Unlearning Learned Helplessness

[00:00:00] When you are telling yourself that you can't do something because of your perfectionism

[00:00:05] or that it's harder for you because of your perfectionism, that is learned helplessness.

[00:00:10] If you want a life of misery, I highly encourage you stop listening to this podcast and go

[00:00:15] listen to dusty outdated how to be in perfectionism recovery and how to perpetuate learned

[00:00:23] helplessness.

[00:00:24] I am not here for that.

[00:00:25] I'm not here for victims.

[00:00:26] I'm not here to make you wrong.

[00:00:28] I'm not here to disempower you.

[00:00:30] There's hundreds of other people that will gladly take your time, your money and your

[00:00:35] attention if that's what you want.

[00:00:37] Who I am here for and why you want to continue listening to this episode is if you want to

[00:00:41] be the hero in your own story, not the victim.

[00:00:44] If you are ready to burn bright instead of burning out, to lead without losing yourself

[00:00:50] and to enjoy the life you have worked so hard to create then keep listening.

[00:00:54] I'm your host, America's leader on rewiring perfectionism CLG and this is perfectionism

[00:01:02] rewired the podcast.

[00:01:04] Welcome to perfectionism rewired.

[00:01:07] Today we are unlearning learned helplessness.

[00:01:10] In this episode, we are challenging the learned helplessness that is embedded into

[00:01:18] perfectionism recovery so that you can get on the path to quit fighting against your

[00:01:23] perfectionism forever.

[00:01:25] Let's just start with perfectionism in general.

[00:01:29] The actual definition like scientifically for what perfectionism is, it is the ability

[00:01:35] to see an ideal and see all the possibilities but you're able to see more possibilities

[00:01:43] than a non-perfectionist or a pedestrian would be able to.

[00:01:49] And you also have this compulsion inside of you to bring that possibility into reality.

[00:01:59] Being able to imagine a different future is a cognitive ability that only humans possess.

[00:02:09] They've studied all the other species, no other species is able to do that.

[00:02:13] That's unique to us as humans.

[00:02:18] So I wanted to give you for this episode all of these other people who also have

[00:02:25] perfectionism who have that Ferrari drive harness it and leverage it.

[00:02:30] Who are they?

[00:02:32] Dolly Parton, RuPaul, Tina Fey, Mr. Rogers, Julia Child, Ruth Bader, Gingsburg, Serena

[00:02:40] Williams, Beyonce, Adele, Steve Jobs, the inventor of Dyson, MLK Jr., Albert Einstein,

[00:02:46] Sarah Blakely, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Walt Disney, Marie Kondo, Tyler Perry, Bethany

[00:02:52] Frankel, Ashley Longshore, Dr. Brunet Brown, Big Sean, Megan, Thee Stallion, Gloria Steinem,

[00:02:58] Lizzo, Dwayne, The Rock, Johnson, Jane Goodall, Lucille Ball, Nelson Mandela, Jennifer Lopez,

[00:03:05] Lisa Ling, Pharrell, Issa Rae.

[00:03:07] What do they all have in common?

[00:03:09] Perfectionism for most of human history.

[00:03:13] Making ourselves victims and staying unremarkable has kept us safe.

[00:03:19] We don't need to worry about that anymore.

[00:03:21] No victims here.

[00:03:22] It's all just practical proven, playful facts, truth, and accuracy that are really

[00:03:30] going to help you so that you can feel as amazing as your life looks.

[00:03:34] What are you going to gain from listening to this episode?

[00:03:36] I'm laying out for you the path to get you from Sabotage City to Triumph Town.

[00:03:43] You're going to go from victimville to Winchester.

[00:03:48] Get it?

[00:03:48] Like winning, we're winning.

[00:03:50] And if you are sometimes dropping into that disappointed district, I'm going to

[00:03:55] introduce you to the resilient region.

[00:04:00] Getting out of perfectionism recovery starts with perfectionism is an enduring

[00:04:06] identity marker.

[00:04:08] Why does this matter?

[00:04:09] Because an enduring identity marker is something like your ethnicity, the color

[00:04:15] of your eyes, your birthplace, your country of origin.

[00:04:19] Those are all an enduring identity marker.

[00:04:21] It means that it's something that is with you forever.

[00:04:24] Perfectionism is one of those things.

[00:04:26] It's not a choice to be a perfectionist.

[00:04:29] Just like no one chooses to be neurodiverse.

[00:04:33] It's just who you are and who you be.

[00:04:36] This is an enduring identity marker.

[00:04:38] Okay, so I have green eyes.

[00:04:39] Perfectionism recovery would be like me being I'm in green eyed recovery.

[00:04:44] Hashtag recovering green eyes.

[00:04:47] I guess I could do that.

[00:04:49] I could put on brown colored contacts every day.

[00:04:52] It would be a lot easier if I were to embrace my natural eye color.

[00:04:57] However, if there was a lot of rhetoric and by a lot of rhetoric, I

[00:05:02] meaning everywhere you turned, they were talking about how green eyes,

[00:05:05] that means your line, that you're devious, that you're envious of things,

[00:05:10] that you are of the lineage of Frankenstein.

[00:05:12] If your eyes are green, that you're part amphibian.

[00:05:15] Like if all of those things were what you were being told, you would feel

[00:05:20] that you were a victim of your green eyes.

[00:05:23] And naturally you would do everything to fight against it.

[00:05:27] You would blame things on your green eyes, which by the way, blame

[00:05:30] is a victim behavior.

[00:05:32] Blaming.

[00:05:33] That's for children to do.

[00:05:35] Like who stole the cookies from the cookie jar?

[00:05:37] That's not for us.

[00:05:38] Okay, so blame.

[00:05:40] Oh, it's my perfectionism.

[00:05:42] It's just utterly unhelpful because when you're saying that, you're basically

[00:05:47] saying that your perfectionism is bigger than you.

[00:05:50] Now you know perfectionism.

[00:05:52] It's an enduring identity marker.

[00:05:54] It's with you for life.

[00:05:56] You get to decide if you want your life to be a rocky road, living

[00:06:01] in the disappointed district, or if you want to come on over here

[00:06:04] to a triumph town.

[00:06:05] I'm just telling you the atmosphere much better, but your choice always.

[00:06:11] Now you have some models to look at.

[00:06:14] Oh, okay.

[00:06:14] So perfectionism doesn't mean that you are destined to a life of misery.

[00:06:18] Doesn't mean that you are tightly wound and anal and that you don't put

[00:06:23] any work out in the world and you cut off one of your ears unless

[00:06:26] that's what you want.

[00:06:27] But if you're listening to this podcast, I highly doubt that's what you want.

[00:06:30] If you want a life of misery, I highly encourage you.

[00:06:33] Stop listening to this podcast and go listen to dusty, outdated, how to be

[00:06:38] in perfectionism recovery and how to white knuckle it through life and just

[00:06:43] like punish ourselves and how do you perpetuate learned helplessness?

[00:06:48] I am not here for that.

[00:06:49] I'm not here for victims.

[00:06:50] I'm not here to make you wrong.

[00:06:52] I'm not here to disempower you.

[00:06:54] There's hundreds of other people that will gladly take your time, your money

[00:06:58] and your attention if that's what you want.

[00:07:01] Who I am here for and why you want to continue listening to this episode is

[00:07:04] if you want to be the hero in your own story, not the victim.

[00:07:08] So what is learned helplessness?

[00:07:11] We covered what perfectionism is.

[00:07:13] What is learned helplessness?

[00:07:16] Learned helplessness is learning to accept and endure unpleasant stimuli

[00:07:23] and is unwilling to avoid it even when it is avoidable.

[00:07:29] So what does that mean for us as perfectionists?

[00:07:33] And by the way, this is the definition from the Godfather of learned helplessness.

[00:07:39] Dr. Martin Seligman.

[00:07:42] He is also the director of the Positive Psychology Center at Penn State

[00:07:50] and is credited with ushering in this new wave.

[00:07:54] And by new wave, I mean he's 81 years young.

[00:07:57] A new wave of positive psychology.

[00:08:01] What happens with learned helplessness and perfectionism is being willing to accept

[00:08:07] that perfectionism is a bad thing and then to endure all the fighting

[00:08:11] against yourself and making yourself wrong, being unwilling to avoid that

[00:08:16] even when it is completely avoidable.

[00:08:18] Now, I don't like the term avoidable because it makes it seem like

[00:08:20] you're scooting out of something like you're avoiding something,

[00:08:23] which when we are an unwired perfectionist, I know for me, like I avoided

[00:08:28] stuff all the time because it was like, Ike, I'm comfy.

[00:08:31] I don't want to make people upset.

[00:08:32] So I would just like avoid situations even though it was like really just

[00:08:37] me avoiding standing up for myself.

[00:08:40] OK, so Dr. Martin Seligman did years and years of research on learned helplessness.

[00:08:49] He learned that people learn a sense of helplessness when they misinterpret

[00:08:56] failures that they've had and they internalize it as helplessness.

[00:09:00] I'm guessing that not guessing, but if I were a wagering woman that you have

[00:09:06] had obstacles in your life that you have internalized as you are

[00:09:11] helpless against your perfectionism, that your perfectionism is controlling you.

[00:09:15] And then because of that, what happens is you actually learn to be helpless in the world.

[00:09:22] This is such a dichotomy because I know you and you're probably like,

[00:09:26] what? Helpless? No, no victim vibes here.

[00:09:30] However, when you are telling yourself that you can't do something

[00:09:36] because of your perfectionism or that it's harder for you because

[00:09:39] of your perfectionism, that is learned helplessness.

[00:09:43] It is. What the brilliant Dr. Martin Seligman did is he had this hypothesis

[00:09:50] that we was like, well, you know what? If you can learn helplessness,

[00:09:55] I wonder if you can miss the Elliott, flip it and reverse it.

[00:09:59] So he did studies on exactly that, whether you could rewire helplessness

[00:10:05] and that you could become empowered. His studies proved humans can actually

[00:10:13] completely rewire their thinking from helpless victim to empowered prolific person.

[00:10:24] And those who really practice, make permanent and developed this habit of being empowered

[00:10:31] were a lot more successful. They were happier, they had better health,

[00:10:35] and he has done like over the decades, thousands of scientific studies.

[00:10:40] That is where I learned from a scientific background it's possible to do that with perfectionism.

[00:10:50] It started with me asking myself, okay, how is my perfectionism benefiting me?

[00:10:55] What are the perks around that? What is the gift here?

[00:10:58] And really like getting curious about what was happening and able to

[00:11:01] turn all my L's into lessons. When I make a big mistake, how can I transform this?

[00:11:06] And how can I approach this kind of issue in the future?

[00:11:10] On TikTok, I shared a video of part of my home renovation and how I kicked over a full gallon

[00:11:19] of paint in my bathroom. That is just like such an example of what happens when you

[00:11:24] unlearn helplessness and that you stop deciding to take up residency in perfectionism recovery.

[00:11:32] Now, stepping into the truth booth here, we always keep it 100, but truth

[00:11:36] booth is where we get vulnerable with each other. If you are taught from a young age

[00:11:40] that you are helpless in the face of struggles that are bigger and more powerful than you,

[00:11:44] then especially if that happened when you were age seven or younger,

[00:11:48] you innately continue to view things that happen to you with the same perspective

[00:11:52] of lack of control, even when you can actually take charge of those situations.

[00:11:58] So even if you actually do have authority over what's going on, the default is to this

[00:12:06] learned sense of helplessness no matter the context. This is something that as ambitious

[00:12:12] driven perfectionistic people, you can unlearn and rewire through training ourselves to be

[00:12:21] responsible. And when you are responsible, you are taking on things from a perspective

[00:12:28] of responsibility. Not this is all my fault, but responsibility and it is empowering and it is

[00:12:36] freeing because that means that no one else has power over you, your joy,

[00:12:43] and your ability to move through the world confidently.

[00:12:47] And yeah, crappy things occur. Even crappy is a judgment that's a label, but it's like,

[00:12:53] yeah, not everything goes the way that we want it to go. But instead, the perspective has opened up

[00:13:00] into like, well, there's someone else that's maybe gotten through this? Who has that somebody

[00:13:06] been or do I want to be the first? Am I a leader and I go first and I'm going to show

[00:13:09] other people how they can go through this situation? It's incredible once you realize

[00:13:14] that you are in control of so much more than you think possible, including your perfectionism.

[00:13:21] Having perfectionism doesn't mean that you need to go through life and things are harder for you

[00:13:26] or more difficult for you unless you want it to be that way. You have spent by this point

[00:13:32] at least a decade minimum in fighting against yourself and making yourself wrong and in trying

[00:13:38] to like strong arm your way against the people pleasing the overthinking the ruminating the

[00:13:42] catastrophizing the self criticism and all that jazz. And it's like, oh my goodness, what if there's

[00:13:49] a better way? There is like when I say work with your perfectionism, that doesn't mean that like

[00:13:55] it's the boss of you. It means that like you decide to no longer abdicate the role of CEO

[00:14:02] of you and that you are able to unlearn these habits that maybe got you to where you are,

[00:14:09] but they're not going to get you to where you want to go and then learn like just like upgrade

[00:14:14] your skills and the tools that you have. All of the patterns, behaviors, fear, decision, stress,

[00:14:20] doubt, overwhelm that is surrounding you right now, that isn't who you are. Okay, especially when

[00:14:26] it comes to perfectionism. Those are just things that you've learned. And what we're here to

[00:14:32] talk about what I'm here to talk to you about is how you can unlearn that and get back to

[00:14:36] who you are. So you can show up powerfully for your family, for your career and for your community.

[00:14:45] The way that I realized this was through going to the science side of it. And I just read hundreds

[00:14:52] of studies on this was like 10 plus years ago, hundreds of studies on perfectionism and how

[00:14:58] there's actually two kinds maladaptive and adaptive. And maladaptive is the kind

[00:15:03] that we always learn about. It's the equivalent as though like just imagine if for sexual intercourse

[00:15:10] we only learned about AIDS, incest, rape and syphilis. That was it. AIDS, incest,

[00:15:18] rape, syphilis. That was it. Like you probably would be like, yeah, I'm not going to do sex.

[00:15:24] That's like not for me or like sex is bad. And you would have like a lot of shame around it.

[00:15:29] But what they're not telling you is that yes, those things can happen. But also for the most part,

[00:15:37] you don't have to experience any of those things. And what also comes along with it is there's

[00:15:45] procreation, there's intimacy, there's connection, there's pleasure. Those are four other things

[00:15:52] that are equally as true. And it's the same thing when it comes to having perfectionism

[00:15:59] and being a perfectionist and the way that you go and operate in the world. If you are an empowered

[00:16:06] person, and you're committed to shredding every speck of learned helplessness, you just really

[00:16:12] want to own and empoweredly own my perfectionism instead of it owning me, then the way that

[00:16:19] we can do that together is inside of my private one on one coaching perfectionism optimized.

[00:16:25] Right now I have two spots open, that is a rare anomaly. If you think that one of them

[00:16:32] is meant to be yours, then go to CourtneyLoveGavin.com slash optimized.

[00:16:36] One last thing that I just want to like end it with a question, especially I know,

[00:16:40] because I used to be like this where you're like, I shouldn't need to get support.

[00:16:43] I should be able to do this on their own. And it's like, even the inventor of

[00:16:49] Lasik doesn't do his own Lasik eye surgery. Okay, like there are some things that you can do it on

[00:16:54] your own, you're going to be doing more harm than good. So like if you want to get your perfectionism

[00:16:59] right the first time and do it the right way instead of the hype way, I'm here for you.

[00:17:04] And I get it taking the initiative to invest in support can be uncomfy, but perhaps spending

[00:17:12] decades of time in this one precious life of yours feeling disconnected, disempowered, frustrated

[00:17:21] and stuck is more uncomfortable. Like yes or yes. And action stuff for this episode,

[00:17:26] just ask yourself like what if it could be easier? What if there is a less arduous path?

[00:17:32] Are you willing to explore that? Why are why not? Listen up, taking charge of your

[00:17:36] perfectionism is so much easier than you have been led to believe. Whether you want to stop playing

[00:17:42] out worst case scenarios in your head or be joyfully present, ambitious again, you don't need more

[00:17:49] rigid rules guesswork or hard work and perfectionism recovery. You need a framework that helps you

[00:17:57] understand and most importantly, rewire your perfectionistic habits from the inside out.

[00:18:03] It starts inside of perfectionism optimized besides the obvious mental health and wellness

[00:18:09] benefits rewiring your perfectionism is the fastest way to figure out what's really underneath

[00:18:16] your perfectionistic patterns. This radically different proven proprietary approach helps you

[00:18:22] succeed by dropping the content and judgment that blocks change. Discover how to trust

[00:18:29] yourself, take control of your world and feel truly empowered to own your perfectionism instead

[00:18:36] of being owned by it. Head on over to CourtneyLoveGavin.com and start your transformation today.