What keeps you in self sabotaging cycles?
Want to hear me speak on how perfectionism is sabotaging your health?
Are you ready for this?
Perfectionism could be sabotaging your health and getting in the way of you living a healthy and happy life. 🤯
The idea that there is one flawless way of being in the world, of being in our bodies, of moving, of eating is LIMITING.
Most health and wellness is nuanced. When we get caught up in our heads trying to get everything right, we are striving for perfectionism and it can prevent us from doing anything at all.
I call myself a recovering perfectionist. I was very type A growing up - I liked my homework to be perfect, I liked my clothing to be perfect and I even wanted to be perfect at arts and crafts (which is so silly to me now! Oh, little Miriam). I really liked to present myself as a fully actualized perfect human being, even when I was very young. Eventually, I realized that my perfectionism limited me from taking risks and trying new things and living my life.
In a lot of ways, I got in my own way.
This recording is a perfect example of bucking perfectionism! In my head, I think if I want to do recordings they have to be perfect. I go down the rabbit hole thinking of how much work is created in making an amazing podcast and then I quickly get overwhelmed and shut down and I don't want to do anything at all.
But instead, I thought: what if I just tried? What if I let this recording be messy and imperfect and I just didn't care because I respected my process of showing up?
A question that I've been meditating on is this:
What could I accomplish if I actually got out of my own way? What if I took the path of least resistance and just started somewhere? We ALL need to start somewhere, and nothing is perfect on the first try. What if I accepted that?
Shifting away from perfectionist language gives me permission to be human.
I want to share a client story:
I recently started working with a new client. Her main health goals are to improve her relationship with food and to improve her self confidence. I love these goals! She also mentioned that she wouldn't mind losing a few pounds in the process, which is fine because that can be a result of the bigger nutrition and mindset work we do together.
During our sessions it started coming out that she was a perfectionist. She absorbed a lot of misinformation from her family and wanted to do right by them and make them proud. Unfortunately, she wanted it so badly that it actually kept her from living her life and trying new things. She stayed in her job for years even though she was very unhappy with the work. She'd been so scared of applying for new jobs— of actually putting herself out there and being rejected— that she didn't even try.
Perfectionism prevents us from showing up and therefor a lot of us just sit on the sidelines. If we can't get it perfect, we don't try at all.
So many people that I work with are waiting for the right time to start eating healthier. Sometimes it just isn't the right time to start a new health journey (Like I think we can all agree that if you're backpacking through southeast Asia, it doesn't make much sense to take on a new rigid health protocol). That's okay! Other times, though, it really is us getting in our own way.
The thing about not trying because we won't get it perfect is that we really don't have the opportunity to fuck up. Fucking up is how we learn! As children we don't just go from crawling to walking. Instead, we crawl, we get up, we stumble around, and then we fall and we scrape our knees and we cry. It's doing this that helps us learn! Fucking up helps us find our center of gravity.
Our job is to show up for ourselves. Our job is to acknowledge our fears, and then do the thing anyway. When you do the thing, pay attention to what comes up. When we can be curious about our experience, we can learn through it.
When we can give ourselves grace for being human we also give ourselves the opportunity to grow through our mistakes.
Perfectionism is an outside-in approach. It's someone else's standards of what our lives, our bodies, our diets, and our fitness should look like. When perfectionists get tied up in other people's views, we take their opinions as facts and we tend to override our body's needs.
As an example, in session this same client that I was just speaking of expressed to me how hungry she was. She was ravenous and tired, craving everything and feeling extremely depleted. In reviewing her diet, I noticed that she was not eating enough food. She was keeping her portion sizes small because she wanted her body to be small. She believed that small portions were what a healthy diet should look like, that eating less calories was just inherently better. She was starving herself! So much so that she was binging every weekend and feeling super crappy. Every Monday she'd start the cycle of all or nothing thinking anew.
In reality, it is important and essential for her to listen to her body. She needed to eat more food and eat more often so that she can truly feel nourished, satiated and balanced. What works for some will NOT work for all and bird sized portions were not working for this client.
We have to acknowledge that we are on our own path and health and fitness and food and our relationships with ourselves is a complex topic. Our health is more nuanced that can fit in a meme or what looks sexy on paper.
We all have mental chatter. We all have those little voices inside of our brains that are mean to us. That is our fear chiming in to prevent us from growth and change! I like to listen to those voices, because actually when we tune in, they can teach us a lot about what's keeping us stuck.