399: The Perfectionism Trap: Why Imperfect Consistency Wins Every Time

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Courtney Townley 0:01
A topic I bump up against in my coaching practice over and over again with my clients, is the trap of perfectionism. Perfectionism is literally the death of consistency, and it’s really fear dressed up as high standards.

Courtney Townley 0:20
In today’s episode of the Grace and Grit podcast, we are going to explore why perfectionism keeps us in this start, stop cycle of our good intentions. And most importantly, I’m going to give you some strategies to overcome that and be more willing to get into the messy middle of behavior change, because behavior change is messy for everyone. So if that sounds good, stick around, because that’s where we’re headed.

Courtney Townley 0:44
Welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now as she breaks down the fairy tale health story you have been chasing all of your life into sensible action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 1:13
When I first started the Grace and Grit podcast 10 years ago, I can’t believe it’s been 10 years, but it’s been 10 years, all of my episodes were so incredibly scripted. Moreover, I would spend hours upon hours recording and re recording to get it just right. And two problems stemmed from that.

Courtney Townley 1:39
Number one, it kind of alienated the listener, because I wasn’t talking like a real human. I was talking like a scripted human. You can go back and listen to some of my really early episodes, and you’ll hear it.

Courtney Townley 1:51
But the second problem is I was spending so many of my resources trying to perfect something that was never going to be perfect anyway. The amount of time, energy, mental bandwidth, and money that I spent trying to make it perfect, it well, it was a lot, and inevitably, what I discovered over the course of 400 episodes is that the less scripted I was, the more human I was, the more willing I was to make it good enough, not perfect, the more the message seemed to be resonating with my listener, and the more I was protecting my valuable resources to give to other things in my business and my life that also needed my attention, I could give you hundreds of examples in my own Life about how perfectionism has trapped me and prevented me from success and progress.

Courtney Townley 3:06
And I bet that you also have a lot of examples of how perfectionism has paralyzed you and stalled you in your own life. And I have a particular heart for this conversation, especially for midlife women, of course, because that is the bulk of my clientele. So I’m dealing with midlife women around the topic of perfectionism all the time. But I think midlife also presents some interesting challenges with perfectionism.

Courtney Townley 3:39
Number one, we’ve had a lot of years to practice perfectionism right. We’ve spent the last 4050, years of our lives trying to get things just right. So we have a lot of practice under our belt by midlife. We also have been conditioned by culture at large, by social media, by all of the spaces and places kind of sending this message that we should be perfect. We shouldn’t screw up. We should nail it on our first go. Which is crazy, because if you look back on anything that you have created progress with in your life, none of it was done perfectly. And really, who’s the judge of perfect anyway? Right? Because everyone has a different idea of what perfection even is. So whose standard of perfection Are you even holding yourself to?

Courtney Townley 4:40
We also, by midlife, has have compared ourselves to an awful lot of people for a very long time. And again, I would point to social media, because social media is constantly inundating us with people’s highlight reels. Social media is a very visual platform. And we are seeing people’s highlight reels quite literally all the time. We aren’t seeing all the failures. We aren’t seeing the messiness, the brokenness, the hardship sometimes we are but the amount of posts that show that pale in comparison to the winning and the perfectionism and the excitement of other people’s lives. And I also want to offer because I have seen this so much in my coaching practice that at midlife, especially, and I think throughout our life, but at midlife, it just becomes glaringly obvious how many of us are using perfectionism as a hiding habit. We are literally using perfectionism as rationale for not leaning into the work that our life is calling us into, right? Because if we can’t do it perfectly, why do it at all?

Courtney Townley 6:05
I have a mentor who used to say that perfectionism is for scared people, and I love that so much because it’s true, we can hide behind perfectionism so we don’t actually have to face failure. We don’t have to face the mess. We don’t have to rumble with disappointment or frustration. How convenient. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about the different types of perfectionism, and more specifically, how they get in the way of us consistently showing up for ourselves.

Courtney Townley 6:42
So number one, I would say there’s this performance perfectionism, which is the way that I do things is supposed to look a certain way, and if I don’t do it that way, I’m either not successful or somehow less than and we can get really hung up in this, because especially even in the wellness world, there’s so much prescription there are so many cookie cutter programs telling us the way that we should be doing things to create a certain outcome. And my God, if you don’t do it that way, well, you must not be serious about success. There’s a lot of dogma, a lot of beliefs around how we are supposed to go about fitness, nutrition, morning routines, like you name it, and there is a protocol for it. And when we have bought into some of those protocols, and then also give ourselves some permission to do things differently than what those protocols tell us to do, we somehow feel like we’re not successful. That’s madness.

Courtney Townley 7:58
There’s also timeline perfectionism. I should be further along by now, at by this stage of my life, I should have figured this out. And oh my gosh, how relevant is this to midlife women, right? Like, where in our owner’s manual for our life does it say that we’re supposed to have it all figured out by now, because I don’t know about you, but I feel like the older I get, the less I know, the less uncertain I am about everything. And yet, we kind of move through our life, especially when it comes to having to develop new skills or learn new things, with this belief that this should be easy for me by now, so if you’ve never really had a strong relationship with something like exercise and you start an exercise program, often, we aren’t extending ourselves the Grace of letting it be messy and uncomfortable and imperfect, we’re expecting perfect execution, which we never get, and then we tell ourselves a lot of lies, and we have a lot of negative self narrative about what that means. So of course, we aren’t going to keep showing up. We aren’t going to consistently lean into practicing that skill set.

Courtney Townley 9:26
Another layer of perfectionism is just circumstance perfection. I need everything to be just right before I can start. I know this is going to land for a lot of you because, man, I hear this all the time, right? Oh, well, after the summer, after the holidays, after tax season, right? Once things settle down, after the wedding, when I’m 10 pounds lighter, like we often use imperfect circumstances of our life to. Rationalize why now is not a good time to begin. And let’s be honest, there is never going to be a perfect time. There just never is. It’s kind of, I always use the analogy of having kids. It’s never a perfect time to have kids. You just decide that it’s something you want and you dive in, there is no such thing as perfect timing to have children, and there’s also no such thing as a perfect time to up level your self-care, or certain parts of your self-care. So a few things I want to throw out to help those of you who really rumble with perfectionism. And to be totally honest, I don’t know that I’ve ever coached a woman who didn’t rumble with perfectionism in some way. So the first thing that I would say, and this is something that I’ve talked about long ago on the podcast, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned it in recent months, but it’s this concept of B minus work. I don’t need to be an A plus student in every commitment that I make.

Courtney Townley 11:15
In fact, when it comes to my health and well, being good enough will get you pretty damn far. So if I eat a pretty nutritious diet, I’m going to be pretty healthy. If I move my body enough throughout the day, I’m going to do pretty well, right with my physicality. But this isn’t what we do. What we do is we convince ourselves that, no, my diet has to look exactly like this. I need this much protein. I can’t have any carbs like whatever your dogma is around diet. There’s a lot of perfectionism based baked into our beliefs around diet. And the same is true of exercise. Again, it’s very prescriptive. We’ve done a lot of protocols around exercise, which deludes us into believing that if we do it any other way, it’s not worth doing, and that’s just madness. So this concept of B minus work is not doing things perfectly. Doing things just well enough.

Courtney Townley 12:25
And again, I would circle back to the example. I opened this episode with this podcast at the beginning of this journey of mine, 10 years ago, I was so focused on making every episode an A plus episode, and the listener suffered for that, and I suffered for that because of the amount of energy it took to produce one energy, one one episode. There’s no way I could have kept up with that. So when I gave myself permission to become more of a B student with podcasting, I would I still write out bullet points for myself, but certainly I’m not scripted. I don’t try to be perfect in everything that I say. I allow myself to have some pauses. These are things that I did not allow myself in the beginning, but as I allowed myself to lean into kind of that B level work. Number one, I enjoyed the process a hell of a lot more, and I started getting a lot more feedback from listeners because, again, I was humanizing it.

Courtney Townley 13:29
So where in your own process might you need to allow yourself that B level work. So you can show up more often, because I can lean into a plus plus plus work in very short doses for short periods of time. But if I expect every dimension of my life to be a plus plus work all the time, that is a recipe for burnout, and it’s a recipe for inconsistency. I would also say it’s really important to focus on markers of progression rather than markers of perfection. Okay, markers of progression versus markers of perfection. So at the end of the day, simply asking yourself, How did I show up for myself today in what ways did I make progress with the things that I’m working on?

Courtney Townley 14:38
We’re not so great at recognizing those so I always call this a victory log right at the end of the day, really recognizing where you did well, because we’re awesome at recognizing where we didn’t do well. But part of consistency, staying consistent is recognizing where you did well, because that feels good, and we’re more likely to keep showing up for things. That feel good. So when I can say, You know what, I didn’t exercise perfectly today, whatever that means for you, but I did show up, and I showed up like five minutes longer than I did yesterday, that’s progress. I didn’t eat a perfect diet today, again, whatever that is for you, but I did eat more vegetables than I normally eat, or I did have a little bit more protein, or I did I was more mindful when I was eating. Those are all markers of progress. Markers of perfection, honestly, just breed a lot of disappointment, because there aren’t very many, because we are human. We are rarely, if ever, perfect in our execution of anything but markers of progression. If you look, they’re there. You can find them, and you can find them a few of them. Every day. Okay?

Courtney Townley 16:03
The third thing is just that, you know, accepting that consistency doesn’t always look the same, right? Being consistent with your self-care, with your health journey isn’t always going to look like 100% right. Some days it’s going to look like 60% some days it’s going to look like 75% but again, it’s kind of alluding to that, that B level work, not every day needs to be an A plus or 100% consistency can look like 50% it can look like 75% and some days, sure, rarely will it ever, but some days it will look like 100% All right, so a few things that I think are super useful to practice to help you get out of this perfectionism trap, if you find yourself in it, number one is really considering your minimum viable action, which is also just your bare minimum that you’re committing to. I ask this of my clients, a lot.

Courtney Townley 17:21
When we end a conversation and they tell me what they’re committed to, a client might say, well, I’m going to exercise more this week. Okay, let’s get really specific about that, and let’s start by defining the bare minimum that you are committed to. In fact, I had this conversation earlier today with someone who was feeling really overwhelmed by their to do list, and so I asked her, let’s just commit to a bare minimum of tackling the to do list each day. And when I asked her, what felt like it would. It would reduce overwhelm for her to commit to. She committed to 10 minutes a day, and some of you listening to that would be like 10 minutes a day. What’s that going to do? Well, 10 minutes a day can still create progress, right? It’s better than nothing, right? It’s something versus nothing.

Courtney Townley 18:17
And if I know that if she shows up for that bare minimum a lot of days, she’s going to want to go a little further, because the hardest part of any task is usually the first few minutes. So if you are someone who is resisting exercise, resisting doing something in your business, resisting anything, how might you commit to that thing with a bare minimum in mind? I’m just going to do this today for five minutes. I’m going to do this today for 20 minutes and see where that takes you, because I bet it will take you much further than if you commit to an hour, no matter what happens, no matter how I feel, the kind of that perfectionism mindset, a lot of you aren’t going to show up at all if you set the bar too high.

Courtney Townley 19:07
The other thing I would say is we have to be gentle in our course corrections, because we are going to get off course. Because life has a way of distracting us. Life has a way of presenting us with a lot of things we didn’t expect to have to contend with, a sick loved one, a bigger problem at work than you anticipated, having to travel more than you anticipated. And so we are going to stray from the way we expected ourselves to show up, and so how can we gently bring ourselves back with kind of a mindset of grace and flexibility, right? Nothing has gone wrong here. I just realize right now that I’m misaligned and. And I’m more misaligned than I’d like to be. So what is the next decision that I could make? What is the decision I could make in the next hour to just move me back in the direction I intended to go? That’s it. You.

Courtney Townley 20:19
Realigning is just one decision away. What a relief is that? But that’s not what we do. When we get misaligned, we start beating ourselves up. This shouldn’t have happened. I should be better than this. I you know, I’m a failure. Blah, blah, blah. We have all of these, this negative self narrative that just takes us further off course, and if we can remember that, you know what? Hey, I’m feeling a little misaligned right now, or very misaligned, but I also know that I’m just one decision away from realigning. So what is that one decision? And the one decision might be as simple as I’m putting myself to bed and I’m going to start again tomorrow. It might be, you know what? I haven’t gotten away from my desk in a few hours, so I’m going to take the next 10 minutes and go outside and get some fresh air.

Courtney Townley 21:18
You are one decision away from realigning. I also think to get out of this perfectionism mentality, we really have to redefine what success means to us. I had so many coaching clients today, and I can’t tell you the number of times the same theme showed up around my clients, feeling like their life was incredibly imbalanced in terms of what they were dedicating to work and what the time that they had for themselves and their families and their loved ones and their other pursuits. They were feeling as much as they love their work, they were feeling kind of depleted and burnt out because there were no boundaries set with work.

Courtney Townley 22:09
And I’m telling you this because one of the things that I coached all of them on is, how much are you willing to give to work? How do you define success with work? Is it just money? For most women, honestly, I’ve never heard someone say yes to that, that it’s all about money. Success with work means that I have the energy to show up for it in a passionate way, right? I’m excited to go to work. I like my work. I’m doing a good job, and we none of those things are true when we’re giving all of our resources to work, because a lot of our nourishment comes from outside of work. So what does success mean to you? I think that’s really important to clarify. Otherwise, we’re just kind of chasing this idea of perfectionism or success, and we haven’t even defined for ourselves what that even is. So redefining success can definitely be useful, and sometimes celebrating that showing up is its own reward, that sometimes that’s enough.

Courtney Townley 23:25
When I do group coaching calls, I always have everyone share a rise where they’re winning, before they share their rumble, which is where they’re stuck, frustrated, have a question, things like that. And what’s so interesting is sometimes I can see a woman really scrambling to figure out what her win is like. Where have I been winning? I feel like I’m not winning anywhere. And the thing that I always offer is, you showed up here, that’s a win, right?

Courtney Townley 23:55
If you didn’t care about making progress, if you didn’t care about your own self development, you wouldn’t be here. So just showing up is a win. And sure, we can hyper focus on all the things she didn’t do that week, but reminding her that showing up is a win helps her to face her rumbles with a lot more grace and kindness. So the practice of noticing what is working, what is going well, can really kind of help us get out of that, that fear around not being perfect, right? There are things that are going well and yes, of course, we also acknowledge there are things that are not going well. Both can coexist. One does not eradicate the other. So the fact that I’m rumbling right now with some things does not mean that I have failed everywhere. Yeah, but man, is it easy to go there, right?

Courtney Townley 25:04
All right, my friends. So this is, this has been episode five in our six part consistency code diary series. And remember, the whole reason I’m doing this series is because we’re leading up to my book launch on November 5. So hopefully you are excited about that. You have plans to buy the book, share the book, all the things. And I committed the very beginning of this series to reading you a small passage from the book in each episode. And so, of course, for this episode, I selected a short passage all about perfection. So I’m going to read that to you here.

Courtney Townley 25:39
Unhelpful thought consistency means I have to do things perfectly. Let’s be honest, you’ve never done anything perfectly in your life. I certainly haven’t. No human has, and yet, we have all created amazing things because we were willing to keep showing up despite imperfect action, consider for a moment where that has been true for you, a job, a relationship, an athletic endeavor of some kind, if perfection were a requirement of consistency, 400 episodes of the grace and grit podcast would not exist. My marriage would have dissolved years ago. My health would be a hot mess, and my kid never would have made it to 16. Heck, he wouldn’t have showed he wouldn’t have made it past his first year to consistently show up for anything demands a willingness to be sloppy, messy and wildly imperfect. You plan, you fail, you learn and you stand up a wee bit wiser. You know that saying fall down nine times, stand up 10 Well, that is a beautiful summation of consistency. Striving for perfection is really just the fast track to inconsistency.

Courtney Townley 27:14
All right, my friends, if you want to find out more about the book, you can head on over to the to theconsistencycode.com and there’s lots of goodness awaiting you there. And we have one more episode in this series, which I will drop next week, which is going to be literally a couple days before the book launches. So thank you for being here. I hope this was useful to you in some way, and I hope to see you again next week, take care.

Courtney Townley 27:47
Thank you for listening to the Grace and Grit podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story, and it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self-care. You are worth the effort, and with a little grace and grit, anything is possible.