As a recovering perfectionist I was always looking for advice on how to stop being a perfectionist. In this video, you will learn how the art of feminine embodiment and working with my wounded masculine and feminine energies have helped me deal with perfectionism. You’ll also learn about the different types of perfectionism and how it shows up in your life.
Prefer reading? Here is the transcript:
Today’s video is going to be very helpful for anyone who struggles with perfectionism, whether you are unable to make a decision, you feel stuck and you can’t move forward, or you can’t get yourself to just quit on something or stop working on something until it is absolutely perfect. Then this video is definitely you for you. I want to talk about perfectionism through the lens of feminine embodiment. And specifically, I want to explore how working with and activating your feminine energy can help you overcome perfectionism. My name is Tertia, and I help women like you drop from your heads into your heart, so that you can access and express the full spectrum of your feminine power. On my channel here, I make videos about feminine energy, self-worth and embodiment. And if those are things that are exciting to you, if they light up your soul, then I invite you to join our community, subscribe, and also make you hit the bell so you can get notified of all of my new videos.
Perfectionism is something that I have struggled with for a very big part of my life. And I still struggle with it at times. So it’s a topic and a subject that’s very familiar to me. And I really have tried so many different things to get over myself, to stop being so driven and stop being such a perfectionist. And it’s only really when I started working with feminine embodiment and working with my feminine energy, activating my feminine energy, that I noticed that there was change. And what I’m coming to see is that perfectionism is often a direct result of us suppressing our feminine energy. So perfectionism can show up in so many different ways for different people. And maybe you recognize some of this. We can be people-pleasers, it’s always about accomplishing more, and doing better and improving yourself. And to be a perfectionist is exhausting. It’s exhausting because you never give yourself a break.
So research tells us that you get three types of perfectionists, and it’s not really important for you to be able to put yourself into one of these categories, because most likely, like me, you’re going to find yourself a little bit of a mixture of everything. But the three types of perfectionists that you have is you have someone who is self-oriented. So a self-oriented perfectionist. And that is where you have a very, very high expectation of your own performance. So you’re very hard on yourself. You expect yourself to be able to deliver in a certain way at a certain level. And you tie your self-worth to your level of output, your time, your value, to what you’re producing.
You also get other-oriented perfectionism. And this is where instead of having all that view and the glare on yourself, you turn it towards other people. So the focus is externally on other people, how they perform. So a lot of judgment on others, their life choices, the way that they do things, a lot of criticism in the way that other people show up, how other people behave compared to your own standards of how you think it should be. And often what happens with this kind of perfectionism is you’ll end up doing things yourself, you’ll end up controlling everything yourself because you think you can do it better. Nobody else can match up to the expectations that you put [inaudible 00:03:52]. So again, very exhausting, this need and this drive to be in control of everything and to run everything because you feel that only you are capable of doing it in a certain way.
And the third kind of perfectionism is socially oriented. So this means that we attach our self-worth directly to the opinions that other people have of us. We measure our self worth based on things like vanity meters. So on social media, how many likes do my posts get? How many interactions do I get compared for example, maybe to my peers? So the opinions of other people are very important to us. We try and live up to the standard, we don’t want to show other people how we struggle or how we are not perfect, or how we suffer with something. We keep that all in and we have this mask.
One of the things that actually inspired me creating this video is my own struggle with perfectionism quite recently. So I’m busy creating my signature coaching program and I was feeling stuck in terms of exactly what this is going to look like, how I’m going to guide my clients through this journey. So I did some self-coaching around this and what came up for me as I was busy writing and just feeling into what was going on was inside, I had this conviction, this feeling of certainty that before I was able to move on, I had to find the perfect answer. I had to have the perfect journey completely mapped out before I could actually offer this to the world.
And I think that’s what happens to so many of us who are entrepreneurs or who are creatives, is we hold ourselves back from actually offering what we have to the world, from bringing our services to the world because of perfectionism, because we hold out for that inspirational light bulb moment that’s going to give you the perfect answer of what something needs to look like before it can be accepted by the outside world before it is something that can be deemed as worthy. So knowing this intellectually didn’t really help me because I know that I struggle with perfectionism. So what I did is I took this feeling of having to wait for the perfect answer, having to have the perfect answer. I took that to my mat with an embodiment practice, and I was able to move through the stuckness.
So this brings me then to what are some of the things that are creating this perfectionism in us? And I don’t think that there is a clear and definite answer as to what creates perfectionism in some people, because not all of us are perfectionists. But from what I’m seeing, it definitely has something to do with our family system, generational perfectionism that might be coming through the line. That’s certainly the case for me, where generationally, there have been many perfectionists in my family. So it is a learned thing by observing others. But I also believe that we get limiting beliefs and imprints given to us as children, that we need to be behave perfectly, we need to be a good girl, we need to do things in a certain way so that we can be accepted. And for some reason, that conditioning turns into perfectionism for some people.
There are other things that also cause us to become perfectionists and it has to do with our culture, it has to do with the society that we grow up in, and it has to do with the messages that we get. So this perfectionism is then driven by a very strong inner critic. If you are a perfectionist, if you struggle with perfectionist tendencies, guaranteed you’re going to have a very, very strong inner critic, who’s going to continue telling you that you are not good enough, that you need to do better, that you should try harder, that you should be ashamed of yourself for not performing at a certain level. And this is part of what keeps perfectionism stuck is that shame. So with all this shame that is linked to perfectionism in my experience, embodiment is one of the more successful ways to begin to deal with it, to begin to solve it.
When we do embodiment practices, it means that we come from the level of the mind, we come from the level of the thinking and we drop into the level of the body. Through embodiment, we access not only the physical body, but we also access our mental plane, we access our energy plane, we access our emotional plane. All of those things are alive inside the body. Now, shame lives in the body too, as does all of our other emotions, good or bad emotions, it all is alive in the body. And a lot of times, these emotions create frozen tensions. It causes us to continually show up in certain ways and have these patterns and have these limiting beliefs and have these self sabotaging behaviors. And when we can begin to unravel the tension that’s keeping these patterns and these beliefs in place, then it frees up our life force energy. And it allows us to better show up for ourselves in a way that releases the perfectionism.
Every time we choose to work with our feminine energy, what happens is we heal our inner wounded, masculine energy. We heal and dismantle that inner patriarchy and that inner critic, which is the thing that keeps the perfectionism stuck within us. Every time that you commit to being fully self expressed in your feminine power, you loosen the grip that this has on you, and that’s the work that I do with women.
So I really hope that you found something in this video that resonated with you, that gave you a new level of insight or clarity that you needed to be able to move forward. And if you want some additional support, then I invite you to jump onto an exploration call with me. I’m going to leave a link for you in the description below to find out how you can work with me, how you can begin to dismantle the inner patriarchy, get rid of that inner critic and begin to overcome these perfectionism patterns that are alive inside of you through feminine embodiment coaching practices. So if you enjoyed this video, can you please let me know by giving it a thumbs up, and also share with me your thoughts. How did this land for you? Did this resonate with you? Let me know in the comments below. If you are still not a subscriber, then I invite you to get on with it and subscribe. We’d love to have you on board. Thank you so much for watching. I love you, I appreciate you, and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye.