Joanne Lee SmithChronic pain and symptoms recovery Nurse / Coach

Overcoming Perfectionism and Rigid Personality Traits

5 Oct 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:25

In this segment, Joanne Lee Smith encourages listeners to examine personality traits that hinder them, especially perfectionism and rigid, OCD‑like behaviors. She advises identifying unhelpful patterns and making small, concrete adjustments—such as tolerating a slightly misaligned shoe or leaving a room less meticulously arranged—to gradually loosen the grip of perfectionism. Joanne shares a personal anecdote about obsessively arranging objects, lights, and curtains, recognizing the excessive time it consumed, and reframing it as a perfectionist drive. She emphasizes that these traits are changeable and that recovery is possible through mindful, incremental tweaks.

Chapters

just look out for what, what you think the personality traits that you're having that are not, not serving you well, the things about you that you're like, this is not working for me, and just see whether there's anything that you can do to tweak it slightly, just to suit you a bit more. Because even if it's with like being perfectionism, well, am I willing to just leave that, that shoe just slightly out of line? Um, at the end of the day, you've put everything away, everything's tidied up. Am I willing to just leave that? This is just an example of what I've personally done over the time, because I would have liked my things to have been put in certain orders, and the lights would have been in certain positions, and the curtains would have been dangling in a certain way. And I recognized that this is not working, and I'm spending so much time putting things in certain places and in certain ways. And I guess that was maybe, um, some perfectionism about wanting it to be in a perfect way, and maybe some, uh, maybe some what people might describe as, um, OCD thoughts. But either way, you can recover from all of those things.