Author: John Jantsch / Source: Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: Would you consider yourself a protectionist? I certainly would not consider myself a traditional protectionist, but I wonder if there’s times when viewing my view of the world through other people’s lens has cost me, has held me back, has stopped me from doing what I was meant to do

In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast we visit with Petra Kolber, she’s the author of The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy. I think you better check it out.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Petra Kolber. She’s international renown fitness expert and wellness leader. Also, the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today called The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy. So Petra, thanks for joining us.

Petra Kolber: Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me John.

John Jantsch: And I also forgot to mention that you are, you’re gonna shoot me, Scottish.

Petra Kolber: Oh, my god. You are so off. I am British. My dad was Scottish though. I have to be honest, my dad was a Scott.

John Jantsch: There’s a little Scot in your accent still, what’s left of it.

Petra Kolber: If you say so. Okay, we’ll just leave it at that, because my mother’s turning in her grave right now going, Scottish?

John Jantsch: I could have called you Australian.

Petra Kolber: That too. I’ll answer to anything John. If I’m just talking to you, whatever works. I’m fine with that.

John Jantsch: All right, so let me ask you this first. Is this book autobiographical?

Petra Kolber: Well they say you teach what you need to learn, so yes. For me it was autobiographical in a sense, but again for me the pain point of the book, as you know with sales and marketing speak to the pain point. That was definitely my own personal pain point for many years and I thought, if I can help people fast track the seven year process or so that it took me, John, to figure out that you don’t have to be perfect to do great things in this world, then I though it’d be a book worth writing.

John Jantsch: So detoxing is really hot right now. I mean there’s probably half a dozen books in every book store about it, and diets and what not. What does that speak to you think?

Petra Kolber: Well I did the name Detox to be honest, like we had talked about before, my background was fitness for 30 years, so detoxing, nutrition is definitely a piece of that and if you look at the books cover, The Perfection, Perfection is very lightly written, so I do believe many people who pick this up thinking it’s a juicing book, but again, so hey why not build on a cultural trend. That’s not why I called it that. Like with detox from anything is basically cleaning out the crud, and that’s what this book is about. It’s not cleaning out the crud from your body or your nutrition, but really your mental aspect and whether you’re gonna go for a job of your dreams, you’re gonna start that business you’ve been thinking about. It really is about, not what you’re doing, but do you feel worthy enough to even begin the dream and how do you feel about yourself along the process?

John Jantsch: Okay, so let’s start here. What does perfection look like?

Petra Kolber: Ha, great question.

John Jantsch: I’m probably saying that because I have no idea. It does not enter into my life in any sense.

Petra Kolber: You are so lucky John, let me tell you. So I do believe perfection means different things to everybody and I do believe a lot of people have asked me. Why did, this book as you know is definitely got the woman perspective, yet I speak to men and woman across the board, and many men come up to me and go, “Oh my god, you were speaking to me.” Perfection means different things to everybody and what I ask people to consider is, when you think of the word perfect in the three main areas of your life, self care, the relationships of your own personal family relationships, and your work. When you think of the word perfect, does that add joy to your life or does it suck the joy out of you? Because perfect and perfection is only a word until you attach a meaning and an emotion to it. So this book, this idea of perfect, you know detoxing from perfection, some of your listeners might go, “Well, hey perfect works really well for me in my business.”

I strive, and this is not about not working hard. This is not about wanting to be the best that you can be. It’s not about wanting to be the leader in your field and what it is about is how are you feeling about yourself when you’re striving for these high goals? Do you ever reach them, or they are so high where perfections become the basement level. Maybe we can look at different metrics and a different definition of success.

John Jantsch: So I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and one of the things that I see is almost rampant in that community is that they didn’t define what perfection was. They’re striving for somebody else’s view of perfection because they see somebody else being more successful in their view, or whatever, having more customers, a bigger launch, a bigger house, you know, whatever it is, and how much do you think that, that plays into it? Is that we don’t step back and even define perfection. We just try to hit somebody else’s target?

Petra Kolber: Oh, that’s so interesting John. Nobody’s ever really put it to me that way. Yeah, I agree and I think whether it’s comparison … I think we are comparing being by definition. We need to look at other people for inspiration and I think Jon Acuff was the one that said, “Don’t compare your beginning to everybody else’s middle.” And what happens, especially in this world of social media and the online culture where everything is coming across our feed so fast and if you’re like me, for many years I never had this idea that I had anything unique to say, so who was I to be doing a book, a bran, an online course and so whether you see it as perfection, like you had said, or you see it as a lack of confidence or the gap between where you are right now and where you want to be, I think it’s all about the same thing John. We start looking at ourselves, unwittingly comparing ourselves to others, and then out negativity biased, which is a part of our evolution, is automatically gonna hit on the things that we think we are not enough of.

Or in some cases, we think we’re too much of this and what happens is then, we then stop beating ourselves up and judging ourselves, and I should know better, I shouldn’t be comparing my brand, or my launch to someone else’s launch. The challenge is the part of our brain that’s the strongest, it’s not part of your character flaw, it’s a part of our genetic makeup and unless it goes managed and unless we notice these thoughts John, like “Oh, my god, their launch was so perfect. Or, “They wrote the perfect book, ” or, “Their online program is so perfect,” and unwillingly we’re comparing our back story and our struggles to what we see as their overnight success, which in reality is 10,000 hours of hustle and hard work, and failure after failure and iteration 2.0. This is when we get stopped in our tracks and so it’s where we stop doing, we start watching and then we start becoming paralyzed because we start judging what we think we’re doing to everyone else’s highlight reel.

John Jantsch: So physical toxins, are quite often aligned with something you’re familiar with, as a cancer survivor. How is perfection toxins, what’s that costing us?

Petra Kolber: You got some great questions John. You know what, the interesting thing about this, people often say, “Ah, it’s just a thought. I’m just having these thoughts. I’m beating myself up.” And now science is showing that these thoughts have a physical reaction, a chemical reaction to your body. So what we’re seeing now in this world of elevated stress, elevated anxiety, in the entrepreneurial world and in the life’s of our children, elevated depression, although with our kids, they’re saying anxiety is going up, as depression is coming down a little bit. Every time we have these thoughts, our brain, every time we have a thought of self judgment and doubt, or worry it’s not a status quo, it’s gonna trigger irresponsible in your body. It’s either gonna be fight or flight, or tandem befriend and this cortisol, the adrenalin, and placed on top of the adrenaline and cortisol that gets triggered every time we have an email alert, or a text come in our we have an argument with our partner, or work partner.

This is all having a physical impact on our body and our immune system, our health, our joy, our happiness, and so again, people go, “Oh it’s just a thought.” “Uh, yeah, no.” Because your body can now not … This is science, the science of neuroscience. Your body cannot tell the difference between an actual something we should be afraid of and go on physical defense or a thought where we ramp up and have this same toxic, like you said, toxic emotion built into our body and often to put on top of that John, this work is often happening behind a computer and we’re sitting and you and I just spoke about this before. Sitting is the worse place for our body, our health, our happiness, our focus, our agility, our resilience. So you put all these thoughts on a body that’s now static, it’s just compiled and exasperates to a magnificent and an unfortunate level.

John Jantsch: For the record, I’m at my standing desk right now as we record this interview. I want everybody to know. So let’s pick on social media a little bit now. So let’s pick on social media a little bit, shall we. You know my last interview that I … Who knows when people will actually be listening to these. They probably won’t come out back to back, but Dan Schawbel, Back To Human: How Greatly Leaders Create Connection in an Age of Isolation, and one of the main thrusts of his book is that technology, while it does enable us to do some cool things, it’s probably made us more isolated than ever, and I suspect that in the perfection game, social media is a pretty big culprit isn’t it?

Petra Kolber: Yeah, absolutely. I love that idea. I think the currency of the future is gonna be connection and I heard Gary V. speak recently at an even and he held up his phone, and he goes, “Technology doesn’t have and opinion,” and I was like, oh that’s good, ’cause I had become silently very judgy about social media…

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