When perfectionism gets sneaky

Daily Landscapes

In this new video, I share personal stories and introduce the unexpected members of what I call the Perfectionist Family.

How did I come up with this theme?

It started quite calmly, on a short family break last year, early morning in a hotel room, my journal with me. I found myself reflecting on an old (and still a bit shameful) career experience: I had people-pleased like crazy, diving into a new role with excitement but also with ice-cold fear and unaddressed perfectionist tendencies lurking in the background. I hadn’t yet faced them, so they came into full force to haunt me.

The more I journaled away, the more I realised something: perfectionism doesn’t show up in one way. It’s not just about wanting things to be flawless (Anyone else cringe at the word?). Sometimes, it shows up as procrastination, people-pleasing, indecision or that familiar fear of not being enough.

So I thought I want to turn this wound into something creative. Like art therapy. I began sketching out a video idea – inspired by my love for Hotel Transylvania – and wrote a rough script with visual cartoon scribbles right there in that hotel room.

I then left it in the drawer for 6 months, not doing anything with it.

Funnily enough, in the meantime, I picked up Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection, which I highly recommend. Ironically, I haven’t finished it. Not because it wasn’t good – it’s great – but because I kept coming back to my version of the story. I wanted to tell it from my own experience.

So, bit by bit, in my spare time, I gathered images, developed the visual concept, refined the script.

The video is 13 minutes long, designed with a castle theme and visual images to convey the struggles with personal examples but hoping the overall themes and healing resonate. I used Adobe Firefly (an AI image tool that doesn't scrape artists' work) to generate the base images, then transformed them in Photoshop into a charcoal and muted beige style and occasional red accents.

It’s ironic that I was working on the Perfectionist Trap video in my spare time as it’s a passion project and guess what happened in the last 20% with the nitty gritty of combining the videos together, adding sounds, going over scenes I left blank or didn’t like. I reminded myself that I was literally making a video about this. 🪰🪰🪰

Take your own advice.

I stepped away, came back, kept going.

Healing, like creativity, is not linear.

if you had this habit for years, it’s not going away when you are facing it once.

These tendencies may be rooted in years of emotional patterns – people-pleasing, fear of failure, chronic self-doubt.

But with awareness, you can start noticing when these patterns show up. You can pause, acknowledge them, and try tools like tapping, body scans, or therapy to reduce their power.

And sometimes, wounds flare back up. The Universe is testing you. It’s messy, it’s infuriating and sometimes it feels like falling several steps back.

That’s okay.
You’re not broken.
You’re human.

Just remember:

It’s an inside job.

External quick fixes are just temporary relief. It’s plastering over our wounds and leaving us unhappy and still feeling trapped in the end.

The real shifts happen from within.

So, meet the Perfectionist Family (and How to Escape Them). I also share tools that go beyond a ‘I just need to fix my mindset’.

Thanks for reading.

💬 I’d love to know what resonated, if you sometimes have a party with perfection ‘friends’ showing up. Feel free to reply or comment.

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See you,

Chrissy