 I need it like all the time, like I need to be the perfectionist just to keep raising their standards each time they get something. And you you're probably familiar with this, that idea of like, oh, well, I did it, you know, but like, it's not anyone could have done it. You know, like that sort of discounting your achievements and then like setting the bar high next time. What's up, everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. All right, well, welcome to the show, Dr. Kemp. It's great to have you here. Thanks so much for having me. This is really exciting to be on here today. Yeah. So Michael Harold, one of our team members has ran into you in a few conferences and we've had this topic come up on the show again and again in passing. The idea of perfectionism, many in our audience may not even realize they struggle with it. So today we're excited to have you here to unpack, unpack perfectionism and really this idea of unhelpful perfectionism. Because I think many of us feel that well, who wouldn't want to strive to be perfect and perfectionism can even be seen as a personality trait. That's a good thing, but it does also impact us in negative ways. So I love to just talk a little bit about unhelpful perfectionism, what that means and how we can tell the difference between the two. Yeah, sure. I think that's a starting out a really good point. When I work with people on perfectionism, one of the first things I'll say is like, you don't have to drop your standards. There's nothing wrong with, you know, aiming high, wanting to do good work. I feel the same way. I love doing high quality work. I'm not going to tell you to be a slacker here. You know, and I'm not into wasting my time when I'm working with people either. So if I was to ask you to do that, you probably wouldn't do it. So like that's not both waste our time. There are so many helpful aspects to perfectionism really that and often it's called like that kind of healthy striving like wanting to do a really good job, wanting to succeed and like, yeah, let's that's great. Some people are very motivated around that. That's probably a core value of theirs is to do, you know, maybe have a good big impact on the planet or help lots of people or do really great quality work. And perfectionism, the helpful sides can come along with all of that. And then there's this sort of element where it can just sort of tip over into something that is unhelpful that really you don't even like realize that that's happened until you're kind of already there. And I think that there's a few different things if I can break it down for you like that I look for. The first is is that there's sort of like a switch from setting high standards to those standards becoming really rigid rules that you have to follow. So like for a student, it goes from like, I want to do well at college to, you know, I must get an A in every assignment in every subject and have a perfect GPA, you know, and it's become a rigid rule that then is like controlling what you're doing. Like I have to work harder and harder and often work with with students on things like proportional effort. For example, like you just don't put the same amount of effort into something that's worth 5% that's something compared to something that's worth, you know, 30% of your total grade. And if you're trying to get like perfect grades for everything, you're going to really burn yourself out for a start. But one thing that even further than that, the perfectionists do is that they keep raising that bar all the time. So once I kind of get like all A's or something, then I need all A pluses, you know, then I need that little bit more. Or once I, you know, get sort of that approval from my manager or something like that, I need it like all the time. Like I need to be the best at this sort of thing and just kind of perfectionists just keep raising their standards each time they get something. And you probably familiar with this, that idea of like, oh, well, I did it, you know, but like it's not anyone could have done it. You know, like that sort of discounting your achievements and then like setting the bar high next time. And what that leads to is this kind of idea where the bar that you're trying to reach, the standard or benchmark you're trying to reach is always just out of reach. Like you're just always setting it higher. If you set your standards like always out of reach, then you're going to end up constantly feeling like you're failing because you're never going to get there. And if you base how you feel about yourself on meeting those standards, then you're going to feel like a failure yourself. Even though you might be achieving just amazing things, you still weirdly feel like you're failing. So when I'm looking for perfectionism in people and it shows up in really unusual like places, I'm looking for this kind of rigid standard that they're setting for themselves. And then I'm and that they keep raising that over the time over time. And we are looking for like real fear of failure, like really like how I feel about myself is dependent on meeting those standards. So then I'm really scared of failing because if I do fail, I'm going to feel just terrible about myself. Like it brings up lots of feelings of shame and embarrassment and the urge to kind of withdraw, get away from people. So yeah, so we've got those rigid standards, fear of failure and then a lot of self criticism if you don't meet those standards. So they're sort of like, I guess you could say the drivers of perfectionism and that perfectionistic self criticism, that stuff like I've certainly felt it. It's relentless, like nitpicking, fault finding. If I use any like Australian terms, please pull me up like I've I sometimes in I've done podcasts overseas and people have said you're what? You know, like so just pull me up. Anyway, nitpicking and fault finding and like just constantly almost like in technical terms, we call it hyper vigilant, like constantly looking for something that could go wrong or trying to prevent something going wrong. So the fourth thing I'm looking for is usually a whole bunch of different avoidant type of behaviors. Like all the sorts of things that you're doing to try and get away, make sure you don't fail, try not to feel bad, don't criticize myself. So they can, you know, the stereotype is the high achieving type A perfectionist, you know, but actually are just as often will see people who kind of don't do anything at all. Like they're just frozen by this debilitating almost. Yeah, if I can't do it perfectly, I won't do it all, do it at all. I was like that as a kid, like I'm not a team sport player. So I'm just not naturally gifted at that. You guys might be, but I'm not. I worked it out really early. And so any time I had to do team sport, I was just trying to find some way out of that. And so I just didn't do it at all. Still love to exercise now, but I don't really do team sports still. But I kind of enjoy some aspects of that, but it's funny now because I can, I feel like I've got a bit more permission to stuff it up. But I didn't have that permission when I was younger. I couldn't mess up. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. One of the things that comes out in this is this rigidness. And now for our, our clients who come through, we give everyone an intake form and part of that intake form is the ocean test. And as you can imagine, we definitely see some patterns that have developed when giving those out. One of those is very low in openness. So very rigid in their ways of, of experiencing new things. And of course, when it comes to art forms and conversation connection, I view as an art form. It's difficult not to be rigid for somebody who is high or low in that openness because we're going to need to try new things. And I think this is why they've experienced so much trouble because they're looking at the interaction as something that they would like to do perfectly, something they would like to nail. And even when we, when we lay out some of our strategies, the questions then go to, but if they do this, what do I do? And if they, and if this happens, what do I need to do? And anytime that I hear questioning in that manner, I know that they are looking for the right answer. And of course, when it comes to conversation connection, there's no right answer. There's no one size fits all strategy that is going to allow you to be able to do this. And you have to be able to allow things to develop. So I would imagine that this goes to the control aspect. And rigid people like to have control over the things that they're, they're engaging in feeling a loss of control. I can certainly see why that would cause a lot of anxiety for those. Could you speak to that, please? Yeah, sure. Yeah, absolutely. And I see it when I work a lot with other helping professionals too, because we work in an area that is really high in uncertainty. We never really know, and working as a coach, working in leadership, working as a therapist, social worker, any kind of area where you caught people, I guess, you've got a high degree of uncertainty because people can't be controlled, can they? Really? Much as you might, you know, some of us probably have tried. So dealing with that, when you've got a lot of uncertainty, it's a natural in your kind of context in what's going on around you. It's a natural thing to try and control that. And you need to control that if you want to be sure that you're going to do well. You're going to be sure that you won't fail. And that's where that kind of, yeah, that rigid standard of like, I must not ever fail. And when I, just as a side, when I talk about failure, I mean in the broadest sense, like a failure is really kind of any time where you haven't met your own standards. So that could be, obviously you could fail in your assignments for, you know, at school, but you can also fail socially by being, you know, kind of awkward or embarrassed. And so embarrassing yourself. And that's like a little social failure. You can fail in leadership because your team doesn't perform as well as it needs to perform. You can fail to meet, you know, obviously work standards or targets and those kinds of things. There's a strong failure is really anything. I had one client once just freak out because they did feel this immense sense of shame because they left locked their keys in the car. And they felt this, this as a failure. I can't believe I've done this stupid thing and erect my whole day. And so any little mistake can be, can be a failure. So of course you want to lock that down. And that is this, yeah, control is like one of those strategies. I would call like an active avoidance strategy to by actively doing this thing. Another form of control, like if I want to control the outcome is checking my work a lot of times, spending an hour writing and rewriting an email to make sure it's perfect. I'm trying to control how the reader, the reader is going to receive that and control my world around me. So yeah, I can absolutely see low openness and the ocean scale being related to this. Do they still call it neuroticism as well in the ocean scale? And we had an episode recently about that and how it shows up. Another thing that we see in doing these exercises, right? Especially when it comes to the uncertainty around communication is any little trip up, they'll have to restart the exercise from the very beginning. And we do video work in our improv sessions in our X Factor program and we do video work in our live training in person. And we will have from time to time clients who make one little tiny flub and then have to start the exercise over and hold everyone up in class until they can redo that exercise. And a large part about communicating with other people is there's going to be flubs constantly. We're all making mistakes and tripping over our words. Thankfully, this podcast is edited, so you don't get to hear many of those flubs. But that's a normal part of conversation. And if you're going into every conversation in the second, there's a mistake saying, I have to start over, I have to pull back, I have to redo it. That constant need to redo things is debilitating. It's an unhelpful form of perfectionism. And when we point that out, of course, many times they don't identify as perfectionists. They're just like, hey, I'm trying to do what you taught me the right way. And we have to explain that's why we teach everything in frameworks, right? We don't teach you spell out exactly what to say word for word because every audience member is going to perceive that differently. And if you are sitting there memorizing lines of conversation, well, it's hard to listen. It's hard to recognize emotional bids. It's hard to be open and vulnerable to connection. So we have to unwind some of that unhelpful perfectionism for them to see like, oh, I can make mistakes and it's okay. One of the easiest ways to do that is more improv comedy, where you have to be on your toes thinking on the spot and the flubs lead to the laughs. The flubs lead to the humor.