If you missed my recent blog about making my dreams come true, it’s possible that you weren’t aware that I’m a recovering perfectionist.

Yep. It’s true. I was holding myself back from achieving lots of things in life and business, due to being crippled with perfectionism.

WHAT IS PERFECTIONISM?

Perfectionism is a behaviour that we adopt to help soothe ourselves so that we AVOID the discomfort of feeling those uncomfortable emotions like disappointment, or rejection, or someone judging us for our work, or maybe letting someone down, or someone judging our intelligence, or someone judging our worthiness etc.

Perfectionism is a COPING MECHANISM and in my case it was passed down to me from both of my parents.

When I think back to my previous career as a fitness professional, perfectionism shrouded an awful lot of what I did.

And, later on, when I built up the teacher training and business mentoring side of my business, it continued to do so.

People who display perfectionist tendencies are perfectly nice people (pardon the pun 😄), but they’re often hiding behind a mask of sorts 😷, and perfectionism keeps that deep, dark secret hidden from public view.

I know WHY I’m a perfectionist, and everyone’s reasons will be different.

If you’re interested to find out HOW many aspects of my work were shrouded in perfectionism, let’s dive in…

 

1 – PILATES PRINCIPLES

I taught Pilates for several years and one of the principles of Pilates is “precision”.

I’ve got to say that informing me, the perfectionist of this, is like handing me a permission slip to pepper my perfectionist tendencies into everything I did, including the way I taught exercise and movement to people.

Pilates is very postural. You BET that I had fun setting people up in various starting positions, and yep – damn SURE I wandered around class making sure no one dare deviate from neutral – har har! 😂

In 2015, I updated my skills, by completing an in-depth biomechanics qualification.

And, whilst it revolutionised the way I prescribed exercise to people including the pelvic floor teacher training certification I created etc, it was very “alignment-focussed” and, what followed was even more “you must be in the correct position” cues.

All I can say is this: it’s a good job I had a good sense of humour, because the exercise content of my classes was most definitely “heavy on the details”, which I took to mean “everyone must move in a perfect manner”, otherwise there will be consequences.

 

2 – ALWAYS DOUBTING MYSELF / NEVER FEELING ENOUGH

That fear of doubt, and never feeling like I was ever enough was strong inside me, the past perfectionist.

In my case, I think part of the reason I taught group classes for a very long time before venturing into the world of personal training, was realistically due to me fearing that I wouldn’t KNOW the answers to my personal training clients’ questions, and/or I wouldn’t be able to GIVE them enough to get them the results they desired from me.

There’s safety in numbers, right, and I took this to the extreme by continuing to AVOID being in a position where I didn’t have to have that intense interaction with 1:1 clients.

Teaching groups meant that I developed the knowledge, experience and wisdom to eventually:

a) find a niche (originally it was pre and postnatal exercise, then abdominal separation, then pelvic floor dysfunction), and then
b) find the confidence to venture out into a one-on-one setting and feel comfortable with it

But…imagine how many more PT clients I could’ve worked with if I didn’t have this fear?! 😨

Part of my personality means that I have to “learn all of the stuff” before I feel ready.

And, this can sometimes reach a point of “information paralysis” whereby I go down rabbit holes to “learn all of the stuff”, but it never feels like I’ve learnt ENOUGH of the stuff, if you see what I mean?

In my case, perfectionism showed up to help me COPE with the fear of not knowing enough, and not BEING enough which is linked to my low self-worth. I’ve made huge waves in improving my self-esteem, self-confidence and self-worth in the last year and feel so much better for it.

HERE’S THE THING THOUGH: I didn’t just have a low opinion of MYSELF as a person, I also hated my body too, which is also linked to low self-worth (funny that 🙄).

You can read about my body confidence journey here in my personal memoir “Uncovered”.

3 – OVER-PREPARATION / LESSON PLANNING

CONFESSION: very rarely did I ever NOT teach my group classes from a lesson plan.

Sure, I got smart and savvy towards the end of my teaching career, and I got to the point where I re-hashed, re-cycled and re-used several old lesson plans to save myself the brain space of having to re-write new ones.

But, I definitely felt like my lesson plans were a security blanket of sorts for me.

It wasn’t until later that I realised in doing so, I’d essentially lost touch with my intuition.

Obviously, a skill that every educator develops over time is the ability to “think on their feet”.

And, gosh, it was anxiety-inducing for me when 6 x people come up to me before class with various ailments and injuries 😨

Somehow, I just managed to accommodate them all, but it definitely kind of left me hanging by a thread in the moment, and for several hours afterwards on the come down after class!

 

4 – POWERPOINT HELL

Over my career in fitness, I created well over 30 online courses, and for many of them, I used PowerPoint for the “teaching” or “educational” modules.

HERE’S THE THING THOUGH…

I don’t much like PowerPoint, or anything graphic design for that matter.

This video here sums up my thoughts on the matter perfectly:

🚫 BAD LANGUAGE WARNING! 🚫

For some reason, putting text in boxes and then moving those boxes around a million times until it never looks right was NOT something I enjoyed doing.

Doing this for hours and hours and hours at a time, was me sitting in my perfectionism zone, for hours and hours and hours at a time 💀

Imagine what other things I could’ve achieved in that time?!

Or, another way to look at it is this: imagine all of the FUN I missed out on instead?!?

Ok, moving on to the next perfectionist point…

 

5 – OVER-EDITING

I like the written word, and I actually find writing quite cathartic.  That’s why I’m now venturing into the world of blogging.

I’m a fast typist, and this is due to one long, boring summer when I was about 10, where I taught myself to touch type on the family’s Commodore 64 computer.

(Yep. Kids these days don’t know the meaning of boredom, do they?! It’s a useful skill to have though I guess – har har! 😂)

I’ve produced a lot of written content over the years: endless sales pages for my websites, I’ve managed 3 x separate blogs, published 4 x different email newsletters, produced countless advertorials and written pieces for newspapers/magazine, written 200+ show notes for my podcast, as well as penning ALL of those captions and posts for social media.

If you add all of that up – that’s a lot of writing, isn’t it?

Problem is though: perfectionism meant that I could edit and edit and edit my work over and over and over, and still NEVER be 100% happy with it.

Nowadays, I set myself a limit of 3 x edits, and that’s it 🙌

I start typing whatever it is I’m typing.  Sometimes it immediately flows.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes I give up after a few minutes.  Sometimes I return back to it later with fresh eyes and then it flows better.

Either way though, I’m strict with my “3 strikes” rule now, and I’ve reached a nice cosy place of acceptance, which I never thought would ever be possible.

I used to over-edit and over-edit. I’d dot all of the i’s and cross all of the t’s. I’d make sure I hadn’t used the same word twice in the same paragraph. I’d overanalyse my use of punctuation. And, i’d check for spelling mistakes constantly because heaven forbid what others will think of me if I typed “practise” when it should’ve been “practice”.

That last point used to trigger me a LOT!

Nowadays though, triggers teach and reveal things to me that I know I need to address.  And, oftentimes triggers reflect my own insecurities, my own fears, and my own judgements BACK to me.

So, whilst it’s uncomfortable to BE triggered by something or someone, I lean into these more and see them as teaching moments for my-self.

Food for thought, right there.

 

FINAL POINT…

A final point I’d like to make about perfectionism for me is that I had a tendency to wear my perfectionism as a bit of a badge of honour.

You would’ve regularly heard me say in response to someone: “Oh, I’m a bit of a perfectionist over here, so, I…”, or “I kind of like things to be perfect myself, so…”, and I guess I talked myself into thinking I was HAPPY with this behaviour, whereas realistically, nothing could’ve been further from the truth.

I’m MUCH happier in myself now that I’ve let go of the need for things to be perfect, and I’m enjoying life more, probably because I have MORE of it available to me to have fun, so there you go.

If you’d like to hear my full story of HOW I released my perfectionism, click here

One of the things I wished I’d done sooner in fact, was tap into my creative side more; embrace the messy middle; and release the need for the end result of something to HAVE to be perfect.

You can follow my fun formula in The Perfectionist’s Recovery Playbook here.

And, you too can release your perfectionism, and go from performance to play in just one week!

And, that’s it!

If resonate with any of the points I’ve raised in this post, please comment below.

I knew I wasn’t alone being a perfectionist – it was a big part of me, but I knew that it didn’t need to be a part of my IDENTITY long-term.

Yes, it took work on my part to raise my awareness of how much of what I did was shrouded in perfectionism, but there was light at the end of the tunnel, and finally at age 48, I felt I was finally ready to face it head on and confront it.

Thanks so much for reading my story here.

Please do reach comment below if you resonated with anything that I mentioned in this post.

Until next time.

Claire xx