Are you at a crossroads in your life and don’t seem to be making progress toward your goals? We all know that we should give our all and aim for excellence in all that we do, but what happens when this desire for success becomes toxic? Everyday, we look forward to something productive, successful and even joyful. However, not everything will go the way we wanted and that could lead to self-doubt and languish. As a person, we also make mistakes leading to unfortunate events. Fortunately, there’s an antidote.
Our guest for today is Audrey Holst. She is a recovering perfectionist who coaches audacious top achievers on how to stop micromanaging their lives with perfectionism. Audrey helps people struggling with the fear of failure and mistakes. Join us as we break down what’s preventing you from success and how you can focus on your progress. Stay tuned to learn more!
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Ditch Perfectionism, Strive For Progress with Audrey Holst
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a bit about perfectionism and this is something that I’ve observed prevent a lot of people from following their dreams. You’re waiting for the exact right time, waiting for the exact right setup, the exact right thing or excessive amounts of research and perfected your product, you’ve crossed every t, dotted every i, as they say, and you’ve accounted for every possible scenario and I can’t stress to you enough how many times I’ve seen this really get in the way of people’s dreams. My guest today, Audrey Holst, is the founder of Fortitude & Flow and she specializes in helping people overcome this tendency toward perfectionism which is so prevalent in our culture today.
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Audrey, welcome to the program.
Thanks so much for having me. I can’t wait for this conversation.
Definitely, Audrey. Now, I want to start off with the foundations. What are the origins of perfectionism? What makes someone really feel like they need to have every last little thing perfect before launching anything or before sharing anything with the world?
Yeah. So I think the first thing to understand about perfectionism and perfectionists is that nobody wakes up at age 30 and says, “You know what, that perfectionism thing, I haven’t tried that yet. I’m gonna try that on for size,” and then they just automatically all of a sudden start with these perfectionist tendencies. That is just not anybody’s story. So I did over 60 hours of interviews with perfectionists, people who self-identified with perfectionists, and every single one of them, I asked them questions, I had them tell me their stories, and every single one of them had origins in their youngest years. They could think back when they were a kid in their household, in school where perfectionism had its beginnings and then how other places in their life either helped to stoke the fires of perfectionism or actually helped them work through it.
So, how I look at perfectionism is it’s a survival mechanism, which is why perfectionism tends to flare up in times of stress. Share on X
When people get stressed out, when people are in new situations, that’s when they tend to go towards that tendency more, which is one of those things that can be really difficult for people that are maybe entrepreneurs or in spaces that require a lot of agility and being uncertain because it really flares up those perfectionist tendencies and it can be a huge issue.
Wow. So you’re saying most of it begins at childhood and then, at some point in life, the people around you either reinforce it or send you in the opposite direction. Have you heard a lot of good stories about people being sent in the opposite direction, saying, “Okay, I grew up perfectionist,” and maybe had a perfectionist family, or I think our education system with our pass/fail grades reinforces perfectionism, but then finds the right people and they say, “Hey, wait a second, no, this is what a minimum viable product is.” This is you’re looking at everything else, like when you hike that mountain, did you ask for perfectionism? Did you ask for perfection from those rocks by the river? And, sorry for the nature examples, I was told —
Nature examples are good, yeah. Yeah, and it’s often through the guidance and relationship building of mentors, of employers. It comes through relationship. Perfectionism, if we think about a survival mechanism, there’s two answers that are trying to be met: Am I safe and do I belong?
So, when you start to have relationships where we are proven time and time again that we can make mistakes, that actually mistakes are celebrated, and I’m going to put mistakes in quotes because sometimes they’re actual mistakes and sometimes they’re just awkward moments or I tried this and it didn’t go as well as I thought it was going to go but people who tend to change this wiring in their system is in relationship with other people, they start to find that, “Oh, I can actually do this thing that feels really scary and terrifying and like, I’m gonna die, AKA make a mistake. I didn’t die and nobody kicked me out of the village and I’m still standing and maybe I’ll try it again,” and that’s when things start to shift.
Part of me thinks about it in terms of what pursuit you’re in, even what job you’re in, and I always look — across the street from my house is a basketball court and I’ve witnessed a lot of people playing basketball and even when I see the person who’s the big shot, the hotshot that makes all the shots, I always think about the fact that this person, at one point, had to be there for the first time. At one point, this person was missing shots. At one point, this person was making a fool of themselves because they were just getting started and had to work up to that. What I’m wondering is if pursuits such as that tend to move people in the opposite direction of perfectionism as opposed to people, say, you pursue a job where your particular employer doesn’t tolerate mistakes and I’m putting that in quotation marks as well, doesn’t tolerate any of that, and honestly leads you into this mindset that anytime you mess up or anytime you present an idea that’s not liked, you’re liable to get fired.
Yeah, so this is such a good question. I’ll use the example of lawyers. So I work with a lot of lawyers and they do studies of people go into law school and sort of people’s baseline level of stress. So they compare them to people who’ve gone to other types of education for other types of jobs. Lawyers tend to come out of law school more stressed and with a higher level of perfectionism, what I would call toxic perfectionism, when they come out of law school. So now you have people that have a baseline higher than the rest of the population in terms of that perfectionism and now you’re throwing them into another area, another occupation, in which they can literally be fired or lose millions of dollars if a comment is in the wrong place. This just continually emphasizes and reinforces that perfectionism piece over and over again. And what we know about the body is the body loves efficiency and the body tries to anticipate the future to become more efficient so now you have a system that is continuously wired into this groove of, “This is what I do. This is what’s efficient for me and now I’m in this perfectionism groove,” and just because the body finds it efficient, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s healthy for the body. It’s the same thing with chronic stress. When people get into these chronic stress loops, raises their baseline level, and now they’re operating up here instead of coming back to homeostasis, which is what the body wants to do. It’s very clear in the law world, which is why a lot of people have a hard time — people that may really thrive in the beginning, if they aren’t taught different ways to cope when things get stressful, which is one of the things that I do and I would say it goes beyond coping but I think just for a simplistic word, if they’re not taught other ways to be in this challenging environment that doesn’t break them down physically, mentally, and emotionally, then they’re out because it’s not sustainable. Their bodies physically can’t sustain it.
Yeah. It reminds me of those old stories, I don’t know how true they are, but as a New Yorker, you heard them of Wall Street in the 80s and people who would literally work 20-hour days or work 12-hour days and party another eight hours and just sustain themselves on cocaine and how for 18, 24 months for some people, it was a wild ride and tons of fun and worked really well, they made tons of money, had lots of fun, but, eventually, that was not sustainable. Eventually, you’d have that crash.
And people end up with chronic health conditions. That’s when people have their bodies shut them down and now they can’t work and they can’t keep up that same pace and now they have to basically learn from scratch, “Okay, I can’t burn the candle at both ends. Also, I’m trying to crawl out of this hole that I’ve kind of been put into because my body shut down on me. Now I have to make different decisions,” which is really tough for people, especially if you have that perfectionism thing, you’re all in or you’re shut down. There’s this very prideful, “I can take it better than other people,” that often comes because it comes from disconnection, that’s a piece of it. They are able to disconnect from their body where their body is going, “Hey, the kitchen is on fire,” and they’re like, “No, no, it’s fine,” there’s smoke coming out of their ears. So it’s either that or shut down because the body does shut them down and they get sick or there’s some issue and then now they can’t work because their body says, “Hey, we can’t run these hormones like we’ve been running them for the past six months.” So that’s what happens. We talk about it sometimes it’s a mindset thing but it’s a body situation.
Oh, yeah, reminds me of whenever anyone will use the phrase, “I’ll live,” which is really the shortest way to put it and someone’s like, “Oh my god, you don’t look so good today. You’ve been coughing a lot lately,” and they’ll just go, “I’ll live,” and then quickly move on with whatever they’re trying to do.
And so here’s what’s so interesting about that, language matters, because what that says to me, if I can take that little tiny sentence and break it down a little bit, I’m suffering really hard, I’m under resourced, I am on this mountain and times are tough, things are really rough right now but I will live, like I’m not going to thrive, I’m not going to have a good time, I’m not having fun but I will live and that’s the same sort of language that people will use in the opposite direction. When they try something that’s scary for the first time, they will literally say something or they’ll make, I’m putting this in quotes, make a mistake, and then look around, they’ll say, “I didn’t die,” which sounds dramatic but, again, this is the body’s interpretation of, “I thought I was gonna die, like I literally thought the body thinks I’m gonna die if we do this which is why we don’t wanna do this,” and then you have this relief of, “I didn’t die.”
So when we use language like live or die, that points to that survival piece that is actually just wired in us. Share on X
And so with some of these professions, like being a lawyer, you can’t really change the nature of the profession. As long as you’re a lawyer, you’re going to have to deal with the fact that the comma in the wrong spot, the period, forgetting to write phrases such as “is not limited to the following examples” could potentially really ruin your life and so with someone that has that type of situation, is there something someone can do elsewhere in life to counteract this constant barrage of reinforcing perfectionism that they get from their career?
Yeah, and I think it actually comes into play in those environments. So I think it’s not just a thing on the side, it actually becomes something that has to be integrated in all of it. And that’s the other thing, you’re a full human all the time and, yes, you may feel like you can turn things on and off but you can’t just magically fill up an empty resource cup at the end of your — that filling up and that emptying out, it goes throughout the day so a lot of it is first starting to just pay attention. So, when I bring people through the fortitude and flow process, which is how I start people starting to disengage from this thing, noticing is the first step because people do what I call the perfectionist two step, which is they see it and fix it, they see it and react, they’re very reactive, they’re very quick moving, and often their instinct is to just pick up the ball and run with it. They don’t stop to think, “Is that actually my ball? Do I wanna pick up that ball? Do I actually need to touch that ball?” There’s a very reactive fast-moving nature of people. So, often, a lot of it is just slowing things down to get their fast-moving brain and their body on the same page at the same time so they can start noticing, “Oh.” I have like one client, for instance, how this relationship to chaos where chaos would really — when chaos was happening, it would just throw them off. And they started paying attention, they started to notice, just notice chaos, like, “Oh, here’s me and here’s chaos and I can notice that chaos is happening,” and it just created enough of a recognition and separation that it didn’t overwhelm them every single time and they started to be able to function in that relationship better. So, just noticing is the first step, because people want to fix something but I’m like, “We don’t have enough information.” We haven’t gathered enough information to make any decisions yet and, often, when people start noticing, you don’t have to actually do anything. You don’t have to blow up your entire life, basically.
Yeah. Well, one thing I’m wondering is, we live in an instant gratification, quick fix culture where, creepily, in my view, Amazon will deliver you your package an hour and a half after you ordered it, a whole bunch of other things, social media, especially, load up your picture, get your likes, load up your video, get your responses. Are you battling that a little bit when you’re working with your clients and that initial stage of saying, “Hey, wait a second,” the first thing, it’s not about find the problem, fix it, check the box next to your to-do list, this is something that’s a little bit of a longer term. This is more about your mindset issue, how you respond to certain things, how you respond to stress, how your life is set up.
Yeah, it’s so context dependent. It totally depends on what somebody’s job is and how they need to do it and all the elements to it. So whenever I have a coaching client and we’re working together, we got to be realistic. I’m not going to say, “Okay, we’ll just turn off your notifications,” sometimes like the attention of your notification but sometimes it’s based on the nature of your job, you do need to be making sure you’re checking emails at certain times because certain things are — maybe that’s how people can communicate with you. So, sometimes, people can set boundaries, sometimes they can’t so it’s kind of like — well, again, let’s gather the information, see what’s possible within the current context, and sometimes just having the awareness of like, “Oh, wow, yeah, like I’ve got 15 different notifications flying in my face all the time. No wonder I’m feeling the way I do,” because a lot of people tell themselves, “Well, I shouldn’t feel this way,” and when you start to pull the pieces apart and just say like, now that we’ve talked about this, now that you’ve pulled out all of these pieces and they’re all on the table, does that make a little more sense to you why you feel the way you do and often people say, “Oh, okay, now I understand why I feel the way I do it,” like, okay, well, that’s a good starting point so you can stop beating yourself up for feeling like you shouldn’t feel exhausted.
Yeah, there’s a lot of that shouldn’t in there as well, right? Because I said this a number of podcasts ago but I’ve observed people who are working 30-hour weeks who are utterly burned out and people who are working 60-hour weeks who are not burnt out, they’re energized, all depending on how well aligned you are. It’s kind of interesting to really validate people’s stories.
I have to always point this out. And it’s hard to believe it sometimes because people are showing you the highlight reel.
Dr. Margaret Rutherford has something that she calls perfectly hidden depression, I think she may have updated what she’s calling it now, which is basically she will talk about these people who look like they have it all and end up committing suicide because they have this whole inner world, and this is another thing I’ve discovered with perfectionists is when I was doing my interviews, they would often say people on the outside have no idea or they would think that people on the outside have no idea. They’re having a different inner experience than what they’re masking to the outside world. Let’s just say we took technology out of it. So say we were just walking around our village checking out things. We’d be physically seeing people’s lives. We’d be seeing their yards, we’d be seeing their families, we’d be involved in them in some capacity, there’d be a certain amount of intimacy. We would have some insight into how they were doing like in reality. Now, our bodies think that it has all the information but there’s often big gaps missing so we fill them in with our own perceptions. So we see somebody doing something and we’re like, “Oh, man, they’ve got it together, they’re making all this money,” and then meanwhile, in the background, their marriage is unraveling and they’re $50,000 in debt but they’re not advertising that to anybody. So we create these stories and then it puts us all in these awful narratives where we’re like we’re actually all in a more similar situation that we think we’re in.
When I first started working after graduate school, I thought I was the weird one because I worked in 90-minutes spurts and then needed some rest after that and the idea of just sitting still at a computer for eight hours straight didn’t really sit well with me and I honestly thought this made me a weird person. And then I think it was only three years ago, I started reading the research that 90-minute spurts are actually a fairly normal way to work.
You’re actually way ahead of your time there. Totally, and I’m one of those people that I can’t — I have to go for a walk. I’m a very physical person. If I tried to sit at a computer for eight hours a day, my mental health just tanks because I can’t function like that. Maybe other people are able to. I don’t really know that many that can though, honestly,
I don’t know. For some reason, I thought I saw that early on and I was like this 3 p.m. fog that I’m getting every day, what what’s wrong with me?
Right, because nobody’s really talking about it or they’re joking about it but they’re pushing through and, again, we have these perceptions of how we think everybody else is doing things or what is working for everybody else. It’s just not true. But we’ve told ourselves this thing so now we think, well, I’m the aberration and that makes me messed up and I don’t feel good about that.
It’s so weird to think about when the majority of people think they’re the aberration just because the minority that happened to fit into the system that was built seems to be doing well and people get afraid to say, “Wait a second, this isn’t working out well for me and maybe there are others.”
Yeah, totally, which is why I think that I’ve had such a — I’ve been so, lucky is not the word I want to use but it’s been a fascinating thing as a coach because I get to see everybody’s inner world, I get to hear all the drama and I’m getting a very different conversation than a lot of people’s outside relationships are having so I’m seeing the backdoors of people who are looking like they’re killing it but, on the back end, they’re freaking out, so it’s like I’ve had the privilege of working with some really amazing, incredible people who are still really amazing, incredible people and are very human. Anybody out there that you are putting on a pedestal, take them off that pedestal because they are just as human as you, they just maybe have a better team or their marketing is cleaner. I don’t know, I don’t know what to tell you.
It’s something like that but one of the things that I think a lot of people are taking a deep breath and thinking about is what information I’m receiving in my head and is what information balanced and so, for example, social media and even just work in general encourages people to only show off their best which we’ve seen is what’s leading to a lot of people’s depression because so many people in so many settings are comparing the entirety of their lives to only the top 10 percent of everyone else’s lives, like, “Oh, look, this person has a cute baby picture,” “This person just went on a trip to Hawaii,” “This person just got a promotion,” and no one’s posting, “My boss yelled at me today,” “I got fired today,” “I woke up in a gutter with whatever in my arm.” I mean, to go to the other extreme.
Really take you to the opposite end, yeah.
Yeah, so do you feel like you’re getting a balance because you’re in the profession you’re in or do you feel like you’re actually getting skewed into the other direction where you’re seeing the bad, the false, the panic more often?
It takes a balance because when people get into a space where they’re actually able to say stuff is hard and it’s not going that well, it can also be really easy for them to tank in that direction, where all of a sudden it’s like now they’re staring into the void and now they’re on the catastrophe train and everything is terrible. And this is another thing with language is people will say things like, “I always…,” “I never…,” I this…,” “I’m this, I’m that,” they’ll label themselves and, again, language matters and what you are telling yourself on a regular basis is habituating your body as to what it believes is efficiency and what it needs to do. It’s important to validate people’s experiences, it’s important for people to be able to say what they want to say and say what they need to say and then it’s also important to be like, okay, and I’m not going to let you fall down into that hole without being like, “Okay, I got the rope on your harness and we’re actually gonna come back out because going down deeper into that hole is not actually helpful, we’re gonna actually bring it back out a little bit and find that balanced perspective,” because that’s another thing I will mention that perfectionism can do is that it can skew people towards — and this is another thing that happens with lawyers, they get trained to look for what’s wrong. That’s their job. They look for the problems, they look for what’s wrong, what isn’t going right so that they can get ahead of it, they can have plan A, B, C, D, E through Q when that doesn’t work, so they’re kind of planning for the worst case scenario all the time, which is what their body starts doing. So, one of the things that perfectionists can really help in the beginning is starting to orient to things that are going well, that feel good so that they can build their nervous system capacity so that they’re not just honed in in this survival mode of, “All these things are going wrong, I have to be hyper vigilant all the time.” They start to be able to resource better.
I see, yeah.
So it’s a balance. It has to go in both directions. And it can also be, like you said, “I’ll live, I’m fine, everything’s great,” because it’s lies and that’s not going to get you anywhere either.
Yeah. So it is about finding that balance. Now, what brings someone into your office? What state of mind makes someone need your services?
It depends on the context. In a lot of corporate context, it’s people who need some extra support, who are maybe feeling overwhelmed or feeling under resourced or not really coping well. In terms of people who are hiring me individually, there’s often — because, let’s be honest, people often don’t invest unless there’s something that is related to their jobs or their work because that’s very common. So people are going to get coaching if their job is in jeopardy or their money is in jeopardy because, again, survival. So, often, it’s people who are struggling in the work that they’re in and they’re feeling like, “I feel like I need to find another job,” or things are not going well. Or the other thing that happens very often is, “I’ve checked all the things on my list, I’ve got the successful business, I’m making the money I want, I’ve got the house, I’ve checked everything off my list and I don’t feel less anxious. I feel just as stressed out as I was when I started off my business or when I started this venture,” and it’s like, well, yes, yes, so a lot of that will be like, okay, now that you’ve gotten the checklist, let’s rewire your body to actually be able to land where you are now.
And enjoy it, because one of the first things that people look at when they’re starting a business, or I want people to look at, others want people to look at is how are you going to feel when you’re sitting in the chair that you want to be sitting in. And I guess this goes for traditional careers as well as business, when you have the right amount of clients, when you’re growing at the right pace or when you’ve gotten a promotion, when you’ve gotten to that spot that you have so driven in your mind that you want to get to, what does that feel like? Do you know, I randomly bring up hip hop lyrics quite a bit and it was Big Sean that recently said, “Good news is that you came a long way, the bad news is you went the wrong way,” type of situation.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly what happens is people get out of the sort of startup grinding, “Is this even gonna make it?” phase and they take that same energy and vibe and mentality into the next cycle of their business and they never quite get out of that grind because you have to muscle through it sometimes, like I’m not going to say that everything is going to be easy all the time and you’re always gonna feel good. That’s not what I’m saying at all.
Where they say an Alcoholics Anonymous, like admit that you have a problem is the very first step which pretty much makes sense when it comes to that or any kind of behavioral change that someone has to want it, otherwise —
Yeah, I’m not dragging anybody through anything, that is not happening over here, like I’m not dragging anybody through anything.
You are taking the steps yourself and I’m happy to hold your hand sometimes but that’s the only way to do this. Share on X
So if someone feels like they’re at the point where they can’t really do this anymore, do you ever advise them to just hold tight for a couple more months or a few more weeks to get to a certain place where your exit from the situation become a bit more sustainable, whether it be just that, okay, you’ve saved up a little bit more money or you’ve landed a few more clients or you’ve completed a degree that you’re one course away from, is there ever a point where you say, “Okay, grind a little more but then we’ll plan a nice relaxation period afterward”?
I would never tell somebody to keep doing what they’re doing just to make it through. If I’m already in the conversation with somebody and we’re already working together, because this happens often, where people come in and they’re like, “I wanna exit but I know I’m gonna totally screw myself over financially if I get out now.” It’s like, okay, well, let’s not do that. Okay, let’s figure out logistically what is needed and, at the same time, let’s see what we can adjust within the way your operating system is wired and how you’re looking at things so that you can be with this in a slightly different way. Because that’s what ultimately people need, to be able to kind of, okay, if I can’t get out of this situation or if I need to be in this situation for a certain period of time longer, which happens sometimes, what are we going to work with that we can shift in some capacity to get them to where they need to be in order to have what they need?
So you talked about lawyers in the beginning and how that profession really can’t be changed in the sense that if you don’t put those phrases, “Not liable for blah, blah, blah,” there’s certain things that could really burn you so you have to have this really detail-oriented look at every single word and make sure it’s perfect type of mentality. Do you oftentimes work with people who are applying too much of that mentality to jobs where you don’t need to be quite as perfect, where you could dial down the perfectionism and move a little bit more into that minimum viable product, which, for anyone listening that doesn’t know, minimum viable product is something that’s good enough to show a target demographic what the product looks like but it’s not the perfect for sale product that you’re eventually going to build Is there oftentimes that you move people more into that direction and say, “Hey, wait a second, your customers don’t care about this RGB 212-111-107 exact color,” or whatever it is?
Yeah. Oh, 100 percent. I mean, all the time. This is when we talk about experimentation. The four steps that I take people through are noticing, discernment, action, integration. So we get to action, action has to be small, doable, sustainable, experimental. And so this is one of the things, for nervous system shifting, we’re doing things in small titrated doses so that the system can start to get on board with things and there are not huge shocks to the system, because, often, we’ll make these huge leaps, again, we survive, but now the next time our body’s like, “I don’t wanna do that again. That was awful.” It’s like how do we — in what you’re talking about, people start to experiment with — just using the word experiment takes like 100 percent of pressure off people’s shoulders.
And people feel a little bit more permissive, like, oh, this is not that test where you get a pass-fail and if I fail, then I can never go to college, there’s that mentality.
Yeah, that mentality. I mean, those are some formative years when that’s being drilled into a lot of people’s heads.
It’s awful. It’s really awful.
It makes sense. So when I think of experimenting, I always think about trying a new restaurant and whenever I hear anyone getting too intense about it, like, okay, if it’s not good, it’s one bad meal and then you just never go to that place again.
Yeah, totally. And, again, language. I think I’m going to talk about language a lot today because it does make a difference and you will start to hear it when you’re listening to yourself, when you’re listening to other people.
People use the term “fear of failure.” Every word in there is terrifying. The word “fear” is scary. “Failure” is scary. And then people say, “Don’t be afraid to fail.” I’m like I am. But I am. Share on X
Even “don’t” is a negative word to start that sentence off.
Right. So, again, it’s like how do we how do we find different ways of talking about a thing, of seeing a thing, of expressing a thing so it feels more approachable because that’s what it feels like. To the body, it feels like you want me to walk up to this tiger and hope it doesn’t bite my head off but maybe we just create some different parameters here where I feel like I can get close to the tiger but I still feel like there’s a cage there so like I’m going to be okay.
And I’m guessing that this consciousness of our language is something that applies both externally and internally. Because we talk to ourselves, we say a lot of things to ourselves —
We’re awful to ourselves.
— quite frequently and I heard someone once say 80 percent of it is negative. You might have a better number on that.
I don’t know the percentages but I know that personally feels pretty accurate.
And it’s so weird, so there’s a small difference between saying, “Don’t fear failure and try something new,” or experiment with something new, something where you’re changing it from negative words to positive words and what you’re saying is that that could actually have a really huge change, whether it’s something you’re saying to someone else or whether it’s something you’re saying to yourself.
Yes, 100 percent. It’s that whole thing of like, “Don’t think of a pink elephant.” What’s the first thing that happens? Okay, now, the pink elephant’s in your head and you’re trying not to think about it but now you’re thinking about it and here it is. It’s here again and again. And we’re like, okay, well, you have to give it — think about your brain is like a border collie with a lot of energy. You have to tell your brain what to do. You can’t tell it what not to do because what’s the point? Don’t eat the couch. Okay, what do you want me to do instead? So what is it? What’s the productive thing that you’re trying to do so you can put your energy in that direction? What are we doing? Often, I’ll say, okay, so how do you want to feel? Well, I don’t want to feel stressed. We can’t move towards not stressed, we have to move towards something and this is something that people have not considered before, which is why they’re not going there because they literally have no idea — they know where they don’t want to be but they have no idea where they want to be so that is extremely important.
That reminds me of something a friend of mine told me last year that I’ve repeated to so many people. He said nobody’s ever planned a trip to Hawaii by thinking about how they don’t want to go to South Africa.
Right, exactly.
You don’t go to Expedia and look up hotels not in this destination or —
That’s a great — I’m going to use that, I’ll give credit to — I’ll be like credit to Steven’s friend, whoever that is. That’s great. I love that. That’s exactly what it is. If you’ve got your GPS, you set your GPS, you have to tell your GPS where to go and you have to actually start moving in that direction to make any sort of adjustments. You can’t sit in your driveway and be like, “Well, I’m gonna get to California perfectly.” Well, you have to actually start moving there and then you hit the roadblocks and the construction and the traffic and then you can reroute around but you have to actually move in order to go somewhere.
If anyone listening out there, just say listening to this conversation, what do you think they should say to themselves? If someone listening has the opportunity to just right now say one sentence to themselves that’ll put them on a better path than the typical human self-talk of people who are so focused on, “I don’t wanna do this job anymore,” “I don’t wanna think about this topic anymore,” “I don’t want this happening to me, I don’t want that happening to me”?
I think just like who you are and how you are and what you do make sense given your body’s wiring.
And that’s something we can all try to do.
That’s your starting point is you got to get on board with yourself and the fact that even though it doesn’t make sense to you sometimes, your body is always on your side. Share on X
This is not one sentence, this is more sentences. How you are makes sense is my sentence.
How you are — so your body is always on your side.
Right, we use words like self-sabotage, how terrible is that that we’re against ourselves in some capacity? And it’s like no, the body is doing things because it thinks that this is my best way to survive, this is my best way to make it through even if it doesn’t feel like the right way. There’s something in your system that is wired in that direction. So starting with like, “This makes sense, I’m okay, there’s nothing like so-called wrong with me,” we got to start there and then we can make tweaks and adjustments, that’s all.
Yeah, so I spent the better part of a decade trying to overcome the 2:30 p.m. energy dip and that was one of the things about, I guess, about myself that I was not willing to engage or self-sabotage and, obviously, there are some ways to do it. I realized the level of caffeine intake in the morning was part of it so you can do some experimenting on it, but one of the first parts of that particular experience would be saying, “Okay, my body is saying something’s happening to it at 2:30 every day,” I then later start to realize it was roughly 75 minutes after I finished my lunch, the awareness piece that you mentioned before, and then you change up what you’re drinking in the morning, when you’re eating, what you’re eating, you try a bunch of things. And so it seems like an important, I don’t know, part of the path toward being in a place where you’re — you said fortitude and flow, and that’s like that flow of life and saying you’re not fighting against yourself like you are when you’re saying, “Oh, everyone’s perfectly fine sitting their ass down at a computer at eight o’clock and not leaving until five with the exception of 25 minutes to run out to a sandwich shop, get a sandwich, and run right back to their computer. Why am I the only idiot that can’t deal with it? Why am I the only one that can’t seem to do it right? Why am I the only one getting brain fog at 2:30 every day?” when there really is something else behind it. Your body’s communicating with you, hey, until 1965, humanity from 70,000 years ago until then didn’t operate like this, maybe something needs to be different.
There’s been a lot of change, a lot of context, a lot of speed that’s been added to our lives that we somehow have just not calculated into how we think about our lives, how we think about work, how we think about what we should be able to handle or not handle. Even the — and I know this is a big thing that you’re into is like this inundation of information. If we were just, again, humans without technology, we’d be walking around, we’d have the reality in front of us, we might have stories that people tell us, we might be thinking about things, but we wouldn’t be having literally multiple worlds and people shoved in our face on a regular basis because now my brain is considering what’s happening overseas, my brain is considering what’s happening on the East Coast, on the West Coast, up in Canada, with this person, with that — so my body and my brain are getting pulled into these different realities that aren’t even a part of my current reality and that takes energy.
Yeah, yep. This energy behind context switching too which is where the notifications —
Yes, the technology is putting us on that and we’re like, “I don’t know why I’m so tired.”
So it’s a big challenge right now that we have this technology, we’ve absorbed it, for people to decide, okay, what do I really need to think about and what do I not need to think about?
And that’s the thing. I think this is another piece where being aware of perfectionism can be helpful because, for a perfectionist, everything is urgent and everything requires A-plus effort or producing A-plus work. People have to get on board with C-plus work. You don’t actually even need to put that much effort into this thing, it doesn’t really matter. Some stuff, you want to put your A game on, great. Other things, you can actually just take it off your calendar. Yan change your mind — changing your mind, it’s a thing. I did it today with a meeting. I looked at my schedule, I went, “Wow, I overbooked myself, that wasn’t very smart.” Does anybody have a calendar that allows you to rebook? Oh, this person does. I rebooked. “Sorry for the last minute cancellation, can wait to talk to you later.” But people, I know in my past self and people will be like, “Well, I’ve committed to this thing. I committed to this thing and I’m stuck with it.”
Yeah, and that’s the same thing with people who, and I’ve interviewed other guests on this podcast, people who need to change courses, who are on something, they’re building a business around one thing and then, after doing a little bit of experimentation or living a little life and observing it, they’re like, “Wait a second, I think I need to move a little bit more in this direction, and I’ll tell the two clients I have or whatever it is, sorry, I’m gonna move in a different direction. This is what I’m offering now and we’ll see what happens.”
That brings to mind a couple of things. Katie Burkhart, who actually I believe she’s the one that connected us.
Yeah, she’s the one connected us, yeah.
Yeah, so she’ll say stuff like if you think about your vision of the world you want to live in, are you behaving in a way — these are not her exact words, she says it so much like smarter and smaller than I am saying, but the general way that I interpret it is, essentially, are you behaving in a way that supports the world that you want to live in? So like, for instance, the good news is, I am trying to model a human world that is not drenched in perfectionism. So guess what? I mess up sometimes. And you know what? My clients friggin’ love it. Like when I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. I forgot about this,” they love it. They’ll be like, “Oh my gosh, I just love knowing that you’re human sometimes,” like people get permission and they think, “Oh, my gosh, I don’t have to hold myself to this impossible standard, I can actually mess up sometimes,” and because this is another perfectionism thing, they feel there’s this conditional relationship piece where it’s like if I’m not perfect, I get kicked out the village, everybody hates me, and it’s like communicate, communicate with people. Some people, it may be inconvenient, it may suck, maybe that relationship blows up, I don’t know, but if you can’t make a single mistake and you blow everything up, then something was wrong there to begin with.
Yeah, and that goes for whether it be a social relationship, a personal relationship, or a work relationship.
Totally.
I wish it were easier in the modern world for people to find new social, personal, and work relationships when they realize that things aren’t working well in those cases, but that’s a whole separate issue.
That’s a whole other conversation. And you know what, even when we’re talking about lawyers, the people that work in law are super caring, awesome people, and a lot of the relationships in these firms, people are awesome. They love each other. I mean, I’ve heard some horror stories about environments that people have worked in but when you have a company that’s actually caring about their people and are really trying to shift culture, there’s people with great relationships, people who really like each other, this stuff exists and in even the worst environments, people will band together and try to help each other out so there’s always something good somewhere even in some super toxic places, which, again, I’m not saying that all law is toxic, please don’t misunderstand me.
For sure. And I always say that no matter how you subset people, no matter how you subset companies, professions, whatever, you’re going to find good and bad, so whether it be like race, gender, age, generational group, you’re going to find good and bad in every one of those groups the same way if you say lawyers versus, I don’t know, pro cyclists, there’s going to be people who are great people, who are just trying to be good to everyone and you’re going to find the jerks in there.
Yeah.
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I think that’s the other piece to think about is like just the term “resonance,” it’s like does this have resonance for me? Am I vibing with this? Because that’s important. This is — I’ll tell you another story. I’ve got so many things to say, Steven, I know, I’m just talking so much but I’m just going to go with it. I was talking with a friend about networking. This is a thing we do, we network. It can be really nerve-wracking. Introvert, extrovert, I don’t really care. I know that I come across as fairly extroverted, I don’t really think I am but I do.
A lot of people are in the middle on that spectrum so, yeah.
Yeah, and I think it just depends on the context. And so I mentioned to a friend of mine, I said when I am networking or when I’m talking with somebody, I’m paying attention to what’s interesting me. Like what are they saying? Am I interested in what they’re saying? Is this keeping my attention? Sometimes words will pop out and I’ll be like, “Huh, oh, the way they said that, there’s something there,” and I’ll ask about that word and then we’ll have a conversation, we get excited. There are some people that I talk to and I’m like, “Eh, didn’t do anything for me.”
It’s going to happen at any networking event.
And then I just say, “Great, nice to meet you,” and I move on. And it like blew her mind. She was like, “I always just thought it was like me not being able network well.” I’m, like, no, sometimes people are just boring or you just don’t have resonance and that’s okay, like that’s the other piece.
Yeah, you’re not going to resonate with every single person. If you try to resonate with every single person in a networking event, believe me, I know what it’s like to go down that path, that can become exhausting in its own way, it can become like, “Oh, tell me more about this. Tell me more about that,” and it’s okay to just — because I don’t think anyone’s inherently boring or interesting, you’re just interesting to some people and boring to others, depending on whether you resonate. And some people are interesting to more people than others, some people have a broader range of interests, whatever, but everyone’s interesting to someone and everyone’s boring to someone.
Totally. Another quick story, I’ll share. So there was a networking meeting that I had been invited to and you had to fill out a form in the beginning and it was talking about, maybe it was elevator pitch or something, I looked at that form for — I probably looked at it one night and I put it aside and I came back to it. I was so scared that I was going to write something that wasn’t the right thing to get me into this networking event. And I remember showing up and being freaked out, all these people who seemed like they had it all together and I’m like — I always feel slightly like that. I go to these corporate places and my background is in yoga, right? My degree is in horses, like I do not have that corporate background that a lot of people have. However, that’s a huge benefit for me and I’ve figured out, over time, that me having different perspectives and different experiences actually is hugely beneficial because I’m not coming in with that same preconceived notion of how this is going to go, I’m going to be kind of weird and I’m going to show up and some people vibe with that and some people don’t, but for me to come in and be a slightly different flavor is actually beneficial to me and so I think that that is one of those things that when people start to get off this perfectionist piece and this cookie cutter mentality, that’s when you can actually start to get some traction.
So it’s when you believe in your value to the point where you can witness yourself not be valuable to a specific person and say, “I’m okay with that. That was not the person or that was not the place, and I know it is.”
Yeah, it sometimes sucks, right? Because the person that you want to appeal to is not the person that — you don’t appeal to them, you’re like, well, shoot, I really wanted to connect to that person because I think they’re really cool but apparently they don’t think I’m cool. That hurts. I don’t love that. And I’m also not going to chase after things that are not resonant. Like I have a strong follow-up but I’m not going to fight against the tide if somebody’s not interested either.
Yeah, no, I mean, you can’t possibly be interested in everybody in a world of seven point whatever billion people. I can’t keep track.
Just sitting here, I still feel uncomfortable with it, like I’m still like, “Well, but I really want, I want everybody to like me,” but some days I feel better about that and some days I don’t, and that’s also normal.
That’s amazing. So, to wrap up, I just want to give anyone listening a chance to get a hold of you, if anyone wants to get a copy of your book, which we didn’t get into, or is interested in working with you in an individual or corporate sense, yeah, how would someone best look for you or contact you?
If you go to fortitudeandflow.com/perfectionist, I actually have a whole guide on the archetypes of perfectionists that I’ve come up with over time. So that’ll give you an idea of like what flavor of perfectionist you might be mostly swimming in and then where in that fortune and flow process it might be helpful for you to put your emphasis and your start on and then you’ll get some information from me. So that’s what I would say is go to that link, check out the archetypes, see how you feel about them, because here’s another thing. If you don’t vibe with those archetypes, we probably aren’t going to vibe together anyway so that’s just a good way for people to dip their toes in the water, see if they like it, find me on LinkedIn, follow the posts, stalk me for a while, that’s cool, but you can always email me directly too, audrey@fortuneandflow.com but stalk me for a while. Figure it out.
Sounds good. Well, Audrey, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes telling us all about how to be a little bit less perfectionist and use some more positive words in how we describe all the things we do so as opposed to saying don’t be a perfectionist, maybe be an experimenter.
Yes. Oh, be an experimenter, I love that. Yeah, this was great. Thank you so much for the opportunity, Steven.
Definitely, and I would like to thank everybody out there listening too for listening to this and other episodes of Action’s Antidotes. I encourage you to go back, there should be about 65 prior episodes or go forward to some of the episodes yet to be recorded. I always love to have you on this journey as we’re all trying to just reach a point where our lives resemble a lot more closely what our bodies want, what we want, and where we feel like we’re really in flow as opposed to the one-size-fits-all cookie cutter world of last century.
Important Links:
- Fortitude & Flow
- Email address: audrey@fortuneandflow.com
About Audrey Holst
Audrey Holst works with ambitious high performers to identify and address their pre-burnout and toxic perfectionism so they can fully enjoy their careers and lives. She’s the creator of the Perfectionist Archetypes™ and founder of the Fortitude & Flow® Process which fuses mindful and embodied practices to create sustainable transformation. Her work goes beyond mindset and addresses perfectionism’s impossible standards at their root cause.