much because I have tried to live my life daring greatly and I have failed spectacularly at a lot of things. I just had the whole thing with Dr. Greger, how I messed up just trying to get my LDL lower and was

Lauren Bernick (04:50.046)
stupidly eating coconut yogurt that was probably raising my LDL, even though I kind of knew that, you know, I put it all out there, you know, so that you could see me making mistakes. And then I did better, I improved it. And I did lower my LDL a little bit, my cholesterol, like 20 points. But you know, first I let you see me messing up. And that's, you know, I could have kind of taken that, I could have edited that part out, I could have, but

I don't want to be perfect. I want you to see me being human and messing up. I wanna put myself out there as an example. We just did a live show from Austin during South by Southwest. And to say it didn't go as planned is like an understatement. We practiced, my producer and I, Vanessa, we practiced.

we have a recording studio, a virtual recording studio that a lot of podcasters use and you could go live from it and it's, you know, allegedly will blast it out to YouTube and Facebook and LinkedIn and we think we know what went wrong. But on the day of, we said we're going live at nine o'clock and on the day of, you know, we had been there for an hour, everybody was set, we tested the microphones, we tested everything, we're ready to go.

And it wasn't working like we couldn't go live from from the recording studio. It just wasn't happening. And now it's nine o'clock and now it's nine one and nine two. And Vanessa looks like she's about to have a stroke and we're all like calm down. There are four of us on the panel all together. We're all like just calm down. Take a take a breath. Nobody's going to die if we're late or if we can't make it happen or whatever. I mean, it's we'll do the best we can. And finally,

I just said, look, let's just go live straight from YouTube. It won't be able to broadcast out to any of the other places and whatever. Let's just do it. So now it's like 9.04 and Vanessa looks at me. I have my computer in front of my face for my notes. And she goes, that computer is eating up your, you can't even see your face. Cause I'm so short, you know, we were sitting in this booth and she's like, you can't have your computer in front of your face. Well, I wasn't prepared. I didn't have notes.

Lauren Bernick (07:16.158)
So we're going live now and I just decided to be brave, to be curious. Okay, where will this conversation go? Might not go in the direction I had planned, but let me just be brave and curious. I didn't remember all the topics I wanted to cover, but guess what other interesting things came up? And it went where it went. And the audio wasn't great, it was cutting in and out and there were all kinds of technical things.

But guess what? We did it. We got out there. We were in the arena. It was not perfect, but it was good. And we learned so many lessons and I think, you know, we know what happened and that won't happen again. I mean, Vanessa was really ready to beat herself up, but it wasn't her fault. And I just said, look, we're not gonna do that. You know, after the show we were talking and she was like, I should have done this. I was like, stop.

We're not doing that. We're not gonna beat ourselves up. We did it. You did it. We learned some stuff. No one died. We had fun. Next time's gonna be better. And another Brene Brown quote, I don't even listen to her that much. All of a sudden I'm like Brene Brown expert. another quote that sticks in my mind that she always talked about was first fucking time. FFT. You know, can't get good at something until you do it.

So whenever I'm about to do something for the first time, I always remember that the first fucking time. And then I just do it. I didn't have that Brene Brown quote when I started doing standup comedy 35 years ago. I think some of you have heard me tell the story that when I was a little kid, went to, we vacationed in the Borsch Belt in upstate New York. And we saw all these great

Jewish comics, my mom took me to the nightclub with her. She never made me stay with a babysitter or stay in the room. I was a little kid, I was maybe seven, six, seven, eight, probably I was all those ages when I went to the nightclubs and saw, you know, Robert Klein and David Brenner and Buddy Hackett and just saw all these standup comics.

Lauren Bernick (09:34.145)
And I remember looking around the room like everybody was all dressed up and smoking and drinking and having the best time. And these people were making other people laugh. They were standing on stage making people laugh. And I was like, is this a job? my God, this looks so much better than, you know, my grandfather's thread business where like the women sat around and answered the phones and smoked and, you know, just waited till they could die. And the men,

I'm not sure what they were doing. looked pretty much the same just with whiskey. I was like, I want a job like this. Well, it took me till I was 35 years old to get the nerve up to try standup comedy. And the first couple of times, I mean, I was so terrified. I can't describe to you like probably the first, I don't know, six months. Every time I got up there, I was probably going once or twice a week for six months.

Every time I got up there, my knees were knocking and my head felt like, you know, I was in a tunnel and I couldn't think of what I was saying. Like I knew my routine and I, you know, I had memorized my routine and I wasn't like making, you know, talking with the audience. I wasn't doing that kind of work yet, but I was just going through my routine. And to tell you the truth, the first month went pretty well.

You know, I just got up there. I was nervous. I thought I was going to have a heart attack, but I got up there. got through the first people were laughing and, you know, for the first month I did pretty well. So then I decided to invite all my friends and I was at this, it's called the Velveeta room on sixth street in Austin. were having an open mic. I had been mostly going to, this other

comedy place in Austin, but I decided, okay, I'm gonna go to the Velveeta Room on Sixth Street. I got in line for the open mic, it was my turn, but on the way over there, I was driving over there, and I had my routine down, my five minutes, but on the way over there, I started thinking about something and I was like, my God, this is hilarious. I'm gonna open with this new joke, this is hysterical.

Lauren Bernick (11:56.297)
And I won't even, I don't remember the joke and it was so bad anyway, but it was something about, I had just found out like, this is the problem with this joke. The setup is so long and convoluted by the time you get to the punch, it's like, I don't even know what you're talking about. But the premise was something about, I had found out that the lady who played Jerry Seinfeld's mom on Seinfeld, if you can picture her,

Back in the day, she used to date James Dean for real. And so I found this out and I made up some terrible joke about like, can you imagine this? know, like, Jimmy, it's gonna be cold in the convertible. Take a sweater. It was horrible. I don't even know. But let me tell you, I opened with that new joke and nobody laughed, dead silence. Well, I learned a big lesson that night.

you don't open with the new material no matter how brilliant you think it is because then the audience just thinks you suck. They don't think, she just opened with a bad joke. They're like, okay, she's not funny. I'm not gonna laugh at anything she says, even though all the other material was getting laughs before this. And so I just stood there and after I went through a couple of jokes where nobody was laughing, I literally stood there and just hung my head. And from the back of the,

from the comedy place, I heard this man I later found out was J.R. Brow. He's a great comic and musician. And I hung my head and I just stood there and J.R. yelled, keep going, keep going. And I just got through my material and I walked off stage and all my friends were there.

And the funniest thing is I have this one friend Amy and she hates standup comedy anyway. It embarrasses her and she was, you know, such a like champ to go. And then I walked off stage and all my friends are like, oh, you did great. I was like, no, I didn't. I know I didn't shut up. And they're like, no, it's great. I was like, shut up. And poor Amy couldn't even look at me so bad. But anyway, J.R. Brau caught me in the back later and he said, hey, I've seen you.

Lauren Bernick (14:16.022)
And I don't know what you did tonight. I think you opened with new material. I was like, yes. He's like, don't do that. And he's like, don't open with your new material. But he said, look, I've seen you before this. And he's like, you have to you need to come back tomorrow night. And he's like, you have you have something. Okay. He's like, you have something and you need to come back tomorrow night. Because if you don't come back tomorrow night, you're not going to come back because you just scared yourself.

But he's like, just ditch that shit joke and come back tomorrow night. I don't think I went back the next night. I had little kids. I probably went back a few nights later. And thank you, JR Braille, because I did go back and I learned a bunch and I got way better. And you know, the funny thing is a couple of years after that, I was watching the documentary Comedian by Jerry Seinfeld, Ties Back to Seinfeld, and he's sitting around and he's trying out all his new material. He's going back out on tour and

you know, after Seinfeld and he's sitting in a comedy club with, I think it was with like Chris Rock and Colin Quinn and some other comedians. And they're all talking about how there's no comedy school and everybody has to learn. You never open with the new material. And I was like, yes, you never open with the new material. I know that now. But they were talking about how you open with your second best joke, you stuff the new material in the middle in case it bombs and then you close with your

best joke and I was like, well damn, that would have been helpful. But I learned that on my own. And I didn't let the fear of perfectionism stop me, even though that was a horrible experience. I don't know if there's, I mean, it was a great experience and a terrible experience. Because let me tell you, there is nothing like standing on the stage with a mic and making people laugh. That is

Living, you are alive. When you have to pause because people are laughing so hard that they're making involuntary noises and you have to wait to go on, there's nothing like that in the world. By the same token, there's nothing like it in the world when you're standing up on the stage with the mic trying to make people laugh and the room is dead silent. There's nothing like it. You are alive, let me tell you.

Lauren Bernick (16:44.962)
But after that, like, what, I mean, what, how much more could I ever embarrass myself than that? I don't know that I could. So keep going, like J.R. Brow says, keep going, come back, keep going. You're gonna get better. You can't do something until you do something. You know, try to be imperfect.

Let go of those expectations. What are you not doing because you're worried to throw your hat in the ring? Are you worried about being judged? Do you judge people when they fail? Are you a little bit happy when somebody fails? I mean, be honest, because I think we've all learned, we just talked about this on the live podcast last week, that when you judge something in somebody else, it's because

of something you see in yourself that you don't like. Maybe you're worried about failing, so you're a little bit happy when you see somebody fail, but you're not putting your hat in the ring. You're not getting in that arena. So first of all, stop judging other people when they fail. Be happy for them when they do something good, and get out there and do something messy and fail. know, a long time ago, actually, this...

It was right about the time I started doing standup comedy. took this weekend workshop called The Mastery. Van Brooks, he taught The Mastery. I met my friend Maggie in there who was on the podcast talking about her little plastic surgery tweak that she did, her laser surgery. But we met in The Mastery and she had already been doing standup comedy for

I don't know, a couple of weeks. And Van Brooks asked us, what have you been wanting to do in life, but you're too scared. And when it was my turn, I said, stand up comedy. And he said, okay, great. Maggie's done it a couple of times. You go off, you guys write up three minutes. She's gonna help you write up a thing and in two hours, you're gonna do stand up comedy in front of this group. I thought I was gonna puke. Let me tell you, but I did it. And it was, I mean, for having...

Lauren Bernick (19:10.222)
two hours notice, it was good, it was fine. It was pretty good, people laughed, mean they were very supportive, they were gonna laugh. But then he said, you have to go and do an open mic, like within the next week. And I did, I did an open mic and then just kept going. But in the mastery, he also said, who are you to deprive the world of your gifts? I mean that's.

Like take that in a minute. Who are you to deprive the world of your gifts? And he also said, if you're not failing, you're not interesting. Think about that. So if there is something you have been wanting to do and you are just not doing it because you don't think you could do it to the standard that you have in your mind, just get out there and do it. And

Be messy, make a big old mess. Don't deprive the world of your gifts. Be interesting. Just remember, you can't do something unless you do something. Put a big FFT, first fucking time reminder to yourself where you could see it and be proud that you're not being perfect. All right, muah. Until next time. Thanks, thanks for listening. We're gonna have Chuck Carroll next week. I think a lot of you know Chuck Carroll.

He hosts the Exam Room podcast, so he's gonna be our guest next week, so be sure and tune in for that. All right, love you guys.