How to Quiet Your Inner Critic & Escape Perfectionism | Dr. Ellen Hendriksen

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Episode Transcript:

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:00:00] Our world today, 2025 is turning into a perfectionistic climate all on its own. Between capitalism, consumerism, social media, advertising. If we’re put in an environment that makes us feel like we have to perform and achieve and consume to ever higher levels, of course we’re going to respond by feeling like we’re not good enough.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:25] So have you ever poured your heart and soul into a project only to look at the final result and feel utterly deflated? Like that sinking feeling of this isn’t good enough despite all your hard work. I know I have more times than I can count. Whether it was writing or art or just about any creative endeavor. That inner critic voice would pipe up telling me I had just kind of fallen short. Again, perfectionism or overly harsh inner critics can be so hard to shake. The constant striving to meet impossibly high standards, and the self-judgment when you inevitably miss the mark. You still do want to operate and deliver on a very high level. That’s still a big thing for me. I want to show up and give my best. One that makes me feel amazing about what I do. But I’d also love a break from feeling like what I do and who I am are never quite good enough. So what if I asked you to imagine a world where that harsh inner critic lost its power? A world of self-acceptance, creativity, genuine fulfillment, incredible self-expression. Not based on flawless performance, but on self-compassion and living by your deepest values. Well, if you’re intrigued, then stick around, because my guest today, Doctor Ellen Hendriksen, may just blow your mind. She is on a mission to help self critics and perfectionists like maybe you and probably me, quiet that inner voice of harsh judgment and still show up and do amazing things in the world. Ellen is a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders and the author of the new book, How to Be Enough Self-acceptance for Self Critics and Perfectionists with a scientifically based, Zero Judgment Approach.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:13] She has helped countless people break free from the perfectionism trap and cultivate true self-compassion. Drawing on decades of research and her own personal experiences, Ellen really shares actionable strategies to reframe the way that we evaluate our self-worth. Whether you’re a high achiever, feeling burned out? A people pleaser spread too thin, or just someone who can’t shake the feeling of not being enough, this conversation will open your eyes to a kinder, more sustainable, and joyful way of being so excited to share it with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.. And it is so good to be back in conversation with you. Um, we talked, uh, six years ago, something like that. And that conversation actually became one of the most popular on the podcast over the next year or two. Apparently, um, not everybody feels all that comfortable in social situations with themselves. So just notion that conversation around anxiety and social anxiety in particular was really fascinating to see how that kind of lit up our community. You are deep diving into a topic that I know now is it has gotten so much. I don’t want to say coverage, but I think it’s a conversation that’s on the top of a lot of people’s minds, and they struggle with greatly. In the new book, How to Be Enough, you really certainly tee up this idea of perfectionism. Now. Perfectionism we hear talked about regularly enough so that I’m not actually convinced that we’re all talking about the same thing when we talk about it. So why don’t we start out there? What are we actually talking about when we talk about perfectionism?

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:03:50] Yeah, I’m really glad you asked that, because I do think that there is a lot of confusion out there about perfectionism. I think perfectionism is really like one of those optical illusions where you look at it one way, you see one thing, you look at it another way, you see another thing like the bunny and the duck or the young lady and the old lady, you know. And so some researchers would disagree with me, but some would absolutely agree with me that perfectionism can be helpful. It’s when we strive for excellence. We do good work for the work’s sake. We set high standards. We care deeply, you know, please, please keep doing that. In fact, the healthy heart of perfectionism is a personality trait called conscientiousness.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:34] And the big five.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:04:35] Yeah. Yes, exactly. Yes. And it is when we tend to be responsible and diligent. I like to say it’s the least sexy superpower, but it is definitely the one to choose for a good life, for both objective and subjective Of success, whatever that means to you in life. Conscientiousness is the personality trait to choose. Okay. However, where it tips over into unhelpful perfectionism is when we get into two things. And this is the work of doctors Ross Shaffer and Zafar Cooper and Christopher Fairbairn from when they were colleagues at Oxford University. And they say the two pillars of unhelpful perfectionism are self-criticism. And that’s something that’s probably familiar to a lot of us. But in Perfectionistic Self-criticism that it gets particularly harsh and personalistic, so perfectionistic self-criticism could look like overt name-calling. So I was working with someone today, a client who definitely does this calls himself an effing piece of of s. Or it could be like, oh, I’m such an idiot. Or like, I’m so stupid. It could be rhetorical questions like, why can’t I do this? Or what is wrong with me? Or it could simply be sort of an underlying rumbling current of dissatisfaction with our lives, with disillusionment with ourselves. So self-criticism is one pillar, but the second one is something that I think might be new to a lot of people, and that is something called over evaluation.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:06:07] And that is when we start to conflate our worth with our performance. So in other words, it’s a mindset that says we have to perform as superbly as possible to be sufficient as a person. So forgive my grammar, but it’s when I did good equals I am good. Now we can over-evaluate almost anything. So classic examples might be like a striver student who needs to get all A’s, like that’s who they are, and that when they get a B or God forbid a C, you know, that’s not just a bad grade to them, that means something about them. Or we might over-evaluate our social behavior. Perfectionism is the heart of social anxiety. And so we might rise and fall based on our social interactions. And. Like, did I say something stupid or did I tell a joke that went off poorly? We could over evaluate our quarterly evaluation. A musician or an athlete might define themselves by how well they performed in their last show, or their last game. It’s anything where our performance is a referendum on our character.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:13] So it’s the self-criticism based on that really evaluating us as human beings, our value as a human being based on how we perform in this one particular domain or project or whatever it is, you know, insert whatever it is that’s relevant to you.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:07:27] Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So again, it could be anything we truly value and how we define ourselves. And what happens is that we set the bar for adequate and flawless. And that means that whenever we struggle or we make a mistake or we come up short because we’re human, that really flips us from from all to nothing. There’s a there’s a huge gulf, uh, in which we can criticize ourselves for not reaching that bar of flawlessness.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:58] Right. So let me float an example from my own life from when I was a kid. I’m curious what your take is here. So I was a painter as a kid. I used to paint album covers on jean jackets, like back when album covers were like the coolest art on the planet. This was how I made my walking around money in high school. And I like to choose really brutally hard album covers, like, you know, like Frazetta, Molly Hatchet out, like all these absolutely wild things that I had no idea how to paint and then do it, and then I would steal away in my basement and I would paint for days and days and days, sometimes weeks. And if I got done with that right, and I poured myself into this, I had no training. I just was doing what I felt like I was just compelled to do. Nobody told me to do this. I loved doing it. So when I got done with it, it was not unusual for me to stand back. And if it didn’t meet my bar, I would destroy it. I would throw it out. I would give it up, I would start over. Now, of course, it was somebody else’s jean jacket. I was not going to do that. But canvases, I would do that on a fairly regular basis. I would look at it. I was like, not good enough, right? Where do we cross from those high standards, that self-criticism that says I can do better and I want to do better to this is actually destructive. Like, where is that line between this is actually helping me be more of who I want to be, perform at a higher level. That makes me feel really good to this is actually now dysfunctional.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:09:21] Yeah. So I think something that you point out is that you had really high standards, like you, you wanted it to appear on the jean jacket like it appeared in your head or on the album cover, like you again, you set those standards really high and I really want to shout from the rooftops. The high standards are not the problem. It’s the over evaluation. If for you, having a album cover that was not good enough meant something about you, like that meant you were not good enough, that that you were not adequate, then this absolutely qualifies as perfectionism. And you can also ask yourself and your listeners can ask to and certainly I put myself in this category. You know, I wrote this book certainly for everyone who identifies with this, but also for me, perfectionism and overvaluation also comes packaged with a focus on flaws and details. So we tend to zero in like on metaphorically on the one frowning face in the crowd of smiles like we see the crumbs on the otherwise clean counter that no one else sees. We see the typo in the slide deck no one else sees. So for you, maybe, maybe if you saw a detail that was not quite right and that rendered the whole thing not good enough, maybe that could qualify. And the other thing is that we we evaluate things as all or nothing, as I was saying. So if we we make a mistake, we screw up. Other examples might include, you know, one cookie ruins our healthy eating for the day or like losing our temper with our kids once makes us a bad parent. So there’s that all or nothing evaluation that goes along with the high standards, which are not the problem.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:55] Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting, right? Because as you describe, when we first started talking, this notion that perfectionism is not inherently bad, that there are elements of it that actually can help us aspire to do really cool things, to become better at things that we really care about. It’s when it tips into these different zones. But it’s interesting also because if I use that same example for me, oftentimes when I would look at this, I wouldn’t just look at the jacket and say, oh, the jacket isn’t good enough, or the painting isn’t good enough, that I would turn that back on me and say, I’m not good enough. I’m not skilled enough. Like, I have a clear picture of what it is in my head. Or maybe if I’m reproducing something, I’m literally looking at what I want to reproduce as exactly as I can, and it’s not coming out like I don’t have the actual skill yet, or if it’s something that I’m craving, you know, like just from my brain, my skill hasn’t reached a level where I can close the gap between taste and expression. So I’m looking at me and saying I’m not good enough yet. Why is that a bad thing? If it’s true?

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:11:58] I think in your story there, perhaps your skills were not good enough or you weren’t there yet. You had some room to grow. But did that mean that you yourself as a person were inadequate? And I think that’s the line.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:17] So it’s less about qualities or skills that may be associated with you. It’s more like me as a human being.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:12:24] Correct. Exactly.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:25] Yeah. I can see how that would be pretty brutal. And I think this is a phenomenon that is probably so prevalent. I’m curious whether you have prevalence data on this. Like like how widespread is this phenomenon among just adults?

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:12:39] Yeah, what I found. So I’m a clinical psychologist. I work at an anxiety specialty center, and something I’ve found is that most of my clients have perfectionism. At the center of the overlapping Venn diagram of, you know, the issues that are coming in for. But nobody comes in and says, Ellen, I’m a perfectionist. I need help because everything needs to be perfect. No, no one has ever said that. What happens is that people come in and they say, I feel like I’m failing. I feel like I’m falling behind. I should really be further ahead in my life by now, or I have a million things on my plate and I feel like I’m not doing any of them well. I think that’s because perfectionism as a word or a term is a little bit of a misnomer. It’s not about striving for perfection, it’s really about never feeling good enough. And a lot of my clients are very accomplished, very impressive. And I like to say that we really look like we’re hitting it out of the park, but we feel like we’re striking out. And I think therefore the prevalence data, whatever it may be, is probably much lower than it actually is. There is prevalence data for kids, and they’re one third of kids have some kind of clearly maladaptive perfectionism, where they’re over evaluating their character and their performance and criticizing themselves harshly because of it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:09] Yeah, and that would actually make a lot of sense to me, because probably I would imagine that a lot of this comes out in the form of academic striving. So that’s the age right there, right? Because all of a sudden they’re put into a system where they’re in a group of people and they’re all being rated and judged and graded and scored on a regular basis and striving towards a particular outcome. And then they get a report on a regular basis saying how close or far that they’ve come with that. So I would imagine there’s sort of like a feedback mechanism and a system to support that perfectionism in a way that just. Either falls away or just morphs into all sorts of other weird things once you. Sort of like step out of that structure into adulthood. Does that make sense?

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:14:50] Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think for kids, I think grades 100%. Absolutely. But I think it can also be very prevalent with athletics. I think it can be prevalent in terms of like musical performance. I think it can be, you know, again, our social performance, like, are we cool and charismatic or are we awkward and weird? It could be how we appear, like whether we’re we think we’re attractive or not. Some people will over evaluate their reflection in the mirror, the number on the scale. And so it really can be anything. And I imagine with, especially with social media showing us a constant highlight reel of how we think things, quote unquote, should be, that that would be very hard to, to fight perfectionism. We usually think of it as sort of a personality profile, like we think of the Martha Stewart or Serena Williams, or like Hermione Granger’s of the world. But research is increasingly showing that it can come from within. You know, it can be genetic. It can absolutely come from our families of origin, but it can also come from all around us. It can come from what the researcher Andrew Hill calls a perfectionistic climate. And that’s if we’re in a high pressure, high stress climate where there’s no room for mistakes and we’re criticized harshly when we inevitably fall short because we’re human. That, of course, is going to make us respond by feeling like we’re not good enough. You know, originally this research was meant to characterize like the highest levels of women’s gymnastics or like symphony auditions. But I think our world today, you know, 2025 is turning into a perfectionistic climate all on its own between capitalism, consumerism, social media, advertising. If we’re put in an environment that makes us feel like we have to perform and achieve and consume to ever higher levels, of course we’re going to respond by feeling like we’re not good enough, which.

Jonathan Fields: [00:16:50] Makes me curious. Also, do you see, or are you aware of either any research or you just you just see clinically representation strongly beyond age, beyond sort of saying like there is data that says a third or so of, of younger folks exhibit this. Do you see any, any association or correlation with things like gender or any other sort of like identifiers where it shows up more often than not?

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:17:12] Yeah for sure. Continuing along that theme of how it can come from within, but it can definitely come from all around us as well. So I think folks from marginalized communities or, you know, minority communities, there’s another layer there. Because, again, if all humans react to the situations we’re put in, if we’re put into a society or an institution that due to racism, homophobia, ableism, you know, name your prejudice either overtly or covertly tells us you don’t belong here. You know, you don’t deserve to be here. Of course, the result is going to be a poll to prove ourselves like a way to earn our way into the group. And then it’s no longer a personality trait, but an understandable reaction. I give an example in the book. This is the research of Doctor Gary Mitchell from Duke, and he researches college prep programs that are designed to launch high achieving black and brown kids into impressive career trajectories. And he finds that sometimes at those elite schools, those kids may be subject to higher standards of academics of behavior than, for example, like legacy kids or donor kids. So there’s perfectionism can’t even be institutionalized. And again, then it is a pretty understandable reaction to being put in a situation that says you are not good enough.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:37] So then some of this can come from the outside in. As you were describing earlier, there can be a really strong cultural influence and that could be large scale culture. It could also be just it sounds like a media culture within an institution or a class even, or a small group. I’m curious about because you also said that there may be a genetic component to this. I was recently having a conversation with a researcher who and we were talking about this, that, that very same big five trait that you described, conscientiousness. And how much of this people kind of assume is genetic and also changeable. And he was sharing that, you know, by the time most people reach somewhere around the age of 20, it’s commonly agreed that these five traits are largely set, but that even the expression or the experience of them is for the rest of your life. Probably about half of that is genetically determined. But then there’s another 50% that’s with all sorts of other contributors. Is it similar with perfectionism or is it different?

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:19:32] So that exact answer might be beyond the cutting edge of science, but there is definitely a growing mountain of of literature showing that perfectionism itself is definitely heritable and certainly disorders that it lies at the heart of. So social anxiety, OCD, eating disorders, some kinds of depression, those are definitely genetic. That said, our genetics are not destiny. And I think there’s a lot we can do if we find that we have fallen into some of that clinical perfectionism, that unhealthy perfectionism. Even if our factory settings are tilted towards perfectionism, there’s a lot we can do to be flexible and to really live the life we want to live and not be yanked around by it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:20:17] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You’ve kind of referenced here and there some of the ways that you sometimes see this show up in people’s mental health or even their physical health sometimes. You know, like both. Because we all know that you can’t really separate those these days, kind of broadly speaking, or maybe even specifically, how do you see perfectionism then ripple out into a person’s actual mental or physical health? Like, how does this actually show up in the mind and the body and then in somebody’s life?

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:20:48] Yeah, absolutely. So I think, again, the heart is that over evaluation and that self-criticism. And there what I see is when folks set the bar for adequate and flawless, and we define failure as not meeting expectations, then we’re going to rack up a lot of failures. And as we do that again and again and again, we start to feel like failures. The perfectionism researcher Doctor Martin Smith finds that most people mellow as they age, but for folks with some perfectionism, something different happens and the wheels start to come off and we burn out, or we lose relationships or struggle with our mental health. What I often see is depression, OCD, eating disorders. For me, it manifested physically. So I developed a GI illness. I went through, I think, five rounds of physical therapy. I had an overuse injury from too much typing. I at one point couldn’t turn my head to the right because my neck muscles were so tight. So that was for me. But for a lot of folks who come into the clinic, it might look like marital troubles. It might look like realizing all their friends have drifted away. It might simply manifest as feeling like a failure so it can show up in a lot of like a really heterogeneous ways. But the core is that as we don’t meet our unrealistic standards again and again, we start to feel like failures.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:16] I know I’ve been there.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:22:17] Haven’t we all?

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:18] And it must be such an interesting, because I almost feel like there’s a tipping point between high standards and really tipping into the space of dysfunction were just like nearly impossible standards. And then instead of taking criticism and striving towards something we just like, we make it all about ourselves. We are deficient human beings. And yeah, I mean, it’s a brutal way to live. Um, and it’s going to show up physically in your body.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:22:41] Yeah. So I think imperfection is having sort of a cultural moment, which I love and completely agree with. But I do think that the advice around it is a little bit misguided. So because a common piece of advice I know I’ve been told this, I wonder if you’ve been told this is to stop when things are good enough or to lower. You got to lower your standards, Ellen. But good enough doesn’t resonate when it’s something from which we derive our value. You know, it’s something if we if we’re using that to measure ourselves, of course, we’re not going to settle for subpar or mediocre performance because that means that we’re subpar or mediocre. So again, it’s not the problem is not the high standards necessarily. It’s the over-evaluation. I think that is the thing that we can try to tackle rather than telling people, oh, you just got to, you just got to stop when things are good enough. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:29] I’m so glad you brought that up, actually, because that has been something that has bothered me in a bunch of different domains, in entrepreneurship, in art, in all sorts of different things. I’m somebody who’s definitely mellowed from when I was a kid. I don’t have that same standard. You know, I’ve thankfully tipped more towards mellowing than festering and breaking down. I’m not always.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:23:48] Sure.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:49] But I also still have really high standards. You know, I really when I have a vision of something that I want to make real in my mind and I get really clear about what that is, I really want that to happen. And I want to work, and I’m willing to work incredibly hard to get there and to acquire the skill and to whatever it is that I need to do. And I found that oftentimes it is really hard and it takes way longer than I thought it would take. And, you know, I get knocked around along the way. But then when I actually achieve what I strive for. The feeling of that is just so juicy and so alive. It’s it’s like, that is how I want to show up. This is what I want to do, that the thought of never feeling that to me, the thought of getting three quarters of the way there and saying, oh, it’s good enough. I have a really clear vision of what I want it to be, but, you know, it’s good enough. I’ll just like, send it out into the world or move on to the next thing. And never experiencing that closing of the gap and that just full body elation and expression. To me, that’s really hard to stomach just going there and not actually going all the way.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:24:59] Yeah. No. Absolutely. And again, this I think this underscores that it’s not about the high standards. Please keep your high standards. It sounds like that has really brought you a lot really like helped you follow your dreams, accomplish the things you want to do. Please keep doing that. And it sounds like as you have mellowed, as you said, maybe you’ve come away from that over evaluation that you might have been experiencing as a teenager. That’s the crux of what we need to do in the book. For example, I tell the story about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and his time at UCLA under the legendary basketball coach John Wooden and the under Coach Wooden’s leadership. The team just reached such amazing standards that a psychologist started to study. What was it about Coach Wooden, this style that made him so exemplary, that helped bring this team, you know, to all these championships. And what they found is that Coach Wooden very seldom praised or criticized his players. He would almost never evaluate them. What he did was he taught, he gave information. And so instead of saying like, oh, like, that’s no good, or like, yay, good job.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:26:12] He would say, pass from the chest. Take lots of shots where you might get them in games, pass the ball to someone short. Run. Don’t walk. He would tell the players what to do and how to do it. And I think if we’ve got some over evaluation, if we’re overidentifying with our performance, we could take a page from that. And rather than having this be something about ourselves, like rather than conflating our performance and our worth, we can look at the work for the work’s sake. We can strive for excellence for the sake of excellence, and take the stance of a sculptor like I in a block of marble and say like, okay, what would make this work better? What would make this thing better? And that comes at it from a really different perspective of thinking, oh, this performance equals me. So I think that’s one way that we can try to get away from some of that overvaluation and still achieve the bliss and the excitement that you describe from setting high standards and then striving to meet them for excellence’s sake.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:19] I think we’re kind of shifting into some. Well, we’re shifting into some of the shifts that you talk about in the book. One of them that really grabbed me is this if you want to rephrase this, just let me know. But, you know, the way it caught me is it’s sort of like this shift from criticism, especially self-criticism to kindness or compassion or self-kindness or self-compassion. I found that when I said, you know, I’ve sort of mellowed over the years, but I still have really high standards. I think one of the things that’s happened is the shift where I can now look at something that I’ve done, where it doesn’t meet my standard, and then I can look at it and say, okay, it’s not there yet, but you know what? I’m okay with it. Like, I’m a writer. And 20 years into my writing journey now and I’ll read something from a writer and I’ll laugh, slash cry at a sentence, and then I’ll tell myself, so if I was the younger me, I would probably be really frustrated that I can’t do that yet and that, you know, like, I should be able to do this and that would be the standard which I would beat myself up for not being there. Now I’ll kind of look at that and I’ll say, this is stunning. This is gorgeous. This is amazing. I would love to be able to write this sentence one day, and maybe in ten years if I keep writing and I keep paying attention to the craft, I’ll be able to. Does that fall under sort of like this shift, or is that a different reframe?

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:28:37] No, absolutely. I feel like that sounds aspirational and inspirational, for sure. It’s lighting the fire under you to keep doing the work, not because you’re not good enough, but because you want to reach those high standards. And so I think that, again, not not over evaluating is really the key there. And for my own kind of self-compassion journey, something that I’ve found is that I’ve learned to take my self-criticism less seriously. We were talking about conscientiousness at the beginning, and those of us with perfectionism are very conscientious. We take things seriously, but that also means that we take our self-critical thoughts and feelings really seriously and really, literally, and that can make us perseverate or spiral or feel inadequate. And so what what I’ve learned to do is to sort of take the stance of listening to my self-criticism as if it was the music in a coffee shop, or as if it was the music at the grocery store. So it’s still there and I can hear it. But, you know, just like some brains are wired to be more optimistic or pessimistic or like more introverted or extroverted, you know, my brain is just wired to be self-critical. But I can hear the self-criticism, but I don’t have to listen to it. I don’t have to, like, dance along. And that has been particularly helpful for me.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:06] It brings up something that just popped into my head, as you’re describing, that I’ve talked with folks in the past, they will give that voice of self-criticism a name and a personality within their head, and then basically treat it like as like the person living in their head. I’ve heard some people say, that’s such a great technique. I’ve also heard some people say, that’s a terrible technique because you’re giving it more, almost like rigidness and more like validity and more realness. I’m curious where you land on that.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:30:35] Yeah, I think if giving it a name or like a persona helps you see that, that self-criticism is just a series of thoughts, then I think it’s magical because then you can sort of get some perspective on it. There’s there’s a term called cognitive diffusion, which is pretty much exactly that. And that’s when we play with our self-critical thoughts and make them like a little bit ridiculous or a little bit irreverent in order to emphasize that they are thoughts. So, like, I have a client who has named her self-critical voice Helga, and she pictures Helga with like, a Viking helmet and a stern expression. I have another client who has not named his self-critical thoughts per se, but he pictures animal from the Muppets like beating his drum set and like yelling the thought everyone will judge you. And then I have another client who her thought is, you’re going to let everyone down. And so she has decided to, you know, to play with this thought, to emphasize that it is just a thought, you know, it is not truth, it is not reality. She pictures the thought on a coffee mug, and then she pictures herself, taking a little nonchalant sip from this coffee mug. And that’s their way of emphasizing that these are just thoughts that are kind of just products of our own self-critical minds. And I take that. The subtitle of my book, self-acceptance for Self Critics and Perfectionists, really pretty literally. And I find that, you know, this is just what our brains are going to do. That’s just how we’re wired. And that’s okay. But we don’t have to get tangled up in the content of the self-criticism. We can just, like, let it flow by like a revolving sushi restaurant.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:19] I may have to now actually, like, take on the personality of one particular Muppet with my voice in my head.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:32:25] So that’s a good one.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:26] Here’s what else I’m curious about. Okay, so this is fun. This is cool. Like these are something where you can kind of do this and maybe really help make that shift from self-criticism to self-compassion to kindness. What about somebody who’s listening to this, watching this? And they’re in a work situation, right? And they’re surrounded. They’re on a team where the stakes are very high. The standards are exceedingly high, the pressure is very high. And the culture in that team, and in fact, the entire company is perfectionism. The culture is like we do, perfect all the time when it counts the most, when the stakes are, you know, like the highest possible and you get paid an ungodly amount of money to do that and great perks and but that is the standard. Like that is what we do. And I know people who work in firms like that, and I know firms entire like large companies and teams that function like that. So let’s say like that your your situation, you don’t want to leave. There’s a lot of good stuff that’s going along with this. How do you deal with something like that?

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:33:31] I think we can deal with it in private, like personally. And then I think we can also deal with it with the team. We were talking about self-compassion, and I think there we can take care of ourselves. So I was taught that self-compassion was talking to myself like a good friend. But then my perfectionistic brain thought that that meant that I needed to generate, like this steady stream of self-compassionate, articulate hype. You know, I need.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:56] To do that perfectly.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:33:58] Exactly right. Too high a bar. So I want to pose the idea that self-compassion doesn’t have to be words at all. Self-compassion can be actions, and because that’s way easier to control, to write like we can control our behaviors way easier than we can control our thoughts or our feelings. So we can give ourselves a few more minutes under the warm spray of the shower. In the morning. We can give ourselves a moment to breathe. When we’re stressed, we can go to yoga because we know that from experience that we’re going to feel better afterwards. Or importantly, we can give ourselves permission not to go to yoga because we’re already exhausted. We’re already overwhelmed. So for those of us with some perfectionism or those of us in perfectionistic environments, self-compassion can be either doing a thing that will take care of ourselves or permission not to do everything we expect of ourselves. So I think that’s something we can do sort of privately, I think something we can do with the team. And this this will take a little bit of, of nerdy background. But perfectionism is what researchers call interpersonally motivated, meaning it’s trying to help us belong to the tribe. It actually guides us down the wrong path to get there, and it tells us the lie that we have to perform as superbly as possible to get people to like us, that we have to be good at things in order to belong.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:35:19] So you described a perfectionistic environment where that might actually be true. But what we can do is in addition to all that Uber competence or not allowing mistakes, we can also bring in some humanity. So I’ll tell you the story of a client I had who we will call Gus. So he worked in one of these perfectionistic climates, and he came in because he wanted to optimize his performance, which for me is always a little bit of a flag. And he specifically wanted to work on his public speaking. And for him, his kind of perfectionistic self-presentation manifested as overpreparing and over practicing to the point where he would kind of come off as wooden, and then before the meetings where he would present. So he would sort of stand at the podium and like, silently go over his slides, silently rehearse his slides as people filed in, didn’t acknowledge the people. And then when he gave the presentation, he would sort of perform his slides like it didn’t even really matter who was in the room. He was just focused on, like not making mistakes, doing it perfectly. So what we tried to do is we tried to add on another dimension of how we evaluate each other as humans. In addition to competence. We can talk about this more later.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:36:30] We tried to add on warmth. And so for him that looked like instead of over preparing and over practicing, we tried to roll that back to simply preparing and practicing, but not not doing it to the point where all he was doing was trying to, you know, reduce his anxiety instead of silently rehearsing his slides as people filed in, he greeted them by name. And then as he presented, rather than sort of performing his slides as if it didn’t matter who was in the audience or who was there, he tried to tell a story and like, focus on sharing his knowledge with the energy of like, look at this cool rock I found, you know, rather than like trying to perform his slides as, like, gusty impressive expert. So what he was doing at the beginning was certainly avoiding mistakes, but he also missed out on the connection and possible trust with his colleagues that adding on that dimension of warmth, I think really bought him. So yes, he’s still in this perfectionistic climate. He still is trying to avoid mistakes. But I think what he can do is rather than trying to avoid mistakes, avoid screwing up, is he can add on some connection and some display of like trustworthiness. And I think instead of just trying to avoid mistakes, he can add on some warmth and some trustworthiness and some connection.

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:51] And I was just momentarily reliving, like me being Gus in a very early iteration of my speaking career. So it took a long time to learn how to let go and just relax and tell stories. Absolutely. And then I actually remember also then transferring a sense of perfectionism to the art of storytelling.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:38:09] You know, we’re not doing anything. Absolutely.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:10] Right. Exactly. It’s like searching for the next target there, and we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You know, one of the things that you talk about is and again, use a language that if I’m not getting this right, is the sense of shifting from rules to a sense of adaptability or flexibility, agility as one way to really help with this. Take me into that a bit.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:38:35] Rules. Absolutely. So those of us with perfectionism want to know the rules so we can follow them. And then what happens? I know I can relate to this. If there are no rules, we make up our own personally demanding rules and then we follow those. So like, you know, think about making up rules for like healthy eating, for example. Like that’s not necessarily bad when three things happen. We’ve kind of tipped over into the unhealthy perfectionism. So when the rules get rigid, we apply them in any situation. Like we try to follow that healthy eating rule even on Thanksgiving. Two we apply the rules as all or nothing. So if we follow the rules acceptably, we are acceptable. But if we slip or mess up even in the slightest way, that renders us unacceptable. So like with our healthy eating example, like I ate a cookie, so I’m bad. And then the third thing that happens is we start to impose our rules on other people. The classic example is there is a right way to load the dishwasher, and that can get in the way of our relationships. So we orient to rules. We want to know what we’re doing. We want to know we’re acceptable. But it can it can get in the way if they’re rigid, all or nothing, or we impose them on others. So I think the next question is what can we do about that? We’re going to try to shift over to values.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:39:54] And I really want to define values because I think that’s a word that gets thrown around a lot. So values just so we can be on the same page are a person’s principles or a sense of what’s important and meaningful in life. And the researchers Doctor Michael Touhig and Doctor Clarissa Ong, when they were colleagues at Utah State University, came up with four qualities of a value, and I’ll give you them all. But I think the last one is really what’s the most important. But one is a value is continuous. You’re never done living a value. So a value is different than a goal. So like making $1 million isn’t a value, but like maybe wealth or financial security is two values are intrinsically meaningful. Meaning you would care about them even if nobody else knew. Getting famous isn’t a value, but putting in the work is. Third is values are under your control, so they’re not contingent upon anyone else. So like being loved isn’t a value, but being loving is. And this is the fourth one, which I think is the most important, especially when we’re trying to move from rules to values, is that values are freely chosen. Values are never coercive or obligatory, so you freely choose to follow them, and you’re likely willing even to tolerate some discomfort or inconvenience to do so. So like for instance, the value of sustainability or the value of giving back might be why you’re willing to give up your Saturday morning to go volunteer to pick up trash on the beach rather than spending the day like relaxing at the beach.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:41:32] So as we move from trying to just follow rules, whether the actual rules or they’re our own made up rules or they’re someone’s generic idea, we might end up doing things differently. Just yesterday, I was having a conversation with another podcast host, and she said that she used to struggle with the rule of I have to have a beautiful home. And so she would see like gorgeous homes on Instagram or like in magazines. And she’d think, oh, now I have to have this beautiful, like white and beige house. Like, even though I have two toddlers and she had this big epiphany where she realized that that’s not even what she valued. Like she wanted a climbing wall in the living room. She wanted her kid’s toys everywhere. She wanted to have a fun house, not a beautiful house. And she noticed that it was this great weight off her shoulders when she gave herself permission to have a home that matched her values, rather than blindly following some arbitrary rule. So that’s a I’m making air quotes with my fingers. Kind of an easier example, because as we move from rules to values, we might also actually not do anything differently. So for instance, if we’re trying to move from rules to values, and we’re used to following the rule of like, I have to be a good friend, that means there are certain things I have to do.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:42:48] I have to remember my friend’s birthday. I have to ask them detailed questions about their life I have to surprise them with their favorite coffee order when we go for a walk. Okay, none of those things are bad, right? Those are actually lovely. Like, please, please keep doing those. But what gets in the way is that sense of have to. That fourth part of that definition of values was that values are freely chosen. And so if there’s a sense of coercion, a sense of duty, a sense of obligation behind it that can make the friendship feel like a people pleasing grind. Then we’re living by a rule. Whereas if we can shift to a value of being attentive to our friend, a value of being supportive of our friend, and we’re freely choosing to run towards those, we might still remember their birthday, we might still ask them detailed questions about their life. We might still surprise them with their favorite coffee order, but the quality of the experience changes. Like, it starts to feel like a want rather than a should. So our behavior on the surface might not change at all, but it’s really driven by something different, something that’s freely chosen rather than something that is obligated.

Jonathan Fields: [00:43:54] No, I love that. And it makes me curious about a distinction on that fourth one freely chosen. Is that always an easy distinction to make? Because what’s popping into my head is that how do we know if we’re actually we legitimately this is freely like we just want to actually exhibit this value. This is really what’s important to me. Or I know that if I do this thing or behave a particular way or make a decision, I am going to belong. I am going to be loved. And we want to belong and we want to love, and that’s what we’re actually. But to me, that makes it feel murky. Like how do we tease out when it really is emanating from us rather than we’re doing a thing because it’s going to result in a feeling that we want? Coming back to us.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:44:35] Yeah. The lie of perfectionism says that we need to double down on performance in order to earn our way into belonging. Like, rather than focusing on connecting or focusing on enjoying each other. One thing that goes along with that is that following your values might not always feel good. I think there is often an expectation of like, If I’m true to myself, if I live my values like, then I’ll feel great and that’s that might not actually be the case. Like, it can be really hard to live our values. It can open up a lot of emotion. I’ll tell you a story about a client named Steven. He wanted to follow the rule of, like, I need to prove myself at work. And that meant that he would answer work emails on the sidelines of his kids soccer game, or he would duck out of kid bath time and kid story time to go sit at his laptop because he felt like he needed to prove himself at work. He was, you know, very aware that he was missing out on his kids. His partner was resentful because she was picking up all his slack. And so he really tried to shift towards a value of being attentive to his kids. But what happened is that then he would stand on the side of the soccer game, and he would feel his phone buzz in his pocket, and he would feel anxious and a little guilty. Or he would he would stick with kid bath time, but he would have to sort of surf the urge of like, oh my gosh, I should really be working. And if we looked at his behaviors, he was living the life he wanted to live. He was being the person he wanted to be. He was truly running towards his values, but it didn’t necessarily feel good. So I think that’s important to understand that, that that might happen. But if you’re going to feel uncomfortable either way, you might as well feel uncomfortable while following your values.

Jonathan Fields: [00:46:25] Yeah, in the name of something you genuinely care about. And that’s important to you? Yeah, because we’re going to feel uncomfortable with all sorts of different things all day, every day. So might as well be aligned with what really matters to you. This is really fascinating. There are a bunch of other shifts that you actually write about and speak to in the book, but there’s one other that I really want to dive into with you, and it’s this notion of what you describe as demand sensitivity. Take me into this.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:46:49] Yeah, I loved researching about this because, like, light bulb after a light bulb just went off over my head. I was like, oh my gosh, this is so common. It has a name. This is what I do. So all right, this is the work of Doctor Alan Mellinger. And so demand sensitivity is exactly that. It’s a heightened sensitivity to perceived requests or demands. In perfectionism, we orient towards the shoulds of life, like what we should be doing. But what that means is that, to quote Doctor Mellinger, we often turn the volitional into the obligatory. So, for instance, if our kid can’t find their phone, we feel obligated to start looking for it. We sit down in front of Netflix and we feel like, oh, I should really watch a documentary, I should learn something, or we get invited to somebody’s house and we feel like we should bring a dessert, but then it spirals into like, oh, well, I should make something from scratch. And it just becomes this overwhelm of shoulds. And then what happens, as I like to say, all work and no play makes anyone a resentful human. And that brings us to demand resistance, which is when we feel so overloaded with tasks and shoulds that we start to balk. We start to procrastinate. We start to rebel, even if it’s something that we initially wanted to do. I can tell you a story about myself.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:48:04] I keep a running list of books I want to read as I come across them, like on the internet or I hear recommendations. I keep a list of movies I’d like to see, but then they’re part of a list, and my life is already full of lists of things I have to do. So when the book comes in to the library or the bookstore, or when I sit down to like, watch a movie now it feels like a chore. It feels like it’s something on my list that I have to do, and then I lose interest completely. And so what I’ve really tried to do there, and I write about this in the book. It’s a tool I call dare to be unproductive is to really tune in to whatever I found interesting or cool or fun in the first place. And I think if we’re used to only doing what we should, that can be really hard to do at first. It can be hard to know what we like or hard to even know what we’re genuinely drawn to. But I think with some practice, it’s quite freeing to dare to be unproductive. And fundamentally, you don’t have to slog through a history of the Taliban. You know, you can you can go ahead and read that rom com, you know, that you’ve you’ve been eyeing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:09] So I’m wondering if this kind of describes a phenomenon that, as you’re describing it, that popped into my head when our daughter was in elementary school. So she’s a kid who loved to read. She would power through book after book after book after book. She would just curl up. And I think it was fifth grade. She started in a classroom and the teacher instituted a reading requirement. You know, like every day, 45 minutes a day, five days a week. From that day forward. She wasn’t a reader. Mhm. Yeah. Is that what we’re talking about.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:49:38] Absolutely. It became a chore. Yeah for sure. Yeah I understand what the teacher was doing the teacher was trying to get. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:44] Well intended, of course.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:49:46] Yeah, he was trying to get kids on the other end of that spectrum to read. But for her, yeah. Then it felt like a chore. It wasn’t freely chosen just to do a callback to values there.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:55] Yeah. It’s so interesting the way that these things just show up in all different aspects, in all different ages of our life. If we zoom the lens out a little bit, you know, and we really think about just perfectionism and how it shows up in all the different parts of our lives. One other curiosity I just wanted to dip in also is I imagine that you see this in the context of relationships wanting to be the perfect X, the perfect partner, the perfect spouse, the perfect parent. And again, it’s one of those things where you want to have really high standards in the way that you show up for the other people aligned with your values, even, you know, like you value being emotionally and physically present in the lives of the people who you love dearly. Do you see this aspiration tipping into perfectionism in a meaningful way.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:50:41] Yeah, I more often see feeling like they’re never good enough. I feel like I see, wow, like, I’m so lucky to be with my partner. I don’t know how they put up with me. I’m just not good enough for them. Or I’m trying so hard to be a good parent, but well, here actually I can. I can tell you a story about that one. I have a client who we will call Jamie, who’s very concerned with being a good parent and for a good reason. She came from a very unstable family where there was some, you know, some emotional, there was some physical violence. And she’s working really, really hard to break the cycle with her kids. She’s working really diligently, but she still yells at them on occasion. She doesn’t hit them, but she will still lose her temper sometimes because we all default to our factory settings when we’re under stress. Okay, but when she loses her temper, she automatically relegates herself to I’m a bad mom. All the work she’s done, like all the progress she’s made, all the time, she’s stopped herself from yelling like really means nothing whenever she breaks her rule. And just as a connection to our earlier conversation, if you told her to lower her standards, that would not go over well, nor would it be appropriate. Right? Okay, what we can do there is to try to make some room for mistakes. Hear me out on that one.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:51:57] So we’re going to move from either or move from I’m a good mom or I’m a bad mom to both. And so Jamie and I work together to set an expectation. So like, how often could she reasonably expect herself to screw up and yell at her kids? And the answer can’t be zero. You could also phrase it as like, what standard would you hold someone else to who is in the same position? And so Jamie decided that 90% of the time when she was tempted to yell, she would expect herself to stop, like to get it together and not do that, which I thought was actually quite high. But now now she has 10% wiggle room and that doesn’t mean it’s okay. It does not mean she approves of it, but now it makes it understandable she can take it from either or good mom, bad mom to both. And I’m a good mom who sometimes loses my temper. And the kicker is that when you make room for mistakes, it actually diminishes the chances that they’ll actually happen. We can do this around anything. I’m a smart person who sometimes doesn’t know the answer. I’m a capable person who sometimes screws things up. I’m an easygoing person who sometimes makes executive decisions. I’m a dedicated person who sometimes doesn’t try my hardest. But making room for those mistakes doesn’t lower our standards. But it gives us some much needed wiggle room and room to breathe.

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:14] Yeah, I love that. It’s like it normalizes them as just a part of the human condition. Rather than saying this is a problem, this is an error. It’s a glitch in the code that needs to be fixed. It’s like, no, this is just this is going to happen.

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:53:26] This is life.

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:26] Yeah. And we don’t like it. And we like we love. It didn’t happen. But it’s also going to. And so let’s just acknowledge that and sort of like you know like get okay with it. So many other places I’d love to go with you, but I feel like we need to wrap this up. There are a whole bunch of other shifts in the book that I think are deeply fascinating to me. So zooming the lens out here in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Ellen Hendriksen: [00:53:48] I say live the life you want to live, not someone else’s generic idea of the right thing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:54] Mm. Thank you.

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:57] Hey, if you loved this episode, before you leave safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Ellen a few years back about overcoming social anxiety. You’ll find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle Bliss for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable. And chances are you did. Since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor? A seven second favor and share it? Maybe on social or by text or by email? Even just with one person? Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.