Are you at a crossroads in your life and don't seem to be making progress toward your goals? We all know that we should give our all and aim for excellence in all that we do, but what happens when this desire for success becomes toxic? Everyday, we look forward to something productive, successful and even joyful. However, not everything will go the way we wanted and that could lead to self-doubt and languish. As a person, we also make mistakes leading to unfortunate events. Fortunately, there’s an antidote. 

Our guest for today is Audrey Holst. She is a recovering perfectionist who coaches audacious top achievers on how to stop micromanaging their lives with perfectionism. Audrey helps people struggling with the fear of failure and mistakes. Join us as we break down what’s preventing you from success and how you can focus on your progress. Stay tuned to learn more!

 
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Ditch Perfectionism, Strive For Progress with Audrey Holst
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a bit about perfectionism and this is something that I’ve observed prevent a lot of people from following their dreams. You’re waiting for the exact right time, waiting for the exact right setup, the exact right thing or excessive amounts of research and perfected your product, you’ve crossed every t, dotted every i, as they say, and you’ve accounted for every possible scenario and I can’t stress to you enough how many times I’ve seen this really get in the way of people’s dreams. My guest today, Audrey Holst, is the founder of Fortitude & Flow and she specializes in helping people overcome this tendency toward perfectionism which is so prevalent in our culture today.

 
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Audrey, welcome to the program.

 

Thanks so much for having me. I can’t wait for this conversation. 

 

Definitely, Audrey. Now, I want to start off with the foundations. What are the origins of perfectionism? What makes someone really feel like they need to have every last little thing perfect before launching anything or before sharing anything with the world?

 

Yeah. So I think the first thing to understand about perfectionism and perfectionists is that nobody wakes up at age 30 and says, “You know what, that perfectionism thing, I haven’t tried that yet. I’m gonna try that on for size,” and then they just automatically all of a sudden start with these perfectionist tendencies. That is just not anybody’s story. So I did over 60 hours of interviews with perfectionists, people who self-identified with perfectionists, and every single one of them, I asked them questions, I had them tell me their stories, and every single one of them had origins in their youngest years. They could think back when they were a kid in their household, in school where perfectionism had its beginnings and then how other places in their life either helped to stoke the fires of perfectionism or actually helped them work through it.

 

So, how I look at perfectionism is it’s a survival mechanism, which is why perfectionism tends to flare up in times of stress.Click To Tweet

 

When people get stressed out, when people are in new situations, that’s when they tend to go towards that tendency more, which is one of those things that can be really difficult for people that are maybe entrepreneurs or in spaces that require a lot of agility and being uncertain because it really flares up those perfectionist tendencies and it can be a huge issue.

 

Wow. So you’re saying most of it begins at childhood and then, at some point in life, the people around you either reinforce it or send you in the opposite direction. Have you heard a lot of good stories about people being sent in the opposite direction, saying, “Okay, I grew up perfectionist,” and maybe had a perfectionist family, or I think our education system with our pass/fail grades reinforces perfectionism,