Is Your Perfectionism Keeping You Stuck?
Is Your Perfectionism Keeping You Stuck?
My perfectionism is an unrealistic ideal that I hold myself to. It either keeps me stuck through the conditions that keep me from starting or the rigorous standards I put on myself that burn me out.
For most of my life, my perfectionism is what got me stuck - especially in the area of my physical fitness.
My perfectionism took shape in the conditions I put on starting. It was the thing that kept me from moving forward and caused me to trip and fall.
Until I started doing my personal development work I thought I wasn’t a perfectionist - most of the time.
I always thought my problem was laziness…
As I did my work, I realized was my laziness was a symptom and byproduct of my perfectionism.
What I ended up finding was that my perfectionist standard is what kept me stuck.
Sometimes it got me stuck in rigorous patterns of overworking, but more often than not it kept me stuck in doing nothing.
The reason for this is simple:
I would set such high standards for myself to get started that I ended up spending most of my time just waiting.
It kept me waiting because those perfect conditions would rarely happen.
And when by some miracle of the universe things would finally align in a way that I would start, I had such high standards that I would push myself beyond my edge. The result of this was I would burn myself out or get disenchanted by my lack of results and I would quit.
Healing my relationship with my perfectionist standard is what enabled me to break through the weight loss barrier that kept me stuck at over 300 pounds.
Looking back I can see I took five actions that freed me of my perfectionism.
Action #1 - Stop Waiting To Start
Action #2 - Finding an Accountability Partner(s)
Action #3 - Fully Accepting Myself
Action #4 - Letting go of “My Way”
Action #5 - Making the Way I Feel Be the Measurement of Success
#1 - Stop Waiting To Start
The first action to take to free yourself of the prison of perfectionism is - Just start!
Stop trying to figure out all the details of how you should be doing it and just start moving forward. You have to remember that “trying to figure it out” is a protector. The job of this part of you is to keep you safe from perceived danger and it does this by keeping you stuck in your comfort zone.
Comfort zone = safety
Safety = no action
Taking action without having all your ducks in a row feels dangerous to the subconscious.
Trust me it’s not!
The key here is to take baby steps. Maybe it’s going for a walk, maybe it’s just getting to the gym, or maybe it's a choice to cut out the extra snacking throughout the day. It doesn’t need to be complicated. It just needs to be a SIMPLE action that you can practice CONSISTENTLY that points you in the direction you want to go.
There are only two rules to action number one:
Only push yourself to your edge…
Don’t wait to start; Do it now!!!
#2 - Find an Accountability Partner
The second critical action to free yourself from the filter of perfectionism is to find an accountability partner.
“If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together”. African Proverb
An accountability partner will remind you of who you have committed to being, especially in the moments when you just want to quit. They will call you forward when you are reverting to the protective behaviors that keep you stuck. They do this by mirroring the blindspots of your shadow that you can not see back to you.
Having an accountability partner also builds a sense of community and tribe. The road of discipline is easier traveled in a community than alone with your thoughts.
#3 - Fully Accepting Yourself
Once you have started the wheels of your committed action in motion the next action is to do the Emotional Work required to fully accept yourself for who are, what you have done, and where you are at.
You must heal the parts of you that scream some version of “I’m not good enough” or “there is something wrong with me”.
The first step of this healing is to slow down and listen past the voice in your head. You must be willing to hear that critical voice not as an adult but as the child who first internalized your negative thoughts. You must be willing to sit with and experience the feelings that your little inner boy or girl was not able to process and feel.
Once you have stepped through this gateway of pain from your past experiences you will see a simple truth.
There is nothing to fix.
Your thoughts and negative emotions, just are.
Your past actions are just something you did, they do not define your future.
And when you do this a space will be created for you to bring compassion and love to those wounded parts within. You will no longer seek to avoid or reject them, but love them as if they were your child.
When I did this for myself I saw something that resulted in a shift…
I gave up trying to be happy someday. I stopped looking for something in the world and for something in the future to make me happy.
And when I did this I was given a choice to be happy right now in the current moment, over and over…
When I accepted this choice to be happy right now I was given another choice.
To accept everything about myself, my strengths and flaws alike. Even weighing 316 pounds...
And when I began to accept rather than reject my reality, my world began to change.
The pounds began to melt away as I tapped into the pain I was unknowingly clinging to.
As I gave myself the love I so desperately was craving from the world, I no longer looked to the world and food to fill that void.
I’ve recently passed the 100-pound mark of my weight loss journey (316 lbs to 212).
The reality is it’s been a four-year journey of healing from the grief I was holding onto from the battle I waged against my Mom’s alcoholism. A battle that led to her death in 2007 ~ I had internalized a failure to save her from herself. Over time failure after perceived failure stacked on until one day, I woke up and the scale read 300+…
During the first 3 years of this healing journey, the scale did not budge, despite all the work and all the awareness… I could not sustain any kind of discipline.
In 2022 I made a shift. A shift from seeing “something is wrong here” to finding complete acceptance and surrender to where I was at. Even when I still weighed 316 pounds.
The moment I choose to fully accept myself and where I was at a space was created for compassion and love to enter… And the pounds started melting away.
Discipline was no longer a grind, discipline became an act of love…
- Matthew Maes, via Instagram
#4 - Letting Go of “My Way”
The next action to free yourself of perfectionism is letting go of “my way” of doing things.
My perfectionism results in me having close-minded thoughts and rigid behavior.
It is an unrealistic ideal that I hold myself to. It either keeps me stuck by thinking that the only way I can start is to have all my ducks in a row, or it makes the experience of what I’m doing miserable through rigidity and obsession.
The “My Way” thoughts that keep me stuck sound like this:
Once I get motivated I will…
I’ll start on Monday…
When I get a personal trainer…
After my birthday…
Once the kids are done with soccer season…
When I get a little more time…
I just need to figure out…
Maybe if…
Maybe when…
The “My Way” behaviors that make me rigid and obsessive when I’m in action look like this:
No flexibility for life to happen around me. When something comes up that feels disruptive to my agenda I become anxious and grumpy.
My actions become the center of my world; For example in the past when I would diet it would consume my thoughts and it was all I would talk about.
I push myself beyond my edge which always leads to burnout.
I am driven by a need to get it right, there is no room for mistakes or failure.
There are two key “red flags” that I’m in my perfectionist mindset:
I’m putting conditions on doing what I need to do.
I’m thinking or saying some variation of “I have to” or “I should”…
The way to move past “my way” behaviors and thinking are to align our Mindset to our bigger why. We must commit to get started and to be open-minded to whatever comes up for us along the way.
This open-minded mindset will create the space for us to bring awareness and compassion to the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that keep us stuck and make us rigid.
We must also bring awareness to the underlying desire that motivates those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
It is critical that we also bring compassion for ourselves when we do this Emotional Work of bringing awareness to these shadow parts of us. Compassion allows us to hold what awareness shows us with love.
Compassion keeps us from pushing action into obsession and rigidity.
Compassion allows us to practice discipline lovingly.
Together awareness and compassion allow us to see and hold our protective parts with love ~ so that we can let go of the pull they have on us.
#5 - Make the Way You Feel the Metric of Success
The final action to free yourself of your inner perfectionist is to intentionally let how you are feeling be your metric of success.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t celebrate tangible victories. You should!
It is still very important to celebrate all your wins.
The key is that you don’t let those tangible wins become the focus of your journey.
Do not let the outcome-based wins become your why…
You have to keep the “why” of your journey aligned with your values.
When the why of your journey is aligned with your values and not the outcome - you shift experiencing the gratification of the journey from the destination to the current moment.
Success is no longer experienced by attaining an outcome ~ it is experienced in the feelings you cultivate in the current moment.
The way you feel in the current moment becomes the metric of success.
Tips for working with the inner perfectionist:
1. How do you know when you are not in the current moment?
Bring Awareness:
What I have done is to bring awareness to the moments when I catch my mind drifting off into the distance.
This is a practice of getting to know your thought patterns that take you away…
For me these are the moments when I catch myself thinking about someday with thoughts like “when I weigh 160 pounds…” or “I’ll look great on the beach”…
2. What do you do when you realize you are lost in the future or the past?
Bring Compassion:
Recognize that the ego will always pull you away from the now, it’s what it does.
There is no need to react to yourself with shame or renunciation.
The game is not to not to fall into the trap of distracting yourself from the current moment. This is just another from of perfectionism.
The game is how quickly can I become aware that I have fallen into the trap.
Then respond to yourself with love…
I do this by saying things to myself like:
“It makes sense you would want to lose weight to look good for the beach ~ but you know what, your family will love you no matter what, I will love you no matter what”…
Closing thoughts…
I’ll close today with a post I shared with my brothers in the Mantalks Alliance. It was the moment I saw that my perfectionism was not just the behaviors that push me to extremes but also the thoughts and beliefs that keep me stuck.
Meeting My Perfectionist
August 29, 2021
I had a prompt today that I struggled with in the book “Claim Your Power”…
“In my creative life what I am letting go of is?”
I struggled to come up with something that felt right. All I could think of is waiting for the right time and being creative to get approval.
Later in the day my wife and I were talking and she asked me when I was going to help my daughter make another YouTube video for her channel. That it’s been a long time since I made one with her and it’s really important to her.
I started going off on my excuses of how busy we have been and she says “all I hear is it isn’t important”.
I said, “I see that, but it takes hours to make a video and everyone gets upset when I spend a whole Saturday editing”.
She responds “I could make a video on my phone in 30 minutes”…
I responded “but to make the video right and make it special it takes hours to edit…”
Then my wife hit me with a freight train.
She said, “It doesn’t have to be perfect, you keep waiting because you’re trying to make this perfect video and all she wants is something simple”.
I sat in silence and she could tell she struck a chord with me.
My wife showed me where my perfectionism holds me back.
I have this story that I have to put everything into something and if I don’t have time then I can’t do it. So I put that thing on hold.
The two areas of my life this impacts me the most are my creative expression and my health.
So the answer to my prompt for the day is:
What I’m letting go of in my creative life is perfectionism.