 Tis not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or how the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the woman who is actually in the arena, whose face is mowed by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who airs and comes up short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthousiasms, the great devotions, who spends herself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if she fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that her place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Let's take a minute. I want everyone's feet on the ground, planted. Take a deep breath in. You can close your eyes if you want to. You can keep them open and breathe. Breathe into your body as if there were anywhere else you could breathe. What are you feeling in your body right now? I'm feeling my legs are jittery, my knees are bouncy. Feel your butt on the seat and your feet on the floor. Just pay attention. More breath in. Hi guys. Thank you for coming. My name is Derek Doreps. I also go by Hawkeye Tender Wolf. You can call me whichever you like. We started with that little grounding minute because we're going to talk about some heavy stuff tonight. It's five o'clock and I can't believe y'all are still here. I don't think I've been here at five o'clock at a Drupal con and actually come to a session, usually home napping by now. And perfectionism. This isn't going to be a technical talk. It's going to be a little woo-woo. Little background on me, I'm a senior architect, senior Drupal architect at Kalimuna. I build Drupal websites for 32 hours a week and the rest of my time is spent doing a lot of woo-woo things like meditation and therapy and reading and studying. And I want to talk to you about my process and how it has affected me, my personal life and my professional life over the past two and a half years. So to start off, let's look at definitions. So we're not going to have slides right now. There will be some post-it afterwards that highlights some of the key things. So you'll kind of have some take-aways, some resources, some links and things like that. So perfectionism. Of course I can't find my notes as soon as I forget what I'm trying to say. So a lot of my material is coming from Brene Brown. You might be familiar with some of her work. She has a really popular TED talk and several really good books. I have two books I'll be giving away at the end for people who come up and share. Perfectionism is a 20-ton shield to protect myself from criticism, judgment, ridicule and shame. It's a tool that I use. It's a defense mechanism to keep others out, to keep intimacy away, to keep myself from being seen, to keep my flaws from being seen, to keep my vulnerability from hanging out. Now one of the things in that definition was shame. We're going to talk a lot about that today and it's a heavy topic. Let's define that as well. Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. So I'm not going to ask for hands to raise, but I'm guessing there are many of us in here who have felt at times that we are flawed. We are fundamentally that there's something wrong with us. And that's the difference between shame and guilt, between shame and embarrassment. Shame says, I am wrong. I am bad. There is something wrong with me at my core, at my being. Guilt says, I did something wrong. Embarrassment says, I did something really silly and I feel sheepish about it. Shame keeps us locked, locked up inside of a bubble that keeps everyone out. And perfectionism is part of that shield. Now, I want to tell a little bit about where my story started. So in 2012, I took a walk not too far from here across the sea in England. And I decided that I had been in so much pain and so frustrated at myself that I couldn't fix this perfectionism. I had searched and searched for answers. I had read books. I had latched onto religions and gurus and therapists and homegrown philosophies and nothing worked. Nothing could fix me. So I took this walk and I thought I'm going to figure it out. I walked for nine days and every day I would find a new place to spend the night, the next little village that I came across. And I decided what I had to do was take out all the other factors. I had to do an experiment and I had to remove any part of my life that wasn't absolutely critical. I needed to breathe, eat, sleep and work. So I kept my job. I was working for an agency, a different agency than I am now. And I closed out everyone from my life. That's friends. That's family. I left to go to the grocery store and I left to go visit with clients. Those were the two times I left my apartment. This went on for about two years. And I don't recommend it. I thought I was losing my mind actually. I would record myself because I was convinced I was losing my mind. And I was begging. By this time I had two therapists and several sessions a week with each. And thinking there's got to be an answer. There's got to be an answer. Fighting for it. Asking for it. And one therapist was saying the only thing left for me to do is let's drive to the funny house and check you in. Those are your options. You're at the end of the road. And you might be thinking there is another option. I did contemplate suicide. That was part of where I went. And then my other therapist said, I hear you. I hear you asking for help. How desperate are you? I said, I'll do anything. He said, okay. Take a week and go to this place up in North Carolina. It's called on-site workshops. It's therapeutic retreat center. They do some really good work. I'm going to give some resources at the end and it'll be in there along with some other really great places to do some real deep soul searching. And I walked in with a big fuck you just tattooed right across my forehead. I hated everyone there. I was so angry and it took about three or four days before my shell finally cracked. And then the waterworks started and I just started crying and crying. And that experience was really tremendous and really powerful, but not fundamentally changing. It didn't fix me. It didn't take away my anxiety, my depression, my pain. It didn't take away my thoughts and feelings of being broken. In fact, by the time I was driving away from that place, by the time I got to the end of their long driveway, I think I had lost 98% of everything that I just closed right back up. But there was a 2%. I took 2% home with me. And 2% is all that I needed because I had a shell. I had a really complete thick hard walled shell that no one could get into. That 2% was a crack and that's where the light came in. The next step for me was to build community. And again, there will be some resources here at the end. Shame cannot survive in the light. It can only survive in the dark. The second I share my story with someone, it goes away. And so in my work, in my professional life, I'm an architect. I teach, I lead, I mentor, I build websites, I lead projects. And when I'm coming from a place of I'm not enough, of I'm not worthy, when I put my worthiness on the table, when I stake it on the success of a project, you better believe I'm going to make that perfect. I'm not going to let anyone mess that up, including my junior developers who are doing their darndest and doing their best. But when they mess up, I'm going to shame them. And so cultivating self-compassion, cultivating a sense of worth, that has to be done in community. And perfectionism is an attempt to avoid legitimate suffering. Legitimate suffering, it's a term the Buddhists use. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. And I've brought suffering all over my team and myself by demanding perfection, by rejecting every single one of their pull requests that didn't pass coder. You know, the line had three spaces instead of two. The last entry of their array didn't have a comma on it. Things that work perfectly fine. And we'd be right up to the deadline. And I would still be rejecting those pull requests. A few other ways that my perfectionism manifested itself was in some OCD compulsions. You know, that kind of thing, you think about organizing the sock drawer. Anything that would help keep me away from the painful reality that I was facing, that I'm not in ultimate control of this project. And here I have staked my worth on the success of this thing. So if it fails, I fail. That's a threat of non-being. That's a threat of psychological death. That's what infants feel when their mothers reject them. That's real. And what gets activated in that moment is the lizard brain. This little piece of your brain, it's got another name. I'll call it the lizard brain. And it's really old. It's what the dinosaurs had. It's all they had. And when that gets activated, you have fight, flight and freeze. Those are your three options. So hiding away and pushing everyone out of my life. That was flight. That was getting the hell out of there. But most of the time I opted for fight. When flight was not an option, I couldn't leave my job. I knew I needed to keep that down. Then fight became my next option. And so here's an example. I want to go back to that 2%. When I am in the midst of furiously typing up a response on JIRA, someone's posted to one of my tickets telling me that I did it completely wrong, or at least this is what I'm reading in my head, right? Really, it said, I think there's a better way to do this. And I read, you're an idiot. What's wrong with you? You should have never been born. And at that moment, that's what my lizard brain thinks. You've got to kill this person. You've got to make them feel so bad that they never hurt you again. And so where the 2% comes in is cultivating that pause, that moment, those two seconds for me to go, whoa. I recognize, I know what that feels like. I know what that lizard brain feels like. And I can see the venom that it's spitting out. And right before I hit send, I do a select all copy, go over to Slack, click on my buddy Justin, control V, enter. All right, Justin, can you read this for me? And then his response is, what did they do to you? My God. Fortunately, he knows me well. This is where community comes in. We have to have those people. We have to have the people who can really listen to us. If we don't have that, if we can't show who we truly are to at least someone, there are moments to be vulnerable. Self-love and self-care is about learning to be authentic always and learning to be vulnerable in appropriate situations. And so I pick and choose my vulnerability with different people with you all right now and being very vulnerable. I can tell because my knees are shaking. And so cultivating that community is so important. Finding those people you can talk to, it could be friends, it could be family, could be your therapist, could be your teddy bear. Honestly, talking to a wall can be great sometimes. So I'm going to show you a little video now that talks about listening and the difference between empathy and sympathy and what it takes to really listen to somebody. Wait a second. Where am I getting these sounds? So what is empathy and why is it very different than sympathy? Empathy fuels connection. Sympathy drives disconnection. Empathy, it's very interesting. Teresa Wiseman is a nursing scholar who studied professions, very diverse professions where empathy is relevant and came up with four qualities of empathy. Perspective taking, the ability to take the perspective of another person or recognize their perspective is their truth. Staying out of judgment, not easy when you enjoy it as much as most of us do. Recognizing emotion in other people and then communicating that. Empathy is feeling with people. And to me, I always think of empathy as this kind of sacred space where someone's kind of in a deep hole and they shout out from the bottom and they say, I'm stuck, it's dark, I'm overwhelmed. And then we look and we say, hey, I'm down. I know what it's like down here. And you're not alone. Sympathy is, ooh, it's bad, uh-huh. No, you want a sandwich? Empathy is a choice and it's a vulnerable choice because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling. Rarely if ever does an empathic response begin with at least. I had a, yeah. And we do it all the time because you know what? Someone just shared something with us that's incredibly painful and we're trying to silver lining it. I don't think that's a verb, but I'm using it as one. We're trying to put the silver lining around it. So I had a miscarriage. At least you know you can get pregnant. I think my marriage is falling apart. At least you have a marriage. John's getting kicked out of school. At least Sarah is an A student. But one of the things we do sometimes in the face of very difficult conversations is we try to make things better. If I share something with you that's very difficult, I'd rather you say, I don't even know what to say right now. I'm just so glad you told me. Because the truth is, rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection. So I love Brene Brown. Gosh, she does amazing work. And if you haven't watched any of her talks or anything, I highly recommend you find her on TED Talks. And so this was a little woo-woo, right? I mean, there was a little heart bubble at the end. And this is what it means to really listen, to really be empathic with someone. Now, I'm not typically getting that vulnerable with people at work. But for me, like I said, this is like, that's like advanced doctoral degree listening and empathy. I'm looking for something just out of elementary school, maybe like middle school, high school, somewhere around there. And there's this thing called the sick man's prayer. And the sick man's prayer goes, when I'm in my rage, when I'm thinking what is wrong with this person, how could they possibly have submitted a poll request to a code like that? What were they thinking? Or how could they have possibly forgotten to do this thing? I told them so many times. Or how could that person have, why did they cut me off? The sick man's prayer goes, is there something, is there anything, can I think of any possible scenario that could be going on in that person's life that would justify that action? Their wife is having a baby, they're going to the hospital. In the case of what's really common for me is I jump all over people. Did you read the instructions I put in the ticket? That'll be my response on JIRA sometimes, just really indignant. They'll say, okay, here, issue's done. Looks good. Throw it over the wall for QA. And I look at it and just throw it back at them and put the ticket back to in progress and say, please read ticket notes. No reason. No, just super passive aggressive. And so I do things like that. And so because I'm just angry and I haven't taken that two-second pause. Now, it's a process. There is no arriving. There is no end point. My therapist told me that, and I love this, I took a break from dating for a while. And the question would come up, when do I know I'm ready to date? My friends would ask me, what's going on? What's your timeline? And I didn't have a good answer. And she said to me, I know I'm ready to date when I have a well-worn path back to myself. It's not that I never deviate. It's not that I never go off the deep end and lose my head, but that I have in those moments because mental fortitude is not enough in those moments. Because I'm in lizard brain. I'm no longer using my higher functioning that has taken millions or billions of years to create. And so I'm looking for that well-worn path back to myself. It's practice. It's maybe a week from now. I find myself doing that same thing where I was writing a nasty email to somebody and because I just did it last week, I remember to select all, cut. Don't leave it sitting there. You might actually hit enter. Paste it to a friend. Take the name out of the two, you know, address before you write up that nasty email. Don't accidentally send it. Put a send timer on your email. That's really important. How many emails have you regretted sending, like, that you could have taken back within 30 seconds? So having that well-worn path back to myself. And so the sick man's prayer goes in the context of my work. You know, in my moment, I'm so narrow-minded and so focused on what is wrong with this person. How could they have done that? It's so clear. It's so easy. I'm looking at it right here. But if I can imagine some way, if I can, it's about creativity, you know, when I and my, when my team is not working from a place of perfectionism, when they know failure is not only encouraged but required, then we have space for creativity and innovation. When we're working from a place of shame and blame and criticism and judgment, there is no room for creativity. No one wants to be vulnerable. No one wants to put their ass out there. And so that comes to a paradox of perfectionism. You'd think, you know, it's kind of, it's almost popular to be a perfectionist. It's kind of like, oh yeah, I'm super perfectionist about, you know, my hair. Or, you know, I'm super perfectionist about my car. But the thing is, it doesn't actually produce the best results. The best, not only does it suck the whole time, not only are you in, you know, mental hell while you're going through it, but the end result is actually not as good as when I'm working with a team where we have a culture of compassion and understanding and where failure is encouraged. So again, going back to the sick man's prayer, I'm going to ask myself, is there any way that John could have, you know, been right in the middle of another project when I threw this ticket at him and said, it needs to get done now. You know, is there, are there any other deadlines? What's going on in his personal life? Is there something that I know of that could possibly be going on? Maybe his, maybe his battery, maybe his laptop battery was low and he was at a coffee shop and was about to run out of power. So he just committed the code real quick and pushed it up. You know, I mean, just getting creative can really help and just creating that, cultivating that little bit of doubt, cultivating that little bit of self-doubt because when I know I'm right, when I know I have all the answers, A, I'm no fun to be around, and B, what was B? I had it. When I know I have all the answers, then, yeah, I'm no fun to be around. We'll just stick with that one. And it was going to be really good. I was taking a nap this afternoon. We had a long day of travel yesterday. We took the sail rail over from London. Highly recommend it, much better than flying, but it takes a long time, early day, late day. And so I was taking a nap this afternoon and as I'm falling asleep, I think of something that's so critical. I really, you know, really needed to share it with y'all today. And I think, but oh, it's so important for sure. I'll remember it when I wake up. And my God, if it didn't bug me for like the next, you know, I did manage to sleep for maybe about 15 minutes and then woke up and first thing I thought of, what the fuck was that? Why didn't I write it down? You know, and then I go and take a shower and I'm like, okay, clear my head, get grounded. It's going to be there. And then I thought I have to practice what I'm talking about today. I have to practice letting that go. So when I am able to cultivate that little bit of doubt, when I am able to learn and to acknowledge that I am not the highest power in the universe, that I do not have all the answers, it makes me a lot more fun to be around. And it makes my, why does every time I say that first line, it just kicks the other one out of my head? What is that? Jesus. It makes the projects go much more smoothly because when I have all the answers, I don't need anyone else. I know exactly why you did that. It's because you hate me. It's because you think I'm an idiot. And it's because there's something wrong with you. When I have all the answers, there's no room for people to be wrong. There's no room for mistakes. And so for me, it's been really important for me to cultivate that sense of something higher than me. Call it spirituality. Call it, you know, the G word. I don't really like to say God. You know, it kind of used to freak me out a whole lot. But I have some spirituality in my life. And cultivating those practices are super important. And so knowing that I do not have all the answers and that there could be something else going on, that is one of the biggest challenges for me to this day, you know, because my instant, when I haven't had, in self-care is so important. If I haven't had the right sleep, the right exercise, the right food, I mean, I don't even have a chance at responding with my prefrontal cortex. I mean, I'm going to go instantly to lizard brain. And again, it's recognizing, it's having that well-worn path back to myself. And in that, in those cases, the well-worn path back to myself is straight to my bed or straight to the refrigerator. Knowing when to numb out is actually really important, right? We talk about perfectionism as a shield, procrastination, identical to perfectionism. It's not wanting to get started because there's a chance I'm not going to do it perfect. It's avoiding the painful reality that this is not going to be perfect, that there's a chance I could fail, that I could be ridiculed, that I could find criticism and judgment and blame. And so I put it off because that's uncomfortable. Vulnerability is uncomfortable. And so knowing when to numb out, knowing when to put up those shields is really important. There are times when I need to go to the refrigerator or down to the supermarket, get that half gallon of milk from the fridge, find something with carbohydrates in it, and finish the box, whatever it is. And I need to just listen to a podcast and just chill out. Self-care is super important. Well, I did pretty good, y'all. I'm really impressed with myself. Okay, two last things. Bifocal vision. Bifocal vision is being able to acknowledge that, yes, it goes back to that difference between guilt and shame, between embarrassment and shame. It's being able to say, yes, what that person did, that was kind of crappy. And they are a worthy human being. They're worthy of love and kindness and compassion and connection. And everything I want for myself, I want it for them too. And that other person, I guess what, most of the times, that's me. I'm needing to find that same compassion, that same understanding with myself because I am the harshest critic. I'm harsher on myself than anyone else. And when I learn to soften up on myself, I learn to soften up on you. When I learn to soften up on you, I learn to soften up on myself. Like I said, it's a process. The other thing I wanted to talk about was bumper lanes. Bowling, blow up bumper lanes, you know, what I'm talking about. When I would leave projects, it was all about laying out the vision, right? Here's the white line that you're going to walk down. I'm going to do a bunch of drunk tests with you. I'm going to make sure you can walk straight down this really narrow line. And if you deviate one inch, I'm going to be all over your ass. I'm going to reject your PR. I'm going to tell you why you were wrong. And maybe I would even start off kind of nice about it, right? I'm kind of being a little bit harsh just to prove a point. But I would be a little bit softer about it. I'd be like, hey, you know what? You missed something there. You know, I might even do the approval sandwich. Hey, you know what? Great work on that first piece. You know, you kind of did this a little bit wrong. And also, great hair today. I mean, anything, it doesn't matter. The approval sandwich is great. It could be completely unrelated. And so I would be, so even if, and maybe I even let it go, right? But if I'm so dedicated to walking that tight white line, one of two things is going to happen. I'm going to go back behind them later. I'm going to stay up late and fix it myself because it's bothering me too much. Or it's going to have residual buildup that over time turns into something really passive aggressive or just outright explosive, right? And it's toxic. It's poison to the team. The alternative, bumper lanes. So much more fun, right? No more gutter balls. And so my, the way I look at my job now as an architect, as a team lead is to set out some guards, right? Like over here is, you know, we did it perfectly but spent an extra six figures on the project. You know, we lost our assets and the client had to pay a bunch of extra. Over here is, we just completely missed the ball and delivered something that had nothing to do with what they asked. And right here in the middle, I'm trying to set up some guideposts to let some flags, to let them know when they're going off track and to let, you know, some flags to me that things are going off the rails a little bit. And they can go anywhere they want within that. You know, if it's not the most, so I have a classical computer science background. So I'm a nut about code cleanliness, you know, code smell, you know, how good it smells, how pretty it is, how elegant, how efficient. So, you know, there's a lot of different ways to solve the same problem. And I'm not going to say they're all equal. Some are clearly better than others, but it's about prioritizing, it's about does it fall within those boundaries? When I find myself being really strict, when I find myself getting angry that someone didn't implement it exactly the way I wanted to, the way I had it envisioned, then I know that that's a moment I need to pause, I need to get grounded, I need to sit back, put my feet on the ground and pick up the phone. Community is so important. Being able to reach out is crucial. Okay, I'm going to put some resources up on the screen and you can also find this presentation at doublin.tenderwolf.io. I'll put that up on the screen as well. So there's some slides in there that kind of cover some of the important definitions and some of the important takeaways. So I recommend you check this out, doublin.tenderwolf.io. And these are supposed to be links and the links are like just kind of suddenly gone. I'll fix that. So these are actual links. 12-step recovery. It's not just for alcoholics, it's not just for drug addicts. And there's some of us in the room right now. 12-step recovery is just basics about learning how to live life on life's terms. It's really good stuff. So there is AA, which an open meeting means that anyone can attend. You don't have to be an alcoholic to attend. So a lot of AA meetings are open. Alanon is for family and friends of alcoholics. ACOA, formerly called Adult Children of Alcoholics, now called Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families. Coda, codependence synonymous. We didn't talk about codependency today, but that's really important. Not only does it sabotage personal relationships, but in work, it makes work really hard. And SLAA, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. The Bliss Gratitude Journal. This is a really fun one. It's a little app I have on my Android and it's also a Chrome extension. And it just pops up at different times during the day. It kind of learns when you're most likely to have a few minutes free and it pops up and says, write down three things you're grateful for right now. Write down, it has like different prompts. Write down one thing that went well today. Somatic therapy. There are lots of great modalities of therapy. Traditional toxicotherapy is great. Somatic therapy is about getting in touch with your body. The body stores trauma. The body stores so much of our emotional life, our emotional intelligence is inside of our bodies. So finding somatic therapy, there's hands on, there's hands off. Somatic experiencing is one that I've done that's completely hands off. You know, a massage is somatic therapy. Soma is Latin or Greek or something for body. So somatic therapy is just therapy that takes a particular interest in the body-mind connection. And various therapeutic retreat centers. This must be an old version of the slides. I had a couple listed out there, some good resources. I'll put those back up. And now I'd like to, there's a microphone there. I'd like to welcome anyone to come up to ask questions or to get vulnerable for a minute and share a story, share something that they'd like to say. All right, well, oh, someone's getting up. You leaned forward. That meant, that was you getting up. I saw it. All right, thanks, y'all. I appreciate it.