Break Free from Perfectionism: Overcome Shame, Embrace Imperfection and Boost Self-Esteem

Break Free from Perfectionism: Overcome Shame, Embrace Imperfection & Boost Self-Esteem

Show Notes:
In this eye-opening episode, we dive deep into how perfectionism isn’t a virtue—it’s a crutch that keeps us hiding our true selves and trapped in shame. Discover why striving for perfection in your body, home, career, relationships, and more can lead to an unrelenting inner critic and prevent you from experiencing authentic connection.

What You’ll Learn:

• The Hidden Shame of Perfectionism:
  Explore the #1 shame triggers for women and men—from not being “perfect” in every aspect to being perceived as incapable or weak. Understand how these societal pressures foster deep-rooted shame and isolation.
• The Mask We Wear:
  Learn why perfectionism creates a false public self that distances us from our true identity, and how this disconnect affects our self-esteem and relationships.
• Inspiration from “The Greatest Showman”:
  Relive the emotional journey of Keala Settle in “This is Me” and see how embracing your scars and vulnerabilities can set you free. Her powerful performance reminds us that authenticity is the key to self-acceptance. The Greatest Showman Clip 
• Breaking the Cycle:
  Understand why perfectionism is not about striving for excellence, but about avoiding criticism. Find out how shifting your mindset can lead to healthier personal growth, improved mental health, and deeper relationships.

Key Takeaways:

• Perfectionism is a societal trap that limits growth and authentic connection.
• Embracing imperfection is the first step toward reclaiming your self-worth.
• You have the power to challenge your inner critic and say, “I am enough, and I matter, despite…”
• Real change begins when you start valuing your internal worth over external approval.

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Learn more about my Signature Coaching Program for Parents who want to strengthen their family relationships: Courageous Connections - CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE 

Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with mothers and parents who are experiencing difficult relationships with their adult children, and they want to work on creating more authentic connected families.
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Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.

Transcript

Tina Gosney: 0:00

Tina, welcome to the podcast today. I'm your host. Tina Gosney, the family conflict coach, helping you navigate those messy family relationships. I decided to repost this episode earlier this year when I saw one of my mentors, Jennifer Finlayson Fife, post on Instagram about perfectionism, I want to share that post with you so you'll know why it was so influential to and to me in deciding to repost this episode, she said: Perfectionism is a response to the terrifying idea that our flaws make us unlovable. It's our attempt to earn our value by proving that we are somehow above the human condition. Of course, we have flaws. We all have flaws, and yet we all matter. We must come to believe in a God who loves us unconditionally and accept within ourselves that we matter simply because we exist when we accept that our value is immutable, we can stop the fruitless effort of trying to prove ourselves in the minds of others, and instead embrace our humanity and our focus on doing more good in the world. The Human Project is not a perfectionism model. It's an integrity model. Our goal is not perfection or the denial of our humanity, it's to accept ourselves as beloved creatures in development and to get busy making a positive difference in the world in whatever way we are able. When Christ said, Be you therefore perfect, he was not telling us to be flawless. He was inviting us to be whole. Flawlessness never was the goal growth and development are." That's why I decided to repost this episode on perfectionism. This was actually released a few months ago, last summer, and I thought this is just a great time to remind us of what we are all here for it's for growth and development, not for flawlessness, not for perfectionism, especially in our family relationships. Now we will let our misconceptions of ourselves and our flaws get in the way of our ability to connect with others, especially our families. We will leave it up to others to accept us, to tell us that we're okay, to reinforce how we want to see ourselves, to validate who we think that we are. But that is never where our inner sense of value should lie. When you begin to move that value of yourself from the external to the internal, so you're not trying to get it through external validation. You're getting it from within, from your inherent, immutable value. That is when you begin to strengthen your family relationships with a very strong foundation, when you allow yourself or family members to make mistakes, and sometimes really big mistakes, and to still show up with love and acceptance in the face of that disappointment, you are the one that is growing and developing. Because relationships are human growing machines, they pressure us to look at parts of ourselves that we don't want to look at. Now this episode is highlighting one of those very difficult things to look at within ourselves, the perfectionism, and it's just showing us what we go through in this process of growth. So enjoy this re released episode on perfectionism. Do you know what the number one shame trigger is for women? It is not being perfect. That is what triggers us into shame, not having the perfect looks, body, house, family, career, life choices, relationships, you name it. If we can judge it, we're going to try to be perfect, and if we aren't, it's going to send us into some shame. Do you know what the number one shame trigger is for men? It's not being seen as capable, competent or strong. Shame is this feeling that you get when you think there's something wrong with you, it's like this deep, dark place that you go when you're feeling, oh, that just depth of humanity and how flawed you really are. And we think that we're the only ones that are flawed, and it's going to keep us hiding who we really are, our authentic self. I t has us hiding our true self, and we put up a fake friend. We have this public front that we show everybody else, but deep down, we know, we know that there's really something wrong with us, and it keeps us from letting anyone else run. Really know us in a true way. But do you know what that is our that's what our soul really wants deep down. That's what our soul wants and needs, is to be truly known for your true, authentic, real self. Have you ever seen the greatest showman? When that movie came out a few years ago, we watched it so many times, and there's this clip on YouTube that I love. It's about how they when they were trying to get the green light to go ahead and make the movie, and the woman who plays the bearded she plays the bearded woman. Her name is Keala settle I probably didn't say that, right, but that's her name and the greatest showman, if you're not familiar with it. It's a movie about PT Barnum, about his life and about his work, how he created the circus, but he really did, and he shows this in the movie. He exploited people who were different, who were not like everybody else, and for sure, they were not what we would consider today to be perfect. So at the reading of this movie, they all the actors, all of the chorus, the performers had come in and they were going to perform the songs for the for the studio to hopefully get the green light to go ahead and make this movie. And like I said, Keala played one of the main characters. She played the bearded woman, and it was her turn to sing the song called this is me, and she was really nervous. You could see in this clip how nervous she is. She was standing behind the music stand, and she even talks about how that stand was her safety. And then she started singing, and she got past the first part, and she decided to step out from behind the stand, and she went out, and she faced the rest of the chorus, who was backing her up. And you can just see in this clip how she comes alive. She gets her courage. She starts belting out the music. And man, does she have a voice. She has a beautiful voice, and she was feeling the words of the song. These are the words of the song. Well, just the first part of it. It says, I'm not a stranger to the dark. Hide away. They say, because we don't want your broken parts. I've learned to be ashamed of all my scars. Run away. They say, no one will love you as you are, but I won't let them break me down to dust. I know that there's a place for us, for we are glorious. When the sharpest words want to cut me down, I'm going to send a flood, going to drown them out. I'm brave, I'm bruised, I'm who I'm meant to be. This is me. Look out, because here I come and I march it onto the beat. I drum. I'm not scared to be seen. I make no apologies. This is me. I don't even do those words justice as I say them. I want to break into song, but I will spare you that part, because she just sings this so beautifully, and the chorus behind it just Oh. Every time I watch it, I just get emotional, and watching her get emotional, and all the people that are singing with her are feeling it just like she is. And then at one point towards the end of the song, you can tell she starts to lose her courage, and she grabs Hugh Jackman's hand, and she holds on to it, and he holds on to her. That was beautiful. I'm I have a link in the show notes. You can go watch the clip. I've watched it so many times. Every single time, it just gets me when we show our true selves we are brave and vulnerable, and then we get more healthy inside of ourselves, because self esteem does not come from somewhere out there. It doesn't come from anywhere or anything outside of us, or any, even anybody. It comes from inside of us, the very part that we are too afraid to embrace and to show other people. We have this private self versus the Public Self. We have the person that we know we are inside versus the person that we show other people. We have the person that we want to be versus the person that we know we really are deep down, and the more all of those things match, all of those different versions of us, the more an alignment they all are, the healthier we are, and the greater our self esteem. You know perfectionism, which is what this episode is about. But perfection. Ism culture. It invades our society, and there's this feeling that no matter how hard you try, you're never going to be good enough. In fact, I've done quite a bit of speaking, and I usually ask people at the beginning, what are your biggest struggles, and that is what they all basically boil down to, no matter how hard I work, I'm never going to be good enough. Let's start challenging that. Let's look inward for our worth and value, instead of looking to what society and our culture tells us we're supposed to look to. We don't need to look to all those other things we will never have healthy relationships with other people until we can step out that shield of perfectionism. It's a protection. We use it as a shield. We can only have healthy relationships with ourselves by viewing our failures and our mistakes in a different way than we do know there's no getting around it. Perfectionism is not a virtue. It's a crutch. It's something that we lean on. So we won't have to be vulnerable, and we won't have to show the part of us that that isn't perfect. Is it that this flawed? In fact, this is perfectionism. Is called our society's favorite flaw. We wear it like a badge of honor, like, it's a good thing. In fact, a lot of people will in job interviews, they'll even say, I'm a perfectionist. Like, that's like one of the list of the criteria that that makes them more desirable for the job. And we get immediate payoff for perfectionism too. We get to feel accomplished. We get to have other people congratulating us, giving us accolades, saying, Hey, good job for what you did there. And for at least a moment or two, we have some relief that, Oh, finally, I've arrived. Finally I am good enough. But if you're a true perfectionist, that moment doesn't last long. All that praise fades quickly, and then there's another challenge right around the corner, and we have to try harder, even harder, to outdo ourselves from the time the before. And if you're a perfectionist, you are picking up that baton and you are running with it, and you're beating yourself with it, and you are trying to do all of that with no mistakes, because mistakes show weakness, mistakes will they open us up to the judgments and the criticism from others. Perfectionism hurts us. It hurts our children. It hurts our families. Perfectionism is not about working really hard and trying to do your best. Perfectionism is all about working hard to avoid the criticism and judgment of other people. It is always looking out, thinking, what are people going to say about me? I need to control the way other people think about me and what they say. This is not the same thing as striving for excellence, which comes from a healthy place. It comes from inward and a thing inside, something inside of us, that says I just want to do my best, and I'm going to make mistakes, but I'm still going to try, and I'm going to I just want to do a good job. That's what striving for excellence does. That is different than perfectionism. Perfectionism cripples our growth because it faces outward. And when we're a perfectionist, we are avoid the growth and development of ourselves because we're purely trying to avoid making mistakes. Mistakes bring us the criticism and judgment of other people, and we're afraid of what other people will think of us so we sacrifice ourselves and everything in us to look good in somebody else's eyes. Now I might know a thing about perfectionism, a thing or two. I like to call myself a recovering perfectionist. I know how hard it is to live with that perfectionist mindset. But why do we even get it in the first place? What drives a perfectionist to become a perfectionist? It is our society and it is our culture, but there's something even behind that, and we call this a reflected sense of self. So there's three parts to this reflected sense of self, and this is really one of the parts of differentiation, which is what I help my clients with to improve their relationships, we have to have a solid sense of self, rather a reflected sense of self. Okay, so there are three main parts. Us to a reflected sense of self. First, we imagine what other people are thinking about us, and that's usually coming from some thing we have in our head that we just imagine that that's what they're thinking about us. We tell ourselves that it's true that they are thinking that we think that we know what other people are thinking. We don't we, but our brain will tell us that we do. So first we imagine, oh, this person is thinking that about me. And then we imagine, from that thing, that we think that they're thinking about us, that they're judging us either good or bad. So that's step number two. Step number one, this is We all start off life with a reflected sense of self. We are too young to know who we are. We are trying to figure out who we what they're thinking. Step number two, this is they're are, so we're looking to other people to tell us who we are, especially our family, especially our parents, and thinking that it's good or it's bad. Number three, we take that hopefully our parents reflect back to us that we are so worthy and so valuable and that we don't have to be perfect to be loved and accepted, and we develop that solid sense of self judgment of what we think the other person is thinking, and as we go through our childhood, and hopefully our love and acceptance In our home wasn't tied to our accomplishments and our performance, and if we didn't perform appropriately, then we internalize that as our worth and our value. We get our then love and approval was withheld. But if we performed correctly, then we got the love and approval we needed. We're supposed to grow out of this reflected sense of self. We're supposed to grow up and start looking more inward and less own sense of ourself according to what we think their judgment outward, and find our value from within instead of outside of us. But if no one shows us how to do that, we're probably going to stay in a reflected sense of self for the rest of our lives. is that we made up. This is a reflected sense of self. This is Most people do not come out of childhood with a solid sense of self. Most people don't have a set of parents who will properly reflect back the worth and value that is not tied to your not being solid in your skin. performance or your accomplishments. So then we look to society. We keep looking we leave our home and we look to society. We look to friends, and we look to whatever social media and society holds up this unrealistic view of what we're supposed to be like, that standard that we see the perfect standard is unrealistic, and so that's how we're measuring ourselves, and that is the when we have that reflected sense of self. That's step number two. That's the judgment we think that other people are looking at us with. So no wonder we think that we're never going to be good enough, even though we're practically killing ourselves to get there. Many people live their entire lives in a reflected sense of themselves. They never feel solid in their own skin. They don't ever get to a point where they know their own value and worth and they and they just keep living into the judgments, internalizing the perceived judgments of others. This feels terrible, and it's not healthy. If we are looking outside of ourselves for our value, and that measuring stick is perfection, then we will always be lacking. And just think about if you're feeling this right now, everybody else is feeling the same way, but we think we're the only one. So we go around trying to be better than everybody else thinking. I just need to be better. I need to do better. I need to work harder. I need to do this because I am not good enough. So no wonder we are feeling terrible about ourselves and more disconnected from others at the same time, it is not written into our DNA to live like this, because perfectionism keeps us separate from other people. It keeps us at arm's length. It does not allow us to truly connect with another person. I taught music for over three decades. I saw so much evolution in what children were in turn. Internalizing, and how they were approaching their lessons and how parents were doing the same thing, especially the last 10 years, I saw young, young children putting so much pressure on themselves that by the age of seven, the pressure was too much and they wanted to quit. The age of seven. That's the age I started playing the piano. I put I saw parents putting so much pressure on their children properly. I'm sure they were such good meaning parents wanting to help their kids improve. But the way that the pressure was put on was not always in a great way, and there was some of the joy that was lost in music. It wasn't so fun anymore. Music was used to be you could approach it from many different angles, but now it has to be serious and it has to be competitive, and you have to have a a talent and a passion for it. It doesn't feel like there's a choice anymore for kids and an option for kids who just want to learn how to play because they like it and they think that it's fun, everything has to be a performance. Now, this affects our self esteem, and our self esteem affects our relationships. When relationships break down, everything breaks down. Now Liana, the woman who sang the song in those in the video clip, she had to grab Hugh Jackman's hand towards the end. She had bravery. She had courage, and then she started to lose it. She needed a support from another person, and we can get that when we grab onto each other, and we can stand for each other. Even after she came out from behind that music stand, she was feeling the courage, and then she was feeling shaky, and she needed a support. That is relationship. We need to find our own value and worth internally, but then externally. We need each other. We need to support each other. And perfectionism keeps us from doing this. It just says you can't make a mistake. It's going to affect your worth, and then people won't like you, and they will judge you, and they will criticize you. And so we put up this big, giant, strong, thick brick wall that keeps us climbing that insurmountable perfectionism and isolated from others. So let's start using this sentence instead. I am enough and I matter despite... And then you finish the sentence, I'm enough and I matter despite. I just yelled at my kid. I'm enough and I matter despite. I've been unemployed for six months. I'm enough and I matter despite I'm 100 pounds overweight, I'm enough and I matter despite that I'm divorced. How do you finish that sentence? Whatever it is, however you finish that sentence is important, because how do you matter? What are you judging yourself now? What are you trying to keep yourself protected from so that no one else will find out? That's the way you fill in that end of that sentence with and this is just the start that sentence is just the start of how we begin breaking down that shield, that big shield of perfectionism and moving into a healthier version of ourselves, we have to challenge that inner critic inside of our head that tells us that we have to be perfect or that no one is going to like us. We need to start talking back to that inner critic more than we listen and believe what it says. This is not positive affirmations. This is putting our focus in a way that is healthy for us, that will give us a healthy sense of our own failures and weaknesses, and look at them as stepping stones that we can learn from, rather than millstones that will drag us down. It takes courage to look at your failures as stepping stones, especially when you try, and you've been trying to hide them for so many years, and you've been trying to even avoid having mistakes and so living into that perfectionism like that is so hard to start having courage to look and be honest and look at yourself, but we can't do it without compassion for ourselves, that we're flawed and that we do make mistakes, and that life is hard and being human is hard. Here's my takeaway for today, perfectionism is not healthy. It's a cancer. But that cancer has spread through our entire society. It is celebrated. We're celebrating the cancer of perfectionism. You can't tell society to stop all this madness and start doing things differently, but you always have a choice to decide what you are going to do with what society gives you. You can decide to start dropping that perfectionist mindset and living into a more authentic, flawed, 100% worthy version of yourself, and that will be very uncomfortable, but being uncomfortable is the price that you pay to have the life that you want. Thanks. I hope you found some value in this episode, and if you've listened to it before, I hope you found something new this time. Giving up the crutch of perfectionism is something that we work on. In my signature program, courageous connections, it requires a lot of courage to let go of something that has seemed to work but was actually just just an illusion, and then to begin embracing a different way of being that takes a lot of courage. Developing a solid sense of self is something that we work on, and that is, you are giving up perfectionism. You are finding your internal worth, and that was always where it was to begin with. You just had it hidden from you. And we find that in courageous connections. If you want to know more about this program, there's a link in the show notes, we're a community of parents that are changing the way that we connect with ourselves and with our families, when we find our own immutable, solid sense of worth and self, we can have a big impact on our families just by changing the way that we are showing up. If you're interested in learning more about that program, go visit the link in the show notes.