[00:00:00] Adelaide Olguin: You tell perfectionists, don’t be a perfectionist.” They’re like, “What do you want? Garbage?” Nope. [chuckles] That’s not going to happen here. Now, I’m not a therapist. I’m not going to mend your past, but I know how to help you to thrive where you are right now so that you can really shift from those perfectionist tendencies to those high-achieving tendencies.

[music]

[00:00:26] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. I am so excited to welcome my dear friend Adelaide Olguin today to talk to you not about foreign language, but to talk to you about a language of persistence, a language of perfectionism. Those who have that language recognize each other in a crowd. We understand what it means. We want to give you some really concrete tools to be able to work around this. I heard Adelaide speak about this at FPEA last year, and I’ve been chasing her since then because it was such a fantastic conversation. I’m excited to welcome her. I’m going to let her introduce herself, and then we’ll get started in earnest.

[00:01:11] Adelaide: Awesome. Thank you so much, Gretchen, for having me. Thank you all of you that are live or listening after. You all are in really good company because both Gretchen and I are constantly recovering perfectionists. Yes, Gretchen?

[00:01:26] Gretchen: Yes, absolutely. Always on the journey.

[00:01:29] Adelaide: Always on the journey. We get you. You tell a perfectionist don’t be a perfectionist. They’re like, “What do you want? Garbage?” Nope. [chuckles] That’s not going to happen here. Like Gretchen said, I’m not talking about foreign language. She said that because I own TalkBox.Mom, where we help families to start talking in a foreign language the same day you start the program. As you can imagine, we have a lot of perfectionists, whether it’s the parent, or the spouse, or the child, or everyone in the family joining that are perfectionists. That’s going to be one of the hardest things for perfectionists to do, is to speak another language.

We have helped tens of thousands of perfectionists to be successful. Now, I’m not a therapist. I’m not going to mend your past, but I know how to help you to thrive where you are right now so that you can really shift from those perfectionist tendencies to those high-achieving tendencies, which is how we get families to be able to speak a language. If you want to speak a language, you maybe would help where you live or help your future, connect you to family, perfectionism shouldn’t stop you again there. We really want to help you to be moving forward.

[00:02:45] Gretchen: Absolutely. One of the things that happens is often parents will come to us, and they’ll say, “I have a child with perfectionistic tendencies.” Children learn those from us, unfortunately. My kids learned it from me. I drove my kids a little bit crazy, and I had to really consciously learn to walk it back. In some instances, I did it more clearly and gently than others. Today, I think you guys had fantastic questions. You will see yourselves in our conversation. I’m really excited just to get Adelaide to talk as much as possible about this because she really, really delivers. What direction shall we go in?

[00:03:31] Adelaide: Let’s just make sure you are in the right place. I have had people think that they’re perfectionists, and then they’re like, “I am not.” Let’s just see if this is you. Perfectionism is really trying to do everything flawlessly, especially, this is the kicker, when you start.

[00:03:50] Gretchen: Yes.

[00:03:51] Adelaide: You start something new, and you want to do it flawlessly. I like to think of this as a graph where you start at the bottom, and you shoot straight up at what you’re doing. This is like your abilities at the top, going up, and then going across as time. Immediately, you’re great, and you just continue being great. That’s how we’re thinking. When we are going to say something in another language, we’re like, “Oh, the first time I say it should be perfect.” Then it’s not, and you’re like, “Oh, man, [chuckles] I guess I’m bad at this.”

It might be for your child, too. They’re trying to spell a new word or learn a new concept in math, and they think, “If I’m good at it, I will be good the first time. I can do it flawlessly.” That’s where you’re going to start seeing some conflict. Another thing that perfectionists, and I would say it’s a superpower, but you can become a supervillain if you don’t use it well, is picking apart what you or your child does and zeroing in on what could be better.

Now, you can see how this would be like a supervillain zone, but it also is a superpower because you’re able to see how things can be improved. Some people can’t do that. They can’t look around a room and figure out what needs to be picked up. I think we’re familiar with that. You probably have that superpower there, yes?

[00:05:05] Gretchen: Yes. [laughs] I’m laughing because I asked my husband to help me clean up some things yesterday in the house. He is the polar opposite of perfectionist. He is literally room blind. He can’t see what needs to be put away. It’s taken us 45 years together to get to the point where I can say, “Okay, that pile there, that still needs to go find a home.”

[laughter]

[00:05:33] Gretchen: We tend to marry each other. It really is true.

[00:05:37] Adelaide: Yes. You definitely see that. When you are a perfectionist, you think when you start, it’s going to be amazing. We’ll talk more about different approaches to that because that’s where they’ll see it’s going, but I do want to comment on your husband, too, because I’m not sure– When you say polar opposite, I don’t think he’s not doing anything, right? Obviously not, right, Gretchen?

[00:06:01] Gretchen: [laughs] No. He’s retired, and he’s very busy. Even he will say this. He’s so attention-deficient. He’ll start something, look over and go, “Oh, that needs to be done.” This has begun, and now that needs to be done, so that gets begun. Then he’ll have eight things-}

[00:06:21] Adelaide: This is a great comment.

[00:06:22] Gretchen: -going on at one time and none are done. [laughs]

[00:06:27] Adelaide: That’s probably one of the biggest things as a perfectionist is learning how to talk to people differently in a way that makes them feel really good, but also, you’re seeing you’re getting your needs met as well. My husband, he is on the high achiever side, and it would make me very upset sometimes, just what he was doing. For perfectionism, it’s going to have a negative effect on your self-esteem, of course, because it didn’t work out. It’s not going how you want. You might want to try a lot of things. I know when I was in school, Gretchen, there would be different things I wanted to try, but I didn’t want to get a bad grade, so I wouldn’t take certain classes.

[00:07:09] Gretchen: Right. Yes, that’s true.

[00:07:10] Adelaide: I was like, “I got to focus on what I’m good at,” where my husband, he would see things as like, “Oh, this is an opportunity to learn.” I’m like, “Yes, but then you’re going to get a bad grade.” I just didn’t feel that. I didn’t have a good peace of mind. It was affecting my ability to try new things and just my enjoyment of life. It’s my life. Why am I not trying things?

I’m just in the zone where I have to do things that will work out, whereas a high achiever, they’re going to focus on striving for excellence. He’s like, “Oh, I’ll try it. I’ll do my best. That’s good.” Then he’s happy about his achievements. I’m like, “How are you so happy?” [chuckles] It wasn’t that great in my head. Maybe out loud. We don’t know.

[00:07:51] Gretchen: [laughs]

[00:07:51] Adelaide: We don’t have a time machine. That’s good. Then he’s really able to learn from his mistakes. He’s like, “Oh, yes, I tried that. It didn’t work. I’m just going to do it differently.” I’m like, “Huh, okay,” where I’m like, “I don’t know if I want to try because I don’t want that to happen.” Just the high achievers are less stressed, and they’re happy with a job well done. I know for us perfectionists, we would like to be less stressed and happy with a job well done, right?

[00:08:15] Gretchen: Right. We were laughing because we built a set of custom bookcases over the Christmas holidays. It’s the first home improvement project the two of us have done together from beginning to end that was absolutely completely, completely done. We were like, “Celebration.” Then about four days later, he came in, and he’s shaking his head. He said, “We really didn’t finish the project.” I looked at him, and I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Because my tools are still on the front porch.” [laughs] Being able to laugh at yourself is really a helpful thing.

[00:08:53] Adelaide: Yes. It’s definitely about your attitude. How do you get to the place where you can laugh at yourself? If you’re having tears in your living room and you can’t finish the homework assignments, you’re like, “This isn’t funny, you guys. This isn’t-

[00:09:06] Gretchen: No.

[00:09:06] Adelaide: -funny at all.” When you’re dealing with a perfectionist, you do have that fear that I mentioned that if you let go of these perfectionist attitudes, what we’ll call them, is that you’ll be terrible. Really, the truth is, if you let go of the perfectionist attitudes, you can excel more, but we don’t want to let them go and have everything fall apart because there is this element of control. You want things to go well. We want to make that shift to high achiever. Where we’re going to really see that as perfectionists is looking at our standards. A lot of us have unrealistic standards that we want people to meet,-

[00:09:45] Gretchen: Sure.

[00:09:45] Adelaide: -or ourselves to meet. One of the standards that I saw as someone who does languages is that a lot of foreign language programs, they want you to start with reading, writing, and grammar. They’re like, “That’s a great idea. Let’s start there.” If you think about it, when you learn your first language, first you’re talked to, you’re sung to, and you’re read to. Then you start talking and singing, and if you’re allowed screen time, watching videos. Then you start telling stories. Then you start reading, writing, and grammar. It happens after you can already speak. A lot of people will-

[00:10:17] Gretchen: Right. This is true.

[00:10:19] Adelaide: -will struggle with foreign language because they miss the entire foundation of the language. As a perfectionist, you might be thinking like, “I need to be able to read and write in this language.” That needs to happen, but your standard is not a great standard. It doesn’t even follow what’s natural.

[00:10:36] Gretchen: Right. That’s true. That’s very true. I remember being in college, and my college German class was so difficult. I thought, because my father was German, “Why is this so hard?” I actually bought the textbook and mailed it to him. He called me, and he said, “Boy, I hope you pass this class, because I couldn’t pass the class,” because it was all about grammatique. It was just grammar. He said, “I couldn’t do this.” [chuckles]

[00:11:04] Adelaide: That is true. If you think even just about English, how many people do you know in English that don’t know formal English grammar, but they speak English as a native speaker with fluency? It does hit a point where it’s like reading, writing, and grammar is actually optional in a language unless you really want to do it, but the foundation is talking. If you can talk, then you can hear the grammar principles. You’re more with your ear, which makes it so that you’re not in your head translating. The last thing you want to do when you speak a language is translating in your head. It’s the same thing when we learn reading or we learn math. We think, “I learned it once. I should be great at it,” like we talked about. Let’s talk about a realistic learning curve because we have to look at how people are telling us to learn because it just might not be natural. That’s something I appreciate from Demmi Learning, of course, that [chuckles] we’re going to be on the natural side. Now we’re looking at our learning curve. One curve you might think, instead of just going straight up and being great at it, you’re like, “Over time, I’ll just get better.” That might be a reframe for you, but we’re not robots. We’re not going to just get better over time and make improvements and go.

The learning process is really that you are like, “Am I making any progress?” Then you see this glimmer of hope. You’re like, “Yes, I made progress.” Then you’re like, “Why did I forget everything? [chuckles] What happened?” Then it’s going back up. You have more of this wave that can drop dramatically and shoot back up until things have been stored in your long-term memory, because we’re dealing with processing speed, short-term memory, long-term memory. It’s going to happen at different times. We have to realize that our learning curve is not going to be amazing when we start.

We had a great question in there about, how do we find our unrealistic standards? What is it that can help us do that? The way that I find my unrealistic standards is whenever I get upset about something, it’s probably most likely because I had an unrealistic standard, especially if I’m confused on the messaging explaining it to someone that– It’s just anger, right? What you want to do is write down immediately what happened. I like this example. When my husband and I first got married, we got this really beautiful dish as a wedding present. It was so pretty. [chuckles] What happened is my husband put the hand-wash-only dish into the dishwasher, Gretchen.

[00:13:33] Gretchen: Oh, no. I know where this is going. [chuckles]

[00:13:33] Adelaide: He put it in the dishwasher. When it came out, I was upset like, “Someone bought this for us. You immediately ruined it. Did you not read? What is going on here?” Now the next thing is you have to figure out what did you expect. I expected him to read it and wash it by hand. I didn’t expect him to leave it out because someone dealing with imperfections might be like, “Then I’ll never wash the dishes.” No, I don’t expect that. I expect you to read the things and do that.

Then, the third thing I have to do is, what’s the realistic learning curve? What’s the realistic learning curve for him using a nice dish? I find out that he grew up in a home without a dishwasher. They didn’t have one, so he was like, “Oh my gosh, this is a dishwasher. I’m just going to put all this stuff in it.”

[00:14:21] Gretchen: Everything goes in the dishwasher. [laughs]

[00:14:23] Adelaide: Everything. He’s like, “I was the dishwasher.” [chuckles] He’s ecstatic about it. Then it was like, “What’s going to be his learning curve for using a dishwasher and not having things melt or whatever it is?” That became the reframe in it that I had to see, “What is your learning curve, because I thought you should have been great at it?” Then it comes to our communication of what we expect. That’s something that we’re going to have to work on as perfectionists because we can scare other people if we’re not careful about how we communicate what went wrong.

First, we want to think about the idea of what we want to communicate. Is the idea abstract or concrete? The idea of the dish, am I just upset with him that he can’t use a dishwasher, or am I upset with him about the specific dish? I need to get concrete on what it is that I want to communicate. Then we have to make sure our message, is it implicit or explicit?

Am I just like, “Oh,” upset? That’s not a really clear message. I need to make sure my messaging is very clear. This is where I can set an easy standard and say, “Hey, when something is hand-wash only, I want it set aside and then hand-wash.” That’s very different than like, “You ruined everything, and this is terrible.” It’s more stating what we need. It’s just really good messaging.

For kids doing school work, it’s so important to have really good messaging on what you expect from them. Not only for them, but for you. If you’re the perfectionist, it protects your kids a bit from your perfectionist tendencies, and it helps you rein them back in. You can have different standards for subject, time of day, activity, like dishwasher expectations. You can have realistic standards set for a ballet class that your child’s going to. You can have it for math. It can be in the afternoon what you expect, because maybe you want everybody to have the downtime.

I’m going to give you my standards so you can see how those work. I use my standards for almost everything because the simpler you can keep it, the better. The goal for your standards is to have a reference. You can have them up. You can see that. I’m actually going to give you a link to mine so that you can download it, print it out, and have it because somebody asked– What was the question? It could diffuse something when a perfectionist is going through something. I’m trying to find it. Diffuse a perfectionist’s moment of despair. This is definitely for that. It’s your standard.

My first standard that I give my children and myself is to show up. Show up does not mean that you’re under the table crying. Show up doesn’t mean that you’re running away. Show up means that when it’s time to do math, let’s say, or spelling, we’re going to come and we’re going to sit at the table. That’s showing up. Fair? The next standard is to smile, but not in a creepy way, not like Forrest. It just means to have a good attitude. It’s just an easy way to say it very quickly. Smile. I don’t want to teach kids who are crying.

[00:17:36] Gretchen: Sure.

[00:17:36] Adelaide: Yes. If someone starts crying, we know they’re not going to learn. You’re not going to remember anything if you’re not in a mood to learn. Then I’ll be like, “Hey, right now you’re not smiling.” I might give them something to do or whatever it is, and then you can come back when you’re smiling. I don’t know. They didn’t even want to do math with me. They’re like, “No, I’m fine.” I’m like, “Just give yourself a minute. Go get a drink of water. It’s totally fine.” I don’t know why they were crying like they want to leave, and then they don’t. I have no idea. Smile. That’s something we want to have happen, that we’re coming with that good attitude.

The third standard is so important. It’s to try. That one’s so important for me because when my kids were little, and they would do their writing or something, I would be like, “Oh, your letters aren’t touching the baseline.” That’s the first thing I tell them after they spent all this time trying to write, and it’s the biggest deal that they wrote a sentence, that immediately I zero in on what could have been better. I’m like, “Oh, this wasn’t great.” It’s like, “No, no, Adelaide, it didn’t need to be perfect. They needed to try. Did they try?”

My first comment then, when I look at something like that, is, “Oh, wow, you spent a lot of time writing this. I can see all these letters that you’re really getting to be the right size, and you’re working–” It shifts me from looking at the thing that could have been wrong. For one of my children as well, he might go to do something. He’s like, “It’s not going to be good.” I’m like, “I don’t need it to be good. I just need you to try. Can you do that?” He’s like, “Sure, I can do that.”

A word we use a lot in our home is our first iteration. One of my sons was telling me, he’s like, “The drawing program is really hard.” I was like, “Oh, what’s hard about it? Is it going too fast? Are the drawings too–? What does hard mean?” He was telling me, he’s like, “I just don’t know if I’m going to do it very well.” I was like, “Oh, the first time you don’t need to do it very well. This can just be your first iteration. You might do 10 of them until you have something drawn the way you like it to be drawn, and that’s fine.”

We’ve gone to different artists and seen their beginning work. It’s not good, guys. It doesn’t look great. I went to a whole museum. I’m trying to think of who it was in Mexico. Dior Rivera. It was his first artwork. It was in his early home growing up. I think it was in Guanajuato, I want to say. Anyways, the stuff was not good. You wouldn’t be like, “Oh, this guy’s going to be a great artist.”

[00:19:59] Gretchen: [laughs]

[00:20:00] Adelaide: That’s just the way it is, right?

[00:20:01] Gretchen: Right. We forget that there is a learning curve because we’re so intent on wanting it to be right that we don’t give ourselves the grace of that learning curve.

[00:20:15] Adelaide: Absolutely. If you go to, I’ll say it slowly, TalkBox.Mom/perfectionistsaver, you can print out the standards. I have them in different cute ways you can print out. You can choose the design you like to print out. You can just pop those standards up so you can think of those standards and remember them, because it’s going to give you a really great foundation as you move forward. Now you’re shifting from these unrealistic standards to clearly stated standards.

Now, something that you just said, Gretchen, about being perfect, when you shift your goal, your thing, that you’re like, “I want to be really good at this right away,” if you’re like, “I’m going to be really good at trying right away,” [chuckles] you can do that as a perfectionist. It makes it really nice. Something that we do with foreign language, too, is that we tell people, “We don’t want you to say it perfectly. We want you to have fun.” When we say that, a perfectionist is like, “I need to have fun.” It just focuses on we’ll say things in silly voices. We’ll just do things to have fun as we do it, because then if you relax, you can remember more, you can hear better, you can improve.

There’s this thing about fun. Fun is something that you can’t control. You can’t make people have fun. Fun’s not that, like, “All you kids, you’re going to have fun right now.” It’s so good for perfectionists because we’re like, “Oh, wait a second. I need to step back so people can have fun.” Same thing with trying. I need to step back so people can try. I don’t need to control and make sure that they do a good job.

For me as a parent, especially when your kids are younger, that’s the best time for them to fail on their own. Coming in and saving them is going to hurt them further down the road. Let them fail at these smaller things so that they can really learn because it’s really not a fail. It’s just another iteration, and they can try again. I did, though, Gretchen. I had one of my boys– [chuckles] It was with Matthew C. He didn’t want to do his math, and he wrote the same answer on every single thing. It was all, I want to say, sevens. I got it, and I was like, “Please.”

[00:22:24] Gretchen: That’s creative.

[00:22:25] Adelaide: Yes. He’s like, “I finished.” I was like, “[sighs] Did you try?” I was like, “No, you didn’t try.” This is where we want to mind the gap. We see the gap in what someone has done and what they should have done. That’s where we want to be highly critical, but we have to be honest about it. We’re not going to lie and say, “Oh, that was fantastic. You did all seven. That’s not going to happen.” We have to be direct, and we have to be kind. I’m looking at it, and I’m like, “Why did you put all sevens?” I’m thinking, “Is it because it was too hard? Is it because you want to run out of here?”

It’s this point where you can think of a ladder, and you want someone to make incremental progress, so each of the rung of the ladder, they can get to the top. Doing the whole assignment correctly, or trying their best on the whole assignment, let’s say, is at the top, and it’s like, “How does he need to get there?” That’s where I can be like, “I see that you put sevens here. What I need you to do next time that we do math is I need you to fill out the whole top row the best you can. Try and bring it back to me.”

Now I’ve made it a lot smaller what he needs to accomplish so he can feel really good about that. Then he can do that row, we can talk about it, and then he can go back and do the next one. I can break it up for him so that he can really get there. That just really helps out a lot. Something that we do in our home, though, to grab a lot of these things that are popping up– If you notice, Gretchen, I didn’t tell him he had to fix it right then, right?

[00:23:55] Gretchen: Yes,-

[00:23:56] Adelaide: Like, “What did you do. You need to fix this right now.”

[00:23:56] Gretchen: -which I think is really good.

[00:23:58] Adelaide: Yes, because, obviously, if he’s doing something like that, he’s not really showing up. I guess he’s showing up. He’s not meeting the standard. He’s not in the capacity to learn, and so I’m going to reassign that to another time. I will see things pop up throughout the week or my kids will see things pop up throughout the week. We just have a notebook, and we can just write down what happened and move on, because addressing it right then is not going to be great. Sometimes people just want that attention.

Let’s say we’re doing something, and one of the kids is poking another kid. He’s like, “He keeps poking me.” I’m like, “Let me write it down. This child poking this child during history.” Whatever it is, we write it down. Then, at the end of the week, we decide for our school, because we’re trying to focus on the process, not the results, what do we want to keep doing, what do we want to improve, what do we want to stop doing, what do we want to start doing?

That spells kiss. Each week we kiss, but not in a weird way. [chuckles] I’m like, “This is getting weird fast?” We want to kiss. My kids are just not allowed to say we want to stop doing school. That’s not an option. One of my sons, the same one who did all the sevens, he would do a math problem, Gretchen. It was so hard. I was like, “Do we need to get someone else to do this?” I thought I was going to die doing math with him.

He would fill in one answer, and then he would look around the room and just look. I’m like, “What are you doing?” I was like, “Hey, go on to the next one.” He’s like, “Oh, yes.” Then he would start doing the second one. I’m looking at the paper. I’m like, “There is 14 things on this paper.” He finishes the second one. I look over, and he’s just looking around the room again. I’m like, “Hey there, are you going to go to number three?” He’s like, “Oh, okay,” and he’d go to number three.

[00:25:41] Gretchen: [laughs]

[00:25:42] Adelaide: I’m like, “Wow, we would be done by now.” You get that feeling of the efficiency. You’re like, “What is happening?” One of our kiss sessions, I was like, “Hey,” I wrote down that between every single problem, you stop and you need me to say something. Then, looking for solutions. You don’t want to be the one who comes up with the solutions. It’s his problem. He’s like, “You know what would really help?” I’m like, “Tell me anything. What would really, really help?” He’s like, “If we got those lights that flash, you can make the lights flash.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” He’s like, “At Party City, they have a string of lights, and you can push it, and they flash.”

I’m like, “Get in the car. Get in the car right now.” We get in the car. I’m like, “We’re going to Party City.” This is when it was still open. We drive to Party City, and I’m like, “Is this it?” He’s like, “Yes.” I’m like, “Okay, great.” We get it. We go back, and I’m like, “Let’s see you do your math.” He sits down, and he does the first problem. He pushes the little button on the lights, and they’re all going off. It was like the demo thing. It wasn’t even how the lights were supposed to be used, but whatever. It’s a kindergartener. I’m like, “That’s fine,” or first grader. He’s pushing it, and he’s all happy, and then he just goes to number two. Then he pushes it, and he goes to number three.

He just needed some kind of kick between every single problem to keep him going. He needed to be acknowledged. That made him really happy. We’ve done things where kids are like, “I feel like if I had a motivational candle to do my writing, it’d feel really good.” I’m like, “Sure. That’s the solution.” It’s time to write, they’re like, “Let’s light the candle.” Sometimes it would turn into what looked like a seance going on. I’m like, “We’re just writing, honey. We’re just doing our writing.”

[00:27:19] Gretchen: It’s okay. [laughs]

[00:27:22] Adelaide: It’s really fun when they can come up with the solutions to figure out what it is they need, because I would never have thought that lights from Party City would have been the solution to moving on to the next–

[00:27:33] Gretchen: You know what’s really cool about that is here’s a child who is in touch enough with his own inner psyche to know, I need this to stay motivated to keep myself focused on this. That’s really cool, especially if you’re six or seven [chuckles] years old.

[00:27:49] Adelaide: I know. Amazing, right? What it could have turned into as a perfectionist, though, me being like, “My kid just doesn’t do their math. They just don’t finish it. They don’t do it well. They’re just skipping things.” He has this need that’s not being met. If we just meet that need and he can figure out how to meet that need– It turned out so much better than it could have.

[00:28:11] Gretchen: What would be your closing advice to our audience today? What would you say would be the takeaway you would want them to go ponder on for the rest of the afternoon?

[00:28:24] Adelaide: I think for a lot of us perfectionists, a lot of perfectionists can come from just the school model of when you have 100%. Every time you do something wrong, you lose a point, you lose a point, you lose a point. I remember in classes, I didn’t want to talk because I was like, “I’ll just lose a point or something will happen.” The real world, it’s not like that. Let’s say with foreign language, when you go to talk to somebody, the point isn’t to be perfect and to not make mistakes, it’s to communicate with the person. It’s to make a new friend. It’s to help someone. It is really not about losing points. There’s no points that are being lost.

Our goal as perfectionists needs to be to make mistakes faster because we’re going to learn by making mistakes. Not moral mistakes. I’m not talking about [chuckles] that. I’m talking about mistakes when you’re trying to learn something. I would love for you to have a try jar. Just have a jar that you can put something in every time you try something, and just keep filling that in.

[00:29:28] Gretchen: Oh, that’s a great idea. That’s very visual.

[00:29:31] Adelaide: It’s very visual because it’s going to retrain your brain not to take things away from 100% when you try. I tried, and it wasn’t good enough. I tried and look how much I filled up. Look how much I’ve done.

[00:29:44] Gretchen: That’s awesome. That’s a terrific visual, and that can be for a five-year-old or a 50-year-old. It doesn’t matter your age. The try jar is a great idea. I love it. I want to thank you so much for joining me. for this conversation. I’ve been so excited to have it. I think our audience can agree that you have offered some absolutely tremendous resources. We’ll make sure that the resource you’re offering from TalkBox Mom is included in the show notes. I’ll also include Pam Barnhill’s webinar because I think –

[00:30:20] Adelaide: That’s so good.

[00:30:21] Gretchen: -that would be helpful as well. If you’re at a homeschool conference this year, find Adelaide. She’ll teach you how to speak in a foreign language, and it will be absolutely awesome.

[00:30:32] Adelaide: Yes. If you need a project to overcome your perfectionist tendencies, there is nothing better than speaking a foreign language with your family. You will learn so much. We were talking to this one perfectionist. I was like, “I didn’t even know you’re a perfectionist.” She’s like, “I know. You tell me to have fun. I step back. I let them do it. I’ve never done that in my life.” I’m like, “All right, you go, girl.” If you want a challenge that’s going to be fun, we’ve got it for you. All the things I’ve talked about, we’ve built into our program to really help perfectionists thrive.

[00:31:04] Gretchen: Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us today. I want to thank our audience for allowing us to come into your living room. We don’t take that lightly. We are humbled by the fact that you trust us to bring you fabulous content like this every week. We appreciate you. Adelaide, thank you. As conference season begins, I hope your travel is flawless, and I look forward to seeing you on the road. Take care.

[00:31:28] Adelaide: Thank you, Gretchen. Have a great-

[00:31:29] Gretchen: Bye-bye.

[00:31:30] Adelaide: -conference season, too. Bye.