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Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast today. I wanna talk today about something that a lot of people with anxiety have issues with, which is perfectionism. And this is something that I struggled with for a lot of years as well. People with perfectionism feel like life is a performance and you are always being evaluated and that your worth as a person depends on your performance. Perfectionism has links to something that we have talked about before on this podcast, which is the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. So perfectionism is really linked to the fixed mindset where you see failure as proof of your inadequacy as a person. The growth mindset, on the other hand, which is on the other end of the spectrum from perfectionism, sees life not as a performance, but as a classroom, that life is about learning. That it's like learning to ride a bike. That you have to fall down a certain number of times as you're learning to ride a bike before you will learn to balance correctly. Your body has to learn what's too far in order to be able to learn how to balance. So people with a growth mindset feel that skills and abilities and even qualities like character qualities are all things that can be developed, whereas people with a fixed mindset feel like you're stuck. Everything is set in stone, and you either have it or you don't. And if you fail, if you don't have it, then that means that you're not worthwhile.
So for me, perfectionism showed up in lots of different ways in my life. When I was in school, I had to do perfect work on all of my assignments. I could not handle turning anything in that was less than fabulous. It left me really exhausted. I felt really terrible whenever I would make mistakes on tests or when I would get a less than perfect score on an assignment. In my stage performances in my musical life, it showed up as me feeling like my value as a person was going to be earned by the way that I performed right then. And if I didn't perform well, then that meant that I wasn't valuable as a person. And having this point of view means that you end up having a lot more anxiety because when your value is on the line, when you get up on stage, then mistakes are terrifying. And so you have a lot of anxiety, performance, anxiety. Another way that perfectionism showed up in my life was that it made it really hard for me to say that I was sorry for things, because when I admitted that I had made a mistake, it was like admitting that I am a failure. I am a bad person, instead of having this point of view that a growth mindset person would have, which is that I made a mistake, that I did something bad that needs to be repaired. But my value wasn't affected. So people with this fixed mindset, the perfectionist mindset, feel that your performance determines your value.
Funny thing was though, that if you were going to ask me what I really believed about value, like if you came up to me during that time and you said, do you really believe that human beings' value is determined by their performance? That when we are born into this world that we have no value and that we earn it by the way that we live? And the people that perform well and are smart and are perfect and do everything just right and are amazing, those people have tremendous amount of value? And the people who are not able to perform as well, that those people have no value? I would've said, no, that's ridiculous. That's not true. I believe that people have innate value and that that is not influenced by their performance. A value is a fixed commodity. I would've couched it in religious terms. I would've said that every human is a child of God, and as such, they have infinite, eternal worth, and that can't be changed by the way that they behave. Their value is fixed. So there was this dissonance in my brain, because on the one hand, if you were gonna confront me about it, I would've said that I believe that value is not determined by your performance. And I believe that life is about learning. It's about education. It's about growing. Whereas another part of me really believed that my value was determined by my performance and that life was a performance, life was a test. Life was an evaluation. And if I wasn't doing well on that evaluation, then my worth was way down. So I had this dissonance in my own brain, different parts of me that believed different things.

I started to make progress though, when I started to use that part of my brain that believed in immutable value to talk to the other part of my brain that believed that I had to be perfect in order to be to be worthwhile. We've talked about how your emotions are not determined by your circumstances, but instead they're determined by your brain's evaluation of your circumstances. And we've also talked about how when you practice seeing things a different way, when you practice having your brain view things a different way, that this can become your default view of things, this can become a permanent change in the way that your brain relates to the world and relates to your challenges.

So I started to try and practice seeing things a different way. I did this before I had really studied much about emotion science and about how, how emotions are generated, how emotions are regulated. I did it kind of intuitively, but it really worked. So I wanted to share this method with you in case it might help some of you.
What I did was I wrote down what I really believed, what it is that I would tell my child about human value. What it is that I would stand up for in a court of law. I wrote down in my notebook a couple of pages of basically describing what it is that I believe, and I wrote down how I believed that I am here in this life in order to learn. That life is not a test. Life is a classroom. I wrote about how I believe that my value is not changeable. I wrote about how mistakes don't define who I am, but they give me information about who I want to become, that maybe I wanna become someone different. In the interest of not reading the whole two, three pages that I wrote about this, I'll just sum it up with a quote that kind of sums up the entire idea of these pages. This is a quote that I read here on the podcast before. It's from the Inner Game, Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey, and he says, " when we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice it is small, but we do not criticize it as rootless and stemless. We treat it as a seed, giving it water and nourishment required as a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don't condemn it as immature and underdeveloped, nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change, yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is." So this quote kind of encapsulates what it was that I believed about my value as a person. Anyway, I wrote down all of these different affirmations about what I believe on two or three pages in a notebook, and I would sit down and for about a year I would read those affirmations almost every day, sometimes multiple times. Or another thing that I did was that I wrote it down and then I recorded myself saying it into my phone, and I would listen to myself saying it. Reading and hearing these affirmations was a really powerful experience for me because it was me talking to myself. It was even more powerful than if a friend had come up and told me these things, or if my mother had come up and told me these things, because this was my own brain, my own beliefs that I really believed telling the part of me that didn't believe them all about it, and it felt, it just sunk really deep and it felt really true every time I read it. And with this type of repetition and continually using the part of my brain that believed in unchangeable worth to talk to the part of my brain that wasn't so sure about that, eventually the one part of my brain was able to convince the other part of my brain, and I started to be able to see performance on stage and performance in my life differently. I started to be able to see that it was okay for me to make mistakes on stage. It was all right. It was going to teach me something, it was gonna help me learn how to do better in the future. And I started to be able to feel that when I made a mistake in my personal life, that it was okay for me to apologize and say sorry, because it didn't mean that my value was gone. It didn't affect my value. It meant that I made a mistake, not that I was a mistake. It helped me to feel that my value was constant no matter what happened and that I could afford to change. I could afford to admit that I was wrong and I could afford to try something and fail and learn from my mistake and do better.
So just talking about it in a couple of minutes on this podcast makes it seem like not such a big deal, but it was something that, because I really believed it, there was part of me at least that really believed it, and because I did it over such a, a long period of time, repeating, repeating it to myself, that I started to be able to incorporate it into the way that my brain saw things, even, even in my unconscious brain. Since my conscious brain believed in immutable value, with this repetition, I was able to reach my unconscious brain and teach it that ,I to also believe in the same thing.

And another interesting thing that happened as a result of me getting to the point where I was more accepting of imperfection in myself, I was then able to be more accepting of other people's imperfections and have a growth mindset toward other people. Because the funny thing is when you are constantly criticizing yourself and you feel like you have to be perfect in order to be worthwhile, when you see imperfection in other people, it feels also in unforgivable, unforgivable. So whereas before when I was stuck in the fixed mindset, when somebody, if somebody would, did something to me that inconvenienced me or hurt me in some way, it was really difficult for me to forgive that person. It felt like a permanent problem. It felt like a permanent wound on me. But once I was able to learn to teach myself that mistakes are part of a learning process, then when I, looking at other people's imperfections, I was better able to tolerate the fact that they were not perfect and that they were in a process of learning. And of course for me, this also involved writing down in my notebook what it was that I believed about other people.

So here's an example of some things that I wrote down and that I would read to myself to help me, to make sure that all of my brain was on the same page. So I wrote down, "life is not about performance. Life is about growth each individual needs. No one is measured for their performance or measured against someone else's performance. It is only about growth. Don't look down on others for their behavior. It means nothing about their value or about their potential. It's just them learning in their context right now. It's a hard day in the life of everyone. Other people have deficiencies you don't have, disabilities. Be reverent before each person's challenges. Celebrate them for trying hard in their challenging circumstances. Respect the difficulty of each person's journey, how some people just don't have the same gifts that you do. Have mercy on each person's handicap . Respect them for battling handicaps that you don't face. Forgive them like you'd forgive a lame person for not being able to walk." So this is just an example of things that I would write down for myself about what I really deep down believed about other people's mistakes and about other people's deficiencies. And it helped me to bring that judge, judgmental, perfectionist side of my brain, my unconscious brain over to be at one with the part of me that believed in patience and forgiveness and growth and learning and evolution for everybody. So what I really found in my own experience was that when I, when I was able to have a growth mindset for myself, it was a lot easier for me to have it for other people. And I also discovered that the reverse is true, that when I was internally constantly criticizing myself because I was so assured that my failure meant that I was worthless, that that also reflected on the way that I saw other people and I was unable to be patient or forgiving with other people or believe that they could learn and change.

So I just wanna ask you today, what do you really believe? If you're a parent, what would you tell your child? If you're not a parent? Imagine you are a parent, you have a child, what would you tell them? Let's say your child has been practicing for months to play in a piano recital with other students, and they get up there and they make a terrible mess of it, and they forget everything and they play terribly. Would you tell your child after that, that this means now that you are worthless? This, your failure up there meant that your value went down the drain? Would you tell that to your child, or would you say to your child, Hey, this is your first experience performing. You're gonna do so much better next time. It's all about learning and growth. The more we practice performing, the easier it gets. If you have trouble with this belief, ask yourself, what is it that I wanna believe?

And if you need help trying to decide what it is that you would like to believe, it might be interesting for you to know that studies have shown that people with a fixed mindset have higher levels of anxiety and depression, and people with a growth mindset have better emotional regulation, better resilience.
Growth mindset is associated with better learning outcomes, more adaptive behavior in the face of challenge, stronger motivation, greater emotional resilience, and result in people having healthier environments in their schools, in their relationships, in their workplace. Whereas the fixed mindset is linked to increased anxiety, as I said, a brittle sense of self-worth and avoidance of hard things. Those with a fixed mindset will just continually avoid trying new things or hard things because they're so afraid of failing.
So what is it that you deep down believe, or that you deep down want to believe that you want to be able to teach your child about human value? If there's part of you that believes or wants to believe that human value is not determined by a performance, that life is a learning opportunity and not a test, then you can try what I did. You can do it by writing down in a notebook with a lot of detail and conviction about what it is you actually believe, and then reading it every day or recording it into your phone and listening to yourself say it. But repetition is a really powerful tool when we're talking about the unconscious brain. And it will feel like a really powerful voice coming to your unconscious because it is your VO voice. It is what you actually believe. At least that's what I found. You don't have to do it this way. There's other ways that you could do it, that you could repeat these beliefs to yourself. You could write it on three by five cards. Put it around your house, put it on your bathroom mirror, put it as the wallpaper on your phone. Whatever seems to work for you. But if you're stuck in a perfectionist mindset and you don't want to be, you don't actually believe that that is the best, the most healthy and the most productive way to live, then try and use a growth mindset affirmation to teach your fixed mindset self, to have a different view. It worked for me anyway. And it was something I did have to repeat over a long period of time, but the change was gradual and I did feel, I did feel it transforming in the process of this year where I wrote down and read to myself what I actually believed. And the result is more, incredibly rewarding because it means you will have less performance anxiety in performances because you will be able to feel that mistakes are not a threat to your value. They are simply information feedback about how to do better next time. You'll have more courage to try new things, even if that includes failing along the way. Just like when you learn to ride a bike and you fall down, or a little kid learning to walk, who keeps falling down but keeps getting up. Learning just doesn't happen effectively when you are in a fixed mindset. So if you can teach your brain to have a growth mindset, to be able to believe that when you make a mistake, it doesn't mean that you are a bad person. It means that you did something bad and that you can fix it. Your value is not affected. Your behavior can change, and you can learn from your mistakes. Repeat that to yourself in whatever way works best for you, and you will begin to see a new default perspective in your unconscious reactions to yourself and to the people in your life.
Thanks for listening today, and join me again next week. Have a good week. ​