The Academic Imperfectionist

Do you often have thoughts like, 'I just need to finish X, then I can relax'? Except that when you finish X, you still can't relax, because along comes another obligation - and before you know it, you're face-to-face with burnout. If that's you, you're not alone, and you're not incompetent. You're simply approaching your work in a way that has served you well ever since you were a kid: finish your homework now, play later. That approach is not serving you any more, but it's hard to move on because it's part of your identity. Who even are...

We all have that one person, don't we, whose success makes us painfully aware of our own shortcomings? A person who serves as a reminder of all the great things we could have been, but aren't. Hearing news of their latest achievement is liable to ruin our entire day, as we rush headlong into reflecting on how flawed and disappointing we are. But what if it's not that simple? What if the reason that person is doing so well is not because they're better than you, but because the two of you have different values, and therefore different priorities...

Yeah, okay, clickbaity title, but I really do want to share with you a helpful way of reframing perfectionism that I've been thinking about recently. Perfectionism happens when our lack of confidence in our ability to succeed meets our lack of knowledge about what success requires. Overcoming it requires filling in the gaps in our knowledge and finding constructive ways to respond to our lack of confidence. How do we do this? Well, by thinking about what we do when we're hungry, and also by thinking about getting wedged in an unground tunnel. Hear me out.

Do you ever worry that you're not serious enough for academia? That you're constantly playing whack-a-mole with hiding your many frivolous and unimpressive traits as you try to convince everyone that you deserve your place at the table? That you're a big old fake because you need to curate yourself so much in order to seem like you belong? If so, you're not alone - and it's not because you're flawed. It's because you're yet to uncover academia's dirty little secret: that it's just a job. If you can get your head around that, life will be much less...

You know how, when teaching finishes for the summer, you feel all-powerful and end up vastly over-estimating how much you'll be able to get done before the new academic year? And, have you ever noticed that the opposite happens once term starts up again: you're overwhelmed, you panic because you don't think you're going to manage to do everything, but then you surprise yourself and it's all fine in the end? Yeah, well, there's a reason for that. Join your imperfectionist pal for a speculative little dive into the psychology of perception, and some ideas about how you can...

Binary thinking is that horrible all-or-nothing approach that holds us back by convincing us that any positive change we consider will inevitably lead to disaster. You know the sort of thing: 'I should be more assertive, but if I try, I'll end up being an arrogant psychopath who everyone hates', or 'I should get out for a walk every day, but if I do, I will neglect all my duties and get fired', or 'If I show compassion towards myself I will give up and stop trying and never get anywhere in life'. If you catch yourself doing the...

We all know how hard you have to work to sit down and write. You'll do pretty much anything to avoid it. Have you ever noticed, though, that avoiding your writing is no less exhausting than just bloody doing it? Weird, right? Well, actually, not weird - at least, not when you understand how hard your poor, anxious brain is having to work to trick you into getting your words down. You care deeply about your writing - that's why you're so worried about getting it right. Yet, lots of the most well-known writing advice focuses on convincing you...

Are you frustrated with yourself because you just can't get on with the work you care most about? Do you find it easier to make progress with emails and marking than to get your writing done? Is your procrastination out of control? Are you just unbelievably lazy?

Take a pause, my friend. There's a reason why you struggle to make progress on the important things, and it's not what you think. Tasks like writing are complicated, and require a ton of decision-making in order to make progress. That's exhausting, but it becomes impossible if you refuse to...

Is it bad to be called lazy? Prince Harry thinks so: in his memoir, he suggests that it's better to called racist than lazy. But even if you wouldn't go that far, I'm willing to bet that you care deeply about not being viewed as lazy. Perhaps you've worked when you should have taken a sick day, said yes to things that you knew were a bad idea, or pushed yourself to burnout - all to avoid the L word.

If you've ever thought you might be lazy, you're in great company. Plenty of high achievers think...

Be honest. You're here because you think you completely suck at self-control, aren't you? You're constantly disappointing yourself, and it's getting you down. The people around you seem to be able to get on with things - but you find it impossible, for some reason. And, by 'for some reason', you mean 'because I'm a terrible person'.

Help is at hand, my beautifully flawed friend. You've been hoodwinked about self-control. It's likely that you're actually much better at it than you think, and that the reason you think you're terrible at it is because you're taking an...

You know what frailty is, and you definitely want to avoid it. But have you heard of emotional frailty? No, of course not - I've just made it up. But if you've ever felt like you're completely winning at life, and then some tiny little setback knocks you sideways, leaving you wondering what's wrong with you and why you suddenly can't cope, emotional frailty is to blame. Emotional frailty is invisible, it's dangerous - and often, the culture around us encourages us to do exactly the sorts of things that exacerbate it. It's time to fight back. Your Imperfectionist...

You're a good person. You try to be a good friend, a good colleague, and a good neighbour. You care about other people, you pull your weight, and you don't let anyone down. But, sometimes, you feel you're not enough. You're exhausted, but taking time for yourself means doing wrong by somebody else. You feel like you need to destroy yourself just to avoid being a bad person.

If this sounds familiar, you're not crazy or inadequate. The problem is that you've constructed a moral framework that unfairly burdens you, and you don't even realise, because on...

What comes to mind when you think about willpower? Discipline? Self-denial? Overcoming your weak, useless, lazy self? Exhausting, right? Thankfully, there's another way, and this episode's guest is here to take you there. Dr Dana Klisanin is a psychologist and one of Forbes's 50 leading female futurists. She's a researcher, an author, an artist, a TEDx speaker, and the founder of ReWilding: Lab, where she explores the untapped potential of human-nature connection to improve health and wellbeing, and to help us live more sustainably. She sat down with me to talk about how a fulfilling life needn't involve fighting and...

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your willingness to say nice things about yourself? How about your willingness to point out your own failures and shortcomings? If the first number you came up with is higher than the second, then move along, my friend - this episode can do nothing for you. Gather round, the rest of you. You've been taught all your life that modesty and humility are virtues. But, would you know if your self-deprecation had gone too far? Could your toxic humility be holding you back? And if it is, so what? Better...

Do you get up every day and tear around trying to get stuff done, and yet still end up feeling overwhelmed and frustrated at your lack of progress? There's something very simple - so simple, in fact, that you're going to feel cheated and frankly furious as soon as I tell you what it is - that you can do to get more done and feel less frantic. Now, I know you don't have time to listen to this episode because YOU SHOULD BE WRITING, but trust me on this one. Get the kettle on, take a break, and...

I know how committed you are to self-improvement. Self-improvement is a good thing, right? Well, it depends. If you're motivated to improve yourself because you don't like yourself as you are, then perhaps it's not as wholesome as you thought. But how do you tell whether you're doing the wholesome sort of self-improvement or the unwholesome sort? What even is the right sort of self-improvement? Step off your upward trajectory for a moment, friend, and let your Imperfectionist friend here decipher all this for you.

Find the 5 whys exercise here. 

If you thought you knew everything about procrastination, prepare to be humbled. Professor Wendelien van Eerde is a psychologist who has spent her entire career understanding procrastination, motivation, and time management, and helping people work more effectively. She swung by Imperfectionist Towers to share her knowledge and help troubleshoot your productivity woes. You're going to hear all about how your tendency to procrastinate depends on your personality traits, your age, how nice you are to yourself, the sort of task you're trying to do, whether anyone knows what you're doing, and more. You'll also pick up some tips about...

What's coaching, what's the difference between coaching and therapy, is a coach going to tell me what to do, what happens in a coaching session, how many coaching sessions should I have, how often should I have them, how do I choose a coach ... I get asked these questions (and more) a lot by new coaching clients. So, here I am, putting all my answers in one place. Hit play, and find out everything you never realised you needed to know about what goes on behind closed (online) doors at Academic Imperfectionist Towers!

Book a coaching session...

Ever wondered how your Imperfectionist friend here got from academic philosophy to coaching? Lots of coaching clients have asked this over the years, so here I am, with an episode to bring you up to speed. I'll tell you all about how it's thanks to COVID that I ended up coaching, how the podcast was born because I realised I was incapable of uttering sentences like 'Would you allow me to offer you a powerful and transformative coaching experience?', and how I came to see that philosophical ideas don't need to be true to be effective weapons against...

Do you massively over-estimate how much you can accomplish in any period of time? Do you struggle to work out how long it's going to take you to complete a particular project? Friend, same. Don't worry, though, because there are some well-recognised psychological reasons for that, and plenty of advice too. There's just one problem: when it comes to projects that are linked to your sense of self-worth, time management is even trickier, and the usual strategies might not cut it. Luckily for you, your imperfect buddy is here to throw you a lifeline.

Here's a helpful...

If only you spent more time working and less time procrastinating, your life would be so much better. Right? Friend, I know how you feel, but it's not that simple. Some forms of procrastination actually help us get our work done, while some forms of work are just a waste of your time. In fact, I've come to realise that the very idea of procrastination is pretty unhelpful, and it can stand in the way of understanding why we struggle to make progress, and how to fix it. In this episode, I'm going to share with you a more...

Do you ever feel that, unless you achieve the things you think you should be achieving, you'll cease to exist? That you'll fade away, become invisible, fail to be a fully-realised human? If so, you're in good company. For many of us, living a fulfilling life is inextricably linked with achievement, striving, productivity, winning.

I'm not here to tell you not to care about achievement. But I am going to tell you that you're wrong if you think that the only life worth living is a life that prioritises achievement. And not only do I have Aristotle i...

Do you struggle to make sense of the jumble of attitudes you have towards your career? Perhaps you feel overlooked despite the fact that you've just been given a job. Perhaps you're striving to do well and hoping to get noticed while at the same time feeling resentful of the whole process, and critical of yourself for engaging in it. And, if you do feel these things, do you also attack yourself by telling yourself that you've got nothing to complain about, or that you're imagining things, or that you're irrational? Friend, I've heard it all before, and despite...

'Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement', James Clear tells us in Atomic Habits. But what if you don't have the right habits - or at least, not yet? And how do you motivate yourself to do the thing for the 21 days that, according to legend, are required in order to establish a habit unless you already have the habit?

With all this talk of the importance of habits, you'd be forgiven for thinking that without the habits, there's no hope for you. But, in fact, motivation without habits is easier than you might think. You just n...

You've done the coaching and the therapy, you've read the books, you've listened to the podcasts - and finally, you can accept that you're just as worthy as the next person! You belong here! You can stand up, take up space, and be proud! You can stop carrying all that anxiety, fear, and shame! Except ... nobody told your anxiety, fear, and shame. You feel just as uncertain as you ever did. And, to make things worse, you now also feel like an irrational mess, because if all those insights you've made about yourself haven't made any difference, perhaps you're...

You know all the advice about ignoring your inner critic, avoiding comparisons, and giving yourself credit for your achievements. But you can't shake the sense that the real you is something shameful, something you need to keep hidden at all costs, and that those people who say nice things about you would be horrified if they knew what you were really like. 

Friend, you've got Real You all wrong. The fact that there are parts of you that you'd hate to share with others doesn't make you wrong, or an impostor, or shameful. According to the sociologist Er...

Ah, the sabbatical. Getting one is like hitting the jackpot, right? All your problems would melt away if you had one. You'd go into it a frazzled, anxious, burnt out mess, and emerge serene, rested, and with a few dazzling additions to your CV. In fact, you'd be so sorted if you got a sabbatical that it's probably never occurred to you that you might need some hand-holding through the process.

Enter our guest for this episode, Bethany Wilinski, Associate Professor at Michigan State University, sabbatical coach, and host of the Sabbatical 101 podcast. Bethany's own sabbatical experience t...

What's your reaction when your inner critic tells you that what you're doing is not good enough? If you think she's right, and that it's only thanks to her that you're getting anything done at all, you're not alone. But while you're busy listening to your inner critic, you're overlooking the fact that she's not helping you. In fact, she's making things worse. She's so greedy and impatient to get more from you that she's hurting your ability to get things done. She's killing your productivity, just like the farmer killed the goose that laid the golden eggs in...

Do you know how writing is supposed to feel when it's going well? If you're anything like I was a few years ago, you have some pretty bizarre ideas here, involving things like hours on end of laser-sharp flow, iron-clad willpower to resist distractions, and a mind that is drawn towards lofty ideas instead of flighty nonsense. The fact that my actual experiences with writing didn't remotely resemble this fantasy was, in my mind, due to my many shameful shortcomings. I'm not like that now, and my writing goes a lot better as a result. In large part, that's...

Are you entitled? If not, you should be. No, not like that. I'm not talking about over-entitlement, which these days seems to be what people mean when they talk about entitlement. We don't hear so much about under-entitlement: people who allow themselves to be short-changed by life because they don't realise they should be getting more. Or, rather, we do hear about this, but we don't talk about it using the language of entitlement. Does that matter? Yes, it does, because thinking of 'entitlement' as a dirty word is holding you back. 

Focus your attention on what you can control. That's what the Stoics taught us. But if you're someone who responds to every bad outcome with guilt-filled 'If only I'd ...' thoughts, you might be overestimating how much lies within your control. Don't worry - we can fix that. Grab a cuppa and sit down with your Imperfectionist friend for the first solo episode of 2025.

You can find the Wheel of Life exercise here, and the Core Values exercise here.

Have you ever wondered whether Stoicism might help you manage the stresses of modern life and find peace and satisfaction despite things being far more imperfect that you'd like? Have you ever wondered what Stoicism even is, other than a source of motivational poster slogans and the inspiration for 4-minute-read online articles called things like 'Use These 3 Stoic Hacks to Put Out Your Bin Fire of a Life'? You have? Then this is the episode for you. I interview my colleague, Professor John Sellars, who is not only a scholar of Stoicism, but is also devoted to helping people...

Friends, you are going to feel so SEEN in this episode. Kate Ahl is an integrative psychotherapist who has spent her entire life living and working with academics. She spent several years as an in-house therapist at Cambridge University, where she helped researchers and other university staff work through their emotional and interpersonal challenges. You might think your struggles are uniquely weird and shameful - but Kate has seen it all before, and she's here to give her compassionate, insightful take on why things are so hard and what to do about it. 

Find out more about K...

I know you love nattering about your research with your fellow nerds. But do you know how to talk about it with normal people too - without sending them to sleep or bombarding them with jargon? If this is something you'd like to be able to do but you're terrified by the idea and/or you don't know where to start, this episode is for you. My guest this week is Tony Stubblebine, CEO of the huge blogging platform, Medium. He has smart, interested, curious readers who are dying to know what you're up to, and he thinks there's...

Professor Stephanie Dunson is an award-winning scholar with over 20 years' experience as a writing process expert under her belt. She holds positions at Yale School of Management and the University of Connecticut's Department of English - and if you're thinking, 'Wow, that's quite a mix of disciplines!', that's because Stephanie's understanding of the process and practice of writing truly transcends disciplines. Come to think of it, it transends academia too: not only does Stephanie help academics, she also helps people in business use writing as tool to unlock insight and creativity. If you think of writing merely as...

Do you know how to turn what you're interested in thinking about into something that other people want to read about? Do you even know what you're interested in, as opposed to what you think you should be interested in? Do you recognise that boredom and feeling lost are necessary and unavoidable parts of the research process, and that you can use them to your advantage? Do you know how to tap into your unique strengths and produce writing that's original and insightful? Do you realise that perfection is not only unattainable, but also - and this was a...

Friends, it's the 100th episode! So, isn't it about time we talked about what perfectionism is, and why it's a problem? It's over 4 years since I recorded the first episode of this podcast, and I've learnt a LOT about perfectionism from the 99 episodes I've released so far - not to mention from the many hundreds of hours of coaching people I've done. Leave that unfinished project, that untidy desk, and that incomplete task list, and join your old imperfectionist friend for some perfection-related truth bombs.

It's a familiar story. We're feeling stuck and out-of-our-depth with our writing, so we decide we'll go and do a bit more reading - just, you know, to soak up some of the wisdom out there and become better informed and therefore better qualified to continue writing. But sadly, reading for these reasons ends up making us feel less informed and qualified, not more. Sometimes, when we're stuck, we need to write, not read. And when we do read, we need to have an agenda. We need to know exactly why we're reading. Step away from the library card, an...

When I came across Dr Debbie Sorensen's recent article, 'How to recover from burnout', I knew I had to get her on the podcast! Debbie is a Denver-based psychologist with nearly 20 years of clinical experience, specialising in burnout, chronic stress, and anxiety. Her own struggle with burnout, along with her experience helping others, make her an absolute goldmine of insight and actionable strategies that you can apply to your own life. Stop fantasising about how today is the day you'll finally catch up on everything, get the kettle on, and settle down to listen to what Debbie has to...

What do you do when you have no idea? When you literally can't think of anything to write about? I don't know why I'm asking. I already know the answer: you panic and run to your favourite productivity websites for a new hack to solve it, right? And you definitely, definitely don't tell anyone, because struggling to come up with ideas is a shameful secret that you must guard with your very life. 

Friend, step away from the productivity hacks. Having no idea is something we've all experienced. It's even - hear me out - a completely nor...