perfectionism and procrastination are ruining my life I'm at my wit's end with my perfectionism it's taken over my life and is causing me to procrastinate on every creative project I've ever wanted to pursue the Arts music animation writing Video Games Etc I have so many ideas and passions but I can never seem to follow through with them because I'm too afraid of not being able to execute them perfectly I also have a hard time learning new things quickly and effectively I put so much pressure on myself to understand everything immediately this has made it difficult
for me to progress in my personal and professional life I constantly feel like I'm not good enough it's not just affecting my hobbies it's affecting my work and personal relationships too I'm constantly self-guessing myself and feeling like a failure because I'm not meeting my own and possibly high standards I'm struggling to find joy in anything anymore and it's all because of my crippling perfectionism every task feels like a defeat and if anything isn't perfect it's like I'm failing at everything I put every task on the back burner procrastinating on everything I need to do because
I'm too afraid of not being able to execute it perfectly I feel like I'm stuck in a cycle of perfectionism and procrastination I don't know how to break free I don't know where to begin and what's worse I don't know what to do if it doesn't work out have any of you experienced this level of perfectionism before how did you overcome it are there any strategies or techniques that have worked for you I'm willing to try anything at this point the first thing that I'm going to say is someone says I'm willing to try anything
and this is why I'm going to start by pushing back a little bit are you willing to try anything or are you only willing to try things that work so if we look at this what's the first thing to understand the first thing to understand is that when someone says I'm willing to try anything we're not actually willing to try anything that's crazy I only want to try things that work but let's understand perfectionism and procrastination okay so this person is brilliant insightful articulate love it so let's understand a couple things the first is that
the procrastination is a symptom of the root of perfectionism right so why is it hard for them to get started they even laid this out so if I want to be perfect I can't get started until I know it'll be perfect and so we can't get started because we're setting an impossible standard for us all because we need to be perfect I need a plan that will achieve Perfection and I'm going to figure out the perfect Plan before I get started because what's the point in starting without a perfect plan because then I'll do all
this work and it won't be perfect and that won't be good enough so why even bother getting started in the first place so the procrastination comes out of the desire for Perfection so if you want to disable the procrastination you need to do one one of two things either let go of the perfectionism entirely and be okay starting without being perfect which there's a path to we've done a video about you know we've done multiple videos about how to overcome procrastination there's something in the ADHD guide and guide doing stuff by the way but let's
understand that procrastination if your goal is perfection you can't get started until you have a plan that is perfect so since there's no such thing as a perfect plan because as a human being you can't predict the future it's impossible to get started so why do we say that this procrastinates does this person never do anything no they do stuff but it's really hard for them to get started and that's because something else has to overcome their need for procrastination desperation last minute Panic it's due tomorrow someone else is mad at me and so experiencing
life is this person is awful it's like European ping pong ball and you're getting swatted back and forth between perfectionism and what other negative emotion is required to overcome the procrastination related to the perfectionism so you have no control over your life you're being like swatted around by negative emotions and when you're getting swatted around by negative emotions and you have no control your performance suffers you certainly ain't behaving perfect let alone good so how do we tackle this so let's understand the desire for perfectionism so we want to be perfect for a couple of
reasons the first is sometimes our performance correlates with our value as a human being so if you look at like a lot of people grow up in situations where they're taught you're not a good child you're not a bad child oddly enough people who are taught that they're good children or bad children this doesn't apply to them there are some of us who are taught that whether we are good children or bad children depends so in a very traumatic situation abusive situation these people are not perfectionists they don't struggle with perfectionism because they're like I
suck to begin with I'm gonna suck no matter what their problem is different and then there are people who are sort of brought up in a secure environment where like you know you're a good kid and it's okay to fail and like you you know that's not us then there are those of us who are perfectionistic and what happens with the perfectionistic people whether I'm a good or a bad person depends on my performance it depends and once we fall into that then we're in big trouble because our value as a human being and we
want to make people happy we're going to make people happy we want to be a good person these are important ideals these are good things to want it's important to make other people happy it's important to feel good about ourselves like self-esteem is important the problem is that depending on your wiring you started equating performance with value as a human being and so what do we want to do I want High self-esteem I want to be a great human being of course who doesn't want to be a great human being how do I become a
great human being great human being equals perfect performance when do you see this you see this in people whose value was dependent on their accomplishments that's one reason or people are perfectionistic second reason why people are perfectionistic is they cannot tolerate the consequences of a non-perfect solution so if I'm not perfect that means that stuff can happen okay and that stuff when that stuff happens that is not perfect there is a response within me that is too painful to deal with so I'll give you all an example I like someone I want to ask them
out on a date them saying no hurts so much I'm rejected I don't want to be rejected I don't want to be a POS I want to be a Chad and that rejection I've learned to hurt to fear that rejection because I've been rejected or whatever in the past and so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to come up with a perfect strategy because if I can come up with a perfect strategy I can control the result and if I can control the result then I don't need to suffer so the desire
for Perfection is a protection against the consequences of a sub-optimal result if I get a b and someone else else gets an a they're going to get an award everyone's gonna cheer and clap and I'm gonna feel jealous I hate feeling jealous I hate feeling second best I don't want to feel second best so instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to be perfect and then I'm going to be number one and then I'm going to clap for me and I'm gonna feel so good I hate that feeling of Envy I hate that
feeling of jealousy especially because I know that person deserved it and I don't deserve it which makes it hurt even worse so we desire Perfection to protect ourselves from the consequences of a lack of perfection so it usually has to do with intolerance of negative emotion it has to do with our sense of ego or value so then how do we tackle these two things so let's start with the second one so if we think about procrastination oh I can't get started until I know I'm going to be perfect and if I'm perfect then everyone's
going to cheer for me everyone's gonna clap for me I'm gonna feel good and I don't want to feel bad and so if we think about literally what this will feel like for you is when you think about getting started there will be an anticipation of a particular feeling so what the procrastination will look like is if I get started now and you can pay attention to yourself okay what this looks like is if I get started now your mind will warn you of a particular a consequence you'll start to feel fear or jealousy or
inferiority or something like that and that's how you know that that's what's going on even the thought of getting started is evokes that emotion and then that emotion is something you're so terrified from you run away from it so you don't get started you procrastinate the other thing is that if you're trying to get started and you think about other people and this can be tricky because this can evoke an emotion as well but this person will think this about me and this person will think this about me and if I do it this way
they will think this about me if I do this they will love me and if what you're chasing is something from someone else that's that other kind of perfectionism because it's about ego it's about wanting to be seen a particular way now the question becomes okay so like what do we do about it and that's where each of these things is like Monumental tasks on its own so now I'm left with the task of trying to figure out how to help you out with it so let's start with the emotions so the first thing is
when you try to when you feel that procrastination coming on you will respond to it you'll either quit the task and beat yourself up or you'll complete the task and like kind of beat yourself up and push through it does that kind of make sense like even if so I I think about okay I need to start studying today and then I step away and then I start thinking about I didn't study today I need to study blah blah blah blah blah blah and I'm going to beat myself up but the interesting thing is once
you start that cycle you're no longer thinking about studying you're beating yourself up for not studying so you've actually stepped away from the task or when that beating yourself up is strong enough you push yourself through and you start engaging in the task but you're not sitting in that middle Zone if that makes sense you've pushed through the procrastination or you've run away from the procrastination and now the problem has become you've never you haven't really conquered the procrastination you've let your guilt despair or frustration or overcome it which means now you are becoming dependent
on the frustration fear or guilt to overcome the procrastination then you're screwed because you're damned if you do damned if you don't so what we need to do is just sit with procrastination just sit there in that moment it's not about beating yourself up today I need to do some studying I'm going to try to study right now don't force yourself into it notice the frustration just sit there and don't do your work sit with the procrastination don't start it don't don't run away from it don't beat yourself up you'll notice those things and move
away from when you start beating yourself up now I should just start it no no no we're just gonna sit there set a timer for five minutes we are not going to start studying for five minutes just gonna sit and do nothing so how do we stop playing ping pong stop hitting the ball you're trying to get it knocked around just sit and this is where your mind will start to Rebel it'll say but if I just sit I'll never get anything done and all those kinds of things and there there it is again with
the stick what is the ping pong paddle pop nope she says five minutes we're gonna do gonna do anything no no you need to do stuff you need we're just gonna chill five minutes breathe you can do meditation if you want to you got to be careful because if you start meditating to start working that's another ping pong paddle you need to meditate more if you meditated better you'd be able to work nope we're just gonna set five minutes set a timer just feel the tolerance and this is where you say but it's not working
I'm not being productive yes you are what you are doing for those five minutes is tolerating the emotion and not letting it control you you are literally training yourself to be resistant to the SWOT of the ping pong paddle your ball is becoming heavier it's no longer a ping pong ball it's becoming Stone lead some kind of super dense alloy and if you become if you rise to the level of Buddha you're going to be like a supernova or a black hole infinite density and nothing will be able to touch you just tolerate don't do
a damn thing and don't react to any of your emotions either way do you all get that now what if you have the other one what do people think this and think that about you this is where it's kind of tricky but what you've got to do is recognize there's two different things here one is the task that you need to do and one is how people will respond to the task which one do you really want because as long as the two are Tangled together your Sol you'll get that like you're like trying to
fight a war on two fronts you can't make people happy and do work you can either do work you can't even really ever make people happy all you can do is do the work so acknowledge that in this work you are adding another Victory Condition it's like we're playing this game and now there's the second Victory Condition it's like holy crap that makes winning the game way harder and what are we actually trying to do we're trying to stop procrastinating so we're trying to do is get started but when we layer in that second Victory
condition if this needs to be perfect so that people will love me like that's really hard because you can't get people to love you and now it's like I'm playing an RTS game or let's say I'm playing an FPS game and the Victory condition is like something that doesn't exist in the game it's like there's one Victory condition which is score like 15 points by hitting 15 bullseyes and the second Victory condition is become president of the get elected president to the United States like that's not even in the game that's what we're doing like
if you're trying to like study and your mind is adding this thing of if you don't get an A your parents won't love you like how are you even supposed to say like there's nothing in the textbook about making your parents love you that's something you're layering on top so separate those two things it's the only shot you've got to separate those two things and even that it'll be a challenge it's not easy to separate them but then sort of ask yourself in that moment can I at least get started on the work and I'll
worry about making other people I know I want to make them happy I can worry about that later so as best as you can procrastinate on making other people happy and just get started with the word can I just do this for like 15 minutes 20 minutes 30 minutes and if it's not good I'll solve that problem talk to the part of your mind it's like oh it's not going to be enough and it's like okay fine but it'll be a start we always quit later but let's get started in this kind of cognitive reframe
this cognitive flexibility can be really hard to do and it's not going to work the first time you do it but if you keep trying you'll start to get some traction right it's kind of like learning how to do a push-up if you've never done a push-up before you can't even do a single push-up so even if you're like thinking about pull-ups like if you can't do a single pull-up and failure is inevitable how do you learn how to do one pull-up you jump up you grab the bar and then you train yourself on The
Descent right you let yourself you let the rate of dropping slow down and that'll strengthen the muscles and then eventually you'll be able to do one pull-up so oddly enough trying to separate it even if it doesn't work is still strengthening those muscles and the real way to overcome this whether you're becoming you know a ping-pong ball to a black hole or separating these things out it's a painful process of repeated failures and the Beautiful Thing is once you start engaging with that something will shift in your mind it's okay to fail and now the
pendulum is slowing far far far away from perfectionism and then becomes easy foreign
