Balance & Beyond Podcast

Episode Summary

#81: The Harsh Truth About Self-Sabotage

Is perfectionism silently sabotaging your life in an AI-driven world?

Explore how the constant chase for an unattainable ideal can steal joy and fulfilment from your achievements. I share my personal journey through the maze of perfectionism, revealing how moving the goalposts denied me the satisfaction of success. Discover the subtle ways this mindset can hinder authentic self-expression and learn why embracing our humanity, complete with its vulnerabilities, could be the key to unlocking true potential.

Maintaining a facade of control and excellence comes at a high cost—one that often goes unnoticed. From childhood influences to the hustle mentality, I unpack the exhausting cycle of self-sabotage that arises from projecting perfectionistic tendencies onto ourselves and others. It's time to dismantle those shields of perfectionism and build more genuine identities. Join our discussion and seize the opportunity for transformation with our free workshop series, designed to help you act now and stop waiting for the perfect moment to grow.

Be the first to know about the Self Sabotage Solution, a brand-new 4 week program starting 3rd February at www.balanceinstitute.com/selfsabotagesolution 

Never miss an episode!

Sign up for hints, tips and insights relevant for your life

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive, and where you have the power to define success on your own terms. I honour the space you’ve created for yourself today, so take a breath, and let's dive right in…

On last week's podcast, I spoke to you about some of the self-sabotage behaviors that are going to hold us back with these outdated success patterns in 2025.

This week, I want to share with you my personal story of some of the hidden costs of self-sabotage, particularly focusing on perfectionism. In an era of AI, our humanity, our vulnerability, our authenticity is what's going to set us apart as leaders, as individuals, and not robots. Perfectionists, in particular, are going to really struggle with this transition, and I can see it being a huge force that's going to hold so many women back from their potential and, most importantly, their true, authentic selves.

So today, I'm going to share with you more about my past journey with perfectionism, how it held me hostage, how it manifested, and how the behavior came out in really nuanced ways. I haven't witnessed a lot of people talking about some of these, let's call them, sneakier sides of some of these self-sabotage behaviors.

And yes, there's the, you know, stereotypical perfectionist who wants to have the perfect house and the perfect hair. But for me, it manifested in different ways. The closer I get to a really deep-level understanding of what drives these self-sabotage behaviors, where they come from, the more I see its insidious nature.

The more important it is for you to recognize that there may be signs that you are sabotaging yourself or that you're getting in your own way that are broader than you realize. And again, with all of these podcasts, my intention is to broaden your awareness to ensure that you understand that the right tools and strategies are only ever going to work if you're able to identify the right problem to attach them to.

So, I used to be a really, really proud perfectionist. It was a big part of my identity, and I'm pretty sure I've been that way since I was a kid. I always used to have neat handwriting, and I was always somewhat organized. I went through a period as a teen—my mother was an absolute neat freak—so I went through the whole "room’s a bomb" phase. But I think that was probably more teenage hormones rather than necessarily who I was.

Yes, I was a proud perfectionist, but I used to get a little confused because some of the perfectionists I knew were all about never having a hair out of place. It was all about their appearance, their nails, or their outfits, and that’s never been something that applied to me. If you’re in my world, you know I show up all the time on camera—no makeup, hair’s never done. 

This is how I show up as I am because, to me, that’s a really big part of my authenticity and breaking some of these chains and expectations we have on ourselves to always look perfect. So I’ve never had the desire or felt the urge to look perfect, but oh boy, oh boy, has it played out in other ways.

So, some of the big ways my perfectionism played out for me were that I would continuously move the goalposts on any goal, dream, or anything I ever did. This even goes back to when I was a kid, playing with my cousin in the street. I’d say, "Okay, let’s do four laps," and then the moment we reached four, I’d say, "Let’s make it five."

While on the surface that might seem really motivating—like I was pushing myself in a good way, encouraging us to see what else we could do—it also had a downside. It meant I never allowed myself to experience the satisfaction of achieving anything. If I achieved something, then I told myself it must have been too easy. If I did it, I’d think I didn’t push myself hard enough. And if I just missed the goal, well, that was proof I wasn’t good enough—even if I had actually gotten close but shifted the goal right at the end.

I used to do this a lot with sports. I’d set goals like scoring a certain number of goals in netball or achieving a specific time when I was doing triathlons. Moving on the bike in my second leg of the longest triathlon I did, I was going faster than I expected. I had a goal time—I can’t even remember what it was now—but I looked at my watch and thought, Okay, I’m going to nail this goal time.

In that second, on the bike, in the middle of a 30K ride, I scrapped the old time that I had, took an extra five minutes off it, and turned around and was like, Right, I’m now doing this. This is my new time. And then, no surprise, I didn’t make that time and felt really bad. My husband was like, “But you beat the time that you said!” I said, “Yeah, but on the bike, I changed it.”

So, I completely denied myself the ability to ever feel successful. A lot of this was rooted in the belief that I had to beat my way to success—that if I flogged myself, if I was always pushing myself, if I could always be that little bit better—well, then I would get further. I would be my best self. That, for me, has been my internal battle for much of my life. “I’ve got to reach my potential.” “I have to push myself as hard as I can because I should be able to push myself.” 

There’s a whole lot of “shoulding” there, right? Which comes with obligation and all kinds of other crazy emotions. So not only did I move the goalposts, but I also never let myself feel satisfied. If anybody around me ever met their own standards, I would look at them and think, “Oh, that’s a bit mediocre”. “Oh, you know, that’s a bit basic”. “You could have pushed yourself a bit more”. I would judge them, because they actually allowed themselves the joy or sense of achievement of doing something. 

And if they didn’t set goals or weren’t as crazy ambitious as me, once again, I would look down and think, Gosh, you’re not pushing yourself very hard, are you? I’ve got a husband who’s an introvert—ambitious, but in his own quieter way, not as overtly as I am. I spent a lot of years judging his goals and how he operated because he didn’t seem to be fueled by this constant desire to exceed, like I was.

This had a really big impact on a lot of my relationships, and it also resulted in a whole lot of excessive control. These are some of the other traits of perfectionists: I wanted everything to be perfect, so I sought to control everything in my environment to have the best possible chance of it being perfect.

One thing my kids say—this is something I’ve worked really hard on—is when we have people over, they call it “crazy mummy.” Crazy mummy comes out, and mummy used to clean the house like crazy because I would want everybody to think my house always looked like that. I don’t do that as much now. I still like to have a presentable house when guests come, but I remember when we built our first house.

I had my team coming over, and my husband looked at me and said, “What are you doing?” I was scrubbing the inside of cupboards, organizing the laundry, and he asked again, “What are you doing?” I said, “Well, they might come and open the laundry cupboard, and it’s a mess, and they might judge me.” He looked at me and said, “We’ve just moved into a new house that we’ve built. Why on earth would they be judging you for dirty laundry or just disorganized laundry?”

There was this facade that I felt I had to keep up at all times—that I had it together, that I was under control. That involved controlling a lot of everything and everyone around me, which drove my family nuts because I used to have certain expectations for how they should behave. Again, I’ve never had the perfectionist dress thing, so I often didn’t care how they looked. That wasn’t a thing for me, but it was the state of their rooms, or their manners, or how they presented themselves.

So all of this combined into a whole lot of hustle. A whole lot of hustle, a whole lot of grit, a whole lot of grind. I used to think that was a really good thing because you can go onto YouTube and find a gazillion motivational videos about pushing through, never giving up, giving 10 more, working harder than everybody. I bought into a lot of that for a really long time because that was the only way I knew how to operate.

I could push more than most, I could do things to a higher standard than most, and so much of my identity was wrapped up in all of that. And that was the really hard part I had to shift— in some ways, even though it came from a place of not feeling good enough. There was a huge amount of what I was doing that I was doing in order to feel superior. I can do it faster than you, I can do it better than you, I’ll do it myself. 

These perfectionistic tendencies, I almost projected onto other people and judged them in order to feel better about myself, rather than acknowledging, You know what? This doesn’t matter, or somebody else could do it. That approach—that hustle, that almost superiority complex that a lot of perfectionists have to hold up the facade—is exhausting. 

And as the facade gets more complex, when you add kids, when you add aging parents, when you add health issues, you add all these things to that facade, and you spend a lot of your time worrying about cracks appearing. Part of what I was really good at—and again, some of these traits in me have been real gifts, but they've also had a dark side—was being a really, really good chameleon. I was good at being the perfect version of who I thought those people wanted me to be. 

And yes, there’s a crossover here with some people-pleasing tendencies, which we’ll cover in next week’s episode. But for me, I was almost shapeshifting. I was with, you know, this group of blokes on a corporate golf day, and I could make cracks about football and fit in, which was never me. 

While there’s a difference between knowing your audience, and I can do that today, back then I was literally trying to change at my core to be the perfect version of who I thought they wanted me to be—so that they would accept me and respect me. Instead of saying, “Here I am, I’m human”, “I make mistakes”, “I’m vulnerable”, and having them like me for who I really am—not who I thought they wanted me to be.

Can you see? It’s just a mindfuck. I thought I needed to be perfect because if I wasn’t perfect, they would steal the real me, and they wouldn’t accept the real me because there was something wrong with the real me. So I spent huge amounts of energy and time upholding a facade for so long that I didn’t realize how heavy it was. I started to tell myself the story that that’s who I really am. It’s insane, right? Brene Brown says it best when she talks about this.

Perfectionism is like a 20-ton shield that we carry to avoid being hurt, and it’s exhausting. But putting this shield down is really hard. I had so many beliefs wrapped up in it. Well, if I’m not this high achiever, if I don’t meet these standards, then I’m going to be mediocre. And being mediocre was one of the biggest insults in my family. Being lazy was an incredibly big insult, and if I wasn’t always pushing and striving, then what did that mean about me?

I had to build a completely different identity away from these perfectionistic tendencies because there was so much self-sabotage at play. I’m wondering how much of this resonates with you in different ways. Maybe part of this applies to you, but there are so many ways that perfectionism holds us back. What have I learned about my perfectionism and where it came from? 

Well, like many of you, I had parents who used to praise me for results. What I've learned—and I’ve come back from some time away with my parents overseas—is that I used to think, Oh, you know, there would be big praise for this and praise for that. I’ve seen firsthand that many of these signs that pushed us into being people-pleasers or perfectionists were actually really, really subtle. It might have just been, Oh yeah, that’s nice, an off-handed comment, but that five-, six-, or seven-year-old me took it as so much more than it was.

So yes, there were prizes on the fridge, and well done, and I was always quite competitive. I’d go over to my grandma’s house and take great delight in showing my medals, or ribbons, or whatever it was that I got. But it was a whole lot of stories that I made up. It was little tiny nudges that I then took and, like any high achiever, went, “Right, this is how”. “This is who I have to be”. “This is who is now going to make me be seen”. 

So I decided, “I’m just going to be the best at everything I can”. “I’m not going to be flawed”. “I’m not going to make a mistake”. And my, also kind of unusual upbringing—having three half-siblings who were a lot older than me—led to a huge amount of FOMO, which, once again, is a lot of fear. So I thought that their rejection of me, which actually had nothing to do with me, was something I had to fix. 

There was a huge age gap between us, we didn’t grow up in the same country, and I was desperate to be accepted by them. I was desperate to be seen as a sibling. I spent my whole life wanting siblings, and then I made up a story that, “Well, if I was a bit better, or if I was a little bit smarter, then maybe they’d see me”. “Then maybe they’d accept me”.

So, whether or not it’s these really interesting confluences of circumstances, of upbringing, of tiny nudges, of oh-so-subtle things that our primal brain has woven together—it all adds up to saying, “Ah, A plus B plus C equals all of this crazy behavior”.

And as I’ve emerged from this, you know, kind of peeling back the layers of the onion of this work that we continuously do, I’ve had to really build a new value system. It’s one of the best strategies I teach people: it can be really hard to tackle this perfectionistic thinking head-on because it’s so entrenched. It comes from such a young age, and it infiltrated every area of my life.

However, as I began to build up a different value system and decide, You know what? These were things that I inherited, that were gifted to me. We’re all sort of wounded and scarred as children, to varying degrees. What now is a value system that matters to me? How do I decide that I actually value speed, I value failing, I value efficiency, I love learning? 

So how do I take some of those qualities that I know to be true about me and now build and intentionally create a new identity that allows me to pull apart some of these behaviors that have really held me back? And not only have they held me back, but they’ve sucked energy, they’ve sucked joy, they’ve led to huge amounts of hustle and pushing, and not feeling I’m good enough. 

And so today, this is something that I’m continually watching out for because it pops up in really nefarious ways. But I’ve done so much work celebrating. If you’re in my world, you know that the first question on every call I ask is, What are you celebrating today? And people look at me like, What?

Because our brain is hardwired to notice the things that we haven’t done, my perfectionism had me hardwired to see where I missed or where I didn’t do something good enough, or where I didn’t do it perfectly. So I’ve had to intentionally spend a lot of time. I have journal after journal full of all the things that I did that were good enough, all the things that I did that were good enough, and all the things that I did imperfectly.

And this is a muscle, particularly now in an era of AI, that we have to build. We have to embrace our humanity. It’s going to require a whole lot of taming of perfectionistic tendencies. It’s going to require a deep understanding of where this came from. It’s going to require a really healthy and robust toolkit that allows you to see where this is playing out, to build new belief systems, to dismantle your identity, to delegate, to ask for help—these are all things that are currently behaviors you probably only have partial control over.

AI is all about perfect. In some ways, it's all about robots, and what is going to distinguish you now is your empathy. What is going to distinguish you is your humanity, your vulnerability, your emotions, and that’s going to require you to put that facade down. It’s going to require you to acknowledge your imperfections and actually celebrate them—to celebrate your mistakes. To celebrate your mistakes, to celebrate your perception. That only comes from failing fast and failing forward, and for so many women, this is terrifying in an era of rapid, rapid change.

If you don’t tame these traits, if you don’t stop these particular self-sabotage behaviors, then you are going to see yourself fall behind really, really fast. Not only will you fall behind, but you’re also going to burn out in the process because you’re going to lean into these outdated success patterns like working harder, like trying to be perfect. You may end up just outsourcing your internal perfectionist to ChatGPT, because now you have something else that can help make you even more perfect.

So we’re going to see this interesting era where women who are going to be successful will lean into their humanity, and on the flip side, we’ll see other women lean into their perfectionism, supported by AI. There’s going to be this gulf of women. It’s not going to be easy for either one, but I know the trajectory right now that I want to be on. This is why you see me show up here with full authenticity, because there is so much content out there right now that is being done by AI. 

But AI doesn’t make slip-ups. AI doesn’t use random words that don’t make sense. AI is very, I guess you could call it, pattern-istic and robotic. That’s the whole point. So how are you going to stand out? How are you going to be a leader? How are you going to be remembered? One thing that AI lacks, at this stage anyway, is feeling. It lacks emotion. It lacks heart. You have all of these things in spades, but it’s going to take you leaning into something that might be terrifying in order for you to really thrive in this year and the years ahead.

If you are ready to tame this side of you, to really dive into your self-sabotage patterns, then I’m currently running a free workshop. But on this podcast, you’re going to be the first to hear about a brand-new four-week program that’s opening its doors in just a couple of days. In fact, in this episode, I’ll include a secret early bird link in the show notes. This is a first-ever opportunity to work with me in a specific container called The Self-Sabotage Solution.

This program takes some of my most popular modules from my signature 12-week program, and I’ve expanded them, giving them to you over four weeks, focusing on these particular topics. It’s going to feature live coaching from me, and we’ll be going through it as a cohort. This is a beautiful opportunity for you to sample who we are and what we do, at a different price point than our normal signature program. It also includes one-on-one coaching sessions and other modules.

If you’ve been sitting on the fence, if you’ve been stalking me for a while, or if you’re a regular podcast listener but have never jumped in more deeply, then this is your chance. I share probably 10 to 15% in these podcasts about what I know, about the tools, and what else is out there. So if you’ve found these helpful, imagine what being in our world for four weeks in this beautiful container, focused on finding the solution to our self-sabotage—particularly in 2025—could do for you. 

This is your once-in-a-lifetime chance. I’ve never done this before, and I don’t know if I’ll ever do it again. So don’t miss out on this opportunity to join. You can visit balanceinstitute.com/self-sabotage-solution, and let’s get you the tools you need to get unstuck. Now, that’s still a secret link. It hasn’t been announced to everybody else because we’re still in the middle of part two of the free workshop series. 

But if you’re listening to this as the podcast drops, that is your opportunity. It’s your chance to get in. There’s actually a discounted entry for the first ones to sign up. I want to incentivize those who are ready, who are saying, “I’m not going to wait, I’m not going to procrastinate. This doesn’t have to be the perfect time. I’m going in now because I know this is my chance.” So, I cannot wait to see you—either in the next episode of the podcast, somewhere in our world, or in the self-sabotage solution. Have a great day, and here’s to stopping self-sabotage.

OUTRO: Thank you for joining us today on the Balance and Beyond Podcast. We're so glad you carved out this time for yourself. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend who might need to hear this today. And if you're feeling extra generous, leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice would mean the world. If you’re keen to dive deeper into our world, visit us at www.balanceinstitute.com to discover more about the toolkit that has helped thousands of women avoid burnout and create a life of balance, and beyond. Thanks again for tuning in, and we'll see you next time on the Balance & Beyond Podcast.