Then whichever one of these things you feel like you fight with the most, whether it's perfectionism, high expectations, high specific standards that you feel like you need to meet, that's good, that's striving for excellence. But if it is a negative internalization and you beat yourself up and you feel inadequate to do the thing, that's where we get maladaptive. So there's perfectionism, low self esteem, procrastination, and overwhelm. Really, this column tends to come from inadequacy. Not always. Tends to. Okay. And procrastination and overwhelm tend to come from uncertainty. I don't know what to do. I don't know if I have the skill. I don't know when to do it right. That's just uncertainty. Okay. All of them come with a benefit in today's training in that they tend to have the same feelings, the same enemies, and the same fixes, which is why so many people confuse them and don't know where to start. All those things come with the same feelings when they're maladaptive, when they're not good for you, when it is quote unquote, negative. Okay, here's the feelings you sense in procrastination, low self esteem, overwhelm. And what I miss. Perfectionism. You feel heightened stress. It's an area that you're focusing on where it brings you more stress. Like when I. If I think about my truck being a mess, if it brings me high levels of stress, that it doesn't meet the standard, it's pristine, it's decked out, it's perfect, it's cleaned, it's washed, it's organized. If all these things, if those realities are not met, and I get highly stressed, that's what we're looking for. This is a high level of stress. So you're thinking it's higher stress. Okay, so heightened stress. Now listen to the words I'm using specifically. And it's enduring stress, so it's heightened. And it lasts longer in some cases when it becomes very unhealthy when we start using words like, I'll share it later, like disorder. What's happened is it's very heightened and it's chronic. It just, it's like, it's always there, like when you're in a bad place. In perfectionism, as an example, you have very high expectations. They're not being messed. You feel high stress, high anxiety about it. Not being met and it lasts forever. Even if the project gets done, it's the next project and the next project and the next project. They all bring heightened stress. They all bring heightened anxiety. You're never gonna meet those expect. And you keep beating yourself up and not enjoying life and not making progress because you just can't meet that expectation. Clearly that is not a good thing. So I always want you to think about it like, oh, our feelings, listen, feelings are normal stress, entirely normal. You will feel stress today. Even if you're in a great mood stress, there's biological stress happening at all times. So don't think that you're not going to be stressed. We start to worry when any of these things are heightened and they're longer lasting. Okay? So if you think your kid is coming home and listen, they're stressed once in a while, that's normal. If it's very high stress, high anxiety, and it's across tons of things now you might have a real challenge. That's a personality. Oh, okay. It's not just the specific day of school, the specific project. So the more global and the longer lasting, the more it tends to get into some trouble. When I've heightened and enduring stress, I tend to feel those things. And those things cause that I feel stuck. I feel really stuck. And many people in their life, they feel stuck and they don't realize the worst kind of stuck is coming from all of them. I'm a perfectionist. I have low self esteem. I'm procrastinating knowingly and I'm overwhelmed. And I know it when all four of those hit. You just hunker down. Like years will go by before you unstick yourself. You needed an intervention usually like with a coach or a therapist or a great advisor, mentor, friend. And it's really important. Like there's levels of stuck too, right? There's like you can be stuck on a Monday afternoon on a certain project, or you can be stuck in a career. Does that make sense? Like there's levels I'm trying to teach you, there's levels here. And your most important thing in high performance psychology is you're the scorekeeper. You need to know, well, what levels am I talking about? Am I kind of stressed? Like, I'm kind of stressed a lot, but it doesn't become a big problem. I get stuck on a chapter when I'm writing all the time. But I don't call it writer's block, right? Oh, I'm a writer and I'm blocked. No, I'm actually stuck on this paragraph, I don't know how to do it. I need to take a break. Or I need to turn it this way or try it this way. Start again. Attempt to progress, not go. I'm in writer's block. I guess I'll take the month off. Make sense the difference between stuck in a paragraph or a chapter and calling it writer's block. See, our society loves to label, and they love to label extreme. Oh, you have writer's block. Oh, you have anxiety. Most people actually don't have anxiety at a clinical level, it's barely in the double digits. And so most people, they're not experiencing clinical anxiety. They're really stressed. And most people are actually appropriately stressed. It's okay. You're stressed about your finances when you have tons of debt. That's called normal, not anxiety. And so the issue that we have is we use these words, and they might be accurate words, but we globalize them, and we make them so extreme that they feel catastrophic. Because if I have writer's block, that feels so catastrophic. If I'm like, yo, I'm stuck on this paragraph. Can I talk it out to you? I'm going to say this paragraph to you. Say it back to me. What you heard. Okay, let's do that. Now. I'm going to say this paragraph to you. Now say it to you. Say it back to me. How you would say it. Oh, that's interesting. What's another way I could approach this paragraph? Oh, that's good. Hey, that's great feedback. Thank you. I'm going to try that. I try and I keep going, but if I call it writer's block, oh, I must need a vacation to Bora Bora. You know, it must be my childhood causing writer's block. Yo, you're stuck on a paragraph. Your childhood has nothing to do with that chapter. Can we just over, like, let's stop. We globalize. We make things so big and catastrophic because we are in a, like, armchair therapeutic world. Like, we took all these clinical disordered words and we say that everybody has them, and that's just like, it's not helpful for your progress. You might just be stuck on a simple things. You need four or five different perspectives. You need to try it again and iterate it again, and you'll find that click, that's okay. Versus I'm stuck. Brennan, I need to come to your seminar because I'm stuck in my life. I'm like, you're not stuck in your life. You and your husband are fighting a lot. Let's just deal with that, that's different than me. I'm stuck in my life. Does that make sense? Don't globalize. Generalize and catastrophize so much and then we can really get you finding progress again. But the more you globalize, it's everywhere, it's pervasive. It's a huge problem. We fall into those things like learned helplessness where we stay stuck forever. I hope I'm not berating too much here. I'm just trying to get you to understand most of what you're dealing with is low grade stuff. It's not super high, it's not super chronic. Not most people. But I want to let you know, it's like, it's okay. Like you probably aren't globally stuck somewhere. Okay. It's like, I was with a friend, he was literally, I'm not kidding, this is like a couple weeks ago, my friend, he calls me, he's freaking out. He's like, I'm stuck in Africa. He's on a safari. I'm like, you're stuck in Africa? Yes, I'm stuck. And oh, all these things are going on. I mean, okay, let's talk about this. Are you saying you can't get a flight today? That's what he was saying. But see, I'm stuck in Africa. It's like, bro, you can't get a flight today. Let's just like, can we use appropriate language? It really helps us internally. Does it make sense how often we use the wrong big explosive language and phrases that prevents us from going, okay, iterate, try the next thing. I'm like, I just, bro, hang up with phone with me, call four more airlines, then hit me back. Sure enough, like 35 minutes later, he calls me back. He's like, oh, I got out tomorrow, thank God. But he was making this huge global scary thing. Do you do that in your life? I think a lot of people do that specifically around stuck. And I'm like, stuck is so like myopic. It's so like short term. And I think if you give yourself that gift, then you won't face writer's block or be stuck in Africa. Here's a big one though, and I'm teasing a little bit on purpose because this one's tough. Self loathing. Now this is where you know that things get really maladaptive. Self loathing is where because of things not going the way that you wanted, you hate yourself because you're not doing the things you know you should do. You hate yourself because you always feel like you can't handle things and you're overwhelmed and you don't do you hate yourself? So see, this is the thing we have to be very careful about. When all of a sudden these things are happening which are normal, right? Striving for excellence is normal. Putting off things that aren't right for now, that's normal. Not knowing how to handle life's enormity and all the opportunities, challenges, problems at any given moment, that can feel overwhelming, that's normal. When those normal things make us feel inadequate or lower levels of self esteem, so much so we start self loathing. And I want to give you some language about this that might help. What do I mean by self loathing? Self loathing equals self talk. You speak self hate to yourself. The words going on in your brain aren't just low self esteem. Like low self esteem can be high levels of criticality. Like I'm just very critical on myself. Self loathing means I hate myself and I start using language because I can't handle the world or I don't get everything right, I must not be good enough. So I'm going to berate myself, I'm going to say really negative things to myself because there's a lot going on, I can't handle it. I'm not good enough, I'm a failure. And now I start calling myself's name, I'm a failure, I'm no good. And you start saying like really negative things like self loathing can very quickly fall into hopelessness, can very quickly fall into suicidal ideation. Because whatever we hate, we tend to very much dismiss and we throw language at it. You see this in ideology, right? In politics. So often people, they don't like that side, they hate that side. What do they say? They say terrible things, they don't like the side, so they call them names, they say really terrible things. They threaten their life, they threaten their kids, they threaten their careers. You start threatening and speaking ill and hate towards things that you don't understand, relate with, feel like you can progress towards influence or they just have a values conflict. You start saying very terrible language. Well, a lot of people internalize that. They don't like their side, their values, their behaviors, who they are, how they're going about the world. So they really speak awful. And I just want to let you know if you are in a self loathing mindset and that's been something that's been like often in your life and it's been enduring and it's really critical and it's mean and you're really Mean like you hear it to your, you hear yourself saying really mean things and harmful things to yourself that you would never say to somebody else. This is very important that you get therapy for this. Like, while I'm the high performance coach and I train tons of therapists and psychologists all around the world, they also come to me because they realize I tell my audience this all the time. Like if you have trauma or major self loathing, it's very important that you see a therapist because there is very clinical, specific things that they can do to work with you on and it's very necessary. And so a hype conversation or even psychological performance training like I'm trying to do today with the performance part about it, I'm just here to let you know, it's like if there's been enduring self loathing, you need some help in that category that's super hard to overcome. And so I tell people all that time because I'll give you some fixes, some interventions that you can do that will help you get progress. But the hardest person to get progress for is the meanest person to themselves. The hardest person to get progress for is a mean person themselves. There's self hate, they're self loathing. They're so mean to themselves. So please notice that. What else is there in all categories of perfectionism, Low self esteem, procrastination, overwhelm, there's social angst. Social angst. And the social angst comes on both sides of the coin. There's one side of the coin, social angst is like if I'm a perfectionist, I have a lot of angst about other people not meeting expectations. My angst is called compliance. Like they need to get better. How can they be so low performing? And I loathe the fact that they're not a high performer. If that social angst starts creating division in your life where you're so mad that your brother, your sister isn't as good as you, where you're so mad that somebody on your team is just not, you know, meeting that level, that now you're mean to them, dismisses of them, unprofessional with them, now we've got a problem. Make sense. So that's common social compliance. The other side of social compliance or social angst is you feeling the need to meet their expectations. A lot of perfectionism is actually not about your perfectionism. A lot of perfectionism comes from there's this high bar of standard that other people have set and I'm scared I'm not going to meet it and so I have anxiety. I worry about rejection, I worry about judgment, I worry about social comparison. All those things are other people oriented. And it causes me angst, right? And again, there's heightened levels of angst and there's long going angst. Like the more social angst I have about not being able to to meet somebody else's needs. Well, the higher and the longer that goes, the lower my self esteem is gonna be, right? Think about that. The heightened stress, stuck self loathing or social angst I feel. And the longer it endures, the more it's gonna drop my down my self esteem. So that's why getting progress is really important in people's lives, right? Cause when I don't sense that, I'm gonna feel these. When I don't sense progress, I'm gonna feel these. When I don't sense progress, I'm gonna feel these. You can have progress and these can be part of that. Certainly they're not all mutually exclusive. But if I don't sense a sense of progress, it's gonna be like I'm never gonna meet their needs. They're never gonna do better. Why try? And we become resigned.
