Dr. Harry Barry

something in their parents every day.

And they have to learn to live with that during the day.

And what's really interesting is that they notice that for the first hour or two, they're very, very aware of it.

But after a while, it actually fades into the background.

So they begin to realize that imperfections are kind of normal and that we can learn to manage them and learn to cope with them.

I also teach them to purposely make mistakes in situations and learn how to manage and cope with that.

I teach them, for example, I love this one where

They have to, if they love their rooms tidy, for example, they have to mess up some particular room that they, maybe their bedroom that they love tidy, and they have to live with the chaos for 24 hours.

It's kind of messing up their lives, showing them that that's the way life is.

Life is messy and imperfect.

And the second really key thing, and I've often talked about this, Clare,

The second thing is the merging of that.

If they make a mistake or if they're not perfect, that they're a failure.

That's where the real problem lies.

That's the heart of perfectionism.

It's this internal self-rating where we're very harsh on ourselves.

We play the rating game.

So if things are not going well, we think we're absolute failures.

So we believe that we're useless, we're weak, we're failures, we're just not good enough.

And of course this dogs them all the way along the line academically in their workplace and in relationships.