The Truth About Perfectionism: How To Finally Overcome It with Hope Timberlake
How often do you find yourself writing and rewriting emails? How much time do you spend practicing difficult conversations in your head? Perhaps you don't feel like you're achieving what you think you should be.
There's no denying that perfectionism is a common trait for most of us, and it's becoming more prevalent - but don't worry, we got you covered! Perfectionism occurs in three situations, and in this episode, you learn how to combat it and achieve your goals.
In This Episode, You Will Learn About:
Three situations perfectionism shows up
Strategies to combat perfectionism
Getting past fear and achieving your goals
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About the Guest:
Hope Timberlake is a speaker, trainer, and author of Speak Up, Dammit! How to Quiet Your Fears, Polish Your Presence and Share Your Voice. She focuses on persuasive communication, executive presence, and elevating the voices and visibility of women and those underrepresented in leadership. Hope earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Duke University and completed a Master's degree at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, teenage children, and dogs Mona and Sadie.
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When People Might Find Themselves In Perfectionism
The more we're trying to control something, the less likely we are to actually meet our objective. We see perfectionism arise in two distinct situations.
When we are new to something.
It feels scary. And by new, it could be something that we have done a long time, but we still feel new or we feel like we haven't mastered it. Maybe that's the better way to put it. We are feeling like, okay, we've got the imposter syndrome, they're expecting me to do something. And I don't know this as well as someone else. And so we're getting to that place where we try to control, our perfectionist streak comes.
2. When we are genuinely more junior in the room or newer to the situation.
So then we feel like it's compare and despair. It's that idea of like, they know it all.Who am I again? Imposter creeps out and trying to be able to control our environment feels like the way or control how we move forward feels like the right strategy, but it always backfires. And even if it doesn't backfire the first time and the problem is we can sometimes get away with it, we can be perfectionists about it and we can do it. And then we can be validated like, oh, that went really well, but it takes a toll. If we're going to go to that effort of perfecting everything before we do it, we're going to burn out where our relationships can suffer. There's just a lot of health problems that can come up. So there are so many issues with consistent perfectionism.
When I reflect back at the time that I was leading a team for a fortune 500 company. And when I would often see perfectionism come up as the most is with new hires. Yes. And you're talking about something when something is new to somebody, and even though they can come with years of experience, they find themselves in the, well, I don't know everything. I have to know every detail. Before I respond to that question or yes, provide that answer. Or before I speak up on the next conference call, I need to be here longer. And I remember reassuring some of them and saying you were hired for a reason. You may not know the products or this particular company, but there are skillsets that you have that I hired you for, that are transferable that we get to then learn from you.
Tenure does not always correlate with being an expert. It's what is your background, your experience, what you've gone through and maybe questions. Sometimes we get in a rut where we keep doing the same things over and over again. And I loved it when new and fresh set of eyes would come to our team and they would start to ask questions and I'm going well, that's what we've always done, but that's a great question.
Why are we still doing it that way? So exactly. If you are new and you are in, if you're listening right now and you are new to your role, to a team, to an organization, know that you bring value. We want you to speak up. We wanna hear your ideas. Yeah. It's.
Perfectionism is Procrastination in Disguise
Put aside that perfectionism, because all that's doing is procrastinating.
One of the things, especially with women is we have good student habits. So we're really, really good at following directions and executing and doing our homework and doing all the things.
And what I'd like to say is that good students belong in the classroom, not the boardroom. Because what happens in school, how we're graded in school is very different than how we're graded in our careers and in life. So we gotta pivot. We gotta pivot from being like, okay, I checked all the, I, you know, I checked all, what is it?
Dotted all the I and checked and crossed all the T's because that works in school. But like you said, if you want to be visible, if you want to have a good career, you need to share your idea. Even if you're not the most seasoned or the longest veteran in the room, if you're just someone who is a really good idea or a different perspective, or asks that important question, like your story, you just told. Sometimes a way of asking a question while adding value is bringing into the conversation. Well, what would it look like if we tried things this way, you're providing your idea, but you're positioning it in a question that sometimes feels a little more subtle? And that might be one way of doing it.
When it comes to perfectionism, there are two things that happen with perfection. It's procrastination in disguise. That's not serving us. It's not serving the company we work for because then we're so focused on getting everything perfect. But what we see as imperfect, maybe somebody else sees as perfect.
The know worst situation happens, I see it a lot, where someone's optimizing for perfection and they come in the meeting and the people meeting want to take a totally different direction. So now they've spent hours or days or weeks of sleepless nights and preparation, and they think they have something perfect. It's not the direction in which the team wants to go. So now you're like, oh my gosh, what was all that for?
And the other thing that happens too when you get so focused on perfect. You lose out on the creativity. Yes. And you lose out on learning of failure. And I say failure is a good thing. I spent so much time focusing on perfecting certain things in my business, which now looking back a year later, I don't even use half the stuff that I originally created because my business has pivoted. And yet I spent hours in sleepless nights. And like you said, the stress and the anxiety around that. And it's either procrastination or it's preventing us from failing, which can be really good cuz we can learn from that
Strategies to Combat Perfection
Identify your script. This is the little refrain that's in the back of your head. Whenever you're doing something new or you're in an environment where you're uncomfortable, what is that little voice telling you? And so it could be like, I'm not good enough. Who am I that anyone wants to hear from me? Whatever that script is saying, identify it. And we're gonna flip it. So we're gonna flip your script to the total opposite. It's an aspirational view of a new script. And I have a worksheet that I'm happy that if your listeners if anyone wants to reach out to me. That's great for flipping your script and it's just moving from that negative refrain to that aspirational mantra, like, this is your powerful self.
Move or remove the target. So the target is what I call that thing, that goal, you have that goal of like, I'm gonna say the right thing in this meeting, or I'm going to get praise. I'm gonna get at a girl at the end of that call, or everyone's gonna look at me like, oh my gosh, she is so smart. So whatever that target is, move it or remove it all. So you could move it and say, instead of like, oh, um, everyone's gonna think I'm the smartest of the room. It might be like, okay, everyone's gonna be happy that I contributed. Or remove it altogether and just say, I don't really care. There's no outcome as much as you and I, Danielle are so into intentionality in this case it's around today. I'm just gonna share my thoughts and whatever the outcome is. No big deal. I, I am gonna be divorced from the outcome. I'm gonna be emotional Teflon and just be totally fine with whatever happens.
Dive in. As a recovering perfectionist, making mistakes feels like the hardest thing in the world to do. We don't wanna make mistakes. Like we're meant to be perfect. So diving in means just jumping in without doing all the work you think you need to do. It’s leaving behind those good student habits, leaving behind all the behaviors you've done before and just jumping in. There's some really, really powerful research around when you do first of all, more often than not, you actually do meet that goal you set because you didn't overthink it - you just did it. And you just intuitively met them. Use of the room. And the other thing is when it does flop, it's never as bad as it feels. Other people's perspective is never as bad as it feels to you. And that's how we build this immunity. We keep building these muscles to build some version of toughness so that you can take on these harder challenges and you can be more visible and you can advance your career:
You need to fail a certain number of times
You need to be embarrassed a certain number of times
The correlation between control and perfectionism
When I think of the people that finally release control and dive into that uncomfortable zone:
That's when you learn the most
That’s when you grow the most
That’s when you accomplish the most
Every time that I just leaned in and I just kind of let go of that perfectionism, my business grew more than I would've ever imagined.
If you’re playing any kind of sports - tennis, golf, rowing, or any kind of sports - where you're holding onto something, when you grip really hard and you're trying to control the racket the handles, you’re going to do worse. You're more likely to fall. You're more likely to get hurt. But if you can have that light grip on those different sports, you're going to do so much better. The second we let go a little bit, we wind up growing our business and meeting all of our goals without even realizing it.
How Perfectionism Paralyzes Us
Perfectionism causes you to not ask for help. And then you don't advance in the areas that you want to. If you are new to a team, to enroll to whatever it is that you're doing anything, ask for help
The other thing too is sometimes you could vet it out. You could say I have this idea of how we could do things differently. And let me just ask one person, like, what do you think? Do you think that that's a question I could bring up? And if I ask the question this way, do you think that they would be responsive?
There's so much that we think that we all had to do it on our own. Ask for help from one person from your manager, from your team, whomever it is, that is key, especially when you're feeling a little timid. You can ask what are your thoughts on this? So you're coming with the solution, but you're still asking a question and giving yourself that opportunity for some feedback, for some coaching, for some advice, whatever that is.
