Stress busting tip number 14 - perfectionism!

Hi there! My name's Caroline Cavanagh. I'm an anxiety specialist, and I'm here today with tip number 14 of my Advent Calendar stress-busting tips. And today it's one that I'm sure a lot of people can relate to. It's about perfectionism and avoiding perfectionism. So perfectionism often, um, is something that really peaks at this time of year— finding the perfect present for someone, Cooking the perfect meal, hosting the perfect Christmas. And so it can really exacerbate what is already quite a stressful period. And the thing about perfection is there is no such thing. Now, when I was doing a bit of research before doing this video, I came across a quote from Michael Jackson, and I might not get this quite word for word, but it was, um, I am never pleased with anything that I do. I'm And to me, when I read that, it sort of really made me feel very sad. I think someone that created such amazing music that touched so many people's lives was never pleased with what he did. I often use the metaphor that perfectionism is a bit like trying to score a goal on a football field where there are no goalposts and you're blindfolded. That's kind of what it is, because it's so No one actually knows what perfect is. So the background to my tip is to change perfection for doing your best, because doing your best is something we can all do. What perfectionism tends to do is it stops you from moving forward because it's a fear of failure. And so if you don't do anything, you haven't failed. Brilliant! However, Failure, I would actually argue, is not doing anything, because when you don't do anything, you haven't learned, you haven't progressed towards your goal, and you haven't learned anything— that actually, that's not the right way to do it. So by doing your best, you start to at least grow as an individual, whether that's achieving what you wanted in the outset— brilliant— or it's learning that's not the way to do. You have still moved forward. So please stop aiming for perfection and start aiming for doing your best. And this is something I do an awful lot of work— I love working with teenagers and helping people with teenage anxiety, and perfectionism is a massive thing around teenagers. And again, with them, helping them say, no, rephrase, turn it round, do your best. Do your best. If you've done your best at your exams, if you've done your best at helping mum clean the house, it may not be perfect. But there is no such thing as perfect. But by doing your best, you're always going to make a positive step for you, and in many cases, in my experience at least, for other people too. So that is tip number 14. Something I'm doing with all of these Facebook Lives is the intention is to actually spread more techniques, more tips to people, so that as we move out of this, what's been quite a challenging year for many, into a new year, you feel more resourced to deal with whatever 2021 is going to throw at us. Hopefully not very much, but you never know. And the more tools and tips we have, hopefully the more people will be able to relax into that year, get more pleasure out of things, because the reality is what we create. I know lots of people over the summer that actually turned COVID into something very, very positive, all because they chose to create that reality. So the more tools we have, the more choice we have in how we see things. Therefore, I would love it to anyone who chose to share this post onto their timeline and maybe help some of their friends, family, and loved ones learn new techniques and tips too. If you do that, any post that is shared, I will put your name into a hat, and after Christmas I'm going to draw some names out the hat and offer people the opportunity to work one-to-one with me free of charge. And also anyone that likes my page, their name will go into a hat as well. So if you would be prepared to do either of those things, like the page or share the post, that would be absolutely amazing and I would be very grateful to you. And I will be back tomorrow with tip number 15. And just finally, for anyone that is watching all of these tips, you may notice that there was A gap of 12 and 13, and confession of an anxiety specialist, I didn't do them over the weekend. Got so entrenched in other things, but I will make sure tips number 12 and 13 are recorded at some point too. So by the time it gets to Christmas Day, there will be 24 tips available for you to watch, for you to use as you choose to. But for now, thank you very much for watching, and I look forward to talking to you again tomorrow. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now.