Speaker 1
Yeah, labels are a good, I don't know, guide But I think it can be detrimental to use those labels to define who we are as a person 100% and to get to your question The two things you want to see if you really want to test where your perfectionism is at In terms of whether it's in a healthy or unhealthy space It's like how are you striving and why are you striving? And so if the how is like you're striving in a way that feels good and energizing And connected for you, then that's adaptive perfectionism If you're striving in a way where you're just burning yourself out And you're frustrating yourself and pissing yourself off and all that stuff That's more maladaptive And the why are you striving? It's like are you striving because you think you're going to get this thing X amount of listeners, X amount of money, X amount on number on the scale And that's going to certify your belonging somewhere to some club or some group Or that's going to make you feel worthy of all the stuff we talked about at the top of the conversation Or are you striving because you love to? And it makes you feel like more of who you are And you're not so attached to the outcome, you're obsessed with the process And if you're striving for those reasons, then that's healthy perfectionism Yeah, it's almost like we're abutting the limitations of the English language here, right? Because what we're talking about is like striving versus someone might call that a chase Someone else might call it devotion to something, right? And the devotion side I see as being the sort of healthy obsession about something The striving for a particular outcome or chasing an outcome is a surefire path to misery Because what happens is you get it and then you're happy for about three seconds And then oh wow, look at me, we're just talking about this morning, Mal, when we were talking about pride And how Hailed Wode Skin talks about how pride is essentially the fear of not being able to do something again Which I thought was a really interesting framing Because here's the thing, like if we were nominated for an Emmy a few years ago And it'd be easy to feel pride for that at first, but then what's the pride saying? Uh oh, this is rare, I might not be able to do this again Or the very first time I tied my shoe, I felt pride around, I was a late shoe tire, I didn't get to it I was like seven or eight years old And so I felt a lot of pride, but imagine if I walked into this studio today and I was like You're not going to believe this, Catherine, I was able to tie my shoe all by myself this morning Well I don't feel that way because there's no scarcity around, there's no fear that I won't be able to do that again I do want to touch on the five types of perfectionists in a moment, but let's tune in to Instagram, Malabama We got a question from Rose I'm cohabitating with someone who isn't a minimalist and I need help on developing some strategies to maintain our common spaces I know it isn't reasonable to hold them to my high standards, but I don't want to play made to them either We've tried several different systems to keep clutter at bay, but it never seems to last for long What are some tools to help me keep the peace and keep things organized? So Catherine, I'm interested in this question because I do suffer from perfectionism to the point where it becomes the opposite of productive It becomes neurotic, I neuros over it, and it becomes a type of prison And in your book what you talk about is having boundaries around the perfectionism Because I think we were talking about this earlier, to some extent, but the chase isn't going to bring happiness I think the same thing is true with decluttering, decluttering is not going to bring you peace It's going to set up the environment in which you've removed the chaos and so you can be peaceful But let's be frank about this, it's also possible