Episode 80 - Me, My, and Your Perfectionism

Amanda is a young lady described in a recently published book reviewed in the August 23, 20023 Wall Street Journal. She’s had perfectionism drilled into her, Barbie-style, and she’s internalized it. “Self-directed” perfectionism is the perfectionism that’s directed at yourself; it’s what we normally think of as perfectionism. Amanda has hit all her milestones through her middle-class upbringing: the grades, the extracurriculars, and the great school. And now she has a great job. She’s empty. Why? Answering that question is, in many ways, the point of this podcast. We all know, intellectually, that chasing success can be a trap. Success, however, comes in many forms, including not only professional work but also marriage, family, children, roles in our local church, health, body image, and more. For instance, have you been complaining about your lack of progression in your “spiritual” life for pretty much all of your life? As midlifers, we are likely to need to give up on some of our hoped-for “successes'' if we want to flourish, if for no other reason than the fact that our ambitious and unrealistic 20-year-old selves very likely set a bar so high that we can’t reach it in every area of our life. Perfectionism is one of the big thought traps we can so easily fall into. Most perfectionists refuse to see it for the performance-killer and joy-stealer that it is. As we say in Minnesota: “Go figure.”

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