Are you a perfectionist? Many of my clients are! They often don’t seem like they are perfectionists because they often procrastinate and don’t turn work in on time. But they are!

Check out this video, where I tell the story of a high school freshman, and how he and I are working to figure out how to identify the signs of stuckness, so he can get help sooner rather than later. This might seem like a straightforward task, but to a student with ADD who struggles with executive functions and awareness about his own actions, it can be really hard to identify you’re stuck in the first place!

List in to find out more about what we discovered together during our last session.

Hey there, don’t have time for the full video? No worries, I’ve got your back. Here’s a summary:

I’m curious if this is applicable to you. Do you spend to much time working on things? Do you procrastinate because you want to make sure things are done perfectly? And then when you do get started you obsess and dwell on sentences and paragraphs and you find you can’t move forward, and suddenly the evening is over without you being able to finish your homework, and now you’ll have to turn it in late. This perfectly describes one of my clients, a freshman in high school. In our most recent session, we had an interesting chat. He was working on a research project, which we had already talked through in the previous session, and he had found himself once again spiraling down into perfectionism. Instead of following the plan we had hammered out in the previous session, he was caught up in a variety of different topics that he thought connected and he wanted to include in the essay. He was stuck like this for about an hour. Then he realized he was completely off-topic and had wasted a huge chunk of time. So this last session we were talking about the signs of when he is stuck, and what to do about it.

Gretchen Wegner | The Anti-Boring Approach to Powerful Studying | Perfectionist | Perfectionism | Student | Homework | Essay |

For him, he knows he is stuck if one of the above 3 things are happening. If he finds he’s deleting things over and over, staying in one place for too long, or if he finds himself “in the flow” – which is what happened to him this last week. Once he identifies that he’s stuck, he should go and get help, whether that’s talking to his parents, texting me, talking with a friend, or just talking it out with someone. The beauty of this, as he realized this last week, is that when you talk to someone and talk out what you are stuck on, you often will find yourself realizing the answer to your problem. That’s why I always encourage my clients, “When in doubt, reach out.”

If this tip was helpful to you and you’d like others, make sure to check out my course, which has a variety of tips for people with all kinds of problems, whether you are a perfectionist, or just find yourself sidetracked a lot. Click here to learn more.