Working Hard but Never Doing enough: Help Your Clients to Harness the Power of Perfectionism without Losing themselves!

Please note that all registrations have to be paid in full before the event takes place - otherwise you will miss out on receiving the Zoom link. This event will be recorded for all those who are registered on the day. Recording is available for three weeks.

Today’s world pushes everyone to achieve more, excel at every task, be the best, and succeed at every level of life. A lot of clients are prone to do things the “right” or “perfect” way, constantly think about how to be better and strive, struggle when they drop the ball, are petrified at the idea of making mistakes, and judge others by the same stringent standards to which they hold themselves. 

Clients are usually told that their perfectionistic behaviors need to change because they can be harmful to their lives, health, and relationships. But, let’s face it, perfectionistic actions are reinforced and clients persist with these behavioral patterns despite long-term negative consequences. Clients would usually say that, “their efforts to do things right and perfectly pay back.” At the same time, they report that no matter how hard they work and how much they do, they will feel like they’re not good enough and that they’re not doing enough. 

Identifying and targeting the key psychology processes that maintain problematic perfectionistic, high-achieving and striving actions opens up opportunities to make a real change in clients’ lives. This is precisely why Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), as a behavioral and process-based model, is handy.

Participants will learn a functional contextual formulation of perfectionism and use it as a guidance to teach clients skills to assess when perfectionistic behaviors make their lives better or miserable; sit with the terrible discomfort that comes with living in an imperfect world; put in action acceptance skills to handle the internal messiness they go through when things go wrong; make room to handle the unpredictability of any given situation; learn to accept themselves as they are and not as they wish to be.

This experiential workshop will guide participants in how to help their clients shift from relying on unworkable perfectionistic actions to harnessing the power of perfectionistic behaviors without losing themselves.

Learning objectives

• Conduct a functional -contextual assessment of perfectionism.
• Describe the five psychological processes that maintain perfectionistic, high-achieving and striving actions.
• Deliver acceptance-based and compassion-based interventions to tackle problematic perfectionism 

Learning materials

Digital Download: The Upside of Perfectionism: An Acceptance and Commitment Skills Workbook

Audiobook to listen to: ACT Audiobook for High-achieving, Perfectionistic, Striving behaviors 

Online Course: ACT for Perfectionism (Clinician's Edition)

Book to read: The ACT Acceptance and Commitment Skills for Perfectionism and High-Achieving Behaviors. London, UK: Routledge.

PRESENTER: Dr. ZURITA ONA (USA)

Dr. Zurita Ona or “Dr. Z,” is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in California. Her clinical work started first as a school psychologist and then as a clinical psychologist. For over seventeen years she has developed significant experience working with children, adolescents, and adults struggling with anxiety, perfectionism, procrastination, and emotion regulation problems; particular areas of expertise are Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and related conditions. Dr. Z is passionate about helping clients to get unstuck from any problem related to anxiety-based struggles.

Dr. Z attends local, national, and international conferences on a regular basis in order to present her clinical work and keep up with current clinical research to deliver up-to-date therapy services to her clients. 

In addition to her doctoral training, Dr. Z is a graduate of the International OCD Foundation Behavior Therapy Training Institute (BTTI) for the treatment of pediatric OCD and adult OCD; her clinical work is primarily based on Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), the recognized front-line treatment for OCD, anxiety and related condition disorders. Dr. Z completed a 10-day intensive training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and over the last 17 years, she has been learning, practicing, and teaching Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) applied to specific populations. In 2019 Dr. Z had been nominated a Fellow of the Association of Contextual Behavioral Science.