Overcoming the Need to Be Perfect - 5

Perfectionism might look like high standards on the surface, but underneath, it’s often fear in disguise—fear of judgment, fear of failure, and fear of not being “good enough.” In this episode, I unpack how perfectionism keeps us stuck, why it’s really about self-criticism and punishment, and how it robs us of creativity, progress, and joy. 

I’ll share practical tools to loosen perfectionism’s grip—from practicing “B-work,” to reframing mistakes as experiments, to learning how to move forward even when things feel messy or incomplete. 

If you’ve ever found yourself saying “I’ll start when it’s perfect,” this conversation is your permission slip to stop waiting and start living. 

Welcome to Lady(ish)—the podcast where real talk meets whole-self transformation. Hosted by coach, healer, and wellness guide Autumn Noble O’Hanlon, this unfiltered space is for women who want more out of life—but on their own terms.

Each week, we dive into the messy, beautiful, and often contradictory layers of wellness, covering everything from career shifts and body image to energy healing, intuitive living, fitness, burnout recovery, and creating change that actually sticks.

Whether you're chasing a new chapter, healing old wounds, or just trying to reconnect with yourself in a loud, overwhelming world—Lady(ish) is here to support your evolution. Expect honest conversations, coaching wisdom, holistic tools, spiritual insights, and permission to be a little bit of everything (and nothing you're not).

Because wellness isn’t one-size-fits-all—and neither are you.

AutumnNoble.com

Newsletter Sign Up: https://autumnnoble.com/newsletter/

Autumn@theuncomfortabledream.com

For moon rituals, sabbats, and nature practices, subscribe to my YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/@ALifeCollective

Let's meet! Schedule a call/session: AutumnNoble.as.me

Transcript

Autumn Noble (00:00)

Welcome back to the podcast my friends. Today we're talking about something that holds so many of us back, perfectionism.

This podcast came to mind recently when I was working with a new personal training client. This woman had not been in the gym for a very long time. And here she was before me telling me how she was going to come into the gym five days a week, she was gonna change her entire diet. And she wanted me to help her figure out how to work out two to three times a day. And I'm sitting here thinking, I need to help her scale back, I need to help her set reasonable expectations. But this is something that so many of us do.

we set a goal, we decide that we wanna change something and we just take it to the extreme and almost set ourselves up for failure before we even begin. So if you're someone who has a goal or something you wanna change in your life and you can just feel yourself going to the extreme, putting a tremendous amount of pressure on yourself, you may be suffering from perfectionism in this episode is gonna help you dig out.

At the other end of the perfectionist spectrum are those of us that want to do all these things, but we just don't feel ready or we're waiting until the time is right to execute. That is another sign that perfectionism is really driving the bus. So I want you to tune in today and check out some very simple tips that you can use every day to dismantle perfectionism and make more meaningful progress that will last in your life.

I want to start by dismantling the perfectionist illusion. Those of you that are familiar with my work, historically I've worked primarily with attorneys. And this is not something that's unique to attorneys, but it is something that I saw an awful lot in that space. They would tell me, you I want to do this thing, but I don't want to do it until I can do it right and do it correctly. And it sounds so

noble and it sounds so ethical in alignment with our duties as lawyers. But the fact of the matter is that type of sentiment and story that we're telling ourselves is a little bit more nefarious than it looks on paper. The truth is that perfectionism is just another way to protect ourselves, but do it in kind of a pretty and nobler way by saying, you know, I just want to do it right.

When we tell ourselves that we're going to delay action until we can do something flawlessly, what really ends up happening 99 % of the time is that it just morphs into inaction. Because what does it ever mean to be ready completely to do something? It's such an amorphous standard that it's really giving us permission to stay in place and not take action. And this is something that I see all the time.

And here's the really nefarious part about it. It's not just about avoiding failure or trying to do something right. A lot of it has to do with avoiding our own self judgment and how we'll talk to ourselves if we do the thing and we don't do it perfectly. Deep down, a lot of us use perfectionism as a way to

punish ourselves for past failures or bad behaviors or decisions. We carry with us this guilt or shame from mistakes that we've made in the past. So we set these impossibly high standards as a form of penance and self-protection from making that same mistake and feeling that way again. We think to ourselves, if I can just get it right this time or perfect this time.

It will make up for these times in the past where I failed and I didn't do it right or people judged me.

but that really does keep us stuck in our own cycle of judgment because typically, as I said, that perfectionism leads to inaction. So we're just sitting here not taking action and reminding ourselves of those past failures and all the guilt and the shame that comes with them. And we're just kind of stewing in it and not making any forward motion.

So instead of evolving with compassion, we're just holding ourselves back and keeping ourselves hostage to these very unrealistic expectations that we've created.

So in short, perfectionism is absolutely a fear of failure, right? And kind of a prettier outfit, but it's also fear of ourselves, fear of our own inner critic and our own inner judgment. It's a lot safer to hold off on taking action than it is to risk facing the harshness of our own self-talk if something doesn't go as planned.

And that is why perfectionism is so exhausting. You're not only trying to protect yourself from other people's criticism, but you're also bracing for the punishment that you'll hand down on yourself if things don't go the way that you want them to.

but let's add a little bit of science and research to this position.

Research has shown that perfectionism often morphs into a cycle of self-criticism and emotional strain linked to anxiety, depression, burnout, and even eating disorders and parent-child tension when that perfectionism takes place within the home and the familial dynamic.

Similarly, studies in academic settings confirm that perfectionist tendencies, especially that fear of making mistakes, is tied to higher levels of procrastination, which makes a lot of sense. Mental patterns of being consumed by the wrongness of things actually traps us in inaction. And so this research has supported what I'm telling you today is that perfectionism really prevents any action and forward progress.

In a study of university students around perfectionism, researchers found that self-critical perfectionism eroded life satisfaction in general.

and stood between low self-esteem and well-being. So it sort of kept us from evolving to better well-being and healthier well-being and kept us stuck in low self-esteem and kind of churning in that self-judgment.

Research has also found that part of this is driven by the disconnect between who we think we should be and how we think we should be and who and how we actually are. And it's that emotional dissonance that we experience when our reality doesn't match up with this ideal. And psychology really understands that gap between the dream and reality and who we ought to be.

psychology has shown us that that dissonance is not only just really, really painful, but that is part of and one of the many drivers of perfectionism. We've created this standard that we think we should uphold and we should be, and we look at our lives and we see that there's a disconnect, there's a mismatch, and that drives, that strive to be different and be better in that self-judgment because of the gap.

In my experience as a coach, one of the biggest downfalls of engaging in perfectionism, in my opinion, is that it actually prevents us from being more confident human beings. And listen, I have coached powerful women and attorneys all over the world and people with really amazing titles and really amazing resumes.

And what I will tell you is the vast majority of them are still seeking more confidence and want to feel more in control of their presence and their power. But when you engage in perfectionist tendencies, it actually prevents you from being more confident because confidence doesn't come from being hard on ourselves or punishing ourselves. It comes from

self-trust. And it's really having our own back and trusting our own decisions and not judging ourselves for those decisions. It's sort of stepping into that power of trusting yourself and allowing yourself to make the right decision with all the information available to you at the time and then not judging that decision later on. Confidence truly is the epitome of self-trust. And that self-trust only grows when we act.

fail, make a mistake and learn to move forward from it without falling into a black hole of self judgment and guilt and shame. When you know that you can survive embarrassment, shame and guilt, when you can withstand your own thoughts and your own failures and your own judgments, not get sucked into them, that's when you start building resilience. And resilience is what ultimately turns into

self-confidence and trusting that power and your ability to show up and keep going. That means that if you want to become more confident, you have to start risking failure and taking action even when that action isn't perfect. You have to stop using perfectionism as self-punishment and start using failure as a training ground for trusting yourself. You cannot be more confident

and not experience some type of failure in negative emotions. They are mutually exclusive. To be confident, we have to start experiencing those things, which means we have to start acting imperfectly.

One of the things I want you to consider when we think about dismantling perfectionism is really challenging yourself. What if I allowed myself to only give 80 % or strive for B minus work instead of perfect and utilize that old adage that sometimes done really is better than perfect? And what if we let that guide our actions and set our standards? What if you recognize that sometimes

your boss, your job, your partner, your family. It doesn't need A++ work. They just need you to show up as best you can in the moment. And maybe that's just 80%. What's the worst that could happen if you let yourself stop overthinking and just started acting? Usually the worst thing that could happen is embarrassment, shame, or guilt, which are feelings that we create, vibrations that we create.

by the thoughts that we're choosing. So here's the beauty of it. You get to choose how you talk to yourself when things don't go as planned. And you get to choose how you talk to yourself when you're only giving 80 % or B minus work instead of A plus plus work. You get to decide what that means and how you talk to yourself about it. You decide whether to punish yourself or remind yourself that this is just

one step in the learning process and that you know what not everything has to be perfect. Sometimes showing up is better than not showing up because you can't show up perfectly.

So I really want you to hear me when I say, how we feel after any type of failure or shortcoming is directly within our control because those feelings don't just come out of the ether, right? There's not some judge out there saying, you should have done better at that. I want you to feel terrible. We choose to feel terrible because we're the ones deciding what the standard is and we're the ones choosing how we talk to ourselves. And if we tell ourselves you should have done better,

You could have done better. Everyone's disappointed in you. And that's the story on repeat. Yeah, you're going to feel terrible. But that is all within our power and control. And that's a beautiful thing because you can instead start to choose a different story to tell yourself. I'm doing the best I can. I can't give 100 percent to everybody. You know what? It wasn't perfect, but I'm learning and I'm trying. That story is going to generate different emotions for you and drive you to show up differently in your life moving forward.

So I wanna share with you some very simple tips to start combating perfectionism in your day-to-day life. The first one is very easy, very simple to apply, just journaling and reflecting. I'm a huge advocate for journaling and getting to know ourselves a little bit better so that we can start to understand the stories that we're telling ourselves so that we can know what stories need to be changed and dismantled. So start journaling about times when you feel the urge

to be perfect or when you feel yourself judging and criticizing yourself and ask what triggered it? What rules am I trying to follow? Are there any shoulds floating around? I should do this or I should be more like that. Where does that come from? And really exploring that and then reflecting on how those shoulds and self judgments made you feel. We wanna start naming the cycle, understanding the stories that we're telling ourselves

so that we can start to see it simply as that unhealthy patterns, unhealthy stories that we can then dismantle, but we can't do that until we see them and understand them. And journaling can help you do that. 

Two, simply reframe your mistakes. Instead of seeing any mistake as a proof of your inadequacy or proof that you shouldn't have acted and you weren't ready, respond instead as that's just good information for me to have, more data that can help me grow. And reaching for a simple reframe of this didn't go as planned, but what can I learn and do differently moving forward? And intentionally choosing not to play those stories of self judgment and self criticism, but instead shifting to a new story of growth and evolution. What can I learn? How can I take this with me and move forward differently?

Three, challenging that inner critic and really notice when that kind of mean part of you says, like that just wasn't good enough. And when you hear that inner critic say things like that, practice responding with self-compassion. And you can do this in a journaling exercise or you can just do it in your own head. Because research has shown that more self-compassion that we engage in will reduce perfectionism and increase resilience.

So almost imagine if someone said to you, you should have done better. That wasn't good enough. If I was to challenge you to defend yourself, what would you say? That's the story I want you to start biting back with in your head. I did the best I could. Would it surprise you to know that I have a life outside of this and you gave me an unrealistic deadline? know, whatever it is, but practicing standing up to that critic in the same way you would to an external critic.

Four: setting flexible standards. And that really goes back to this idea of 80 % or B minus work. Asking yourself, what would good enough look like in this situation? Like what's the bare minimum that's actually needed here? And why am I telling myself that I need to do better? Right, for example, you know, I coach a lot of women that, you know, they wanna host things, they wanna do things with friends, they're juggling all of these things. And I said to a client the other day,

You know, she had a crazy schedule. She runs a whole law firm and she was hosting this event and she was going to cook all this stuff. And I said to her, why do you feel the need to cook everything from scratch when you have all of these other things going on and demanding your time? And what we found was it really came back to this self judgment of, know, if I'm hosting, I should be the one cooking everything. And I said to her, you know, what would it get you to let go of that standard just this one time?

and maybe engage some additional support. You can ask people to cook things, you can ask people to bring things, or you know what, you can have it catered. But really forcing her to think outside of that standard that she had set and see if there was another more flexible, more gentle standard that she could engage to show herself some compassion and recognize everything that she was juggling. That's the kind of shift that can really move you out of chaos or paralysis.

and help you start seeing that there are always other options available to us that don't require us to be so perfect or to bend over backwards.

Practicing exposure to imperfection, and I love this one so much, and this is something that I've really engaged in, in my own practice, my own businesses that I run, is to try to do something intentionally imperfect, like sending an email without triple checking or posting a photo without editing it, or you know what, taking a running start at podcasts and not worrying about whether or not they're all perfect. Practicing putting yourself out there imperfectly.

is going to build that resilience. And it really flexes that muscle in your brain of tolerating the discomfort and see that perfection is survivable. So we sort of force these macro imperfections, or these micro imperfections and these micro failures to teach our brain, like, hey, this is really not that big of a deal. Like I sent an email with a typo or I released a podcast that had all these issues. And you know what? No one said anything. Like, no big deal, moving on.

and I save myself all that time and judgment and spinning just by moving forward. So look for ways to let go a little bit and kind of practice a little bit of rebellious imperfection. Six, mindfulness and self-acceptance. Mindfulness techniques teach you to start noticing those patterns and noticing those stories and judgmental thoughts without attaching to them. I'm gonna release some upcoming meditation. ⁓

guided meditations and meditation instructions, but one of the core elements of meditation is starting to notice your thoughts as if they were sort of like leaves on a stream, just floating by you. And we're just watching them. We're not attaching to them. We're not judging ourselves for having them, but we're just starting to see, you know, what is happening up there and starting to disconnect from those thoughts and seeing them more as choices and truth.

And then we can just recognize like these are just stories that have run on repeat in my head. They're not me. They're disconnected from me. And that is why meditation and mindfulness, I think, are so essential in dismantling some of these practices because it allows us to separate from those thought patterns and learn some new grounding and centering techniques that can reduce anxiety, that drives perfectionism, and it can help you recognize your own patterns so that we can then fix them.

Seven, focusing on values and not rules. And I love this, especially when we think about New Year's resolutions. Many of us have perfectionist tendencies and they really come out around New Year's, right? It's like, I'm sick of being overweight, I'm sick of being lazy, and I'm sick of, you know, all these judgments and I'm gonna change this and I should be more like this, right? It's really driven by a judgmental energy and there's a lot of shoulds in there. So instead, when you think about goals or New Year's resolutions,

Think about it from a space of what do I value here and what's my core underlying intention? Instead of saying, I need to go to the gym, I'm sick of being overweight and fat, you can say, you know, I really do value a well-rounded health, right? Not just emotional health, but physical health. And my core intention is to, you know, attend to that physical health a little bit more in any way that I can. And that...

is a kinder, gentler, just the energy around saying it is so much more compassionate than the judgments of shoulds and those rigid standards that we keep. So instead of saying I should be more like this or I should do more of that, ask yourself like what's the actual value I have here? What's my underlying intention? And let that drive you instead of the judgments.

Eight is certainly gravitating towards any therapy or coaching support that's available to you. If this is really something that's wrecking havoc in your life, cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown to be very effective for perfectionism. Coaching is also an option that's available to you to help you untangle some of those deeper roots of self-worth or failure of past criticism. And therapy is also

a tool that can help you unpack all of those things. So don't ever be afraid of engaging additional support. And last, practice more realistic goals day in and day out. Kind of going back to where we started, that woman that I was starting to train and she said she wanted to come in five days a week. And this is from someone who had not worked out for many, many years. And I said to her, I want to take all of the goals that I'm hearing from you and I want to cut them in half.

And she kind of looked at me and she knew exactly what I was getting at because she was just being so hard on herself. And a lot of us do this in every day, right? We show up at work with this massive to-do list, things that we're gonna knock out over the weekend. And it's huge and it feels so, you know, just overwhelming. And so take your to-do list, take your daily plan and cut it in half.

Because let's be honest here, you're probably not gonna get through all of it anyway. So we might as well start the day by being honest with ourselves and strategizing around what we're not gonna get through instead of beating ourselves up for the things that deep down we know that we're not gonna get through them. So starting off our day is more realistic, taking those goals, cutting them in half. Instead of saying, I'm gonna meditate every day for an hour.

maybe is I'm gonna meditate once a week for two minutes. Instead of saying I'm gonna go to the gym five days a week from nothing, maybe I'm gonna go for a walk for 10 minutes, one time a week and get started there, but really being realistic with how you're getting started and making sure that any goal or to-do list is founded in self-compassion and not self-judgment because you're gonna get so much more traction and growth from starting with compassion first.

because that self judgment is just gonna morph into perfectionism and it's gonna paralyze you and keep you from moving forward and prevent you from becoming more confident and it's gonna cause all those yucky problems that we talked about earlier, right? More anxiety, potentially depression and just not making progress on our goals. So a lot of reasons to start cutting those to-do lists and goals in half at least and trying to be more compassionate with the standards that we set.

The bottom line here is that perfectionism is just a form of self-punishment disguised as high standards, right? It's just self-cruelty and a nice outfit. Healing is going to come from awareness, self-compassion, and practicing more flexibility and reminding yourself that you are worthy whether or not you meet every perfect mark or standard that you just create out of the blue, right? There is no universal standard for how we are supposed to be.

as women in all the hats that we wear, we get to decide. So here's my challenge for you. Commit to action, period. Commit to 80 % or even B minus work. Take that to-do list and cut it in half. Take those goals and make it a fraction of where you started. Allow yourself to fail. Allow space for compassion. Allow space for growth and evolution.

because every single failure is the price of admission to real success, but also more confidence. We have to start making space for those little micro-growths with those failures. And we have to stop punishing ourselves for just being human. Perfectionism, it isn't noble, it's fear and self-judgment in disguise. So don't let it steal your progress, your peace, or your confidence.

strive for that continuous improvement, not perfection. Perfectionism is no movement whatsoever.

So get out there, put your imperfect work into the world, risk failing, risk criticism, And when you do fail, don't pile judgment on top of it. Choose compassion, change the story you tell yourself.

that's how you grow, and that's how you create the life that you really want.

And if you're feeling stuck in perfectionism and need help moving forward, one simple session with me can make all the difference. You don't have to do this alone. You can sign up for a free session and start creating the life that you really want.

Thank you so much for joining me today, my friends. I hope this episode was helpful to you. If it was, I would love to hear from you. You can send me an email to autumn at theuncomfortabledream.com or check out the link in the show notes to schedule a virtual coffee to chat with me or a free coaching consultation. And if you're interested in the upcoming new moon and utilizing this new space of energy, I have an upcoming new moon meditation that's coming out this Saturday.

You can join me on YouTube linked in the show notes or catch the audio version on this podcast.

And if you'd like to take your nature-based practices even deeper, don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel where I share sabbat rituals and seasonal practices to guide you through every turn of the wheel of the year.

Thank you so much, my friends. look forward to seeing you next week.