EP 35: My Ongoing Battle with Perfectionism
“You’re not helping yourself by focusing on perfectionism, you’re not going to get where you think you’re going to go,” says host Corinne Morahan on today’s episode of Get Organized for Good. Like so many of us, she has suffered under the illusion of this false belief system that, to paraphrase researcher Brene Brown, if we just do everything perfectly we can avoid painful feelings. We waste precious time chasing an ever-retreating end point. We operate at the level to which our limiting beliefs regulate us. We say scathing things to and about ourselves and start to believe other people are thinking and saying the same about us.
Clearly, perfectionism is getting us nowhere. To help us shake it off, Corinne shares some of what she does to keep it from creeping back into her life—especially as the world continues to become a more stressful and scary place. She explains how she’s learned to redirect all of that perfectionistic energy into creating, having fun and nourishing the spirit—with no expectations.
So, let’s get messy! After all, no one’s perfect.
Quotes
- “Perfectionism is different from the pursuit of excellence, which I think is amazing, and I feel like I am always in a pursuit of excellence, and I think that is great. But that is different from being perfectionistic, where you are trying to be just perfect, look perfect, do perfect, say perfect. You can’t live like that. It’s no way to live.” (4:51 | Corinne Morahan)
- “I’m trying to do more of the channeling that energy into doing something fun and creative and building and messy as opposed to, ‘How can I perfect the things that do not need perfecting?’ They do not need any more time. They do not need any more attention. It’s just a waste and I’ve wasted…I mean if I add up all the time throughout my past four-and-a-half decades trying to make things perfect—perfect-er, more perfect, better— what I could do with all that time and I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to waste any more time on things that don’t need to be done.” (11:18 | Corinne Morahan)
- “We’re all in it together. What I can tell you is, you are not helping yourself by focusing on perfectionism. You’re not going to get where you think you’re going to go. There’s not an end point to it. You’re not going to arrive and feel like, ‘Finally! Everything is done.’ And even if you do, then what?” (12:22 | Corinne Morahan)
- “The other thing that I think is tricky about perfectionism is because we’re being so critical of ourselves and we have these mean voices, we think that other people are saying those same mean things about us.” (14:55 | Corinne Morahan)
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