September 30, 2025

Reclaiming Perfectionism (Not Recovering From It) | Episode 99

We can lean into and celebrate our perfectionism wherever and however it brings us joy. Forget about recovering from something that inherently drives us. Instead, we can reclaim the fact that we love closing the gap between reality and the ideal.

I unpack a potentially life-changing book about perfectionism, synthesizing big-picture themes and, of course, drawing parallels to values-aligned business and decision-making.

Full Episode Transcript

Hello hello and welcome back to the Purpose & Progress Podcast.

Today we’re talking about perfectionism. But likely not in a way you ever hear about. It’s come up often on the podcast, but always as something to overcome, to grow away from, to recover from. This is an episode about reclaiming your perfectionism, and reshaping it into a positive force in your life and in your business, rather than something that continually holds you back.

And this all stems from reading the book The Perfectionist’s Guide To Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power by Katherine Morgan Schafler, who’s a psychotherapist and former on-site therapist at Google. It was a rec from the brilliant Cate Scott Campbell, who I interviewed in episode 51, linked below.

But wait this isn’t a business book. And to that, I say it is. Because how we engage with and show our deepest self and how we empathize with others is the most basic foundation of business. And brand-building. And putting yourself out there.

Ok, so first about the book itself, then about how to translate these ideas about perfectionism to your your. Because I pretty much tell every woman I know to read it. I talked about it so much, my friend literally bought me a copy. (Because my original was from the library.)

I’ll share the book vibes and getting on the same page (pun intended) about what perfectionism is and isn’t.

On her website, she wrote, “My intention for this book was like, “a public health campaign, but make it fun.” And that’s exactly it.

It’s a self-help book, but really it’s more of a self-discovery book. Not only did I like her thesis and find it to be incredibly validating and permission-giving, I also really liked her writing style. It was smart, but super human and personable, funny without trying too hard. Like she had a real voice and point of view and I felt like we could be fast friends. It’s research-backed for sure without feeling clinical at all. (Side note: I went into college thinking I’d be a psych major because I loved figuring out what makes people tick. But at Wash U, psych was very clinical and I just couldn’t get my interest-fueled brain to care about all the trials. I cared more about how our thoughts and feelings manifest out in the world, which is how I found my way to anthropology. And this deep curiosity about what makes human human is something I carry over today in all my work around values-aligned messaging, marketing, and decision-making. All that to say, follow those breadcrumbs of interest because I promise they all shape how you view the world and what you bring to your work.)

Honestly, it’s one of the most relatable and validating things I’ve probably ever read. Because I have always identified as a perfectionist, sometimes wearing it as a badge of honor, but mostly thinking it was some sort of character flaw.

In this book, she actually goes through five different types of perfectionism, most of which I’ve oscillated through during various phases of my life. She gives super concrete, empathetic examples of each type throughout the book, both from her own lived experiences and from her clients. If you’re curious, I’m mostly a messy perfectionist these days, which to a perfectionist sounds like a nightmare, but totally screams high-achieving, ambitious woman with ADHD if you ask me. She says messy perfectionists “effortlessly push through the anxiety of new beginnings, and superstar idea generators, adapt to spontaneity well, and are naturally enthusiastic.” If you’ve ever listened to the podcast, been on a call with me, or attended one of my audits or workshops, you’ve likely seen and felt this. However, she also says, “Left unchecked, they struggle to stay focused on their goals, ultimately spreading their energy too thin to follow through on their commitments.” Me to a T, behind the scenes.

When I was growing up, I was often an intense perfectionist—the teacher’s pet, take control of the group project without any regard for other type. Although, in retrospect, I think some of my perfectionism was probably ADHD masking as a child.

And then sometimes I do still fall in the camp of the procrastinator perfectionist, which is when you can prepare until the cows come home, but don’t actually do the thing you prepared for out of fear of failure or constantly feeling unready. I get this especially with big projects that are either horrible in my mind (like doing my taxes) or too conceptual or nebulous (like reaching out to ideal clients, which could go a million directions so I just don’t choose any).

Anyway, there are 2 other types and I imagine you’d find the quick quiz super validating. If you take the quiz and find your type or types, definitely DM or email me so we can swap notes.

And despite feeling so seen by these perfectionist category, in recent years, I have tried to identify as a recovering perfectionist, but that also never really sat right. Like I was denying a part of myself.

For example, this entire podcast is called Purpose and Progress. I’ve been wanting to focus on the progress, on the little steps, on getting something out, even if (or rather, when) it’s not perfect.

But this book really validated that perfectionism is not about actually attaining the perfection. I want to repeat that: it’s not about attaining perfection.

We know logically, by the rules of nature, organically, there is no way to actually have perfection. Or that even once you attain it in the here and now, then it’s a moving target, right? Have perfect sound quality now? A new mic came out that could make it better. Or a new airpod model came out that modifies how your recording tech plays with their headphones. The list goes on.

Or maybe it’s just the question of having to maintain that perfection, which sometimes isn’t possible because our resources and energy ebb and flow.

But she basically describes perfectionism as seeing the difference between the ideal and the reality. So being grounded in reality, right? Knowing what is real, what is possible, and then constantly striving to close that gap. It’s the pursuit that’s actually fun for us perfectionists, not necessarily the result.

And one of her many important caveats is that we’re not aiming for perfection in every facet of our life. We have things that are more important to us than others. She gives tons of examples, but one example from my life is that my hair is never perfect. In fact, I intentionally like it to be ever so slightly undone, even when I’m done up. I am not a perfectionist when it comes to my hair, but I do like my home to be perfectly put in order. That’s how I was raised. That’s how my brain thinks best, which I also think is an ADHD thing—when I see visual clutter I have mental clutter. We choose what we care about, excel at, and aim for perfection in. Then we’re often able to ignore the rest.

So anyway, I would have highlighted and annotated like 70% of this book if it weren’t a library book. Now that I own a copy, I likely still won’t go back and mark it up because maybe it’s the perfectionist in me, but it almost feels sacrilegious to sully a book with pens and tabs and highlighters. I was truly tempted though.

And I had SO many quotes that I wanted to share on the podcast, but that probably would have been an hour straight of me just reading my favorite passages to you, so instead I’m transcribing the 54 photos I took while reading into a little list on this episode blog post, so at ashleesang.com/episode99. If you do read the list or the book itself, PLEASE DM or email me with your favorite insights.

Ok, so now that I’ve gushed about the book, the writer, and the ideas in the book, I want to jump into the practical application as we reclaim perfectionism for ourselves.

I have said many many times that I’m a recovering perfectionist. Which makes it seem like this is a condition that needs fixing.

In my opinion, one of the main arguments of this book is that the idea of being a recovering perfectionist instead of reclaiming your perfectionist tendencies is really important to unpack because she essentially says that being a woman who’s ambitious and well-accomplished and has high standards, especially outside the domains of domesticity, has always been put down. Striving and aiming for that perfection has been so condemned that it’s been pathologized, literally making it some sort of mental condition.

[Give examples from book.]

So today, here and now, we’re really reclaiming this identity of perfectionism without the modifier, the little disclaimer, the knocking ourselves down with the “recovering” label. Because there’s nothing to recover from.

To be fair, she says that there are adaptive and maladaptive ways to be a perfectionist, ways it can be good for you, or bad for you. And I really think that her argument is you can either find joy and fulfillment and purpose in the striving, in the progress, in the knowing that you’re working toward something wonderful, even if the wonderful thing may not exist at the end of the rainbow or the tunnel. Rather than perfectionism being about the arriving to a final destination, buttoning it up, saying it’s done forever. Then dealing with the dopamine crash, that now what moment.

I have a friend and client who does event strategy and planning. She says she always gets the post-event blues because you build up to this big, exciting, all-encompassing event for months on end, and then it culminates in a single day and ends. And of course, if you’re in fundraising or relationship-building or even within the context of making a sale, you might experience the same thing. So, if we are able to find the beauty and the purpose and the fulfillment in the striving, in working toward something that feels important to us, then we’ll feel good. She said that meaning is really the missing piece.

But I feel like we only every hear about the maladaptive, harmful, counterproductive ways of being a perfections. But to unlock the adaptive, positive side of perfectionism, it all comes down to letting go of control and self-punishment, while seeking true power (which she differentiates from control) and self-compassion.

So basically all of the therapy-esque things you would be learning in any other self-help book, but in a really individualized way centered around this striving to close the gap between the ideal and reality.

Not everyone cares about whether things are perfectly aligned on a tablescape or in a closet. Not everyone cares whether all the details of your workshop go off without a hitch, or if there are no typos in your newsletter, or whether every word in your social media post is the most poignant and perfectly selected one possible.

But what you care about, what you attach meaning to, is what gives you that purpose. And that drive to perfect it. For example, typos really matter to me. Sending out emails, just normal replies, let alone pitches or newsletter can take me ages. A two-minute email for one person might take me 20 minutes. But that’s (mostly) ok with me.

And that meaning makes it feel like the striving is this wonderful situation to be in, rather than simply doing something to complete or arrive at. It really is about the journey toward the destination, which sounds a bit trite. But also, you know it’s true. And she has a whole book of research and client anecdotes to back it up.

Our brains and our perfectionist tendencies all work so differently. It really truly is about finding that balance or what feels good to us.

And speaking of balance, it’s not about that, because balance is also unattainable, but that’s a question of control, not power. She literally says in the book that the happiest women she knows are decidedly unbalanced. She says, “Perfectionists are not balanced people, and that’s okay. Subscribing to prepackaged notions of balance and generic wellness when they don’t fit who you are isn’t being healthy, it’s being obedient.”

And for sure I’m finding in motherhood, but even in entrepreneurship more generally and just in growing up as an adult human in the modern world, we all have these different phases of our life where we care about different things at different times. Maybe if you move into a new home with your partner, or you’re navigating a divorce and you have a completely new space, or you move to a new city, or whatever it is, maybe you are all of a sudden incredibly perfectionistic about all of your articles of clothing because you have so few now. Or you care more about how everything is decorated because that spacemaking is so important to this new phase of your life. Whereas before, it was like, just something up from IKEA or from the secondhand shop down the road and call it a day.

Or maybe in your business as you create something new, you are extremely perfectionistic about all the pre-launch details because you really want to start off with on the right foot. You are proving to yourself and to others that this is viable, that you can do it well, that it is valuable as well. And then, after a couple launches, you maybe let go of the reins a little bit because you know that even if every detail isn’t quote unquote perfect, people are still getting value from it.

And from there, we have to be super aware of our bandwidth when managing, or maybe a more neutral way to say it is while manifesting, our perfectionism. My bandwidth is just so, so limited, mentally, emotionally, time-wise, that if I were to painstakingly pour over every detail of everything I do and say like my brain wants me to, I would actually be an anxious wreck and I think I would stop functioning to be completely honest. I have so many balls in the air, pots on the fire, whatever analogy you want to use. Just so much to manage. I know so many of you can relate.

Things like Notion to be able to dump all those ideas and calendar reminders and external accountability really help with the sheer volume of what I want and need to do, but also where I want to spend my energy and attention. I simply cannot pour as much into my business and my personal brand, or my motherhood as I would like. But I think that’s sort of the perfectionist way regardless. It’s never enough because that gap between reality and ideal is always there. Would I like to be creating my own graphics to a T? Would I like to be refining every single workshop presentation, every single time to have the latest stats and the best stories and the most beautiful screenshots? Uh yeah, I probably would. As a child, I was able to do that because my full-time job was being a student and an athlete. But now with health and family and wealth-building and conscious consumerism and creativity and spaceholding for my clients and everything else I care about and love to do. There are about a thousand one layers to everything I do and think about, and while I love being perfectionist in some areas of my life, I have also had to let go, as the author calls it, of control.

And that control is something we’ll never have in life, or in business. Despite our best laid plans and best intentions. But that’s where having a really clear and solid values system in place makes a huge difference. She mentions values many times in the book and how they’re the manifestation of your most authentic self — they’re part of what give meaning to what you’re pursuing. Aka what makes perfectionism adaptive vs maladaptive. To me, this means we can aim to have perfection and be a perfectionist in our brand, while also still giving ourselves the grace of knowing it’s a moving target, knowing we will evolve, knowing that we won’t ever get it right every single time. We can still feel good in that pursuit.

And I love that perfectionism isn’t one size fits all, by person or by context.

My friend—the one who bought me my copy—messaged me saying that she read the book too. Her biggest takeaway was the encouragement to rethink time management as energy management. And also the realization of how many people she knows who are likely also perfectionists.

And I agree, nearly all the women in my orbit are likely one of the 5 types of perfectionists, in part because they’re achieving and outrageously accomplished. But I was also really surprised by my friend’s lightbulb moment because I had no memory of reading anything about time/energy management. Which is one of my favorite things about books and content in general—that the way we receive and perceive it is so dependent on our lived experiences and current states.

For me, the biggest thing I got out of reading this book was the validation that there is nothing wrong with perfectionism/me/the collective us. And that we can actually lean into and celebrate our perfectionism wherever and however it brings us joy. I still need to do a lot more work on the self-compassion and non-control-seeking side of things.

But for now, I’ll leave it as this: I’m a proud perfectionist because I care about a lot. I care how things are done. And that’s directly tied to the values I hold dear and the way I want to be known.

If you are eager to reclaim your perfectionism, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a DM or a voice memo.

And of course, check out this borderline life-changing book in the show notes or at ashleesang.com/episode99, as well as all the other resources I’ve mentioned.

And since this was a bonus episode on a 5th Tuesday of the month, come back in 1 week for another solo episode with me.

My Favorite Passages & Quotes from the Book

Joy, Pleasure, and Living Your Best Life

“Letting go of the outcome doesn’t mean you stop caring about goal attainment; of course you care. Goal setting isn’t problematic. The problem arises when you hook your joy onto a future outcome: I’ll be happy when I get this or I’ll be happy if I can keep this.

You will never experience the future; you’re always and only in the present moment. If you’re waiting on the future to feel joy, you will never feel joy.”
“When people say they don’t know why they can’t sleep, what they usually mean is they’re not ready to explore the possible reasons out loud. Saying words out loud changes something. Sometimes you say a thought out loud to give it weight because it matters. Sometimes you say a thought out loud to let it go because it’s trivial. Until you allow the words to hit the air, it can be difficult to tell which is which. The stakes are higher when you say something out loud because the truth becomes clearer to you.”
“We hand women the boulder of balance, remind them that it’s impossibly heavy and that’s what makes them superheroes, and then parrot-preach self-care at them: ‘Balance and self-care, balance and self-care, balance and self-care.’ Yes, thank you. I heard you.

Women operate under the assumption that once you achieve balance, you’ll be ready to unleash your power into the world. You don’t need balance to do that. Balance is not a primer for being who you are. For most women, and damn sure for perfectionists of every type, living authentically looks on the surface like the opposite of balance. The most fulfilled women I know are terrible at being balanced, and I mean, truly, iconically awful at it.

Women feel an increasing sense of liberation as they age, not because they’ve finally achieved the balance they were searching for but because they’ve finally given up on it.”
“A celebration is intentionally flooding the moment with gratitude and recognition to awaken you to the joy in your life. When it comes to inviting joy, anything goes. A celebration doesn’t require a party, it doesn’t require any money, it doesn’t even require another person.

You can enjoy a peaceful and private moment of celebration by cooking a nourishing meal for yourself. You can take a celebratory walk with a friend. You can throw a loud-ass backyard barbeque, swim in the ocean, wear red lipstick, go to a real-life movie theater, or use the fancy thing you were saving. As the saying goes, ‘Don’t save anything for a special occasion; being alive is the special occasion.’

Leading a self-defined life means that you get to decide what success looks like for you, and you get to decide how and when to celebrate that success.

Some people don’t like celebrating during the process because they don’t want to jinx it. They don’t want to mess up their chance of achieving the outcome by enjoying the moment “too early.” It may be the thing we forget the most: nothing is promised in this life. If we only celebrated what we could be certain of, that which we were sure we could never lose, we would never have cause for celebration. There is no such thing as officially having anything.

We often choose not to celebrate ‘too early’ as a way of hedging our anticipatory grief. You’re trying to control the amount of joy you feel now so you can control the amount of loss you absorb later.

Not once have I worked with someone who said: ‘Well, X important thing that I deeply wanted fell through, but luckily I didn’t get too excited about it, so I’m inoculated from pain now. I’m not sure what to talk about today.’ The pain comes anyway. You can’t control grief by subtracting joy from your life.

You can’t control grief, period.” — pg 159
“Comparing yourself to others is a maladaptive waste of your energy.

You as a person are a whole world of cities unto yourself. You’re so dynamic that you couldn’t possibly begin to measure yourself against someone else, and you do yourself a disservice every time you do. You won’t be for everyone; that doesn’t mean you need to change.

We get so stuck on what we think we’re not, then we compare ourselves into an oblivion… Self-imposed upper limits on what you can and cannot do and who you can and cannot be are control tactics. You’re trying to control your vulnerability to getting hurt.

Keeping your world small is a protective mechanism enacted by the part of you that does not understand that when you’re connected to your inherent worth, you have a built in protection system. Yes, you will fall, and yes, you will feel the fall. But because you know your worth, the fall will not define you.”
“Manage your weaknesses with boundaries and support while you focus on maximizing your strengths.

When you have a true passion for something you’re not good at, that’s not the same as having a weakness; it just means you’re a beginner. When you’re trying to improve upon that which you hold passion for, you’re not hemorrhaging energy because you’re being pulled, not pushed. It’s different.”
“Our productivity is the main score board we look up at when determining if we won or lost the day.

How do we change this? We don’t.

Productivity is rapidly (and unfairly) becoming the dirtiest word in wellness. Ironically, vilifying productivity is a waste of time and energy. There’s nothing wrong with being productive. It feels great to be productive when what you’re doing is aligned with your values.

Focusing on productivity becomes dysfunctional when you’re striving towards goals you don’t care about or in a manner that violates your integrity. Focusing on productivity also causes problems when you use ‘time’ on the x axis and ‘task completion’ on the y axis as the exclusive barometer of your productivity.

Anything you do to protect, save, restore, and build your energy is productive. Productive activities include but are not limited to sleeping, listening to music, lingering in bookstores, taking a bath, washing your car, completing the work assignment, good conversation, cooking, redecorating, watching a movie, getting a manicure, playing basketball, reading, walking, and singing in the shower.

Anything that helps you operate with premium energy is productive…Maintaining premium energy is what gives you the stamina for the never-ending task of rising to your potential.”
“Trusting yourself looks like finding the courage to override the constant temptations to minimize the small but meaningful steps you’re taking to honor your intuition.

Trusting yourself looks like depersonalizing setbacks. Trusting yourself looks like realizing that just because the thing you felt so certain about changed, that doesn’t mean you were wrong, made a bad choice, or have faulty intuition.

When you’re in an adaptive space, you allow what’s perfect for you to change because you know that the perfection is coming from inside of you.”
“When you’re in a maladaptive space, you’re not connected to your wholeness (perfection), so you try to outsource perfection. Your world becomes superficially perfect while you’re miserable on the inside.

If you’re out of the practice of asking yourself what you want, and aren’t we all at some point, trusting yourself looks like being brave enough to ask yourself that question in the first place, then believing your own answer. Your most authentic life probably won’t look the way you were expecting it to look. Trusting yourself looks like giving yourself permission to enjoy and embrace the surprises that come.

Lastly, trusting yourself looks like knowing that even though living the way you want to is taking you so much longer than you thought and is not looking the way you thought it would, you can do it—and, in fact, you are already doing it.”
“The bigger the dream, the bigger the shadow the more resistance there is. Resistance is a good thing; it means you’re on to something real.

There’s no need to personalize the fact that you encounter resistance. Resistance is an inextricable part of growth, one that doesn’t stop once you become ‘healthy.’ No matter how good you get, no matter how far you advance, no matter what you do to evolve, resistance mutates itself alongside your growth.

While there are endless examples of resistance, at the core, resistance for perfectionists involves resisting your inherent worth. The remedy to resistance is not discipline; it’s pleasure. Pleasure is an antidote for so much. Find what brings you real pleasure and you will find your way home to yourself.”
“The gift of a crisis is that it’s a call to action; something is visibly wrong, and a crisis demands that reparative action be taken immediately. People act swiftly in a crisis. In the absence of a crisis, accessing support is often postponed or altogether ignored.

For high functioning perfectionists, the siren will never sound, the lights will never flash. When your suffering is invisible to other people (and when you’re adept at keeping it that way), you need to be the one to fire the flare.

Somewhere along the line, we got it in our heads that being healthy and strong means that we’ve finally figured out how to not need anything from anyone. We have that exactly backwards. Being healthy and strong means that we’ve finally figured out we could use help from everyone.”
“The sacrifice of one’s own pleasure marks the difference between service and martyrdom. Pleasure is an interesting string to pull. Examining the areas of your life in which you are sacrificing pleasure will lead you to a direct understanding of the conditions you place upon feeling joyful and free.

Giving yourself permission to feel joy now is the ultimate marker of successfully managing perfectionism.

Perfectionists mired in maladaptive patterns heal by committing to self-compassion as a default response to pain and then letting joy into their lives.”
“The low-calorie version: Sure, I’ll have a little joy, but just a taste, because I’m working really hard on X project right now.

The intermittent-fasting version: Thank you, but I only allow myself joy for the half hour before bed.

The paleo version: I only consume joy from a single source, my children.

Joy is healthy in any amount. Like the air you breathe, you never have to worry about having too much joy. Restricting joy is profoundly unnecessary.”
“It’s not that perfectionists are consciously trying to restrict joy; perfectionists are consciously trying to restrict pleasure. We restrict pleasure in misguided expressions of responsibility, the irony being that when it comes to your mental health, restricting pleasure is an irresponsible decision. From a clinical perspective, sacrificing your pleasure is not a virtue; it’s a serious risk factor.”
“‘Enjoy’ means you are ‘in joy,’ not outside of joy looking in, not intellectualizing joy. Joy is a feeling. To feel joy, you need to give yourself access to pleasure.

We think of pleasure as a superfluous, hedonic piece of our lives, but pleasure is central to our sense of aliveness and personhood. Pleasure is a serious mental health issue.”
“Pleasure is an energy source. Taking pleasure in our lives sustains us. Taking pleasure out of our lives destroys us. Immediate gratification is not a substitute for pleasure.
There is no substitute for pleasure.

Perfectionists get scared that they’re going to lose their competitive edge if they let in too much pleasure and get ‘too happy.’ Look at the successful people you admire; joy is their edge. There’s no greater competitive advantage than loving what you do and taking pleasure in your life.”
“The more you trust yourself, the more pleasure you allow yourself to experience.”
“Needing validation from others is pathologized in the pop-psychology world. The truth is that human beings need to be seen, heard, and understood by one another. Validation becomes especially critical when you’re part of a marginalized group or you’ve been singled out and actively invalidated.

Needing validation is not a reflection of insecurity; it’s a central mode of connection. Healthy people need validation. Everyone needs validation. It’s okay that you need validation; what’s not okay is for you to employ external validation as a primary source of self-worth.

When they’re not restored, Parisian perfectionists use people-pleasing as a shortcut to connection. People-pleasing doesn’t work as a bridge to connection because it disconnects you from yourself. You might get across to the other person, but you’ve left your true self on the other side of the bridge.”
“From a restored place, you have the bandwidth to be compassionate with yourself about what you’re letting go of. You stop pretending that you can be in twenty-six places at once, and then you stop pretending that you can be in fifteen places at once, and then seven, and then two.

Once you stop burning through your internal resources trying to resist loss, you’re able to redirect all that neon energy of yours towards one clear path. You reap all the benefits of being committed to that which you hold passion for, mainly the joy of watching what you love take shape, expand, and change you for the better.”
(On adaptive perfectionism) “You attend to the parts of yourself that need your own loving care. You make room for the chaos life brings. You make room for the chaos inside yourself.

You still love planning, you still love organizing, you still love making it beautiful—but you do it because you want to, not because everything will fall apart if you don’t. You operate from a well of desire, not a pit of desperation.

Your life may or may not look the same on the outside, but on the inside, much has changed. You stop working to curate a programmed experience.

You allow yourself open access to all that you think and feel. You allow yourself to be free.”
“Loving yourself is touted as a cure-all. Let’s get clear on something- self-love is not a panacea.

Thinking that self-love is the answer to every single one of our internal woes, we practice self-love faithfully. We go to therapy, we get enough sleep, we put lotion on our legs before bed, we assert boundaries, we speak kindly to ourselves, we do all the things. So why do we still feel locked out of joy?

No matter how much you love yourself, if you don’t trust yourself, you meet your gestures of self-love with low-key suspicion and hesitation.”
“What you want will continue to present as intangible for a significant, probably painful amount of time. Remember that your worst day of actively working towards what you want in this life is going to be better than your best day of a life in which you are denying yourself your truest desire.”
“We grip onto an endless array of unconscious attachments about the ways in which our relationships, appearance, and achievements define who we are and what we’re worthy of.
You are a human being. You are not what you do or what you have or who you’re with or what you look like. You are an expansive, powerful, large, ever-changing force in the world, like an ocean—not some tiny forgotten room in an old run-down house. The larger you allow yourself to be, the easier it is to find your way back to yourself.”

Reclaiming Your [Perfect] Power

“Do not allow your ambition to be pathologized. Refuse to apologize for or disguise your insatiable desire to excel. Reject entirely the notion that you need to be fixed. Reclaim your perfectionism now.

If only for the briefest moment, allow yourself to consider a radical thought in a misogynist world: there’s nothing wrong with you.”
“You’re not flawless—none of us are—but you are whole, you are complete, and you are perfect. We so effortlessly acknowledge perfection in children, nature, our best friends—but we deny perfection in ourselves as grown women because what would happen if we didn’t need to add anything to ourselves? What would happen if we understood deeply that we’re not broken, we’re whole? That we’ve always been whole. That we don’t have to fix anything to be ready for life. That we can just show up, now.

The answer is not ‘We would become powerful.’ We already are powerful. The answer is that we would be people who feel entitled to step into the internal power we already possess. What would the world look like if we felt as entitled to step into our power as we do to renounce our wholeness?”
“In case no one’s told you recently (or ever), you are the best expert on your life, your motivations, your desires: whether or not you have a problem, the depth of your capacity, what defines you, whether you’re a perfectionist or not, whether that’s a good thing or not, what you need to do or not do about it-these are your decisions to make.

Dethrone the idea that anyone else could ever begin to instruct you on how to be who you are. As well-intentioned as others may be, as ever-bursting with love or credentials or authority or experience that others may be, you are the one who knows.

Letting go of control doesn’t automatically transmute into power. Sometimes letting go of control means that you just handed the control off to someone else. Giving control to someone else is another way to deny your power. Don’t let anyone, including me, tell you who you are. You tell other people who you are—that’s power.”
“When you don’t trust yourself, you move through life trying to memorize the right thing to do instead of trusting yourself to know it. You interpret setbacks as failures because you don’t have the security to operate from a wider perspective.
You need what you’re doing right now to work out (a relationship, a job, a creative project) because if the thing doesn’t work out, you don’t trust that you’ll figure out a way to pivot and succeed regardless. You live with an attachment to a future outcome that generates chronic excess anxiety and you call that anxiety ‘hope.’”
“In a world where the desires and ambitions of women are pathologized as a matter of course, the messages in this book may sound radical—they’re not. The opposite of radical, these are basic starting points: you’re already whole. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not a tumbling barrel of weaknesses. You possess rich strengths, and you can use those strengths to lead your life in any direction you choose. With the same ease that you so willingly accept the veracity of ‘experts’ who are constantly telling you that you’re fucked up in some way, entertain the idea that you’re not.”
“Your history of false starts is irrelevant—I don’t care about it, and neither should you. Allow your history of long and winding false starts to represent your abiding commitment to discover your authentic self.

Recognize that none of the solutions to managing your perfectionism have worked thus far because they’re all solving for the wrong problem—they’re trying to get you to stop being a perfectionist. You don’t heal by changing who you are; you heal by learning how to be yourself in the world.”
“Like lust and love, power and control can look identical. They’re not the same thing.

Control is limited and transactionally owned. If you’re a person in a position of control and you give someone else control, you have relinquished your control. Power, by contrast, is unlimited and can be shared. If you’re a person in a position of power and you empower someone else (you give someone else power), you haven’t lost any power.

Power is understanding the immutability of your worth. From that place, you’re not desperate for an outcome to unfold in a particular way, because you know you’re already worthy of whatever the outcome would grant you. You give yourself permission to feel joy, love, dignity, freedom, and connection now. You already won.

The confidence of having already won liberates your potential. When your self worth isn’t on the line, it becomes easier to take risks. You get more of what you want because you’re more willing to risk trying.”
“Overthinking is a powerless act. Overthinking involves either dwelling on events that have already happened and about which you can do nothing (known as ruminating) or worrying about things that haven’t happened but could theoretically happen, through the lens of a worst-case scenario (known as catastrophizing).

When you ruminate, you mistake replay for reflection. When you catastrophize, you mistake worrying for preparation.

Trying to change your thoughts one by one is how you exert control; it takes a lot of energy to control your thoughts because you have to monitor and manage each thought as it enters your mind. Engaging a broadened perspective is how you exercise power. When you make a perspective shift, you automatically see things in a new way, a way you can’t unsee. Perspective shifts change your thoughts in one fell swoop.” — pg 180
“When you allow setbacks, rejection, delay, or whatever you’re perceiving as failure to serve as a commentary on who you are, it’s hard to move forward because you stop believing in yourself. You lock yourself out of a growth mindset. When you’re in a maladaptive space, failure has the final say on what’s possible for you.

When you don’t allow rejection, delay, or failure to serve as a commentary on who you are, it’s easy to move forward because you still believe in yourself. You step over the failure like a napping dog and you keep going.

When you’re in an adaptive space, you don’t give failure any power. Not only does failure not have the final say; it doesn’t have any say.

To fail forward means that you allow yourself to grow from your failure, and out of that newfound state of expansion, you try again. You engage in the process for the sake of enjoying and learning from the experience, not for the glory of a future win.”
“Is there more work to do? Yes. No matter what ambitious people have done, they’ll always perceive more work ahead of them than behind them—that’s what makes them ambitious.
You cannot be a perfectionist without being ambitious. That sense you privately carry, that you still have so much work to do, that you’ll never be done, that you’ve been working on self-improvement for so long and yet it feels as if you haven’t even dented your vision—that represents your ambition, not your defeat.

In a world where we’re taught to stay small and constantly second-guess ourselves, it’s remarkable that you’re seeking ways to thrive instead of ways to destroy yourself. This very second, you’re actively choosing to focus on possibility; hence why you’re reading this book instead of pursuing the ten million other things you could be doing. Your state of consciousness is a victory in and of itself that no one else could give you and no one else could take away. Step out of reflexive self-loathing and dare to be impressed with yourself as you are, right in this moment.”
“Like lust and love, power and control can look identical. They’re not the same thing. Control is limited and transactionally owned. If you’re a person in a position of control and you give someone else control, you have relinquished your control. Power, by contrast, is unlimited and can be shared. If you’re a person in a position of power and you empower someone else (you give someone else power), you haven’t lost any power.

Power is understanding the immutability of your worth. From that place, you’re not desperate for an outcome to unfold in a particular way, because you know you’re already worthy of whatever the outcome would grant you. You give yourself permission to feel joy, love, dignity, freedom, and connection now. You already won.

The confidence of having already won liberates your potential. When your self-worth isn’t on the line, it becomes easier to take risks. You get more of what you want because you’re more willing to risk trying.

When you’re disconnected from your self-worth, you’re fixated on control. You may be experienced as demanding or needy to be around because you’re so attached to a specific outcome’s unfolding. You need something to happen in a certain way to feel relief. Whether you realize it or not, you are desperate.”
“Letting go of a goal that isn’t aligned with your values isn’t quitting-quitting, it’s power-quitting. It’s like when your best friend finally breaks it off with her appalling, disaster-show ex who slept with her roommate and stole all her furniture. She’s not losing; she’s winning. Doves fly out of the group chat upon hearing the news-behold the glorious day.

Yes, she has left something that she could not make work. No, she is not failing. Power-quitting is important. If you’ve never power-quit anything, that’s something to explore.

For adaptive perfectionists, success is not defined by whether you win or lose, stay or leave, push forward or quit. Success is experienced as an internal state. When determining their level of success, maladaptive perfectionists ask, ‘Am I meeting my goals?’ Adaptive perfectionists ask, ‘Am I living up to my intentions?’

The more specific you can be about the intention behind your actions, the more likely you are to live up to the meaning driving your intentions.”
“Subtlety is powerful.
The closer subtlety comes to being undetectable, the more powerful the subtlety is. Like effective subtlety, effective healing unfolds without detection. Healing is less often big and bold and more often minute and silent. In hindsight, you can see that the signals of progress were there.

In real time, healing feels too slow to count as legitimate growth. Healing is a series of tiny evolutions, born from ostensibly negligible choices, carried out day after day; it’s most often expressed in moments that have no witness other than yourself. These invisible ‘nothing’ moments are where the magic happens.”
”INSTEAD OF: What do I need? What am I feeling?
TRY: What does [your name here] need? What is [your name here] feeling? (Research supports the notion that speaking to yourself in the third person, while it may feel silly, can create a perspective shift that allows you to better regulate your emotions and focus on what you need. Clinically referred to as self-distancing, the practice of reflecting on your situation in the third person can be helpful because it generates psychological distance between you and your experience. You know how it’s so much easier for you to know exactly what your bestie should do about all their problems, and yet your problems feel so complicated and unsolvable to you? The psychological distance between you and your best friend’s experience is what makes it easier.)”
“People who trust themselves allow themselves to adopt the role of ‘expert’ in their own lives. Like all experts, those who develop trust with themselves move with confidence, not certainty.

It’s important to know that even the people who diligently commit to accessing their intuition and connecting to support still make mistakes and encounter ambiguity about what the best course of action is. You don’t have to have all the answers to be an expert; that’s not what makes someone an expert.

Experts are people who stay committed to both informed and experiential approaches in their domain of expertise. Your domain of expertise is your own true self. It’s okay if you’re not positive at every moment about how to be you; you’re constantly changing, so how could you be permanently sure? It’s okay if what you thought was the right answer shifts as you gain more information and experience being you.

Listen closely and near constantly, you’ll hear experts say things like, ‘There’s no one right answer,’ or ‘The reality is, it varies.’ Situations can be complex, and there’s rarely one clear, right path. Acknowledging the layers and paradoxes within our lives, the smartest people in the world are the ones who say, ‘I don’t know’ the most.”
“When you trust yourself, there’s no tally of mistakes. There’s no pettiness. There’s generosity in self-compassion and curiosity, followed by action to better support yourself.
Healing is not about figuring out what to do; it doesn’t matter if you know what to do if you don’t trust yourself to do it. Healing is about learning to trust yourself.”
“Trusting yourself is not something that happens to you; it’s a choice you make and support through action. No matter what you achieve or how well you perform, you will not trust yourself until you choose to trust yourself.”
“Certainty isn’t real. Therapists continually witness certainty being upended. Sometimes everything a person thinks is true about then life changes in the span of ten months, ten hours, or even ten seconds.

When you’re connected to yourself and you’re present, you don’t need certainty. When you trust yourself, you understand that no matter what changes around you, there are a thousand right paths to the true self within you.”
“If you think of yourself as the small room, you’ll look for the one door that’ll get you into the room. If you think of yourself as the ocean, you’ll know there are a thousand places you can dive in from. The former feels anxiety provoking: What if I can’t find the door? The latter feels like an empowering adventure: Where should I jump in from today?!

You’re in a control mindset when you fixate on finding the one right person, the one right job, the one right house, or the one right life. There is no one right way to be who you are. There’s no “one right door” to enter before you get to you any more than there’s one right place to dive into the ocean.”
“Even when you do know with absolute certainty that someone or something is definitely “it,” you change. People change, jobs change, passions change, cities change—everything changes. Adaptive perfectionists cycle through change vigorously because we love pushing ourselves to grow, and you can’t grow without changing.

Change is scary because we think it requires us to rearrange ourselves such that we have to find the one right way all over again. Change is a lot less scary when you stay in touch with the notion that you are large, not small, so of course there are a thousand paths to yourself.”

Perfectionism In A Nutshell

“In the most basic sense, managing your perfectionism looks like becoming aware of the core impulse all perfectionists reflexively experience: noticing room for improvement—Hmm, this could be better—and then consciously responding to that reflex instead of unconsciously reacting to it. Perfectionists are people who consistently notice the difference between an ideal and a reality, and who strive to maintain a high degree of personal accountability. This results in the perfectionist experiencing, more often than not, a compulsion to bridge the gulf between reality and an ideal themselves.”
“Because in a misguided effort to be more balanced and healthy, I was resisting my own perfectionism.

I was sick, so of course I should’ve been relaxing, doing the bare minimum. It all made sense on paper. So I tried, I really did. And it was terrible, it really was. I was plopping pink bath bombs into my tub and sitting there watching them fizz away, bored out of my fucking mind, when I would’ve much rather been working, pushing, doing. Not pushing from a compensatory or avoidant place, not pushing to the extent that I disrupted my healing, but pushing because I enjoy being intensely engaged in my work and in my life.”
“Thinking of yourself as a perfectionist is an enduring identity marker.

We don’t talk about perfectionism episodically because we don’t experience it episodically. For example, a person may say something like, ‘I went through a depression after college,’ but we don’t ‘go through’ perfectionism. Perfectionism is experienced in a visceral way, as a deep and integral part of selfhood, as opposed to something external that you encounter.

Perfectionists never stop noticing the gulf between reality and the ideal, and they never stop longing to actively bridge the gap. The noticing and the longing last a lifetime, hence the psychical constancy to perfectionism. People who relate to being perfectionists relate to that identity interminably…

Trying to get rid of your perfectionism is like trying to get rid of the wind by whacking it with a broom. Perfectionism is too powerful for an eradication approach. When you try to get rid of your perfectionism, all you’re doing is hemorrhaging energy at the opportunity cost of attending to your wellness.

Perfectionism is meant to be managed, not destroyed. (Perfectionism is also meant to be enjoyed, by the way, but we’ll get to that later.) To manage anything successfully, you need to be able to recognize it in its inception as well as in its most advanced iterations, and everything in between.”
“People don’t experience natural impulses in the same manner or measure. The impulse to tell stories is as natural as the breeze (You’ll never guess what happened to me on the way home from work), but writers feel this impulse so powerfully that stripped of the tools and time they need to write, they will author entire anthologies in their minds. Forbid a true artist from making art, and they are guaranteed to make art in secret.

Some people can go months or even years without having sex and be perfectly happy. Others, not so. The point is, not everyone is piqued by the natural impulse of perfectionism.

Ambition is not a universal trait. Some people are not interested in continually pushing themselves towards their highest potential or chasing an ideal. They may not ever even think about it.”
“Perfection is a paradox—you can never become perfect, and you already are perfect. A perfectionist in an adaptive mindset believes both those statements are true. A perfectionist in a maladaptive mindset believes both those statements are false.”
“All perfectionists chase that which is unattainable, ‘unrealistic,’ an ideal.

Unlike a perfectionist in a maladaptive mindset, however, adaptive perfectionists understand that ideals are not meant to be achieved, they’re only meant to inspire. That’s how adaptive perfectionists get to spend their lives, inspired. Pulled towards something bigger than themselves, a grand task they can never finish, something worthy of a lifetime of striving.

To lead an inspired life yourself, you’re going to familiarize yourself with the perfectionistic impulses inside you, give yourself permission to embrace the energy of your perfectionism, and learn to work with it, not against it. The work is not about fixing anything, getting rid of anything, or correcting anything; it’s about connection.”
“’That is perfect which is complete, which contains all the requisite parts.’ You’re perfect because you’re already a complete and whole human being. You already ‘contain all the requisite parts.’ You never had to do anything to become perfect…You don’t earn your wholeness; you’re born with it.

Being whole never inoculated anyone from feeling broken. Sometimes you can only see tiny divisions of yourself. Sometimes you can’t relate to your whole and true self at all. Limited perceptions don’t dictate reality. The moon is always full and whole, even when it hangs like a slither in the sky, even when you can’t find it in the sky.”
“There’s no need to feel like you’re failing because you’re not happy all the time. The absence of cheerfulness is not a disorder.

Your goal is not to be constantly happy or revel day and night in the dopamine-coated candy of immediate gratification. If that were your goal, you’d be hedonically oriented; you’d be a hedonist, not a perfectionist.

Perfectionists are bored by hedonism. Perfectionists love working. Perfectionists love a challenge. Perfectionists want to contribute, create, and grow.”
“…shame avoidance is one of the most exhausting and futile emotional exercises a person can engage in. You can’t enjoy the process when you’re in a maladaptive space—for the same reason that you wouldn’t enjoy being in a car accident just because you weren’t critically injured. When your entire goal is to win for the purpose of avoiding shame and then you win, it doesn’t feel good—it just feels like you weren’t critically injured.

This central shift from avoidance of failure to the pursuit of self-defined success is, in a word, freedom. In two words, it’s adaptive perfectionism.”
“Why do we single out perfectionism as a negative marker in women?

There’s a reason you’ve never once heard a man refer to himself as a ‘recovering perfectionist’—because men aren’t taught that they need to ‘recover’ from their perfectionism. Men are taught to integrate their perfectionistic strivings, insistence on high standards, at times inefficiently meticulous, at other times interpersonally destructive drive to excel into the more holistic sense of who they are. Men are taught to pursue their ambition unapologetically. Not only do we expect male perfectionists to do this; we celebrate them for it.”
“In examining the difference between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionists, research has demonstrated that it’s not perfectionistic strivings that are harmful to our mental health, it’s the self-criticism we lacerate ourselves with that endangers our well-being.

Pay attention to those who describe themselves as ‘recovering perfectionists.’ Notice that they aren’t people who have lowered their high standards, learned to want less, or stopped chasing the ideal. They’re people who have committed to self-compassion as a default emotional response to pain. That throbbing thorn in your brain isn’t perfectionism; it’s self-punishment.”
“It’s especially easy for perfectionists to justify indulging in immediate gratification of unhealthy familiarity because doing so doesn’t look like slacking off; it looks like working harder.

Parisian perfectionists work harder to do more for other people at the cost of meeting their own needs. Intense perfectionists apply brute force to their work, clocking more hours with less rest alongside a disregard for the law of diminishing returns and the risk of complete burnout. Procrastinator perfectionists plan to make a plan about learning how to best make a plan. Messy perfectionists play Jenga with their goals, continuing to shift the top priority in a way that’s built to collapse. Classic perfectionists jam structure into every open space they see, including the places signed to be breathing holes.

Letting go of the immediate gratification attached to bad familiarity is the beginning. You also have to let go of the outcome of your striving.”
“We don’t feel instantaneously entitled to reject negative categorizations about ourselves because the bad stuff is easier to believe.

The word perfect comes from the Latin perficere, per (complete) and ficere (do). Something considered perfect is that which is completely done, it exists in a state of completion, wholeness, perfection. When we describe something as perfect, what we’re saying is that there’s nothing we could add to it to make it better. Nothing more is needed because you can’t add to something that’s already whole.

Think of someone you love. Now think of the sound of that person’s laughter. Is that sound not perfect? There’s nothing you could change about that laughter to make it better; it’s already complete, it’s already whole. We use the word perfect to emphasize completeness. When you say someone is a ‘perfect stranger,’ you’re not saying they’re a flawless stranger, you’re saying they’re a complete stranger to you.”
“INSTEAD OF: I’m such a perfectionist. It’s so annoying, I know!
TRY: I have a strong and clear vision.”
“We want there to be only one right way to be ourselves because we think that will tell us something about who we are. If we know that what we’re doing represents the right choice, then we can know if we’re right or wrong. On a deeper level, this emotionally charged logic translates to our incessant need to verify our worth—if what we do is the good thing to do, then we are good.”