How to Break Free from Procrastination and Perfectionism with Deborah Hurwitz
Are you sick of doing what you’re "supposed" to do? Are you jealous of others? Are you noticing your negative self talk getting out of control? Are you procrastinating like crazy (then beating yourself up?)
Overachiever Deborah Hurwitz was too, and she broke free from the old masculine identity that defined her and now owns her time, work and success and is here to tell you how to break free from your self destructive patterns, too.
“We don’t recover from perfectionism. Perfectionism is really a type of fear.” – (1:20) Deborah
“Ironically the perfectionism is the thing that has us not doing the thing we want to do.”- (2:39) Deborah
Listen as she lets you in on the secret of how to live the life you sit and dream about. Learn how to align with your path and live the confident, fulfilled life you know you’re meant to live.
“You get to a point where you're gonna really make those changes or take those actions, however small, you wanna ask yourself, what am I unwilling to tolerate?
“Tony Robbins famously says, you don't get the life you want. You get the life you're willing to tolerate. What are you no longer willing to tolerate? So if you're saying, I'm not willing to tolerate that, but it's actually in your life, you're tolerating it.” (16:35) Deborah
You also get to learn why multitasking sucks, and how to stop tolerating the intolerable. Empower yourself with this episode!
“Because I was chasing the metrics of success that I thought I had to have, in order to have those metrics of success, I had to sellout a lot of stuff that really mattered to me.” (8:48) Deborah
But not anymore! And neither do you.
In This Episode:
(1:13) – How to break free from perfectionism.
(1:45) – The difference between perfectionism and excellence.
(2:28) – How procrastination and perfectionism are the same (yep!).
(2:55) – Defeating perfectionism sometimes means identifying what really matters.
(3:05) – Why acting is more important than trying to be perfect.
(9:47) – The stuff that mattered the most ended up being what was negotiable.
(12:05)- Outlining big changes and how they happen.
(16:00) – The fork in the proverbial road.
(17:14) – Define what you’re willing to tolerate.
(19:35) – Methods for becoming beautiful in your own skin no matter what part of life you’re in.
(20:00) - The importance of being present and still.
(22:47) – What are you willing to do to become the best version of yourself?
(23:43) – The 10 seconds that can change your life.
(24:00) – The art of single-tasking.
(25:00) – The myth of multi-tasking and what it costs.
(27:10) – Why you can only do one thing at a time.
(30:00) – ROI is more than about dollars and cents.
(31:00) – The truth about “being safe” and there’s no growth in safe.
(33:17) – The things you do in the moment.
Resources and Links
52 Weeks of Hope
Go to https://www.magicmind.co/hopelauren and get up to 50% off your subscription for the next 10 days with my code HOPELAUREN.
Deborah Hurwitz
Listen to the episode here: https://podcasts.apple.com/ph/podcast/52-weeks-of-hope/id1596556067?i=1000623180986
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Deborah [00:00:00] If what you want to feel is that you're making something up in this life, right, and you're not having that, is this all there is existential crisis? All the fucking that, right? If what you want are those true metrics of success, the peace of mind, the satisfaction, the fulfillment, then what's non-negotiable is what's inside what you know to be true at a very deep level. And what's negotiable is the shit you think has to happen that actually doesn't.
Lauren [00:00:24] Welcome to 52 weeks of Hope. This is where you get to hear how to feel happy, balanced, and worthwhile. How to make that lonely ache vanish and feel empowered, confident and secure. I'm Lauren Abrams, and I get to help you feel that magic again. Since going through my own dark night of the soul by chatting with incredible leaders, healers and elders who give us their messages of hope after overcoming challenges of their own. Today we're talking to the amazing coach for perfectionists recovering perfectionist herself, Deborah Hurwitz. Are you sick of doing what you're supposed to do? Hamster wheel of success, overachiever Deborah Hurwitz was too, and she broke free from the old masculine identity of work, work, work that defined her, which she'd been super successful at, by the way, and now owns her time and success and is here to tell you how you can own your success, too. She's going to tell you how to live. What lights you up? Stop procrastinating and complete that dream. Welcome to 52 Weeks of Hope, Deborah Hurwitz.
Deborah [00:01:17] Hi and thank you, so great to be here. What a fun intro.
Lauren [00:01:21] Hey. It was so much fun learning about you. And I want to know, how did you break free from perfectionism and how can listeners do that too?
Deborah [00:01:31] Well, that is a big question.
Lauren [00:01:32] I know.
Deborah [00:01:34] Yeah. I mean, the first thing I want to say is, you know, I joke, not joking, that we don't recover from perfectionism. Perfectionism is a type of fear, really, at the end of the day. And while we can strive for excellence and desire to achieve perfection, quote unquote, in the sense that we're satisfied it feels done, we have peace of mind, right? We can strive for excellence and we can look for and achieve the peace of mind that we want. But perfectionism itself is a mechanism of safety. It is a fear based set of operations that has us pushing and pulling and hoping and pleasing and controlling and reaching for all sorts of things that don't actually bring the satisfaction and peace of mind we're looking for. So I identify as a recovering perfectionist, and I coach self-identifying perfectionists to actually do the thing they really want to do, which ultimately comes down to a form of liberated self-expression. And the irony is that with all the like picking and editing and controlling and pleasing and worrying about what other people think and trying to get it just exactly right and doing that one, taking one more course, doing one more edit and all the things that we do as perfectionists, including not doing right procrastinating. I'm not ready. I need to feel better. I need to do better and need to be better before I even start that thing. Ironically, the perfectionism is the thing that has us not do what we really want to do, not achieve what we really want to achieve and not feel how we really want to feel. So when I'm working with Perfectionist and I founded Productivity for Perfectionist and then ultimately ruled out about coaching where I run my mission accomplished programs and a bunch of other things. It's really about identifying what's what actually matters to you, which sometimes is really scary to even look at, much less claim, and to be able to take action on that thing imperfectly messily. Can we curse on this podcast?
Lauren [00:03:28] Oh. Go for it. Yeah.
Deborah [00:03:30] Like, make a shitty first draft. Right. Like, you know, throw crap at the wall. Let it be absolutely disastrous. As long as you're taking action that's aligned with what you truly desire. And so the work of breaking free from perfectionism is really the work of identifying what feels unsafe and then working with the ecology of your system to make it safe for you to create, to do, to write, to give yourself permission to simply exist, really, which some of us don't even feel on the inside, like we have a right to do.
Lauren [00:04:09] So that was so amazing. I don't think I ever. I love the liberated self-expression. I don't think I ever thought about, I don't think of myself as a perfectionist. Maybe my first couple years of college, I had a 4.0 and people thought I was so scared of failing out because I thought, It is stupid that I worked really, really hard. So I did well. I was like, Oh, I'm not as dumb as I thought that I was. Wanting to be a perfectionist as is close. That's the only time I ever think of that. So I'm always amazed, like, look what I'm doing. I was not the overachiever ever in.
Deborah [00:04:39] A goal diagnosis of perfectionism, right? It's something that I created as a niche for myself just because it's so great.
Lauren [00:04:47] No, it's so great. Its people don't try because they're scared of failing. But I never thought of the perfectionist. It's the same coin, the flip. That was so amazing. So sorry I did cut you off, but I just thought that was. Absolutely amazing.
Deborah [00:05:01] Yeah, but that's just like you.
Lauren [00:05:03] Yeah, But how do people find what matters? Because a lot of people, they know something, they're missing something. And maybe they need to just slow down and stop. I mean, I have a lot of answers to that, but I would love to hear you say you had said that they need to find what matters to them. But how do you help them?
Deborah [00:05:20] Yeah. So, you know, I'll give the example of my show business career since I didn't get a chance to mention that. So I started, like, watching business as, like, a second career. I got curious about online marketing. I wanted to own my work. I wanted to own my time in my life. And that's sort of the most recent chapter and it has taken off like gangbusters. And I never thought that I would have a passion or an excitement or a calling that was even greater than my calling to go be a professional artist. I was dead wrong. This is like way better. But for the first, you know, several decades of my life, I was a professional artist starting from when I was 12 years old, playing cocktail hour as a bar mitzvah and teaching voices that teaching voice performance at a conservatory. I was a professor at Berklee College of Music. I've conducted many Broadway shows. I've written metric shit, ton of music for television and film, and that was my career for a really long time.
Lauren [00:06:08] She's performed at the White House. I mean, she is so accomplished, is amazing. I will I put all of it on the website.
Deborah [00:06:17] Yeah. So is it the original company of Miss Saigon and Mamma mia and Jersey boys and in fact, even though I'm well into my coaching business and have effectively retired from Broadway, they've just recently made a movie of Jersey Boy, kind of the same thing they did with Hamilton. They've now done with Jersey Boys to make a movie of the show, and they brought back the original creative team in the original band, and I'm in both of those. So I was part of the team helping to make the movie, and I'm also in the movie. And that was this past summer. So and thank you. So that was really fun and it was really fun to go back. Like, how often do we get a do-over of like 18 years ago? You know, I've been with the production great in years and I got to go back essentially to 2005 when we were the Hamilton of 2005 and revisit the role I played, not just the role on stage, but the role in my own life. Right. Revisit the role of employee, revisit the role of COG in the machine, revisit the role of performer standing in the back. Right there were all of those things that I've really outgrown significantly, but it was fun to go back and perform that role, enjoying how free I was, like this wasn't the career maker or breaker. This wasn't every moment was so high stakes. This wasn't who I was working with was going to determine my future. The circumstances of this were it's a six-week one off. It's super fun. It's a legacy gig. It's the definitive version of a show I worked on for almost 20 years, and I get to just have a friggin blast and I have a business that I own that I love that's mad successful that I go back to. So I'm not worried about fucking anything on this project. And comparing that to the existence that I had for so many years when everything felt so high stakes. This is the perfectionist brain. Everything is it's all or nothing. I have to do it perfectly or I can't do it at all. I have to do everything or I can't do anything. Every person's thought, the funniest little eyebrow twitch, Oh my God, my career is dead, right? Like, there's so much drama and high stakes running in the standard showbiz industry. Right? And part of why, like I said, I started my show was my coaching career, my coaching business, because of a factor of ownership. It wasn't that I didn't love the work I did as a musician, as a producer, performer, writer. It was that I wanted to own what I was doing and have 100% creative congruency with what I desired and what I was manifesting out in the world and in show business, what I was navigating all the time as the perfectionist. Coming back to your original question, how do we see what matters to us was, I might have an idea. Thoughts thought I might write a song that nobody hired me to write. Nobody's paying me to perform. What I was being hired to do was make the other people's stuff look and sound great. When I was being hired to do was conduct someone else's score, right? According to someone else, specification accompanies someone else's star turn right. And so because I was chasing so this is the thing I want your people to hear because I was chasing the metrics of success that I thought I had to have. I had to have a certain kind of resume. I had to have as a record of apartment in New York. I had to look a certain way. I had to have a certain kind of money in the bank the to in order to say I'm successful, In order to have those metrics of success, I had to sell out a lot of shit that really did matter to me, like a quality of musical performance or production, a style that maybe I was told when I was 22 was a hard sell and therefore I veered off to the right and didn't stick with that. Things that were essential to me, congruent and aligned with me, my soul, my reason for being on the planet I didn't pay a lot of attention to or I gave short shrift to, or I was quick to trade off because they didn't necessarily line up where I told myself they didn't line up with the metrics of success I had to achieve. And so I had it inside out. What became non-negotiable was the external accomplishment stuff. And what was negotiable was the stuff that actually mattered to me. And it was a long process, several decades, for me to discover that it's actually flipped. If what you want is to feel good when you wake up and go to sleep, if what you want is to feel self expressed and satisfied and have peace of mind, if what you want to feel is that you're making something up this life, right, and you're not having that, is this all there is existential crisis, all of that, right? If what you want are those true metrics of success, the peace of mind, the satisfaction, the fulfillment, then what's non-negotiable is what's inside what you know to be true at a very deep level. And what's negotiable is the shit you think has to happen that actually doesn't.
Lauren [00:10:45] So how did you get there? What happened to you is something has to have happened. You get it. You have to have had some kind of bottom.
Deborah [00:10:53] I hit many, several bottoms. And now let me say this. There are a number of bottoms I can choose from. Maybe I'll choose more.
Lauren [00:11:00] I submit a final catalyst. I mean, I had to like.
Deborah [00:11:03] There were several I will give you a couple of markers as highlights and then I'll go deeper into whichever one you want to go deeper into. But the reason that I want to say there wasn't just one bottom is that something I was frustrated by in my journey towards evolution, self-actualization, whatever you want to call it, was there was this picture perfect fucking story for every successful entrepreneur where it was like I thought everything was fine or I didn't think everything was fine. And then I finally had this one day when I just couldn't stand it anymore. And I blew it, my life. And then I was really in the pits. And then I found this thing and now this is the answer and this is what I'm selling to you. And I hated that. It was so pat and so perfect. And so, like, nobody's life is like that, right? So anybody who's listening here, you're like, kind of wondering, does this sort of resonates? Is this applicable to me? Is there something I should be doing here? Maybe, maybe not. And there isn't necessarily, Oh my God, this is the moment when I knew, right? There isn't necessarily a bottom that says now everything has to change. In fact, one of the things that I coach and teach on is that the big changes come from incremental tiny little adjustments, small steps, right? You do not need to blow up your life in one fell swoop to have enormous change. In fact, I don't recommend that you do.
Lauren [00:12:17] Now, we pivot in life we don't like.
Deborah [00:12:19] There are many small changes along the way. Big changes happen and small consistent steps taken over time. So don't worry about there being like, Is this the moment to do the big thing? No, probably not. But this.
Lauren [00:12:32] Yes. So your house, your business and get a divorce and now that's like.
Deborah [00:12:36] Yeah, exactly. But there is let me just complete the thought because this is important. It is always the moment to take 10 minutes to do something that you care about, 10 minutes to do the thing you love, but you're worried you're not good at 10 minutes to pay attention to what you think needs 3 hours of your time, 10 minutes to do something that you think no one will ever pay you for, but you like it. Those are the things that actually make the big changes over time. So I had a number of a number of big drops I had. So I was touring with Cyndi Lauper 20 years ago was kind of my big first lot on. I had been for the ten years out of college and I just dated myself completely. So, you know, ten years out of college, I was ramping up, I was composing for commercials, I was playing Broadway shows. I was like a 20 something really happening. And then I was in my early thirties touring with Cyndi Lauper, thought this was kind of finally my big break where I was going to be discovered as a rock star. I had put out a first album. I had a guy that I thought I was going to marry. I was on the sexy, glamorous rock door and it all went to shit in the space of a couple of months, the guy broke up with me. The agent that was supposed to be making me a star ran off to Chase in vain Malmstrom for some money in Korea. And. And I was absolutely left high and dry. And because I had been on this tour, leaving all these other gigs behind, I was coming back to, like, a shredded career. So I felt like that was a bottom in the sense that I had. I didn't have income, I didn't have business. What was supposed to be a big, big launch point fizzled out to nothing. And I was lonely and jilted, dumped. And I had a period of time when I just desperately needed to cry and talk, and that was it. Like I didn't know what I was going to do. I didn't feel like I had the wherewithal to put my career back together. At that point, I was not trying to do anything else. I was very much committed to my career as a musical artist. There wasn't anything like an online business or an online existence or marketing. There were no online entrepreneurs. I mean, the Internet was do right. And I mean, this is seven years before Facebook was even invented. So and what I want to say about that bottom is that it was kind of my first indication that some of the work of being happy was an inner game. Some of the work of being happy was going to be up to me creating resourcefulness and resource sadness for myself such that I wasn't so at a fact of my circumstances that I couldn't just be taken to absolutely nothing because of what some dude thought or because of what some other dude did. Right. Just like you. That was unacceptable. And so that began the work for me of really strengthening my interior life and having some sense of self-worth, regardless of what laurels I was resting on at the time. And then I would say, like the big bottom that ultimately became me launching my coaching business five years ago. It was in 2011 when I did a big show with Cirque du Soleil, and this was again supposed to be like the next big thing for me. And I dropped, I was on Jersey Boys Broadway. I was with the company being music technical designer for the production required a very cushy, stable gig. As far as being a musician, that's kind of top of the heap. And I got this opportunity to be the music director of a brand new Cirque du Soleil show. And it had all this glamor and all this excitement. I've always been a rabid Cirque fan, so this was just like it just pressed all my happy buttons. It was just something I was really excited about doing after it with a vengeance. I got the gig, and even though it was a risk, like Jersey Boys was a stable, long-running Broadway show, I knew I would have a job for another eight years or so. And Cirque was supposed to run for ten years, but there were no guarantees, and they pride themselves on being the circus with all sorts of chaos and mayhem. And it's not actually a circus for them, but the mentality is there. And the show that was supposed to run for ten years ran for two and then closed. And again because I had just been so immersed in this one project, I had no other irons in the fire hot. I came back to a completely dead cold career, and at this point, it being, you know, a good 15 years later than the first bottoms, I wasn't willing to go back to doing what I was doing when I was 24. I wasn't willing to go back to pounding the pavement as a freelancer, even if I had better quality contacts and better skills and better advantages and opportunities. I just wasn't willing to go backwards. I wasn't willing to go back to New York with the East Coast winters that I was tired of. I wasn't willing to go back to, you know, subbing and taking little handfuls of freelance gigs while I had my neck. I just wasn't willing. And that's another piece in terms of coaching, perfectionism and having you get to a point where you're going to really make those changes or take those actions, however small is, you want to ask yourself, What am I unwilling to tolerate? Tony Robbins famously says, You don't get the life you want, you get the life you're willing to tolerate. What are you no longer willing to tolerate, really? Because and you'll have the answer in how your life actually looks. So if you're saying I'm not willing to tolerate that, but it's actually in your life, you're tolerating it, actually Morgan who introduced as a mutual friend, loves to work with toleration as an area of focus for improving your life. What are you tolerating? What are you telling yourself you won't tolerate? But in fact, it's there. So ipso facto, you are tolerating it. And what are you no longer willing to tolerate? Right? Like I was unwilling. I'm 53 years old, thinks I'm out with my age. I was unwilling to turn 50 with my life in the state it was in with my financially precarious situation, with my marriage feeling as bad as it did with all sorts of life situations, just feeling like I was not ready to hit my halfway point in life. And yes, I say that 50 is my halfway point in life. I was on his mind.
Lauren [00:17:59] So. Okay, there you go
Deborah [00:18:00] I was on. And we will in our lifetimes have people routinely living 220. No question about it. Right. That's another conversation. But anyway, I'm willing to have my life continue that way. Now, this was 2001 earlier, but when I had the breakdown right when I came off of that show and went into a really deep depression, I knew that I needed to rebuild the structures at a pretty deep level. Like, I remember actually being on my bed. My husband was visiting a friend like 3000 miles away and I was on my bed unable to feel okay in my own skin. I was sitting on my knees. I remember feeling like my butt cheeks on my heels and just rocking, like holding myself in fetal position with my fists balled up and my arms protecting my chest, rocking and crying and saying I need help. I didn't know how to keep breathing as the person that I was. It was that intense and dire, and I sought help. I started working with coaches and mentors. It was for me, the clinical therapeutic route was not for me. I knew this was a more holistic, spiritual, physical and emotional situation. I sought mentors, I sought guides, I invested heavily, and I do recommend that people do that in order to effect big change in their lives. And I first had to get right with my own body, honestly, my own being like the house that I'm currently in. I needed to get right with that and I needed to be able to be the person who was no longer 25, no longer the young cute girl in the room and still feel radiant and beautiful and vital and able to create whatever the fuck I wanted in my life. I wasn't there, but I knew that's where I wanted to be, so I first had to do that before there were any career decisions, before there was any business strategy, before any of that, I had to get right breathing in my own damn skin and that.
Lauren [00:19:46] Having to do that, because that's the kind of thing that the listeners want to know how to do. How do you get to where you feel like you're the most beautiful person in the room, that you feel right in your own body? You know, you're the shit.
Deborah [00:19:59] Yeah. Well, so many modalities. I worked. I did so many programs and worked with several different people. But there was if I can do a little bit of a montage, I would say the absolute number one top priority. The top priority piece was for me to learn and engage practices that allowed me to get present and still so as perfectionists were always in the past or the future. We're ruminating on the past. We're having anxiety about the future. Were never right here, right now. We're never actually accepting what is so and true and present right now, more importantly, what is not true and so and present right now. But that we're making it up because we're worried about it or happened before or it's going to be the end of us or whatever the fuck. And so to actually be in this moment and give permission for what so to be so, which ultimately forms the basis of the system that I now teach, but to be present and still so we can often get one or the other right, but one chose the other right out of this space so we can be present. But in the moment that we're present, we get so like lit up and excited, which sometimes can feel like terror and looking over the edge of the abyss but lit up and excited are just interpretations of the same physiological experience that we Oh, we go, we've got to move, we've got to go, we've got to do something. We got to figure something out. Sometimes it's a positive. I'm inspired. I'm going to move literally or metaphorically move, or sometimes it's a terror. I must go away from this. I can't be here so that we are not able to be present. And still sometimes we're able to be still. But in the stillness we crowd the space past the future crowd the mental space, the thoughts that are creating a reality for us in that moment that's actually not part of the moment, is part of what was or part of what will be or might be, but it's not part of what is. So, you know, we as humans have a really funny relationship to time, and this is a very much bigger, longer, deeper conversation. But for this moment, to answer your question, how many versions meditation, dance, yoga, listening to binaural, you know, theta wave inducing audio tapping. There are so many modalities. There's so many tapping is the emotional freedom technique. It's a way of touching points, kind of a communist combination of acupressure and hypnotherapy that brings you into a state where your brain and body are receptive to shifting thought patterns. And then you introduce the shift in the thought patterns and you go from feeling anxious about something to feeling calm about something. And that's a great modality I've worked with. I'll just call out some of my mentors Katherine Woodward, Thomas Liana Silber, Morgana Ray to some Sumpter. I mean, there are so many people that I've worked with in a number of different ways, in a number of different things. But really, if I were going to drill down being present and still with a somatic awareness somatic meaning in the mind, you know, the somatic in the body to be present in what is the physiology here right now, not just in my brain but below the neck. Perfectionists have a really hard time getting below the neck or so in our heads, right So left brain crunchy and analysts you know and get into the right brain piece get into the experience of the body. What does it feel, Taste, smell, sound like to be present and still at the same time to tolerate that? Right. It's not just what are you unwilling to keep tolerating? What are you willing to do? What are you willing to try to accept? How uncomfortable are you willing to be with what's unfamiliar, unknown, and therefore often unsafe to our very scared nervous systems so that you can actually be in a different place, right of more common way of saying that very well known. You have in order to have something different, you have to do something different. But often the doing that needs to be different is not doing. It's just being hits of the being still in present. If you can tolerate being still and present at the same time, this moment and now this moment and now this moment, living in the body, you're actually in bringing your awareness down below the neck, belly, breathing deeply, dropping the shoulders back, maybe wiggling your fingers and toes and saying, I am here, too. Here's I am here to write, like really bringing your awareness. It's a very tangible place in the body and breathe there for even 10 seconds. It can change your life. Rest of strategy.
Lauren [00:24:03] Then? Yes, talk about meditation a lot. And now you have mastered the art of single tasking and oh, you're always bragging about multi-tasking. Talk about not being distracted, please.
Deborah [00:24:15] Oh, this is one of my favorite topics. Thank you for asking. Yes. So we are, you know, as busy overachievers we absolutely value. I can do a million things at once. And there's nothing wrong with traditional masculine. Do it, do more, do it all the time. Productivity in the sense that the systems and structures that get things done can be very effective. I personally love to go into a realm of like super efficiency and getting lots of different things done. I personally get a great deal of exhilaration from coming off of a day where I did this and I did this, I did this, I did this. Oh my God. And I run nuts. Yeah. And celebrate with whatever I'm going to celebrate with that night of hot baths. That's why. Whenever, however. Sometimes. Again, what I was talking about before around what we think is non-negotiable is actually the thing we need to let go of. And what we think is fine to trade off actually cost us our all in our peace of mind. Similarly, with productivity, with quote unquote multitasking, I'll get to the fallacy that that is in a moment. We sometimes sacrifice the thing that really wants and needs to get done to have a say. Now, that was a day that I that was significant, that was meaningful, that I feel good about having thought that the thing that would give us that feeling and experience we don't do were too busy doing this and this and this and this and this because we're going for the I'm busy. I am breathlessly on the move every second so that I can feel worthwhile, so that I can justify my place in the world, so that I can take that paycheck home or whatever it is. And in fact, we're just exhausting ourselves doing a lot of truly unimportant shit. But if we're a people pleaser, we're going to do it to make sure we're buying everybody's love around us and earning our place as the person who does for others, who makes sure others are okay. That's a one version of Codependent perfectionist. There's a control freak that says, If I want it done, I have to do it myself. I can't trust anyone that comes from a deep level of missing self trust. When we can't trust ourselves, we have a really hard time trusting others. Doesn't matter what's actually happening out there or how trustworthy those people actually are. What's happening is that we just have a problem with trust, period, starting with ourselves. And so we can't trust anybody to do anything because we have to have eyes and hands on everything all the time to make sure it's perfect and it's going to get done exactly right. Right. And that creates another level of exhaustion and then hustle and overwork and busyness at the expense of doing the one thing you'll actually feel good about, like pressing publish on that post or writing that blog or journaling for 10 minutes or doing that yoga class or whatever it was that, you know, on some level was the really important thing to do that day. Somehow you get to the end of the day and didn't get done. So multitasking is a way of moving from thing to thing with the breathless skipping over of being present and making a choice. And what we're really doing when we're multitasking is we're switch chatting and there is actually no such thing as multitasking in the sense of where we're consciously placing our attention. We can unconsciously place our attention all over the place. We can be listening to a podcast while we're vacuuming. We can be doing the dishes while we're having a conversation. We can be doing more than one thing at once. But I promise you, check me out on this and frickin email me if you think I'm wrong. I will take the science to you. We can only consciously place our attention in one place at a time. And so if you're doing the dishes and having the conversation, I promise you, while your attention is on the conversation, your hands are on autopilot and you're going to skip some great spot while you're vacuuming and listening to the podcast, you're going to notice a piece of dust on the floor. Your attention is going to move to the vacuum and you're going to miss what happened on the podcast. I promise you. Now, there's nothing wrong with doing those things at once. Do them, but don't say you're multitasking. What you're doing is switch asking. You're moving your attention from thing to think sometimes very quickly, but sometimes multitasking is actually a huge energy drain because the time that it takes to go into a space really focused there, achieve some level of flow, achieve some level of mastery, achieve some level of pleasure or peace of mind or achievement requires that your attention goes deep in order to pull your attention out of that, go to another task and drop your attention into a useful place there. That's a switch task, and it takes energy and time. It costs you something. It is not just being the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You are not hopping from Lily pad the lily pad like freaking dragonfly out.
Lauren [00:28:36] Just like I hope people email you or text your like, please bring this ring with your multitasking. You're engaged. It is switch tasking. I don't even remember. I drive to work because I was doing this. You know the autopilot, right?
Deborah [00:28:51] You can direct your listing. You can be unconsciously, physically doing all kinds of shit. You can be doing more than one thing at once, but you cannot be consciously placing your attention on more than one thing at it.
Lauren [00:29:03] Do you have any moments when you just felt like giving up, and do you share those besides the two that you said? I mean, when you're coaching, I mean, who's your mentors now? Who do you what do you do? Who would you go to?
Deborah [00:29:16] Thank you. Thank you for asking. Yeah. I love giving credit to people. So Ariana Hall is someone that I've been working with recently. She actually singly enough works mostly with men to her site is empowered man. But because I have so much like masculine leading in my life, like she's actually helping me to really embrace the feminine at a much deeper level. Katherine Woodward Thomas helped me to find and not kill off my husband, and that was my first introduction to feminine power, which at that point I thought was an oxymoron. I didn't think of it in awe. You can have power, you can have that.
Lauren [00:29:44] I mean, all that old stuff and is so good at cleaning out your old stuff.
Deborah [00:29:49] Exactly. So yeah, so I worked with her on that. Arianna for me is a little bit next level in terms of that authentic self-expression and some of the things that are for me, really breaking from my particular brand of perfectionism, which is a type of codependency, a type of controlling to feel safe. And I did you know, I invest in $5,000 weekends and $10,000 weeklong retreats like I invest now more in my personal and professional development than I used to make in a year. Right. And I do it gladly because the ROI is huge. It's a no-brainer. Like, why wouldn't you plunk down five K on a weekend if that weekend is going to make you 50? Like, why wouldn't you? And sometimes it's a financial ROI and sometimes it's other types of return on investment that are even more valuable. Like, how do you put a price on peace of mind?
Lauren [00:30:32] Yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Deborah [00:30:34] But to come to your question, because I think it's a really important one, do I have my own down days? Who do I go to for my support? So in addition to giving all the shout-outs to all the people, which I'm happy to do those down days, it's important to know, like I was saying before, I always hated that like perfect freaking story, Like I hit rock bottom and then I found the solution and now everything's amazing all the time. No, it's not because I'm a human being and sometimes I have a really shitty day is a really awful feelings and I'm not a nice person or whatever. Fuck like I am a human being, living a full human experience. And if you are not taking risks and getting out there, you are not going to have either the achievements and the successes or the down days of the failures. You get both. There's no such thing as just all unicorns and rainbows all the time. It does not happen. So if everything's super safe and comfy and nice all the time, you are not taking risks in your life. You're not growing and we has to grow. It's actually in our nature. Like if you think you're a person, like I just like to be sort of comfortable and fine and not really doing anything, you know? First of all, you're not listening this podcast. And so I can of, you know, like I'm just looking at the sign raised after two weeks of hope, like if you are listening to 52 weeks of Hope, what do you what are you hoping for? Why does it even matter to have hope? Because you want to grow. You want to be in another place. You want to go to that next level, whatever that looks like for you. There's an itch. There's a thing there. It's like crustaceans molds out of their shells because they experience the pain, like the nerve endings of I'm too big for this, this shell is too small. And they break it out and they grow another one. And we have our own human version of that we will grow. We must necessarily grow how we grow, whether we turn towards the sun, whether we expand or whether we squeeze. Right. Those are the choices we make along the way. So I absolutely have done this, but what I do is I have an arsenal now of tools and skills and resources where, number one, I know I can get out. I am never trapped. It is never this hurts and it will always be this way. It's this hurts. Okay, What's next? This hurts, how am I going to acknowledge it? Move it through my system, get clearer. Have this, teach me something. Have this. Bring me to an ever deeper place. A place of empathy, a place of compassion, a place of wisdom. Right? I'm never stuck the way I used to be before I went on the path of I'm going, I'm not going to create something here. Right. And to finish the answer to your question, like, no, I'm not just telling stories from ten or 20 or 30 years ago. I'm telling stories from last Tuesday, and I tell my clients that when I enroll them, when I enroll them into my program, I'm like, I'm with you on the journey. We are all works in progress. I am not the person who used to procrastinate and never does. I'm the person that's going to tell you the story of how I was procrastinating on that hard thing I'm doing now and what I did to move through that in 48 hours instead of three years. And that's valuable.
Lauren [00:33:18] Oh, absolutely. Do you have a message of hope you want to give?
Deborah [00:33:21] Let's say a message of hope that I want to give. Here's the message of hope. You are not broken. You are not alone and you are not wrong. We are always, all of us, part of the human condition, no exceptions, making the best available choices on our menu in the moment. So if there's a choice that you wish you made or you want to make and it's somehow not happening, your system is doing the very best it can to make sure you keep breathing. And it's doing a brilliant job because here you are breathing, you've got all the way here. So if there's something that you want different, there's a way to get there that doesn't involve you being anyone other than who you actually already are in this moment, your desire for that thing is enough. There's a tiny little next step that you could take. Take it
Lauren [00:34:06] That is so good. Starts with just the action. Yeah. So that's what it is. It's always about action. Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't know to ask or you wish I had?
Deborah [00:34:17] I don't know. I feel like we really have.
Lauren [00:34:19] We just got a little bit. Yeah, I know,
Deborah [00:34:22] I hope this is helpful.There's nothing burning right now except just, you know, like, invite people to reach out for whatever help that they can. You know, one, I will say this one last thing. Often as perfectionists, we are the lone wolves. We are the ones who don't fit into any mold. We don't fit into a group. We don't fit. You know, nobody knows exactly what's going on. This is my head. It's different. It's weirder than anybody. And I know I get you. I hear you. I see you. It's okay to reach out and tap someone on the shoulder like me, like Lauren, like whoever is showing up to you as a potential resource for help and say, Hey, maybe you can give me some insight on this and reach out.
Lauren [00:34:59] And I will have all of Deborah's links and everything else will be available on the website. Thank you so much for being a guest today on 52 weeks of Hope.
Deborah [00:35:07] My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Lauren [00:35:10] I hope you enjoyed this week's episode and take with you the messages of honesty, gratitude, and an open heart. Such great messages to take into your week ahead. Be sure to tune in next week for another empowering episode all about how to live abundantly, authentically and how to have fun. It's a great episode that's super upbeat, and that's next week. You definitely don't want to miss that. You should have signed up for free Confidence and clarity boost sessions. If you're struggling, this might be for you. It's for those who feel like life's passing them by, your inner critic scoring nonstop, you're feeling burnt out and jealous of those who are doing what you wish you were doing. Just go to the website of 52 Weeks of Hope dot com and sign up over there. If you're enjoying the podcast, share the love and tell two of your friends. I'm Lauren Abrams. Thanks for listening.