today we're going to learn how to take the curse of perfectionism and turn it into a [Music] blessing so we have to start by understanding where perfectionism comes from and usually perfectionism comes from very very high or unreachable standards when we're growing up so this can look like parents who want you to be perfect all the time and won't settle for anything less than 100% sometimes this also looks like a situation of Golden Boy syndrome or even having an older brother who's a golden boy or Golden Girl your older brother or sister did a great
job at this went to Harvard was valedictorian did this got married at the right time had kids at the right time and so you've got really big shoes to fil and so what is a child in that situation learn how does the brain adapt to that that situation what the brain learns is to avoid the pain of falling short hey y'all I want to talk for a second about HG coaching a lot of people wonder why do I need to sign up for coaching can't I just DIY it can't I watch another YouTube video and
you're right you can absolutely do those things which is why we offer those resources but one thing that I found is that people who try to do things by themselves take a really long time to do it and my experience has been that the earlier that you get your life together the better your life will be so coaching is designed to not help people treat Mental Illness but discover things like what you want out of life what's holding you back how to conquer procrastination and how to find motivation and I have worked with each and
every one of our coaches I work with them for eight weeks to make sure they're of the highest quality and they really represent what we offer at HG so if y'all are interested check out the link in the description below if we look at the brain there are actually two kinds of perfectionism there's personal standard perfectionism which is sort of the standard that you set for yourself and always wanting to be better and then there's also something called external concern perfectionism so this is perfectionism that is rooted in the opinions of others everyone around you
expects you to be perfect or you want to be perfect for their sake in an order to make them happy and it's this ECP this external concern perfectionism that is usually damaging and sabotaging and in order to understand how we have to sort of come back to the roots of perfectionism so if you're highly perfectionistic chances are you grew up in a situation where there were unrealistic standards so this can look like harsh narcissistic or tiger parents who expected you to be perfect and no matter how hard you try they were always disappointed or if
you did perfect that's the norm so if you were at the top of your class that's just what they expect that's the Baseline and so if you sort of think about perfectionism you can either do normal or you can disappoint there's no way to make your P parents proud if they're expecting you to be at the top of the class all the time sometimes this also happens in a case of like Golden Boy or golden girl where you have an older brother or sister who did awesome right so really harsh parents really high expectations and
your sibling knocked it out of the park which means now you're expected to do it too because your parents have unrealistic expectations but they were able to pull it off so now you should be able to pull it off the end result though is that you grow up in a situation where you can't win the best you can do is break even or lose and what does that do to the brain it turns out that personal standard perfectionism and external concern perfectionism actually live in different parts of the brain external concern perfectionism comes from this
part of our brain called the medial frontal gyrus you don't need to worry about where the neuro Anatomy is the important thing is what the medial frontal gyrus is for in what it actually does so this is a part of our brain that redirects attention it actually shifts attention away from what we're doing right now to something else now this may sound kind of weird but this is where thankfully we've got good scientific experiments that explain how this works so a group of researchers took a group of people who were high in personal standard perfectionism
or PSP versus people who had high ECP and then they gave them a task in which you make mistakes and then they measured the brain activity for both of these groups of people when they were making mistakes and here's what they discovered so when someone who is external concern perfectionism is high right you've had these crippling parents who were always trying to you to be perect and you could never do good enough what these people end up doing is anytime they make a mistake the medial frontal gyrus activates and stops thinking about the mistake that
you made because remember when you were growing up nothing you can do is ever good enough so anytime you fall short what did your mind do and you may have noticed this in your own life that anytime you had to tell your parents that you got to be you just retreated mentally from the conversation you like knew ahead of time that you were screwed no matter what so you just started distracting yourself you told them hey here's the report card or if you're like me you actually walked out to the mailbox and took the report
card out of the mailbox so that your parents wouldn't see it and your parents are like Hey where's the report card and you're like I don't know maybe they made a mistake you just avoided the situation entirely and even when they found out you mentally checked out you became numb and it didn't really hurt because it hurt too much instead of focusing on our mistakes this part of our brain activates and shifts our attention away from our mistakes in order to protect us in doing so it fcks us because now we don't actually repair our
mistakes and this is the curse of perfectionism which is that you want to do a great job you want to do a great job you want to do a great job but anytime you screw up you don't have the resilience to actually fix the problem you just end up beating yourself up you end up numbing yourself out out you end end up feeling like there's nothing you can do to win this game and the reason you feel that way is because literally the part of your brain that learns from mistakes is handicapped by the MFG
medial frontal gyrus and the medial frontal gyrus starts thinking about other things why does it do that because when you were growing up that's all it could do because you had parents who could never be made happy so if you think about it if you have parents who are never going to be happy the only adaptation your brain has is to numb itself out because there's no way you can make them happy so solving the problem doesn't work and so literally your brain stops solving the problem now let's look at personal standard perfectionism so these
are people who have a high standard for themselves so in personal standard perfectionism a completely different part of the brain activates and a completely different thing happens so the anterior singulate cortex or the medial singulate cortex some different part of the brain activates and what these people do when they make a mistake is they slow down their thinking and they actually pay attention to the problem literally their cognition slow down so what we see when we give these two people tasks in which they're supposed to make mistakes is that the person with PSP makes a
mistake once slows down their thinking and then improves with the task over time makes fewer mistakes whereas the person with the external concern perfectionism avoids whatever the task is as soon as they figure out they've made a mistake and starts thinking about other things so they actually don't improve over time the problem when we struggle with perfectionism is that the advice that we get sucks because people out there will tell you oh just do less good or just stop caring what other people think or just learn how to S set boundaries cut out these toxic
people from your life but if you are perfectionistic you know that you carry that perfectionism With You from One relationship to the next to the next and the whole point is that when you are perfectionistic the your brain is like different from somebody else's brain you've been wired to care about what other people think whereas these people with personal standard perfectionism they're actually okay ignoring the rest of the world but the reason they're okay with that and the reason they give you that advice is because their upbringing was different where they could afford to not
care so now this is where things get really interesting because how do we solve this problem and this is where we're going to actually show y'all okay so let's take a quick look so over here we have personal standard perfectionism or PSP over here we have external concern perfectionism or ECP and now what we know is that you can have high or low of each of these quantities okay so if I have high external concern in low personal standard okay so this is where you are chances are if you're perfectionistic this is where you are
which means that you want to be perfect for other people but you don't expect a whole lot from yourself now here's the problem if we listen to all these fers out there who are like just care less about what other people think what we'll actually do is move into this column so not only do you not give a about what other people think but you don't give what you think to begin with so now you're over here and you give no right so there's like zero concern and this leads to the worst outcomes these people
do the worst in life they don't care about themselves they don't care about anyone else maybe you're down here and if you're down there my heart goes out to you now here's the really interesting thing people may think that being in this column is the best high personal standard I care about what I think and I don't care about anyone else I'm going to live my life according to my rules and other people's disrespect or disappointment me I don't really care about that doesn't bother me I'm happy and that's what's important these people do better
than these people so these people do the worst these people which is probably all do bad these people do okay but here's the cool thing these people do the best and so the wild thing here is we don't want to move you from here to here because it's really hard to change that wiring it's really hard to stop caring about what other people think when you grew up in an environment where your survival and happiness depended on what other people think what's actually way easier is for you to move this way so instead of stopping
to care about other people and the cool thing there is that in the same way that the personal standard perfectionism people it's hard for them to start caring about what other people think if you can make this shift into setting a standard for yourself in addition to caring what other people think because we can't change that you will actually outperform the person who doesn't give a sh about anyone else and it's actually hard for them to start caring about what other people think it's hard to move on the ECP axis it's easier to move on
the PSP axis okay I know that's kind of confusing but the tldr is that we don't want to change the way that you think around other people that's not how we're going to harness perfectionism we're going to leave that there because you've tried to fix it and it hasn't really worked so far and what's actually easier is harnessing the personal standard perfection and what that literally means is learning to set a standard for yourself so there are two things that you can do to boost your PSP the first is when you make a mistake slow
down remember that what we learned from kind of these studies on mistakes and ECP and PSP is that when someone makes a mistake and they have high ECP their medial frontal gyrus activates they distract themselves whereas the PSP person slows down so instead what I want you all to do the next time you make a mistake catch yourself there's going to be a a part of your mind that feels very squirly it's like it's going to try to move over here it's going to try to move over there it's going to try to do anything
but sit with the feeling or the thoughts or whatever you have in that moment so what you need to do is don't distract just slow down the good news is you don't have to fix anything right that's where the perfectionists fall into this this trap which is like how do I fix it how do I fix it you don't have to fix it all you have to do is pay attention to the problem that'll disable the medial frontal gyrus and then thankfully the rest of your brain will start to act so just slow it down
anytime you make a mistake tip number one second thing that you need to do is develop a standard for yourself so if you have a high level of ECP and you're very perfectionistic anytime you approach a task you don't think about you you never ask yourself the question what would I be happy with why because it's a dumb question who cares what I would be happy with it matters what other people think and why do you think that way it's because you used to have an opinion when you were a kid and your parents didn't
give a so you stopped giving a about your opinion that needs to change so anytime you're faced with a task notice that your instinctive response is to think about how to make other people happy how do I succeed how do I be perfect and instead ask yourself what would I be happy with pretend the rest of the world did not exist would a b be okay for me do I need to get an A or an A+ do I need to be at the top of my class what would make me happy and then hopefully
what you're able to do is as you perform you can hold both of those things at the same time other people may have been disappointed in you but at least you can take some pride in your performance and the beautiful thing is that if you do this if you literally just slow down anytime you make a mistake you don't have to fix it you don't have to make anyone happy you don't have to make yourself happy literally just slow down and you start to develop personal standards for yourself you will actually shift into the high
PSP and high ECP column and if you're able to shift into that column you will actually outperform all of the people who are just doing whatever they want to in life and just hold themselves to their personal standards you will actually be able to outperform all those hyper independent people that you wish you could be like all these people that are giving you this crappy advice of just stop caring about other people if you really look at things like median income and performance in life what you'll discover is that high ECP can be a blessing
if you can inject some of your personal standard perfectionism feels like a curse because no matter how hard we try we seem to always disappoint people and the good news is that that degree of striving for Perfection can actually allow you to achieve the best things in life all you need to do is add some of that personal resilience in there add some self-respect and add some expectations for yourself for your benefit and it's not so much about fixing the perfectionism or wiping it away or becoming someone else because that's hard what it's really about
is adding this additional component which will allow you to outperform everybody [Music] else
