The Secret to Overcoming Perfectionism

• Releasing the pressure valves (7:36)
• Understanding perfectionism (2:15)
• Transform your mindset by celebrating wins (10:24)

QUOTES: 

“Perfectionism is actually a thinking problem. Your brain has created a negative association with failure and with making mistakes. And the more you think about the things you haven’t accomplished, the more evidence piles up, proving that you haven’t done enough yet.”

“When you start to see other people are getting promoted, or you compare yourself to other people who are doing the things you want faster than you, or you beat yourself up whenever you make any kind of tiny mistake. ….you are now saying to the universe that your current life is not enough.”

“The first step is for you to identify why you want the thing that you’re pursuing. What is it you really care about? What is it that you really want? It’s important for us to start to dig into what is behind this desire. And when you can recognize that, that can help you start to release that intense pressure to be like, oh, this is why I want it. I want it not just because I want the goal, but I want it because it’s going to give me something. The second, the next step, the second step is to teach your brain to look for success.”

“It takes around eight to twelve positive thoughts to counter one negative one. So your job is to start to counter with positive ones.”

NICOLE

Hello, welcome back to the School of Self-worth, I’m your host, Nicole Tsong. So excited to be here with you all today for a quick, powerful episode, because we’re going to talk about a topic that is resonating deeply with my clients and is definitely a personal experience I’ve had to move through as well, and that is the secret to overcoming perfectionism. I am all about releasing the pressure valve so you can live a life you really want, with joy, ease, alignment and peace.

So stay tuned for this incredible topic. And before we get started, if you’re an Asian American corporate woman who wants to manifest her promotion in 60 days while working 20% fewer hours, DM me ‘dream’ on Instagram @ NicoleTsong. I’ve got something there for you.

All right friends, let’s get into it. Welcome to the School of Self-worth, a podcast for ambitious women who know they are worthy of an astoundingly great life.

Join us weekly as we get on the right side of your intuition, redefine success and reclaim your self-worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong, an award-winning journalist who left it all behind to become a best-selling author of three books and work/life balance expert, helping ambitious women unlock their intuition and step into a life of fulfillment and radical joy.

Every single week, I will bring you diverse and meaningful conversations with successful women from all walks of life, who share insight about what it takes to be brave, joyful, and authentic every day. Every episode is thoughtfully designed to leave you feeling empowered with tangible tips and advice that will lead you to your next breakthrough.

When I was younger, I thought that overachieving was the same thing as perfectionism. To me, they were pretty much the same idea, and I was actually really proud of it. I thought it was a badge of honor, which meant that I was crushing the competition. I was rising fast in my career and my life, and I was really making my family proud. But as I got deeper into my career, particularly when I was a journalist, I realized that there was a dark side to perfectionism. So how it looked for me back then, is after I wrote a story that was going in the paper the next day, I would take all my notes with me, or email them to myself, then I would be thinking about that story all evening. Even if I was out for drinks or dinner with friends, in the back of my mind, I was worried, stressed about all the facts in the story and whether I had gotten them right. As soon as I was done with dinner, or working, I would rush home, and double check everything. I would compare my story, line by line, with all of my notes.

Sometimes I would call into the newsroom around 8, 9 or 10pm! Copy editors hate this by the way, calling to say “Hey, can we change these three words in the lead”, or “Can we change this fact?” They’re like, “Are you sure?” They don’t really like it when you skip your editor and try to change things late. So that would happen to me frequently and then I would worry until I went to sleep, usually at midnight, still looking at all of my notes. Then in the morning I would wake up feeling so anxious, it’d be so heavy in my chest, and I would avoid reading the story until I got to work because I would just go into this crazy avoidance pattern. Once I got there, I was in such dread walking to my desk, where I would see if there were messages from sources or from readers telling me that my story was wrong, or I had made a mistake, or something was bad or wrong with my story.

If someone actually said that there was a mistake that I had to correct, it could send me into a full day anxiety spiral. So this was pretty unpleasant, to say the least. And this was normal for me. This was my life for years, until I learned that there was a better way. I recognized and started to understand that perfectionism was actually costing me my sanity and my inner peace.

So for my immigrant daughters out there, this is so common. And a big part of it is because you’re usually raised with the idea that your actions are not just about you, they’re a reflection on your family. They’re a reflection on the whole. There’s always this idea that you should be making sure that the choices you’re making are reflecting well on people, beyond yourself, and it’s really distinct from the American individualism way. And I like to acknowledge it, because I feel like sometimes we don’t even recognize that we were raised with that, then we kind of come into corporate culture or into other places, where that’s not the case.

For example, like good grades are not just you doing well, it’s a reflection on your parents feeling like they have succeeded, and particularly as immigrants. For them, success is their children succeeding in the new country that they came to. And then if you did things poorly or you messed up, oh my gosh, that was so negative and can be really challenging. I remember being really embarrassed when things like that happened, like getting a B in geometry, and my dad was just so disappointed. You know, it was really hard for me at that time, feeling like I had disappointed them.

Oftentimes, because of experiences like that, you feel your goal in life is to do everything you can to make your family proud, and the only way to do that is to be as perfect as possible, at all times. And I’ll say that this is often true, no matter what your family said or did. So while my dad was disappointed in that B, I will shout out to my parents for being really supportive of every crazy twist and turn I’ve taken in my career, from journalism to teaching yoga (which is a really nutty one for Asian parents), to entrepreneurship, and they have always been so positive and loving, through all of those choices.

The reason I wanted to share that, is because perfectionism is actually a thinking problem. Your brain has created a negative association with failure and with making mistakes, and the more you think about the things you haven’t accomplished, the more evidence piles up, proving that you haven’t done enough yet. This is when you start seeing other people getting promoted, or you compare yourself to other people who are getting the things you want, faster than you are, or you beat yourself up whenever you make any kind of tiny mistake.

But what you’re really doing when those things are occurring, is you are now saying to the universe that your current life is not enough. And the way the law of attraction works, is you’re now in an energetic spiral, that you can’t break out of, where it feels like everything is not enough. And you compensate, right? You compensate with that perfectionism, trying to control outcomes, and trying to make sure you never fail. Which, a) is impossible because failure happens for everybody and, b) it makes you so much less resilient and able to pick yourself back up when something does go sideways.

Go look back at journalist, Nicole. That’s what was occurring for me all the time. On top of that, it creates an impossible pressure. One of my clients was going through this the other day, where she had associated reaching a particular goal as a metric of success, and that was creating insane pressure to hit that goal, and it was stressing her out and making her so anxious – like she wasn’t doing enough, and she had to do more – and this cycle had been nonstop. She’s also in their summertime now, and wanting to spend time with her family and have free weekends, but how can you make any of that happen when you’re feeling that inner anxiety, and what she really wanted to feel, was free. She was pursuing her purpose that she was in action in her life, so we had to look at all of those pieces. I said, “Here are the things that I want you to do, because you’re actually not going to like this, you’re probably actually going to hate this a little bit – and that is to choose a powerful new habit – this is the way to move out of the perfectionism. Here’s a new two-step system for you to create this new habit. The first step is for you to identify why you want the thing that you’re pursuing? What is it that you really care about? What is it that you really want? Why does this goal, this thing that you’re going for, matter to you?”  In my client’s case, she really wanted freedom, like to feel like she was in her purpose. She was living in alignment. She was who she is here to be.

This applies to any of you who want a promotion. Why do you really want that? What is it going to give you? What is it going to offer you? It’s important for us to start to dig into what is behind this desire? And when you can recognize that, that can help you to release that intense pressure. To be like, “Oh, this is why I want it. I want it not just because I want the goal, but I want it because it’s going to give me something. It’s going to give me a desired outcome, a feeling in my body that feels really free or spacious, or like I have somehow succeeded.”  So it is important to know about that piece.

Then we have the second step, which is to teach your brain to look for success. So your brain has a negativity bias, we all do. It’s just the way it came onto the planet. And it can be incredibly difficult to find the off switch for all those negative thoughts that are inside. Then the way the law of attraction works, is when you’re in a negative thought, it attracts more negative thoughts and more negative thoughts, and then we can just end up in this really dark place. There’s evidence and data about this, that it takes around 8 to 12 positive thoughts, to counter 1 negative one!

So your job is to start to counter with positive ones. Sometimes this can feel really challenging. What is a positive thing? It may make you feel like you’re faking it, but it’s actually really simple. You just want to celebrate one tiny thing. Wherever you’re at listening to this, celebrate one tiny thing. It could be like, I drank water this morning. I got out of bed and made coffee. I unloaded the dishwasher. I did something really small, really easy. I texted my mom. That’s it. Just so simple, because when you start to celebrate doing something small like that, the more you stack these wins of success, the more you are now drawing in successful wins. This experience is like, “Wow, I am doing good things today. I’m now countering that feeling of not doing enough.”  And it is so essential to do this repeatedly.

We do need some accountability, right, for us to do this? This is something that I do with my clients consistently, because I find for most of us, it’s pretty challenging to put this into practice and know that you can make a shift right now! So make a shift, just celebrate a win, tell me what it is, DM me on Instagram, I actually really want to know, and then just anchor it in that way by sending me a DM to Nicole Tsong and say ‘stack the wins’, to start to move your energy in the direction of celebration and success, and see that the more you bring it in, the more of it you get.

To my perfectionists, it is not about nailing this and getting it exactly right. It is about gradual improvement. It’s part of the bigger system that I teach around really being celebrated and promoted, in my course, because it is part of the bigger thing that we have to work on, as part of the system. And if you want to learn that exact step -by -step system, DM me ‘dream’ at Nicole Tsong on Instagram, and we’ll talk about it, because it is really important for us to understand that starting to overcome perfectionism, is a process. It’s not something that will happen overnight. And you do have the power to make a change right now. It’s about adding up any tiny wins you have, no matter how small. So DM and let me know what your win is, or if you want to learn more about the step -by -step system it takes to really overcome this for good, DM me ‘dream’ at Nicole Tsong.

Thank you all so much for listening. I am so proud of you, wherever you’re at, and whatever win you have from today, I can’t wait to hear from you about your wins. Thank you so much for tuning into day’s episode. Before you go, don’t forget, if you are a high-achieving woman who wants to uncover your biggest blind spots preventing fast, intuitive decisions, I’ve got a 72-second assessment for you. So make sure to DM me ‘quiz’ @NicoleTsong on Instagram.

Thank you for being here and for listening. We read every note that we get from you about how the podcast is making a difference in your life. Please know how much we appreciate each and every one of you.

Until next time, I’m Nicole Tsong, and this is the School of Self-Worth.