Shame and Perfectionism

And the subtle art of the pivot

I am in the midst of a career pivot.

Pivot!

The word sounds so clean, so elegant. I picture a woman, one foot poised on a polished wooden floor in suede-soled dance shoes, about to tango in a different direction.

Which reminds me of the milongas at the old Clärchens Ballhaus in Berlin, where I attempted to learn the Argentine tango with my husband years ago. Couples would pivot with sensual ease, going first this way, then that, then hesitating in place to draw out the tension, a stilettoed heel languidly wrapping itself around a trousered leg.

That scenario bears no resemblance to my current status. What I am engaged in feels like painstaking disentanglement and careful regrowth, weeding and planting, sifting and nurturing, and all of it happening at once without the least inkling of elegance.

I grew up in an environment where what I did and who I was were as intertwined as the legs of expert tango dancers. I learned very early on to equate ‘good at’ with ‘good, period.’ I felt the tacit tension of my immigrant parents’ limited resources and the considerable sums they poured into my education.

So when I recently began translating my decades-long experience of teaching and performing into a new program for highly sensitive professionals, my old friends Shame and Perfectionism rushed onto the scene as first responders. They slipped right past my defenses by doing immensely convincing impressions of Reason and Common Sense.

When Shame and Perfectionism Sound Like Common Sense

They offered their usual melange of unsolicited advice, hostile interrogation, and blanket judgments:

What makes you think you can do that? Where are your qualifications? Who do you think would ever be interested in that? Why would you abandon your stable job and established career to fly by the seat of your pants? Think of all that your parents sacrificed so that you could have the life you have now. How ungrateful! And imagine how people will laugh at you! How they will wag their tongues when you’ve failed miserably and have to go crawling back to the old way! Stupid girl, why even try?

The day this harassment began, I had decided to go on a little outing as a reward for finishing my taxes, and I hoped my invasive friends would stay at home while I went for a scenic drive and a hike. I listened to a podcast on the way for good measure, but when I got out at the Königssee in Bavaria, I noticed with dismay that they had been murmuring in the background all along and were now back to their deranged shouting. I walked up a hill to the stunning ‘painter’s view’ of the lake and sat there eating my lunch and defending myself against my uninvited companions.

my picnic spot

Yes, even as a trained coach, I still fall into the trap of arguing with my inner critics.

I spent the whole day fending off their attacks and making counterarguments, even though I knew from past experience that I was no match for their stamina or debating rhetoric.

They reminded me with great precision of each of my failed endeavors, from trying out for the cheerleader squad in the sixth grade to writing a novel to starting a podcast. They brought out a meticulously prepared presentation deck featuring my age, gender, and paltry accomplishments as criteria for certain failure. They had dedicated a whole spreadsheet to the degrees, qualifications, and awards I lacked. At this point I came back at them with examples of people who were of the same age and gender, did not have the above credentials, and had been successful nevertheless. At this, they added another column to my spreadsheet labeled ‘reasons they were able to do it but you never will.’ Damn, I thought, they’ve done their research. They were like some kind of AI-bot programmed to discourage rather than flatter.

Later that night, I went to bed and picked up where I had left off the day before in Anaïs Nin’s diary from the WWII years in America. At this point, it was 1941 and she was living in a hovel in Greenwich Village, donating her entire monthly allowance to other exiled artists, retaining just enough for herself to eat and pay her rent. About her friend Gonzalo More, a Peruvian journalist, she wrote:

Human flowering was Gonzalo’s greatest gift to others… The goal was to live fully, not to construct. Gonzalo, a few days after settling in New York, knew all its streets, cafes, restaurants, out-of-the-way places, quarters, characters. He staked out first his exploration of the land, which no one at work has time to do. Human life the goal. Laughter born of irresponsibility. Tolerance born of his own defects. Rich adventure born of leisure and independence. Talks at the bar by which he enters all kinds of realms, lives, experiences. Wisdom born of the streets. And then regrets for not having built anything he can see, touch, be proud of. So I end by praising the laziness with which he was lashing himself!

Praising the laziness! Only then, as I marveled at Anaïs Nin’s generosity both of material and spiritual gifts, did I recognize my disguised companions for who they really were. Not Reason and Common Sense after all, but Shame and Perfectionism. Only those two would feel so threatened by my plans to abandon the conventional path.

Several pages later in the diary, Anaïs writes: ‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’

Courageous soul that she was, Anaïs Nin was willing to support someone just so that he could live the life of an artist without even producing any art (he was probably also her lover, but that’s another matter).

I allowed myself to imagine what she would say to me.

She might talk to me about the feminine mode of creation; she might analyze me and correctly identify my musician/professor persona and my thirst for public recognition as masculine qualities, absorbed from masculine surroundings. She might observe how some of my most meaningful work, like hers, lies in the ability to see other people deeply, to enter their worlds and offer them the instrument most useful to them: a mirror, a stepping stone, a trellis upon which to mold their growth.

She might tell me that the feminine in me—the intangibility of my purpose—is the very quality that allows me to enter softly into these worlds and provide the appropriate elixir. That the slowness and poetry of my current life, hovering in the ether between more concrete worlds, is a healing balm in itself.

We would sit in her Village attic apartment and sip bad American coffee and she would drink me in with her all-encompassing eyes as she spoke these words to me. She would see my demons and obliterate them with her charming French accent and her quiet, intense regard for my higher self, just as she said to her actress friend Luise Rainer: “It’s not that I don’t see the demon in you, we all have one. It’s that I believe it can be defeated, tamed, sublimated, used for creation.”

Oh, Anaïs, I would say to her. I vastly prefer your company to theirs!

But your demons will be transmuted, she says, through your joy and through the witnessing of others’ demons.

What a terrible impression of her prose.

I apologize, Madame Nin.

But I grasp the essence of it and am sure of its authenticity even if I cannot conjure her mellifluous words.

My Kindle dropped onto my forehead and I woke up violently, scaring the cat off my legs and recalling all the ways in which paperback books are superior.

I wanted to go back to Anaïs’ living room and listen to her. What she understood in supporting her friend Gonzalo is that ‘human flowering’ does not equal constant productivity. She was pointing to the wholeness of a human life, everything we are given to experience, to feel, to reflect back to others. The effect of such a life on the lives around it is more than its output, more than what any good capitalist’s dollar would buy. It is an attitude—no, more internal—it is an aura. It does not broadcast brilliance or invite envy.

I remember my first childhood awareness of being an object of envy. It felt like a glass box had descended from the heavens to contain me, separating me from my peers. I was conscious of every movement I made, conscious of the distance between me and them, saddened by my sudden isolation. At the same time, my friends Shame and Perfectionism were blissfully silent. Being the object of envy meant I was doing everything right by them.

When Anaïs Nin praises her friend’s laziness, she is celebrating everything that makes him who he is. She demands nothing in return for her philanthropy, even as she herself writes erotica to pay everyone’s bills—at the going rate of a dollar per page.

Shame and Perfectionism want me to stick to what I know rather than deviating from the safe path that has brought me this far. They want me to be untouchable, stranded at the top of a pinnacle—beyond reproach, as Brené Brown says, protected in glorious isolation. They do not want me to indulge in the laziness of being who I am, because then we would all discover that I am not special, I am worthy of neither envy nor admiration. That I share a common essence with all of humanity and a common uniqueness with every other human being.

And that would be their death.

Which brings me back to the dance floor.

Clärchens Ballhaus. Photo: Bernd Schönberger, Der Spiegel

Clärchens Ballhaus was a legendary dance hall; it had been partially bombed during WWII and never renovated, leaving some of its bricks exposed, the original sign still hanging on its fading facade, cracks running through its grand stucco ceilings and walls. In the low lighting of a milonga, it would have felt like a 1920s time capsule had it not been for the campy silver tinsel on the walls and disco ball hanging from the ceiling.

On tango evenings in the 2010s, with apparently no space to maneuver on the packed dance floor, dozens of virtuosic couples went on twirling, figure-eight-ing, floating in an approximate counterclockwise circulation with forays into the center and back out to the perimeter. Sometimes I would be chosen by a partner who, unlike me, really knew what they were doing and led me so expertly that I felt myself among the ranks of those who could pivot and twirl effortlessly.

There is no final destination in the tango; couples do not step out onto the dance floor with the aim of arriving at any particular location. The point, if there is one, is to create subtle tension and resolve it, all of it in the most aesthetic, sensual, erotic way possible. Anaïs Nin would have understood.

The pivot is the result of a buildup of tension.

The pivot is a subtle way to push back against what has become untenable, and a good leader allows you the space to express your resistance, to resolve the tension.

Shame and Perfectionism have been overbearing, controlling partners, leaving me no room to explore my other options—which is why it has felt like such a mess.

And as luck would have it, I have chosen a metaphor I can ride all the way home: a milonga is an event where you can change partners as often as you wish. You can make eyes with your next partner as you endure the clumsy stiffness of the current one.

I guess I’ll just keep switching partners, then, until I find one who grants me both freedom and grace.

---

If any of this felt familiar

Why does my inner critic get louder right when I'm trying to make a meaningful change?

Shame and perfectionism tend to surge precisely when you're stepping off a proven path, and they're skilled at disguising themselves as reason and common sense, producing detailed, seemingly logical arguments about your age, your credentials, and your odds of failure. Recognizing them as shame and perfectionism rather than legitimate reasoning is often the first shift that loosens their grip.

Why do I still doubt myself even after years of expertise and success?

Self-doubt during a transition isn't evidence of unreadiness. It can surface even for someone with decades of experience, because the inner critic isn't tracking your actual qualifications; it's protecting a familiar, safer identity. Long experience doesn't inoculate you against this internal argument, it just makes it more likely you will eventually recognize the pattern for what it is.

Is it true that being productive is what makes a life meaningful?

Not necessarily. A life can have real depth and effect on the people around it through presence, attention, and how it reflects others back to themselves, independent of visible output or achievement. Measuring your worth purely by production is one of the very assumptions shame and perfectionism rely on to keep you in place.

Why does making a career pivot feel so much harder than the word suggests?

"Pivot" sounds clean and elegant, but the actual experience is closer to painstaking disentanglement: undoing old patterns while slowly building new ones, without any of the grace the word implies. The mess is normal; it doesn't mean the change is being done wrong.

Why do I feel exposed or afraid of judgment when I try something new publicly?

Shame and perfectionism often push toward staying "untouchable"—safely accomplished and beyond reproach—because visible risk-taking threatens the identity of being special or exceptional. Being willing to look ordinary, uncertain, or exploratory in public is often exactly what they're trying to prevent.