My name is Ron Durin, and I'm a recovering perfectionist. [LAUGH] I hope that gets your attention. I grew up with this idea that the correct model for my life was to be a perfectionist. Anything less than perfection was basically considered not good enough, all right? This is the way I was raised. This is no knock on on the way I was raised, but that was just the way that my parents doing the best they can, that's the way they raised me. This idea that if you really want to achieve in life, you've got to be perfect, all right? It took me a long time to unplug from this. I am passionate about this topic because I feel perfectionism is so toxic for most people. We'll talk about a little bit of this idea of what may be a healthy version of perfectionism is. But for the most part most people are have a toxic relationship around this. So again, I had to break free, and again, many times I'm going to say it's going to start with self-awareness. If you feel like you have that model of perfectionism in your life, that's okay, you've come to the right place, I'm going to try to talk you out of it. That's my, I don't know, my calling in life is to get more people that are recovering perfectionists. And I'll explain why as we move forward. But before I do, let's talk about what is a perfectionist. So a perfectionist is a person, it should be pretty self-explanatory, but it's a person who refuses to accept any standard short of perfection, all right? So we have this really high bar and I'll talk about my ideas on what that means, perfection in a little bit here. But we have this really high bar, no matter how you define it, it's a high bar and not anything short of that is considered maybe failure, right? All right, so what is perfection? Well, again, the definition is the condition, state, or quality of being free or as free as possible from flaws or defects. I would push back on this a little bit. To me perfection means completely free of flaws and defects, not as close as possible, all right? I'll come back to that again, but I just want to share that. Make sure we're on the same page, what is perfectionism, what is perfection? Okay, now we've got something to work with, we're all on the same page, let's move forward. There's three types of perfectionism identified in psychology. One of them is self-oriented perfectionism, that's imposing an irrational desire to be perfect on oneself, all right? So I'm looking at, maybe looking in the mirror and saying I have a desire to be perfect, all right? Then we have other-oriented perfectionism. This could have been, again, this could be parents, this could be maybe you're a leader of your team. I see leaders sometimes struggle with this, they expect their team to be perfect, right? So this is directing that perfectionism, maybe you have it, a lot of times the reason why we're directing that toward others is because we have a case of perfectionism. And so we expect others to be at that same standard of being perfect. So that would be other-oriented perfectionism. And then the last one is socially-prescribed perfectionism. And it's perceiving excessive expectations or perfection from others. And I would say that's either explicit or implicit, all right? It can be direct or indirect, the social pressure that we get to be perfect. This is the one that I really want to, well, I think all of these are important, but this third one as you're going to see in a second here is the one we really gotta be careful with. This is the, in my opinion the easier one to unplug from although it's probably the most dangerous. This idea of perfectionism is rising across the board. We looked at those three different kinds of perfection, all of them are rising, all right? But the one that's rising the most is again that socially-prescribed perfectionism. It's going up by a third. That's pretty crazy. In this time frame, roughly I don't know what is that. 35 years, it's gone up a great deal. What do you think is driving that? I think you would, hopefully your mind's going well, what would it be? I think you]d probably quickly move to the idea of social media, right? And I think that would be a good place to start. I don't think that's the only thing that's driving this, but I think that's a big driver of this idea of socially-prescribed perfectionism and why is this toxic, all right? So one of your readings, and we're going to get heavy for a second here. But one of your readings is especially with young people, all right? And I deal with a lot of students that are younger and the amount of pressure that's on them to perform at a high level and in many times is perfectionism, is incredibly staggering to me to watch. They have so much riding on everything they do or at least they think they do. They have a perception they can't fail and they have to be perfect. And we're seeing this with young athletes, but I don't think it's relegated just to athletics, but with young athletes committing suicide, all right? Perfectionism, they can't live up to that perfectionism and they feel the only way out is to commit suicide. Please find help, if you're feeling that way there's people out there to help and I encourage you to do that. And I always like to say you can get a hold of me anytime you need somebody to talk to. So I'll put that out there. There is people to help. But again, driven by this is that crazy high expectation to be perfect. And where is that coming from? A lot of times that's coming from this comparison to others, right? Constantly evaluating our own behavior, thoughts, emotions, relationships, all that stuff. The way we look, the clothes that we wear, Instagram drives this crazy, right? And so all of this comparison, that I don't measure up, I'm not as good as Sally or Joe, they're on these great vacations. Again, what is social media? Social media is a comparison machine, all right? I'm going to say that right here, it's a comparison machine. That's exactly its job, is to get you comparing yourself to others, all right? And a lot of times there's distress that comes out of that, right? because we almost always feel like we don't measure up, right? This is not a good place to be. And again, it's all driven by what? By comparison. What if we could unplug from that, what if we could say, you know what? I'm going to run my own race, swim my own race, all those things that we've heard. Stay in my own lane, those sort of things. I'm going to do my thing and I'm not going to compare myself to Sally or Joe, they're different, right? I'm an apple, they're an orange, okay? We are not the same people, we're at different places, we have different influences, we are a different set of variables, each and every one of us. It's not a direct comparison. Why would we do that and why would we look at that as objective? It's completely not objective, it's subjective. One of my favorite quotes is comparison is the thief of joy, okay? Theodore Roosevelt said this, my students here it all the time. And so I want to share that with you. Comparison is the thief of joy. You want to live a good life, you want to unplug from the distress, unplug from comparison, all right? Stop looking at others and saying, how come I don't measure up to them? There's no good that comes out of that. Now, you might be saying, hey Ron, how do I get better? All right? If I can't compare myself to Sally or Joel that're above me, how do I get better? Well, you compare yourself to you. Compare yourself to what I'm going to share with you later in a lesson is, what is your personal excellence? What does that look like for you? Compare yourself to that. You can still be elite by doing it just like that. We don't need to chase others to be elite, okay? I know it's a little bit of a controversial statement and it's not going to sit well with everybody, but that's what I would advice, okay? So let's talk about this idea, we're going to spin this a little bit. Maladaptive perfectionism is often driven by fear of failure, feelings of unworthiness, so your self-worth, is maybe another way to put that. Low-self esteem, and a lot of times this starts in our childhood, all right? It did for me, and again, this is no knock on the parents out there, it's the toughest job in the world. You're doing the best you can to raise your children the right way. But a lot of times I see parents putting unrealistic expectations on their kids, be careful with that, all right? So that's where this a lot of time starts, again you'll hear things like never enough. That was something that I always felt was perfectionism as I was never enough. And again, that's very much tied to my feelings of self-worth. If you feel like you're never enough, what do you think is going to happen with your self-esteem and your feelings of self-worth? They're probably going to be pretty low, all right? So think about that, that's maladaptive perfectionism. If we look at adaptive or positive perfectionism, and I'm going to tell you my thoughts on this after I share this slide, but I have some thoughts on this. So when you have a positive relationship with perfectionism, you set lofty goals, you have high standards, you work hard, all those things, you're achievement-oriented. I think these are all great things, all right? Instead of being fearful of failure, you embrace it and is a way to have a growth mindset and get better and that sort of thing. So I think that's a good thing, although, the only thing I'm going to push back on this. I'm going to share this, I did just share this, but I'm also going to say I don't like this. because again, this is not perfectionism, in my humble opinion, I like everything about this except I would take out the word perfectionist, all right? Again, perfectionism is a level that there's no flaws, okay? Just stand by and I'll tell you what I think about that. But here's the idea, what you see on this slide, if we just replace perfectionism with personal excellence, I love this slide, all right? So that's what I'm going to say to you, again, that's coming up in a lesson as we move forward here. But here's the deal, here is my thoughts on perfectionism. I believe as human beings, anything that we're doing that's even remotely complex, perfection is unattainable, okay? There's just too many variables, too many moving parts to get done with anything that we're doing in life and say, you know what, I couldn't have done anything to make that better. I always feel there's always a small tweak that could have made it a little bit better. So I believe perfection is unattainable, okay? Now if you don't believe that, stick with me, I'll present an argument for that too. But if you're with me and saying perfection is unattainable, so I have this target that's unattainable, all right? When I just say that, does that sound ludicrous? I have a target that's unattainable, perfection is unattainable. Why would I ever shoot for that target? That sets me up for an entire lifetime of failure. I'm perfectly fine with failure, but I don't want to fail every single time, okay? That's where we get these high levels of anxiety, high levels of distress, and again, in the worst moments perhaps even suicide and suicidal ideation. So let's not set that bar up there in an unrealistic spot, all right? Now, you're saying, hey Ron, I do believe it's attainable, okay? I disagree, but I'll stick with you on this one, let's have another discussion. If you say it is attainable, I can attain perfection. I would say, how often can you attain it? And if you say all the time or at a high level, I'd say, I don't know where your definition of perfection is coming from. I would say, even if you feel like it's attainable, you're going to attain it very, very rarely, okay? And that's fine too if you want to advance that notion. But again, 1% of the time I'm going to achieve perfection, 99% of the time I'm going to fail, all right? I'm going to come up short. Again, it's the same kind of argument that I just made. That's a lifetime of a lot of not feeling good about ourselves, all right? So think about that. That's why I rail against this idea of perfectionism. Positive perfectionists are achievement-oriented. I love that, all right? So again, I wouldn't use the words positive perfectionist, I would say personal excellence, but achievement-oriented is great. Negative perfectionists are failure-oriented, all right? So they're usually very fearful of failing, because why? When you fail you're not perfect. So immediately we get this feedback that we are not good enough. That's what's at the heart of that. If you're an engineering student, a lot of my students out there are, you probably know asymptote, you know this idea of asymptote, right? If you don't, go back to your high school math and maybe you'll remember an asymptote. And really it's something that approaches something but never actually achieves it, all right? So approaches in this sense, in math, we're approaching a line, or a formula, or something like that, but we know it never quite gets there. It gets really close, infinitesimally close, but never quite gets there. So I want you to think about, instead of using perfection as your target, look at this asymptote to perfection. And I'm going to call this personal excellence or mastery, all right? We're going to talk about personal excellence and mastery in the next two lessons. So I'll expand on what that means. But the idea is to let go of perfectionism and start to seek that asymptote which looks a lot more healthy than perfection as your target. I hope you enjoyed this, will see you in the next video.
