In the first part of this episode, therapist and a life coach Aileen Kelleher (photo) expands on how people with a “high intensity, sensitive type of personality” may experience perfectionism.
She notes it can be associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental health problems.
She adds “there are certain overlaps of characteristics of gifted people that also relate to perfectionism. There’s the high expectations of yourself and others, there’s this sensitivity, which will leave us easily wounded, and have a need for emotional support, high levels of frustration.”
(See more in the transcript.)
The second part of this episode is an excerpt from a podcast: “Perfectionism & Procrastination: Two sides of the same coin?” by Aurora Remember.
She notes “There’s an intersection between perfectionism and giftedness that a lot of people experience.
“For me perfectionism and procrastination have been two areas where my own brain has been in conflict over the years. Instead of fighting against these tendencies, I’ve found ways to flow with them more effectively.”
Aurora Remember is a school psychologist, neurodiverse coach and founder of Embracing Intensity, with resources and programs which help you “identify and use your neurodivergent strengths, while supporting your challenges.”
The audio with Aileen Kelleher is a brief excerpt of a 45 minute video conversation.
It is one of many recordings in the Guest Call library available to Embracing Intensity members.
The Embracing Intensity Free Resource Library includes links to podcasts, videos, Course Membership and more.
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See the main Creative Mind Audio Podcast site for links to players including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and others.
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Transcript
Aileen Kelleher
I’m a therapist and a life coach primarily focusing on working with people in the gifted community. My therapy practice is all gifted and twice exceptional children and families.
And then my life coaching practice is with gifted and also people who identify as perfectionists or overachievers, just that kind of like, high intensity, sensitive type of personality I really enjoy working with.
So yeah, I had done a presentation on perfectionism a little while ago, just created a course for it. And so I’m just going to kind of go over some of the key points from that, but it’s definitely a topic that is near and dear to my heart.
I, you know, as with a lot of things that we teach, you know, the reason we’re passionate about it is because it’s something that we often have dealt with ourselves.
Or I would say, I’m a recovering perfectionist, it’s something that I’ve definitely learned how to work with and become more compassionate towards myself and manage my thinking a lot better. But I think that, you know, we’re always continuing to learn and grow.
So… all of this stuff I share, it’s not to make you think that I know everything about it. It’s just kind of what I’ve learned over the years in working with perfectionism in myself and other people.
So when it comes to… there’s an intersection between perfectionism and giftedness that a lot of people experience.
The definition of perfectionism in the American Psychological Association dictionary is the tendency to demand of others or of oneself an extremely high or even flawless level of performance in excess of what is required by the situation.
It is associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental health problems. So as you can see, perfectionism isn’t this kind of benign character trait of like, Oh, I’m such a perfectionist, you know, like how some people will use the term OCD kind of flippantly, when actually, it’s something that can cause a lot of real pain and difficulty in people’s lives.
So there are certain overlaps of characteristics of gifted people that also relate to perfectionism. So there’s the high expectations of yourself and others, there’s this, that sensitivity, which will leave us easily wounded, and have a need for emotional support, high levels of frustration.
So particularly when we feel like we’re not meeting the standards, we have, sometimes a volatile temper, especially related to our perceptions of what failure is and whether or not we’re failing.
There’s also the strong power of critical thinking, skepticism, self criticism, which don’t necessarily have to be negative, right?
But it can be when we turn it in on ourselves too harshly. There’s this heightened receptivity and the urge to perfect things, this kind of idea of wanting to create something of beauty, and then give.
People are also often vigilant about fairness, justice, threats to humanity. And so that can create sometimes kind of like this moral perfectionism.
And then there’s also, let’s see, so in terms of the high standards of giftedness, it’s kind of natural for gifted people. And it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a wrong thing.
It’s okay as long as it’s motivated by internal values and what we truly like want to create, as opposed to these external expectations that make we may feel pressure to live up to something external – that’s when it can kind of create this difficulty within ourselves.
So one of the cool things is that we as people who identify as gifted or twice exceptional get to choose what excellence means to us.
It doesn’t have to be, you know, just defined as a response to perceive judgment from others, it can be this kind of beautiful, developing mysterious quality that continues to unfold as we continue to create and do what we love, right?
And it’s also okay to feel good about like the rewards and the positive aspects of our healthy striving for, you know, pursuing the things we love.
So there’s also this sense of the difficulties when giftedness and perfectionism overlap can be this sense of urgency…moving at a fast pace, which when we’re kind of when we’re in flow back can be more comfortable and feel good.
But there’s also sometimes this sense of urgency that can be causing anxiety and impatience, that can be difficult to deal with, we also can get kind of bogged down in a maze of our own making within our minds, where we kind of create these traps for ourselves that we can’t seem to get out of, as in regards to our own abilities, and what we what we need to do – our beliefs about what how the things we do in life need to be created.
And then there’s also the, this sense of avoidance in disguise. So hiding out in our inner world is something that some gifted people can deal with. Especially if you have that kind of imagination or intensity, it’s easy to kind of, you know, create a fantasy place in your mind or in other areas of your life where you can escape.
But eventually, we all have to usually face the thing we’re avoiding, so that can create more trouble for us.
And then also, the gifts in mind content just tend towards worry if it doesn’t have something to occupy our attention.
So, you know, personally with myself, you know, in a recent arguing argument with my husband, like, if I don’t have something to keep my mind busy, I will look for problems, right and like, there won’t necessarily be an issue, but I’ll look for where maybe I perceive one thing to not be perfect.
And then, you know, it can create an issue where there wouldn’t necessarily be one if I was focused on myself and the things I care about.
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Aurora Remember
I’m Aurora, I’m a school psychologist, and also the host of the Embracing Intensity podcast and community and a neurodiverse coach. I started to focus on twice exceptionality because of my own personal experiences, and realizing how little information there was out there for 2e adults.
Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about perfectionism and procrastination. So I’ve been participating in the Hoagies’ Blog Hops for, I just realized, going on five years now – five years ago, this summer, I started blogging, and I started participating in the blog hops.
And today, the September theme was on perfectionism. And I hadn’t had the chance to get anything done for it until today, because summer, craziness, all that fun stuff.
But as I was thinking about what to write about on the topic of perfectionism, I thought back about a story from when I was in high school. And we read the book, The Scarlet Letter, and we were supposed to write… we had an assignment where we had to pick a letter that represented one of our faults or weaknesses.
And I picked the letter P. for actually two things, procrastination, and perfectionism.
And it’s so funny, because at the time, my teacher believed the procrastination part, but she did not believe the perfectionism part, because by that point, my perfectionism was kind of an all or nothing thing. And so if I couldn’t do it perfectly, I would just do it, just kind of throw it out there.
And so that’s how in my education, I really developed this pattern of procrastination, because as I would find out later, they are actually two sides of the same coin.
So my procrastination habit, actually stemmed from my own internal perfectionism, because I knew that if I had all the time in the world to focus on something I would obsess over getting it done perfectly.
I actually just learned to procrastinate because if you do things at the last minute, then you have an excuse for not being perfect, right?
So that is why I started to develop this procrastination and aside factor as well as the fact that I have my own executive functioning challenges, which meant that having I needed some sort of sense of urgency to get this things done.
So that’s the other reason why I developed the procrastination habits. So as I was looking through the last five years since I started blogging, my perfectionism, I really had to relook at that because over the years, even when I was in school, my procrastination would get to the point where like I would, no matter how long I had been Don’t stay prepared, I would always stay up until 4am.
The next in the morning before I had a big assignment due. And no matter how much I planned or prepared, I always somehow was always 4am No matter what I had it timed perfectly.
And so over the years, I still tend to do things last minute. But I have started to develop more strategies and really figure out how long it takes me to do these things so that I can better estimate when I get it done and not be pushing it by pulling all nighters.
So a couple of things that I’ve learned since I’ve been blogging, I one of the things that’s really intimidating about blogging for especially the the gifted blog hops and an audience that is primarily gifted outside the box thinkers is that they also tend to be perfectionist.
And so in the beginning, I was really apprehensive about blogging for a gifted audience, because I was really afraid that they would be criticizing my lack of, of grammar knowledge, because I never actually had a former grammar lesson through my Spanish Immersion program.
And also the fact that I tend to miss details, because with my executive functioning challenges, I tend to miss those details.
But what I found out is that really, people, my the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive over the years.
So a couple of things I learned, and I wrote a post on this you can read on my blog, is that first of all, procrastination is not a bad thing, if you learn how to harness it.
So if you know yourself, and you know that you need some sort of urgency to get things done, that is okay. But sometimes you have to create your own urgency and your own deadlines, in order to not be pushing it to the point where you’re you’re taking work home or having to pull all nighters to get things done.
That’s the part that you need to create, for some some sense of urgency in order to help yourself and use that procrastination habit in a positive way.
The other thing that I’ve learned in the last few years is that there are some unnecessary steps that you can skip. So when I look at my podcast, and I look at recording the course lessons that I’ve done in the past, I would spend hours recording and re-recording myself and second guessing myself and starting over again.
And when I redid the course that I have now – the ignite your power course in my community – the first time I redid it, I started re recording my episodes, but they weren’t that much better.
And so I realized, since I started doing these live episodes on my podcast, that the best way to get it done is to record it live so that I’m not second guessing myself, I’m not re recording myself, and just put it out there.
And the funny thing is that I’ve actually gotten really positive feedback about my solo episodes, even though they are unedited, for the most part, and I record them live so that I don’t have time to second guess myself.
So skipping those unnecessary steps can be really helpful in avoiding both the procrastinator and in harnessing our procrastination and perfectionism habits.
And then finally, when it comes to what you put out in the world, whether it’s art, creative, work, whatever it is that you’re doing, relatability is way more important than perfection.
And so when people can relate to what it is that you’re putting out there, they’re not going to care about perfection. In fact, we are all our greatest critics when it comes to the perfectionism piece.
And people are more concerned about their own perfection than they are about yours.
And so if you have something that you’re putting off doing because you want it to be perfect, just get it out there because people want to see what it is that you have to give to the world.
They don’t really care as much about perfection as you do. So whatever it is that you’re doing, put it out there and just let the world see what it is that you have to offer.
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Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the The Creative Mind series of sites which provide “Information and inspiration to help creative people thrive.”
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