That Feeling of "Always-Behind and Never-Enough"—Here's the Antidote | Ellen Hendriksen

Move on from the inner critic and beat perfectionism without lowering your standards. Dr. Ellen Hendriksen https://www.ellenhendriksen.com/ is a clinical psychologist who helps people calm their anxiety and be their authentic self. She serves on the faculty at Boston University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD) and is the author of HOW TO BE ENOUGH: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/how-to-be-enough-9781250291875/ and HOW TO BE YOURSELF: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Yourself-Critic-Anxiety/dp/1250161703. You can find her on Substack at How to Be Good to Yourself When You're Hard on Yourself https://substack.com/@ellenhendriksen. This episode originally aired in 2025. In this episode we talk about: The relationship between perfectionism and anxiety The definition of perfectionism––and why the word is actually a misnomer Dr. Hendriksen's own struggles with perfectionism, and how they manifested physically The difference between healthy perfectionism and unhealthy perfectionism Changing your relationship with your inner critic Shifting from rigid rules to flexibility Keeping high standards while making room for mistakes Overcoming procrastination Navigating social comparison And much more Related Episodes: Strategies for Social Anxiety | Ellen Hendriksen https://www.danharris.com/p/strategies-for-social-anxiety-ellen-35c?utm_source=publication-search The Voice in Your Head | Ethan Kross https://www.danharris.com/p/the-voice-in-your-head-ethan-kross-495?utm_source=publication-search How To Move Into The Future With Optimism Instead Of Anxiety | Frederik Pferdt https://www.danharris.com/p/how-to-move-into-the-future-with-3a4?utm_source=publication-search Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Join Dan, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren for Meditation Party, a 3-day immersive retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, October 16–18. Grab your in-person spot here https://www.eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party, or sign up to livestream here https://www.eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-livestream! To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dan Harris?

  Hey, hey, welcome to the 10% happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Perfectionism really can be the ultimate head fuck. You know, it's driving you crazy, that feeling of always behind and never enough. But you tell yourself you need this relentless self criticism in order to succeed. That anything less would be an unacceptable, even dangerous lowering of your standards. All lies, according to my guest today. Ellen Hendriksen is a clinical psychologist at Boston University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. Her latest book is called How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics. She first appeared on this podcast to discuss said book back in 2025, but we're bringing the episode back because it was a staff favorite.

• 0:48Dan Harris?

  I should also add that this was her second appearance on the podcast. She had come on several years earlier to discuss her first book about social anxiety called How to Be Yourself. You can find more from Ellen on Substack. Her newsletter is called How to Be Good to Yourself When You're Hard on Yourself. In this conversation, we talk about the relationship between perfectionism and anxiety, the definition of perfectionism, and why the word itself is actually a misnomer. Dr. Hendrickson's own struggles with perfectionism and how they manifested physically, quite significantly, actually. The difference between adaptive or healthy perfectionism and maladaptive perfectionism. How to change your relationship to your inner critic. How to shift from rigid rules to flexibility. How to keep high standards while making room for mistakes.

• 1:32Dan Harris?

  How to overcome procrastination, navigating social comparison, and much more. It's a rich conversation. A few things before we hear from our sponsors. I highly recommend that you head on over to danharris.com to check out my newish meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris. Right now, we're in the middle of this really cool series where every Sunday, the legendary Dharma teacher Sharon Salzberg is leading a live session where she does some teachings on the Buddha's Eightfold Path. You can think of the Eightfold Path as the Buddha's foundational list. It's his cookbook for leading a happy life. Sharon does some teaching on one aspect of the path. She guides a meditation, and then she takes your questions. We're in the middle of it right now, but it's not too late to join.

• 2:17Dan Harris?

  You can sign up at danharris.com, and you can watch the first few sessions on video replay and then join the rest of them live. It's really cool. One of the keys, I believe, and this is an evidence-based assertion, one of the keys to starting a habit or maintaining a habit like meditation is doing it with other people. And that's what we're doing over on 10% with Dan Harris. Life is better in the carpool lane. Join the party. We'll get started with Ellen Hendriksen right after this. Most of us can remember being about 15 and feeling completely invisible, or worse, extremely visible, but for the wrong reasons. I remember one year when I was a teenager, I had a pimple in the crevice of my nose

• 3:02Dan Harris?

  for the entire year. I didn't like that. Either way, even if we have painful memories of that age, most of us tend to soften it in memory, and it was actually harder than we remember it now. That is the territory of Carrie, now streaming on Prime Video, the first ever television adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie. Eight episodes from Mike Flanagan with Stephen King as an executive producer. Flanagan had described this show as a tragedy. It's about a girl who doesn't feel seen by anyone and about how small, everyday acts of unkindness compound into something nobody meant to cause, which happens now at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable not long ago.

• 3:44Dan Harris?

  What I really appreciate about the show is that the show takes Carrie seriously as a person rather than as some sort of symbol. And the season keeps circling around one major question. Are you watching the making of a hero, a villain, or something more complicated than either of those options? Carrie is now streaming on Prime Video. Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, welcome back to the show.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. I'm excited to be back.

• 4:16Dan Harris?

  Excited to have you back. All right, so tell me how this latest book came about, because the last time you were on the show, we were talking about social anxiety. This book is related, but quite distinct, related in some ways to anxiety, but quite distinct from social anxiety. I suspect this, and I'd love to hear this story if you're comfortable telling it, I suspect this book has its roots in your own struggles with perfectionism.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  How did you guess? Yes, I write about my own problems. Yeah, well, and there are enough people out there, I've realized, with the exact same problems that it forms an audience and therefore a community. So, yeah, for sure. You're absolutely right. Yeah, social anxiety and perfectionism are, at the very least, siblings. Or to change the metaphor, if we drill down on social anxiety, we find a foundation of perfectionism because they're both based on the same flawed perception of self, the felt sense of inadequacy that keeps us separated from others. And in both, we have to work, or we think, we have to work hard to avoid finding ourselves in a situation that would reveal that inadequacy to others.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  So we need to either hide or avoid or overcompensate. But regardless of whether it's social anxiety perfectionism, that hiding and concealing and overcompensating backfires because that steals the credit for keeping us safe. And in both, we think we have to perform as superbly as possible for people to like us. So that's the connection. And then you asked personally about perfectionism. And yeah, for sure. So let me back up and give a definition of perfectionism. I find it highly ironic that perfectionism researchers can't agree on a perfect definition of perfectionism. And so the one that I like is that it's demanding of ourselves a level of performance higher than is required for the situation.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  And I like that because you can look at it two ways. You can look at it as like, that's quite healthy. Please keep doing that. You know, shoot for the stars, do more than the bare minimum. You know, research shows that setting goals and striving to achieve them confers all sorts of cool things like mastery and purpose. So like, yeah, please demand of yourself a level of performance higher than what is required for the situation. However, where it tips over into less healthy mindsets and behaviors is when we start to equate our performance with our character. We look to answer that universal, very human question of like, am I okay? Am I good enough?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  By looking at how well we do things, like looking at our performance. For me, for too much of my life, I held that classic mindset of making my self-evaluation, my self-worth overly dependent on meeting my personally demanding standards that I set for myself. So high school and college, probably put too much stock in grades. When I was a young adult and social life is very important, I probably put too much stock in social behavior. When I was launching my career and like a young mom, the measure was productivity. And so not only was I conflating what I did with who I was, but I also did three things that made my life harder.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  The specifics gets into the universal because this is what we all do when we start to conflate who we are with our performance. One is that I would focus on flaws and details. For example, in my social behavior era, if there was an awkward silence on a date or like I told a joke no one seemed to get, even if everything else went well, that detail is what I would think about afterwards. I would do the equivalent of focusing on the one frowning face in the crowd of smiles. Two, I would give myself only two options, all or nothing, for evaluating outcomes. Let's look at grades.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  If I was aiming for straight A's and I got that, except for 189, that disqualified all the other A's and shunted me from all to nothing. So I gave myself this very narrow criteria for success and a very wide gulf for if we're defining failure as not meeting expectations for failure. When I was looking at productivity too closely, if there were a couple of things on the to-do list that went undone, like that wasn't good enough. And then the third thing I did is that I was hard on myself. And so when we fall short of our personally demanding standards, we will often self-criticize. But this is, I find ironic, if we somehow pull out all the stops and meet our personally demanding standards, we decide those standards were insufficiently demanding in the first

• 8:56Speaker 01

  place and move the goalposts. So that's me. So again, I wrote this book for myself, but I also wrote it for everyone else. I think there's a silent epidemic of perfectionism happening. And as a clinical psychologist at an anxiety specialty center, the vast majority of my clients have perfectionism at the center of their challenges. But no one has ever come in and said, Ellen, I'm a perfectionist. I need help with perfectionism. No one ever says that. What they say is things like, I feel like I'm failing, or I feel like I'm falling behind. I'm not reaching my potential. I have so many things on my plate and I'm not doing any of them well. We all say things like that.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  That's because perfectionism is a little bit of a misnomer. It's really not about striving to be perfect. It's about never feeling good enough. And that's something that a lot of us can relate to, especially in 2025.

• 9:51Dan Harris?

  Well, let's just pause on that for a second. I hate when people do this to me, but I'm going to ask you to say that again because I think it's worth dwelling on. Perfectionism as a word is a bit of a misnomer when applied to the actual condition.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yes, because the mindset, through my own experience and observing that of clients and the research, shows that it is less about striving to be perfect and more about never feeling good enough. We think we have to perform as superbly as possible to be sufficient as a person.

• 10:28Dan Harris?

  So it's not actually about nailing it. It may manifest as a desire for...

• 10:39Dan Harris?

  The perfect outcome of whatever you're doing. But the underlying issue is not enoughness.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Correct. Yes. And we often think about perfectionism as like a personality profile, like sort of type A, picky, detail oriented. And it can be that. But again, that heart of it is conflating our self evaluation with our performance. And it can be about anything. Like I talked about grades and social behavior and productivity, but it could be our work evaluation, our weight, our bank account, our last musical or athletic performance, or even more subtle things like, did I stick to healthy eating today? Was I a good parent today? Did I meditate? Did I do it well enough? Did I get distracted?

• 11:27Speaker 01

  You know, it's anything where we think we have to perform as superbly as possible to be sufficient, to be enough.

• 11:36Dan Harris?

  16 years of meditation and you're describing my inner dialogue to this day. Although I will say that I catch myself much more rapidly and much more kind of myself in a million different ways, but the conditioning remains because it is so, so deeply ingrained culturally and historically. The question that comes screaming out of this conversation is, well, how do we address that insufficiency? And we will get to that. But I do want to stay on perfectionism for a second, and specifically on your perfectionism, because if memory serves, it manifested physically for you?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when I was researching this book, I came across a paper, and I'm going to mangle this title, but it was something like perfectionist at 20, work-life balance issues at 40. And I was like, oh, have these people been in my house? What is this? So yeah, for me, I think I had been grinding for so long, basically. This is a tangent, sorry, that you use the word culture, that our culture rewards in an ever more competitive, ratings oriented, optimization focused culture. It makes sense that we respond by feeling like we're never doing enough, aren't good enough. So I had been grinding for a long

• 12:51Speaker 01

  time. And yeah, around 40, it really started to manifest in my body. And I went through like a number of rounds of physical therapy. I woke up one morning, I couldn't turn my head to the right because my muscles were too tight. I had blown out my forearm from typing too much. I got a GI illness. So yeah, it absolutely manifested physically. And I'd already kind of known this wasn't sustainable, but that really drove that message home that something needed to change.

• 13:22Dan Harris?

  So it manifested physically for you. That makes sense for me, just to me, because, you know, I've had so many of my psychological ailments manifest physically.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  It's like there's a mind-body connection or something.

• 13:34Dan Harris?

  Ellen Langer would say it's mind-body unity. It's not even a connection. It's the same thing. I want to pick up on something that's related to this, and also that it's a breadcrumb you dropped several paragraphs ago, where in your work at a center that specializes in anxiety and related disorders, your sense is that perfectionism is at the root of, and I believe you write about this in your book, it's at the root of, or at least linked to obsessive compulsive disorder and eating disorders. Can you say a little bit more about this?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So perfectionism is not a disorder in and of itself. It's not diagnosable. It's more of a mindset or a trait, but it definitely lies at the heart of other diagnosable disorders like social anxiety, or OCD, eating disorders, some kinds of treatment resistant anxiety. Sometimes we will worry ourselves into a depression because of perfectionism. Yeah, the heart is that we have to perform as superbly as we can. And so in eating disorders, it's either on body weight or shape, or on feeling

• 14:43Speaker 01

  in control when we eat. In social anxiety, it's that idea that there is kind of a fatal flaw about us, and it will be revealed unless we work really hard to conceal it. We have to perform correctly socially and not make mistakes. So it's at the heart of a lot of what we do. The number of clients I have who are struggling with perfectionism, if you line up 100 different people, you will see 100 different phenotypes of perfectionism. I work with a musician, a stay at home mom, an academic, a neuroscientist, like there's just all sorts of varieties of people who are making their performance a referendum on their character.

• 15:25Dan Harris?

  Performance a referendum on your character. I suspect many heads are nodding asynchronously as people consume this podcast. Where does this come from? Do we evolve for perfectionism? Or is that a more modern development?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Okay, it definitely comes from both within and from all around us, which I think is really interesting. So it has been shown to be genetic. Again, even though it's not diagnosable, it definitely runs in families. And then speaking of families, it can be conferred upon us from certainly any kind of family, but there are a number of sort of different styles of parenting that have been identified as making it more likely that will come out perfectionistic. That is if we are from a family that's perfectionistic itself. If we're from helicopter, snowplow family where caution and avoiding risk and

• 16:27Speaker 01

  mistakes is really important. If we're from a family that conferred a lot of contingent approval, or like love sort of got confused with pride, we got attention and positive regard when we accomplished things. And then fourth is if our family was sort of chaotic or dramatic or erratic, abusive, when that's where kids will often find safety and control through their performance. You know, if I can't control dad's drinking, at least I can control my grades. If I can't control mom getting angry, I can be charismatic and be the most popular kid in school. So definitely there's some that comes from within.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  But it also comes from all around us, from the environment. And I would argue from 2025, because every human reacts to the situations we're put in. And so in a society that really is getting more demanding, competitive, performance oriented due to capitalism, competition, advertising to social media, you name it, all these messages are coming at us, saying that we have to perform and consume and achieve to ever higher levels to be sufficient as a person. The researcher Andrew Hill says that perfectionistic climates turn us all into perfectionists. I certainly agree.

• 17:47Dan Harris?

  Just to go back to evolution, would it be safe to say, and this is kind of just a surmise on my end, after having listened to you, that there may be aspects of the human mind dating back to our origins that predispose us toward this trait, but that latent potential has been put on steroids because of how culture has evolved?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, I'll surmise along with you for sure. So perfectionism, we usually think of it as a personal problem, but it's really an interpersonal problem. And we can talk more about that later. But my point is that perfectionism is interpersonally motivated. We do it to try to stay in others' good graces, to try not to get criticized, or rejected, or judged. And so, you know, again, we're doing things as well as possible to try to keep criticism and judgment at bay. And ultimately, it's because we want to connect with people. And so I think evolutionarily, yeah, we learned to perform as well as possible because we thought that it kept the group together, kept it going, helped us get along harmoniously

• 18:55Speaker 01

  with everybody else. That is my surmising.

• 18:59Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it makes complete sense, based on the very limited understanding I have of how we evolved. I mean, it all whittles down to love and safety.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, but I think the thing that we get confused when we double down on performance is that admiration and being impressive is different fundamentally from being accepted or belonging. Again, pride and love are different.

• 19:29Dan Harris?

  Yes. Yes. And the persona, which is actually probably a kind of form of armor that we create in order to get what we think is love, but is actually admiration, paradoxically and maddeningly gets us further away from what our underlying goal is.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  We can end right now. That is absolutely, that is the message for sure. Because the wall that we put up to try to protect ourselves from criticism and judgment acts as a wall that separates us from others. So we end up being on this pedestal, but that means we're alone. When we're singular, we're separate. It's ironic that we are doing this to try to gain connection, love, belonging, and we end up with sort of an ersatz version of that admiration, approval, compliments, but those are fundamentally different.

• 20:32Dan Harris?

  And I would just add to that, even if you're not getting the approval and you're still a perfectionist, because I think that describes many of us. I've been a failed perfectionist in many areas of my life. I'm not getting what I hope for and I'm kicking my own ass. The compulsive, reflexive, persistent self-evaluation removes you from the world, makes you less available, less authentic, and widens the gulf between you and what you actually want, whether you are singular or not in your achievements.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, we don't see the world as it is, right? We see the world as we are. And so if we're holding ourselves to personally demanding standards, we assume other people are holding us to those same standards. But that's not what relationships and connecting are about. Think about why your friends are your friends. Are you friends with your friends because they're good at things? Because they meet personally demanding standards and metrics? Like, they're good at public speaking, or they always pick a good restaurant, or they're good at meditating? You know, probably not. Like, I'm guessing you're friends with your friends because of how you feel when you're together. You feel supported, understood, like you can be yourself, and that you don't have to perform at all. Like, that's that difference.

• 21:47Dan Harris?

  Real friends, yes.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Real friends, right. Not connections or networks. Yeah, right, exactly.

• 21:54Dan Harris?

  I can't remember who said this, but it's something like, people never remember what you say. They remember how you made them feel.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yes. So the internet taught me that that's a Maya Angelou quote, but the internet is often wrong. So I could be wrong in that.

• 22:06Dan Harris?

  But she said so many brilliant things, the odds are pretty high that it was her.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 22:13Dan Harris?

  All right. There's a term you use in the book, "The Many Salads of Perfectionism." Have you heard from Sweetgreen's lawyers? And what do you mean by this?

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Sure. Okay, what I mean by a salad of perfectionism is that it's this tortured metaphor, where there are a million different salads out there, like things as different as tabbouleh and Niçoise salad and Jell-O salad are all salads. So there's all these different phenotypes. Likewise, as I alluded to before, you line up 100 different people with perfectionism and you have 100 different phenotypes. There's infinite ways of being perfectionistic. So again, it could be about how much money you're bringing in. It could be about how healthy you ate today. It could be whether or not you yell at your kids, and so many different ways. But the definition of a salad is that it's a variety of ingredients

• 23:02Speaker 01

  bonded by a common dressing. So there are some commonalities in perfectionism. Most people will be sort of allergic to mistakes. I say that we have sort of a peanut allergy to mistakes. If we make a mistake, there's a big reaction. We often procrastinate. We often compare ourselves to others. We do this thing called perfectionistic self-presentation, where we show the world what's going well and we sort of hide what's not going so well. Colloquially, this is called duck syndrome. It's where we look like we're gliding effortlessly across the surface, but really our little duck feet are working really, really hard underneath the surface. So there are a number of things that bind people with perfectionism, even as we all look very, very different.

• 23:49Dan Harris?

  That, Lance, that makes complete sense. As promised, we are soon going to get to, like, how does one address the root causes here, this sense of insufficiency? But just staying at a higher level for a second, there's a lingering question that I suspect some listeners are gnawing at in their minds, which is, isn't there a case for perfectionism and high standards sometimes? And I believe you even say in the book, there's a difference between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, for sure. Okay, it's like, again, some researchers would disagree with me, but others would totally agree with me, that like, there is such a thing as healthy perfectionism, and that's when we strive for excellence. We do good work for the work's sake. We set high standards. We care deeply. Like, please keep doing that. In fact, the healthy heart of perfectionism is a personality trait called conscientiousness, which comes from the root word conscious or conscience, our sense of right and wrong. Essentially, conscientiousness is, according to research, including by the psychologist Dr. Angela Duckworth, who's better known for her work on grit, conscientiousness is the number

• 25:02Speaker 01

  one trait for a good life, both subjectively and objectively. So if you've got to choose a personality, conscientiousness is the one to choose. And sometimes that does overgrow into perfectionism. We have self-control that sometimes gets a little out of control. But yes, it can absolutely be healthy and at its heart means well and can do great things.

• 25:26Dan Harris?

  So how do we walk the line between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism?

• 25:32Speaker 01

  So we can't entirely separate out ourselves from our performance, nor would we want to. Of course, we're going to feel proud when we do something well. Of course, we're going to be bummed or disappointed when things go wrong. But I think we can try to separate them out a little bit and be able to gain some distance and perspective. There's a difference between our self-worth and our performance. The technical name for this is over-evaluation. Our evaluation of our work gets overgrown and becomes an evaluation of ourselves. So one of the things we can do is we can try to shift from evaluation

• 26:15Speaker 01

  to information, to make it about the work, not about you. So we could take the stance of like a sculptor eyeing a block of marble, or like a chef tasting a dish. We inherently know that the sculptor and the sculpture are different, the chef and the dish are different. All right, I'm going to mix my metaphors. Our attention is like a spotlight, and we get to choose where to point it. If we point it at the work, whatever it is we're trying to do, we generally feel better and perform better. If we point it at ourselves, we generally feel worse and perform worse. And so I'll tell you a story from the book to illustrate this. I tell the story of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and his time at UCLA under the

• 26:55Speaker 01

  legendary basketball coach, John Wooden. During his time there, or around that time, the UCLA basketball team was just a powerhouse and had seven in a row national titles. It was incredible, all under Coach Wooden. And so two education researchers, doctors Roland Tharp and Roland Gallimore, decided to sit in the stands for every single practice of the '74-'75 season to see, like, what is the secret sauce? How does Coach Wooden do this? And what they discovered is that he very seldom praised or criticized his players, that instead he would focus on the work. He would tell them what to do and how to

• 27:39Speaker 01

  do it. So he wouldn't say things like, "Good job," or, "No, like, you stink. You have to practice more." He would say, "Pass from the chest. Take lots of shots where you might get them in games. Pass the ball to someone short." He would give you information as opposed to evaluation. And that shift from yourself to the work seems subtle, but makes a big difference.

• 28:03Dan Harris?

  So do you never want to say to yourself, "Good job"?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  No, no, no. Again, there are degrees of this, for sure. You know, we can certainly be proud of what we do, but it's, we're trying to get some perspective and get some distance that we are not our work. We are not our performance. That those two things can be related, but not. If you picture a Venn diagram, we want it to not be completely overlapping, which is what I will often see when folks come into the clinic. So we work to try to crank them apart just a little bit. And that, okay, here, this is another quick story. A potential client emailed me and said, "Hey, I'd like to work on perfectionism." I said,

• 28:47Speaker 01

  "Cool, come on in." And we set up an intake. And the day before, she emailed me again, and she said, "You know, I have given this some thought, and I want to wait until I have lots of time and can put lots of energy and effort into, like, fighting this problem." What I said to her, and what I would say to listeners who might be, you know, nodding, is that, to your question, you don't have to separate out worth and performance, or never say, "Good job." Just like a 5% difference, a 10% difference, that's really all you need. It's not this complete cleaving of worth and performance.

• 29:28Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Ellen talks about the seven key shifts for addressing the underlying causes of perfectionism.

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• 32:01Dan Harris?

  Well, you've brought us to the practical, which I've been promising for a while. And the book consists of seven different shifts we can make to help us address what you're calling, and I'm sympathetic to your argument, what you're calling the underlying root cause of perfectionism, which is a sense of not-enoughness, insufficiency. So shift number one is from self-criticism to kindness. My goal for the rest of the interview is to kind of just go through as many of these shifts as we can cover. The first one is from self-criticism to kindness. Can you, I suspect we may have already covered some of this, but can you hold forth on that one?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Let me just normalize things also that everybody criticizes themselves from time to time. Self-criticism is the core of humans' ability to self-regulate. A healthy dose of self-judgment helps us evaluate our behavior, modify it to improve ourselves, like get along more harmoniously with our fellow humans. Evolutionarily, we critique ourselves to better ourselves. So some self-criticism is gonna happen. But perfectionistic self-criticism is particularly harsh and particularly personalistic. It's about us. I have found that, as an anxiety therapist, I have two levers I can pull. I can pull change or acceptance. We could change self-criticism, and we can. But I've gotten a lot farther with folks

• 33:27Speaker 01

  by trying to change their relationship to self-criticism. What I mean by that, actually, here, this is a good story. Many years ago, I was on your show. And I was there as a first-time author. This was the biggest show I had ever been on to date, and I was quite anxious. We recorded, and you asked such good questions and were so kind. And along the way, I made a totally reasonable number of mistakes. I think I lost my train of thought at one point. I think I stumbled over my words a couple of times. At one point, I actually remember thinking that I had offended you. And so after recording,

• 34:10Speaker 01

  despite you and your producer and everyone just being so nice and so complimentary, like, that's all I could think about. All I could think about was, like, the errors. And so I was just kicking myself on the way out the door. And my poor editor, who had come with me, steered me into the nearest bar and bought me a gin and tonic, ostensibly to celebrate. But I think he knew that my self-criticism had really started going. And so I have now, fast-forward seven years, done this enough, like, something with a microphone or put my workout into the world, enough that I know this is just kind of what happens, that I will do something with a microphone, and then my brain will just start to zero in on the mistakes, or the details,

• 34:54Speaker 01

  or the things that went wrong, and will focus on that. But rather than trying to not think about that, or like, let me reframe this, which, you know, absolutely can work, I have tried to change my relationship to the self-criticism and think, you know, this is just how I'm wired. This is what happens when I do something involving a microphone. And it's just part of the script, kind of like, you know, I go to a restaurant, the hostess seats me, the waiter comes, I order, the food comes, I eat it, pay, I leave. Okay, that's just the script. When I do something, a podcast recording, part of the script is that I record, I leave, I think it stinks.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  I think about all the mistakes I made. And then usually, it's fine. And if it's not fine, either I can learn from that, or sometimes, things just don't go well. And that's okay. And I know that other people have their own version of this. Like, my partner, whenever he gives a PowerPoint presentation, comes home and thinks it sucks, and will think of all the mistakes he made. And we've learned, this is just how it goes. This is just part of the script. And so by taking the stance of kind of listening to my self-criticism, like the music at a coffee shop, that has made all the difference. It's there. My brain is still making those thoughts. I can hear it. But I don't have to sing along. I don't have to take my self-criticism seriously

• 36:20Speaker 01

  or literally. It can just happen, and I can change my relationship to it.

• 36:25Dan Harris?

  I'm really interested in this dialectic change. I don't know if I'm using that word correctly, but change and acceptance. The argument you just made for acceptance completely lands for me. And as you were talking, I was thinking about the work of both Kristin Neff and Ethan Kross, both of whom have been on the show. I'll put some links in the show notes. They both talk a lot about rewiring your own inner chatter. So it would be less on the acceptance side, although they're both pro-acceptance, but more, their emphasis is more on the change side, that you can learn, anybody can, without massive meditation interventions or anything like that, learn how to just develop the habit of talking to yourself kindly.

• 37:08Dan Harris?

  And it doesn't have to be cheesy, well, it can be cheesy, but it doesn't have to be unrealistic affirmations, pretending that you're perfect or being in denial, et cetera, et cetera. It's more like the way a good coach talks to their players. And so I'm just curious, what's your take on the, we've talked about acceptance, but what about on the change side here as it comes to the inner critic?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Man, you teed me up just right. That was great. Okay, so, yeah, absolutely. No, I love Kristin Neff. Her work actually helped me understand perfectionism because she says that self-compassion consists of three things, of self-kindness, of non-judgmental mindfulness, and connection to the larger human experience. But the perfectionistic brain is reverse-threaded for all three of those things. So instead of self-kindness, we're wired to be self-critical. Instead of non-judgmental mindfulness, we can be judgmental. You know, we zero in on flaws. And instead of connecting to the larger human experience, we see our struggles or mistakes or shortcomings as things that set us apart, rather than as common experiences that connect us to others. That is not carved into a stone tablet.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Like, we can absolutely change all of those things, but just our starting point is kind of, we're coming from inside a hole, basically. And so I was taught, the Kristin Neff method, that self-compassion was talking to yourself like a good friend, or, yeah, talking to yourself like a coach. But my perfectionistic brain thought that that meant that I had to generate a steady stream of articulate and effective self-compassionate hype. And that was too high a bar. So in pulling the change lever, I learned, oh, my gosh, Ellen, you don't have to make it that complicated, that it can be one word. It can be easy. Or two words, you're okay. Or something way less self-compassion presidential speech-writing-esque. But in addition to words, again, pulling that change lever,

• 39:00Speaker 01

  I learned that self-compassion can also be actions. And for me, at least, that was a lot easier because I feel like it is hard to control our thoughts, like, don't think about a cheeseburger floating above my head. It is hard to control our feelings. You know, if you've ever been told, calm down, or just relax, or cheer up, you know, you probably wanted to punch the person in the face, that you can't just change your emotion. But you can, and when I say you, I mean everybody, we can control our actions. So self-compassion can be turning towards our pain and suffering and asking, what do I need? And so it could be something as simple as taking a few more minutes under the warm shower on a cold morning.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  It could be, I did this yesterday, I made myself go to the gym, even though I didn't want to, because I knew, I just know from experience that it'll make me feel better. But...

• 39:56Speaker 01

  It can also be giving ourselves permission not to do everything we expect of ourselves. It could be deciding to skip the gym because what we really need is an extra hour of sleep. All in all, self compassion can be words and can be actions, which was really helpful for me. And it's turning towards our pain and suffering and asking, what do I need with care and understanding?

• 40:20Dan Harris?

  Chris Germer, Kristin Neff's longtime research partner and pal, said here on the show that the preeminent question of self compassion is, what do I need right now? And so, amen to everything you just said. Shift number two, so just to reset, we're talking about perfectionism. Ellen's thesis is that what lies beneath perfectionism is a sense of insufficiency. And so, like, how do you start to feel like enough? Well, there are these seven shifts that she's going to propose in the course of her book, which you should read. We talked about the first one, which is from self criticism to kindness. Shift number two is coming home to your life. What do you mean by that?

• 41:00Speaker 01

  So with the coming home to your life, essentially what I mean is that perfectionism drives us to focus on performance, to focus on being good at things. And I posed the question of essentially, let's change the yardstick. Rather than measuring ourselves by, did I do the thing? Let's switch over and ask a completely different question, which is, am I living the life I want to live? Am I being the person I want to be? And so, that implies that that takes us from a lower power position where we have to do the thing and our, you know, every performance is a referendum on our character.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  So our worth is never a settled question, to being able to choose, and we'll get into this later, but based on our freely chosen values, what do I want to do? What is meaningful, important, purposeful, fun for me? And if I could choose how to live my life and what to do next, what would I do? And surprise, we can, you know, within our context, we can do that. That's essentially, in a nutshell, what I mean by coming home to your life.

• 42:13Dan Harris?

  Just trying to think this through as it would apply to me. So I could be obsessed with being a successful, and that's a goalpost that always moves.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 42:24Dan Harris?

  Writer and podcaster, and that would be a label. Or I could be more focused on hewing closely to my underlying values, which would be cultivating positive relationships in every aspect of my life. And the latter is much, confers much more agency.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Amazing. Yes. Yeah. And then like, what's under being quote unquote, like, successful podcaster and writer? Is that, that you're helping people, is that building a community, is that serving others? Like, those sound like values. And as long as those feel freely chosen and not like a new rule, then yeah, absolutely. You're running in the direction of values as opposed to trying to stick to some rule or some label.

• 43:05Dan Harris?

  Right. And freely chosen seems important also because depending on what your chromosomal structure or pigmentation is, society can impose upon you values that may not be your own.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. In the book, yeah, I tried to make a distinction that folks from sexual, racial, gender minorities, there's another layer. Because again, yeah, all humans react to the situations we're put in. And so, if we're put in a society or an institution or a workplace that overtly or covertly tells us, you don't belong here, you don't deserve to be here, then that resulting urge to prove ourselves, you know, to earn our way into the group is no longer a personality trait, but like, an understandable reaction. An example I give, so Dr. Gary Mitchell from Duke researches college prep programs

• 43:58Speaker 01

  designed to launch, you know, high achieving black and brown kids into impressive career trajectories. And he finds that at some of these schools, the kids in the college prep programs may be subject to higher standards of behavior of academics than kids from, say, like, legacy or like donor families. Perfectionism can be institutionalized even, and there can be higher expectations for certain folks. And so, one solution there is representation. You know, when everybody belongs, it lessens that external pull to prove that you belong. And so, you can spend less of your bandwidth proving you belong by doing excellent work. And instead, you can just simply do your excellent work. And then, you know, another solution is community.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  And so, Dr. Mitchell calls this a thick sense of cohort. And that assures us that we're not alone. So there can be a very real pull to prove ourselves. And then, yeah, that is conferred by the environment, for sure.

• 44:59Dan Harris?

  Shift number three, you noted to this a little bit earlier, is from rules to flexibility. Say more.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So we alluded to rules a little bit, like, okay, I gotta be a successful podcaster and writer. We all have rules, and especially like, those of us with perfectionism. We want to know the rules so we can follow them. And like, ironically, if there are no rules, we set up personally demanding rules and then we follow those. So, you know, think about making up rules for healthy eating or making up rules for like, I don't know, training for a 5K or something, studying for your, not a chemistry exam. Like, it's not that rules are bad. It's when three different things happen that they start to get in our way. So one is when our rules become rigid, we apply them no matter the situation. So like, we try to follow the diet even on Thanksgiving.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Then we're getting ourselves into some questionable territory. Two, the rules are all or nothing. If we follow the rules acceptably, we're acceptable. If we mess up, then it renders us unacceptable. I ate a cookie, so like, that ruins my entire healthy eating for the day and I'm bad. And then, three is when we start to impose our rules on other people, it can get in the way of our relationship. For example, I'm sure I have the right way to load the dishwasher. But if I try to impose that on my other family members, then, you know, it's going to cause some commotion. The dishwasher just always comes up. That's the classic example.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  So the shift is trying to shift from following the rules, did I do the thing? To values, which we alluded to before. And I want to take just a minute to define values because it's a word that gets thrown around a lot. So I'm going to give you the definition that, so Mike Tuigig and Clarissa Ong, who wrote an excellent book called The Anxious Perfectionist, defined values as having four, four qualities. And I think the fourth one is the most important. So one is values continuous. So you're never done, don, you know, living a value. So a value is different than a goal. It's like, making a million dollars is not a value, that's a goal.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  But like, financial security or wealth, or I don't know, whatever, that could be considered a value. You're never done. Values are intrinsically meaningful, meaning you'd care about it even if no one else knew. So like, getting famous isn't a value, but like, putting in the work and putting good work out into the world is. Values are under your control, meaning they're not contingent upon anyone else. So like, being loved isn't a value, but being loving is. And the fourth one, again, this is the one I think is most important, and we've, we already use these words, but it's they're freely chosen. Values are never coercive or obligatory. So you freely choose to follow them. And you're probably even likely to be willing to tolerate some discomfort or inconvenience to do so.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  So it's like, the value of sustainability or like, giving back might be why you're willing to give up your Saturday morning to go volunteer to pick up trash on the beach, rather than spending that same morning like, relaxing at the beach. And in perfectionism, the thing that I feel like we need to watch out for is that oftentimes, rules were sort of masquerade as values or values will function as rules. That sense of it being freely chosen is what differentiates them. So the example I always like to use is I had a client who said, through a combination of God and my mother, I was taught to be generous. But she said that that meant if somebody on the street asked her for a dollar or a neighbor asked her to babysit, she had to do it.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  It was the very opposite of the spirit of generosity because it was obligatory and coercive, the sense of I have to. That's what I, I have clients and folks watch out for is, does this feel obligatory? Or does this feel freely chosen? If it's freely chosen, it's functioning as a value. This is a very long answer, but when, when we stop living by only rules and shift over to values, we might not even do anything particularly differently. So for instance, I had a client who was very concerned about being a good friend. Amongst other things, there are things she had to do if she was going to be a good friend. She has to remember her friend's birthday. She has to ask them detailed questions about their life. Like, if they go for a walk together, she's going to surprise them with their favorite coffee order.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  None of these things are bad. They're lovely, please keep doing them. But it's that sense of have to, it's that sense of coercion, like, the duty, the obligation behind it that can make that friendship feel like a people pleasing grind. So she, this client, she tried to shift to a value of being supportive, being attentive. And then, she was freely choosing to remember their birthday, ask them detailed questions about their life, maybe surprise them with their favorite coffee order. But the quality of the experience changed. It felt like a want rather than a should, and that made all the difference.

• 50:03Dan Harris?

  Let's just go back to the cookie for a second because I think that's probably deeply resonant for a lot of people and it describes me and thankfully, not anymore, although occasionally. But you were using the example of, I have these food rules. I slipped up and ate a cookie and the whole day is out the window and I'm a bad boy. Smack me on the snout. If I'm understanding this heuristic of, you know, moving from rules to flexibility, it's like, yeah, I can have cookies once in a while. My value is to take care of my body, to be as healthy as I can, but not miserable. Sometimes some cookies, that's what's called for. Am I stating the spirit of this correctly?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. Yeah, for sure. So is, are we getting into mistakes now?

• 50:47Dan Harris?

  Oh, sure. Let's, let's do that. So that, that is, that is shift number four, which is mistakes, mistakes, colon, from holding on to letting go.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Sure. When we're over identified with our performance, whether that's, yeah, healthy eating or productivity, social behavior, et cetera, et cetera, good parenting, whatever it is, there's no room for mistakes because then it reflects on us personally. I have a shout from the rooftops rant where, okay, so I think the conventional advice about perfectionism is you have to lower your standards, or you have to stop when things are good enough. And that doesn't go over well with people with perfectionism. If we're still working on separating out our worth from our performance, settling for subpar or mediocre performance means we're subpar

• 51:38Speaker 01

  or mediocre, and we're not going to do that. So I think semantics are important. Keep your high standards. The high standards are not the problem. What I try to focus on is to make some room for mistakes. That's different than lowering our standards. And so I've told the story before, but I think it bears repeating. I was working with a pediatrician, and she had been a pediatrician for 25 years, you know, long storied career. She came in one week and was just beside herself because she had misdiagnosed a little girl who came in with what she thought was constipation, and it turned out to be appendicitis. Kind of a big mistake. The little girl ended up later having to go to the emergency room,

• 52:19Speaker 01

  have emergency surgery. She was fine, but my client was just kicking herself, saying things like, I should retire early, maybe I should get my head examined, like, I'm a terrible doctor. For her, I would argue that we actually don't want to lower her standards, or like, stop when things are good enough. She should keep the high standards of correctly diagnosing every kid who comes through the door. But there are going to be inevitable mistakes over a 25-year career, not because she's incapable, not because she's incompetent, but because she is human. It's just gonna happen. Mistakes is part

• 53:00Speaker 01

  of the package deal of being human. And so I like to try to ask people appropriate to their situation, like, all right, over a 25-year career, like, what percentage of misdiagnoses do you think is reasonable? Or, you know, how many cookies do you think you're going to eat in a day? What is a reasonable amount of mistakes, or screw-ups, or escape hatches, or whatnot? It doesn't even matter what the answer is, as long as that answer is non-zero. Because that little bit of wiggle room is all we need to allow ourselves some of the inevitable screw-ups that are part of the package deal of life.

• 53:40Dan Harris?

  Yep. Yep. I often tell my staff, I expect excellence, and I expect mistakes.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 53:50Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Ellen talks about the negative impacts of social comparison, why warmth and connection can be more impactful than high performance, and how to channel who you are at your core.

• 54:10Dan Harris?

  Shift number five, from procrastination to productivity.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Yes. Okay. So procrastination. So people are often surprised that this is part of perfectionism, but you know, I think it makes sense. Procrastination is not a time management problem. I think the research is starting to show us, and it's starting to show up in popular writing as well. Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem. And then perfectionism puts everything on steroids, because aversive tasks require quite a bit of self-regulation. You have to focus and get your act together, regulate enough so you can do this thing you don't want to do. And self-regulation deteriorates under emotional distress. So if we're feeling distressed and overwhelmed because our standards

• 54:58Speaker 01

  are unrealistic, we feel like we have to do the whole thing in one go, or we are not allowed to make mistakes, or we have to do this easily the first time, that sort of overwhelms our self-regulation, and procrastination steps in as a coping mechanism. And it's a double whammy, because it allows us to both avoid the task that's making us feel bad, and immediately replace it with something that makes us feel better, whether that's pandemic-era procrastobaking, or like, going into a TikTok rabbit hole. Not that I've ever done either of those things. What we can do is the classic of break tasks down into steps so small you feel no resistance. In perfectionism, we can make them ridiculously

• 55:40Speaker 01

  small. No one has to know how small our steps are. I worked with a gentleman who was trying to motivate himself to go to the gym, and his first step was peel a banana. Then he would eat the banana that would fuel his workout. And then his next step was find car keys, which I found highly relatable. Anyway, the point is that the steps can be really, really small. And that's okay. No one has to know how small they are. And if you feel resistance, break it down even more. So that's one. And the less classic, newer technique that I found was quite helpful is to connect with your future self. It's found that folks who procrastinate and folks with perfectionism relate to their future

• 56:22Speaker 01

  self in a brain scanner, almost as if they're relating to a stranger. We think that our future self will feel like washing the dishes, or writing our literature paper, or working on that slide deck. When, we know from experience, that's not the case. But it doesn't even matter if we picture our future self doing the task or not. If we can just kind of create a more realistic relationship with our future self, and not kick the can down the road to it, assuming it'll be motivated and happy to do all these tasks, then it's easier to get started now.

• 56:59Dan Harris?

  I love that. We've done episodes. I'll drop a link in the show notes. We did a whole episode about relating to your future self. In the interest of time, I'm going to move us along to the final two shifts. Shift number six of seven is from comparison to contentment. My wife, the other day, pointed out in a great moment of using my own teaching against me, that I was falling into comparing mind, because I joined a new workout group, and I'm definitely the least fit person in this group. So anyway, from comparison to contentment. Say more about this, if you would.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  We must be in the same workout, or in similar workout groups, because I feel the same way every time I go to the gym. Anyway, okay. So I want to start out by saying that comparing ourselves is inevitable. You're not doing anything wrong there. So Dr. Leon Festinger, who originated the theory of social comparison, essentially found that it's hardwired. I mean, we can't even tell if we're tall or short, without comparing ourselves to others. So to try to stop comparing ourselves entirely is essentially fighting biology. But what perfectionism is doing is, we're comparing ourselves to others to answer the question, like, am I doing okay? Am I enough? But then we're outsourcing our worth to the people we're comparing ourselves to, and our self-esteem

• 58:19Speaker 01

  will rise and fall with each comparison. So what to do is, so social comparison is at its heart, a lack of information, that we tend to compare on one metric. So to your point, like, fitness, or something that's happening with a lot of young people, like number of social media followers, or likes. I had a client who was comparing herself to her boss based on age and title. So like, why am I not farther along by this point in my life? We compare apples to apple pie, basically, and we always come out behind.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  And so what we can do is to try to broaden the comparison points until we're what I call comparing apples to tennis balls. With my client, she was comparing on age and job title. If she's trying to answer the question, am I good enough? We tried to flood the zone with tons of different variables. So like, we included things she knew, like education, time at the company, and then a million things that she didn't have any access to, like work hours, or partner support, or mental health challenges, possible nepotism. The point is, if we're asking, am I good enough? The goal is to include so many comparison points, both in quantity and variety, that the answer becomes, well, I can't determine that by comparing myself to this person. And so the whole thing breaks down. The point

• 59:40Speaker 01

  is that we compare on very few things, and we stake our whole self-worth on it. And so what we try to do is to make it a little bit ridiculous, and leave us with the conclusion of, well, only I can determine if I'm sufficient. I can't outsource it to my view of this person.

• 1:00:00Dan Harris?

  I love it, because it's like, the antidote to comparison is more comparison.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Right, right. Exactly.

• 1:00:07Dan Harris?

  All right. Shift number seven.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:00:09Dan Harris?

  From control to authenticity.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  There's a lot in these chapters under this shift. So this is dealing with emotional perfectionism, which can be internal or external. And essentially, it boils down to needing to be appropriate, however we define that, in one's felt or demonstrated emotion. Oftentimes, people with perfectionism have learned that emotion is a response to the outside situation as opposed to how we actually feel inside, that we present as sad because the situation is sad, or we present as amused because the situation is supposed to be lighthearted. So I'll tell you a story about a client named Gus,

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  who, well, we'll call him Gus. So he came in because he wanted to optimize his performance at work and specifically wanted to work on public speaking. And so that already raised this flag for me for perfectionism. Anytime somebody says optimize, that tells me perfectionism. He wanted to be really, really good at public speaking and to come off as, you know, not making any mistakes, be impressive, leave everyone with their jaw hanging open. But what happened is that his perfectionistic self-presentation manifested as over-preparing and over-practicing to the point that it came off as wooden. Before meetings where he would present, he would like stand at the podium like silently rehearsing his slides and he would ignore the people who came in.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  And then when he gave the presentation, he would perform his slides. Like, it didn't really matter who was in the room. And so what he was doing is, to back up to some theory, Susan Fisk at Princeton says there are essentially two dimensions on which humans evaluate each other. There's competence and warmth. And competence is like, how skilled, talented, capable is this person? Warmth is like, how kind, caring, good-hearted is this person? And in perfectionism, we double down on competence. We want to give a good performance. But it turns out that warmth comes first

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  and carries more weight in making a good impression on other people, that we need to determine if people are friendly, are on our side, or are foe and working against us before we evaluate their competence and whether or not they're capable of carrying out those intentions. That was nerdy and heady. So what Gus was doing is he was doubling down on competence, but at the expense of warmth. So we tried to double down on warmth. Keep competence. We all want to be competent. We're not doing a 180 and flipping from competence to incompetence, but we're just going to add on some warmth. And so instead of over-preparing and over-practicing,

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  tried to roll him back to preparing and practicing, but you know, not to the point where he came off as wooden. When, instead of silently rehearsing his slides as people came in, he greeted them by name, said hello, you know, how was your weekend? And then, this was the most important, when he presented, he focused on sharing his knowledge and the story he was trying to tell with the energy of, "Look at this cool rock I found", rather than trying to perform as like Gus, the impressive expert. To boil it all down, when Gus was using perfectionistic self-presentation, yeah, sure, he avoided mistakes, but he also missed out on connection with his colleagues and showing his colleagues that like, he cared about them and trusted them.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  That when we show people a little bit of what's under the rug or allow them to see us before, everything is perfectly polished and we have the correct highlighted answer at the end. When we say like, "Oh, here's a little bit of my mess", we're sending two messages. We're saying, "I trust you", because I'm showing this to you before, it's like perfectly polished. So I trust you not to judge me or criticize me. And two, we are the same. We are equals. This is not some kind of like mentor-mentee relationship or teacher-student relationship. Like, we're both human, we're both equal. And implicitly sending the message of, "I trust you and we are the same", is really going to draw people closer to us

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  and get us that, to come back to the beginning, that connection and belonging that we're ultimately looking for.

• 1:04:44Dan Harris?

  There was a lot in what you said, but the one thing that really stood out to me was the rock. I'm going to present as if I'm showing you a cool rock. And I'm guessing that Gus likes rocks and that you, as a wise therapist, honed in on who he really is at his core, which is a dude who likes rocks. And if you can channel who you are at your core and bring that energy into whatever room you're occupying, people are going to like you because we all like realness.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. Like, it's the energy of like, "Hey, look at this cool thing", you know, as opposed to like, "I must present this perfectly to you". To your point about authenticity. And actually, our overall, like, trying to increase our feeling of enoughness. I feel like so many of us will try to like hype ourselves up or psych ourselves up with, "I got this", or before our client Gus could go on to his public speaking, maybe he would try to reassure himself. But what we can do instead is to affirm what we know to be true about ourselves, even if it has nothing to do with the situation at hand. You can do this before or after. So let's pretend Gus's presentation goes poorly.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  He might be tempted to reassure himself, "He's actually smart" or "He's actually talented", or to like, think about presentations where it did go well. And that can try to make himself feel better that way. But that doesn't often work. And what we can do instead is try to focus on the things we know to be unquestionably true about ourselves. "I think rocks are the coolest thing ever", or like, "Reading books and making art make my world go round", or "I was put on earth to help the less fortunate", or like, "I have wicked awesome style", or like, whatever, whatever we genuinely hold dear. "I'm a great dad" can shore up the story of ourself and thicken our skin, which can buffer against self-esteem threats. So I didn't make this up.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  This is the work of Doctors Jeffrey Cohen and David Sherman. And they find that the goal is not to flatter ourselves or to like, again, reassure ourselves that we're actually smart and like, most things go well, but to really maintain sort of an overarching narrative of the self's adequacy, which again, creates that buffer against the inevitable mistakes and struggles and setbacks of life.

• 1:07:10Dan Harris?

  This has been enormously helpful. Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book? The name of the book that you wrote before it? And also, anything else that we should know that you're like doing in the world that people can go consume?

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So this book is How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists. The previous book, which is about social anxiety, is How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. And the place I am most active on the internet is Substack. I have a Substack called How to Be Good to Yourself When You're Hard on Yourself, which encompasses both those topics and other related maladies of being human.

• 1:07:59Dan Harris?

  Anybody who's talking about the maladies of being human is an ally of mine. So we will put links to all of those in the show notes. Dr. Alan Hendriksen, always a pleasure. Thank you.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Great to talk to you again. Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:08:15Dan Harris?

  Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before you go. Remember to sign up for my new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com. On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers, ad-free access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads, exclusive livestream events,

• 1:08:59Dan Harris?

  which we do weekly, sometimes twice a week, robust discussion threads to connect you with our team, with our teachers, and with one another. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Peace.