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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So when you think about male perfectionists, you might think of like a James Cameron or Gordon Ramsey or Steve Jobs, who were just genius visionaries, wanted things in a very particular way, in a very particular style. And when you think about female perfectionists, you might think of like a Martha Stewart or Marie Kondo, like
women who are allowed to be public about their perfectionistic standards, but only if it is expressed through archetypal homemaker interests that are not in competition with men. Because if you're not doing that, then otherwise you're sort of like the Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue or Serena Williams. You're a difficult woman or you're
you know, just not balanced enough, you're not maternal enough, you're fill in the blank, not enough of something. So that kind of I don't know if that answers your question, but that is what the difference is in the term. I think I don't know if you feel this way, John, but I think language is such an immediate locator for gender performance expectations.
And you can learn a lot about a culture by the language that we use, like words that we have for things, but you can learn a lot more by the absence of words, right? So there's a lot of language around being called like recovering perfectionist. I'm a recovering perfectionist. It's not something that I often hear men say, if at all, right?
When you use the term strong-minded, that's really a descriptor for... femininity. You don't say watch out for him. He's a strong minded man, because that descriptor gains a superfluous quality when you're talking about men. And the idea there is like, well, men are supposed to be strong minded. You know, men are supposed to know what they want.
And the subtext of that subtext is like women aren't, you know, and so it's like, even like, do you know the phrase resting? Bitch face?
Well, there's no resting jerk face, right? For a reason, because women are expected to be palatable and pleasing all the time. And when they display a neutral facial expression, there's a punishment for that. And it's kind of jokey jokey. You know, no one's really being punished, but it's not really jokey jokey.
You know, like, there's no name for that for men because the message is like, you're not supposed to, you don't need to be that all the time. And so perfectionist is like, let me, let me like blow the whistle on this term. If you're an ambitious woman seeking power. Don't allow yourself to be called a perfectionist in a kind of derogatory way. And don't do that to yourself either.
You have a vision. It's important to you. You want it executed in a certain way. That's okay.
I describe five types of perfectionists in the Perfectionist Guide to Losing Control. And one of them is the Parisian perfectionist. And that's someone, all perfectionists are seeking an ideal. And the Parisian perfectionist is seeking ideal connections with other people.
And there are pros and cons to each type of perfectionist, just like there's pros and cons to the perfectionism, perfectionist construct in general. And I think if you're someone who really
The pros of being a Parisian perfectionist are like you're naturally warm person, you have empathy pretty easily you can put yourself in someone else's shoes and get a good sense of what they might be feeling you go out of your way to help people feel included right you're naturally inclusive.
And the cons of that particular perfectionist profile are like, sometimes you want connection so badly that you try to take shortcuts to it and you people please instead of engaging in authentic connection. And so if you're really good at empathic accuracy, which is you can accurately read the room, right? Whether it's a group of people,
or one person, you can pretty accurately understand what someone is feeling because you can feel it too. And the colloquial ways we describe empathic accuracy are like feeling someone's eyes on you from across the room, or like you walk into a room, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, and you could just like feel the tension in the room.
You know the couple or something tense just happened. And so I studied that Because I think it's so interesting how people vary in their ability to feel what other people are feeling. And can we get better at doing that? And the people who are naturally good at it. and don't know it, like how much do they understand, oh, this person is upset, so let me work very hard to help them feel better.
And in doing that, you kind of can abandon yourself sometimes because it's like, that's not your job to attend to the other person's emotional landscape.
And so that's how it intersects with perfectionism because if you want perfect connections with people and you can feel that they're not connected with you or disconnected from themselves or sad or whatever, you can get into these really kind of codependent dynamics where you're trying to do the emotional labor for two people or a system of people like a family or a team at work when that's not your job, nor can you control it, right?
Perfectionist guide to losing control. not maintaining control.
I mean, I think there are lots of ways in which perfectionism shows up. And if you want to be understood in the way that you're describing, you might over-index on perfectly articulating what you're trying to say and over-index on the language that you're using at the expense of just allowing your energy and understanding
who you are to kind of also come into the room right and the way i describe this in the book is like when we think of moments that are perfect or when we perfectly connect to someone When I listen to people describe those moments, they are not describing flawlessness. They are describing wholeness, right? So a perfect moment is a moment which is already whole.
Showing 41–60 of 127 · page 3 of 7
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