Making Perfectionism Work For You Week Four Meghan

Making Perfectionism Work For You Week Four Meghan Bhagat, MS Huabing Liu, MS University of Massachusetts, Amherst Center for Counseling and Psychological Health

Agenda • Checking In • Putting Everything Together • Committed Action • Utilizing All the Skills • Reflecting on the process • Evaluation • Checking Out with loving-kindness

Checking In • Examples of maladaptive and adaptive perfectionism over the last week • The challenge from last week was to set a SMART goal that moved you towards your values – how did it go? ?

Putting It Together • We’ve discussed a number of things: • Increasing awareness of our perfectionism • Strategies to cope with the emotional and cognitive effects of our perfectionism • Frameworks for affecting change in our behavior • And today: committing to action!

Committed Action • Are you willing to accept whatever discomfort your mind provides you AND commit to the values you have identified? • Values are not goals, but setting goals helps us move in our valued direction • So, we try to set goals that move us towards our values, not despite of our pain, but with it

Setting Goals for Committed Action • Set a short-term goal in the direction of your values with which perfectionism interferes • Is it practical? Obtainable? Realistic to your current situation? Does it move your towards your values? • Set up actions and subactions that get you to that point • Reflect: what could you do from that list today? What could you do from that list right now? Do it.

Barriers to Committed Action • Perfectionism will try to tell you all the reasons why you can’t do the thing (psychological resistance) • Avoidance behaviors, giving up, perseverating • It is then that we utilize our abilities to tolerate distress, speak to ourselves with self-compassion and remember our motivations for acting to work with the barriers we experience • ‘you do not “get over” barriers or “get around” barriers. You do not even “get through” barriers. You get with barriers. ” (Hayes, et al) Activity adapted from Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life by Stephen Hayes and Spencer Smith

Reflections/Feedback • What do you think you’ll take from this? What do you think you will try to use in the future? What has been helpful? • What do you wish you had gotten more of? What felt missing from this experience? • Anonymous feedback: https: //umassamherst. co 1. qualtrics. com/jfe/form/SV_1 Hu. Fkg. Mrd. Vr. Wg. G 9

Loving-Kindness Check Out • Adapted from: https: //positivepsychology. com/loving-kindnessmeditation/