Brave, Not Perfect - Reshma Saujani

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This is the beginning of the road map that leads us off a path of regret and onto one where we fully express who and what we most want to be.

       The Origins of Perfectionism

      Where along the way did we trade in our confidence and courage for approval and acceptance? And why?

      The categorization of girls as pleasant and agreeable starts almost as soon as they’re born. Instinctually, whether we realize it or not, we ascribe certain expectations to infants we see in pink or blue; babies in pink are all sugar and spice, babies in blue are tough little men. But it turns out that we even make assumptions when there are no other telltale signs of gender. One study showed that when infants are dressed in a neutral color, adults tend to identify the ones who appear upset or angry as boys, and those they described as nice and happy as girls. The training begins before we’re even out of onesies.

      In girls, the drive to be perfect shows up and bravery shuts down somewhere around age eight—right around the time when our inner critic shows up. You know the one I’m talking about: it’s that nitpicking voice in your head that tells you every which way you aren’t as good as others . . . that you blew it . . . that you should feel guilty or ashamed . . . that you fucking suck (I don’t know about yours, but my inner critic can be a bit harsh).

      Catherine Steiner-Adair is a renowned clinical psychologist, school consultant, and research associate at Harvard Medical School. She works with hundreds of girls and young women across the country and has seen firsthand how devastating perfectionism can be.

      At around the age of eight, she says, kids start to see that ability and agility matter. “That’s the age when girls start to develop different interests, and they want to bond with others who do what they like to do. Along with that awareness of differences comes an inner sense of who and what is better.”

      This is also the age in which kids begin to be graded, ranked, and told their scores—whether it’s in soccer, math, or music, Steiner-Adair explains. “If you’re told you’re not as good, it requires a great deal of courage and self-esteem to try something. This sets the stage for getting a C means you’re bad at it, and you don’t like it. That feeds the lack of courage.”

      As girls get older, their radars sharpen. Around this age, they start to tune in when their moms compare themselves to others (“I wish I looked like that in jeans”) or talk about other girls or women critically (“She should not be wearing that”). Suddenly they’re caught up in this dynamic of comparison, and naturally redirect their radar inward to determine where they fall on the spectrum of pretty or not, bright or average, unpopular or adored.

      These impulses are so deeply ingrained in us as adults and parents that we don’t realize how much we inadvertently model them for our girls. Catherine shared a story from her own life that brought the point home. When her daughter was in third grade, she and some classmates overheard one mom say to another girl, “You have such pretty hair.” Some of the girls stopped dead in their tracks and furrowed their brows as if to wonder, So is my hair pretty or ugly? And so it begins.

       The Overpowering Need to Please

      Like most women, I was taught from an early age to be helpful, obedient, and care for other people’s needs, even to put them above my own. When my parents told me not to date until I was sixteen, I didn’t. When they said no makeup, or showing cleavage, or staying out past 10 p.m., I obeyed. I complied at all times with the behavior my family expected of me. In our Indian household, one greeted elders by touching their feet as a sign of respect; if I came home from school with a friend and found an older auntie there having tea, I would never dream of disrespecting my parents by not doing it, although I was mortified in front of my friend. At family dinners, my sister and I set and cleared the table, never questioning why our male cousins didn’t have to take a turn. Even though I would have much rather been outside playing with my friends, I always agreed to babysit my neighbor’s (bratty) kids. That’s just what helpful girls my age did.

      Thus began my lifelong mission to be the perfect daughter, the perfect girlfriend, the perfect employee, the perfect mom. In this I know I’m not alone. We go from yes-girls to yes-women, caught in a never-ending cycle of constantly having to prove our worth to others—and to ourselves—by being selfless, accommodating, and agreeable.

      A great example of how powerful the people-pleasing impulse can be comes from an experiment about lemonade. Yes, lemonade. ABC News, with the help of psychologist Campbell Leaper from the University of California, gave groups of boys and girls a glass of lemonade that was objectively awful (they added salt instead of sugar) and asked how they liked it. The boys immediately said, “Eeech . . . this tastes disgusting!” All the girls, however, politely drank it, even choked it down. Only when the researchers pushed and asked the girls why they hadn’t told them the lemonade was terrible did the girls admit that they hadn’t wanted to make the researchers feel bad.

      The need to please people often shows up in the way girls scramble to give the “right” answer. Ask a girl her opinion on a topic and she’ll do a quick calculation. Should she say what the teacher/parent/friend/boy is looking for her to say, or should she reveal what she genuinely thinks and believes? It usually comes down to whichever she thinks will be more likely to secure approval or affection.

      Girls are also far more likely than boys to say yes to requests even when they really want (and even need) to say no. Remember, being accommodating has been baked into their emotional DNA. When I ask girls what they do if a friend asks them to do her a favor they really don’t want or have time to do, nearly all say they would do it anyway. Why? Hallie, a freckle-faced fourteen-year-old, neatly summed it up with a “duh, that’s so obvious” shrug: “No one wants their friends to think she’s a bitch. I mean, no one.”

      The internal pressure to say yes only gets stronger as we grow up. Like Dina, who works long hours as an attorney but somehow felt guilted into agreeing to be her son’s class parent. So many of us give our time, attention, maybe even money, to people or causes that are not a priority to us because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings (mostly, though, because we don’t want them to think badly of us).

      Boys, and the men they become, rarely feel this way. Janet, a forty-four-year-old manager at a clothing store, cringes anytime she reads an email that her husband, a general contractor, sends for work because she thinks his directness sounds harsh. He bluntly asks for what he needs or states his opinion, never softens critical feedback, and signs his emails without any salutations. No “best wishes” or even “thanks.” When she once suggested he soften the tone of an email to a vendor he worked with so as to not piss him off, he told her, “It’s not my job to be liked. It’s my job to get my point across.”

      She, on the other hand, peppers her emails to her boss and coworkers with friendly lead-ins, praise, and, occasionally, a smiley face emoji. She reads over every email at least three times, editing and reediting it before she hits send. “My husband thinks I’m being neurotic when I do that,” Janet told me. “I think I’m being thorough. But if I’m being really honest, I’d say I’m being cautious so I don’t annoy or offend anyone.”

      I work with an executive coach who tells me all the time that being liked is overrated. She does not say this to the über-successful male CEOs she coaches; she doesn’t have to. After all, their role models are men like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos who are notorious for not being people pleasers, so they don’t give a damn whether they’re liked or not.

      Despite my coach’s urgings, I do worry about being liked. Running for office, especially in New York City, I built a pretty tough skin when it comes to public criticism. But on a day-to-day level, I care whether my team likes me. I care a lot. I want them to think I’m the most amazing boss they’ve ever had—which makes giving them critical feedback really hard. I do it, because I know I have to be the CEO, but ugh. In my personal life, I get completely twisted up inside if I have a disagreement with a friend or if I sense my parents or husband are upset with me. I’ve definitely spent nights worrying

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