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Ready To Ditch Perfectionism? Read This.
What if wellness wasn’t about checking things off a list and instead about focusing on how you want to feel? That’s the approach Robyn Conley Downs takes in her book, The Feel Good Effect: Reclaim Your Wellness By Creating Small Shifts That Create Big Change, and it’s one that we can easily get behind.
Rather than reaching for an ideal or something outside of yourself, Robyn is all about connecting with your truth and leading a life that feels the most authentic to you. We spoke with Robyn about all things mindset and how it impacts our health—getting into the details of how perfectionism actually inhibits our performance and how striving can get in the way of real success.
Read on for Robyn’s game-changing insights that’ll shift how you think about success, plus her advice for avoiding the comparison spiral.
B3 MAG: We’d love to know more about the name of your book (and podcast!), The Feel Good Effect. Could you share why your work is focused on this intention?
ROBYN: In retrospect, it’s very clear to me that so much of my effort in life was directed toward how things looked versus how they felt. But along my journey, I’ve learned how much clarity comes from centering your efforts around how you want to feel and aligning your actions with that intention.
Through my experience practicing this mindset, I’ve learned how much more purpose it gives you. Focusing on feeling good helps you become better equipped to avoid the pitfalls of perfectionism, comparison, and all-or-nothing thinking, while also helping you avoid burnout when it comes to things like wellness and movement.
B3 MAG: We’re constantly fed messaging that tells us that we need to push ourselves to live healthy and productive lives, but there’s a disconnect between that message and experiencing its promised results. How does The Feel Good Effect approach differ?
ROBYN: If you take a step back and look at what’s going on, a lot of us approach wellness as another form of productivity. And when wellness gets confused with productivity, it can quickly turn into another thing to get done, another impossible standard to reach, or about checking things off an already-full to-do list. In this scenario, ask yourself what’s the real outcome or the end goal? What are you optimizing for when you’re approaching it with that lens? The outcome always results in starving for more, while ironically feeling like it’s never enough.
But when you can reframe things, focusing on how you feel and how you want to feel—rather than what people say you should do, or jumping from one fitness trend to another—that’s how you reclaim your wellness. You reclaim your wellness when you follow what’s in alignment for yourself.
B3 MAG: How did you come to a place of knowing what was enough for you?
ROBYN: It’s a process, and it’s never something that’s fully answered. It’s a daily question, but when I start from that place of how I want to feel and identify the actions, habits, and routines that align with that, I move toward that place of enough. It’s very personal, so what works for me, and how I know what enough looks like and feels like, is going to be different for someone else.
In the book, I write about the 80/20 rule, which is the principle that 20 percent of your daily actions or habits yield 80 percent of your results. When you align how you want to feel with the actions that take you there, then you’re able to strip away a lot of what doesn’t matter.
It’s a simple but radical process, and it’s also counter to what we’ve been taught explicitly and what we’ve internalized implicitly. We have to unlearn and then relearn, and it’s the unlearning that can be challenging, but that’s so worth the effort.
BARRE3: One place where perfectionism can show up in our lives is in our workouts and fitness habits. How do perfectionist tendencies and all-or-nothing thinking limit our growth and success in exercise and fitness?
ROBYN: My guess is that if you haven’t felt success in fitness, it’s because of these mindsets. That’s what the research shows and that’s what we’ve witnessed in our own work. Barre3 is so unique, because it has a lot of mechanisms that help counteract these ways of thinking baked right into the workout and program. For example, encouraging modifications. In a typical exercise program, you may be asked to do something exactly like your instructor, but doing that can bring about those perfectionist tendencies. When you provide an empowering modification, you’re offering an option that may feel better for someone’s body or energy level.
Here’s another example: Say you’re just getting started with fitness and you want to start a new exercise program. Maybe you feel like you have to do it every single day and for a whole hour, otherwise it won’t be effective. That’s a combination of perfectionism and all-or-nothing thinking. You can sustain that for an average of 14 days, and when you can’t do it anymore, you feel like you’ve failed. Instead, when you offer yourself flexibility, you can reflect on what’s going on in your life and what’s really available to you. Start small, and ask yourself, Can I do this more days than I don’t? Can I do it for 3 days a week? For 5 days a week? All of that counts, and it’s a process of reframing your belief that exercise has to be one thing, to instead seeing the truth that every little bit counts.
BARRE3: Barre3 online offers 10-minute workouts that give us opportunities to strengthen specific areas of the body, but for people used to working out for hours, they might be skeptical of the effectiveness of these shorter. We love your philosophy on “exercise snacking”—can you share a little more about what that is and how little bits of movement can make an impact?
ROBYN: Exercise snacking is essentially small bursts of movement throughout the day—like going for a quick walk, doing a 10-minute workout, or taking a stretch break. Before you exercise, I encourage you to ask yourself what the purpose of your workout is. If we’re only measuring a workout’s effectiveness by calories burned, it’s hard to justify a 10-minute workout.
But maybe the reason you’re exercising is to experience a boost in mood, rev your metabolism, or improve blood sugar stability. Research has shown that exercise snacking can accomplish all of that, and if those are your goals, then these brief periods of exercise done consistently is a great option. When you let go of this idea that a workout has to be an hour and instead look at why you’re working out–and then connecting that with how you want to feel–well, then you can let that information help you workout smarter, not harder.
By moving your body, even if it’s just for 10 minutes, you’re moving stagnant blood throughout the body, you’re supporting lymphatic drainage, and you’re doing wonders for your mental health. It all comes back to identifying how you want to feel, connecting that with your “why” and starting from there. If you start from this place you’ll set yourself up with a strong foundation for your practice.
BARRE3: Throughout the challenges of the past several months, many of us are comparing our own experience to what we see others doing on social media. How are you tuning out that noise and tuning into yourself during this time?
ROBYN: One of the concepts I write about in the book is the idea of an Own It Zone. The Own It Zone is about identifying what works for you based on your values, on how you want to feel, and the context of your life. Whether it’s related to the way that I move my body, how I eat, or the way that I do any wellness routine in my life, when I’m clear on what best fits where I am in life, then it really doesn’t matter to me what other people are doing.
10-minute barre3 workouts are a great example of this. First of all, I love barre3 and it makes me feel great, but I’m also a working parent doing virtual school from home, and 10-minute workouts are what works for me right now. Because I’m clear on that, I can look at the Instagram accounts of 10 fitness professionals and not feel like I’m doing anything wrong because I’m not doing it like them. I can own my own truth and accept what works for me while also being able to celebrate what works for them.
BARRE3: With a few more months of cold and dark winter days to go, what practices are you setting in place to help you thrive in this season?
ROBYN: For me, it’s all about coming back to that question of how I want to feel and applying that to my routines. Right now, I know that I want to feel grounded, connected, and cozy. With those words in mind, I might think about the way that I plan my meals or how I can tweak my morning routine to help me feel this way. I find that it’s a fun way of infusing some seasonality into how I go about my day. Plus, it allows me to transition into a typically cold and lonely time of year and reframe my habits and routines to fit how I want to feel.
BARRE3: Change, and particularly changing our way of thinking, isn’t something that happens overnight. What words of advice would you share for those moments when we fall back on old ways of thinking or find ourselves frustrated with where we are in the present moment?
ROBYN: We’ve developed our way of thinking over the course of our entire lifetime, so to believe that with just enough discipline and willpower we can change our mindset overnight is unrealistic. That’s not how change occurs. Change is never a straight line—it’s an up, then a down, then an up and a down again. That’s just the process.
The goal isn’t to completely shift your mindset to only think positive thoughts, either. It’s to make yourself open to change, to thinking a different way, and all the growth that comes with that shift. From there, it’s a process of unlearning and learning, and it’s the accumulation of this practice that starts to alter the path altogether.
Remember, you’re not lowering your expectations, rather you’re recalibrating them. When your expectations become impossible, you can reframe and shift to something more realistic, that you can be successful in, and that you can feel good about along the way. Sometimes, people have this sense that if we punish ourselves, it’ll motivate us to work harder. It can almost feel unsafe to let yourself be loved and to know that it’s okay to make mistakes. Things are challenging, and it’s always important, in any journey you’re on, to be gentle in the process.
Ready for more inspiration from Robyn? You can follow her on Instagram, head to her website to learn more about her work, subscribe to The Feel Good Effect podcast, and pick up The Feel Good Effect wherever books are sold.
At barre3, we’re focused on progress over perfection, building strength and balance in our bodies to power our everyday lives. Ready to get started? Find your local studio or get started with a 15-day free trial of barre3 online plus 50% off your annual subscription.
What if wellness wasn’t about checking things off a list and instead about focusing on how you want to feel? That’s the approach Robyn Conley Downs takes in her book, The Feel Good Effect: Reclaim Your Wellness By Creating Small Shifts That Create Big Change, and it’s one that we can easily get behind.
Rather than reaching for an ideal or something outside of yourself, Robyn is all about connecting with your truth and leading a life that feels the most authentic to you. We spoke with Robyn about all things mindset and how it impacts our health—getting into the details of how perfectionism actually inhibits our performance and how striving can get in the way of real success.
Read on for Robyn’s game-changing insights that’ll shift how you think about success, plus her advice for avoiding the comparison spiral.
B3 MAG: We’d love to know more about the name of your book (and podcast!), The Feel Good Effect. Could you share why your work is focused on this intention?
ROBYN: In retrospect, it’s very clear to me that so much of my effort in life was directed toward how things looked versus how they felt. But along my journey, I’ve learned how much clarity comes from centering your efforts around how you want to feel and aligning your actions with that intention.
Through my experience practicing this mindset, I’ve learned how much more purpose it gives you. Focusing on feeling good helps you become better equipped to avoid the pitfalls of perfectionism, comparison, and all-or-nothing thinking, while also helping you avoid burnout when it comes to things like wellness and movement.
B3 MAG: We’re constantly fed messaging that tells us that we need to push ourselves to live healthy and productive lives, but there’s a disconnect between that message and experiencing its promised results. How does The Feel Good Effect approach differ?
ROBYN: If you take a step back and look at what’s going on, a lot of us approach wellness as another form of productivity. And when wellness gets confused with productivity, it can quickly turn into another thing to get done, another impossible standard to reach, or about checking things off an already-full to-do list. In this scenario, ask yourself what’s the real outcome or the end goal? What are you optimizing for when you’re approaching it with that lens? The outcome always results in starving for more, while ironically feeling like it’s never enough.
But when you can reframe things, focusing on how you feel and how you want to feel—rather than what people say you should do, or jumping from one fitness trend to another—that’s how you reclaim your wellness. You reclaim your wellness when you follow what’s in alignment for yourself.
B3 MAG: How did you come to a place of knowing what was enough for you?
ROBYN: It’s a process, and it’s never something that’s fully answered. It’s a daily question, but when I start from that place of how I want to feel and identify the actions, habits, and routines that align with that, I move toward that place of enough. It’s very personal, so what works for me, and how I know what enough looks like and feels like, is going to be different for someone else.
In the book, I write about the 80/20 rule, which is the principle that 20 percent of your daily actions or habits yield 80 percent of your results. When you align how you want to feel with the actions that take you there, then you’re able to strip away a lot of what doesn’t matter.
It’s a simple but radical process, and it’s also counter to what we’ve been taught explicitly and what we’ve internalized implicitly. We have to unlearn and then relearn, and it’s the unlearning that can be challenging, but that’s so worth the effort.
BARRE3: One place where perfectionism can show up in our lives is in our workouts and fitness habits. How do perfectionist tendencies and all-or-nothing thinking limit our growth and success in exercise and fitness?
ROBYN: My guess is that if you haven’t felt success in fitness, it’s because of these mindsets. That’s what the research shows and that’s what we’ve witnessed in our own work. Barre3 is so unique, because it has a lot of mechanisms that help counteract these ways of thinking baked right into the workout and program. For example, encouraging modifications. In a typical exercise program, you may be asked to do something exactly like your instructor, but doing that can bring about those perfectionist tendencies. When you provide an empowering modification, you’re offering an option that may feel better for someone’s body or energy level.
Here’s another example: Say you’re just getting started with fitness and you want to start a new exercise program. Maybe you feel like you have to do it every single day and for a whole hour, otherwise it won’t be effective. That’s a combination of perfectionism and all-or-nothing thinking. You can sustain that for an average of 14 days, and when you can’t do it anymore, you feel like you’ve failed. Instead, when you offer yourself flexibility, you can reflect on what’s going on in your life and what’s really available to you. Start small, and ask yourself, Can I do this more days than I don’t? Can I do it for 3 days a week? For 5 days a week? All of that counts, and it’s a process of reframing your belief that exercise has to be one thing, to instead seeing the truth that every little bit counts.
BARRE3: Barre3 online offers 10-minute workouts that give us opportunities to strengthen specific areas of the body, but for people used to working out for hours, they might be skeptical of the effectiveness of these shorter. We love your philosophy on “exercise snacking”—can you share a little more about what that is and how little bits of movement can make an impact?
ROBYN: Exercise snacking is essentially small bursts of movement throughout the day—like going for a quick walk, doing a 10-minute workout, or taking a stretch break. Before you exercise, I encourage you to ask yourself what the purpose of your workout is. If we’re only measuring a workout’s effectiveness by calories burned, it’s hard to justify a 10-minute workout.
But maybe the reason you’re exercising is to experience a boost in mood, rev your metabolism, or improve blood sugar stability. Research has shown that exercise snacking can accomplish all of that, and if those are your goals, then these brief periods of exercise done consistently is a great option. When you let go of this idea that a workout has to be an hour and instead look at why you’re working out–and then connecting that with how you want to feel–well, then you can let that information help you workout smarter, not harder.
By moving your body, even if it’s just for 10 minutes, you’re moving stagnant blood throughout the body, you’re supporting lymphatic drainage, and you’re doing wonders for your mental health. It all comes back to identifying how you want to feel, connecting that with your “why” and starting from there. If you start from this place you’ll set yourself up with a strong foundation for your practice.
BARRE3: Throughout the challenges of the past several months, many of us are comparing our own experience to what we see others doing on social media. How are you tuning out that noise and tuning into yourself during this time?
ROBYN: One of the concepts I write about in the book is the idea of an Own It Zone. The Own It Zone is about identifying what works for you based on your values, on how you want to feel, and the context of your life. Whether it’s related to the way that I move my body, how I eat, or the way that I do any wellness routine in my life, when I’m clear on what best fits where I am in life, then it really doesn’t matter to me what other people are doing.
10-minute barre3 workouts are a great example of this. First of all, I love barre3 and it makes me feel great, but I’m also a working parent doing virtual school from home, and 10-minute workouts are what works for me right now. Because I’m clear on that, I can look at the Instagram accounts of 10 fitness professionals and not feel like I’m doing anything wrong because I’m not doing it like them. I can own my own truth and accept what works for me while also being able to celebrate what works for them.
BARRE3: With a few more months of cold and dark winter days to go, what practices are you setting in place to help you thrive in this season?
ROBYN: For me, it’s all about coming back to that question of how I want to feel and applying that to my routines. Right now, I know that I want to feel grounded, connected, and cozy. With those words in mind, I might think about the way that I plan my meals or how I can tweak my morning routine to help me feel this way. I find that it’s a fun way of infusing some seasonality into how I go about my day. Plus, it allows me to transition into a typically cold and lonely time of year and reframe my habits and routines to fit how I want to feel.
BARRE3: Change, and particularly changing our way of thinking, isn’t something that happens overnight. What words of advice would you share for those moments when we fall back on old ways of thinking or find ourselves frustrated with where we are in the present moment?
ROBYN: We’ve developed our way of thinking over the course of our entire lifetime, so to believe that with just enough discipline and willpower we can change our mindset overnight is unrealistic. That’s not how change occurs. Change is never a straight line—it’s an up, then a down, then an up and a down again. That’s just the process.
The goal isn’t to completely shift your mindset to only think positive thoughts, either. It’s to make yourself open to change, to thinking a different way, and all the growth that comes with that shift. From there, it’s a process of unlearning and learning, and it’s the accumulation of this practice that starts to alter the path altogether.
Remember, you’re not lowering your expectations, rather you’re recalibrating them. When your expectations become impossible, you can reframe and shift to something more realistic, that you can be successful in, and that you can feel good about along the way. Sometimes, people have this sense that if we punish ourselves, it’ll motivate us to work harder. It can almost feel unsafe to let yourself be loved and to know that it’s okay to make mistakes. Things are challenging, and it’s always important, in any journey you’re on, to be gentle in the process.
Ready for more inspiration from Robyn? You can follow her on Instagram, head to her website to learn more about her work, subscribe to The Feel Good Effect podcast, and pick up The Feel Good Effect wherever books are sold.
At barre3, we’re focused on progress over perfection, building strength and balance in our bodies to power our everyday lives. Ready to get started? Find your local studio or get started with a 15-day free trial of barre3 online plus 50% off your annual subscription.
