Ditch Perfectionism, Strive For Progress with Audrey Holst

Are you at a crossroads in your life and don't seem to be making progress toward your goals? We all know that we should give our all and aim for excellence in all that we do, but what happens when this desire for success becomes toxic? Everyday, we look forward to something productive, successful and even joyful. However, not everything will go the way we wanted and that could lead to self-doubt and languish. As a person, we also make mistakes leading to unfortunate events. Fortunately, there’s an antidote. Our guest for today is Audrey Holst. She is a recovering perfectionist who coaches audacious top achievers on how to stop micromanaging their lives with perfectionism. Audrey helps people struggling with the fear of failure and mistakes. Join us as we break down what’s preventing you from success and how you can focus on your progress. Stay tuned to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Ditch Perfectionism, Strive For Progress with Audrey Holst Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a bit about perfectionism and this is something that I’ve observed prevent a lot of people from following their dreams. You’re waiting for the exact right time, waiting for the exact right setup, the exact right thing or excessive amounts of research and perfected your product, you’ve crossed every t, dotted every i, as they say, and you’ve accounted for every possible scenario and I can’t stress to you enough how many times I’ve seen this really get in the way of people’s dreams. My guest today, Audrey Holst, is the founder of Fortitude & Flow and she specializes in helping people overcome this tendency toward perfectionism which is so prevalent in our culture today. --- Audrey, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me. I can’t wait for this conversation. Definitely, Audrey. Now, I want to start off with the foundations. What are the origins of perfectionism? What makes someone really feel like they need to have every last little thing perfect before launching anything or before sharing anything with the world? Yeah. So I think the first thing to understand about perfectionism and perfectionists is that nobody wakes up at age 30 and says, “You know what, that perfectionism thing, I haven’t tried that yet. I’m gonna try that on for size,” and then they just automatically all of a sudden start with these perfectionist tendencies. That is just not anybody’s story. So I did over 60 hours of interviews with perfectionists, people who self-identified with perfectionists, and every single one of them, I asked them questions, I had them tell me their stories, and every single one of them had origins in their youngest years. They could think back when they were a kid in their household, in school where perfectionism had its beginnings and then how other places in their life either helped to stoke the fires of perfectionism or actually helped them work through it. So, how I look at perfectionism is it’s a survival mechanism, which is why perfectionism tends to flare up in times of stress.Share on X When people get stressed out, when people are in new situations, that’s when they tend to go towards that tendency more, which is one of those things that can be really difficult for people that are maybe entrepreneurs or in spaces that require a lot of agility and being uncertain because it really flares up those perfectionist tendencies and it can be a huge issue. Wow. So you’re saying most of it begins at childhood and then, at some point in life, the people around you either reinforce it or send you in the opposite direction. Have you heard a lot of good stories about people being sent in the opposite direction, saying, “Okay, I grew up perfectionist,” and maybe had a perfectionist family, or I think our education system with our pass/fail grades reinforces perfectionism, but then finds the right people and they say, “Hey, wait a second, no, this is what a minimum viable product is.” This is you’re looking at everything else, like when you hike that mountain, did you ask for perfectionism? Did you ask for perfection from those rocks by the river? And, sorry for the nature examples, I was told --- Nature examples are good, yeah. Yeah, and it’s often through the guidance and relationship building of mentors, of employers. It comes through relationship. Perfectionism, if we think about a survival mechanism, there’s two answers that are trying to be met: Am I safe and do I belong? Those are two things that are essential for us as human beings is our safety and our belonging, because our village is going to help to resource us and help to keep us alive. So, when you start to have relationships where we are proven time and time again that we can make mistakes, that actually mistakes are celebrated, and I’m going to put mistakes in quotes because sometimes they’re actual mistakes and sometimes they’re just awkward moments or I tried this and it didn’t go as well as I thought it was going to go but people who tend to change this wiring in their system is in relationship with other people, they start to find that, “Oh, I can actually do this thing that feels really scary and terrifying and like, I’m gonna die, AKA make a mistake. I didn’t die and nobody kicked me out of the village and I’m still standing and maybe I’ll try it again,” and that’s when things start to shift. Part of me thinks about it in terms of what pursuit you’re in, even what job you’re in, and I always look --- across the street from my house is a basketball court and I’ve witnessed a lot of people playing basketball and even when I see the person who’s the big shot, the hotshot that makes all the shots, I always think about the fact that this person, at one point, had to be there for the first time. At one point, this person was missing shots. At one point, this person was making a fool of themselves because they were just getting started and had to work up to that. What I’m wondering is if pursuits such as that tend to move people in the opposite direction of perfectionism as opposed to people, say, you pursue a job where your particular employer doesn’t tolerate mistakes and I’m putting that in quotation marks as well, doesn’t tolerate any of that, and honestly leads you into this mindset that anytime you mess up or anytime you present an idea that’s not liked, you’re liable to get fired. Yeah, so this is such a good question. I’ll use the example of lawyers. So I work with a lot of lawyers and they do studies of people go into law school and sort of people’s baseline level of stress. So they compare them to people who’ve gone to other types of education for other types of jobs. Lawyers tend to come out of law school more stressed and with a higher level of perfectionism, what I would call toxic perfectionism, when they come out of law school. So now you have people that have a baseline higher than the rest of the population in terms of that perfectionism and now you’re throwing them into another area, another occupation, in which they can literally be fired or lose millions of dollars if a comment is in the wrong place. This just continually emphasizes and reinforces that perfectionism piece over and over again. And what we know about the body is the body loves efficiency and the body tries to anticipate the future to become more efficient so now you have a system that is continuously wired into this groove of, “This is what I do. This is what’s efficient for me and now I’m in this perfectionism groove,” and just because the body finds it efficient, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s healthy for the body. It’s the same thing with chronic stress. When people get into these chronic stress loops, raises their baseline level, and now they’re operating up here instead of coming back to homeostasis, which is what the body wants to do. It’s very clear in the law world, which is why a lot of people have a hard time --- people that may really thrive in the beginning, if they aren’t taught different ways to cope when things get stressful, which is one of the things that I do and I would say it goes beyond coping but I think just for a simplistic word, if they’re not taught other ways to be in this challenging environment that doesn’t break them down physically, mentally, and emotionally, then they’re out because it’s not sustainable. Their bodies physically can’t sustain it. Yeah. It reminds me of those old stories, I don’t know how true they are, but as a New Yorker, you heard them of Wall Street in the 80s and people who would literally work 20-hour days or work 12-hour days and party another eight hours and just sustain themselves on cocaine and how for 18, 24 months for some people, it was a wild ride and tons of fun and worked really well, they made tons of money, had lots of fun, but, eventually, that was not sustainable. Eventually, you’d have that crash. And people end up with chronic health conditions. That’s when people have their bodies shut them down and now they can’t work and they can’t keep up that same pace and now they have to basically learn from scratch, “Okay, I can’t burn the candle at both ends. Also, I’m trying to crawl out of this hole that I’ve kind of been put into because my body shut down on me. Now I have to make different decisions,” which is really tough for people, especially if you have that perfectionism thing, you’re all in or you’re shut down. There’s this very prideful, “I can take it better than other people,” that often comes because it comes from disconnection, that’s a piece of it. They are able to disconnect from their body where their body is going, “Hey, the kitchen is on fire,” and they’re like, “No, no, it’s fine,” there’s smoke coming out of their ears. So it’s either that or shut down because the body does shut them d