Anita Shimmins
speaker
415 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 10 Jul
Anita Shimmins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
all kinds of physical health conditions. It's got a link there as well. And even, you know, sexuality, for instance, you need to be in a certain physical state to want to engage in intimacy. So it can take a toll in that regard as well, sexual health and intimacy.
the body literally tells you. Absolutely. Yeah. So many conditions, like you said, skin conditions. Also, there's bizarre conditions that are somehow then linked back to stress that is linked back to perfectionism. For instance, you know, seizures that nobody can explain or there's lots of physical health conditions as well that have to do with perfectionism somewhere underneath. Yeah. Well, I'm having all of the breakthroughs here on this episode. I'm like, oh, I'm linking everything back. Oh, okay.
Do perfectionists try new things? Because I can imagine there's that feeling of needing to be a beginner again and that fear of failing when that's going to happen when it's new. I think you're right. You do lose a lot of openness to new experiences and you lose a lot of curiosity about new things because maybe in theory, if you could magically get perfectionism away, these would be things that the person would love to engage in. But the
the fear of not being good at it or making a fool of oneself or failing at it and having to be confronted with that deep sense of inadequacy is scary. So yeah, often we would then try to avoid it altogether. Or if we
If we decide to engage in it or have to engage in it to just do the other bit, which is the intense over-preparation, maybe take classes beforehand so that you can turn up and seem like you've got it all together. But yeah, it's coming from that sense of fear of failure. So last Christmas, I went skiing.
why aren't you better at this? You should be getting this right. You know, the five-year-old is getting past you. Why can't you do it? Yeah. So it's, you know, it's a bit of a point that perfectionism can suck the joy out of life.
Yeah. And it's funny because I was going to ask, I'm like, do perfectionists experience joy at all? At best, I would say perfectionists experience short-term relief. So if you've, if you've kind of hit a particular grade that you were working towards, there might be a moment of relief. That's not pure joy though. That's not, that's not true contentment because I don't know if you've experienced that before, but then you might've achieved that particular goal and
before you've had a chance to kind of revel in it and actually just be proud of yourself the goal post has moved and you're back to sort of the next goal already or you might be unpicking yeah it was good but it could have been even better oh my gosh yeah you're literally inside of my mind right now yeah yeah so it takes it does take the joy away even in moments where there's supposed to be joy after a success um so yeah that constant uh moving of goal posts is exhausting
perfectionistic sometimes because people say it's kind of a good flaw to have. Yes, that's so true. But it really undermines what the person is going through, the risks associated with perfectionism, the constant pressure that the person is under and the never allowing, achieving kind of
the end point because it's a relentless thing. Yeah. And that and also the inner criticism that you have to endure day in day out that inner bully that's just living rent free in your mind. It takes such a huge toll. So it's no joke. Perfectionism. Yeah, it's it's it's harmful, not harmless. Yeah. After the break, Anita explains why it's hard for perfectionists to break their habits.
I always like to think about it coming from two levels. So I think because at the core of it is some deep underlying longstanding stuff. And that sort of thing, there's no quick fix for it. I think, you know, therapy can be a good place to unpack where is that all coming from, that deep sense of defectiveness or that my worth is very contingent on that.
my performance and can we start working on that deeper level as well because then that will trickle up into our everyday behaviours. That being said, there's also some practical things that we can do in the here and now that then help to kind of trickle down and correct some of these deeper underlying beliefs.
So one thing that we can do is make mistakes on purpose and testing out whether our belief that I need to be perfect in order to be accepted or I need to be perfect in order to keep my job or whatever the beliefs might be that are driving the perfectionism. Can we almost be curious and put it to the test? Yeah.
Yeah, so it's what we would call exposure therapy, and that's a big, big part of debunking some of these firmly held beliefs. And so, yeah, can we make some, for instance, write the wrong email to the wrong person, for instance,
put a mistake in a presentation on purpose and then get to experience that instead of some catastrophe happening or combusting into thin air, actually it's quite survivable and doesn't kind of change everybody's opinion of me as a person and it doesn't have a lot to do with my inherent worth.
So when we can kind of test out those beliefs by doing the opposite of what we would usually do, so you reduce preparation, put in mistakes and see what actually happens and see that what actually happens is, first of all, no catastrophe happening and sometimes even positive things coming from it. Like I actually had way more fun than I usually do.
I was able to have a really good chat with somebody that I usually wouldn't because I'm so in my head. It starts to debunk that I need perfectionism to stay safe and to do well. Yeah. Oh, I really like that strategy. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good practical one. You know, if you have a job interview, you're not going to be like, you choose that moment to test out saying all the wrong things just for the experiment. Maybe you start with something
that feels a little bit lower stakes, like a mistake in an email. And then maybe you can build up on that and almost just be that curious kind of experiment to say, right, this is what I expect will happen from my perfectionistic lens. These are all the things that I think will go wrong and how I will feel about myself and what will be the consequences. Do the experiment and then take stock of what actually happened. Usually there's a big difference and that difference can help to start updating the beliefs.
which is that we can survive these moments of imperfection and distress. So when something does go wrong, it doesn't unravel who we are as a person. It doesn't undo our lives to the degree that we expected it to. And I was able to kind of come through it and survive it. And so when I learned that over and over that I can withstand that feeling of imperfection, it makes me more resilient to it and it takes away the power of that fear.
Oh my gosh. So it's actually really important to sometimes fail so we can experience that we can survive even that. Because you're right, it's two things. One thing is it's much less likely to happen and play out in the way that we paint out in our heads. But then it's also awesome to experience when it doesn't actually play out the way that we had it in our heads and we survived anyways. That's so cool. I really love that. So I know that you were talking about kind of like those strategies up here, but you were kind of saying as well, there's some deeper, there's deeper layers there. And is that kind of,
Showing 381–400 of 415 · page 20 of 21
← Previous
Next →