Perfectionism

The idea of perfectionism is, is fear-based, and because it's fear-based, we learn less, we learn slower. All of that happens when we're in that binary thinking and when we're in that false end.

Perfectionism is predictive of all the same negative health outcomes as stress.

The internal mind frame of being perfect is extremely chaotic.

That if I was living right now the life that I thought would be perfect for me, it would be a miserable life for me now. This week on The Art of Accomplishment, we're talking about perfectionism, what it is, where it comes from, and how it's creating stagnation in your life, in our lives, in organizations, and in society. Over the past 30 years in Western societies, perfectionism has increased about 33%. And it doesn't mean things have been getting more perfect. It just means that we've been getting a lot more anxiety, depression, eating disorders. All of these things are downstream of perfectionism. Perfectionism is apparently not preventative of these things like you would think if you were a perfectionist. It's actually a risk factor for all sorts of mental health outcomes that we don't want.

Yeah.

So what's, what's going on there?

Yeah.

What is perfectionism?

It's a reaction to fear and to try— trying to control a situation and make it so that it's less chaotic and therefore creating the chaos. I mean, obviously perfectionism is somebody who's trying to get something perfect, trying to get something exactly right. And of course, right away there's an issue with that, which is your mind says you need to do it perfectly, but there's actually— your mind won't actually define what perfect is. So no matter what you do, it will always not be perfect.

Let's just like back up for a second before we just buy that wholesale. I mean, there are certain things that like need to happen in certain ways. For example, the, the James Webb Space Telescope, right, had to be done perfectly, had to be launched perfectly, had to be built perfectly, designed perfectly, deployed.

The telescope story is amazing, and I would love you to tell it, but the— I am very, very confident if you would have gotten another group of scientists together to do that, and it would have— and that it would have been successful, the telescope would not look the same.

Mm. So multiple ways to do the same thing here.

Yeah. So which one's perfect? So that's the weird thing about perfectionism is perfect seems like there is an idea of there is one way to do it, and that's what the mind tells us when we're doing it. There's a way to do it where it will be perfect, but there is not a way to do anything that is perfect. And even within whatever tolerance windows you have, there's probably infinite ways to do it. And this is what the mind forgets in that moment, because the mind is in fear. Perfectionism is fear-based, and just like all fear, it does two things to the mind. One, it becomes binary. There's a way to do it, and there's, there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. That's part of how fear works, is that binary thinking. And then the other thing that it does is it gives you a false end. That telescope, for instance, if I recall correctly, over budget, not perfect, delays, not perfect, all sorts of not perfect things, right? But it took time, like to get to the place where it hit inside of that window of tolerance you were speaking about. And there was like lots of iteration just scientifically. Oh, let's try this. No, that didn't work. Let's try this. It didn't work. Let's try this and it didn't work, right? And so if you were trying to get every one of your experiments perfectly, and the data shows this, that your teams that are trying to get things perfectly or something like 30% or something like that less productive than teams that are more interested in iteration or excellence or other stuff. So it's just the idea of perfectionism is fear-based. And because it's fear-based, we learn less, we learn slower, we don't get as good results. All of that happens when we're in that binary thinking. And when we're in that false end.

So that would explain why perfectionism is predictive of all the same negative health outcomes as stress.

Correct. Yeah.

Yeah, it is stress.

It is stress.

Yeah.

And it creates itself. Meaning, so usually when you look at people who have— this isn't all the time, but usually when you look at people who have a high perfectionism tendency, it's, it's their reaction to a chaotic childhood, right? And so And, and so, and it was usually chaos that wasn't particularly controllable. So it could look a couple of ways. One of the ways that that could look is alcoholic parent or mentally ill parent, and everything was chaotic. It can also look like they were criticized but not for a consistent reason, right? It's like it wasn't criticized because your hair wasn't perfect. It was Well, I did exactly what you want with my hair, but I'm still getting criticized, right? So it's just like this. It's because the parent feels bad about themselves and the way they're handling it is criticizing the kid. It has nothing to do with the kid. So this is the reaction to, to not wanting to feel out of control. And if you think about it in a Golden Algorithm perspective, which is the thing that we want to— the feeling that we are trying to avoid, we invite in the exact way that we're trying to avoid it.

Mm-hmm.

Perfectionism is trying to control something, not to not feel that out-of-control feeling. And the way we do it is to try to get it exactly right. And trying to get it exactly right creates all sorts of chaos. For instance, just— we've already talked about this— if you are a team that's in the perfectionist team, then that team is going to be less successful than the non-perfectionist team, which is more chaos. Yeah, you're not producing, you're not meeting your goals, you're not doing it well enough. You feel more overwhelmed, right? Because you're setting up a situation in your mind the same way that you was set up in, in your household, which is you can't get it right. Perfection— you can't get it perfect, so you can't get it right. So that in itself is, is like a certain amount of chaos. Trying to get something that you can't get is is blah, right? That creates chaos. The other thing that creates chaos is that when a human being is trying to get something perfect, they usually are trying to get everything about the thing perfect, which is a very ineffective way of getting something right. So what I mean to say is, if I'm going to do something, um, in marketing, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to like 3 or 4 principles. If I'm gonna run a company, I'm going to go 3, 4, 5 principles. And what those principles are, are things that I know that if I get them right, everything else is going to work out in the wash. Everything else is going to fall out of that. So if I know, for instance, that I feel deeply connected with my customer, I know that my product is going to be a lot better, that they're going to feel like we care about them. It's going to be better customer service. So I focus on how do we create connection with the customer. If you're trying to get it perfect, perfect customer service, you've lost track of the fact that connection is actually the main thing. You're thinking, did I say the exact right thing on the phone call? Did— do I have the perfect script for all the people to talk to all the customers? What are the, you know, like, what's the voice quality of my customer service people? How— what's the response time? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And you can't get it all right. And then you've lost track of the really important thing. Right, right. Trying to have the perfect marriage. This is a great example of it. Trying to have the perfect marriage, like, never works. If you just go into any house where someone's like trying to have the perfect marriage, it's just freaking hell. It's hell in there.

And it's the beginning of many drama shows. Exactly, right?

So, so because you've lost track of the most important thing, which is love. Like, who cares what the house looks like? If you've got love.

So from that perspective, it sounds like perfectionism is simply over-focusing on not the highest leverage point. Like, for example, like you're talking about, like if we walk in and we facilitate a team and I'm worried about getting the words right and I'm worried about like, did we hit all the points on, did I say all the little bullet points to the exercise? That's not gonna result in the same outcome as If I'm paying attention to what's happening for people and I'm really feeling what's going on in the room. Correct. And tracking what people, what's the emotional arc that people are on.

Yeah, yeah. So for instance, like when I'm doing coaching videos, I'm focused on, is my heart open? Am I following them? Am I making sure I'm not trying to get them anywhere? If I do those three things, everything else works out. Everything else becomes automatic. And yes, I improve as a coach over time and all those little things improve, but because I am not trying to get it perfect and I'm focused on those 3 things, I actually get to iterate more, which actually gets me to higher and higher windows of tolerance over time.

Mm-hmm. So you're, you're following something, there's something you're following, just like building a telescope. There's laws of physics and there's principles of design. That you follow, you learn, like these have been developed over a very long period of time and people use them, principles of engineering.

And you can't find them if you're into perfectionism.

Yeah.

You can't find them because you're trying to get everything right. And then the other piece about it is that you lose track of context. On one level, the context, you can't see the forest through the trees. You can't see the 3 things that you have to pay attention to to actually have the best effect. But the other thing is you're not looking around at the wider context 'cause you're so focused on the context you're focused on. So if I'm completely focused on getting the email correct, I'm not thinking about when the best time to send the email is. If I'm trying to figure out the perfect time to, like the perfect system for emails about timing and the getting the wording correct and doing all that stuff, then I'm not thinking about, oh, What is the emails? What's the result in the company that I want from the email? And if I'm not— if I'm focused on that, there's always a bigger context that you're also missing if you're into perfectionism. Because, because fear— like when you think about your visual field under fear, it narrows, it gets very constrained, it's binary again, it has a false end again. You're constraining reality into this very tight box and therefore you're not able to actually do the best work.

Yeah. And coming to think of that constraint, even if you complete perfectly the plan that you laid out, it's still a limited plan. It's still the only— it's still the plan that you could come up with, with the consciousness that you had when you started, not the consciousness that's evolving throughout the process through experience and innovation.

That's a great point. Yeah. Yeah. What you're— what I hear you're saying is that doing any project is a learning process. And if you're getting— if you're trying to make it perfect, then there's the assumption that you already know what the end state is, which means you can't learn.

And if I, if I was living right now, the life that I thought would be perfect for me at 39 when I was 18, it would be a miserable life for me now.

Totally. Right.

I could, I could hit all of those strokes.

Yeah.

All those brushstrokes and it wouldn't, it would feel constraining. It would feel—

Yeah. Perfectionism and evolution are an interesting thing, because on one level it doesn't square, meaning there's nothing perfect in evolution. Everything's constantly evolving. And so like, how do you even define perfectionism in it? And yet there's some way in which those chaotic systems, like evolution, like life on Earth, there's a perspective where it's like unbelievably perfect, more perfect than anything, and ordered, and ordered.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's almost as though what we see as chaos from our human perspective, from whatever limited perspective we have, is simply an ignorance of whatever broader context that there actually is, the, the actual underlying dynamics that we're not able to perceive. There's a book I read a while back called Seeing Like a State, and it talks about how when colonizers came to Africa and they were trying to figure out how to produce yields for the resources that they were trying to grow, they saw the way that locals were growing plants and growing crops. And to them it looked like chaos because you've got like the beans mixed with the whatever mixed with— and it just—

I think it's actually beans, squashes, and corn.

Yeah.

And in the Hopi reservation, it's those three things were planted together.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's certain things that are— they didn't see that there are certain things that are planted together in certain ways that might look quite disordered from a very sharp, right-angled, boxy kind of logical mindset.

Right.

But actually were really following the highly complex order of nature that had been discovered over many, many generations of really paying attention and attuning to the land, which bringing this back to perfectionism as a fear response.

Yeah.

If you, if you were to assume that everything that you're looking at, including your unfinished project or your unstarted project, your blank page.

Yeah.

And you see it as perfection and you ask, how do I connect with this? That's a very different thing from—

Right. Yeah.

How do I impose my idea of perfection on this?

I think that goes into that really deeply, that the one of the solutions for perfectionism is to take a different perspective and say, oh, is— how is my appro— it's not how do I get it perfect, it's how do I change my approach. So that approach can be connection. I think it's what I find to be the most effective. The approach can also be, say, excellence, which means how do I just constantly improve, or which means how do I do my best work. Or, um, the, the, the change can be, oh, what's the process What's the process I would enjoy? What's the process that I think will get us to the conclusion the best? Any of those things work a lot better than perfectionism because you're seeing it, you're seeing a broader context in it. You're seeing like the, the how you get from one place to another rather than I know what this is supposed to look like and now my job is to try to make it look, which is, by the way, extremely fucking arrogant, right? It's really arrogant to think that you know what perfection is. It's extremely arrogant to think you can get to perfection. It's extremely arrogant to, to assume that your idea of perfection is actually what matters to other people, or is right. So the whole, the whole thought process of perfection is just full of holes. Yeah, it's just like that. It doesn't exist.

Okay, so there's, there's the thought process we've been talking about, the perfectionist mindset, and then there's something that's kind of coming out here, like the excellence orientation, the orientation towards iteration and learning.

Yeah.

And that's talked about a lot in Silicon Valley, for example. There's this like fail fast concept. Yeah. But what I notice is that in, in leaders and founders, it's not just adopting a new mindset. It's not as simple as that. It's something much deeper. And so I want to get closer to the, to the emotional component here. You're talking about the fear and they're talking about the, the childhood circumstances that create the perfectionism. Yeah. So how does somebody go from perfectionism to what we might call an excellence orientation emotionally? How— what is the emotional journey to get through, get through that perfectionism into, into connection with what they're doing?

Oftentimes there's some removal of love, criticism, attack or something like that, which people are trying to avoid. The chaotic system that they're trying to avoid is what is the fear that creates the perfectionism. Obviously the first step is to see that that chaos is internal. Like, the, the internal mind frame of being perfect is extremely chaotic. If you just listen to your internal— oh yeah, voice.

Yeah, it's a loud screaming.

No, no, that's not exactly—

you're basically living in the way that everything is wrong. Rather than seeing how it's right.

Incredibly chaotic internally. And so the first thing is to, is to see what it's like to not have that internal relationship with yourself. And we can't go into that. I mean, we'd go into that forever, but there's the Voice in the Head podcast that people can go to that would be helpful for that. And then, um, so that's a big thing, that moving fear. And we have the Fear podcast around that that would be really helpful, is like having somebody actually feel the fear and be present with the fear, whether it's through emotional inquiry or whether it's through the expression of that fear through shaking, moving that fear is gonna be a really healthy thing for them to do to get to the other side of perfectionism. Intellectually, it's really doing what we're doing at the beginning of the episode is to see through the idea that they're like, the mind says be perfect, but that it can't define perfect. And if you get to perfect, if you get to the thing that the mind said was perfect, The mind changes the goalpost because the mind is setting up that chaos for you. And so it's going to change the goalposts. And so to see that, to see that like, oh, I got to get this perfect, gets replaced with, there's no such thing as perfect. I can't get it perfect. This is a setup. This is a trap. It's going to make me less effective. I'm going to learn slower. If you know all that stuff, then the mind can't really attached to the idea of perfect, which is really important. On the gut level, I think it's really important to understand that you're under attack. And so that's another way in which that golden algorithm works, which is I'm under attack by myself. I perceive a threat from the outside world. And I know there's some data on like the threat, that it's like in the brain perfectionism is like a threat.

Yeah, activates the threat networks, activates the amygdala.

Exactly.

Turns off creative problem solving.

Exactly.

Prefrontal cortex, yeah.

And so, to— and so that threat is a gut thing, it's a nervous system thing, and it is to— and it's like, how do I react when that— when I feel that threat? Because if I, if I react to it as if it's a threat, then I'm going to make a threat in the world. Meaning, if I treat you like a threat enough, you will act like a threat, right? So the way I would say that this works is, say, in a, in a business. I'm scared of your response as my boss. I'm going to treat you like a threat. Oh my gosh. And pretty soon you're going to be really fucking frustrated with me and you're going to act like a threat. Like, I want connection, I want performance, I want us to be able to work together. I want all these things as your boss. I'm not getting any of them. I'm getting like fear, stagnation, freeze. I'm getting You trying to be perfect instead of actually like get the job done? And then I act like a threat. And so that's another way the golden algorithm works, but it's just generally when we treat the world as a threat, eventually it acts like a threat back.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, something just happened to me in my perspective a moment ago is I was thinking about the space telescope and how long it took and the delays. I'm like, oh, how much of the delays were actually because of people being afraid of the love being removed or people like not knowing, right? Like, Who's in charge? Am I going to be intact?

What's—

so both, both sides can be true almost always.

Yeah, that's right. Both sides. So that's, so that's, so moving the fear, expressing the fear, working with the internal critic, all that you can find on other podcasts, um, really useful. On the, on the threat thing, it's like, oh, you can feel that threat and actually stop and be with it, be present with it and not react from it.

What does that look like? To feel it, be with it, not react from it?

What happens is, is like there's a pulse of nervous system reaction, fear. Oh my God. Okay. And instead of taking an action, just sit with it. Let go. Adjust to what's happening here in this moment right now.

That's like a perfectionist kryptonite move.

It's like, where are you now? Because like any trauma, it puts us into a past situation, back to our parents, back to whatever, Fallujah when you're in Cleveland. Like it just, it puts you back into a state that isn't true. And so if you're actually present in that moment rather than reactive in that moment, then you're actually present with what's actually happening now, which is, oh, I have a boss who wants a job done. Doesn't mean they want it perfect. Just today we were on a call and somebody's like, oh, I'm not going to get this perfect. And Mattia, CEO, was like, you know, we're in this together, we're doing this as a team, this isn't all on you. We, you know, you just totally relaxed the person on the call because all of a sudden they're not at threat.

Yeah.

And the perfectionism let go.

And now considering the being, being with the threat, the being present with it. There's something that often happens when someone's present with a feeling, which is kind of go all the way back to the feeling, like to where it came from and the story of the feeling. So like being present with the feeling I'm hearing isn't, isn't just, oh, I feel unsafe and I'm unsafe and just fully buying that.

Yeah.

Because that's going to the past. Being present is my body is feeling these sensations of unsafety and it is interpreting the world in this way. But what I'm actually also perceiving right now here in this moment.

Yes.

Is, well, what am I perceiving? Am I actually in danger? Am I actually safe? What is, what is the difference between what I'm, what my gut is predicting and what I'm experiencing?

Both are really useful. Meaning like in a day-to-day meetings and situations, just being present with it. Super useful. There is a really important thing to going back into the past, feeling through the emotions that you weren't allowed to feel when you were in that chaos, right? Like, your job is like, oh, you're a kid, there's chaos, how do I be safe? I'm going to control, you know, and yeah, I'm going to get it just right, I'm going to be perfect, I'm going to do this thing and then they can't get mad at me, which never worked. But that means you didn't get to feel a whole bunch of stuff, like the fear of the chaos, like the maybe the anger or whatever. So I think it is important to go back into the trauma and find, find great people to do that with. Obviously doing it alone is not a great idea, but, but that's—

I mean, that, that puts your perfectionism into, into context. You were talking about how perfectionism is like a loss of context.

Yes.

And so if you go back, if you want to work through your perfectionism, then go back to the full context from which your perfectionism emerged as a pattern.

Yeah.

And see that more clearly.

Exactly. That's right.

Yeah.

And so one of the things that you might notice about our business, I, I hope you notice it, but people get more and more productive the more they stay here. And the reason that that's the case is because we fight perfectionism organizationally. So what I noticed over time is that bigger, more bureaucratic the organization gets, the more fear that your boss is going to fire you, that something's not going to be right, that I have to do it perfectly, that what's Joe going to think, what's Steve Jobs going to think. And in that, fear becomes more and more perfectionism, which kills innovation, as the studies show, decreases results, as the studies show. And so the only cure for that is to take the fear out of the organization, right? And so that's why it's so important to like celebrate mistakes like we do. We literally give standing ovations to people who make mistakes, right? Like everything we do is, oh, everything's an iteration because we really want people to take experiments. We expect people to do experiments that will fail. Like it's built into our whole system to say, oh, your job is to fail. At times. Your job is to try things. Your job is to, like, mess up, not be perfect. And so that's why I think we get so much— that's why when people come here, they become more productive. And the crazy thing is, now kind of hanging out in some of the other organizations that I hang out in, what I notice is it's usually just the opposite. Most organizations, people become less productive when they are in the organization. And it's because that fear goes up and that perfectionism goes up.

It's more that there's— there was somewhere for the fear to go. Oh, it's like the fear was able to move and be loved. And the opposite situation that you're talking about is that the fear has nowhere to go. The fear has to be held inside and held alone or work its way out through gossip and politics.

And really well, really well seen. Yeah. That's right.

So it's like if there's nowhere for the fear to go, you're just going to have fear driving all the decisions, you're going to have fear driving all the processes, you're going to have fear stagnating and narrowing the vision and killing the innovation and the creativity.

And I see that like all the time. I see, oh my gosh, being inside of organizations, like, here's the idea, it's a good idea, and then somebody needs to not get in trouble and they'll take the key component out of the idea, the thing that's actually going to give it leverage because they're into perfectionism and they can't see the forest through the trees. They can't see the actual 1 or 2 things that are going to make it right. And then you can say, oh, how have we lived our life from in the last 50 years? So 19— what is that, '85, '75 to today, '75 till today.

You're like, doesn't—

cars look different, houses look maybe a little different. We have cell phones, you know, Things are changing, but not at that same kind of clip. And I— and, and our society has become less and less risk-oriented and more and more perfe— you said earlier, 30% more perfectionism. It's like, oh wait, that's less risk aversion. It's like, that's trying to get it right instead of like, oh, I'm gonna fail. And, and that's, that's the underlying cause. And the amazing thing is, if you look at it on a societal level, and this happens for businesses too, When people are scared that they're not progressing, oftentimes what they do is they put more fear into the system instead of less fear into the system, right? Oh, we need society to improve, we need it to grow, so I'm gonna start creating things that produce more fear rather than things that reward risk.

Which is fascinating 'cause over this, over that same period of time, our technology has increased exponentially. The— so many aspects of our economy and production have increased exponentially. And yet it seems like that just creates a whole bunch of back pressure between the increased perfectionism and stagnation of the way that we actually organize as a society.

Yeah.

And then the increased pressure of the changes that are occurring at an increasing clip, especially now with AI and all the geopolitics going on. And of course, you just have this backlog of fear that has nowhere to go. And boom, here we are.

And here we are.

Not to make this about geopolitics, but—

Yeah, that's right.

But this is something that's not just in a company, it's our society right now.

Right, and what I notice is that typically in the long haul of society, like in an 80-year period or something like that, but also in a company, what happens is you keep on, like one person gets hurt, so you make a rule to prevent the risk. One person gets offended, so you make the rule to prevent the risk. You keep on making more and more rules. And there's this great thing that says— I think this is true for companies, but it's also true for societies— which is, at the beginning of an empire, there's few rules and everybody obeys them. At the end of an empire, there's a ton of rules and nobody obeys them. And that's true with companies. And so these— more of these rules start getting populated as a way to stay safe, as a way to mitigate risk as a way to make sure people don't get hurt, which seems like such a caring, compassionate thing to do, but it's aiming for perfectionism.

Right.

And so what it actually does in a company, in a society, is it creates stagnation. And so there is a way that we are sacrificing the whole for the individual.

Yeah, in a way that like utopia is an idea that has hurt possibly the most people, right?

Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know we were kind of geeking out on geopolitics, but the more important— for me, the more important part of that is that's business as well. And so if you look at, uh, the guy whose name escapes me right now, uh, Netflix and Netscape before, he talks about how he induces— creates a certain amount of chaos in the system because he smart people leave if you make a company idiot-proof. And then when the real changes come, they can't actually handle the, the innovation. They can't really have— they can't change quick enough. And so he makes sure there's a certain amount of chaos so that there can be change. And that's what he accredits.

Yeah.

Going from shipping DVDs to online streaming to probably now gaming or whatever it is that he's doing. And so, so there's like, there's an intelligence to that to say, oh no, I'm going to create, I'm going to make sure there's a certain amount of chaos here that it's not going to be all systematized.

Yeah. And then there's also the forces feeding that in business, in education, and in families. And in like, the moment you have a kid, everyone tells you the perfect way to raise your kid.

Yeah.

You know, there's it goes all the way down through the levels, right? Deeply personal and familial, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you can create— you can have that same fear with your kids and you make less resilient, less capable kids. Exactly right. Yeah. And but it's all perfectionism. It's all, oh, we're going to make this whole system perfect so that nothing bad can happen.

Yeah.

So that we can't create chaos, so there's no chaos. And then what it does is it evokes these big explosions of chaos, like a company failing or going away overnight or very quickly or whatever.

Right. Which, which you see over the course of someone's life with the perfectionism pattern, often especially like right there in midlife when they've built the perfect life.

Yeah. And then they're like—

and then they feel trapped in it and then boom, chaos.

Exactly.

So how does somebody who's listening to this kind of titrate that process, allow some of that fear to see the light of day in a way that isn't going to disrupt their life too much, and maybe some way that they can handle constructively.

And the, the, the most effective is the emotional inquiry. That's a really great way to just learn to sit with the fear that's underneath it, to identify, oh, I'm in perfectionism. Trying to be perfect isn't going to solve the problem. Being with the fear is what's going to solve the problem. I'm going to be with the fear. Emotional inquiry is a great way to do it. It's— it does— it doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. Also, just like really looking at your threats, like going past the endpoint that your fear says there is and, and allowing yourself to feel everything that that might be. So typically what happens is I need to make it perfect because of X. I'll get love removed, I'll get in trouble, I'll get fired, whatever it is. To actually visualize and feel through that experience of, okay, now I've gotten fired and what's going to happen next? What's the next iteration? To feel all of that stuff is what prevents you from, from being scared of it because I've already lived it. I already know what it is. I know I can get to the other side of it. I can see through the false end. And as, as we talk about all the time on the show, that what we're— we're not avoiding circumstances, we're avoiding emotions. Like, okay, if you got fired and you were like, yay, I got fired, this is the best thing ever, and you knew you were going to get the best job, and then you were the happiest ever you've ever been, you wouldn't worry about being fired. Yeah, you're worried about feeling like crap, like feeling so depressed about it that you can't get another job. Feeling, feeling, feeling is the thing that you're really scared of. So to go through a visualization where you actually can feel it.

Yeah, and unless you're avoiding the pleasure.

One of the most chaotic experiences for perfectionists is pleasure and joy.

Mm.

Because usually in a household where a perfectionist is born, their pleasure and joy got kicked. And so it's a very like, oh my gosh, I'm feeling really good. What's about to happen? I'm gonna get it, I'm gonna get it.

Got to get back to just doing things right. So I'm—

Exactly. So yes, that deep experience of pleasure and joy is something that oftentimes they will self-sabotage unconsciously because the feeling of it is so frickin intense.

So how much of perfectionism in creating art, for example, is simply the avoidance of the sheer pleasure of feeling free in it?

Usually people have to invite the fear and invite the anger, invite the grief, and then they can start inviting the pleasure. But if you want to get a head start on it than you do when we talk about enjoying the process. It's if you can, or connect with the process, right? If I can, instead of doing this process perfectly, I can deeply connect with it. If I, instead of doing this process perfectly, how do I enjoy this process the most? That starts to unravel all the negative and that very positive emotional experience that we're unconsciously avoiding.

This was an excellent, excellent, not perfect podcast.

I can tell you all the ways it wasn't perfect, and yet still, yes, here we are, very, very happy with it.

Yeah, thank you, Joe.

Man, what a pleasure.

Thanks everybody for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you like this episode and you find somebody in your life who you think would enjoy it, please send it along. Also remember to like, subscribe, give us a star rating. We'd love that. This podcast is Hosted by Joe Hudson and myself, Brett Kistler. It is produced by Monyi Kelly, and this episode was edited by Reasonable Volume.