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Knowing Is Only Half the Battle
Knowing what your secret rules are is a great start to this conversation but it’s
not the conclusion.
What do you do once you’ve identified them? What’s the best next step?
It’s time to destroy them.
The first thing you should do is simply ask the question, “What does that
mean?” for each secret rule you encounter.
For example, if I wrote down the rule “Success is bad,” under that I would
write down the question “What does that mean?”
Then I’d have to answer it.
I’d say, “Success is bad, which must mean that failure is good. To fail is the
best. Winning is terrible and the only way I’ll know I’m doing good is to fail. If I
can lose money, gain cheese weight, and crash my car, I’ll be having a pretty
baller year.”
Those are stupid sentences right there, but that’s the goal. You want to see
how ridiculous your fake rule really is.
Perfectionism persists unless we ask questions. A well-phrased question is a
burst of water at a dam we need to break. It’s looking at the impossible standard
we’ve been living against and picking it apart. It’s like peeking behind the
curtain in The Wizard of Oz. With the smoke and the thunder and the production,
it seems like there really might be a giant of a warlord behind the whole
operation. But if we were to ask a few questions, we might find out there’s just a
feeble, scared old man running the show.

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The second question to ask is “Who says?” You’d be amazed at how many
cuckoos this question takes care of. In a lot of situations, the answer is going to
be “nobody.” No one says it has to be as difficult as you’re making it, but when
we believe a cuckoo we act as if some authority has made it so.
Sometimes, the origin of the “who says” goes deeper because perfectionism
is often a team sport. You’ll hear successful people admit they work so hard
because they’re trying to prove to their father that they’re good enough. In many
cases, the father passed away years ago and they’re arguing with a ghost. If they
stopped and asked, “Who says?” they’d realize that killing themselves for
someone who would never know about it was fruitless.
A friend had a difficult time being present in her marriage because her mom
told her that her independence was the only thing that mattered. Her mom had
been divorced and lost everything, so the secret rule she passed on was “Never
be vulnerable enough to get hurt.” My friend could love her husband, but only
up until the line that told her she was giving too much. When she asked, “Who
says?” she realized she was living her life out of her mom’s fear.
The third step to getting rid of a secret rule is to write a new rule to replace
it.
Mine would be “Success is good.”
Yours might be “I can be in shape and still be modest.” That might sound
funny, but that’s what Ingrid Griffin struggled with. She said, “I sabotage my
physical goals because ‘skinny is slutty’ and being just a little chunky is ‘more
humble.’”
She is very well aware how insane that is. Can you imagine sitting down to a
Big Mac and silently telling yourself, “I am so humble. It’s the secret sauce that
really holds the most humility. Ranch dressing is the least arrogant of all the
salad dressings.”
Write down your secret rules. Answer the question “What does that mean?”
and then write yourself a new rule, a flexible, reasonable, healthy rule based on
the truth.