Transcript of Lina Noory speaking about her personal journey overcoming perfectionism. She describes perfectionism as an ego-driven protection mechanism, and outlines practices she uses to reduce it—mindfulness (present-moment awareness), working with the ego as a friend, and inner-child healing and breathwork—to cultivate self-acceptance and lessen the need for external validation.
Chapters
So perfectionism, one of my favorite topics, perfectionism, as we just discussed, it's pretty much, you know, it's. It's something that your ego uses, or at least my ego used to. To stop me, prevent me from doing something different, to prevent me from creating a change. And so I felt like if I wasn't the best at something, I wasn't going to do it. So, for example, dancing. I'm not a dancer, but I was like, oh, oh, if I'm not. If I don't have this amazing rhythm, like, I'm not even going to do it. And so for the longest time, I go places and I wouldn't dance just because I simply was like, well, I'm not the best at it, so why would I do. I would embarrass myself. And so that's your ego. And so you have to learn to make your ego your best friend. And for the longest time, I used to battle my ego. I used to say, why is my mind doing this to me? Why me? Why me? And when you get yourself out of that victim mindset, and instead of saying, why me? You use your ego and these triggers, as I mentioned earlier, as an opportunity to learn more about yourself. Your. Your ego like a muscle. So the more you work out your ego muscle, the bigger it gets. So first and foremost, to stop perfectionism, I had to work on actively diffusing my ego. And so that's not just taking out one hour a day to do it. It's being mindful of when your ego kicks in. And in that moment, just taking a moment, asking yourself, why? And so at first, when I first started doing this, I actually, as I mentioned, I would battle the ego. So I would say, what is, you know, what are you doing? And, you know, you're ruining it for me, and I'm trying to get better, and. And then you just, like, chime in. And so when I realized, and I actually studied the mind, that your ego is actually just trying to protect you, and it's trying to keep you safe. From the dawn of time, our mind has been like, you know, when we were cavemen, like, no, no, no, no, don't. Don't go into the forest. There's, you know, there's bears out there, and, you know, you might die. And so although we don't live in a world where I actually, we do live in a world where you, you know, a lot of people are living in, you know, war zones. And it's very unfortunate what's happening a lot of places around the world. So I'll speak for myself where I live currently in America, and I live in a place where I don't have to worry about survival. I have to learn how to get myself out of that survival mindset. And so what I had to learn to do is, is be mindful and actively be present. So a lot of that came from reading the Power of Now and my studies with Eckhart Tolle and just really kind of feeling like. Like, body feeling. So it sounds really weird, but Eckhart always talks about something as simple as, like, when you wash your hands, like, are you thinking about washing your hands? Are you looking in the mirror going, oh, man, I'm running late and I've got like 10 minutes before I have to go to dinner. So I literally will try to make washing my hands a meditation. So I'll, like, imagine, like, the water is, like, cleansing off my hands or when I'm in the shower, I'll imagine, like, that all my troubles that I experience throughout the day is just like, washing off me. So it's those little acts of being mindful in the moment that's helped me work on, I don't want to say diffusing my ego, because it's not. When people sometimes use that terminology, I feel like they're trying to still refer to the ego as, like, their enemy. Like, I make my shadow self my friend, and I tell her, I'm like, hey, we got this. And another major, major, major key thing which I credit Samee to is inner child healing. And so a lot of my need for perfectionism was my need for external validation. So I wanted to be perfect so people would think that I'm enough. And so growing up, I never really felt enough. And so I. I was always a little girl. Like, you know, I got bullied in school and I would, you know, try to help people with homework and get these little jolly orange or lollipops that I've talked about before and hand them out to people could like me. So I had to basically learn to love my little girl, my inner child. And so through a lot of breath work, and especially in a lot of our breath work sessions, we were able to do inner child healing. And so I made my little girl, who I feel like a lot of my ego was based off of her and her not feeling like she got the proper attention and she got the proper love. And so when I did a lot of the inner child healing, I imagine her. So every time I'm in a place where I'm getting nervous, like, if I'M going. I've done a few segments on the Today show and right before I'm going on the Today show, and I get that, you know, that pit feeling and it's the nervousness. I imagine my little girl in my hand and I'm like, we've got this. Like, this is what we've waited for. This is what we dreamed of. And so the way I worked on limiting perfectionism and because it's still something that I work on regularly, is be number one, you know, the inner child, healing and validating myself, validating that little girl that, you know, my parents did an incredible job. I overdoed that over and over again. And they did the best that up to their level of awareness. And so I now knowing more and making the decision to learn more, I have to go back and re. Love her, reparent her, show her all the love and give her all the affirmations, you know, and being mindful of my ego, making it my best friend, and as I said, just taking the active steps of loving myself. Because who is perfect? Like, no one's perfect. And I. I started to find beauty and imperfectionism. So that's what makes me uniquely me is, you know, my raspy voice. And, you know, sometimes I am late, so those little things about me I feel like make me me. And sometimes I find things funny or I make jokes that aren't funny. And so I used to get in my head like, well, that wasn't funny. Now I just, you know, I find the joy and beauty in the little imperfections that I have because that's what makes me me. And. And no one can take that away from me. And so when I learned to love my imperfections, I learned to love my little quirks. That's really where I took a lot of focus off of perfectionism. And that literally changed the course of my entire career because I really feel like, especially online, people have turned away from perfectionism. So in the past, it was the era of, you know, taking the still photos that are perfectly pictured. So you, you know, you'll go and you'll take 60, 70 photos and you'll pick the one or two that look the best. And so then a lot of people would look to that and go, well, I can't look like that.
