Recent talk for durham academy parents & caregivers

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Mental Health is Not a Contest

How the Effortless Perfection Myth Warps Our Understanding of What’s “Allowed” to Count as Struggle

Most women don’t go off to college expecting a major drop in confidence; they’re getting ready to have the best four years of their lives. But the reality is that women leave college with less self-esteem than they came in with and are two times more likely to experience depression than their male counterparts. So, where is the disconnect happening? Drawing from a plethora of data and her own personal experience, Effortless Perfection expert Caralena Peterson shows us just how immense the Myth’s impact can be and why women need to start talking about the ways it disadvantages them instead of hiding behind secrecy and comparison. Full of authentic reflection and heart, this talk invites high school and undergraduate women to take an honest look at their state of mental health and learn ways to move into healing and empowerment.

Audiences Will Learn:

• What the Effortless Perfection Myth is and why it’s dangerous to keep ignoring it and labeling it a superficial cliche

• How to reframe the way they see struggle and recognize that theirs is part of a larger issue affecting many women of all backgrounds

• The dangers of writing off mental health as a "white people issue" or a "rich people issue"

• Vocabulary to express what they’re feeling and experiencing along with tools for how to combat the Effortless Perfection Myth and its side effects

[Please note: this talk can easily be adapted for mixed gender audiences.]

The Target audience for this talk is students in high school, college, and other institutions of higher learning.

Never Enough

10 Helpful Scripts for Teachers with Persistently Anxious, Perfectionist Students

With five years of teaching experience at the middle and high school level, Caralena knows what it is like to attend a professional development session and wonder if the presenter has ever actually spent time in a classroom -- let alone experienced the nuanced challenges of being an educator in the past decade. Have no fear, this presentation is designed to feel like a conversation among kindred spirits wherein teachers can voice their concerns about the ways they see the Effortless Perfection Myth at work in their school community, then sit back and consider a number of concrete tools and strategies for actually addressing the issue in their classrooms.

Audiences Will Learn:

• How to recognize students’ red flag behaviors (such as inflexible all-or-nothing-thinking, reassurance addiction, fear-based motivation, and compulsive inefficient overwork)

• Appropriate language to redirect students away from unhealthy behaviors that lead to burnout and a variety of other mental health struggles

• To consider the ways in which their own habits and behaviors might be modeling the exact perfectionist behaviors they are instructing students to avoid

• Specific emphasis on how jobs like teaching, wherein empathy is a key motivator, often trigger a perfectionist mindset in surprising ways

[Please note: even more so than the student and parent talks, this presentation condenses the research-based findings of a myriad of current leading medical health professionals and academics into a strong selection of bite-sized actionable directives.]

This target audience for this talk is teachers and administrators.

Beneath the Surface

What Your Perfectionist, Self-Sufficient Child Secretly Wants from You

Do you ever worry about your type-A, straight-edge, perfectionist child who seems to have everything going for them? Perhaps you should. They may secretly be feeling the need to earn the love they receive by making themselves smart enough, pretty/handsome enough, perfect enough. They may be attempting to create a sense of identity based on impossible standards and expectations, and be headed toward a breakdown as a result. College in particular is a very intense period wherein your child is likely to experience their highest highs and lowest lows to date. Caralena informs parents on the red flags to look out for and the sneaky strategies their children may be using to hide all that is going on beneath the surface, while providing pointers for engaging them in conversation about how it’s okay to not always be okay.

Audiences Will Learn:

• How your child might be using accomplishment as a cure-all

• Underlying problems with the coping mechanisms they use to project a flawless, unbreakable exterior

• Advice on how to plant seeds and effectively engage your child in conversation on this topic instead of staging a big, overwhelming intervention

The Target audience for this talk is Parents of high school- and college-age students.

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