Welcome to awakening your wild heart. A ten ish minute weekly show that brings together a healing relationship to food, embodiment, practices and spirituality to inspire and support you in coming home to yourself. I’m your host, Julia Hollenberg, an anti diet dietitian, food and body therapist, yoga teacher, and woman on my own personal path to living in freedom, true power, and boundless love. Join me in this sacred space where we journey inward to awaken and nourish your wild heart.
You are the one you’ve been looking for. Reclaim yourself, your power, your life. Hey friends, welcome to awakening your wild heart. I’m Jules and I’m not in my living room. I’m in a different living room that happens to be in Tulum, Mexico. I have left my home in Seattle for about six months, and I’m going to be sharing with you these episodes from the road, and I’ll be in Mexico for the foreseeable future.
And what we’re going to talk about today is perfectionism. And I feel really called to share some of my own personal experience with perfectionism, especially as it relates to this very show that I have been wanting to get off the ground for a very long time. And I’m feeling really inspired to share about this topic too, because I attended a really lovely women’s circle for the full moon last night, and we had this really powerful ritual, this group of conscious, empowered, connected women.
We did a ritual in which we spoke in the group, what it is that we are ready to let go of and release, and we burned it in the fire. So the full moon time is a really potent time for speaking what it is that we want to let go of so that we can move forward with more clarity and power in our lives. And perfectionism was it for me.
So I have worked through a lot of big pieces of perfectionism in my life, but I’m still finding these threads that create a sense of stuckness and binding. And it’s been really interesting to watch myself as I have been planning to offer these ten minute episodes of awakening your wild heart. And I will create time to work on this project. And then suddenly, when that block of time comes, the dishwasher filter needs to be cleaned immediately or there’s an errand that I have to run that’s really inconsequential, but at the moment it feels quite important.
And so it is procrastination station. So I’m going to talk more about that, but I want to share what perfectionism is. And this is not a clinical definition, but it is my perspective and how it’s manifested in my life and how I see it coming through for some of the clients that I work with. And perfectionism and eating disorders go together quite often, not all the time, but they very commonly co occur.
And the perfectionism can create a lot of rigidity and that really propels the eating disorder forward. So what is perfectionism? Perfectionism, as I see it, is this internal pressure, and we’re not born with it, right? But it’s internal pressure that we digest, that we take in from culture and from our family systems. This internal pressure to perform or produce at a very high level in order to get approval from other people.
Approval, acceptance, validation from other people. It could be parents, it could be society at large, it could be people on instagram. And this outside approval is what buoys or even forms our sense of self worth. And that internal pressure to perform at such a high level with perfectionism, there is often no room for making a mistake. It’s either I do it all the way, I do it the best, and I get all praise and no criticism, or it’s absolutely crushing.
So that internal pressure creates a lot of procrastination because the stakes are so high that it’s like, oh, God, I don’t even want to try. I’m just going to sit here and not even try to do something new to put myself out there. Because the stakes of the possibility of failure feel so, so. And what will come from that perceived failure feels like just impossible to face. And so we get perfectionism, which leads to procrastination and this procrastination.
Then when we’re not doing the thing that we want to do, or maybe that we feel that we should do, right? There can be lots of shoulds in perfectionism, too. Then it creates more anxiety, like, oh, I’m not doing the thing. And then the not performing really kicks up the internal. Internal critic, the inner critic with perfectionism is so mean and so strong and so loud. And then that inner critic really is a blow to our self esteem, our self confidence, and our sense of worthiness.
So then we have an even greater divide, right? Self worth, self esteem is down here, and our expectations of ourselves are way up here. And how do we possibly bridge the gap between those two? So we get paralyzed. So stuck, so bound. Right? So perfectionism, I forgot the word. I’m imperfect. Perfectionism, procrastination, paralysis. So in this paralysis, we end up staying in our little box of the known, the comfortable, right?
And it can feel comfortable because it is known. But it often comes with a lot of anxiety. So this perfectionism is absolutely a suffocator of creativity. It stonewalls taking a risk, trying something new. And it says, no, I’m going to avoid criticism by just staying in my comfort zone here. Your wild heart cannot come through. It cannot show itself in that state. When we have blocks with creativity, with taking risks, with trying new things, our wild heart isn’t present.
We can’t find it, we can’t contact it. And so what do we do? How do we start to work with this feeling of stuckness, with this grip of perfectionism, to try to ease that grip, to try to move into a different place, different state, where we can start to get back in contact with our wild heart. So I want to offer five things on ways, five ways that we can start to loosen the grip of perfectionism and start to show up with ourselves and in our lives in a new way that is softer, that is more flexible, that is more free, and again, that allows us to open the space of our wild heart.
And this is just going to be sort of brief on these five things, and I’d love to go into them in more detail in the future. So the first one is self compassion. Self compassion is the quality of befriending yourself at the worst moments. And I’m going to borrow from Brene Brown. She says that self compassion is about being with yourself, befriending yourself when you are face down in the arena.
So what this says is that kindness and support and love toward yourself is not conditional on performing well or doing well or being great, being perfect. Self compassion is an offering of kindness and love and support unconditionally, no matter if you have done really well or if you’ve made a mistake or have hurt someone. And self compassion is a, um. It is a practice that can be cultivated, but I also believe that it is the state.
It is a quality that is inherent in our wild heart. So self compassion emerges when we can really start to release the layers, like perfectionism that block us from our wild heart. So, second is giving yourself permission to be mediocre. Lower the stakes. You don’t have to be great. I have permission to be average, to be mediocre. Whoa. Kind of a revolutionary thought for people who connect with being a perfectionist.
I cannot tell you how revolutionary this idea has been for me. When I started salsa dancing about eight years ago, I was. At a time in my life I was feeling really stuck. I was going through a hard time in my marriage. I wanted to do something new and something for myself. And I thought, I’m gonna go salsa dancing. And so. But I was terrified of looking stupid.
And the way that I soothed my anxiety was with this balm of, I do not have to be good at this. This is something I’m doing for fun. I do not have to be good at this. And that really lowered the barrier to entry and allowed me to show up as a beginner with an open mind, knowing that I was gonna look a little silly at times and that I was just fully embracing the playfulness and the learning process.
Which brings me to the third thing, growth mindset. Growth mindset is the third way to work with perfectionism. So this is as opposed to fixed mindset. So often with perfectionism, we can look at someone else out there and be like, oh, my gosh, they are amazing and they are doing amazingly. And, wow, they must have always been that perfect and amazing. And it creates a sense of isolation, like, why am I not that perfect?
And we want to be, but whatever you are seeing, that you are admiring in another person. They didn’t start out there. They had to go through the process of being a beginner and not being good at something and practicing their skill, honing their skill, working at it to build something, to become good at something, something. These are, and this is what growth mindset is. The awareness that we have the capability to learn and grow and hone our talents, our skills, our gifts.
No one starts out great. No one. Okay, worth one of these things that I want to share with you. Okay. Playful, not perfect. You see that? I just had to look at my notes because I forgot. Imperfect human. Thank you to my coach, Erin, for really helping with this mantra of playful, not perfect. Can we experiment? Can we see what happens? Can we show up and have fun and be not so serious about it all?
Because we are all human beings and we are all imperfect, and we all go through things that we have to learn. We all go through phases of, I’m not good at this. And then we get to decide, is it something that I want to work at or do I not really care about it? But playfulness allows us to contact, oh, it’s a quality of the wild heart, right?
Playfulness is absolutely a quality of the wild heart, and it allows us to experiment without any particular attachment to an outcome. Okay, last thing is a big one, I think, right? So the last soothing balm for perfectionism is recognizing your inherent worthiness, that your worthiness is not conditional, that just by being alive, you are worthy. Now, if this feels like a belief that is very far from where you are.
It’s okay. I invite you to meet yourself exactly where you are and recognize whatever came up for when I shared that. And I also invite you to be curious about what role spirituality plays in your life. And I’m not talking about religion, although religion and spirituality can co occur, but not necessarily, there are many spiritual traditions across the world’s cultures that hold this belief that we are inherently worthy.
So again, if this is something that feels very far, you might just open to what could a spiritual practice, what could a spiritual tradition offer you in coming in to this belief of your inherent worthiness? And when we operate from that place of inherent worthiness, which is the wild heart, it allows us to open into the flow of life. It allows us to try things, to be playful, to take some risks, to experiment because the stakes are not as high, right?
Our worthiness doesn’t have to be gained by doing something or producing something or being great. So that’s all for today. If you appreciate this content, please subscribe to this channel and you can also sign up for my newsletter. There will be a QR code in the notes and I look forward to seeing you next time for awakening your wild heart. Bye.
