89: How I'm Taming My Inner Perfectionist

I love books. My dream is to one day have a library in my house.

If you ask my husband, he’ll tell you I’m well on my way with how many bookshelves continue to pop up around my house.

Although I love fiction stories – the type with haunted hotels or quests to save the world – I also read a lot of non-fictions because I love to learn!

Books have turned out to be a great way to challenge some of the negative beliefs that tend to get me stuck like perfectionism, holding myself to crazy high standards, and feeling like I should be able to do it all myself.

Today I’m going to share three of my favourite books that have helped me challenge that inner perfectionist, helped me build confidence, and helped me make progress towards my goals – without getting stuck on the hamster wheel of self doubt and procrastination!

My History With Perfectionism

From typed instructions for my family on my wedding day to a 3-inch binder of notes for my dissertation defense in grad school – you could say I’m a recovering perfectionist.

I’ve always held myself to super high standards. For a really long time this worked out okay for me and I was able to use my perfectionism and over-achieving to my advantage. From grad school, to my internship, to landing my dream job as a neuropsychologist at a hospital.

But it was when I started my own business that my to-do list exploded, perfectionism started getting in my way.

For awhile, I was working at the hospital at the same time as running my business. You can imagine how busy this made me! I wanted to make sure I was earning a similar salary in my business before I left the hospital. Financial stability, right?

How did I do it? I started using all of my free time away from the hospital to work on my business. I used my vacation days from the hospital to see clients in my private practice and spent every evening and weekend working in my business.

I was working 60 hours a week, and oops did I forget to mention? I had a toddler too!

I was burning out. Fast.

If you’re an entrepreneur or solopreneur you know how much extra is involved in running your own business.

It wasn’t just doubling my case load of clients. It was

Scheduling
Billing
Bookkeeping
Marketing

Then when the pandemic hit, it was a whole other world of

Podcasting
Online education
New computer programs

I was doing it all on my own. Because I’m a perfectionist and an over-achiever, I find it hard to ask for help. Why hire someone when I can do it myself?

Thankfully, I’ve always loved to learn, so I started taking courses on how to run a business. One of the things that kept coming up was the struggles that come with starting a business. Things like:

Trying to take on the world on your own
Holding yourself to unrealistic standards
Playing the comparison game with everyone else
Worrying about messing up or not being good enough

Another huge part of learning is finding a mentor – and this can be as simple as picking up their book! There is so much to learn from reading.

3 books that every recovering perfectionist should read

1. Rejection Proof by Jia Jiang

In this book the author shares his story of how he quit his job with the goal of launching a new app. He put all his time, energy, and money into this new idea. He believed in it so much.

But then, he got shut down and rejected at his first pitch presentation. Deciding that he never wanted to feel that horrible again, Jia Jiang started to train himself to handle rejection by purposely putting himself in situations where he was likely to get rejected.

What I like most about this book is how honest Jia Jiang is about what he learns about himself. One of the things he learns is that rejection gets easier over time.

One of my key takeaways from this book is that our brains have evolved to fear rejection. We want people to like us! But this can also make us work things up in our mind to be worse than they actually are. We assume that everyone is going to say no when we ask for what we want, but this isn’t always true!

This a great book if you’re struggling with self doubt, perfectionism, or people pleasing.

2. Everything is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo

Marie Forleo is a motivational speaker and thought leader in the personal development and business world. For years she’s been helping high achievers bust through limiting beliefs and self doubt so they can achieve their goals.

Her main point in the book is – you guessed it – everything is figure-out-able. In the book she tells stories of when she was a young girl all the way to her success in business (including talking to Oprah on stage!), and how these experiences helped her developed this belief.

I like this book because Marie shares personal stories that show how she worked through hard decisions and what she did when she encountered roadblocks.

This book is a good reminder that although everything is figureoutable, you don’t need to find the perfect solution – you just have to find the solution that helps you take the next step!

As an overachiever, we often get into the habit of analysis paralysis. Overthinking every decision because we’re not confident we’re picking the right option which just leads to more stress and overwhelm.

Marie shares how her habit of taking action keeps her moving towards her goals, even if you have to course correct later down the road or things didn’t go the way you planned, you still have the ability to figure out that next step.

3. Becoming by Michelle Obama

I love this book because Michelle is obviously amazing, and in this book she’s incredibly open abut sharing the personal struggles she went through while her husband achieved more success.

She shares how she had her own ambitions and dreams in her career as a lawyer but also felt the need to hold back on those ambitions while her husband started his run for presidency.

One of my favourite stories she shares is how one day she got so mad at Barack for coming home form the gym while she was busy preparing dinner for the family. She was resentful that he got to take time for himself and exercise while she felt like she didn’t have time for the same. She was juggling raising two kids while her husband was often away for work and she was frustrated that she rarely had the time to do things for herself.

I think we can all relate to never feeling like we have enough time in the time. There are external pressures that demand our time like work, family, or other commitments that drain our energy.

Michelle explains in the book that if “me time” was important to her, it didn’t help to be resentful towards her husband, she had to find a way to make the time for herself.

I love that Michelle emphasizes making time rather than finding time, because we know that just trying to squeeze in time between other time is not productive and rarely successful. It leads to an overloaded to-do list and making you feel like you’re constantly playing catch up.

If the incredible Michelle Obama is okay with asking for help… you can too! Asking for help and delegating can be a struggle for over achievers, but we all need help sometimes. Learning to say no and setting up strategies for teamwork can lessen your load and can make time in your schedule for yourself.

This book was a great reminder for me of the importance of prioritizing, knowing my limits, and getting help when I need it.