Making Perfectionism Work For You Week Three Meghan
- Slides: 8
Making Perfectionism Work For You Week Three Meghan Bhagat, MS Huabing Liu, MS University of Massachusetts, Amherst Center for Counseling and Psychological Health
Agenda • Checking In • Review/recap from last week • Values and Perfectionism • Values vs. goals • Reasonable exceptations • This week’s challenge • Checking Out
Checking In/Recap • Examples of adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism in the last week? • Recap: • Maladaptive vs. adaptive perfectionism • Dealing with the feelings of shame/guilt with distress tolerance and selfcompassion
What are Values? • Values as chosen life directions • “intentional qualities that join together a string of moments into a meaningful path; they are what moments are about” (Hayes, et al) • Values are not goals, feelings, outcomes, or the future • Not something to achieve, but rather something that guides the things that you do and the things that make your life meaningful • They can be in conflict with one another at times • We find ourselves most fulfilled when we are acting in a way that moves us in the direction of our values, as opposed to away from them
Values and Perfectionism • Maladaptive perfectionism can get in the way of us moving towards our values! • In focusing on “perfect, ” we don’t pay attention to “complete, ” or “good enough, ” and we can be consumed by things that don’t actually move us towards our valued life • Can you think of some examples? • So, let’s think about our values!
Your Values, a writing activity • Choose two or three values from this (non-exhaustive) list that feel important to you. Why are they important? What do they mean to you? Be specific! • https: //www. actmindfully. com. au/wpcontent/uploads/2019/07/Values_Checklist_-_Russ_Harris. pdf • What are some ways in which your perfectionism moves you closer to these values? (adaptive perfectionism) • What are some ways in which your perfectionism moves you away from these values? (maladaptive perfectionism) • Can you think of something you may be able to do to reverse this?
Setting Reasonable Goals for a Valued Life • We can’t expect that we can reorient everything towards our values right away – if it was that easy, we would have already done it • Setting SMART goals • • • Specific (simple, sensible, significant) Measureable (meaningful, motivating) Achievable (agreed, attainable) Relevant (reasonable, realistic, resourced, results-based) Time-bound (time-based, time-limited, timely, time-sensitive) https: //www. mindtools. com/pages/article/smart-goals. htm
This week’s challenge! • Set a SMART goal around a value that your perfectionism is preventing you from moving towards. Can you try to do it this week? ? Share it for accountability.
