A perfectionist conversation in action:

Hi! 

How are you? 

Me? 

Yes you. How are you? 

I’m good. 

No, really. How are YOU? 

How often have you had this conversation with someone?

Was it you who insisted on an honest response? Or was it a close friend, loved one or colleague who called you out on your canned response? 

We are sooooo conditioned to show the world everything is finnnneeee.

When most of the time what’s fine is actually a hot-mess that we’d like a whole lot of advice on how to handle and about a bottle of wine’s worth of venting time with your closest friend. Am-I-right?! Gimme a heck yeah!!

So why are we so buttoned down, bottled up and canned to respond in a way that shows absolutely nothing about our actual lives?

Let’s play a guessing game…is it because:

  1. – There’s fear about what people will think. 
  2. – We are the only ones with this problem. 
  3. – Problems should remain a secret. 
  4. – No one cares about us. 
  5. – We just don’t want to deal with it? 
  6. – There’s no solution so why talk about it? 
  7. – We are too stressed to arrange any coherent thoughts. 
  8. – Perhaps we will get in trouble if anyone else finds out. 
  9. – We want to appear perfect or look cool. 
  10. – There’s other ways of dealing with life’s problems beside talking about them. 

I could go on but will stop there. Do you get my drift on why we choose to give our fake ‘I’m fine’ or ‘Everything is great’ response to ‘How are you?’  

Stop living with a perfectionist mentality.

Do not live on auto-pilot and give canned responses.

No one wants to have a conversation with a robot. Not when we call our cable company for customer support and not when we chat with our bestie. 

Be vulnerable. Let people in. Your honesty and openness allows you to make real connections with other people. You never know how you will end up impacting others when you actually start sharing your uniquely human experience. Perhaps they too are having a bad day or maybe they can help turn your day around. 

Now I’m not telling you to go around and share every awful detail about your life with every person on the planet. But be honest about how you respond the question – How are you? 

If you asked me this question as I’m writing this post I’d respond with – I’m actually a bit stressed today. (I have a few projects I want to push live  and timing is working against me at the moment.) 

There you have it – was that hard to read? Probably not!! Plus now you know that I have something special in the works…you’ll just have to keep following along to find out what it is. 

You will be asked this question at least a hundred times this week. Try your best to give an honest answer. You might get a funny faced response or you may end up opening a conversation that inspires you and the other person differently. 

Either way it’s a great opportunity to step outside your comfort zone while being less of a perfectionist.

Let me know how it goes! 

Jordanna

PS – if you’re still struggling with emotional eating moments and this is what’s getting you down then don’t forget to download your free copy now. –> HERE.