A few days back I discovered this wonderful blog post. It’s by Josiane, who invented the name “kimianak” for her blog. I assumed it was an Inuit word, but I was wrong. (Yep, you’re going to have to click to find out what it means…I’m quoting enough of her in this post as it is.)

Josiane writes about having a major epiphany: “I know one of the reasons why I don’t get around to doing some of the things I want to do is that as long as they remain undone, they retain the potential of being perfect.”

This is a huge realization. HUGE.

For a very long time I was unaware, as many people are, of the direct link between perfectionism and procrastination. In fact, it seems contradictory. Someone who strives so hard to be absolutely faultless would be sure to include following schedules and meeting timelines in that, wouldn’t they?

But that ignores how deep the perceived need to be superhuman can go. And that need is based on fear, one of our most primal emotions. Which is linked to our basic biological drive for survival. So yeah, perfectionism carries some serious oomph.

To describe what can happen, I am hereby coining a word of my own.

Procrastifectionism (noun):  Delaying action out of the fear, either conscious or unconscious, of not performing to the unreasonably high standards one desires to meet.

It works like this.

You want or need to do something that feels high-stakes for you. (It doesn’t have to look high-stakes to anyone else—it only needs to feel that way to you.) It’s so important, it absolutely has to be good. And today you just don’t have it in you to give it the amount of time, energy, or concentration that it needs to be that good.

So you put it off until tomorrow. Or Monday. Or the first of the month. Because you’ll be ready then.

Except you’re not. You can’t be, because you’re still just as intimidated about how overwhelming the project seems and how perfectly you need to do it.

So you start feeling bad about your ability to get the job done. If you can’t even get started, how will it ever be good? Your self-esteem sinks, and you don’t feel ready to tackle the task. Again.

Rinse and repeat. It’s a vicious cycle.

Until you realize, like Josiane did, that

The form in which that imagined potential of perfection exists . . . it is not what I want. That potential perfection, even if it was actualised, is deeply flawed. It is flawed, and for a very simple reason: there is no “me” in that (potentially or actually) perfect thing – it is not in any way infused with my essence, my me-ness.

Hmm. Interesting. I kept reading. Then she pretty much blew me away with this bit:

Those things I don’t create . . . can’t be infused with my essence so long as they remain within me. As long as they’re only within me, I am not within them; they have to come out of me in order to take with them – and contain within them – some of what I am.

It reminds me of when we learned about the two types of energy way back in grade school—potential and kinetic. Kinetic energy is energy in motion—acting on the world and doing things. Potential energy contains power, but doesn’t unleash it. It just sits there, pregnant with possibilities, but giving birth to none of them.

Okay, so I’m anthropomorphizing basic physics. But you get the point.

As you go through the next few days or weeks, check in with yourself from time to time and ask yourself which type of energy you’re embodying. There’s no right or wrong—this is about just noticing, so you can make more self-aware choices.

And check out the rest of Josiane’s blog post. She’s one smart woman.

Happy new year!

It’s been a long, long time…hasn’t it?*

*huge props to anyone who can identify the lyrical reference–leave a comment below if you can and you’ll be enthusiastically celebrated.

I haven’t posted in quite a while, because I’ve been thinking Deep Thoughts about where I want this blog to go. You should be seeing me post with some regularity again.

In the meantime, I’ve started off the new year differently than I have in the past, thanks to Cairene MacDonald, who recently hosted a teleclass with her own coach Laura Burkey on choosing a theme for the year, rather than goals or resolutions. Because you know how the latter usually works—you set yourself up for failure, with the best of intentions. If you’re lucky, maybe you even last a whole month. (Me? Not even that long.) Then you spend the rest of the year berating yourself for not keeping your resolutions or not working more diligently toward your goals, slipping further and further into resignation and self-criticism.

Fun fact! I just went to my favorite online anagram creator (be warned—it’s highly addictive), plugged in the word “resolutions,” and one of the anagrams it came up with was “onerous list.” How fitting is that?

I’m tired of that whole resolve-and-fail pattern…but I have some definite directions I want to take this year. So a theme seems like a great idea. According to Laura, a theme gives you a point of focus, but it doesn’t have any specific “action steps,” and you cannot ever be failing at your theme. To a recovering perfectionist like me, that’s important.

Here are the four main concepts to consider when creating your theme for the year. I feel okay sharing this with you because Laura offered them to us for free on the call. I’ve also rephrased some of them a bit, so it’s a mix of her words and mine.

• Your theme should reflect the emergence of your true self. It’s not about changing yourself—it’s about adding to or improving on who you already are and always have been. Some aids to thinking about this are phrases like “What I have always…” and “As a kid, I always…”.
• Your theme must be timely and relevant to you right now. Whatever words you use to express it will speak volumes to you, and resonate with your heart, mind, and even your physical body.
• Your theme should require a daily, healthy stretch. Not to stress you out, but more as a call to yourself from yourself to extend yourself in new ways that you want. Not because of internalized “shoulds,” but because you have chosen this direction for yourself.
• Your theme must “stick.” Its words should really pack a punch and be catchy and memorable to you. Personal.

I’ve chosen a theme for the year. Wanna hear it?

::whistles::

Oh, you do? Okay, then.

My personal theme for 2010 is “Nourish my life, claim my power.”

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Nourishing my life is partly about physical nourishment. Because I have some serious and deep-seated issues with food. I don’t eat well, I never really learned how to cook or enjoy healthy food, and I’m starting to suffer from this. The irony is that I’m probably severely malnourished at the same time that I’m significantly overweight.

This year I want to focus on nourishing myself with food and movement, rather than restricting myself to foods that I don’t enjoy and forcing myself to exercise. I’m not going to say “I can’t have that” or “I must do this.” Instead, I’m going to experiment with “What do I want that would nourish me?” and “What ways of moving would give my body pleasure?” So nothing is out, but I’m looking for more of what I want in.

But the concept of nourishment goes deeper than that. I’ve spent my entire life being a people-pleaser, and now that I’ve decided I want to live life on my own terms at last, I’m having trouble figuring out what those terms are. It seems that somewhere along the way, I forgot how to have fun in ways that don’t require winning the lottery to finance. When someone recently asked me the question “What would you do if you had today entirely at your disposal?” I had to honestly answer, “I don’t know.” That’s heartbreaking and more than a little frightening.

So as a first step, I’ve created a list entitled “Ways to Nourish Myself” and stuck it in my planner so I always have it at hand. It has some incredibly simple things on it like “breathe deeply” and “stretch,” which I can do anywhere, plus things that are more location-based (“cuddle with my cats”) and some that are mini-projects (“try a new recipe”) or longer-term ones (“grow plants”). I’ll add to it as I think of more things, but already this list gives me something to turn to if I’m at a loose end and want to do something to steady myself and experience some pleasure.

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Claiming my power is about stepping into a place of more confidence. For instance, I want to launch a business this year. (Stay tuned!) For the past year or so, I’ve been in learning mode, taking in books and recordings and advice from others so that now I can picture myself as a “solopreneur.” (Which just means being in business for myself, without having employees. Gotta love clever terminology.) But when I look back on last year, I realize I took on the role of the apprentice in my own mind.

I’ll never stop learning, growing, and asking for help and advice, but I need to stop seeing myself as an apprentice now. I need to trust that I have legitimate skills and wisdom to offer, and move out of information-gathering mode into implementation mode. Every entrepreneur I know says they didn’t know what they were doing when they launched their businesses—they just jumped in, started doing things, and noticed what worked and what didn’t. It’s time for me to stop reading about how to swim and dive in already, trusting that I’ll figure it out as I go along and that I have people on my team who will support me in all kinds of ways.

I also want to claim my power in the realm of personal relationships. I’ve gotten much better at stating my wants and needs clearly, and understanding that they’re as valid as anyone else’s—but I’d like to develop that even further. I want to be able to communicate openly and directly, but without anger or violence, in a way that affirms what I want but also seeks to understand what the other person (or people) want. I want to get better at finding win-win situations, and at making conscious choices to walk away from situations that become too toxic for me.

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So…it should be a very interesting year for me. I’ll keep you posted on my progress from time to time.

What about you? Have you made any promises to yourself this year, and if so, how are you doing so far? (And how are you doing it? If you’ve found a way to keep your resolutions, inquiring minds want to know!)

How does the idea of an annual theme sound to you? If you’re exploring it and want to comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Again, happy 2010! I hope it’s a great one for all of us.

Do you get frustrated with all the peppy, saccharine advice out there which tries to convince you that you are a wonderful person just as you are and you should accept yourself without self-recrimination? Do you find it just a tad* hard to accept?

(*sarcasm alert)

Yeah, me too.

This post was sparked by Jennifer Louden (whom I am not accusing of being saccharine, by the way—she’s the real deal) and her Declaration of Freedom from Self-Improvement which she posted today to kick off a week on this theme on her blog.

I signed the declaration by leaving a comment, but it made me think about how easy it is to fall into empty-words, positive-thinking rhetoric and say, “Yes! Non-judgmental self-acceptance, what a great idea! I stand behind it completely!” and then go about your life as usual, vs. really trying to practice it.

And the ironic thing here is that trying to practice it can turn into the very self-improvement self-tyranny you’re attempting to unlearn. (“Damn it! I’m failing at unconditionally accepting myself!”)

That’s a fine line to walk, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on what has helped me to walk it.

Today’s post is about one of the most important attitude adjustments you can make toward overcoming what I am hereby naming “Superhero Syndrome.” (Definitely more to come on that!) I will follow up soon in another post with a list of specific techniques I’ve used.

So . . . how can you move past feeling that the pep talks (from others and from yourself) about how “you’re perfectly fine as you are” are empty positive-thinking platitudes? How can you start believing them?

Realize that accepting yourself as you are now is NOT the same thing as becoming complacent and lazy.

If you already set high (maybe even unreasonably high) standards for yourself, you will not suddenly turn into a person who lets things slide, produces shoddy results, and stops working on yourself. It’s simply not in your nature. You will continue to do your best, but if you can uncouple those efforts from the belief that they define your worth as a human being, you’ll gradually be able to relax into an acceptance what you really are—an amazing work in progress.

This is not easy, but it’s well worth the effort. Personally, I get there by:

• Self-talk. I remind myself over and over again that the essence of me is more than the sum of my actions and how successful I think they are.
• Self-observation. When I act as if the above concept is true, I notice that I feel more peaceful and happy. The more I notice that I do not, in fact, become lazy and complacent when I let go of my attempt to be 100% perfect at everything, the more I build up evidence that I’m not going to turn into an unmotivated lump.

One important thing to keep in mind here is that if you’ve been riding yourself into the ground for a long time, once you begin to realize that you can stop trying so hard all the time you may find yourself sleeping a lot. Or vegging out and staring at walls or the television. Or reading novels. Or playing lots of computer games. Or whatever you do to relax and unplug.

This is fine. You are not becoming a lethargic slob. You are catching up on much-needed rest and rejuvenation, which you may have been denying yourself for years or even decades.

When I finally admitted that I needed to slow down and nurture myself, I slept for 10 hours or more per night for four straight months, with many daytime naps on weekends. And when I came out the other side, I had more energy and enthusiasm for life than I’d felt in many years. I was able to do more.

Go easy on yourself. Don’t be like the saying on one of my all-time favorite t-shirts.

And stay tuned. There’s more to come on this reeeeeeally important topic.

“Here. You might like to write about this on your blog.” A wink, a jaunty tip of his imaginary hat, and my friend was gone. In my hand was a tiny book weighing just a few ounces, entitled The Underachiever’s Manifesto.

My friend is known for his sense of humor, but then again, as a classic overachiever, maybe there was something beneficial in there for me. I opened the book.

And closed it less than an hour later. Like I said, it’s a very slim volume. The author would probably say that it’s exactly as long as necessary, and not a word longer.

It left me . . . disturbed. Because it’s a funny book, but in the way that Dilbert cartoons are funny, being only slight exaggerations (hmm, perhaps I’m being too charitable there) on work environments that really do exist.

Take, for example, the “Ten Principles of Underachievement.” I particularly like #3 – Expectations lead to misery. Author Ray Bennett writes:

It would be nice to believe that setting the bar high always helps, but it doesn’t. Most people start on an exercise program looking for great improvement, only to quit out of disappointment. If only they had learned to avoid expectations . . .

Ouch. Nail hit squarely on the head.

He also talks about the law of diminishing returns. In any undertaking, there comes a point where even if the spirit is willing, the flesh is gasping for rest. The mind goes into lockdown from sheer overload. At that point, you start getting less and less accomplished for every bit of extra effort you apply. Continuing to push will result in burnout, injury, or worse.

Slow down, Bennett says. Lower the bar. Good enough is good enough.

Of course, my Inner Drill Sergeant scoffs at this notion. “Are you insane, woman? How can you respect yourself if you deliberately do less than you’re capable of?”

I’m getting better at scoffing right back. Some days I can look my Drill Sergeant right in the face and say, “You’re only one part of me, and I don’t have to listen to you all the time anymore.”

Other days I still snap a smart salute, spin on my heel, and march away to do whatever the Sergeant has told me to. But at least when that happens, I’m getting better at noticing it. On good days, I even refrain from judging myself for it.

It takes a long time to break a pattern this entrenched. Compassion for myself seems like a good way to go.

So I’m experimenting with doing less. Deliberately. Just a little, here and there.

• Not always being the first to volunteer whenever a task comes up at work, because after more than three years on the job, I shouldn’t have to feel like I’m proving what a good worker I am every single day.
• Not balancing my checkbook for the first time in my life. (Miraculously, I’ve survived this.)
• Not trying to cook (which usually ends up as a late-night run for junk food), but allowing myself to order takeout instead.
• Not keeping up with my elaborate personal planning system; just writing down brief to-do lists on Post-It notes as they occur to me.

The Underachiever’s Manifesto is a lopsided little treatise. It doesn’t take into account that there are some situations in which you really do need to strive for perfection—for instance, I don’t think I’d hand the book to an air traffic controller just going on-shift.

I also don’t believe that pushing yourself is always a bad thing. I’m proud that I’ve run three marathons, for instance, and I never would have accomplished that without going way out of my comfort zone. I think that every now and then, choosing a really difficult goal and going all-out to achieve it can really be inspiring, and it can teach you some valuable lessons about what you’re capable of.

But this book definitely got me thinking.

What about you? Are there areas in your life where you’ve experimented with turning things down a notch? What happened when you did? Or maybe there’s a situation where you’d like to try that approach. Where can you do less and possibly gain more? And what would you gain?

Feel free to comment below. I’d love to have a conversation about this . . .

Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

—Ben Okri

Perfectionism is rooted in feelings of shame and inadequacy. We’re afraid that we are somehow not good enough, not worthy enough, to be loved and respected simply by being our natural selves. There are many reasons why this happens, but the upshot is that we feel the constant need to justify our own existence to ourselves and others. Whatever we have achieved thus far is never enough; we must prove ourselves over and over and over and over again.

Talk about a recipe for stress, depression, and burnout.

An article in Psychology Today entitled “Pitfalls of Perfectionism” (March 1, 2008) states:

But the biggest problem with perfection may be that it masks the real secret of success in life. Success hinges less on getting everything right than on how you handle getting things wrong.

What if we were taught that from early childhood? Wouldn’t it have been great if our school grades weren’t based on how well we scored on tests, but on how gamely we worked back through the problems again to figure out what we’d done wrong and how to do them correctly the next time? Or if our parents had asked us how we felt or what we’d learned when our softball team lost the game, rather than saying things like, “Too bad, better luck next time,” planting the unspoken and therefore insidious conclusion that losing was to be considered a 100% negative experience?

What if we were taught that it was (*gasp!*) perfectly okay to express our unhappy emotions, and that if we learned to do this appropriately most of the time, without attacking others in the process, no one would stop loving us?

The quotation continues:

This is where creativity, passion, and perseverance come into play. . . . you don’t make people powerful by pushing them to be perfect but by allowing them to become passionate about something that compels their interest.

When we are very young, everything is play. We don’t worry about failing because we’re so excited about the trying. We haven’t yet learned that we’re supposed to think of ourselves as being on trial before the world.

Think back to your childhood and the first time you rode a bike. Or jumped off the high dive. My guess is that the giddiness and excitement you felt outweighed any bumping-into-curbs or belly-flopping that you might have done. You didn’t do it perfectly, but you had a blast making the attempt. And because you had so much fun, you did it again, and again, until you improved. But the improving wasn’t the goal. The fun was.

So here is the reason why I’m saying that it’s vital to screw things up once in a while. You must learn that it is not the end of the world. That you can recover, and keep trying, and get better.

You must learn failure-resiliency. You need to know, deep in your bones, that you can always bounce back.

And maybe even have some fun in the process.

For any innate talent or learned skill, there can only be one best-in-the-world (or school, or company, or whatever) at a given time. And let’s face it—chances are pretty high you’re not it. That’s not a put-down; it’s simply me making a guess based on the odds without knowing exactly who is reading this.

But what if I’m wrong about you? What if you really are the best at Whatever-It-Is? Even then there’s no surety, because there’s always the chance—pretty much the certainty—that someone will improve on your best performance some day.

So if your sense of security comes from being king or queen of the hill, you’ll either be disappointed when you don’t get there, or when some newcomer knocks you off your throne.

If your sense of self-worth is synonymous with your performance, you will never, ever feel safe.

Now what happens if you allow yourself to be—and appear—fallible? A few pretty nifty things:

• The intense pressure is suddenly off. You can relax a little. Or even (shhh!) a lot, if you want or need to.
• You now have room for improvement. (If you score 100% right from the get-go, how can you ever do better than that?)
• People will not expect 120% of your effort all the time, so there is leeway when you’re operating at less-than-normal capacity for any reason.
• People will feel connected to you because they’ll feel you’re one of them, not up on top of (or trying to climb) some kind of pedestal.

Now I’m not arguing for deliberate mediocrity here. I’m not saying that you should be lazy, or that you should stop setting and striving toward goals. That’s probably not in your genetic makeup anyway. After all, here you are at a blog about perfectionism, right?

All I’m saying is that if you can surrender your need to appear so unremittingly perfect, to yourself as well as to others, you’ll probably be able to loosen up and enjoy the ride a whole lot more.

You’ll also get to define success and happiness by your own internal yardstick rather than society’s external benchmarks.

Granted, this takes practice. A lot of it. You can’t shuck all of your conditioning with a single shrug of the shoulders.

Hence the name of this blog. ;o)