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Mastering The Confidence Code: Let Go of Perfectionism, with Claire Shipman, Journalist and Co-author, The Confidence Code
Step outside your comfort zone
I don’t think I realized how debilitating perfectionism can be and how critical it is to let go of it if we ever want to embrace confidence, until we started to look at girls. In one part of the book we were really focused on, why are girls doing so well in school now? They are they just uber achievers. Nobody worries about girls academically anymore. People are focused on boys and whether they’re achieving, and girls just go gangbusters through high school into college. So we kept saying, well, what’s happening? Why are they suddenly losing confidence in the real world? Carol Dweck, who wrote an incredible book, Mindset, said to us, “If life were one long grade school, women would rule the world.” But of course life is not one long grade school, or remotely like grade school, but that’s where perfectionism is born. Young girls are so capable of doing everything well, and coloring within the lines, and getting everything right on the spelling test, and being nice to everybody and pleasing everybody. And they very quickly get encouraged to do that, because what parent or teacher doesn’t want that behavior? That’s actually lovely behavior from our point of view. But by the time they’re in high school they’re full-fledged perfectionists. And we started to realize what’s wrong with that is what they’re missing. So then you think about boys, and they’re learning very early on that, in general, they can screw up. They can make people mad. They don’t have to do everything well all the time. Taking risks is fine. Failing is fine. They’re learning some of these lessons that girls just start to shy away from. They’re learning to fail and that’s so important, because, again, you build confidence through action and experience. And so what happens when you’re perfect and everything has to be perfect? You don’t act. You don’t want to take any risks because it’s too frightening what might happen if you fail. It’s a standard nobody can ever meet. We obsess about it, we ruminate about it, we’re worried about what will happen if we fail, and it keeps us from stepping outside of our comfort zone and learning and growing.
Start small
The only way to battle perfectionism is in little bitty pieces. You just have to force yourself to get used to taking risks or even doing things imperfectly. And this will sound like the biggest cliche in the world, you have to start small. Because you’re just never going to be able to tell a perfectionist to go out and do a horrible job at something. But find little ways in which you can tell yourself, “You know what, this is good enough. I’m going to hand it in.” “I’m not going to answer all 400 emails today, they’re just going to have to wait for a week.” Everybody has to find where they go berserk on the perfectionism and try to test the waters with little steps. And it really does work. This too is basic cognitive behavioral therapy. You’re just getting yourself used to essentially what is risk taking. One of the ways I battle perfectionism, because I’m an all-out perfectionist and I used to drive people crazy who were working with me because I would be up all night revising, changing. The editors hated me, the producers hated me. I wanted to be involved and everything had to be just right. I finally realized a) I wasn’t getting enough work done, because I could’ve been doing more and b) everybody was tired and crazy. So I finally learned to divide everything into two bins, mentally. The “good enough”, which is most of the work I do, and the “this really can be very good” because everybody’s going to be watching this one thing so I can go to town and do my perfectionist thing on this. I just have to force myself early on in the process to say, “No, this is it. Good enough. I’m stopping.” And just move on.