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[00:00:05] Kathleen: You are listening to The Thriving Lawyer with Kathleen Brenner and Carla Ferraz. I'm Kathleen, a highly experienced lawyer and an International Coaching Federation accredited coach.
[00:00:18] Carla: And I am Carla. Like Kathleen, I am an ICF certified coach and I have worked with top leaders and professionals, many of them lawyers, at some of the world's biggest organizations.
My focus is on using evidence based approaches to help my clients thrive at work and in the rest of their lives. Together,
[00:00:40] Kathleen: we bring you the Thriving Lawyer podcast, a podcast filled with ideas and inspiration, as well as practical tips to help you thrive as a lawyer and in the rest of your
life. Let's get into it.
Welcome to episode 16 of the Thriving Lawyer Podcast with Kathleen Brenner and Carla Ferraz. I'm Kathleen, and today we are going to tackle a topic that we see comes up time after time with lawyers, and that is the theme of perfectionism, so perfectionism in the legal world. It is often hiding in complete plain sight.
It shows up when we over prepare. We triple check our work. We struggle to switch off, or perhaps we feel absolutely paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake. I see that sometimes with junior lawyers who are worried about making a mistake. Um, but it also can be at any level, you know that I've seen managers who will spend hours and hours trying to fine tune an advice to get it absolutely perfect when it was actually perfectly good and met, absolutely met the client's needs hours before they finalized it. And so the theme that we wanna tackle today is really about well, okay.
Striving for excellence is valuable. We wanna be ambitious, we wanna do good work. But we're asking a really bold question today. What if perfectionism is actually holding lawyers back more than it's helping them succeed? So, Carla, welcome and perhaps a good place for you to start in this conversation is to give us your definition of perfectionism.
[00:02:38] Carla: Cool. Hello. Um, so let's start with the basics, right? Perfectionism, it's more than just high standards. It's a personality trait that can be marked by striving for flawlessness, you know, setting really unrealistic expectations and being really critical when things fall short. Right. So perfectionism is really complex and it isn't just about wanting to do things really well.
There's a lot of research around that, and especially the work of Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flat. Um, perfectionism is considered a multidimensional personality style that affects how we think, how we feel, and how we relate to others. There is of course, um, healthy striving, like, which can be quite motivating.
But then there is also maladaptive perfectionism and, and which is often linked to burnout, procrastination, and even anxiety. Now I think it's useful to look at, uh, perfectionism from different dimensions, right? There is at a trait level, there is the self-oriented perfectionism. It's like when you play, when you place intense pressure on yourself to be perfect, there is the other oriented perfectionism.
It's when you expect perfection from now the people. And then there is the socially prescribed perfectionism as well is like when you believe the others expect you to be perfect. Um, and then there is also like the interpersonal aspects of perfectionism, like, like how the perfectionist shows in your relationship.
You know, there's like the idea to like self-promote. So you are constantly trying to present this flawless idea of yourself to other people, like you avoid showing any mistakes or any vulnerability. You know, you don't talk about your struggles or your challenges at all. So that sort of image of perfection all the time.
Look, so it's really important to, to highlight here that these patterns aren't just quirks. You know, they've been associated with real emotional distress. And for some it can lead to chronic stress, disconnection, and even clinical concerns. You know, and, and if you feel that this is, a problem for you, like we are not psychologists or clinical professionals, so if you recognize this within yourself and it's causing distress, we encourage you to speak to a qualified mental health professional.
Um, and then there is also, um, the research from Brene Brown, um, around the vulnerability, and she links perfectionism to shame. That's a whole other layer, and she defines Perfectionisms as she says, like perfectionism is not the same thing as striving for excellence. It's a defensive move. It's the belief that if you look perfect, you do everything perfectly and you live perfectly, you can avoid or minimize shame, blame and judgment.
So in that sense, perfectionism, it's, it's often like, like a shield or a way to try to avoid shame. And it can be sort of almost like a strategy, to stay safe in environments where being seen as, you know, flawed, not enough, may feel risky And and look. The legal world where high, you know, which is a high performance culture.
This strategy can make sense and it's often developed as an adaptive response to real pressures, right? Uh, from law school to, you know to affirm, you know, the system often rewards people for minimizing error to staying in control and being hyper responsible. So just to normalize this as well, like if you not some tendencies in yourself, it doesn't mean that there is something wrong with you.
It might mean that you've learned to survive and succeed in a demanding system that doesn't always leave too much room for vulnerability. That said. When perfectionism becomes too rigid or too automatic or self punishing or, and even start costing you, you know, your peace or how you deal with your relationships or joy, you know, it's worth pausing and take a look at it.
Evidence-based coaching can support this. You understanding and, and you know, bringing more of that reflection and help you with change. But it's not a substitute for, um, counseling or therapy when deeper clinical issues that at play, you know, but it's, look, it's important, like understanding how perfectionism operates.
It's a powerful first step, you know, especially, um. In, in a profession like law where perfection often feels like it's the baseline expectation.
So Kathleen, like, would you like to share? Why, why do you think this is so common in law?
[00:07:53] Kathleen: Look, I, first of all, can I just say before I go into that, I love that definition of perfectionism because I haven't myself thought of the different ways that it shows up in a trait level, but what that definition really brought home to me was how it really can be different for different people. For example, that difference I think between that self-oriented perfectionism where you place that pressure on yourself versus, uh, having this belief, which could be entirely different, that others expect you to be perfect so you're trying to live up to that expectation. Now, I think in law it's probably likely that these different ones all show up to varying degrees and in different mixes and I think that in terms of why it shows up in law so often, you actually nailed it in your definition. You know, you talked about how often from law school to legal practice, the system does reward people from a
minimizing errors, staying in control, being hyper responsible. Now, you know, being a lawyer does entail responsibility and there are particular duties that you have as a lawyer in terms of acting in the best interest of your client. Like medicine. Although the big difference in law is usually somebody might, you know, won't die if you make a mistake.
Um, but nevertheless, you know, I think that there is a great deal of pressure. That is put on us to get it right every time, but that's just not the reality of how things work. People will make mistakes. Now, of course, we have a, this responsibility to, um, meet the standards of our profession, but there's a problem when often the culture in
legal workplaces from the very time that you go into your first job and you're getting your advice critiqued and criticism and particularly if you're in a hypercompetitive environment.
Now legal cultures are changing, but there are still some that are like that, where it might be a fear about being judged by others or missing out on the opportunities.
Um, I think also more broadly, and I'd be really interested to kind of see more data about this, but there's certainly research that backs up this assertion that perfectionism is rife. In the Thriving Lawyer course, we refer to a number of studies, um, and we might put at least one of them in the show notes.
I think the Victorian Legal Services Board and commission had put out, research about lawyer wellbeing, for example, that dealt with this issue and talked about perfectionism being inculcated from the very beginning. But you know, there's other, um, features. I think, um, lawyers will tend to be high achievers and perfectionism is you know, unfortunately, often goes hand in hand with that kind of personality. Um, you'll find that lawyers will often be very hardworking. They've had to work incredibly hard to get through university and develop their careers. So they're quite conscientious. They're trained to be risk averse so that if they've got those ingrained tendencies, they're probably more likely to come out and that need for control.
So look, I think that it's really common. I think that this is a theme that comes up when coaching lawyers all the time. You make a really good point about thinking about is it causing you a level of distress that you need to seek something beyond coaching.
But certainly coaching and the kind of coaching that we do in terms of being informed by solutions focused and cognitive behavioral approaches can have a real impact.
So. Perhaps that's a good place to ask you to go down that pathway of exploring how we can deal with that tendency in coaching.
[00:11:55] Carla: Yeah, definitely. So there are lots of, models in different approaches that help us, one, create awareness around perfectionism and then learn how to work with it.
First one that comes to mind is the cognitive behavioral coaching approach, CBC, you know, which focus on identifying and help, uh, unhelpful thought patterns.
You know, testing them through real world experiments, challenging them, you know, things like, um, black or white thinking. Really unrealistic expectations. Put on, on self, um, the expectations like we say, like we believe other people is expecting that with me. We without challenging that belief, you know, is that an expectation or is that, you know, is that an agreement around that?
Um, there is also the work with, um, of Dr. Kristin neff, like the work on self-compassion. Usually perfectionism comes with, you know, a very strong inner critic, so. And that has been really helpful with my work with many people, right? So instead of that harsh self-criticism is encouraging, um, people to treat themselves with kindness, especially when they make mistakes, especially when things go differently.
Like, 'cause usually there is something that led you to that. You know, when you look at that, you know, realistically, you know how, and you are already down. You are already down because you made a mistake. Now how do we pick ourselves up quickly so we can get going? Um, and I think like the, the stuff around helping clients, um, build cognitive flexibility, the self-acceptance values work as well.
Like what truly matters for you can also be really helpful, you know, in helping them take like sort of small action steps even in the presence of fear and doubt. Slowly, like, you know, and, and helping them build the evidence that there is other ways to be about that you don't need to do everything perfectly.
That the practice, that sort of good enough. You know, so that there's lots of different approaches that might help us understand how perfectionism show up in, in different way. Um. You know, and, and look like both internally on your relationships and even like, outside work as well, socially.
Do you, um, Kathleen, do you have any examples or any stories, um, around perfectionism in the legal world?
[00:14:34] Speaker 4: Oh, I've seen quite a few in my time. Um, there is one that is, well, two actually, that are really strong in my memory. One was a fantastic, well, both were fantastic lawyers, but let's just explore the first.
The first was a really wonderful black letter lawyer. She was very senior in an organization and she took great pride in her job. But her perfectionism came through in micromanagement. It meant that she needed to hold responsibility for all the work, and she'd got to such a senior point where that actually wasn't a viable way to deal with her team.
She needed to be delegating and she needed to trust her very capable staff. Now, if you'd have asked her, she would've sworn that she absolutely trusted and that her staff were fantastic. She wouldn't have disagreed with that, but something was operating to prevent her from being able to do that, and she would spend such long hours to give that, you know, where the Toyota advice was fine and met the client's needs, she would spend the hours and hours fine tuning words here and there to get the Ferrari version when there was actually no real benefit to the client in terms of the actual outcome that they needed from the advice. And unfortunately for her, it actually led to her having to give up that job.
She decided she didn't wanna be at that level anymore because it was too much and she wanted to go back to being, you know, someone doing the work.
And I mean, the perfectionism still showed up, but it wasn't affecting a whole team in quite the same way. So that's like really one another was again, a really fantastic lawyer.
Um, incredibly high standards for herself and others. But unrealistic in what the expectations were. So that affected herself because again, you could see that it was having mental health impacts for her, It meant that she was overworking, she was exhausted. She could never do good enough on her own judgment, but it also meant her team really felt that they weren't good enough.
And she would've been horrified. I'm not sure she realized the extent to which that was happening.
[00:17:03] Speaker 5: Yeah. Well, thank you. And, and this, these things are so common, right? Like, because, and it's so hard to change those behaviors. As well, because they worked up to a certain point. Right. But when is disturbing your wellbeing?
Yes. Well, for
[00:17:18] Speaker 4: these two people it worked and it got them, you know, some one, a couple of these example are from many, many years ago in, but what I learned from that experience was it had worked for them. It had got them the promotions, but then once they hit the ground, it no longer worked.
[00:17:37] Speaker 5: Yeah. And creating the awareness, right? Like even being able to see how is at play, having a reflection around how it's impacting other people. The feedback.
[00:17:48] Speaker 4: Yeah.
Well, that's where like I, I'm not sure that they had access to three sixties. I don't know.
But yeah, it would've been interesting. That's the kind of role where that feedback can be really useful. Right, because you can begin to get a different perspective on the overall
[00:18:05] Speaker 5: dynamics. Yeah. Especially if you have, uh, you know, an environment, a, a psychological safe environment to debrief that 360, like with trust with, so you don't take that as and become a, a bigger problem.
I do a lot of, um, debrief around 360 and, and when someone has these, these tendencies, they go right, like there is, you know, 90% of the, the feedback. It's great, but there is. 10% here and they will focus on that whole conversation on that 10% .
And forget everything else and forget the others. Oh, I failed in this.
So, so the hence why the relationship and the support, you know, the, the, the trust is so important in order to start looking at those, um,
[00:18:55] Speaker 4: yeah, those traits.
And I just wanna say something there though too, because I think a lot of lawyers will have that environment, but we do need to be really clear. We know that there are some legal environments where there might not be that psychological safety.
Yeah. Because of those reasons. And so addressing those issues in that context might be quite different for you. There might be broader questions that you need to think about as to whether you stay or you leave that environment and if you are going to like how you're going to adapt. Um, so just wanna make very clear that it's not all about just the person responding. That culture matters as well.
[00:19:30] Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's quite complex, right? Like it's, it's not an easy thing to, to deal with because Yeah, it could be at your level, but it could be at an organizational level as well, right? A systemic level.
So what about you? Yeah, so I, I, I am what I like to call, like a, a perfectionist in recovery, you know, like a, um, and, and look, I've had these tendencies for a lot of my life.
But I think for me that the thing that was most useful with that was, realizing that it was actually one of my strengths. Like, so when I started looking at , the last episode that we did about the, the Values in Action Strength. The Strength, um, I learned that appreciation for beauty and excellence was one, one of my top strengths, like, and I used to think it was just about having like really high standard doing things really well, ,but through coaching and, and training and learning how to debrief these strengths, I discovered that the overuse of that strength can actually be perfectionism, you know, and that was a huge shift for me because, what I was able to do, then I was able to accept that as a strength, you know, and then use it in moderation. That was liberating because for like, once I realized that I had the perfectionismtendency, I wanted to change it.
And that was so difficult because, I mean, for 40 plus years I've lived with that. But learning about strength, it was completely, and even the overuse, I knew my dad strength exists, but like, when I actually learned how to debrief, I started looking the underuse, the overuse, and it's like, oh.
Actually, I'm relying too much on this appreciation for excellence, you know, and, and, and, and this was just, you know, shift a bit, the focus on more towards joy and like even understand my values. And now I, I, I make like, how can this be joyful instead of perfect. Look, it's, and it is not always easy, but I think what it's been quite powerful is I'm, I'm getting better at recognizing when it's happening, And then creating space to interrupt that pattern, like so self-acceptance, self-compassion, those have been really helpful for
[00:22:05] Speaker 4: me.
So that, that like all sounds incredibly useful and like practical, but how? How do we actually do that? Like what can help?
[00:22:15] Speaker 5: Yeah, and I think like, uh, I mean we, we we're like a bit broken records. Like we keep saying reflective practice that are, um, the episode that we had with Christian and, and, and David, but that is one way, right?
Like reflective practice is really the key. You know, get curious about the inner critic, you know, what is it trying to protect you from? Um, ask questions, you know, what does good enough look like in this situation? Start challenging some of those beliefs. Um, understanding your values.
It's really. Important too. When perfectionism shows up, you can ask, you know, another value, like what matters more in this moment? Is it being perfect or is it living integrity with my other values? Well, for me it's joy, right? Mm-hmm.
In coaching, we often like, um, help clients set up the good enough goals.
Especially, you know, when perfectionism is stopping them from starting, like when there is pro procrastination.
[00:23:22] Speaker 4: Can I add another one that works for me?
One of the things that really helped me with some of the, you know, the goals that have been setting, for example, with fitness, has been to not be really specific in.
The outcome in terms of I'll be able to lift X kilos, or I'll be able to run a certain speed with a certain heart rate or whatever. I don't worry, like I progressively challenge myself. Right. But it's to be a person who shows up. And to be the kind of person who does that. So I don't have to be perfect.
If I miss something one week or it doesn't go to plan or something goes wrong, that's fine because I'm a person who turns up more for those classes and does it. And so the change is actually at an identity level and when it's at that identity level, for me, that made all the difference because, oh, I'm the person who does that more without having the solid perfectionist kind of standard.
Does that make sense or resonate? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
[00:24:28] Speaker 5: It's going down like, you know, I have to do this, that, you know that outcome and if I don't do it, I failed. It's actually, I'm going to be looking if I actually get there as a first step.
[00:24:38] Speaker 4: Yeah. And that's something like that area for me. Is there one where I used to have a bit of a fixed mindset, right? I thought, oh, I can't, I'm not, I'm just not athletic. Right? Hmm. Challenging that and trying to really push that at our identity level. Yeah, it goes hand in hand with that growth mindset as well, which we've also talked about on our previous episodes.
[00:24:58] Speaker 5: Yeah.
[00:24:59] Speaker 4: Beautiful.
[00:25:00] Speaker 5: Yeah, and another point that I like to make as well, like it is for leaders, right? Like at our organizational levels, like leader can help modeling the imperfection. You know, they share when things don't go to plan. Foster their psychological safety so people don't feel that they have to hide their flaws.
And then self-compassion exercises. Now we, we'll put the link to, to Kristin's Neff's, um, website, and then she's got some exercises there that, you know, really help challenge the perfectionism habits over time, like being kind to yourself. Um, it's really important.
[00:25:36] Speaker 4: Wow. So that is so much and I think it's probably a good place to close off with some reflections.
Uh, and I think if we stop here, what we want you to go away with is a reminder that perfectionism, it might look like a strength in law. But if you leave it unchecked and if you notice those characteristics in yourself, you know, you might find yourself wordsmithing that advice at 7:30 PM when you could have left it at 5.30 if that, you know, if it's becoming a heavy burden, and it's narrowing that sense of yourself and the possibilities of your life.
Take a moment to reflect. That's our invitation to you. What, where might perfectionism be costing you? Peace, connection, or progress?
So as Carla said, we'll definitely leave you in the show notes with a really simple resource, and that's Dr Neff's self-compassion quiz and her exercises. You can also just find it self-compassion. Org.
It's a really great place to start, and as always, thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated for you, please share it with a colleague and join us next time as we continue to explore what it means to thrive in law. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:27:07] Kathleen: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the thriving lawyer with Kathleen Brenner and Carla Ferraz, if you like it, please share it with your lawyer friends and colleagues, and tag us on Instagram at @thriving lawyer or on LinkedIn via the links in the show notes. And if you liked what you heard, please drop a review in apple podcasts.
It really helps spread the word.
If you'd like to work with us, check out our free resources and our signature course, the thriving lawyer. Which you will find at www.thrivinglawyer.com.au. You can also download our free guide, the lawyer's guide to thriving: a sustainable roadmap for success.
It's filled with great tips and ideas so that you can begin to make real change. You'll find the link to that in our show notes.
We hope this podcast has given you massive value. And that you can use it to begin to create your own thriving life. A life where you can thrive as a lawyer. And in the rest of your life.
