Why perfectionism could be holding you back, with Dr Julie Smith (E219)

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1:16Hi there, you're listening to High Performance, the award-winning podcast that unlocks the minds of some of the most fascinating people on the planet. I'm Jake Humphrey, and alongside Professor Damien Hughes, we learn from the stories, successes, and struggles of our guests, allowing us all to explore, be challenged, and to grow. And today we're sharing with you part of a conversation we had recently with the clinical psychologist and number one best-selling author of Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before, Dr. Julie Smith. She joined us to talk about mental health. She gave us some really interesting tips and advice on how we can keep ourselves on the right track.

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4:04julie what a pleasure to have you on high performance a pleasure to be here i'm a real fans so yeah thanks for having me thank you for coming and chatting to us what is your definition of high performance i think if if i was here a few years back i probably would have given you a sort of textbook idea of okay high performance is this this and this but i think in reality over the experiences i've had over the last probably 10 years not only in my work as a clinician so working with people from all walks of life through their worst moments becoming a parent and then also sort of delving into this sort of public life, strange social media world.

4:44I think it's really turned my idea of high performance on its head in some ways that I think like most people, I had this sort of template in my mind about high performance being something that would happen at work and that would be confined to something that I could do that's just one thing and you know that's the thing that gets celebrated and you get acknowledgement for and actually I think in real life probably my moments of highest performance have actually been at home and and I started to kind of think you know I love your your book and the different things about high performance and I started to think why would I apply all this stuff to the work I get paid for and not apply it at home.

5:30And it's really helpful for me to think of that stuff in the context of what matters most to me. So, you know, when I'm being a parent and a partner and all those things, when it's about things like focus, ultimate focus, being present, taking responsibility, all those kinds of things, that has helped me through some really, you know, tough times, you know, gosh, I've got three children. So there's been plenty of nights when, you know getting up every couple of hours to you know tearful children and and then having to get up and go to my job in the NHS the next day and you know speak to half a dozen people through that day about the darkest moments in their lives and for me that was probably in some ways the most difficult period but also probably my most high performing yeah so I think it's really kind of my idea of high performance has expanded beyond that sort of initial template to living as a whole and that you can apply these principles to everything.

6:27I love that. And also what I really like about that answer is it's a reminder that high performance isn't about perfection, right? And in the work that you do, I'm sure you sit with many people who feel that the struggles and the challenges and the pain that they're living with means they can't be high performance. And actually quite often the message is, my goodness, for you to get out of bed and come here and meet me or to walk and buy a coffee or to get through another day is the epitome actually of high performance for those people yeah i mean it's it's fascinating really when you know i've loved you know the podcast for ages and and it's almost like we're on a very similar mission but while you guys take um you know the skills and experiences from people who you know we consider to be really high functioning and achieving and and perhaps you I work with people who are in their darkest moments really struggling.

7:24I wanted to share the skills that they are taught that helps them. If you put well-being on a scale, and in my job I might take someone from minus five to zero, make them kind of okay, and then you guys are looking at, well, how do we get from zero to plus five? And that sort of positive psychology approach. So it's almost like we're both coming from different angles towards the same thing. How do we improve life? make life easier or build strength so that we can live in a way that's sort of more fulfilling so if you think about like two circles like and the venn diagram the bit that overlaps then the bit where the circles meet what are the kind of things that you've seen from people coming from that other position on the spectrum that we could learn from that you understand high performances is yeah do you know and i've worked with lots of um people that you know would be classic kind of guests on on the podcast actually um but from the different place you know maybe they've lost a career through injury or are struggling with the the pressures of that work or all those kind of so it's almost like the sort of darker side of high performance if you like and some of the costs and sacrifices that have to happen for high performance to occur.

8:39And so I guess, you know, when you think about the sorts of things that people apply to high performance, none of that comes without sacrifice or without a cost somewhere else. And it's when those costs become too much, then my part comes in and and and it often involves a big re-evaluation of whose goal is this and why does it matter to you if it does at all that's probably been a big part of that work sort of reconnecting with is this a goal you truly want and if so why and um where those barriers are that kind of thing see because you articulate what like one of the comments my wife often makes to me about some of the people we interview is that how rounded are they or how happy are they or do we touch on the family circumstances because we sometimes don't touch on that what have you seen is the cost of some of these high performers that you've interviewed then that you do explore those areas that maybe we don't always touch on yeah i think um it's interesting isn't it because you get you get this sort of in some of the sort of interviews or if you hear stories from elsewhere as well from people who are you know the best at what they do it's because they have this sort of ultimate focus on that thing and and that's the thing that you know they get celebrated for um and I guess a lot of us maybe then tell ourselves that's what we should be doing you know we should be so focused on something that we can be the best at it and then be celebrated for it and be recognized for that um but I think there's merit in in having balance and focusing on all the things that matter to you because often some of those costs involve things that cause people to really struggle later in life so um there's a lovely quote and i can't remember who it was about about regret and how you know being human means that you can't like go you can't go through life without some sort of regret because it's a human emotion right but you can make really careful choices that ensure the regrets that you do end up with are the ones you can live with.

10:53And that's really always stuck for me about sort of making certain choices about what you apply yourself to. Because certain things can become really addictive too, right? Because when you get celebrated for something or, you know, the rewards are great, the temptation is to just go for that with a tunnel vision. And then it's only when you come up for a later that you go, oh gosh actually there's some stuff that I really value back there maybe it's family life or you know relationships or any of that kind of thing and you know you can really I mean I've seen it and people can take themselves into a sort of big empty space a very lonely place and so I think when it comes to high performance it has to come with you know informed choice and reflection around what are your values and why are you approaching this and why does it matter to you and are you willing to make the sacrifices necessary are you going to be okay with that one of the exercises actually from acceptance and commitment therapy that i love and it's really sort of influenced me personally is this approach where we go okay imagine you're you know 104 and you're sat in your armchair and you're looking back on this part of your life this next chapter to come what choices that you could make now would lead to you looking back with a big smile in your face thinking yes I did the right thing and and you kind of sit and you you know I mean we would take you know lots of time over that and really reflect on it in detail and it's really revealing when it comes to what truly matters to you and what's going to matter in the future so something that feels like it matters now won't necessarily in the future and often that comes down to things like relationships right and family and health and personal missions and things that feel meaningful so would you tell us why that exercise of projecting forward and looking back why is that so effective i think because when we're in the moment we're driven by either aversion to something that's painful or reward that's coming soon and we we're not accustomed to looking way into the future about how things might affect us later on right that's why we make silly decisions and so allowing yourself time to project yourself into the future and how you look back and often you can do it with the idea of a year from now if you're in a sort of tricky situation when I look back on this period in a year's time what am I going to do now what am I going to choose now that means I'm going to look back with a sense of pride that whether it's good times or bad am i going to be pleased with how i face this and what i brought to the situation am i going to have helped the situation and not made it worse am i going to have you know been of service to the people around me you know if it's a really difficult um situation kind of thing is there also a conversation we need to have on this podcast about even the title of this podcast high performance you know linking success linking happiness, linking reward to high performance or having things.

14:02You know, we've all seen the recent documentary about Lewis Capaldi, who says, the bigger my success became, the greater my mental health challenges. And actually, that is a common conversation across so many of the guests that we've had on this podcast. And I think that we need to use this as a space to have this conversation that what we're not saying is achieve great things and you'll achieve great happiness. the two are not linked in fact the two often are not very comfortable bedfellows are they yeah and it's something about you know there's that idea isn't there of you could achieve huge huge success and lots of people you don't ever get to meet will remember you for a while and you could lose a lot in the process or you could still do that thing and recognize that maybe your self worth isn't based on that but based on lots of other things that you value um i mean that probably goes for you know in my work and and with how everything's happened and that I have lots of these amazing opportunities to do these incredible things but I will only take on what I can that won't impact on my family too greatly so and I'm so grateful that that kind of thing has happened that little bit later in life for me where I already have um a solid relationship and three children that you know and I have very clear in my mind what my values are and where my self-worth is based and it's not in how many likes I get on the next video or you know how many books sell or anything like that that can come and go and that's I'm fine with that which helps me to probably take risks in that area but it also helps me to be okay with saying no to stuff I say no to a lot of stuff either because it doesn't match the sort of mission I had in the first place or because I know it will impact on the rest of my life that actually matters to me.

15:52So you're in a place that lots of people would love to be, right? I'm probably one of them, where download numbers, views on your social media, follows on your social media, the sort of the way we measure impact in the modern world, you know, I think it's really powerful that it doesn't have that impact upon you. What work do you do with people when they come to you and say, I have so much, but I feel so dead? there's been quite a lot of that to be fair it's obviously very private work but people just wouldn't believe that some of the people i've worked with who outwardly appear to be the most successful have been among the unhappiest and um have had the deepest struggles but it really tells you that it's an inside job you know if you don't have your mental health sorted out then you could achieve everything and in those quiet moments after that goal is reached it's going to be hell for you your own little personal version of hell so it always goes back to the basics and working out what need was there that maybe you've tried to fill with this your mission and then worked out that it's not filling that or you know it might not be that at all it might be that that you know that's still something they really love but there's also this thing on the side that's separate but still causing pain so so in your clinical practice and julie do you have almost like a checklist that you would run through of to almost explore what is it that would cause somebody not to have a stable mental relationship with mental health not so much so you have i mean a psychiatrist would work from a um a sort of medical perspective so they'll often work with kind of lists of symptoms and they're trying to find a suitable label that you know for that cluster of symptoms and then medicate whereas psychologists work with the individual so it's very much we will formulate a situation so um i remember actually when i was training and i was apologizing to my supervisor saying sorry this formulation is really messy and she said life is messy so if your formulation isn't messy you've missed something and and you really kind of map out with someone the cycles that they're stuck in and what's going on and that's such a massive theme is you know someone will come along and say I'm doing these things I don't know why I'm doing these things but I can't stop doing them and I know it's having a detrimental effect on my life whatever that thing is the detail changes but generally that theme is really consistent and so you sort of map out okay this happens you feel this and then you do this and you think that about yourself so then you do more of that or less of that and and you can kind of start to see these cycles there's such benefit in doing that because you get to have this sort of bird's eye view on your own life oh that's what I'm doing and it doesn't change anything instantly but you get this sort of awareness in hindsight so you'll go to therapy and say yeah I did that last week and then I did that and then over time when you repeat that you start to get that awareness in the moment as you're going around the cycle you go oh I know where I am in the cycle and that sort of opens up this opportunity to choose okay i know i'm feeling this and i know i have the urge to do that i can either go with it or i can take the exit and i know from previously talking about it in therapy what the other direction is i could go in can you explain about unmet needs and whether this kind of ties into everything that we're talking about here so when i talk about unmet needs i'm really talking about those basic human needs for love and belonging and safety you know psychological safety and those sorts of things that are in us and they're not going anywhere but modern life isn't necessarily set up for those to happen all the time or be met those needs to be met and also you know you don't get to choose what family you're born into so sometimes well all the time it is imperfect right and so I think when you then get into adulthood it's really helpful to look back at unmet needs because it informs what you're doing now and often if a key need was not met in your childhood you know that need for a sense of belonging for example maybe you felt left out or rejected from your family or something that feeling is not going to disappear just because you've moved out of home it will then pop up in your relationships and and then you'll have these safety behaviors probably ones that kept you safe when you were younger and worked when you were younger in an environment where you were dependent but in an adult relationship they no longer work right and they just cause problems in your relationship and so you know we can then really get down on ourselves about what we're doing and why am i doing that i'm a relationship and i'm ruining everything and actually if we look at that with curiosity we get to see that there's this this need under there that causes that really strong urge to be controlling to a partner or cheat or do these things that cause destruction there's usually something under there that has led to that urge to happen and then once you understand where that urge is coming from you get more choice whether you act on it or not so if there was anybody listening to this then that was thinking i'd like to go and excavate my childhood just to find out what are the needs that maybe drive some of these impulses today the obvious first step is to come and speak to somebody like yourself an expert on it but if they don't have access to that or maybe they're not sure of how to do it what kind of questions can we be asking ourselves that we could start this process i think start with just you don't want to kind of rush into stuff if if you know that there's really painful things that actually you've been avoiding or pushing away for a reason because it's too overwhelming and you're not sure not sure that you can kind of manage that then take it slow and only do it if you have safe ways to manage painful emotion so there are lots of people out there that don't and so then you know risky or unhealthy behaviors will pop up as soon as you go there a therapist would never ask you to talk about in-depth trauma experiences without first making sure that you have the tools to cope with the painful emotion that's going to come up right it's overwhelming there's a reason and we've got all these, you know, numbing behaviors that just make it go away, and it's because it's overwhelming.

22:10So they'll often teach you the skills first to manage difficult emotion, and then you're more equipped to go with it. I really like it when you talk about making a good enough decision. Because I think for some people, you know, you have to make the perfect decision. Actually, a good enough decision, as you explained, is often good enough. Yeah, and perfectionism is, it's interesting, isn't it, the way people talk about perfectionism as if it's like a, you know you'll often say in an interview I'm a perfectionist so you know employ me I'll do really well and actually it's been described by lots of therapists as like a 10 ton shield where it makes you feel like you're safe but actually it stops you from being yourself and being free to take risks and it's paralyzing for a lot of people so a lot of people who you know are perfectionists will decide not to take that risk because in the face of failure they can't treat themselves with kindness or respect they're going to going to tip into absolute self-loathing and and it's that absolute intolerance of imperfection that makes it incredibly difficult to to take the risks that you need for something like high performance you know high performance and perfectionism are enemies really i mean even doing this stuff for me i had to let go of any ideas of perfectionism in order to even be able to do it because you're vulnerable you're out there i mean even here right I could see the wrong thing.

23:32It could go everywhere. There's always that risk. You're vulnerable. And I think for me personally, the only way truly that I've been able to do that, the most valuable tool that I've had all the way along, is the 100 % commitment to myself that in the face of failure, when I fall and when it all goes wrong and I humiliate myself on live tv or whatever that i'll have my own back and i will treat myself with the absolute respect and compassion that my own personal coach would you know that's like an easy thing to say it's actually a really difficult thing to do yeah oh yeah how how do we go about being that kind to ourselves by not being perfectionist about it so you know in moments where i get something wrong the instinct and the first thing that comes to mind is oh you stupid so it's not about not having those thoughts it's about not letting them go unchecked so noticing whoa massive self-question totally changes our relationship with risk because it no longer becomes a risk yeah because you're going to be can't yourself if it fails yeah yeah and i remember that image of oh it was awful wasn't it the synchronized swimmer who passed out under the water and there's a video of the coach who dives down and pulls her back up and that always really stuck with me that we go through life and we don't have that person but when it all goes to hell and and you know bad things are happening you have to be that person for yourself a lot of the time so you know a lot of people that we would you know associate with high performance that have you know been in my office have really resisted any kind of idea of talking to yourself nicely or self-compassion and it's often there's this sort of misconception that it's self-indulgence and that if I'm nice to myself, I'm going to lose all my drive and I'm not going to achieve anything.

25:24You lose your edge. Be horrible to myself. Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, the data just doesn't show that, that, you know, if you're self-critical, it's much more likely to lead to depression than self-compassion. You know, you can have a sense of drive from a sense of respect. And there's a reason, you know, if you get these elite athletes, they don't employ their old high school bully to be their coach. why would they right they employ someone that they trust that has respect for them that genuinely wants them to achieve their absolute best and beyond that's always going to be there to pick them up if they're struggling or dive down the pool and grab them if they see that you know and there's a reason for that right because it works we recently read some research by a guy called ethan cross that said that speaking to yourself like you'd speak to a toddler is actually a really effective way of getting yourself through difficult moments so i'm interested in exploring when you made the brave decision to come out of private practice and and your private clinician work to then make that leap into going into the public sphere and doing this really important work with the book and the videos that you do what were the kind of messages you were saying to yourself then how did you convince yourself to to take that initial leap do you know it's really interesting question because i didn't really want to do it i'm i'm a massive introvert I'm never more comfortable than I am at my desk with all my books and like you know geeking out on psychology stuff I was trying to think of any possible way that we could make videos without me being in them it didn't come naturally like it didn't feel like I don't I don't get a buzz from the sort of attention of it or anything like that that's been something for me to overcome in order to do it so what was the buzz then what was the reason of wanting to do it yeah so the initial thing was that all these people that were coming to therapy people think that you just do a lot of talking and therapy and you do but you also learn a lot about how your mind works and I found that so many people that were sort of accessing some of those bits of education were then turning around and going I think I'm all right you know that I've got this really difficult thing coming up but I know you know I know I've got these tools now that I can apply when I go along.

27:37And there was this kind of resilience building up. So yeah, I used to just harp on to my poor husband about how this should be more available, you know, all that kind of stuff. So he just kind of solved it a bit too. So I wanted to complain a bit longer, but he said, well, go on then, make it available. I'm thinking, oh no, no, I need to do it. So I made a few YouTube videos and stuff. And that was the beginning of the short form video stuff. So we thought, you know what, let's just share some of this educational stuff in like bite-sized form. I honestly thought it'd be one of those projects you do for a while and then it fizzles out like it feels like a nice thing to do let's make it free and like doing myself out of a job and it just almost instantly there were these messages coming through from people saying I've never thought of it like that I've got this problem and that was really helpful what's the next bit what what what's the detail what's the next part and I'm thinking oh my goodness I'm actually reaching real people I didn't imagine they'd even listen you know and when my husband said oh you know try this tiktok thing no way no way you know how vulnerable is that i'm a professional what are all my peers gonna say so it was swimming against the tide professionally and i i never thought it would lead to anything in the way of kind of respect or admiration i thought it was going to be embarrassing but it just felt like the right thing to do but in the way our brains inevitably work i'm sure you were getting thousands of bits of positive feedback from people saying this is helping me this is giving me a perspective I couldn't have hoped to achieve without you set but inevitably there'll have been some people that would have criticized or had some snide observation to make and our brains are instantly attracted to the negative I'm interested in how you would have countered that yeah it's interesting actually because that's where I think my why helped my really strong sense of I already had this life that I was happy with um i wasn't doing it for social validation which was key i had this mission so if someone said oh your hair doesn't look good today or i hate that jumper or what you know and whatever i was able to kind of calibrate that i'm not doing it for that my only sort of criteria for each video was it had something in it that could be helpful to someone and so if i got the lighting bad badly done or you know whatever i could deal with the imperfection of it because some videos that Kate that I put out that I wasn't really happy with I would get floods of messages about how helpful that was and I think okay I can be out there imperfectly and have a positive impact like how fantastic is that but I did I did get to a point where in the early days I think where I there was that buzz of oh you know look at the comments or those kind of things and I noticed I mean I still remember the moment where I noticed that I was scanning through there were like 300 comments and I'm scanning through these all these lovely really positive comments at high speed looking for the negative right whoa okay enough and now i don't go on there so why do our brains do that so i did a video on actually that my video for it came out of that experience because i'm thinking okay i know this stuff i need to apply it um but there's a sort of cognitive bias that we call the mental filter and it happens to all of us at any point but happens more if you're struggling with depression or something like that where you will filter out all the positives and look for the negatives because there's this seed of doubt right it might match your self-belief that you weren't good enough in some way or whatever and so your your mind will look for information that confirms your belief about yourself so if you you know put something out into the world and you don't believe you're any good at it you'll look for the information and if it's one comment out of 5 000 you'll find it and then that will be your confirmation that you were right about yourself despite all the other information that's different and how can you unpick that in somebody uh through self-awareness so often it will be um will will it literally keep diaries around what were the thoughts that came up in certain situations were any of those biased well you know because there are lots of there's like the mental filter um black and white thinking um all these different you know catastrophic thinking and you you go back and you say okay well you thought that at that point was that one of the biases and if it is biased shall we take it apart a bit because then it's not a true reflection of reality necessarily and yeah so you just build that through awareness through hindsight initially so you're looking back on your week and then eventually you can notice in the moment whoa i'm really catastrophizing here you know so and then you can the process then is just seeing it for what it is you don't have to stop it arriving so i'll catastrophize all the time so i i have a lifelong fear of heights for example and because i live in the countryside and the highest building has about three floors I don't address it all the time and so whenever we go on holiday or something and we're up you know some high tourist attraction it always comes back you know I feel that pounding heart and my mind starts telling me I'm about to die and all of those things and so I don't stop it arriving I just notice I'm catastrophizing my mind has taken me to the worst case horror story in my mind and is playing it out for me like a movie and then re-triggering my anxiety and as soon as I notice it's a bias and I label it, I give it less power.

32:46Well, we'll leave our conversation with Dr. Julie there. But if you want the full version, it's twice as long. You can hear it right now on the High Performance app. Just download the app from the App Store and use your unique access code H-P-A-P-P for access. And remember, High Performance looks different for everyone. So chase your own version. And thanks for listening. Thank you.

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34:22Performances start October 8th. Tickets at arenastage.org. At Capella University, learning online doesn't mean learning alone. You'll get support from people who care about your success. Like your enrollment specialist, who gets to know you and the goals you'd like to achieve. You'll also get a designated academic coach who's with you throughout your entire program. Plus, career coaches are available to help you navigate your professional goals. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu.