Perfectionism can look like success but feel like pressure, insomnia, and an inner critic that never shuts up.
If you’ve tried “just think abundant thoughts,” forced affirmations, or talk therapy alone and still feel stuck…
this episode flips the script: Dr. Tara Cousineau—Harvard psychologist and author of The Perfectionist’s Dilemma—shows why mindset-only fixes fail when your nervous system is in overdrive, and shares her simple, somatic + energy-psychology tools that calm the body so the brain can change.
Want more from Dr. Tara? Grab her free Happy Achiever tools and mini energy masterclass at perfectionistdilemma.com, and dive deeper with her “Peaceful Perfectionist” Substack at taracousphd.substack.com.
Want premium clients from your content?
Grab a free Client Acquisition Audit and I’ll show you exactly where your message, offer, and CTA are leaking conversions—and the 3 fixes to turn your podcast/Substack into a client pipeline.
👉 Book here: https://coachsalchemist.com
Transcript
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: If you've ever felt like, no matter how much you achieve, it's still never enough, you are not alone. Perfectionism might look like success on the outside, but inside it can feel like pressure, self-doubt, and the inner critic that never rests.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Hi, and welcome to the UWorld Order Showcase Podcast, where we feature life, health, transformational coaches and spiritual entrepreneurs who are stepping up
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: be the change they seek in the world. I'm your host, Jill Hart, the Coach's Alchemist, on a mission to help coaches and entrepreneurs amplify their voice, monetize their mission, and get visible, leveraging podcasts and Substack.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: If you are ready to start attracting premium clients without chasing algorithms or hunting people down like a banshee on a mission, head over to Coachesalchemist.com and schedule your free client acquisition audit. It's the first step to building a business where your clients seek you out instead of you chasing them down.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Today, we are chatting with Dr. Tara Kuzno. Tara is the author, clinical psychologist, meditation teacher, and perfectionism coach with over 20 years of experience helping high achievers unlock their potential with ease and confidence.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: She's the author of The Perfectionist Dilemma, Learn the Art of Self-Compassion and Become a Happy Achiever, and serves as a staff psychologist at Harvard University's Counseling and Mental Health Services. Through her Evolve method, Tara guides individuals and organizations to cultivate greater self-worth
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: authentic leadership, and land a life of greater balance and joy. Welcome to the show, Tara. It's great to have you with us today.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Thanks, Jill. Happy to be here.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Alright.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: We're trying something new, just warning everybody.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: A lot of our listeners have tried everything when it comes to dealing with perfectionism. What's one piece of advice that you followed that you thought would help, but it really didn't?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Yeah, that's a great question.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: there's probably several answers, but I think the simple one for me is…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: you know, I would follow a lot of that personal development advice around shifting your mindset from the scarcity mindset to the abundance mindset, and then if you can just keep sort of redirecting your attention to abundance and imagining the world that you want and the feelings that you want to have, that you can kind of, like, just grow yourself into that.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And I just feel like… part of me feels like that's such BS.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Because it's still so cognitive, it still requires you to use your, sort of, thinking brain and actually.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Perfectionism, or any kind of anxiety, or worry or concerns are not good enough is… actually resides so much in the body.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: So, that's the part that I'm just like, oh, yeah, you can get tired of that pretty quickly, and you can get really… it's self-defeating after a while, too, to kind of say, oh yeah, I just gotta have that abundant mindset, and my life will be perfect.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And we perfectionist people who are over here going, am I doing it right? Maybe I need to… I must not be doing it right, because I'm not seeing the results. But…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But they said, that's what we gotta do, right?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Exactly. Oh, I'm not doing it good enough, I should be doing it this instead, I must be missing something. Maybe it's just something flawed in me that I just don't get it, you know?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, it's the maybe something's flawed in me piece, that it's just, like, perfectionists that… or high achievers, they might not even be perfectionists, and that could be part of their problem, too, is they're, like, they don't think that they're very perfectionist at what they're doing, and so they're like.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Must be screwing this up.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Yeah, well, perfectionism's on a spectrum. Even if you don't necessarily self-identify as a perfectionist, some of your behaviors might be perfectionistic.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah. So, when that didn't work, what did you do differently, and what was the shift that actually made the difference for you?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: You know, it's really interesting for me, you know, I'm a clinical psychologist, I, you know, have this PhD, everything in my field is very much about evidence-based, right? And if you're not doing the evidence-based work, well, then you're not actually doing things right, and people aren't going to work with you, because you're not doing it evidence-based. What I actually have found.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: that the thing that works is not necessarily in the foreground of evidence-based work, but there's evidence for it, and I would really say that that's energy psychology and energy medicine.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: So, when I realized that, well, I can try to do all of these mental gymnastics, and I'm still feeling this sort of disease of not good enough, I really actually needed to do something different. And…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: The wake-up call was actually… my somatic symptoms was really tense.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: jaw, you know, getting sort of this trigeminal neuralgia, I thought, you know, what's going on? My body was telling me things aren't right. And so, I actually had to kind of completely flip the script and start working with alternative and complementary approaches to actually address
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: this sort of… almost like it's a compulsion. It's really driven by anxiety and fear, and I had to address it from, really, that energetic standpoint.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: First, and… So that's an interesting sell to the people who come to me.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: It's to say, we're gonna do some energy work.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I'm not sure that it's just, like, that you have psychologists by your name, and… and doctor, which implies science, and…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And then to start wandering into what most people consider the woo. Right. It's just like… but Wu is, like, the cutting edge of science right now. They're finding so much has to do with energy, and…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And it overcomes a lot of the things that we…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: we think about in the world in terms of our brain wants everything to be 3D and very solid, and we're finding that it's just not.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Listen, 25, 30 years ago, when I was just starting out as a psychologist, mindfulness was considered woo.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Like, people who were, like, sitting in meditation, or using meditation and medicine, I mean, that was really a stretch, and people… I remember my, you know, advisor saying, you know, you're a little aloof, this is a little out in left field here, and I'm thinking, no, did you just watch the Bill Moyers special?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: With Jon Cabot-Zinn, working with the patients who feel like they have no other options in their life to alleviate their pain are in the basement of that hospital and they're doing mindfulness.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: You know, I mean, that was the beginning of the evidence, and now here we are, literally 30 years later, and there are
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: meta-analyses and randomized controlled trials on the benefits of meditation on your brain, the way that your brain is structured, the nervous system, your body. So I feel like, in a way, energy medicine, energy psychology is kind of at that inflection point, where people are now open to it, there's enough studies out there that shows that
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: You know, healing touch, emotional freedom technique, actually benefit pretty significant
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: you know, symptoms, like anxiety, PTSD, depression, you know, weight concerns, body image, you name it. So, I have a lot of hope, you know, I might be woo now, but I really do feel that in the next decade or so, the field is just gonna open up and people…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: People are already coming from it. They're coming for it, you know, they're looking for this kind of thing.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: They're just struggling so much with the whole…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You know, we call it perfectionism, but it's really this desire to feel enough.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: like…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You don't have to be everything, everywhere, and how to, like, make it work in your body, because you can tell yourself.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I mean, I tell myself lots of affirmations and things, and the rest of my body is like.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, right. Right. My stomach's still tight, and…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Right, so I… so when I see a perfectionist, you know, they come into my office, and they might self-identify as a perfectionist,
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And really, what I see is, like, energetically, they're all sort of neck up. I just say, oh, my perfectionists, they're all neck up, you know? There's, like, no connection to below the neck, and you can see…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: floaters.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: stance, and the way they sit down, and the way they sort of interact with the interpersonal cues.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And, to get them to start even being curious or aware of how they're feeling, and what are the sensations in their body, feels really foreign.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: To a lot of people. It just is, like, out of whack, but then you say, you know, then you have a conversation with them, and they're struggling with insomnia, they have IBS, they've got migraines, the, you know, hives, like, the list goes on and on, and you're like, I wonder, you know, could these be signs and symptoms?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: of this sort of underlying anxiety, and to your point, Jill, what you said before, is that everybody has this basic human desire for love and belonging. I mean, that is… that is just the essential, you know, of our basic innocent human needs.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And perfectionism is one way that we learn over time to try to get that, that love and belonging. Try to avoid the fear and the rejection, and we do it by trying to do everything perfectly, or everything right, or get all these achievements.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And that then becomes a pattern, right? It becomes this mind-body pattern, in life.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And that's really exhausting, essentially.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It is.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And our bodies talk to us all the time. Like, I have this…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Crazy story about my foot, and I…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I woke up one day with a ganglion cyst on my… on the side of my foot. It looked like I had a second ankle.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: It doesn't hurt or anything, I mean, it's not like…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: it's interfering in my life, particularly. I just found it…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: interesting that as I'm getting ready to shift a whole bunch of stuff in my life and business, that the piece… the foundational piece of my body has also changed.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Yes!
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Oh, hello? We're still here!
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Yeah, and there… maybe there's some sort of sign that, like, listen, you need a little bit more support.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Right?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: In some sort of way. This is actually really why I love, you know, energy medicine, and it was actually, when I think about, like, when did, you know, you asked me this question, like, what… where was the shift? And it really happened during COVID, when we had to very rapidly, you know, doing our in-person work.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: just shifted to online work, and people were literally flatlined. Like, nervous system, you know, they weren't having that social connection, they weren't in their familiar environments. All of a sudden, the world felt so uncertain and unsafe.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And people were just overwhelmed. And I can tell you right now that talk therapy did nothing.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: It's like, we could talk about this all day long, it's not going to actually make a change.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And I went, and I had always wanted to do this, but I was like, okay, well, now's actually a good time.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: is just to get some more training myself in energy medicine, and so I went and I learned, you know, eating energy medicine, I went to the energy psychologist and learned emotional freedom technique. I had so much fun doing it, but really the evidence was when I started sharing this woo stuff.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: with my clients.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And, you know, I know this sounds a little kind of, like, weird, but I just want you to try it. Let's do it together. Are you game? Like, kind of make it fun and inviting.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And I'll never forget, working with a former Olympian, like, gold medal Olympian.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: who was just really experiencing so much self-doubt, and you're thinking, oh my god, really? And this is, like, 20, 30 years later, right? And still in life, it's kind of carrying this, I'm not good enough, I have to keep going.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And finally, I was just like, will you just please Try the tapping with me.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And do it at home, and here's an app, and here's a video link, you don't need me to be present, you can follow along with somebody else. And then I got this email, and all it had was a subject line, tapping, it works.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And really, what was happening was, is that she was modulating and regulating her nervous system.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Right? She could try all the positive affirmations in the world, but it wasn't happening because her nervous system was stuck, like, the energy was stuck. And…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: One way to do that, tapping is one way, there are other ways to do it, but it really actually helped kind of reduce that amygdala response so that she could connect to the prefrontal cortex in her brain and take in the information she knew intellectually would help, but wasn't sticking before.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: When I first started tapping, I thought it was the silliest thing ever, but it…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I thought you had to have somebody talking to you the whole time you did it, or you had to make up these things.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Which, maybe, in terms of this… this person, she was like, I need… I need to have, like, all the right things before we can do it, so it can't possibly work, because I'm not having you sitting here with me and helping me do it.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: or I'm gonna have to go find something on YouTube, but I found out… I found out later that it really doesn't even need to have somebody tell you, it's just the act of tapping.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: That is what calms your nervous system down.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: In fact, I think Brad Yates is the one that told me that.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Yeah, and there's a great researcher in Australia, Peter Stapleton, she also wrote a book called The Science of Tapping.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: There's a study that actually shows that you could actually do the tapping without the words.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Without the setup statement, without the acceptance statement, that just the tapping in and of itself.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: is beneficial. I find that fascinating.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: What I find the words helpful for, because there's another area in my field that's also having its day, I would say, and that's internal family systems, and so a lot more people are aware of this particular sort of method or approach.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Where you're really starting to identify the different parts, right? You can call them patterns, you can call them algorithms, you can call them schemas or scripts.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: But there are parts, I like to use the word parts, you can use tapping with the part of you. Oh, the part of me that feels like I will never be good enough.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And I'm freaking out right now. I accept how I feel in this moment. I mean, you can just tap on the…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: you know, kind of speak for the part, in a way, through tapping, and so there's so many blends that you can do nowadays, but honestly, simple yoga practices, I cannot tell you how many times I will have a perfectionist come in, I can tell that they're totally uptight, they… their, sort of, their chest cavity is like armor. They can't even take
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: a luxurious deep breath, because their diaphragm is basically locked, and just starting to kind of, like, massage, you know, around this diaphragm area, or I tell them, your homework is to
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Put your legs up the wall. You know, get your butt on the floor and your legs up the wall. That way, you'll have blood running to your body, you'll be getting the energy you need, and the earth and the ground is supporting you! Your whole body cavity can relax.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And when they can… when they start to practice these things that might kind of seem silly, and I'm like, do it with your roommate or your kids at home. Just get to a wall and put your legs up it, put your hands on your belly and your heart, and start breathing for a few minutes. See what happens.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: So, there's very simple somatic exercises that actually start to shift your energy, and if your energy's kind of reversed, it will actually get it flowing in the right direction, and then all of a sudden you can start thinking clearly. So, I would say that that's sort of where I've… I've headed, and
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: I don't think, you know, I would necessarily say this at my day job.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: but the people who work with me in private practice. I will actually do, like, the somatic exercises or tapping, with students, but I'm speaking for myself right now, not speaking for my work at Harvard University, which is actually very traditional for the most part, but…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: I do find that that was actually what made the shift for me, personally, and I feel like it makes the shift for a lot of people, is that they get out of their heads.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Bialectical beings?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Yes.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: when you talk about energy, purchase big batteries. We're full of water, and water's an electrical conductor, so you need to be hydrated.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And the more of these practices you do, the more hydration you need, because you're… we're making…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Charges are, like, moving.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Stuff is getting burned up in the process.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: You're absolutely right, and I know that you speak to many people who actually, you know, use these techniques, and I think with people who come in from this very intellectual, sort of high-achieving perspective, this is a stretch. But when you start to say, listen, you know, let me teach you about the nervous system, or let me teach you about the vagus nerve.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: This is how it operates. And when we have strong vagal tone, we are actually in the flow. We can manage life really well, but when we don't, and you can read that on your own by having your whoop, or your watch, or whatever, you can start seeing the changes when you start engaging in these practices.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: So sometimes people actually need that evidence.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And it's interesting now that we have all these tools that can actually help people, you know, sort of quantify themselves, essentially, and see that when they make these shifts, they start to feel better. And I think the hardest thing is
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Especially for the high achievers who just want to be able to get it done, and they're looking for that quick fix, and, you know, they'll try meditation and come back and say, no, my mind's too busy, that doesn't work for me, or I'm not good enough at doing it. I'm not doing the meditation right, you know? I'm not breathing right.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: You really have to do a lot of work with them, saying, you know what, this is… you're doing it right, you know, just by doing it, but you gotta keep doing it, right? You gotta do it consistently. Find those transition moments in your day, because consistency is key.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And then I go into the whole positive neuroplasticity training, like, if you want to learn a new language.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: You gotta practice the language. If you want to learn how to manage your own nervous system, you have to practice these tools. And it's the same thing with self-compassion, right? My book is really about cultivating self-care and self-compassion, and it only works if you do it consistently.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's like anything new that you do, in the beginning, it's really frickin' hard. Like, I can remember learning to meditate, and, like, 3 minutes was an eternity.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But now, it's like, okay, I know the feeling that I'm going for, and I know when I get there, and then time stops.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And I'm just in that space, and it's so yummy and delicious, but you never find that space if you don't, like, endure the 3-minute torture in the beginning.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Yeah, you know…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Figure it out.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Totally, you're totally right, Jill, and I feel like, you know, often I'm just telling people, you have to actually make it pleasant in some way. So, create that little calming corner, you know, in your home, in your dorm room, in your office, where you can kind of just sit, create the cues.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Have a playlist, you know, ready, you know, a candle, a photo, something, so that it becomes, like, these little external cues, because otherwise, all the cues we get are the to-do list, the pings, all the notifications, and all of a sudden, we're just… our attention's going right to all of these other things, and so we actually really have to augment
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Sort of our space, our mind space, and our physical space to really be conducive to taking this kind of, you know, slowing down, taking this gentle care.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: So, curating those kinds of rituals really help with that kind of retraining, if you will, of the nervous system.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And not making it a chore. Like, another thing that I have to do every single day, and if I don't do it, somehow I have failed.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Because high achievers just really don't want to fail, but they really don't want one more thing added to their list.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: They don't want anything added to their to-do list, and that's why a little bit of the science is helpful, you know, to talk about neuroplasticity and brain training and that… did you know there's a study that shows that 7 days of a self-compassion meditation actually begins to alter the networks in your brain and thicken the gray matter, and then they're like, oh, really?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Like, yeah, it just means that you have to keep on doing it. So sometimes, you know, with high achievers, you need to actually let them know there actually are physiological outcomes, and we now have technologies and brain imaging that proves it.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: You know, once you can kind of get them open to that, then it starts, like, kind of softening things a little bit.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: But I would say the hardest thing out of all of those things is the self-compassion piece.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: is…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: really being a friend to yourself, and I think that that is the hardest thing for high achievers to do.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: They've just spent so long trying to, like, find it outside of themselves. The idea that it… it's… it's something that we're all born with.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You're… you are okay.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Yes, I know, I think in June.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: With self-compassion is, is that if they soften in some area of their life, they're letting themselves off the hook.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Right? Or, you know, and because… and procrastination is, like, a near sister of perfectionism, which is another form of anxiety, essentially. You know, I say that perfectionism is protection. You're trying to protect yourself from that fear of rejection, reputation damage, whatever it might be.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And procrastination is really similar. It's an avoidance. It's your body's actually almost logical response to something that's perceived as a threat. Well, you're just gonna stop, or you're gonna hide, or you're not gonna do it, you're gonna avoid it as long as possible.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And so, the self-compassion, sometimes perfectionists get concerned, like, well, it's helped me this far, you know, if I'm not, you know, going at 110%, then I'm really gonna fall behind, or I'm not gonna do it at all, you know, it's like black and white thinking, and…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And I say, okay, well, Tell me, how are you feeling?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: What is your body telling you?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: What are you noticing?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: oh, well, I'm really tense, my neck hurts all the time, right? And then I'm like, okay, then I don't think that your strategy is working for you.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Might you try?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Treating yourself like you would a friend who's actually also burnt out, you know, and trying really hard, and is worried that they're not gonna make it in life, like, what would you actually say to them?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And then they start to soften, but it still is a new language. It's just having to repeat it over and over again, and so if they feel silly, or they're feeling like, you know, they're faking it, I'm like, well, just keep doing it. It's okay to be a beginner.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: You don't have to know everything right now, just keep trying.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: We… we had a… a little experiment in our house. When I… when I was first trying to get into this state of
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Not beating myself up over everything.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And not being enough.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I had been listening to Marissa Pierce, and she suggested putting writing on your mirror in, you know.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: marker, because it will come off, that you write on your mirror and marker, I am enough. So, I did it in the bathroom.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And then, my husband went in, Penny said, Me too!
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And then my daughter went in, and she goes, YES!
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I've always been enough.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Because that's just kind of the person she is.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But it was… it was just like, you know, you can start small, and it doesn't…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It may seem like it's just you, but it really mushrooms out into those around you, too, and so you're not just, like, having compassion for yourself.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And by having compassion for yourself, you're also having compassion for those around you who are significant in your life, whether, you know, you have people that live with you or not. It's like…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Yeah.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: You know, it's…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Friends that come over and visit, they see evidence of, you know, hey, she's being good to herself.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Exactly. I mean, that's being a good role model, and
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And still, you're gonna get the naysayers, you know, they're like, oh yeah, that, you know, I'm beautiful no matter what, or you're perfect the way you are, you know, that's all, you know, that's all hooey and BS. And that's when I actually say, I want you to try something
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Which is, you know, basically the even-tho statement that's often used in EFT, but I've been… I was using an even-tho statement for years, because you need to hold the paradox, right? The paradox is, even though there's a part of me that feels like, I will never get this, or I'm not worthy.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: I am practicing feeling enough, right? So that you're skirting at the edges, like, you're getting… you're softening around the edges first, even if you can't go to write that direct statement, I am enough.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Do the even though, even though there's a part of me that doesn't believe this.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I am practicing.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: being enough.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: You know, so I think, you know, helping to be in that gray area is really important for high achievers, because they're pretty much all or none.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And it… it's…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's giving your brain something to be right about, because your brain wants to be right all the time.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And by saying, well, you know, I recognize, brain, that you think this way.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But we're gonna work on thinking a different way.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Yes.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: This is the goal!
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Like, you know, I've set intentions.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Right. I mean, you know, affirmations work when your intentions are aligned. Affirmations don't work if there's so much resistance to them.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: So, again, going back to the energy to kind of, like, get your energy flowing and in balance so that you can actually be receptive to saying, I am enough.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: I remember having a little meeting with, some of us who were trained in a mindful self-compassion approach to psychotherapy, and I just brought up, you know, the great Louise Hay, who had her mirror exercise, you know, where you'd hold up a mirror and say, I love you. I love you very, very much.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And I was so struck with one of the women who is, like, a great teacher in self-compassion.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Started to tear up.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: It's like, I don't think I can do that.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And I thought, oh, then this is your play work, isn't it?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: to hold a mirror up and say, I love you. Like, look at yourself in the eyes and say, I love you, I love you very, very much. What a practice. And then we all talked about how emotional that is, is because we're not really taught that.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Right? We're always about loving other people, or caring for other people, or making everything good on the outside, but to actually be that sort of vulnerable and intimate with oneself, can just be a challenge.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, and just the whole…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So many of us were raised with the idea that anytime you go inward, or you think about yourself, or you express being proud of what you're doing, or gratitude to yourself for being who you are, that's selfish and that's bad.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Absolutely. Listen, every perfectionist has some story when they start really thinking about it.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: There's a sort of lack of appropriate validation
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: when they needed it, at the age, at the developmental age that they needed it. I mean, we all want to be seen, we all want to be appreciated and loved and cheered on.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And a lot of people don't get that. Doesn't mean that they're going to turn into a perfectionist to overcompensate, but they're… you know, most of us have these sort of… these wounds that happen along the way. It can happen in childhood, it can happen in the workplace.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And so we have to kind of…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: correct for that in some way, and so that's why the self-compassion is so key, because
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: as you become an adult, you can be that caregiver to yourself, and sometimes we call that spiritual reparenting.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: is that you identify, oh no, I'll never forget that time when my dad, you know, got so mad at me when da-da-da-da-da. And, you know, instead of getting the hug, or, you know, the lesson or whatever, it was punishment, harm, fear.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: We don't all have those, sort of.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: statements or, you know, those specific memories, but we might live in a culture or a family where that kind of validation and affection
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Might not have been purposely withheld, but it just wasn't part of the dynamic.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And so…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: there are a lot of situations where it actually was, and if you talk to the person that perpetrated it, their story is a lot different than the memory that you've created, and we all create memories, and those memories do change and adjust, and it's… I like to tell people.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You can totally make up a different story about that.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: to tell yourself. You don't have to hang on to that, and it can be whatever you want, so why not make it a story that benefits you, rather than one that's…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Gonna keep reminding you and making… getting worse over time, and it does get worse over time.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Because you just…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I don't work fellowship.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: My first book was The Kindness Cure, How the Science of Compassion Can Heal Your Heart and Your World. And so there's this word that I actually learned from a yoga teacher, and I went back to her years later, and I'm like, do you remember saying that in that yoga class? And she's like, I don't remember saying that at all. I said, it's totally stuck in my brain, but the word is kind sight.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And I… I just use that for, you know, that we can…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: We write our stories with kind sight, that we can view our life experiences with tenderness and understanding, and that in and of itself is a practice.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: So part of that is really, you know, not only being kind to yourself, but really looking at those experiences.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And if there was no lesson learned, ultimately, there usually is some sort of… like, you wouldn't be the person you are today without having had that experience in some way, and to really make space and to honor that, and so I like to use the word kind sight.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I love that word. It's gonna be part of my vocabulary.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Duh.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Amazing.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: I think we can rewrite our stories all the time, and so can perfectionists and high achievers. We can still be excellent, and I think that might have been one of your questions before, is like, how do you know, like, you know, when you've gone overboard? But,
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: The more self-aware we are, and the more we take care of our bodies, we likely won't go to that tipping point of having gone to the compulsive striving.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I like that.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I know that you have the Happy Achiever Tools and Rewire Your Inner Critic. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Oh, sure. So, The Perfectionist Dilemma, is a book that I wrote with a lot of these stories, actually, and I have this little method in there with an acronym, because psychologists love acronyms, called EVOLVE, and they're six steps, and, so that book is really about how to kind of work through that sort of achievement anxiety.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And the perfectionism piece, even if you don't totally identify with it. And associated with that are just free downloads that you can get at the book website, which is perfectionistDilemma.com, and download those for free, and there's a little master class also on little energy tools on that. So that's free for people.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And, recently I launched a new online digital course called, Rewire Your Inner Critic. And that, I feel like, is distilling my six steps down into, like, 2 or 3 to get to the essentials, because people are like.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: I just gotta get rid of my inner critic. And I'm like, no, that will never work. You cannot silence or banish the inner critic. You need to befriend the inner critic, and so the Rewire Your Inner Critic is really about, you know, how to do that, at least to get started, anyway.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I love that. And you're on Substack now, so let's…
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Yeah, so that's a new thing for me. So I am actually doing a lot of self-affirmations around, it's okay to be a beginner.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you don't need to know everything. And so that sub-stack is called the Peaceful Perfectionist.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: And it's the place where I can kind of continue to, you know, have conversation and dialogue, about, perfectionism, overcoming it, being kind to yourself, self-compassion, and those kinds of things.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Love it, love it. Thank you so much for joining me today, Dr. Tara.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Jill, thanks for having me, it's a fun conversation.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It was, it was. To learn more about Dr. Tara, and to find the Happy Achiever Tools, or the Rewire Your Inner Critic course, be sure to visit her website, theperfectionistDilemma.com, or her substack, which is Tara, C-O-U-S-P-H-D dot com.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: No.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's T-A-R-A-C-O-U-S-P-H-D dot substack.com. I always want to put that .com too soon.
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::Tara Cousineau, PhD: Search for the Peaceful Perfectionist, and they'll find me on Substack, yeah.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Perfect, and we'll put that in the show notes below.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Thanks for tuning in with us today to the UWorld Order Showcase podcast.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: If today's conversation hit home, and you want to apply
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: help applying it. Book your free client acquisition audit at coachesalchemist.com. We'll map your fastest path to clients in 30 minutes.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Links in the show notes. Be sure to join us for our next episode as we share what others are doing to raise the global frequency. And remember, change begins with you. You have all the power to change the world. Start today and get visible.