The Surprising Relief of RAISING Your Standards

[00:00:00] Hello! Before we start today's episode, if you would like a condensed version of what I'm talking about in this podcast, go ahead and subscribe to The Perfectionist Guide. You can read the entire thing in three minutes or less. To access this, go to CourtneyLupgavin.com slash newsletter.

[00:00:23] Are you a bit of a perfectionist? Type A hyper performer? Then you know what it is like when your perfectionism is a constant God-awful companion. But it doesn't have to be.

[00:00:35] If you are ready to burn bright instead of burning out, to lead without losing yourself and to enjoy the life you have worked so hard to create, then keep listening. I'm your host, America's leader on rewiring perfectionism, CLG, and this is Perfectionism Rewired, the podcast.

[00:00:55] Welcome to Perfectionism Rewired. Today we're talking about the surprising relief of raising your standards. Yes, raising your standard is a key distinction and tool that will forever change your perfectionistic tendencies. It's one of those 1% shifts that makes 100% difference.

[00:01:18] If you're like, I actually want to be on vacation this summer and be by the pool with my kids and be present and enjoy it and laugh and not miss those moments that matter because you're just thinking about work, feeling guilty.

[00:01:37] Then you're feeling guilty because you're not paying attention to the kids or you're not paying attention to your partner

[00:01:43] or you forget something major for your summer trick and you're like, man, if I could just be able to focus, if I could just get clear, if I just didn't feel so anxious and guilty all the time. That used to be me.

[00:01:54] It's okay if that's where you are. I'm telling you that I can get you to enjoy present, relax. This episode right here is going to help you do that. So, raising my standards and lowering my expectations. I've always heard that I need to lower my standards.

[00:02:13] No lies, lies, lies, lies. Raising your standards means your standards for yourself. For example, coaching my client, Brian this week. He loves his family as I'm sure many of you do too.

[00:02:34] And he's the oldest, first born, loves his siblings, loves his parents, loves his wife, loves his kids, loves his best friends. And they're going through a lot. He's usually the pillar of support, which he still is. But Brian was like, I'm exhausted.

[00:02:54] I'm burned out with being pulled in so many directions. And so Brian was like, I'm just anxious and I feel guilty and I feel like beholden to my mom and my, you know, he didn't want that dynamic. Maybe you relate to Brian's situation. Maybe you feel similarly.

[00:03:12] This one tweak completely in one week from session to session just completely changed Brian's life and it sealed up so many energy leaks. He realized that raising his standards, he didn't want his relationships with the people that he loved most to be fueled by guilt or resentment.

[00:03:34] Or hold on, I could talk to you for two minutes before I drive my daughter to ballet. The tool, the question that I gave him to ask was, am I available for this right now? Raising your standards for yourself.

[00:03:47] Look at what is your standard for living for yourself? And I'm not talking about the floors are spotless or whatever. I'm talking about like the values that you have, like your priorities. Like for me, raising my standards for myself meant that I don't rush.

[00:04:07] The more stressy and clenchy and pressure I put on myself, the more forgetful and scattered I feel. So for like my standard for myself is I don't rush. What does that mean on the other side?

[00:04:21] My expectation is not I arrive everywhere five minutes early, which or 10 minutes early, which used to be my thing. I used to have so much anxiety about being late and living in Los Angeles.

[00:04:33] Let me tell you it can take as long as driving from Las Vegas to San Francisco as it does to get from the West Side to Hollywood at 3pm on a Thursday. What's more important?

[00:04:46] Is it more important for me to get to the PTA meeting right on time or early? Or is it to not take 10 years off my life because I'm so anxious and stressy all the time?

[00:05:00] Truth booths when most perfectionistic people come to me, they realize that like they're not really upholding any standards for themselves in terms of like what they actually value. Like if they value spaciousness and we look at their schedule, there's not any spaciousness in there.

[00:05:19] They value generosity and they feel like they're having to be very stingy with their focus because they feel like they don't have very much. Their standard for themselves is to be well rested, yet they're staying up late at night scrolling. For example, I love cleaning.

[00:05:36] I find it very soothing. And today, one of the things I cleaned is a ceiling fan. I dry dusted it first and it was 90% better than autopilot where my mind went.

[00:05:50] Now I'm going to get the spray duster and I'm going to get the little thing that goes into crevices and I'm going to make this immaculate. And I was like, you know what? No, I'm going to leave it as is.

[00:06:03] That right there is an example of raising your standards. Now you might be like, but CLG, I'm raising my standards by making everything hospital level immaculate and clean. This is where you want to check your choices because the values me and my family have,

[00:06:22] hospital level cleanliness is not one of them. Instead, it's people live here. I'm telling you about this because the urge, the compulsion inside of me as a perfectionist was to go deep cleaning a high ceiling fan because of the skill and technique of being rewired.

[00:06:45] I noticed and I paused. I thought about how this high ceiling fan, it's not in line with my values and it's actually something that isn't going to make or break my day. When my perfectionism and anxiety would team up, that kind of thing would drive me irate.

[00:07:04] Like I wouldn't be able to do anything else because I'd be fixating on, oh, I will be calm once this is cleaned. I will be calm once I get this promotion. The truth is that's a lie. How do we know this?

[00:07:16] You know this because you have achieved a lot in your life and you've gotten the thing, whatever the thing is, I'm not necessarily talking about a physical thing and then you're left with that empty, that womp womp. Is that all there is? What is it all for?

[00:07:33] What is it going to feel good? When am I going to calm down? When am I going to be able to enjoy my life? What you might be thinking right now, walking me through this example with me, CLG, having this fan immaculate.

[00:07:46] How is this really going to impact the long term? It's not. And when I look at my intelligent energy accounting, which is a technique I created that looks at your four core pillars, the amount of sleep you get, the amount of movement, your nourishment, all of that.

[00:08:03] And so knowing what the balance in my person account, that's just not a withdrawal. You know what I mean? The juice isn't worth the squeeze. That right there is me raising my standards. My standards are I don't deplete myself.

[00:08:18] That my person account doesn't go below a certain amount that I'm not over withdrawn. I don't overdraft my own account, which is what happens when you experience overwhelm, plain and simple. If you're wondering why you feel overwhelmed all the time, it's because your account is overdrafted.

[00:08:34] If you want to get rich in your person account and to be empowered so that it's not like, why did I flip out? Or why am I being snippy with my partner? Why is this bothering me so much?

[00:08:46] So that you have the visibility into what's actually happening with yourself below the surface, then go to CourtneyLoveGavin.com slash contact inquire about working together. Because that's a tool you can pass on for generations.

[00:09:03] Clients use it at work, use it with their partner, use it with their kids. It just makes perfect sense. For you, maybe it's not about the fan. Maybe it's a presentation you're doing at work.

[00:09:14] I'm just using the example of the fan to show that looking at your values, you are upgrading your standards, your personal standards or professional standards. You're just like the standards of the stratosphere and universe of you.

[00:09:29] And that makes everything better because you are congruent where what you're doing, what you're thinking, it's the epic framework embodied presence, interosceptive connection. It starts at a cellular level and then cascades to your emotions, your behaviors

[00:09:48] and cognitively what you're thinking, which is why when I was cleaning the fan, the power pause didn't feel like a like pulling the emergency stopbrake if we're pretending that like I'm a car Ferrari, obviously. It was just like, oh, okay.

[00:10:05] And I will say even though I have done this, I've done this power pause hundreds of thousands if not millions of times before it still felt uncomfy. It still feels uncomfy even now. It's just, you know, part of my brain is like,

[00:10:21] well, the time it takes us to do this podcast, we could be deeply in the fan right now, but it's that restraint. It's that ability to let go. I know eventually that compulsion inside will dissipate and it will just completely dissolve.

[00:10:39] You know what's gonna make it dissolve faster? The fact that I'm not questioning myself because of it. When you question yourself, like, well, why did I do this? What does this mean? Stop interpreting your life as tea leaves.

[00:10:52] If it's not adding to your bank of body or person account, you can person check this by the way. If it doesn't like, ooh, like fill you up or energize you in some way, drop it like it's hot. I'm not saying ignore it.

[00:11:06] This is where the black and white thinking and all or nothing mentality comes out. I'm not saying, oh, just pretend that you never make any mistakes and you don't have room for growth. No, that's toxic and utterly unhelpful. What I'm saying is that recognize it

[00:11:20] and just be like, oh, okay. Just like we're doing a workout. I wanted to do 20 push-ups in 60 seconds, no modifications. And instead I dropped at the 30 second mark and I did the rest with modifications. Do you see how you can still concentrate on the growth

[00:11:39] while noticing that and not interpreting that of, oh my God, does that mean I'm going back to having to do everything on my knees and not being able to hold a plank? No, silly. No, it just means that you're growing and raising your standards.

[00:11:56] As perfectionists we have this vision. You have this vision that you're like, oh, I can just see it. It can frustrate you because you can see it so clearly and then you can feel that either you or other people or other things like they're just not getting

[00:12:11] with the program of the vision that you have in your head. But it's like, yeah, we created that vision in our imagination and now it's time to use that imagination to get creative and just be like, okay. So it's not there yet. How is this for me?

[00:12:26] How can I enjoy this situation? If you can't get there, just get to neutral. It is what it is. Your action steps for this episode. Notice where you are having expectations. Set a timer for 90 seconds. If nothing's coming up,

[00:12:41] your particular activating system will go and bring it up. Like you will notice, since you listened to this episode, you will notice naturally that it will just start to bubble up. So it's not a problem if you can't think about it right now.

[00:12:52] Reticular activating system, remember we're throwing that ball for your yellow lab also put in the show notes a link to that episode. So yeah, look at your expectations and then think about like the standards that you're holding for yourself

[00:13:04] because this is like where I just see so much lies is that it's like, I need to lower my standards. And it's like, no girl or no, no bro. When you misidentify the problem, you misidentify the solution. The problem isn't your standards and you need to lower them.

[00:13:23] It's that you need to raise them. So like a standard for you is when you say yes, when you want to say yes, you say no when you want to say no. You don't dishonor your own standards with yourself in order to appease and accommodate

[00:13:38] and make concessions for other people because you want to control how they feel emotionally. That's just like a quick example. That's the difference. So next time you're thinking, oh, I need to lower my standards, I would actually miss the Elliott, flip it and reverse it

[00:13:53] and be like, actually how could it be true that raising my standards would be better? Because raising your standards isn't disciplining yourself more. It's not hating on yourself. It's valuing yourself. Like all things perfectionism related is highly nuanced, but it's something that for you to look at like,

[00:14:12] well, what are my standards for myself? Standards are not like strict, like this is the standard and you better live up to it. If your brain is like that, come on over. I invite you to work with me inside of perfectionism optimized

[00:14:25] where we can take that dictator inside your mind and we will replace them with a herring, kind, empowered leader so that you can take charge of your life. Like being in charge can be a standard, which means that you lower your expectation

[00:14:46] for having to control everything all the time because trust there is a big difference between trying to control and being in charge. One feels a lot better and can get you a lot farther. If you're interested in being in charge of your life and being empowered,

[00:15:04] then I invite you to go to CourtneyLoveGavin.com slash optimized take care, bye. Listen up, taking charge of your perfectionism is so much easier than you have been led to believe. Whether you wanna stop playing out worst case scenarios in your head or be joyfully present, ambitious again,

[00:15:23] you don't need more rigid rules, guesswork or hard work in perfectionism recovery. You need a framework that helps you understand and most importantly, rewire your perfectionistic habits from the inside out. It starts inside of perfectionism optimized. Besides the obvious mental health and wellness benefits,

[00:15:47] rewiring your perfectionism is the fastest way to figure out what's really underneath your perfectionistic patterns. This radically different proven proprietary approach helps you succeed by dropping the contempt and judgment that blocks change. Discover how to trust yourself, take control of your world

[00:16:08] and feel truly empowered to own your perfectionism instead of being owned by it. Head on over to CourtneyLoveGavin.com and start your transformation today.