Today, learning about the origins of perfectionism so we can tackle it head on.

I'm Maura Aaron's Mealy, and this is the anxious achiever, the show that looks at the intersection of mental health,

leadership, and work, and asks, how can we do it all better?

Your perfectionist tendencies might not come from where you think.

Or maybe they do.

But if you feel constantly on edge, stay up late to polish off PowerPoints, kick yourself

for a week if you misspeak in a meeting, today's episode will do you some good.

First, because it will help you understand your behavior, and then because

it will help you put some new behavior practices in place. We're re-sharing an interview I did with

Dr. Thomas Greenspon. He's a psychologist and family therapist, and he's author of the books,

What to Do When Good Enough Isn't Good Enough and

Moving Past Perfect. And as an expert on perfectionism, he shares wonderful perspective and

advice on how to manage this in our lives. He gave me one of my favorite pieces of advice ever,

which is, if you let go of the anxious perfectionism,

you would still be excellent and amazing. Enjoy.

I have both a personal and professional interest in the topic. Probably in the 90s sometime, I got

interested in it because somebody had published an article about something that they were calling

healthy perfectionism. And somehow or another, this struck me wrong. Actually, I'd been writing

about perfectionism for quite a while before that, just

brief notes in a newsletter. But this article struck me. So I decided I wanted to write about it.

I talked to the editor of a journal, and she suggested I put my ideas together and write something up.

And as I was doing that, it started to occur to me that these are some of the things that I'm dealing with here.

...