Katherine Morgan Schafler
speaker
127 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Katherine Morgan Schafler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Another word that's been radioactively commodified in our culture and what NEF means by this is like being able to say, yes, that meeting was embarrassing. It was the worst. I hated it. But also that's not all I feel. And being able to turn your head a little bit and say like, what else do I feel? Do I also feel proud of myself for being introspective right now?
Am I also looking forward to Saturday night with going out with my girlfriends? Am I also really curious about this book that's been sitting on my nightstand for two months that has nothing to do with my job? And just being able to return to the sense that you're a whole human being and being mindful of the fact that this one experience you're having is not who you are.
It doesn't say anything about what's possible for you in the future. It's feeling like it's eclipsing your whole reality day life, whatever, because your stress response is activated and that narrows your line of
vision because when your body is stressed you're you're wired to focus on like the next one minute of your life and so you're contracting and mindfulness is about letting your body and mind know it's okay to expand now there's no tiger in the room with me you know and you're safe And this isn't all you feel. So perfectionists feel disappointment a lot amongst a litany of other emotions.
And instead of asking yourself, like, how do I feel less disappointed? How do I get rid of my disappointment? A better question is, what else do I feel? Because then you make space for the disappointment and you make space for the rest of your emotional landscape, which is... not just bad, it's filled with a lot of other stuff.
Repetition is how we learn. And we think repetition, like repeating the same mistake over and over again, we think that that's an emblem of our failure. No, that's an emblem of our growth. Repetition can represent failure, but it can also represent learning. Habits need to be in repetition.
Thinking of ourselves as people who are strong, capable, good, worthy, loving, free, that identity structure needs some repeating. And by some repeating, I mean, maybe it takes you years. That's okay. That's what it takes for everybody.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Thank you so much. We're all excited about The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control finding its audience really quickly. So that was wonderful.
Yeah, well, so I always knew I wanted to be a therapist. It's an interesting job to know you want to be as a little kid, but I've always loved listening. And I've spent my whole life listening. So what you hear when you listen ends up being a lot in a certain way, but really funnels down to these same universal elements in another way. And I've worked in a lot of clinical settings as a therapist.
I've worked in a rehab. I've worked helping people deal with addictions of all kinds. I worked on site at Google. I had a private practice on Wall Street. I worked in residential treatment with kids who were traumatized and abused and became wards of the state. And in all of these contexts, I saw this universal theme.
I heard the themes of perfectionism and they weren't always coming from a place that was unhealthy. what I noticed was that perfectionism is a power. And like any power, it has a dichotomous nature, right? So it can be constructive or destructive. And I became really interested in the ways in which it is constructive and why we don't talk about that more.
Because in the research world, we've been talking about that for years. Decades of research has focused on what academics call adaptive perfectionism, when your perfectionism is there to help you and heal you, right? As opposed to maladaptive, which is when the perfectionism we all kind of think about with the kind of perfectionism that... stalls you and hurts you.
And so the perfectionist guide to losing control is about how to understand this power that you have as a perfectionist to not waste time and energy trying to not be a perfectionist because that doesn't work and to lean more into adaptive ways of being your whole full self.
I wouldn't say perfectionism is a woman's attempt. I just think it is a gendered term. So women and men are both impacted negatively by perfectionistic standards, but it unfolds in different ways. And I could write a whole book about perfectionism for men. For example, one of the constructs I talk about in the book is emotional perfectionism.
We tend to think of perfectionism in this one myopic way of behaviorally manifesting itself of like, I like all the pens in a row. I like all the towels to be straight. And what I noticed in my work is perfectionism is kaleidoscopic. It shows up in a million different ways. And one of them is emotional perfectionism.
And emotional perfectionism is like when you want to feel what you perceive to be the perfect way about something. And that doesn't mean happy all the time. It means that we're all kind of walking around with these pie charts hovering over our minds about how... angry you're supposed to be versus grateful versus solutions oriented versus et cetera.
And one of the things that I think a lot of men feel when it comes to emotional perfectionism is you're not allowed to feel unsure. You're not allowed to cry. You're not allowed to need nurturing, warmth, guidance, attention. Like it's a very rigid expectation culturally that we place upon men and it has really detrimental effects. And so what I say in the book is,
This affects both men and women, but very differently. And the way it affects women is that women are kind of called perfectionists as a way to regulate their power and authority. Like if a woman is very much like, I don't like it that way, I want it this way.
At work, she might be called a perfectionist and told to kind of balance out, don't sweat the small stuff, all these little directives that are actually about not taking ownership over an idea or a vision. Whereas a man who... does the same thing might be called a visionary.
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