SWD Podcast: How Your ALL or NOTHING & Perfectionism Mindset is Keeping you Stuck
[00:00:00] your best today and your best tomorrow can look and feel very different. So whatever season you're in right now, you may not have the capacity to do all of the things that you want to do that you know are good for you, and that is okay.
Don't beat yourself up about it. [00:01:00]
Welcome back to another episode of the She Who Does Podcast. I'm your host, crystal Wilson. I've been having a lot of conversations with clients over the last [00:02:00] couple of weeks that's really inspired me to want to record this episode. What I wanna speak to you about today is how your all or nothing mindset is the reason that you are failing, not because you are not capable.
So often we have this like all or nothing mindset. And as you're listening to this episode, I just wanna see like, can you relate? Can you see this within yourself? So this might look like, have you ever had a really big goal only to completely abandon that goal? The minute you miss one day, the minute you make one little fuck up, the minute you fall down once.
And you just, well, like I've ruined the whole thing. So your mindset is, if I can't do it perfectly based on these extremely high expectations that I have of myself, then the minute that I don't do it one day, the minute I fall down, the minute I make a mistake, then I have failed and therefore you don't complete things.
So it's not [00:03:00] that you can't complete things. It's not that you are not capable. It's not that you are a failure. It's that you have a mindset that is setting you up to fail. You have a mindset, all or nothing. have a mindset that basically tells you that it has to be perfect. Otherwise, you are done, you've failed. You are not good enough.
That all or nothing mindset. It's like the voice. It's the voice of your inner mean girl in your head telling you have to be perfect. You have to do it every day. And if it's not perfect, you are failing. You are not good enough. See? And then those days where you don't do the thing, you use that as evidence against yourself to see You can't do it.
, see, can't do it. Now when I had a really unhealed relationship with myself, this all or nothing mindset was something that I absolutely had. I remember, like for me, especially my self-care, when I very first started my journey and I wanted to reconnect back to myself, I wanted to heal my [00:04:00] relationship with myself.
I would set goals, I was so good at writing lists. I was so good at setting goals, completing a goal, achieving a goal. That barely happened. You know why? Because I had this toxic all or nothing, perfectionism mindset. And basically what I would do is I'd be like, cool, I'm gonna walk every day at 6:00 AM.
And then I wouldn't even do it. I'm gonna meditate every day. There was no, room for grace. Whenever I was setting a goal from a toxic and unhealed place within myself, it was an extreme. There was no such thing as like building the habit. There was no such thing as giving myself grace. There was no such thing as having compassion for myself.
It was like, I need to meditate, and if I don't meditate every day, then I am a. And this kept me stuck in this like perpetuating cycle of all or nothing. And what actually happened was every time I fell down or didn't do that meditation, or [00:05:00] didn't do that journaling, or didn't go to the gym or didn't eat health that day, all that I did, my inner mean girl loved it because she was just collecting it all as evidence.
C, you're not really good enough. C, you're not really worthy. C, you really can't do it. Collecting evidence to actually keep me right where I was. So what was the point of trying? Because if I couldn't do it in this high expectation way that I created in my mind, if I couldn't do it absolutely fucking perfect, then I was a failure.
And here's the thing, it was the mindset of all or nothing. It was the mindset of perfectionism, and it was the mindset that it had to be done every day. And I wanna share with you what my life looks like now. I just don't have an all or nothing mindset. And if you've got an all or nothing mindset,
it's a red fucking flag of where you actually are in your relationship with yourself. If you identify as a perfectionist red flag in your [00:06:00] relationship with yourself, if you are somebody who sets goals, ?
Like gets really clear, gets really motivated, like it almost like this hit of euphoric motivation when you set the goal, but you can't stick to it. Red flag in your relationship with yourself.
These things an all nothing mindset. Your perfectionism, your inability to actually keep your promise to yourself this is not, things to be proud of. This is not things to gloat about, boast about the amount of women who are like, oh, I'm just such a perfectionist, but you're not fucking doing anything.
You're a perfectionist, but you're not actually doing anything. , you're so stuck in it being perfect that you're not taking any action. You're not moving, therefore you're not growing those of, you're like, it's all or nothing. It's like you're not actually achieving anything because , you've got such high expectations on yourself, how it must look, how it must feel, what kind of actions you're gonna take, and how you take them when you take them.
That it's like you've set yourself up to [00:07:00] fail before you've even gotten in the arena. And this is why so many of you are not in the arena. You're in the bleaches thinking about what you wanna do and not taking action because it has to be perfect. I can't do it yet, unless I can do it perfectly every day at this time.
That's the only way that I can be successful, and I get it. I get , that it was who I used to be. But you know what I did? I healed my relationship with myself. So you know what I have now for myself. A lot of compassion. A lot of forgiveness, a lot of grace. I don't believe in consistency in the way that I used to believe in it.
That consistency meant that I had to meditate. As an example, I had to go for a walk every morning at 5:00 AM I had to do this thing at this time every day, seven days a week, or five days a week, and if I miss one day, then I was a fucking failure. Right now, I'm more about continuity.
There is a [00:08:00] beautiful flow, ? I'm always moving in the direction that I wanna go. I'm always stepping more into who I wanna be, not because I'm doing it rigid, not because I've got an all or nothing mindset, not because it's perfect. Nothing that I do is perfect. Nothing at all. Nothing at all is done every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday at 7:00 AM nothing.
Now, I might meditate. Five times a month, I might journal seven days in a row and then I might not touch my journal for 10 days. And guess what? , I'm not whole and worthy and amazing on the week that I journaled every day. And I'm not less or failing the week that I didn't pick up my journal at all because I fucking have.
More understanding for myself, and I know I work more in my cycles sometimes it feels really good for me to be all in doing the thing consistently every day. And sometimes that doesn't feel good, that doesn't feel an alignment. [00:09:00] And I'm not whole or more or better when I'm doing something all in or when I'm not doing it all in.
I've let go of that way of being and it's set me free. And now I embody a woman who has compassion and understanding for myself. I was talking to a client recently, and I've been having this conversation a lot with clients. It's been coming up a lot. Why I wanna speak to it. She was saying how she's was in a funk and that for the last two weeks, maybe three weeks, she had not done.
All the meditations, the listening to her learnings, which is something we do in breakthrough work and just her self-care. So she'd really felt that her self-care had really slipped up and I mean that's gonna happen. And so we got on our call and she was sharing with me and she was like, I'm in a funk.
And she was beating herself up. And it was just so interesting to watch her going through her process, kind of explaining how she was feeling and why she was feeling this way. my actual response to her, I'm pretty sure was [00:10:00] like. , so what that you haven't listened to your learnings in two weeks.
I said, let's look at what's actually been happening in your life. So there'd actually been some really big things that had been happening in her life, ? Things with family, weather things. We had a cyclone up here. She'd not been well. So there'd been things going on. And so it doesn't matter that you didn't do all the things, your capacity was elsewhere, ?
You were in a bit of more survival mode of like supporting family, making sure everyone's all right, you know, doing all the things that she had to do over that two week period. She wasn't the number one priority in that two weeks, and that's fucking okay. I. Problem right now is not that you haven't done those things over the beating.
Practicing compassion I understand why I didn't do those things over the last couple of weeks. I understand why. You know, those things that have been important to me weren't as important as I was [00:11:00] holding and doing other things. It's like , it gets to be that simple. Like it doesn't have to be like, oh my God, I didn't meditate every day.
I didn't listen to my learnings every day. I didn't do that thing, so therefore I'm failing. It's like, let's look at it a little more objectively, like, what else has been happening in your life? You know, you're not always gonna have a hundred percent capacity to hold everything. Sometimes other things are gonna have to be like, I'm pausing that for a couple of weeks.
I'm gonna come back to that. And if you're gonna do that, at least fucking do it from an empowered place. Don't then beat yourself up about it. And so I was sharing with her that. So probably the last month actually, I've been navigating some health stuff and like all of my habits that I was doing , from the beginning of the year, like putting my phone away at 9:00 PM I was eating, you know, 100% gluten free.
I was eating. A hundred percent organic. I was being really thoughtful and intentional about the food that I was putting in my body. I was being really thoughtful and [00:12:00] intentional about my sleep and my habits. I was walking every day listening to podcasts, consuming positive and empowering content, ?
That was all in alignment with my goals and, the up level that I was creating for myself this year. Then four weeks ago something happened and it changed how I was showing up. I had some health things and I was sharing to her like, I've not been putting my phone away at nine o'clock.
I've been definitely scrolling and doing more research late at night in bed. I haven't been walking. My energy levels are so low. I've got such kind of extreme fatigue right now because of low iron. B12 deficiency and very extreme low ferritin and something else. Basically, all my energy sources are completely depleted and so the things that I was doing kind of four, six weeks ago that were like super positive and empowering actually are not in alignment with the current little season that I'm in right [00:13:00] now.
I just need to take all of that pressure off, all of those kind of things that I were doing right now. That's not what I need right now. I'm resting a lot right now. I am, you know, doing a bit more research on my phone, spending more time on my phone Right now. I've just kind of slowed all those other areas of my life down so that I can show up in my business still a hundred percent , and I said there's a version of me many moons ago.
That would've 100% been like beating myself up about that feeling like I'm a failure, like I'm not doing a good enough job. And now this version of me who has a whole healed relationship with myself, I know this is my best right now. And this is something that I say to clients so often, if this is the only thing that you take away from this episode.
I want you to write it down if you've got a pen and paper. I know so many of you listen to my episodes and you take notes and you message me after which I, absolutely love. So I want you to write this down. My [00:14:00] best today and my best tomorrow can look and feel different, and it doesn't mean that I'm winning or failing.
It just means that my best today and my best tomorrow can look and feel different. And so my best a month ago. My best right now do look and feel very different. But you know what's different is that I'm giving myself a lot of nurturing, a lot of compassion, I'm just loving on myself.
I'm loving on what I need to give myself right now, which does look and feel different from a, you know, just a few weeks ago. And I said the same to my client. I said, you need to give yourself compassion and understanding right now. You don't need to beat yourself up. You've tried and tested that. It doesn't fucking work.
That's why we're doing breakthrough work together. And I was like your best a couple of weeks ago when you were able to do all those things, it was because you had the capacity, things shifted, you had other big things [00:15:00] going on in your life, and so you had to make an empowered and educated decision. That those things just weren't gonna be as important.
But now that things have settled, it's like, how quickly can you recover? And I think this is where people get stuck. It's okay, life gets busy sometimes you're not gonna be able to do all the things perfectly, and if you keep beating yourself up for that. You are literally like any personal growth you're doing, you're dismantling it by the beat up.
You are never gonna be able to beat yourself down, beat yourself up, and create greatness from yourself. It just doesn't fucking happen. I mean, any of you have children. When do you get the most out of your children? When you love them, when you nurture them, when you encourage them, it's the same thing with yourself, ?
You can't beat your child down, beat your child up emotionally, mentally, and expect greatness from 'em. So why do you fucking do it to yourself? And so your best today and your best tomorrow can look and feel very different. So whatever season you're in right now, you may not have the capacity to do all of the [00:16:00] things that you want to do that you know are good for you, and that is okay.
Don't beat yourself up about it. But where people get stuck is that instead of just having compassion and understanding and making an empowered decision that I'm not doing these things right now because I'm dealing with something else. And then if you do that and you're just like, cool, I give myself permission that this is my best right now, and it looks and feel different to a couple of weeks ago, it's much easier to recover and get back into those habits and routines that you want to have when you actually just support yourself when you can't do it, versus if you beat yourself up and you beat yourself down, down, down, down, down into that pit, ?
Of negativity, then the comeback is a lot harder, ? You don't just pick up the meditation. You don't just pick up going to the gym. You don't just pick up the healthy eating or putting your phone away, right? Because you've beat yourself down and you beat yourself up so [00:17:00] much that it feels way harder to get back up.
Imagine if you had just had compassion and understanding for yourself. The recovery is a lot quicker. So for me, I said to her like, I'm not doing everything I was doing a couple of weeks ago. And I'm totally okay with it because I make an empowered decision about what I need right now. And what I need right now is more rest than usual.
So I'm not pushing myself to go on all of those walks. I'm eating more, you know, carbohydrate food, which I tend to do when my, you know, making an active decision to eat a lot more red meat. I don't eat a red meat myself. Feel really low in energy and I'm craving more carbohydrates. It's just the season that I'm in, it's okay.
I'm not beating myself up when in the afternoon. I need a right now. It's like I'm love myself and give myself. So if I held on to this all or nothing mindset that everything that I said I was gonna do at the beginning of the year, there was [00:18:00] no room to not do that and not do it at a high level and not do it with high expectations and for it has to look perfect.
I would be feeling like shit right now to give myself more of the rest that I need. Just like my clients do. So I've been having this conversation a lot. I was like, I need to speak to this. Like, I need you guys to know that the all or nothing mindset, your perfectionism is a mask. It's self-sabotage.
It's the thing that wants you to fail and stay right where you are because you're setting such extreme goals with extreme measures. Before you're actually being the person who can hold that. It's like when you start, like how many people like, wanna do exercise? I wanna lose weight, I wanna get healthy.
And it's like cutting out all carbs and just go fucking extreme. And it's like, person yet who can handle that level of perfectionism or extremist. Extreme ways of living and then three days in you [00:19:00] fail. And it's like, it's not that you are a failure or not capable. You are setting yourself up to fail, and you're doing this at an unconscious level because your relationship with yourself is not one built on love and trust and nurturing and compassion and understanding.
It's like, imagine if you just gave yourself a bit of grace. Imagine if you just practiced self-compassion, ? Imagine if , you started off the year really strong doing all these things, and then something happened in your health and you had to kind of adjust things. Imagine if I was beating myself up right now for having afternoon naps, ?
When that's actually what I need and that's my high level of self-care right now. My, the version of me four weeks ago, my standards of self-care were like walking every day motivational podcasts going to bed at, you know, 9:00 PM and phones away. But this version of me just four weeks later, it's like, I need a lot of rest.
exercised, like really, I maybe gone for two or three walks in the last five weeks. I haven't gone to Pilates in weeks. I'm really just [00:20:00] really conserving my energy. As I give my body what it needs right now, which is something very different to the goals I set a little while ago, and I'm doing it with nothing but love knowing that my best today and my best tomorrow can look and feel very different.
Living in these all or nothing extremes is perfectionism. It leads to burnout it breeds inconsistency and it has you constantly feeling. Like you are failing. And the reason that you are doing this behavior and you're stuck in this cycle is because you already have a belief deep down that you are not worthy, not deserving, not good enough, that you're not capable, and that you're failing .
You know how I know that to be true? Because you wouldn't behave like this. If you didn't have belief systems, and this is why I say what you believe about yourself and your relationship with yourself is so incredibly crucial and important. If you wanna change your life, you have to change the beliefs that you hold about yourself at a subconscious level.[00:21:00]
This is the work that I do with my breakthrough clients, ? And so even my client last week who's a breakthrough client, we had this conversation. Her recovery has been so quick. She shared with me, I'm in a funk, I've not been doing anything. I brought it to her awareness why this might have happened, and she was like, oh yeah.
That makes a lot of sense. I can let this go. She's recovered quickly. She's back into her routine. She's back into doing the things that she wants. And you know why? Because we're working on those beliefs. We're building a new version of her so that she can start to show up in her life differently and let go of these behaviors that have been keeping her stuck in feeling like she's failing.
This is why you need to let go of your all or nothing mindset and whenever you feel it, no, it's your inner mean girl trying to keep you stuck. She wants you to fail. When you're setting things up like this, you are choosing to fail because it's not realistic. The expectations you have on yourself are too fucking high, and you do that because you can't meet them, which allows you to keep feeling like you're [00:22:00] failing, you're not capable, you're not good enough, and these.
Seeded root cause belief systems that you need to shift and release and rewire at a root cause level, and then you can see behavioral change and that's where the breakthrough happens. Amazing guys, thank you so much for listening to this episode. I wanna leave you with a little journaling task. So my little journaling task for you is I want you to journal on where is your all or nothing mindset holding you back in your life right now?
What are you not doing? Because you can't do it at this unrealistic 100% way that your inner mean girl says that you need to do it in. So where is it holding you back? And what would it look like if you were to actually choose giving yourself grace, giving yourself compassion and believed and embodied that progress instead of pressure?
And perfectionism is actually a healthy, loving way to operate for yourself in your life. [00:23:00] So where is your all or nothing mindset holding you back? If you were to give yourself some grace, love, and understanding, what could you actually achieve, knowing that it's not meant to look perfect, that you're not meant to be all or nothing.
It is meant to be little bit, day by day, habit by habit, step by step, fall down, get back up. That's what it's meant to look like. That's what it should look like, and that's actually the road to success. Transformation and your biggest breakthrough. Amazing week, and I episode.[00:24:00] [00:25:00]
