Head Inside Mental Health

What's Flawed about Perfectionism with Dr. Greg Chasson

• Todd Weatherly

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 43:06

Send a text

Perfection can look like excellence from a distance, yet up close it there's the potential for problems. We sit down with Dr. Greg Chasson—professor, board‑certified psychologist, and leading authority on OCD and related disorders—to separate what’s truly clinical from what’s simply crushing your workflow. Greg explains why OCD is defined by intrusive thoughts while perfectionism is often rule‑bound thinking that can calcify into inoperative rigidity. That clarity can give organizations and people the key to better choices and systems that support vs. hinder performance. 

Greg shares his workplace‑ready translation of exposure therapy: the Emphasis A‑B‑C framework. A is for a tiny set of mission‑critical tasks that deserve 110 percent and perfectionistic focus. B is where most work lives—done to standard and delivered. C is skipping the task entirely. If everything is A, burnout follows and option C might prevail as the response even with important tasks; if most is B, learning speeds up and quality improves over cycles, not in a single heroic pass; a learning organization will no how C can be effective not just an outcome of perfectionistic procrastination. We explore how this approach reduces procrastination, prevents hidden “polish” rituals, and puts momentum back into complex projects without lowering the bar.

Greg offers practical ways to re‑center on values: assertive communication that replaces sanctimony, decision practices that prioritize service and learning, and acceptance skills that separate controllables from noise. Along the way, we touch on real‑world tensions—identity, workplace expectations, and how moral certainty can backfire—and show how metacognition helps teams think about their thinking. If you’re leading a team, scaling a function, or simply tired of “almost ready” in your personal life, this conversation gives you language and tools to move.  Enjoy the episode, and if it helps you unlock progress, subscribe, share it with a teammate, and leave a quick review so others can find the show.

Meet Dr. Greg Chasson

SPEAKER_03

Hello, folks. Thanks for joining us on Head Inside Mental Health, featuring conversations about mental health and substance use treatment with experts, advocates, and professionals from across the country sharing their thoughts and insights on the world of behavioral health care. Broadcasting on WPVM 1037, The Voice of Asheville Independent Commercial Free Radio. I'm Todd Weatherly, your host, therapeutic consultant, behavioral health expert. It is my pleasure to welcome friend and treatment professional, Dr. Greg Chasson. With his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Houston, Dr. Chasson is a full professor and licensed board-certified psychologist at the University of Chicago. He is one of the world's leading authorities on transforming compulsive and impulsive behaviors with an international reputation as an in-to-man professional trainer. As an active scholar, Dr. Chasson has published 70-plus scientific publications and carried out grant-funded research projects in the field of OCD and related disorders. Greg is also the author of an award-winning leadership book on perfectionism called Flawed: Why Perfectionism is a challenge for management, available at flawedbook.com and wherever print, e, and audio books are sold. Dr. Chasson, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_03

Appreciate you uh taking the time today. And um I'm, you know, we we we got to meet, I guess it's now a couple of years ago, two or three years, almost three years ago, when you presented at a conference, uh, the autism research conference down in uh Hollywood Beach, well, that was that's sponsored and put on by the folks down there at uh at uh New Directions for Young Adults. Uh and they have you come in because the people who are on the spectrum, they work, that's their population, of course, uh really do suffer from a lot of OCD. Um but the first time I got to see you, which was really uh really cool, was when you you got to talk about the topic that's here in your book, which is flawed why perfectionism is a challenge for management, which is cool. Um I've gotten to dip into it. I'm not finished yet, but I've dipped into it. But you know, the whole like quote, perfectionism is the enemy of good and that it prevents people from getting things accomplished. Give me the you know, I I also happen to know you well enough because we we got to present again. You presented again at the same conference, and and I got to present there as well. You and I sat down for dinner and um our wives talk more than we did, which is great.

SPEAKER_00

Um but you also buried the conversation, didn't I?

SPEAKER_03

Oh yeah. Well, I mean you're frozen. My my social collateral kind of goes up whenever I bring my wife to things. So they let me know.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, well that's why I'm better than the wife to things, yeah. Right?

SPEAKER_03

Exactly. Um, so you know, the thing that the thing that occurs to me, and the thing that you were talking about is this, you know, as perfectionism is uh is is this challenge for management principles, and that you've taken that over to serving some pretty complex, I mean, your work serves pretty complex individuals. Like you work with some of the like people that are really struggling really hard. What is it that caused you to jump over to to produce this book and kind of take it to a management principles area? Like what did you where is the where was the start point and where was the parallel? Where did what got you started?

OCD And Perfectionism Overlap

SPEAKER_00

That's a great question because that Todd tells me how much you are in sync and in tune with the mental health profession and the community. Because I don't know that I've ever gotten a similar question like that from your standard podcaster, because to them, it they don't see that this is a direct translation from a clinical world into something that is more of a lay world. And so that question doesn't even come to their mind, but I'm happy to answer it because it was a happy sort of development and evolution. I mean, I'm in the world of OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. I direct the clinical services, uh the psychosocial services over at the University of Chicago as a faculty member and psychologist. And we see the some of the most severe cases of obsessive compulsive disorder in related conditions, things like health anxiety, hoarding, body dysmorphic disorder, skin picking, hair pulling, and just OCD proper, which can get extremely severe. And part of the OCD spectrum is severe instances of perfectionism and getting stuck on fear of making mistakes and being responsible for bad things happening. And so it's not synonymous with OCD perfectionism. But if you think about a Venn diagram, you have OCD and you have perfectionism that overlap. And in that center, it's a ton of overlap. Not everyone with OCD has perfectionism, and not everyone with perfectionism has OCD, but it is this area that drew me because of my own personal experience with perfectionism growing up that I'm happy to talk about. But also professionally in the world of OCD, you see it a ton. And so it is something that I've worked on clinically and personally for years. And I have this entire framework based on evidence, evidence-based approach from a cognitive behavioral perspective, that really I think provides a very palatable way of thinking about perfectionism that patients really gravitate to. And so when I was teaching my students how to provide treatment for perfectionism, at one point they stopped me down. They're like, dude, because all my students call me dude, dude.

SPEAKER_03

Right, of course.

SPEAKER_00

Dude, you should write this down. And I that's when I started thinking, oh, maybe, maybe I should, maybe I should. And that's a good idea. Yeah. And so I wrote it down, but I as I was writing, I was like, I can't write this for everyone on the planet. I need to kind of come up with an audience, a domain to for for applying this. And I thought of leadership and workplace because that's where you see this a lot. And you know, it wasn't really a huge stretch to translate a lot of the clinical terms and phenomena to the workplace setting to provide a guide and roadmap for people who might see this in the workplace.

SPEAKER_03

This never in it doesn't really re it did not register with me until you just said it that perfectionism and OCD are different. And that there's, you know, they have this big Venn diagram crossover, and they've got a lot of territory they share with one another. What's the difference between perfectionism and and obsessive-compulsive disorder? What is the difference in your mind? And and clinically speaking, you know, what's the definition there?

Intrusive Thoughts Versus Perfectionistic Beliefs

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, perfectionism really can be multifaceted in that you don't necessarily need to have traditional obsessions and compulsions. The thoughts that come to you don't need to feel intrusive or like they're invading into your territory. That's the characteristic of OCD, right? You're walking around and all of a sudden you have a thought that attacks you, that feels inconsistent with who you are and what you want to be thinking about. That is OCD obsessions in a nutshell, right? And then you do things to try to calm yourself when those thoughts strike. So you try to engage in behaviors to neutralize them. You wash excessively if you have an intrusive thought about getting sick, or if you have a thought about murdering someone that makes you feel appalled and horrible as a human, you might do things to protect yourself or the people around you. Maybe you hide all the knives in your house or you avoid certain people that you have thoughts about. And so those are very classic, what we call ego-dystonic, which is basically saying that they're not consistent with what you want to be thinking about. They're very alien to you and they're very disturbing. Some people with perfectionism have those types of perfectionistic thoughts. I got to do this right or bad things will happen. It feels alien to them. It feels really inconsistent with what they want to be thinking about. But on the other hand, there's a lot of people with perfectionism where their thoughts are completely consistent with their worldview, right? It's not alien to them. It's not intrusive. They have thoughts of this just is the way the world works. I need to have this perfect. I cannot make mistakes. I should do it this way and I shouldn't do it that way. Those kinds of thoughts are not aligned with an OCD way of thinking, right? OCD is very intrusive and inconsistent. And so you have types of perfectionism that don't map on to OCD very well. And then of course there's OCD that doesn't have any connection with perfectionism, right? That you have people fearing all sorts of things that has not that has nothing to do with responsibility and fear of mistakes. And so there really isn't a perfect overlap. Uh, but there is a lot of overlap sometimes.

SPEAKER_03

Well, and it's, you know, uh in working with clients that we serve and uh on the on the mental health side, I've certainly you know been witness to clients that I had one client who suffered from pretty terrible schizophrenia. Um and he suffered from OCD, and he he's a big baseball fan. So he would in order for his team right?

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

In order for his team to win, he had to stand on one leg and hold his arms like like he did that for like 36 hours one time.

SPEAKER_00

So that he could wow, that's a that's impressive.

SPEAKER_03

Uh that's impressive and sad at the same time.

SPEAKER_00

But also, was his name No Mar Garcia Para? Because that would make a lot of sense to me.

SPEAKER_03

Right. That would that's an old reference for those who are your older listeners. He's got a he has a little investment in why he wants that game to come outright. Right, right. Slight amount of investment. That might be that crossover of perfectionism and OCD right there, you know.

SPEAKER_00

That's a magical that that's a signal of OCD for sure.

SPEAKER_03

But I think the lay public, you know, they use OCD to talk about perfectionism. That's there's there's there's this there's this loose kind of association there without a differentiation. And I think it's like you say, you heard me ask a question that's never been asked because a lot of people don't make these connections between something that they use in their common terminology and something that people you know experience at clinical levels that's terrible, that's um impacting their lives. Now, when you you know, as you went into this audience that it that that experiences perfectionism, they might experience aspects of OCD because there's this line where if they don't get it perfect, then they start having the thoughts and the thoughts become disturbing, right? Um or and they and then it starts to become disorder when that person can't control the way that makes them feel. Yes, absolutely. Uh how do you how do you bridge this clinical information? Because this is a struggle that we all have, I think, for treatment professionals. How do you bridge a lot of this clinical information in a way that is receivable to folks that are on performance ends and management ends and kind of regular regular quote unquote regular public, right?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's a great question. It's really not easy. It's iterative. And one of the things that has been one of the biggest roadblocks to me getting out there is people assuming that because I'm a professor, I'm gonna be boring as hell when I go up to talk about things.

SPEAKER_03

I've seen you speak, you are not boring. I can say that.

Translating Clinic Insights To Workplaces

SPEAKER_00

I mean, people think that you're gonna be just this really stuffy, esoteric, you know, and just even the word esoteric probably already makes me esoteric. But the idea is that people people just assume this because it is a tough skill to translate some of this stuff to a lay audience. And it's you know, it takes practice, it takes iterative, uh, iterative, um, you know, make making mistakes and not being perfectionistic, so to speak, and going up there and I, you know, reading people's facial expressions and trying to be empathic and like, what is this person talking about? And being able to see that look on their face and going, okay, oh, this clearly did not hit. Uh so let me rephrase that. But yeah, it's tough. And I think it helps to understand that perfectionism is on a continuum. There's more and less in everybody, right? We all have some elements of it. Maybe some people have very little, but some people have extreme paralyzing amounts of it, but most of us fall somewhere in the middle. And it doesn't really become debilitating until it gets in the way of your functioning and causes you not to do things or maybe causes tremendous stress uh for you and the people around you. And unless it's meeting that marker, it's just part of everyday experience. And so everyone sees perfectionism, either in themselves or the people around them. And so that part hasn't been hard, right? People have an understanding of what I'm talking about once I get into it. Now, what they don't understand is the breadth or sort of the how far reaching this type of perfectionism goes. They see it as people being afraid to make mistakes. But my as my book goes into flawed, it really has tentacles that extend far, far out into all sorts of characteristics that I'm happy to dive into, but it tends to be this most surprising aspect of of uh of perfectionism when I speak to people.

SPEAKER_03

Well, and you know, the I So I have a background in doing management training and facilitating experiential experience-based training and development. So this this whole aspect of bridging over into management's really um really interesting to me. And so the you know, we start to dive into territory from a person's psychological health to an organization's psychological health. Right. And that, you know, when a person is experiencing levels of perfectionism that start to that start to dance on the edge of disordered, you know, they're they're taking it a little too far. Yeah. One one thing is a lot of the people that they're that are working for them or that they're leading can't follow them there. Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's you see it uh organizations are people, right, in general. So if you have you know, the people you know often think that there's something special, but they're really just or people they're made up of people, right? And so, yes, you need to think about social dynamics in addition to individual dynamics, but you definitely can have a massive impact on the organization with a display of perfectionistic tendencies. I mean, you see it all the time. I mean, perhaps one of the biggest things that I see with perfectionism is procrastination, right? Because people get stuck and they don't want to work on things because they're so anxious.

SPEAKER_03

I don't know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, we'll get to it later. We'll get to it later. But yeah, um the you know, and of course, procrastination just brings everything to a grinding halt, but not even just procrastination, even just slowed processes, just just an absolute slowdown because you're trying to find the perfect process, the most efficient, the most effective. And of course, the irony of is that in doing so, you've just slowed yourself down to a grinding halt, the most ineffective or inefficient. And so you get these uh cogs in the wheel that just bring everything down to a halt. And that is extremely costly for organizations.

SPEAKER_03

And it's a dollar, there's a dollar value on that.

SPEAKER_00

And the the other area that people forget is turnover. If you're working for a perfectionist and they are rigid and rule-bound rather than principle bound, and project moralistic standards on other people, like they expect you to and should be a certain way, it's a hard environment to work for someone that's self-righteous and sanctimonious, which is what that looks like. And so you get a lot of turnover, you get a ton. And of course, that's been quantified, that's not cheap in any fashion.

SPEAKER_03

Well, and you're also talking about, you know, you you go over to the development sign, there's there's all the you know, Peter Sangang and Tom Peters and all these guys they talk about like the ladder of inference, for example. It's you're assigning a person when they start to go over a line in perfectionism, there's a values assignment to it. You know, perfect has a meaning. It's not just a mark, it's not it's not just a benchmark for people to achieve. Hey, this is a standard of quality we want to achieve. You know, if you're a manufacturer or you're an engineer, standards of quality are part and parcel for your world, right? So that's healthy, that's okay. But then you start to assign meaning and value to a professionistic standard, if it starts to go over the line, it's almost like you get it's almost like an organization can really get lost. How do you, in your mind, like how do you treat that? Like, how do you treat that with an organization?

Productivity Costs Of Perfectionism

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you first, you know, yeah, that's right. The I don't know that they're dramatically different in terms of of what you would need to do, but you first would need to dissect and figure out where this is happening. You know, in my adventures getting the word out about perfectionism in organizations, I've really learned that you don't see a ton of it at the tippy top of the organization. You don't see a lot of it at the CEO level because you just really self-select. You can't be a CEO and be terribly perfectionistic. You have to be willing to take quick failures and learn and move on. And the for the most of the CEOs that I've talked to, and there have been a lot of them, the idea of perfectionism, they've had the hardest time understanding it because they're like, I don't understand people who are perfectionistic. They're just, it's not in their blood. However, you go one notch down into the C-suite, CEO, CFOs, you know, CTOs, CHOs, they are the perfectionists, right?

SPEAKER_03

Because highly perfectionistic, right?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And so the CEOs actually, when you see a perfectionist uh CEO, that does not last very long. I've heard stories about this where the entire organization just grinds to a halt. Way too rigid, not innovative, not risk-taking, hard to work for people like that because of the uh should statements that come with the perfectionism, like you should do it this way, you should do it that way. Just that really brings down the morale of the entire organization. It's really when you get a healthy organization where at the top you have some flexibility and some of what you described, striving for perfection, but not holding yourself to that value and striving is not the same thing as perfectionism. Striving for excellence is not the same thing, right? And so you when you start to see that, that's when you get into the organization, you have to find the pinpoints of where this is occurring, certain leaderships, certain um processes and funnels within the organization. You can find pretty quickly where the slow points are and where the grinds are. And that's where you need to start talking about how this impacts teams and the process and providing strategies and new frameworks for thinking about this. And those some so some of those frameworks are at the culture level, not just at the individual level.

SPEAKER_03

When you're talking about cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, really in the end. For but for an organization. Um, so I my question to you is, and I'm I'm super this is a topic that I have a lot of interest in and I've done lots of reading on and everything else. So I'm I'm really curious about some of the some of the stuff that you do. Like, what is the delivery for an organ? Like, I know what cognitive behavioral therapy looks like for an individual. Yep. Uh, but what is the delivery for an organization? What is a CBT-based strategy delivery intervention look like for an organization?

SPEAKER_00

I'm glad you asked. That's a great question, also one I've never heard before. Um, it's good because people don't understand what CBT is or how it translates, and that was a great question. I'll give you a great example because my entire book and the strategies in there are based on evidence-based approaches like CBT, acceptance and commitment therapy, essentially exposure and response prevention, which is the gold standard treatment.

SPEAKER_03

A little ERP for people.

SPEAKER_00

A little ERP for OCD and anxiety disorders, which is, you know, we're talking success rates in the 80 to 90 percent. I mean, that's unheard of in most mental health treatments, right? And so I I would be stupid not to try to translate those principles and strategies to an organization. And that's exactly what I've done.

SPEAKER_03

Well, list I I mean, or lazy. You might be just lazy, you know, you might you might not just want to do it.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, all right. And so what I've done is really tried to create a framework and language that doesn't dive heavy into the clinical jargon and essentially camouflages the principles in a way that seem palatable for people in an organization that don't want to be labeled with some sort of horrible diagnosis and don't want, you know, they don't, or they don't want to even think about this as a mental health treatment. And so what I'll, for example, I'll give you an example. I use something called the emphasis framework for helping organizations and individuals. The emphasis framework, if you really boil it down, is exposure and response prevention. But I don't tell people that, right? Even though I just told the entire public that right now in this talk.

SPEAKER_03

Right, right, right.

CEOs, C‑Suite, And Rigidity

SPEAKER_00

But essentially, what I do is I think about tasks in three different buckets. There's emphasis A, emphasis B, and emphasis C. All right. Emphasis A is the give it everything you got, 110%. Right? This is this is truly where you put your energy, your effort, everything. Then there's emphasis B, the get or done strategy. Just get or done. Doesn't need to be perfect, doesn't need to be garbage, probably for things that just need to get done that you can't completely ignore. Right. Then there's emphasis C, which is the let's not do it at all strategy, right? Like let's just skip it. And there's a time and place for all three of these. I am completely acknowledging. To judgment or criticism because there's really truly an adaptive time for each of these, right? And it's based on your values, what's really important to you or your organization, right? So if you're planning your wedding and that's really important to you, if you're trying to study to get into med school, the MCAT test might be really important for you to give it 110%. You know, whenever I go on podcasts, I give it 110%, you know, those kinds of things. But if you can't do that for everything, there's just not enough resource, right? Emphasis C, I'm gonna skip B for a second. Emphasis C also has a time and place. Just nothing, not everything is worth your time and energy.

SPEAKER_03

We're just not gonna do that, right?

SPEAKER_00

Right. I never open my junk mail right in the recycling. I never answer the customer service satisfaction survey at the end of my call with Verizon. Sorry, Verizon. Verizon a sponsor on your podcast. I'm so sorry.

SPEAKER_03

You know, we'll we'll we'll we'll we'll have to dub that out and talk to Verizon. If they're willing to give us some dollars for the promo, then maybe we can keep it up, right?

SPEAKER_00

But these are things that it's just not worth my time. I've determined based on my values that I just don't necessarily want to do those things. Now, if occasionally I will if I want to say something, but it's just not worth my time. So I'll purposely emphasis C that based on strategy, based on values, right? Emphasis B is where most things typically fall to be adaptive, because a common pattern among people with perfectionism or in organizations with perfectionism is that everything becomes emphasis A. There's no way of sort of figuring out and triaging where tasks go. And so they try to emphasise A everything. And what happens is that that's just not possible. And so things get forced or pushed into emphasis C, not because of your values, but because of your anxiety and perfectionism.

SPEAKER_03

You lost your time and your energy. Yeah, you know, you didn't make an intentional decision about it in advance.

SPEAKER_00

Exactly. And so your anxieties and perfectionism is driving everything in the organization or in your individual task lists. And so what I do is I go in there and I talk about let's do some exercises where we start to put these tasks into buckets to essentially um prioritize, and then you're going to purposefully do things in an emphasis B way where you typically would want to do them emphasis A. Right. That is camouflaged exposure therapy.

SPEAKER_03

I know it's hard to do that. That's pretty cool. No, I well, the question that occurs to me is you know, I think about all the I think about the companies that I've worked with in the past. Um, you know, I spent a decade doing corporate facilitation, you know, from from engineers to CEOs and everything else. And I think about like what are the things that we processed when we, you know, because uh the experien experiential methodologies is ultimately this microcosm environment. Let's give you a problem to solve and let's watch how you solve it.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

And let's talk about the the the problems you experience, the frustration, how does that translate to your work world? What are some solutions that you have for for adjusting your culture so this works better, right? And I'm having a hard time thinking of a place where you know this approach that you're talking about doesn't fit.

SPEAKER_00

I exactly.

SPEAKER_03

I mean, honestly.

SPEAKER_00

I know because it fits at the individual level and what are organizations, just a bunch of individuals, right? And so I've seen this. I've seen this work in my therapy office tremendously. And I'm like, why would this not translate? Of course it translates, right?

The Emphasis A‑B‑C Framework

SPEAKER_03

Well, I mean, you're also talking about beh- I mean, you're talking about human behavioral stuff, obviously. And sometimes you have people unable to manage conflicts. Sometimes there's personality, you know, divides that happen within an organization. But in many ways, they're they're they're kind of like you say, they're this values misalignment. And it's almost if you go in, if you go into a conflict model, you know, conflict model looks pretty close to the model you're talking about. You've got you've got, you know, collaborative approach conflict resolution approaches, you've got avoidant conflict, you know, it's like and you know, either I'm gonna force my way and get my way, yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna negotiate some kind of middle middle in-between, or I'm gonna avoid the problem entirely. Like you're talking about the same model, essentially.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, well, yours is more of an interpersonal model, right? And that is something I talk about in the book. I get into this when I really talk about in my world, we call that assertiveness training, right? Like how do you how do you interact with people in a way that doesn't cost you too much social capital, but also makes you feel like you're self-respecting, right? How do you how do you compromise? How do you do things that don't cost you too much, but also don't cost you in your self-worth? And this is very much related to kind of what you're describing. And yeah, it's again another way of translating what I see in the clinical world into an organizational setting. And in this particular example, what you're describing very well could have originated in the in the corporate world and has influenced the clinical world in the other direction, because I I I do think that there's a back and forth between what, you know, quote unquote the real world and the non in the clinical world, right?

SPEAKER_03

Well, and I, you know, you got to speak to uh working with individuals not only suffering from OCD, but also on the spectrum at our conference, um, and talked about some approaches that we're interested in, including the use of AI, uh, and and the this interpersonal measure that goes into the rigidity and some of the OCD and everything else. We see that in organizational environments. We definitely do. And I and I think we're seeing a lot more, honestly. Like I think we're seeing a culture of people, we're seeing, you know, millennials and all the gins, down from down from Gen X, of course. We're perfect.

SPEAKER_00

Right. Can't beat that generation.

SPEAKER_03

No, you can't beat that generation, leave those guys alone. Right. Um, but all the you know, all these folks are coming out, and there's, you know, we could talk about screens and we're talking about anxiety, and we could talk about all these kind of conditions, and they take them into the work world, and you see all these problems arising that are behavioral, but they're all rooted in a lot of this stuff, which is you know, a person, a person has a values alignment, and and they and I here's a good ex here's a great example, I think, that we see in the world, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about this, but um gender identity. Yes, you've you've you've got a large component of our of our society that's you know very offended the moment that they get you know misgendered, deadnamed, um, you know, slighted ultimately in any way. And and a lot of what I see at least, and I'm not a person who struggles with this. I have a very personal connection to this topic myself because I have family members who are trans. Um, but the the thing that happens for them is they don't they don't experience the world in the same way. I'm thankful for that because it looks very hard. Right. Um, they don't experience the world as constantly uh assaulting them, yeah, as constantly offending them and trying to make the world. In fact, I have clients right now that you know the their orientation, the world needs to understand me. And if they don't validate me, then it's for naught. You know, that they they go pretty far down into these dark holes with that stuff.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

And it's like, okay, there's perfectionism in there.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, yeah. I agree. And I very much appreciate you bringing up very light topics today, very non-charged.

SPEAKER_03

I told you this wasn't a gotcha interview. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00

Okay, Katie Couric, are you trying to cancel both of us at the same time?

SPEAKER_03

Um I'm not saying people should be misgendered. I'm not opposing that at all. I'm just playing with you.

SPEAKER_00

Uh, it actually dovetails very nicely into another area of perfectionism that I think is misunderstood and underappreciated, which is people with perfectionistic tendencies get hyper-focused on rules and at the expense of sometimes the underlying principles on which those rules are based. Meaning they get rigid around things needing to be done a certain way because they quote unquote should be that way. And they sort of approach rules as universal truths, right? But often they lose sight of the principles that underlie those rules. I always give a really dumb example of this, right? So you're at the dumb examples.

SPEAKER_03

I need them.

Exposure In Disguise For Organizations

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Well, you're you're at the community pool. It's summertime. I know it's hard because it's winter right now, but imagine you're at the summer uh summer pool or the community pool in the summer, and you see a kid drowning, and you look to your right, and the lifeguards are, you know, flirting with each other as they do and not paying attention. And you look to the left and the parents are on their cell phones not paying attention as they do, and you're like, oh crap, this is up to me. So you start running towards the pool and you look down and you decide to let the kid drown. And someone comes up to you afterwards and says, Why the hell did you do that? You could have saved that kid. And the person says, or you say, Oh, I'm sorry, I ate within 30 minutes, and it says no swimming within 30 minutes of eating. Right? Right there on the rules. And now first of all, there's no running.

SPEAKER_03

There was no running, and I wasn't.

SPEAKER_00

There's no running, so I I I ambled up to the pool and walked. Um, yeah, there's so you know, first of all, I have to explain that sometimes pools have rules that say you can't eat before going in the pool within 30 minutes. Because apparently, and I learned this from the Red Cross, that rule is totally bow bogus. That is a a totally mythical, like that is not true. They apparently they don't want you to cramp up and drown, but Red Cross says that that's bogus. Anyway, so feel free to eat as many people.

SPEAKER_03

Really, they just don't want you to have they don't want you to. There was another one. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00

Um and so, but the idea here is that there's a rule that you so rigidly followed that you lost sight of the principle on which that rule was based. The principle there is public safety, right? Or or the the value is public safety. And the principle is let's all be safe in the community pool, right?

SPEAKER_03

Let's help others if they're in need, right? You know.

SPEAKER_00

And the the but what did you do when you let the kid drown? Well, you completely violated that value and that principle. So you were so adherent to this rule that you actually violated the principle that served to create that rule in the first place. And so I know it's a really dumb example, but it illustrates what I'm trying to explain because I see this everywhere.

SPEAKER_03

And the other thing is that the person probably thinks that you know, don't go in the pool before 30 minutes of eating. That's the value. They've missed they've misplaced them.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. Exactly. They get hyper focused on that rule, or they believe that that is the unspoken truth about reality that needs to that somehow it cannot be broken. It's as, you know, and that's the problem, is that's not how the world works. Rules are suggestions, and I'm not saying we should get rid of rules, right? But rules don't always make the most sense. And people have done a ton of research on this looking at that uh, you know, the classic problem of would you steal medicine to save your wife? You know, it's stealing, it's quote unquote illegal. It's not quote unquote illegal, it is illegal, right? You're taking someone else's property. Is that morally wrong? Maybe, but you're saving your wife. Is that permissible? And so it's this classic question. And the the problem is that people on the spectrum, for example, or people with perfectionism that get really rigid, or people with OCD that get really rigid, they sometimes have a really hard time and they get stuck on these rules and they can't act on the principles, especially when they violate those rules. And what makes it even worse is when they project those standards onto other people.

SPEAKER_03

So if you they start expecting them, you know, the same behavior, right?

SPEAKER_00

So you are walking around telling people that they need to be at work on time, and instead you see it as they need to be work at exactly at seven o'clock. And if they show up at 701 and you're policing them, you're not gonna make a lot of friends, right? And you're missing the point. What if that person had a flat tire and they made it in at 701? That's pretty damn good.

SPEAKER_03

You know what I mean? Early's the new late, right? So whatever.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, whatever, right. And so you're walking around policing people on moralistic and rigid morals. Like you're you're gonna have a really hard time in a culture like that keeping people, and you're gonna have a hard time making friends.

Rules, Principles, And Values

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. And I think that you also, you know, in the in the world where a person may not be in management, um, but they're they're experiencing these challenges. They end up what I'm seeing, this is this is interesting to me. Um, I think I honestly, and you probably you may or may not know of Jordan Peterson, and I'm not trying to promote the guy or anything like that. Yeah. Um, but you know, he and the trans folks got they've gotten into it. Um and I and I yeah, well, he and he says this. And he's not wrong, because he says the same thing that you and I just talked about, which is you know, when you start observing rules in in you know, without looking at the greater picture, you know, it's like we're gonna force everyone to to observe, you know, gender. When you know you've got to you've got to observe a person's gender. It's like if you make rules about people having to say things or do things like this, that's actually dictatorial, and you're establishing a dictatorial environment. He's not wrong. Like you're misplacing the the the spirit of what we need to do, which is accept people and do all these things. But what is his response is, if you see these exchanges that he has, is that he's a complete jerk. I mean, he he comes at them with this like, and you are not analytical enough to be seeing the root of your problem. And he he actually gives them a response while not inaccurate from the spirit of it and the delivery of it and everything else, lands utterly flat and disenfranchises everybody that he's talking to.

SPEAKER_00

Well, hypocritical because he's doing the very thing that he's blaming them for, right? He's getting stuck on his moral crusade and he's not uh right.

SPEAKER_03

Right, right. He's like, You're not looking at the entire problem. I can't even talk to you, you're so dysregulated. You know, he's just he's dissing this person. He's a psychologist. I'm like, dude, you're a jerk, is what you are.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's the kind of self-righteousness and sanctimony that I think people can look like when they're getting stuck on on these moral rules, right?

SPEAKER_03

And so we get this almost a cacophony of of of these reactions in our world that's happening. I you know, I can imagine that in an organization that just that tanks production really quickly. Yeah, you can't get anywhere, you can't get anything done, right? Right.

SPEAKER_00

Well, because so how do you what's the big one of the biggest stressors in any environment is going to be interpersonal dynamics, right? And and right interpersonal stress.

SPEAKER_03

So what's the you know, and with a little bit of time we have, I'm sure we spend a lot of time on this topic because I'm super curious about it. Um, and I love to hear about the work that you're doing with organizations and people in general. But you know, when you when we talk about interpersonal dynamics, if we come if we approach it this frame that you've named, what's the intervention in a social dynamic, in a social environment, say in a work environment? What is the intervention for folks like that? Um and for the or the culture? Like how would you approach that?

SPEAKER_00

Well, a lot of it then comes back to how to dress up evidence-based cognitive favor therapy approaches. So to come full circle, a lot of the work that I'll do on these things like rules versus principles versus values and being careful with approaching people in a moralistic way and how to do so differently and approaching it from an assertive framework. A lot of it is based on CBT and some of the things we do in, for example, acceptance and commitment therapy or in cognitive therapy, where we break down assumptions about how the world works, right?

SPEAKER_03

And rapid resolution. I mean, there's a little rapid resolution, sounds like there's some of that as well.

SPEAKER_00

Right. And so it really comes down to helping people change their worldview. And sometimes you do that through behavior, and sometimes you do that through Socratic questioning and teaching them a different framework. And so everything that I do in organizations stems from the work that we do in the therapy office. It just isn't called that because I think it's not necessarily the same. I'm not treating disorders, so to speak, and I'm not, you got to approach this a little bit more delicately because this is a you know a work setting and it needs to be palatable for groups, not just individuals, right? And so, but I will sneakily put in evidence-based, right? Because when we talk about control, I talk about a control a whole lot because I think a lot of perfectionism is this misperception that there's more control than there really is. And what is the one of the best approaches for dealing with misperceptions of control? Acceptance and commitment therapy, right? And approaching things from a cognitive diffusion standpoint. Now, I'm getting jargony, but the idea is how do you help people separate themselves from their thoughts and understand that just because you have a thought and a belief doesn't mean that it's reality and that it's not you necessarily.

SPEAKER_03

People have to be coached into practicing mentalization, essentially, thinking about their thinking. Like, you know, it's like, okay, let's break this down a little bit, shall we?

SPEAKER_00

All those metacognitive strategies and the thinking about your thinking and acceptance and seeing things that you can and being able to figure out what can I control here and what can't I control? And how do I try to control the things I can.

SPEAKER_03

You know what Socrates called it.

SPEAKER_00

What did Socrates call it?

SPEAKER_03

They or they called it about Socrates' methodologies. They called it Socratic midwifery.

SPEAKER_00

Ah, Socratic midwifery.

SPEAKER_03

Interesting. You you you birth a new perspective from a person's misaligned thoughts and values by asking them a series of questions. You you you birth them into a new That's interesting. I mean, I know Socratic questions. Socratic midwifery, which is a look that up sometimes. You'll you'll enjoy it. Um Dr. Chasson, uh, it has been a real pleasure. I always enjoy talking to you, but thanks for taking time to be on the show.

SPEAKER_00

Thanks for having me. And appreciate some of the the Katie Kirk questions. Those were awesome.

SPEAKER_03

Right, right. You know, I told you it wasn't a gotcha interview, but it was really a setup. So this has been Todd Weatherly on Head Inside Mental Health with Dr. Greg Chasson, WPBM 1037, the voice of Ashville. Greg, you think absolutely.

Assertiveness And Culture Change

SPEAKER_01

I think that the penalty, the pick, I think I picked up it, I've been up, I've been up on the pen, I've been up, I've been so on the last pick, he has to fly away, oh, I want to so long, need to find our way home. I'll be so lonely elastic, he asked me, need to fall away. Oh my home, I want I'll feel so lonely, elasticity, he asked me I need to fall away home, fall by home.