More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 20 - April 30, 2025
Restored procrastinator perfectionists come to understand that it’s not that you want the start to be perfect; it’s that you want faith that you’re going to be okay even if you fail.
The shortcut you take when you’re not restored is placating your fear by running towards the false security of a guaranteed outcome. You get into scarcity mode and try to hedge the loss. You think, I’ll take this job I don’t really want and then at least I’ll be guaranteed to have X.
From a restored place, you can see that your vision isn’t collapsing when you allow it to enter the real world, nor is it failing just because it doesn’t look the way you expected it to look. The vision changes because it’s growing, and it’s growing because you gave it life.
Understanding that you have little to no control over the world around you is liberating; it opens you to step into your life now instead of waiting until you have more control.
Restored classic perfectionists come to understand that it’s not that you need perfect order or organization, it’s that you revere function and beauty.
Chaos isn’t the same as dysfunction; the latter is avoidable, while the former is not. From a restored place, you can tell the difference. You accept, maybe even embrace, that a certain degree of chaos is natural and good.
You still love planning, you still love organizing, you still love making it beautiful—but you do it because you want to, not because everything will fall apart if you don’t. You operate from a well of desire, not a pit of desperation.
You stop working to curate a programmed experience. You allow yourself open access to all that you think and feel.
Restored intense perfectionists come to understand that it’s not that you need the outcome to be perfect; it’s that you want to matter—to others, to the world, and to yourself.
When you’re restored, you’re strong enough to hold the understanding that you matter now, and your life is now.
You allow yourself to be flexible because when you’re rested, it’s easier to remember that your way is not the only way.
Regressing into negative patterns still happens when you’re restored, but it happens less often, you’re conscious of it faster, and you have the energy to make swift and meaningful repair attempts.
The work every perfectionist has the energy to engage in when they’re restored is that of finding the strength to define success on their own terms—on their own timetables, honoring their own values, with their own metrics for achievement.
Prioritizing your restoration is essential for managing your perfectionism. As discussed, every perfectionist is both a maladaptive and an adaptive perfectionist.
What worked six months ago might begin to glitch; that’s fine. It’s okay if a solution stops working. We grow out of solutions just as we grow out of our problems.
You’re not doing anything wrong. Nothing is breaking. Change is natural. Everything is changing in every moment. We’re always being called upon to let go of something, hence the screen-saver grief that comes with being human.
If you press all the buttons at once, it will jam the system. Going on a restoration blitz is not going to help you.
It’s okay to think about changing off and on for a while without behaviorally doing anything; that’s how personal development begins.
If you feel energized and restored, make note of what’s enabling that and consider continuing to do what you’re doing without changing a thing.
Clinically referred to as a cognitive reappraisal, a reframe is when you shift the language around a concept or an event to enable a more helpful perspective.
Reframes are powerful because one of the best ways to change the way you think is to change the way you speak.
INSTEAD OF: I don’t know what I want. TRY: I’m reimagining what’s possible for myself.
INSTEAD OF: I gotta fake it ’til I make it. TRY: I give myself permission to lead with the burgeoning parts of myself.
Clinically referred to as self-distancing, the practice of reflecting on your situation in the third person can be helpful because it generates psychological distance between you and your experience.
To avoid the difficulty of initiating a new approach, people play the passive “wait and see” strategy out until the dysfunction culminates into a crisis, then they busy themselves with the urgency of triage.[*][3] After the crisis is contained, you still have to develop a better strategy.
I don’t know what to do is often experienced as a helpless thought. Consider reframing it as one of the most powerful thoughts you can have.
I don’t know what to do is also a sign of openness, humility, and flexibility.
A reframe acknowledges your initial perspective while also acknowledging that your perspective is one perspective, and multiple perspectives exist.
To begin practicing the skill of reframing, ask yourself the following question: “What’s another way to look at this?” If you can’t think of another way yourself, ask around.
If you overexplain and underexpress, you don’t connect to the entirety of your experience. You intellectualize a lot, you talk around the issue, but you don’t actually “go there.”
The other side of the communication coin is that if you overexpress and underexplain, you don’t give your emotions a way to evolve into insight.
Without explaining, you can’t find patterns or triggers; nor can you develop sustainable solutions. You just keep swimming laps in a pool of feelings.
Being in any type of relationship with an intense or classic perfectionist who doesn’t express can feel like you know a lot of facts about the person, but you don’t know anything about who they really are.
The point is to increase your awareness about how your communication style is being experienced. You want to grow more aware of not only how others are experiencing your communication style but also how you yourself are.
The difference between an opinion and a judgment is that an opinion reflects your thoughts and perspective, whereas a judgment reflects your thoughts and perspective alongside an analysis of your worth as compared to that of others.
When we judge ourselves in either direction (as better than or less than), we make our worth conditional and set ourselves up for shame. The more you meet others with nonjudgment, the more you enable that attitude towards yourself, and vice versa.
The subtraction of judgment alters everything about the way you perceive a situation, including what the problem is, which solutions are available, and what you deserve.
The concept of striking when the iron is cold applies well to multiple contexts. At work, in your parenting, in your relationships, and most importantly, with yourself—don’t try to resolve the negative issue at the height of the negative issue.
When you’re upset, your interventions with yourself are significantly less likely to be received because your stress response is activated.
When you’re doing well, show up for the future you that’s having a hard time. Forge and reinforce protective factors around yourself.
Honor the tenets of whatever you believe in when you feel strong, not just when you’ve been crying for nine hours and your mascara’s giving you Alice Cooper eyes.
You strike when the iron is cold because that’s when you have the most energy, patience, and optimism, not to mention a solutions-oriented mindset.
Exploit moments of your highest functioning to broaden your repertoire of positive coping mechanisms and align yourself with support in every color.
It’s easy to mistake isolation for independence and being stubborn for being strong. Never asking for help was like laying lead on top of my potential.
Asking for help is both a very simple and a very hard thing, especially for high-functioning perfectionists. Just because you can function well doesn’t mean you aren’t hurting.
Dr. Karen Horney echoed the sentiment: “For the analyst it is a source of never-ending astonishment how comparatively well a person can function with the core of himself not participating.”[7]
For high-functioning perfectionists, the siren will never sound, the lights will never flash. When your suffering is invisible to other people (and when you’re adept at keeping it that way), you need to be the one to fire the flare.
We’re all interconnected, and we all need one another. We don’t just need one another occasionally; we need one another all the time. It’s hilarious how much we need one another and how much we operate as if we don’t, and by hilarious, I do mean tragic.
You cannot rise to your potential unless you know what your boundaries are, you know how to communicate them, and you know what to do if your boundaries are violated.
To protect your time, energy, safety, and resources, you decide what is and is not okay with you—those decisions are your boundaries.
