10 - The Art of Not Being Perfect at This

The Art of Not Being Perfect at This

Why perfectionism is the biggest threat to your menopause management

In this episode:

You started the plan on Monday. By Wednesday you had pizza. By Thursday you decided you’d failed and stopped everything. Sound familiar? 

That cycle, not the pizza, is the actual problem. I name the all-or-nothing pattern, explain why high-achieving women are the worst at sustainable health change, and introduce the concept that changed everything for me: the Return Protocol.   

A pre-planned, pre-decided route back to your standards after life knocks you off them. Because the question is not “how do I never fall off?” It’s “how quickly can I climb back on?”

Your One Thing this week:

Write your Return Protocol on a card and put it on your fridge. Three sentences: What’s the first thing I do after a bad day? What’s my minimum viable week? What do I say to myself when the shame starts? You’ll need it. Not if. When.

Links:

→ Grab the free 5 Riviera Standards Starter Guide: https://rivieramenopausemethod.kit.com/5-riviera-standards

→ Follow Riviera Menopause on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rivieramenopause/

If this episode helped, send it to someone who needs it.

Transcript

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Monday, fresh start, new week. You've prepped the meals, you've set the alarm for the morning walk. You've bought the Greek yogurt. You are doing this. Tuesday, nailed it. Protein at breakfast, walked for twenty minutes, drank the water, felt like a different human. Wednesday, work exploded. Didn't eat lunch until 2 pm, had pasta with the kids, no protein in sight, forgot the water, fell asleep on the sofa at 9pm. Thursday, woke up, feeling guilty, thought, well that's the week ruined now. Had toast for breakfast, ate an entire sharing bag of salt and betting and crisps at 4 pm, not because I was hungry, because what's the point? I've already failed. Friday, started googling new menopause diet plan because clearly the last one didn't work. Does that sound familiar? If you're nodding, possibly with the crisps, this episode is for you. The crisps are not the problem. The pattern is the problem, and today we're going to break it. Perfectionism. The all or nothing pattern. The belief that if you're not doing it perfectly, you're not doing it at all. We've all been there. And it's often high achievers that are the worst at this. Here's the cruel irony. The women who are most likely to struggle with menopause management are the ones who are most successful in the rest of their lives. High achievers. The women who've built careers and families by setting standards and meeting them every single time. That approach has worked for everything else, but menopause introduces a variable that your high achieving brain cannot control, a hormonal environment that's changed the rules. Your energy fluctuates, your willpower fluctuates, your ability to be consistent fluctuates. And when a high achiever's consistency fluctuates, she doesn't think, well, that's understandable. She thinks, I failed. And that thought, I have failed, is where the real damage happens. Not on Wednesday when she missed the plan, on Thursday, when she abandoned it. This is so painfully common. They don't fail because the plan is too hard, they fail because they expect perfection from a body that is in flux. And when perfection doesn't happen, they interpret it as a personal failure rather than a biological reality. Your body is going through a hormonal transition that makes consistency harder, not impossible, harder. And that distinction is important because harder means you need a different strategy. Personal failure means you need a different you. And you do not need a different you. So why does one day become a bad week, a bad month, bad year? You miss a day, and the shame arrives. Not rational assessment, shame. The hot, familiar feeling that says, you can't even do this. And on the flip side of that coin, you always do this. You're fundamentally incapable of change. Most women will usually have a favourite flavour of poison they feed to themselves here to explain not following through. But it's the same no matter what the flavour, the shame. And shame is uniquely destructive because it does not motivate. Guilt says, I did a bad thing, let me fix it. Shame says I am a bad thing. And when you feel like you're the problem, you don't fix the behaviour. You avoid the whole subject. You stop tracking, you stop trying, you disengage. So the missed day becomes a missed week. The missed week becomes, well, I'll start again on Monday. Monday arrives and the shame is still there, so you need a new plan. A clean slate. You Google something new. You download a new app and the cycle restarts. Commit, lapse, shame, abandon, restart. That's not a failure of willpower, that's a failure of architecture. You haven't built a system for coming back. You've built a system for starting, and those are very different things. The starting's the easy part. Everyone can start Monday morning. New plan, fresh energy, shiny. That's exciting. That's dopamine. But the coming back after a bad day, a bad week, after the shame has had its say? Well, that requires something motivation can't give you. It requires a pre-planned protocol. A decision made in advance, a route back that you don't have to invent in the moment, because inventing is the last thing you can do when you're drowning in cortisol and self-criticism, possibly a little dose of self-loathing in there as well. So how do you pre-plan your comeback? Here's the thing that changed everything for me, and let me tell you right off that I'm an expert at starting over. I'm a sucker for shiny new things and get bored easily, so I get the cycle in all of its messy glory. And what I'm about to share is gold dust for people like me. You need a return protocol, not a diet plan, not a motivation hack, a pre-planned, pre-decided route back to your standards after life inevitably knocks you off them. Because life will knock you off them, that's a certainty. You will have a terrible week at work, you'll have a family crisis, you'll have a holiday full of croissance, an illness, a Wednesday when the crisps win. This is not failure, this is being a human being with a life. The question is not how do I prevent the lapse? It's how quickly can I come back from it? Because the lapses will absolutely happen. That's normal, that's okay, that's a sign of life. So here's how you build a return protocol. Three questions. Question number one, what's the first thing I can do when I've had a bad day? Make it tiny. For me, it's protein at my next meal, that's it. Small enough that shame can't really argue with it. Also, it's adding something rather than taking something away. So for me, that feels more like a positive thing. I don't know what the brain science says on that, but there you have it. Question two. What's my minimum viable version of my standards? Not ideal, minimum. What does a terrible stressful week look like when I'm still doing something? Maybe it's protein at two meals and one walk, that's it. The full programme can wait. The minimum keeps the thread alive. For me, the bare minimum is having some hard-boiled eggs in the fridge that I can grab for lunch in a pinch, and doing a very brief energy flow first thing in the morning to get me moving. Takes like three minutes. It's not perfect, but it's better than a Tesco meal deal with crisps and a soda. And I want to explain why the minimum matters so much. It's not about the physical benefit of one walk, it's about the identity benefit. When you do even the minimum, you are still the woman who upholds her standards. You're still in the game. The moment you do nothing, the moment the bad week becomes a complete void, your identity shifts from I'm a woman who's having a hard week to I'm a woman who's given up. And getting back from giving up is ten times harder than getting back from having a bad week. The minimum is not about fitness, it's about identity continuity. So question three. What do I say to myself when the shame voice starts? And this is a big one. And generally it's something like, one bad day isn't a pattern, I'm a woman who comes back. Sounds corny, but it works. Or the standard is not perfection, the standard is return. Decide the words now, however corny and rubbish you may think they are, they will help you. Write them down. In the moment, the cortisol will make sure you can't think of them, so write them down. And I want to tell you something about my own return protocol because I think this helps to see a real one. My first thing is protein at the next meal, which I've already talked to you about. My minimum viable week is protein at two meals a day, one 20-minute walk and lights out by 10 30. My shame response is I'm not starting over, I'm picking up where I left off. That last one changed everything for me somehow because starting over implies you've lost all your progress. When you haven't, a bad week doesn't erase a good month. It's a blip, not a reset. Picking up where you left off honours the work you've already done instead of throwing it all away. Now there is a bit of maths behind the messy imperfection that I'm talking about, and I want to give you a number. 70%. If you implement your health standards 70% of the time, imperfectly, inconsistently, just more often than not, over a year you will still see significant improvement. Compare that to what most of us do, which is 100% for two weeks, 0% for six weeks, then 100% again, over a year that averages about 25%, and it feels terrible the entire time because you're always starting from zero, which is just about the hardest part. So the 70% done imperfectly sustained over time beats 100% done perfectly for a fortnight every single time. The math isn't even close. Three standards implemented messily will always outperform five standards abandoned after a bad Wednesday. So give yourself permission to be imperfect, not as a consolation prize, as a strategy. Imperfection sustained is more powerful than perfection attempted. Write that on a post-it note and put it on your bathroom mirror if you need to, and let me say something about the word imperfect that I think matters. In every other area of your life, you already know this. You don't expect perfect parenting. You don't expect a perfect marriage, you don't expect a perfect career. You know those things require showing up, making mistakes, adjusting and showing up again. You have never once said I had a bad day at work, so I'm quitting my career. But you have said I had a bad day with food, so I'm quitting my nutritional plan. Why do we apply a standard of perfection in our health that we would never apply to anything else? The answer usually is shame, and shame's a liar. It tells you that one bad day means you're a bad person. You're not. You're a person who had a bad day, and bad days are normal. They're not evidence of failure, they are evidence of life. And every day we get to be alive is a mini miracle, so evidence of that is always a good thing. Okay, so your one thing this week. Write your return protocol, one sentence for each question. What's the first thing I do after a bad day? What's my minimum viable week? And what do I say to the shame? Write it on a card, put it on your fridge, you'll need it. Not if, when. This episode is the one I wish I'd heard three years ago. The perfectionism nearly beat me. I started and stopped so many times, and the shift from I must get this right to I must come back was one of the single biggest turning points in my own menopause journey. Next week we're going somewhere beautiful. What if menopause isn't a decline? What if it's a forced redesign that you actually needed? I'm not talking some bullshit motivational reframe here, but what is actually happening and why it's not all doom and gloom. If you listened to this episode and found it useful, share it with the perfectionist in your life. Just tell her, standard is not perfection, the standard is return. I'm Laura, this is the Riviera Menopause, and your worst Wednesday does not define you, your next Thursday does. So for now, this is me signing off with love from Monaco.