Pushkin.

The new year is a great time to take a look at what's not serving you.

And if I had to pick one trait that's definitely not been serving me, it's my perfectionism.

I tend to beat myself up a lot. I'm terrified to try things that I might not be good at, and even small mess-ups

make me feel like I'm sort of a bad person. So in this next episode of our how-to season,

I'm bringing you a timely guide for fighting that kind of self-criticism, what I like to call How to Feel Like You're Enough.

And picking an expert for this episode was easy. Dr. Ellen Hendrickson is a clinical psychologist

at Boston University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. Like me, Ellen is a recovering

perfectionist. She's also the author of a fabulous book that I strongly recommend. It's called

How to Be Enough, Self-acceptance for self-critics and perfectionists.

I mean, there's a saying for self-help book authors, and that is write the book you need.

So I partially wrote the book for me, but certainly there's also an external reason I wrote the book,

which is because I think there is

sort of a silent epidemic of perfectionism happening. And I've noticed that perfectionism is a bit

of a misnomer. It's not about striving to be perfect. No one ever comes into the anxiety specialty

clinic where I work and says, Ellen, I strive for perfection. I need to be perfect, no one ever comes into the anxiety specialty clinic where I work and says,

Ellen, I strive for perfection. I need help. I'm a perfectionist. Instead, people come in and say,

I feel like I'm always failing. I have so much on my plate and I'm not doing anything well. I'm

falling behind. I should be so much further ahead

than where I am now in life. Or they just have sort of a sense of dissatisfaction with their lives.

So it's not about striving for perfection. It's about never feeling good enough. And was that the

kind of thing that manifested in your own life when you thought about perfectionism? For sure. Yeah. I think, well, so ironically, before I started writing the book,

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