perfectionism

The Taming of the Inner Shrew 🧟‍♀️ : How to Get Shit Done While Feeling More At Ease Without Your Inner Critical Voice

Have you ever felt that, without your inner nagging, critical voice telling you what a fuck up you are, you would never get anything done?

I have! 🙋🏻‍♀️

Backstory: I started doing these 30-min morning walks first thing in the morning because I learned that getting sun in your eyes before 10am is good for melatonin production for sleep. And as someone who, for a period in her life, struggled a lot with lack of sleep and its negative consequences, I have been determined to make sleep a priority. (If you’re curious, check the first comment below for the link to the video I made about this).

Anywho...the other day, I woke up a bit later than usual and, since I had an important meeting later in the day and needed to prep, instead of just getting up and going straight to do my walk, my internal dialogue of resistance started:

“Alright Pylin...time to go do your 30-min walk.”

“Urg, but I don’t feel like it today; and I am already behind because I woke up late.”

Usually, what shows up next for me would be a self-berating, super critical voice.

“But you have to go. You promised yourself you will do this daily. Stop being so lazy. What’s wrong with you? Just fucking go!”

This would normally go on for a while, until I would finally get so frustrated that I would succumb to this internal beating, and go do what I was “supposed” to do.

But I wouldn’t be happy about it. I would feel pressured, stressed, and annoyed.

🤔 Have you ever heard this internal unpleasant, judgmental, and scolding voice “forcing” you to do something you told yourself you had to do? 📢

When you feel like a fraud: The Imposter Syndrome

WHAT IS THE IMPOSTER SYNDROME?

First things first; if you're a nerd like me who wants to look this up in the scientific journals, they don't call it "Imposter Syndrome," they actually call it the "Imposter Phenomenon" (which led to my initial struggle in finding relevant papers on this topic in the scientific literature, despite it being soooo popular in general media.) But it has also been called the "fraud syndrome," "perceived fraudulence," and "imposter experience.")

One surprising thing that came from my high-level review of the psychological literature on this topic is that currently, researchers DO NOT AGREE on what this concept means.

This was surprising to me because it seems to be all over the internet and mentioned a lot in the vernacular, so I thought the state of the science was further along!

The main issue is whether it's ONE core thing (unidimensional) or MULTIPLE-THINGS (multidimensional) bundled together. So, I don't find it possible to give you a one-sentence definition of this, but more productive to outline what the researchers have been listing as part of this phenomenon.

How to Feel Successful Despite Your Imperfections

“I don’t feel intelligent enough.” 😞

I once had a coaching client who started off our call with this. Let’s call him Nakita.

Nakita was a senior leader in a global company who was able to calmly and logically tell me that he knows that he is an intelligent person.

However, whenever he gets feedback that implies that he is stupid for making a mistake, Nakita goes into an emotional spiral of shame, and inner mental self-flagellation (i.e., excessive criticism of himself). 😞😞😞

As we talked, it became clearer to both of us that the specific feedback that led to feelings of unworthiness about his intelligence only happened 1-2 times a year from a specific person.

This was an a-ha moment for Nakita to realize that he was letting himself be blindsided by something that only happened 1-2 times a year, and that actually for the past 9 years, he has been actively working hard on not letting negative feedback derail him.

“I’m now only letting in the really shitty ones, not all of them, and that’s PROGRESS.” ➡️

🤔 Have you felt this way before? Where you focused so much on what’s still wrong with you that you forgot to look at how far you’ve come?

How baby books made me realize that my perfectionistic tendencies were getting out of hand

A few Christmases ago, I wanted to buy my friend’s 18 month-old-baby two books as a gift, because I wasn’t in the same city as them, and wanted to be a good auntie from far away.

I don’t have kids so I didn’t know what books to buy, so I started off by asking my friend what her baby likes. Then, I crowdsourced on Facebook, asking parents what they recommended as the best baby books.

Suggestions came in, and instead of just choosing among the titles presented, I searched each of them on Amazon, read the reviews, and looked inside each book.

As I was researching these books, I discovered that I could hear each book being read in its entirety on Youtube, so I listened to all of them. All. Of. Them.

How you may be ruining your life with your high standards

Click here to listen to this newsletter as a PODCAST [16:41]

Read the following items. Do you agree or disagree?

  1. If you don’t expect much out of yourself, you will never succeed.

  2. When I am working on something, I cannot relax until it is perfect.

  3. If I ask someone to do something, I expect it to be done flawlessly.

  4. If I do not set the high standards for myself, I am likely to end up a second-rate person.

  5. I set higher goals than most people.

  6. My best just never seems to be good enough.

  7. My performance rarely lives up to my standards.

  8. The better I do, the better I am expected to do.

  9. If I do not do well all the time, people will not respect me.

  10. Even when I do something very carefully, I often feel that it is not quite right.

If you agreed with some or most of these items, you may have perfectionism tendencies.

Why habits fail Part 2/2

Click here to listen to this newsletter as a PODCAST [10:18]

In the last newsletter, we learned 3 reasons why people fail at their habits:

1. They focus too much on motivation.
2. They make the habit too hard for themselves.
3. They don't design their environment.

Today’s newsletter will focus on 3 more factors.

4. They didn’t have a plan B or contingency plan.

Let’s face it, even when you have designed a way to perfectly execute your habits, life happens. What may seem like a minor hiccup can throw your habit formation off balance.

One example is from Noella* (*named changed) who planned to do her 7 minutes of exercise after she has her first cup of coffee in the morning. Seems simple right?

Well, Noella has a 2-year old who wakes up at seemingly random times throughout the week. Sometimes he wakes up a lot after Noella, other time he wakes up right when Noella wakes up, and when this happens, Noella's morning habit routine gets thrown off balance, and she ends up not even doing the 7 minutes of exercise.

A way around this is to have a Plan B in place in case of an obstacle.