Do you suffer from perfectionism?
Do you have high standards on yourselves or even on other people around you?
Then this track is for you!
We all have lifetraps,
Schemas,
Limiting beliefs and lifelong patterns we follow.
In my previous talks I talked about how you can reinvent your life by working on your lifetraps.
A lifetrap is a pattern that starts in childhood and repeats throughout life.
It began with something that was done to us by our families or by other children.
We were perhaps abandoned,
Criticized,
Overprotected,
Abused,
Excluded or deprived.
We were damaged in some way.
And eventually the lifetrap became a part of us.
And this what I share is based on my own experience and from the book Reinventing Your Life from Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko.
This is based on what they now call schema therapy.
And I also draw on other sources from psychology studies.
However this session,
This talk is only for information purposes.
The book has a great questionnaire which can help you to discover which lifetrap schemas you might have.
But in short,
Lifetraps determine how we think,
Feel,
Act and relate to others.
But I won't go into detail right now.
Rather I would like to focus on unrelenting standards.
I mean standards.
Yep,
I'm not going to change that because that's my perfectionism talking.
Because that is in the title,
Right?
And perhaps that drew your attention.
If you're interested in learning more about the other lifetraps,
For example abuse and the mistrust lifetrap or the safety and abandonment lifetrap,
You can find them on my Inside Timer profile as well.
Back to the unrelenting standards,
The perfectionism lifetrap.
This lifetrap focuses on having such high standards that you strive relentlessly to meet high expectations of yourself or others.
Maybe you focus a lot on status,
Money,
Achievement,
Beauty and recognition at the expense of your own happiness,
Pleasure,
Health,
A sense of accomplishment or even satisfying relationships.
You probably apply rigid standards to other people as well and you can be quite judgemental.
When you were a child you were expected to be the best and you would thought that anything else was a failure.
You learned that nothing you did was quite good enough.
The belief that you must strive to meet very high internalised standards of behaviour and performance.
You feel driven to be perfect at whatever you do.
Again,
You might place unrealistic expectations on yourself and others.
You could be often unable to relax and take pleasure in life.
You might feel a great deal of pressure and anxiety in your everyday life and often obsess about the next things you have to do.
You are a perfectionist,
Detail oriented and is rigid in your own rules and how things should be.
Ouch.
This might be a tough pill to swallow.
Perhaps you don't relate to everything I just shared or maybe you did.
Maybe subconsciously you know that this is happening to you.
The thing what I struggle the most with is not only did I have these high standards for myself,
I struggled a lot in relationships because these high standards were often projected onto others who then suffered from my perfectionism.
From my personal experience I know that this schema,
This life trap,
It made me suffer mentally,
Spiritually and physically because I was attaining this perfect body,
Being this perfect person which of course you cannot be.
So what might be the origins of unrelenting standards,
This life trap?
What the book says is the following.
A parent's love for you was conditional on your meeting high standards as a child.
Or perhaps a parent only gave you affection,
Approval or attention when you were successful or perfect as a child.
One or both parents were models of high unbalanced standards.
One or both parents used shame or criticism when you failed to meet their high expectations as a child.
Perhaps a parent was in the military and had very rigid rules on how things should be in everyday life.
And that's actually already a step to changing unrelenting standards,
Becoming aware of the origins of your life trap.
I do recommend to seek a professional to work on damaging unrelenting standards.
So back to remedies for life traps.
The following information is based on John Barletta who was actually citing Jeffrey Young again,
2013,
Schema Therapy.
What is important is that you learn to view performance as lying on a spectrum,
From poor to perfect,
With many gradations in between,
Rather than this all or nothing phenomenon or this black and white thinking.
I know I suffer from this big time.
If we were to get grades in school from 1 to 10 and 10 being perfect,
I of course needed to have a 10.
A 6 didn't exist in my world.
But I then wonder,
How do you get there?
How do you view your performance as lying on a spectrum,
I wonder?
Well,
The review goes on.
Conduct a cost-benefit analysis of your unrelenting standards and ask yourself where can I do a little less or where can I do fewer things and what would be the cost and benefits of this.
So write that down.
You can also explore the advantages of lowering your standards,
The benefits that would help you to get to health and happiness.
So what I've done before was having the writing prompt,
So really write with hand on pen and paper and not on your computer,
That's what I usually recommend.
And I wrote down all the things I would get or what would improve when I would lower my high standards and really see it in front of me in bullet points.
And the advice continues that the cost of the life trap is greater than the benefits.
So try to reduce the perceived risk of imperfection.
You know,
Being imperfect is not a crime and making mistakes probably doesn't have the extreme negative consequences you anticipate.
Other journals actually recommend,
And I've tried this once,
To make mistakes on purpose.
It was so cringey but it really worked.
More advice goes into design experiments to help you reign your perfectionism.
So do less and do it less well.
Schedule how much time you are going to spend working versus doing other things,
Such as playing or connecting to others.
You might want to focus more on doing tasks imperfectly and giving praise when you do something imperfect,
Whilst you're for example spending time with friends or family,
Just for the sake of enjoyment and to enhance the quality of your relationships.
The next tip reports to monitor your mood as a consequence of carrying out the assignments and observe the effects of your moods.
And I think this is a great one,
Because sometimes you notice that even though if you listen to your un-or-landing standards and you finally do the all to do task,
You might actually not feel that great.
If you ever get to finish that to-do list,
Because sometimes it's so big.
The next tip is one I really like,
Is to learn to fight the guilt when you don't try as hard enough as you usually do.
Permit some imperfection and really sit with the feeling.
And I know guilt is a difficult one for those suffering from perfectionism.
Or maybe it's even sitting with fear.
And that's why I have created a visualization based on changing unrelenting standards.
And you can find that on my Insight timer profile.
Thank you for listening to this talk about lifetraps with a focus on unrelenting standards.
Thank you,
Namaste.
