June 24, 2021
An interview with Jen Anderson, a Professional; Imperfectionist and CEO of Accomplist.
For the full interview please listen to the most recent CM Group- Free Lunch Podcast, Episode 57 “Health & Wealth Mini-Series – Complexified Perfectionism”
Colin and Greg: Jen Anderson, welcome to the Free Lunch podcast. To get started can you tell us your story? How did you end up where you are today and what led you to what we're going to be talking about today?
Jen: It just kind of happened, I used to work in technology. I actually have a degree in fiction writing so, of course, I worked in technology. I also I suffer from migraines and nothing worked. I've had them for decades and I start to suspect there was something underneath that was keeping all the medication from working and helping and mind body health proved to be part of the solution. One of the problems is that if you're a perfectionist and a people pleaser, your brain will be very happy to give you pain when you can't say “no”. If you have this resentment building up, your brain will do that to you and then the neural pathways build up. It's not the only reason why you can have a mind body problem. I found articles that said, yeah, you should stop that, it's really unhealthy, but there was very little advice on how to do it. As a perfectionist, I had to find the perfect way to go about perfection. I actually started making collages. For some reason, I feel very bad that I'm not a better artist. I can't draw better, even though if I practiced, I’d get better. But it drives me crazy that I'm not better now. Collages? I didn't care. I just rip things out of magazines, go at out my glue stick. It was fine. Doing something that you're not good at helps a lot.
We always put too much on our list and then beat ourselves up for not getting it all done. So I actually designed an app, crowdfunding campaign coming eventually, that is a to-do app with a perfectionist point of view. Perfectionism is just really bothering us all very badly. If you too are a perfectionist, it's an albatross around your neck.
Greg and Colin: Well, let's talk about that a little bit. I think you touched on this a little bit already, but what exactly is perfectionism and what is wrong with it? What can we do about it?
Jen: Perfectionism is trying to reach impossible standards. There's a big difference between perfectionism and aspiring for excellence because there is no such thing as “good enough”. My inner perfectionist cannot tell the difference between 99% good and 9% good. It's a lot of “all-or-nothing” thinking. It also has to do with excellence and the quality of your work. Perfectionism has to do with the quality of you as a person and your worthiness as a person. Either I'm perfect or garbage. People lose sleep over this. Where it be that their career hasn't gone exactly the way they wanted it to, their housekeeping isn't up to some ridiculous standards in their head, even though they're all working sixty hours a week. If you have psychological distress over how much you do and how well you do it, that's perfectionism and that's toxic.
For more questions and answers with Jen Anderson please refer to our Podcast.
Stay safe, stay happy, stay well!
-The CM Group