Perfectionism is destroying your productivity (and your mental health)

If you're watching this right now, I'm guessing you already know that your perfectionism is destroying both your productivity and your mental health. So instead of polishing that turd, by the end of this video, I wanna help you get to the bottom of your perfectionism and give you two concrete ways to start overcoming it today.

Watch the video below or read on for the full transcript.

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Perfectionism is one of the things that kept me paralyzed for over a decade. And I don't want anyone to waste years of their life, struggling with it like I did. So let's get started. First, we're going to do some mindset work and then we'll get into the concrete ways to overcome perfectionism.

Perfectionism is the idea that something is only worth doing if it's done perfectly. So if you're unable to be perfect, you experience extreme anxiety and things take you forever to finish. If your perfectionism doesn't paralyze you completely and make you perpetually procrastinate that is.

If you struggle with extreme perfectionism, it's likely because somebody in your childhood taught you through their words and actions that you'd better be perfect or else. You learned that you had to be perfect in order to protect yourself from emotional and/or physical harm.

Another side effect from this experience is that you're likely a people pleaser and struggle with putting yourself first. You're a people pleasing perfectionist, not because you prefer perfection but because you need to feel safe, because you need to feel in control. You're a people pleasing perfectionist because that's the only way you knew as a child to take care of yourself. So let's take a moment to acknowledge that.

While now, you may see your perfectionism and people-pleasing as negative and self-sabotaging behavior, you need to understand that that wasn't always the case. This behavior comes from a place of survival and self care. So the question you need to ask yourself now is, do you still need to people please and be a perfectionist in order to survive now? Really?

What does surviving actually mean for you now?

And what does thriving mean for you now?

If you want to dive deep into these questions, I recommend using them as journal prompts for my Anytime Pages technique that I teach in this post.

If you're comfortable, comment below and tell me what you discovered after reflecting on those questions.

So you've already started making a huge shift in your perfectionism, by reflecting on where it came from. And now I want to give you a couple of tips and tricks for overcoming it in the moment when you're trying to get stuff done.

It's really common advice to be told to be imperfect on purpose. That is unhelpful. Instead, you want to be bad on purpose. First of all, that's fun. Second of all, it makes it so much easier to overcome that internal perfectionistic resistance. Because when we try to be imperfect on purpose, our perfectionist brains can skew that to be 1% shy of perfect and we're not actually helping ourselves. So instead, when you are trying to overcome what can feel like insurmountable perfectionism that's keeping you from doing anything at all, be bad on purpose first. You'd be surprised how much that helps you get started.

And when you persevere through that, you will get to a place where you're pleased with your work. It won't be perfect, it never is, but you'll get to a place where you're okay with things not being perfect. The trick is to go from the opposite end of the spectrum. Go from bad into "this is fine," instead of just knocking it back from perfectionist. It's a lot easier.

And tip number two, leave things unfinished on purpose. Perfectionism often makes us feel like we need to do it all perfectly right now. So if you have a 10 page paper to write, you feel like you need to write the whole thing today. But that isn't true. Slowly getting comfortable with leaving things unfinished is just as important as learning how to let things be imperfect.

That being said, if you've got a hard deadline, I'm not telling you to be late on purpose, sorry.

Some examples of leaving things unfinished are, only clean one thing in your kitchen. Only write your papers introductory paragraph. Respond to one or two emails in your inbox instead of all of them.

Learning to leave things unfinished is a really important muscle to develop. Because it's that muscle that allows you to, in the future do larger, more complex projects that take a lot of time. Without that muscle, you're gonna be stuck with projects that you can tackle in a day. You're gonna find adulting really hard.

There you have it, journal prompts for getting to the bottom of your perfectionism so you can dismantle it from the inside out. And two concrete ways to start overcoming your perfectionism today.

If you liked this video, you'll love my free masterclass on overcoming procrastination and resistance. Where I teach you three mindset shifts and one simple three-step system to help you get procrastination to the curb. All you have to do to get access is go to this link and sign up.

And if you liked this video, hit that like button and subscribe and be sure to share it with your friends. I'll be back next week with another video. See you then. Bye.