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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Right. Well, the same way everyone else can, which is understand where you need help and get it right. So messy perfectionists are in love with the beginning of anything, right? Perfectionism doesn't just happen at work or in a traditional achievement context, like grades. It can happen in any context. It's a very fluid construct.
So you can be a messy perfectionist, for example, when it comes to dating. Messy perfectionists are what I call start happy. They love starting something new. I would say they push through the anxiety of it, but there is no anxiety of it for them. They're the counterpart to the procrastinator perfectionist, right?
And so the strengths of that is like messy perfectionists, naturally enthusiastic people, superstar idea generators. Like you want a name for a podcast and messy perfectionists can come up with 50 in like an hour, easily half an hour. And they just have all this momentum and excitement and contagious energy around starting and launching a project and they cast such wide nets.
But if you're not managing this perfectionism, The negative side is that you say yes to a million things without giving yourself the chance to commit to any of it because you're spreading yourself too thin. And then when you hit the inevitable tedium of a process, if we go back to our dating example, you're on like the fourth date and
You're noticing like this person chews quite loudly or something starts irking you like messy perfectionists can bolt. They run or like in a work example, if you're launching a business and then you have to file, you know, a professional license with the state. And you're like, this is boring. I don't want to do this. I don't know how to do this. It's just like your energy deflates upon itself.
And you get this sense if you're not aware of your tendencies to make up a story in your head about why that's happening. And the story is a negative self-narrative. And it goes something like, Well, I must just not care enough. I must not be disciplined enough. Nobody takes me seriously. I must just not be smart enough. I'll never get my stuff together. This isn't going to happen for me.
I might as well, you know, give up. And it's so difficult to contend with that. Whereas like a messy perfectionist, get the project started, then get a procrastinator perfectionist or one of the other kinds of perfectionists in the mix, someone who's naturally structured and it's going to help you to see the project through.
I identify, for example, mostly as a messy perfectionist, which is why I have zero interest in self-publishing any of my books, because I need a team of people around me to help bring the project to conclusion and worry about things that are very detail-oriented, like I don't even know the language to use for like binding the book and sending it to this factory or whatever else. Like, no thanks.
I would like a publisher to do that. I would like my agent to help me, you know, share the idea with other people. Once I generate it and once I write it, like then I just do, I just finished the rest by getting a ton of help constantly, you know?
Yeah. Someone asked me on a panel once, like, so how did you decide to go with the publisher and not self-publish? And I could not stop laughing because I was like, I, just publishers do so much work and agents and there's so much behind the scenes stuff that is so hard and tedious and like doing that in addition to the creative work of putting something out into the world.
I don't, I can't do that. And I don't want to learn how, because I don't need to, you know, because you can have people who are very good at that and who love doing that and for whom that is a strength and could do that really easily. You can have those people help you to do it and you can help them by saying, here's a great book.
Can you bind it and put a barcode on it and get it into Barnes and Nobles and do all the stuff that I have zero interest in doing?
Yeah.
So intense perfectionist pros side are exactly that. They don't care so much about being liked by others, which tends to help them professionally and hurt them personally. But when you don't care so much, when you're not fixated on people liking you and winning a popularity contest, it's very easy for you to be direct. Right?
Often we get into like a politeness contest with people because we don't want to hurt their feelings or we don't want to be perceived in a certain way. We're focused on impression management. Intense perfectionists have no time for that. And that's really helpful in creating momentum around a project and infusing efficiency.
into something and you know as you said the con side to this is that they can sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture right so an intense perfectionist might get the goal they will get the goal done but it's like at what cost and sometimes the ends don't justify the means an intense perfectionist not managing their perfectionism can forget that so it's like great you hit
all your Q3 goals and next quarter, half your team's gonna quit because they are all so miserable, right? Or great, everyone's at Thanksgiving on time and dressed in the clothes you wanted them to wear and the table looks beautiful and the food tastes delicious, but did you notice nobody's laughing?
Did you notice like you can hear forks scraping on the plates because nobody's feeling any sense of spontaneity or connection or warmth because your goal wasn't those things. Your goal was to, you know, have some kind of like concrete vision of what you think the moment is supposed to be.
And so to answer your question, I mean, I'm going to bore you because it's the same answer as all the other ones, but it's, it's understand where you need help. You need help remembering that relationships matter and successful outcomes that are sustainable are built on sustainable, healthy connections with other people.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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