さんだーさんだ！（ブログ版）

2015年度より中高英語教員になりました。2020年度開校の幼小中混在校で働いています。

Escaping Perfectionism (Hidden Brain)

英語 英語学習 podcast 文字起こし

↑こちらのポッドキャストを、先日書いた↓こちらの文字起こしアプリで起こしてみた。
【英語上級者向け】英語ポッドキャストを文字起こし＆要約＆単語抽出【ChatGPTさまさま】 - さんだーさんだ！（ブログ版）

長いので、主な注意点を最初に🙏（GPT-4 APIの使用でだいぶよくなったと思いますが…）

  • [mm:ss]というタイムスタンプは、入っているところと入っていないところがあるかも。
  • 「-Japan（日本）」「-Barak Obama（バラク・オバマ）」があるかも。単語帳作成のためのプロンプト中に例として挙げたものが紛れ込んでいる可能性があります。
  • proofreadについてなど、ChatGPTへのプロンプトを本文と誤認している場合もあるかも。
  • その他にも日本語訳が抜けているなど不完全な部分は多々あるかと思いますが、基本的にはChatGPTの限界だと思ってご了承ください。。
  • 誤訳や不完全な文字起こしがあったとしても、なんの責任も負えませんので、ご自身で確かめながらご利用ください。

"This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. They're on our TVs, on our phones, and on highway billboards. Flawless, airbrushed images of beautiful people living beautiful lives. Their complexions glow, their wealth seems effortless, and their children are always smiling. All of us are surrounded by these pictures of perfection, pictures that contrast all too starkly with our own complicated messy lives. Social media platforms exacerbate this. Friends post pictures of their idyllic vacation. Colleagues announce promotions. A lot of people use the hashtag blessed. Meanwhile, divorces, demotions, and despair or the challenges of making ends meet, these show up rarely or not at all.

[1:02]
What is the effect of the sharp contrast between the worlds we are shown and the worlds we ourselves inhabit? We may remind ourselves that what we are seeing has been airbrushed and filtered, but the contrast still burrows into our unconscious minds. Some researchers have argued that this contrast produces in us nagging feelings of inferiority, shame and resentment. It causes us to feel we never have enough and to reach endlessly for the next ring, the next achievement, the next milestone. The costs of chasing perfection. This week on Hidden Brain. F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, describes the story of a man

[2:05]
who desperately tried to climb the social ladder. The final lines of the novel are amongst the most famous in literature. They read, 'Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year-by-year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow, we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther, and one fine morning, so we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.' At the London School of Economics, psychologist Thomas Curran studies how many of us are modern versions of Jay Gatsby. He explores the psychological consequences of living in a culture that is obsessed with appearance and achievement. Thomas Curran, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me.

Thomas, you grew up in a working-class family in a small town in England. And as a teenager, you were acutely aware of the social status of two friends, Kevin

[3:08]
and Ian, and the contrast with your own family's means. Can you paint me a picture of what that was like? Yeah, so, my upbringing was one of love and support but also material lack, we didn't have a great deal of money. One of my earliest memories of that is going to school with the wrong backpack, or the wrong pencil case, or the wrong brand of sneakers. I didn't have gadgets like a GameBoy or a PlayStation. Phones were just coming in then I didn't have one of those either. When I compared myself with these two characters, Kevin and Ian, who had all of those things and were able to express, I guess, their personalities and their identities with these material goods. You kind of feel like, even though this is all stupid stuff, just stuff, but it really matters to a kid, and especially if you don't have it.

So, as I grow older and things like cars started to come into the picture, this kind of shame

[4:08]
really started to get really into my bones. And that was huge. Actually, cars was a massive part of this because cars is kind of the ultimate status symbol, right? You just look at how they're advertised. All my friends were bought these really super sleek cars with modifications and all the rest of it. And that was like really crushing for me. That was really embarrassing, not to be able to have one, too. I didn't have the freedom that they had. I couldn't go anywhere. I just tagged along, really, in the back seat. And I suppose this is where I first learned about shame, what it meant to feel ashamed and embarrassed about where I am in life and what I have. And I sort of learned that you kind of got buy your way out of that shame in this world. And that became, I guess, of an early motivation.

I understand that, at one point, Kevin and Ian asked you what car you were going to be buying, Thomas. What did they ask you? What did you say? So, they had these what we call hot hatchbacks in the UK. You know, the

[5:16]
really fast exciting pieces of machinery, I suppose. Everybody around the town would be asking, you know what car you're gonna get? And you're gonna get this one? You're gonna get that one? You're gonna get these plates? And what about these trims? And these wheels? You know, I used to love looking at car magazines and craving for a car of my own. And I would always say, you know what I'm gonna have this. And I'm gonna have that. And when I get my car it's gonna have a silver trim and chrome wheels and all of these things that everybody else was talking about.

I would say that one day, my dad's going to come back and he's going to buy me a car, or it's not going to be long now, you know. And I kind of wished, I hoped that that would happen, but of course, unlike them, my family didn't have the means to be able to buy me these things. And that wasn't my fault. There was nothing that I could have done to change those circumstances. But you feel in some way that you're inadequate, you're less than. So later on in life you were determined to get ahead and you became the first in your family to go to college.

[6:16]
You had a fearsome work ethic. Tell me about it, Thomas. So, I came through the education system at a really unique time. In the UK, Tony Blair was the Prime Minister and he had a great education push at that time. It was the late 90s early 90s and there's a lot of financing to go to university. So I took that up and I managed to scrape my way to a local teaching college to study sport with every intention of being a P.E. teacher. That was gonna be my ambition.

And I guess you could say I was lucky, really, because at my time at that teaching college, I happened to intersect with a professor who was on his way to a more prestigious university. I must've impressed him cause he took me with him to do a PhD. And that was when things to really get quite crazy

[7:17]
because I remember instantly being inside this hyper competitive university environment, being surrounded by people who were just way smarter than me, more aero diet, way more put together.

People were pumping out publications. Some of them were even getting grant money. And in that environment, those early feelings of shame and inferiority that are kind of brought with me started to come back again in mega doses. And I think my response, really looking back was to develop what I can only really describe as an urgent need to lift myself above other people through an excessive form of striving. Like, I made sure I was the first in the office and the last to leave and made sure people saw that.

You know, I'd regularly do 80 hour weeks and I'd let everybody know in the office that I was doing that. I sent these weird conspicuous emails to my academic supervisors in the early hours of the morning and sometimes last thing at night just to let them know that I'm working. And I can remember one Christmas doing a thousand words of my thesis on Christmas day. And at that time I felt really proud of it. You know, these are incredibly unhealthy things to do,

[8:21]
but nevertheless I believed if I didn't do these things, then there's no way I was going to succeed. The Facts and The Reasons - So, you eventually achieved prominence in your field, you got a job at a top-tier university, and your new status lifted you into unfamiliar realms where you often felt out of place. You were once invited for example to give a high-profile speech at a fancy resort where people had paid a lot of money to attend this event. Tell me what happened, Thomas?

Yeah so, all that work did end up paying off and I was able to elevate myself through the academic ladder, up the academic ladder I should say, into second tier and then elite institutions. And that's when I did a very important TED Talk at a resort in the US back in 2018.

[9:24]
And I think going to that Ted talk was when I finally realized I've sort of made something of myself here, but nevertheless, I really felt out of place at that conference. There's people that were paying thousands of pounds, and they were from, you know, you talked to them, they're from this mega firm or that mega firm, or that big industry, and it was kind of overwhelming a little bit. And they sort of just carried themselves with confidence and again, this kind of really picked at my thoughts of inferiority. And the weird thing was, I was the one on the stage. Yeah, like I was the one they were there to see."

★ここまでの要約・日本語訳★

• The program discusses the perfectionism often shown in media and social platforms, contrasting sharply with our complex and messy realities—fostering feelings of inferiority, shame, and perpetual striving for achievement in individuals.
• 番組はメディアやソーシャルプラットフォームでしばしば示される完全主義について議論しており、それは私たちの複雑で混沌とした現実と鮮やかに対照をなしています。それは個々の劣等感、恥、そして絶えず達成を追い求める感情を育てます。

• The program relates this societal pressure to "The Great Gatsby," representing individuals' obsession with appearance and achievement. Thomas Curran, an expert on this topic, shares his personal experiences growing up in a working-class family.
• 番組はこの社会的プレッシャーを「大いなるギャツビー」に結び付け、個々の外見と達成への執着心を表しています。この話題の専門家であるトーマス・カランは、労働階級の家族で育った自身の経験を共有します。

• Curran describes his struggles from poverty, material lack, and shame, as well as his relentless determination to succeed, eventually becoming the first in his family to go to college.
• カランは貧困、物質的な欠乏、そして恥からの闘争を描写し、また成功するための彼の絶え間ない決意を語ります。最終的には家族で初めて大学に行きました。

• He discusses his experiences working excessively in a competitive university environment, driven by feelings of inferiority and shame, eventually achieving prominence in his academic field.
• 彼は競争の激しい大学の環境で過度に働く経験について語ります。それは劣等感と恥によって駆り立てられ、最終的には彼の学術分野で名声を博すまでに至りました。

• Despite his visible success, Curran shares his feelings of inadequacy and the constant struggle even after climbing to top-tier institutions, illustrating the ongoing pressure created by societal standards of perfection.
• 顕著な成功にもかかわらず、カランは自身が不十分であるという感情と、一流の機関に登りつめた後でも常に闘争を続けていると語ります。それは社会の完全主義の基準によって生み出される絶え間ないプレッシャーを示しています。

★ここまでの特徴的な固有名詞・英単語・英語表現★

【固有名詞】

【英単語】

  • airbrushed（エアブラシングされた）
  • complexions（顔色）
  • wealth（富）
  • effortless（努力せずに得られる）
  • perfection（完璧）
  • contrast（対比）
  • complicated（複雑）
  • messy（散らかった）
  • exacerbate（悪化させる）
  • idyllic（理想的な）
  • promotions（昇進）
  • despair（絶望）
  • challenges（挑戦）
  • inferiority（劣等感）
  • resentment（憤慨）
  • milestone（節目）
  • motivation（動機）
  • inadequate（不適切）
  • determined（決定的）
  • fearsome（恐ろしい）
  • competitive（競争的な）
  • conspicuous（目立つ）
  • prominence（卓越）

【英語フレーズ】

  • make ends meet（収入内でやりくりする）
  • to climb the social ladder（社会的地位を上げる）
  • stretch out our arms farther（もっと遠くに手を伸ばす）
  • acutely aware of（〜を鋭く感じる）
  • the first in your family to go to college（家族で最初に大学に行く）
  • get ahead（前に進む）
  • work ethic（労働倫理）
  • pumping out publications（出版物を量産する）
  • early feelings of shame and inferiority（早い段階の恥と劣等感）
  • get really into my bones（骨まで染みる）
  • hyper competitive university environment（超競争的な大学環境）
  • be surrounded by people who were just way smarter than me（私よりもずっと賢い人々に囲まれている）
  • out of place（場違い）
  • made something of myself（自分を何かに育て上げる）
  • high-profile speech（高評価のスピーチ）

★ここまでの文章の一部の表現の解説記事はこちら★
ポッドキャストで英語学習：Escaping Perfectionism (Hidden Brain) 1/6 - さんだーさんだ！（ブログ版）



"I'm a bit of a perfectionist now. How many times have you heard that one? How did the talk itself go? Give me a sense of the preparation you put in and how the talk itself was delivered and how it was received. So, the talk itself was extremely nerve-wracking. I'm not a natural speaker. It's not something that I ever thought I would do. And I've kind of just been thrust into in a profession that kind of requires you to be pretty good at speaking.

[10:26]
So, one of the things I do to compact the anxiety that's associated with that is to overthink things, over-prepare because in my mind, that's the most fail-safe way to make sure things don't go wrong. It's so important that you don't show an outside. That you don't show an ounce of weakness or vulnerability because in that moment things can cascade, they can spiral and when it's so public, that's when you feel like your deficiencies or shortcomings are being exposed. And in the end, I was able to recite a 15-minute talk word for word without any mistakes, which was incredibly important for me, but at the same time it wasn't the most charismatic of talks, it wasn't the most inspirational, but I did it. And people were very polite and they applauded and I'm sure they appreciated it, but at the same time you could tell that it wasn't quite the show-stopping talk that perhaps other people at the conference.

[11:28]
Had been able to deliver and that, you know, you do think about that. So, in the aftermath of the talk, when you sort of look back on it, did you remember sort of the polite applause? What portion of it did you end up ruminating on? I was very aware that, you know, it wasn't a rousing speech that others had delivered. And so I wondered, you know, OK, did it look stilted? Was it very one-dimensional or monotonic? You know, was I able to convey the ideas in a way that changed people or in some way made them think differently about the topic? You know, these are the goals I had going in, but I wasn't sure in those moments where I'd actually achieve them. So, your anxieties about your shortcomings reached something of a peak after a romantic relationship ended, Thomas. Tell me about that period in your life and what happened? It was a very messy breakup that happened in a really exposing way and it was something that made me feel very humiliating... humiliate, excuse me.

[12:29]
I worried about how it would look to other people. I just trusted myself about that breakup and what it said about me. And that was turning itself into all sorts of negative beliefs about myself. Why can't you snap out of it? Why can't you just get through this? So, I felt a lot of self-loathing, a lot of shame, a lot of grief. And I went into a really dark place in those moments. And what I needed to do more than anything else was to just stop and deal with the emotional plunge that I was experiencing. But my personality wouldn't let me do that. And if anything, I was trying to push myself even harder to overcompensate for the things that are now starting to go wrong as a function of the breakup and how it impacted on my emotional well-being. Some months later, Thomas was working in his office when he started to see flashes. He had no idea what was going on. And the flashes started to get brighter, they started to obscure what I could see.

[13:34]
I couldn't concentrate on the thing I was reading. I had trouble breathing. My throat became really tight and so I tried to get some water, but that was no use. I ran out onto the open road and tried to kind of suck the fresh air, but none of it was really working and it just started to take over and this panic was starting to feed the panic. And then you worry, what on earth is going on? Am I, am I dying? Is this it?" And then after a few minutes of complete meltdown, I would say, my body just started to come back to me. I was able to regulate my breathing. My heart rate came down and I was almost, I suppose, back in the world again. And at the time, I don't know what on earth that was. And I'm sure many of you listeners can resonate, but that was a panic attack that comes from the bursting of the dam of this kind of suppressed anxiety that we're just holding back. And that panic attack was really the first of many, but it was an eye-opener for me.

[14:36]
And showed me that the way that I was, you know, approaching life, trying to achieve, trying to prove to everybody that I was good enough was actually coming at a great expense for mental health. Alright. When we come back, Thomas explores the root of his self-doubt and self-castigation and discovers that his affliction is all too common in our modern world. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanti. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanti. A few years ago an electronic trading platform ran an ad that was simultaneously funny, sad and revealing. A young man sits on an airplane. The kid in the seat behind him kicks his tray table into the young man's backrest over and over again. Glimpsing a better world in the front of the aircraft, the young man makes his way to an open curtain.

[15:41]
In the first-class cabin, beautiful people lounge on spacious sofas. They drink champagne in long stem glasses. But just as the young man thinks he's going to be invited into the special world, the open curtain is slammed shut. And let me play! The tagline reads, first-class is there to remind you you're not in first class. Psychologist Thomas Karan knows all about that curtain. He has seen it in his own life, but also in the lives of his students. Thomas, your students at the London School of Economics, are smart and hard-working, but many of them come to you in a state of distress. You talk about one student whom you call John, who exemplified this phenomenon. What was John's story?

What I see in young people and students that come through the door is a lot of tension that's bound up in an intense need to excel. And all of our students at some level feel this, but there was definitely a vivid case in John

[16:43]
who I think was a very extreme case of that intense desire and need to do things perfectly, excellently, to excel at all times, he would constantly come to me in meetings telling me that his grades weren't good enough, even though they were really high, that they weren't good enough, that he didn't feel like he was succeeding in the measure that he expected of himself. And no matter really how I tried to reconcile those things and tell him that what he's doing is exceptional he always recast it, those successes, that abject failures and how he'd let himself and other people down. And this was, it was so sad because John really found it difficult to see his successes in any other way. And his justification really, at all times, very simple how could he be a success when he was trying so much harder than other people just to get the same outcomes? that's the thing with being at LSE, everyone's exceptional.

[17:46]
And not being able to derive any lasting satisfaction from success is really a kind of signature of the way my students interpret their experience at university. They find it difficult to deal with setbacks. And I think sometimes we misunderstand this as being fragile or, you know, people lacking resilience. But really it's just excessive self-imposed pressures and a deep and profound fear of failure.

So Thomas, you eventually came to recognise that both you and students like John, were suffering from the same affliction, what was your insight? So it became evident to me that myself, my students and many, many people around me, were struggling with something called Perfectionism. A need and desire to do things perfectly, and nothing but perfectly, comes from a sense of lack, a sense of inferiority, a sense of deficiency, a

[18:46]
sense that I'm not perfect and in order to gain approval and validation in this world that I'm worth something that I matter that I need to be perfect.

So, you've conducted a study that is tracked levels of perfectionism over time, what do you find? So we've found recently that perfectionism is increasing among more recent generations of young people. This is a study we did back now in 2016, 2017, essentially looking at college student data of perfectionism. So we have about 30 years worth of perfectionism data looking at various indicators of perfectionism. And we found when we ran the numbers that perfectionism was increasing, and increasing really rapidly. It's up about forty percent since 1989, and that's concerning because

[19:48]
it's associated most strongly with negative mental health outcomes like depression, anxiety, self-harm, and this hard data is telling us something significant and something that we need to be paying attention to."

★ここまでの要約・日本語訳★

  • The speaker discusses their anxiety around public speaking and the intense preparation they put into it to avoid making mistakes. Despite their successful, mistake-free delivery, they were acutely aware that the talk lacked charisma.
  • 役者は公的な話し合いまわりの不安やそれに向けてミスを避けるためにどのほど強く準備をしたかについて話しています。成功をもとんでミスのない講義を行いましたが、講義がカリスマ性を欠いていることを強く認識していました。
  • The speaker also talks about a painful breakup and the aftermath, wherein they experienced feelings of shame and self-doubt. This personal trauma culminated in the occurrence of a panic attack.
  • また、話者は苦痛だった別れとその余波について述べています。その中で恥や自己疑念の感情を経験しました。この個人的なトラウマはパニック発作の起こるまでに頂点に達しました。
  • The speaker identifies this internal strife as a manifestation of perfectionism, a sense of needing to do everything flawlessly due to insecurities and the need for validation.
  • 話者はこの内部の闘争を完全主義という現れとして特定しています。それは不安定さと承認の必要性からくる全てを完全に行う必要性の感覚です。
  • In his research, the speaker discovered that such perfectionism is increasing rapidly among recent generations, with an increase of forty percent since 1989.
  • 彼の研究で、話者はそのような完全主義が近年の世代において急速に増加していることを発見しました。それは1989年以降40％増加しています。
  • The speaker implies that this trend of increasing perfectionism is concerning, due to its strong association with negative mental health outcomes like depression, anxiety, and self-harm.
  • 話者は、この増加している完全主義の傾向が心配であることを暗示しています。なぜなら、それはうつ病、不安、自己危害などのネガティブなメンタルヘルスの結果と強く関連付けられているからです。

★ここまでの特徴的な固有名詞・英単語・英語表現★

【固有名詞】

【英単語】

  • perfectionist（完全主義者）
  • vulnerability（弱さ）
  • deficiency（欠落）
  • charisma（カリスマ）
  • rousing（奮起させる）
  • self-loathing（自己嫌悪）
  • grief（悲しみ）
  • self-doubt（自己疑念）
  • self-castigation（自己罰）
  • resilience（抵抗力）
  • setback（挫折）

【英語フレーズ】

  • overthink things（物事を考えすぎる）
  • make sure things don't go wrong（物事がうまくいかないように確認する）
  • show an ounce of weakness（少しの弱さを見せる）
  • give me a sense of（〜の感じを教えて）
  • to be thrust into in a profession（職業に突き立てられる）
  • snap out of it（立ち直る）
  • deal with the emotional plunge（感情的な下降に対処する）
  • overcompensate for the things（事態を過剰に補償する）
  • derive any lasting satisfaction（持続的な満足感を得る）
  • pay attention to（〜に注意を払う）

★ここまでの文章の一部の表現の解説記事はこちら★
ポッドキャストで英語学習：Escaping Perfectionism (Hidden Brain) 2/6 - さんだーさんだ！（ブログ版）



"So, perfectionism is really fascinating because unlike many other flaws, many people celebrate this trait. You call it perfectionism, our favourite flaw, what do you mean by that? Perfectionism is something that I think in modern society is lionised, celebrated. We know it carries self-sacrificial patterns of behaviour, makes us feel a little bit miserable, yet we also think that perfectionism is what carries us forward and makes us successful, right? An unnecessary evil, so to speak. Something that if we want to get ahead, we might need a bit of perfectionism.

And of course, this has become something of a joke as well, Thomas. In many job interviews,

[20:48]

when candidates are asked to name a flaw, many of them will say, 'I'm a perfectionist.' Yeah, that's exactly right. And recruiters time after time tell us that that's the most overused cliche in job interviews.

And I think it says something about what we consider to be socially desirable weaknesses, that if somehow we can communicate that we're willing to sacrifice ourselves in some way and push ourselves beyond comfort, that that is something they'll see as positive, something that they really want on their team or in their organization. So that speaks really to the ubiquity of perfectionism at the moment.

I want to spend a moment talking about what perfectionism is and what it's not because I think many of us might use the same word, but mean different things by it. Many people might say perfectionism is about setting high standards and working hard to meet them, but that's very different, I think, from your definition. You say perfectionism is less about pursuing success and more about avoiding failure. One of its hallmarks is something you call a deficit orientation.

[21:52]

What do you mean by this term? So, a lot of people associate perfectionism with really high standards. That's true. But actually, perfectionism is far, far deeper than what we see on the surface because what really matters is where it's coming from. And where those excessive amounts of striving and high standards and goal-getting attitudes that you see on the surface are coming from in the perfectionist people is a place of lack. A sense that I'm not good enough, that I'm not perfect enough and I need to prove to other people all the time that I'm worth something, that I matter in this world and the way that I do that is through being perfect because of course if I'm perfect I'll get their validation and that will make me feel better, that will soothe those shame-based fears of not being good enough. So two people could work very hard, they can both have high standards, they can both care about getting things right.

[22:53]

But one person might just be conscientious while the other person is a perfectionist and the distinction you are drawing is really what's driving them on the inside. Are you chasing success or are you fleeing failure? But there are also some external markers of perfectionism and when perfectionists encounter adversity, you found they often respond with shame and with guilt. Can you explain what that means, Thomas?

So, what we see in the lab is exactly what I experienced when I encountered that breakup in my own life. When you put perfectionistic people in stressful situations, perfectionism will aggravate the stress. So every time you go into the lab, you tell perfectionistic people to do stressful things. Like maybe give a public talk or complete a competitive task against other people. And in the end you say, 'You didn't do very well, you failed.'

What you'll see is perfectionistic people respond with intense amounts of self-conscious

[23:56]

emotion, lots of shame, lots of guilt about having slipped up in some way, particularly if that slip up is public. It validates in them a sense that that fear that they're not good enough. Whereas people who score lower on the perfectionism scales, well, yes, of course, these things do have an impact on their emotional state, but it's a far less profound impact, and they're able to bounce back quite quickly.

You told me that after that talk that you gave, you engaged in a lot of brooding and rumination about how the talk went and you're worried that it had not landed properly or what could have gone better. But you're also seeing this in the data that perfectionists engage in a lot of brooding and rumination and revisiting things over and over again. Yeah, perfectionistic people, people who are high on the perfectionism spectrum, what you tend to see is they also score higher on what we would call self-sabotaging thought patterns. So

[24:59]

things like you mentioned that worry, rumination, they're really hyper vigilant about where they sit relative to others, how they're performing relative to others. They find it very difficult to exist in the moment or be mindful or appreciate successes and so perfectionist people really find it difficult to thrive or flourish because they're constantly worried about what's going to go wrong or how other people are doing.

Now, perfectionists often work very hard, but one of the really curious insights that you and others have had is that they often don't pay attention to working smartly. They are sometimes indifferent to what's called diminishing productivity returns. What does this mean, Thomas?

Yeah, so that's a really curious finding actually in the perfectionism literature, we know perfectionists work really hard,

[26:02]

and they push themselves well beyond comfort into a zone of declining and diminishing returns for every little bit of effort that they put in. Failure is very common among perfectionist people because the goals that they set themselves are way too high. And even if they do succeed, perfectionism really turns those successes into dead ends. Because the better we do, the better we feel like we're expected to do. And so we just continually keep ourselves on tippy-toes, clinging for more and more.

I suppose it's like running on a treadmill that never slows down. So it's really tough to success equation for perfectionists because they really never feel like they've ever made it. You and others have argued that perfectionists sometimes engage in what is called perfectionistic self-preservation. What is this idea, Thomas?

So this is the second reason, I think, why we don't see very strong correlations

[27:03]

between perfectionism and performance. When things start to go wrong, perfectionists do something really, really interesting. They withhold their effort in order to save face to kind of preserve their image and their sense of self. And we've done a lot of experiments looking at this phenomenon.

And one of the most illuminating of those experiments is when a colleague of mine, Andrew Hill, took people into the lab, gave them a cycling task, and said, 'You've got to complete a certain distance in a certain amount of time. And based on your fitness, you should be able to do X amount of distance.' So he got them going with the task, and everybody worked really hard to meet the goal. And at the end, he told them no matter how they did that you failed. Now, what's really interesting here is that after telling people they failed, he asked them to do it again.

And that's where something remarkable happened,

[28:03]

because people who didn't have a great deal of perfectionism, on that second attempt, after the first failure, didn't really change the amount of effort they put in, if anything, it went up slightly. But the people who scored high in perfectionism did the exact opposite. They withheld their effort on the second attempt. Because the thinking in their mind is you can't fail at something you didn't try. And if I put all of myself into this first effort and still didn't make it, well I'm not gonna do that again. Because the feelings of shame and embarrassment were so intense that I just don't want to feel those things again.

And so this is the perfectionism paradox I suppose, this is that they really are so intensely fearful of that failure that when it looks like it's going to be a very likely outcome of anything that we're doing, then they take themselves away from those situations. That's incredibly self-sabotaging. It doesn't just look like complete withdrawal by the way, it can also come in the form of procrastination, so we'll remove ourselves

[29:08]

from doing activities that are really difficult in the moment because the anxiety is so intense. All of those things are not at all conducive to performance."

★ここまでの要約・日本語訳★

  • Perfectionism is often perceived positively in modern society, even labeled as the "favourite flaw", as it is thought to drive individuals towards success.

- 完璧主義は、個人を成功へと駆り立てると考えられるため、現代社会ではしばしば肯定的に捉えられ、"好きな欠点"とも呼ばれます。

  • However, perfectionism is more about avoiding failure than pursuing success, often causing individuals to set unrealistically high standards, perpetually feeling like they're not good enough.

- しかし、完璧主義とは成功を追求するよりも失敗を避けることに重きを置き、多くの場合、個人は非現実的な高い基準を設定し、自分が十分でないと常に感じることに繋がります。

  • When faced with stressful situations or adversity, perfectionists tend to resort to self-sabotaging thought patterns and experience intense shame and guilt.

- ストレスの多い状況や逆境に直面した際、完璧主義者は自己妨害の思考パターンに頼りがちであり、強い恥や罪悪感を体験します。

  • Despite working extremely hard, perfectionists often disregard the concept of diminishing productivity returns, leading to an ongoing struggle to achieve their excessively high goals.

- 完璧主義者は非常に努力はしますが、生産性の逓減リターンの概念を無視しがちであり、過度に高い目標の達成に向けた闘争は継続されます。

  • A phenomenon known as "perfectionistic self-preservation" was also identified, in which perfectionists withhold effort to protect their self-image, causing them to disengage from or procrastinate difficult tasks due to fear of failure.

- "完璧主義者の自己保存"と呼ばれる現象も確認され、これは完璧主義者が自己像を保護するために努力を控え、失敗への恐怖から困難なタスクを避けたり、先延ばしにすることが原因となっています。

★ここまでの特徴的な固有名詞・英単語・英語表現★

【固有名詞】

  • Thomas（トーマス）

【英単語】

  • perfectionism（完璧主義）
  • flaws（欠点）
  • celebrate（祝う）
  • self-sacrificial（自己犠牲的な）
  • miserable（惨め）
  • successful（成功する）
  • deficit orientation（欠陥へのオリエンテーション）
  • hallmarks（特徴）
  • brooding（ぶつぶつ考え込む）
  • rumination（反芻）
  • adversity（逆境）
  • validation（承認）
  • self-conscious（自意識過剰）
  • slip up（失敗する）
  • thrive（繁栄する）
  • diminishing（減少する）
  • productivity returns（生産的な成果）
  • indifferent（無関心）
  • self-preservation（自己保存）

【英語フレーズ】

  • moving forward（前進して）
  • get ahead（進展する）
  • chasing success（成功を追い求める）
  • fleeing failure（失敗から逃れる）
  • being mindful（念頭に置く）
  • appreciate successes（成功を認める）
  • working smartly（賢く働く）
  • failure is common（失敗はよくある）
  • perform well under stress（ストレス下で良く働く）
  • withhold the effort（努力を抑える）
  • engage in something（何かに従事する）
  • save face（面子を保つ）
  • remove oneself from something（自分自身を何かから除く）

★ここまでの文章の一部の表現の解説記事はこちら★
ポッドキャストで英語学習：Escaping Perfectionism (Hidden Brain) 3/6 - さんだーさんだ！（ブログ版）




"So I guess this is why you would say you would not want to have a perfectionist who is the pilot of your plane or a surgeon carrying out an operation on you? There is no way you would want someone like me flying your plane! Because if an engine suddenly craps out at 35,000 feet, you're going to need somebody who's able to think very clearly about the procedures. There's going to be by the way no perfect way to get out of that situation, there's going to be many, many good enough ways to get out of that situation. And what a perfectionist will do will search for the perfect outcome. Whereas somebody who is more conscientious, meticulous or diligent, they'll be able to know that there are many different options that we can take. And the most important thing is to take the option that lands the plane safely. And that's the same with a surgeon. That's the same with working at a nuclear plant. Any of these kind of very high-risk activities,

[30:12]
Conscientiousness, diligence are really important qualities, but not perfection. So Thomas's research has found that there's not just one kind of perfectionism, but really three. And each type comes with its own particular kind of psychological hardship. The first might be exemplified by something that happened a few years ago to a tennis player named Mikhail Yuzhny. At one point he was the number one player in Russia and a top-10 player in the world. During a match at the Miami Open in 2008 he missed a point and slammed his own face with his racket. After the third blow with blood streaming down his face, he required medical attention. Would he be an example of what you would call is self-oriented perfectionist people who subject themselves to incredibly harsh criticism? Yeah, absolutely. I saw that point actually, I remember it well, and it was at the end of a very long rally in which really the shot that was missed was one of the easiest shots, and that intense emotion and outburst that came from it, a place of just complete self-loathing for the fact that having made all of these really tough shots, you couldn't make the easy one. And these are the intense expectations that self-oriented perfectionistic people hold themselves to. And the moment they fall short of it, particularly in very important situations, the self-loathing, the sense of how on earth could you have been so stupid, what on earth were you thinking how could you have let yourself make that mistake can be really so intense that in the extreme cases like this one they can engage in some really quite aggressive self-castigation and that's that's a signature of a self-oriented perfectionist. There is just a simply a lack of self-compassion and a strong sense of self-loathing.

[32:12]
Some years ago, Thomas, Amy Chua, a Yale law school professor, wrote a book called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and at one point in the book she tells her older daughter that if her piano playing isn't perfect she is going to take her stuffed animals and burn them. I want to play you a clip of a book interview with the author on PBS. If you read the back of your book it explains how to be a tiger mother. There's a long list of things you didn't allow your children to do, your two girls. Let me read a couple of them. They were never allowed to attend a sleepover, have a play date, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play. Watch TV or play computer games. Choose their own extracurricular activities. Get any grade less than an A. Not be the number one student in every subject except gym and drama. Play any instrument other than the piano or violin. Not play the piano or violin. When you hear that list read to you, does it sound extreme? Well, it sounds tongue in cheek to me but it doesn't sound so extreme. And you know I, when I talk to a lot of immigrants or immigrants kids, they find it hysterical. You know they

[33:14]
They know that it's poking fun a little bit. But it really captures some truth. So, that is a remarkable interview. I was really struck when the interviewer listed the number of things that Amy Chua kept her kids from doing. Now, what I'm hearing is that Amy Chua feels that some of what she wrote was over the top. But I'm wondering, Thomas, do you feel that this clip captures what you call other-oriented perfectionism? Yeah, other-oriented perfectionism is when we turn perfectionism outwards onto other people and we expect them to be perfect and nothing but perfect. And we'll certainly let them know you'll know of or into perfectionist, when you meet one. They tend to be quite brash. They will let you know when things haven't gone quite to plan. And it's what we call, I suppose what Freud would call projection, the sense that my intense desire to be perfect is projected outwards onto you too. You know Steve Jobs had a reputation for being like this people described him as you know berating other people for not living up

[34:16]
To his high expectations what's the line here between someone who has high expectations and is a demanding manager or a demanding boss and somebody who is an other-oriented perfectionist? Well the line is is really the inability to accept that any time that things are good enough whereas you know someone that's demanding yes, wants high standards, yes is also somebody who can accept and appreciate when things have gone well, when there's been a success and can give praise and appreciation for that. And I think that's the difference. A third type of perfectionism is known as socially prescribed perfectionism. Explain this idea to me, Thomas. Socially prescribed perfectionism is the most extreme form of perfectionism. And it's a perfectionism that comes from outside. A sense that everybody in all around me expects me to be perfect and they're watching and waiting to pounce if I show any form of weakness.

[35:19]
And carrying that around with you all the time is really tough. You need to be perfect all times. You need to make sure that your life is curated to show other people there are no weaknesses. And that is really tough to live under that microscope and to think that everybody in all times is watching. So you found that socially-prescribed perfectionism might be rising fastest amongst all the kinds of perfectionism in our society. Can you talk a little bit about what the data show and why this might be happening? Essentially, what we're seeing today a rise of about 40% in socially prescribed affectionism from the late 1980's to the present day. That's a really, really big rise, which continues to increase. And it's most concerning because it's most strongly correlated with really quite negative mental health outcomes like anxiety, depression, low mood,

[36:21]
A sense of hopelessness and helplessness. So things that are really quite significant when it comes to our mental health. And I think it's indicative perhaps of what is called a hidden epidemic of unrelenting expectations for perfection, which are kind of taking over among young people. And why do you think this might be the case? Obviously, the one that most people point to is social media, and the comparative lens that social media offers us, 24-7 and without escape. But it's not just images of perfection in social media, it's unrelenting pressures to excel in schools and colleges. It's the modern workplace and the intense pressures to hustle and grind, it's changing parenting practices. They're responding to pressures in schools and colleges and you know, the more competitive landscape to get into elite college by pushing young people in the realm of education. So there's all sorts of different pressures now that are weighing on young people and

[37:25]
That are being internalised as pressures to be perfect. When we come back, how to escape the perfectionist trap. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Hear more about it at www.shankarvedantam.com. This is Hidden Brain, I am Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Thomas Curran is the author of The Perfection Trap, Embracing the Power of Good Enough. Thomas, you call yourself a recovering perfectionist, and you've talked about the ways in which you're working to relinquish your perfectionism. And yet someone looking at you from the outside, you know, would see a prominent professor with a job at a top school, someone who writes books and articles and that garner wide attention. Someone might say, you know clearly perfectionism worked for Thomas, it got him to where he is today.

[38:27]
How would you respond to that? Well, clearly my perfectionism has pushed me forward in moments where I've needed it to."

★ここまでの要約・日本語訳★

  • The dialogue discusses the concept of perfectionism and its potential pitfalls in high-stakes fields such as aviation, surgery, and nuclear plant operation. It also illuminates three types of perfectionism: self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed.
  • ダイアログでは、完璧主義とその概念、及び航空、手術、原子力プラントの運営などのハイリスクな分野での潜在的な落とし穴について語られています。また、完全璧主義には自己指向型、他者指向型、社会的指向型の3つのタイプについても明らかにしています。
  • The conversation reveals that while perfectionism can push individuals to attain high standards, it can also lead to excessive self-criticism, unrealistic expectations of others, and an unhealthy obsession with external perceptions.
  • この会話は、完璧主義が個人を高い基準を達成するように追い込む一方で、過度の自己批判、他者に対する非現実的な期待、外部からの見え方に対する不健康な執着心を引き起こす可能性も示しています。
  • The dialogue highlights a significant increase, particularly among young people, in socially prescribed perfectionism - a form driven by external pressures and expectations, which is strongly correlated with negative mental health outcomes.
  • ダイアログでは、特に若者の間で社会的に指向された完璧主義 - 外部の圧力と期待によって駆り立てられる形式 - が大幅に増加しており、これはネガティブなメンタルヘルスの結果と強く相関していることを強調しています。
  • The rise in socially prescribed perfectionism is attributed to factors such as the pervasiveness of social media, increased academic pressures, changing parenting styles, and a more competitive educational landscape.
  • 社会的指向完璧主義の増加は、ソーシャルメディアの普及、学力のプレッシャーの増加、育児スタイルの変化、より競争力のある教育環境などの要素によるものとされています。
  • Despite the perceived success that perfectionism can bring, the dialogue uncovers its potential drawbacks on mental health and emphasizes the importance of self-acceptance and understanding that "good enough" can be a healthier and more attainable goal.
  • 完璧主義がもたらすと考えられる成功にもかかわらず、対話はその潜在的なメンタルヘルスに対する影響を明らかにし、"十分な"ことがより健康的で達成可能な目標であるという自己受容と理解の重要性を強調しています。

★ここまでの特徴的な固有名詞・英単語・英語表現★

【固有名詞】

  • Mikhail Yuzhny（ミハイル・ユーズニー）
  • Miami Open（マイアミオープン）
  • Amy Chua（エイミー・チュア）
  • Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother（バトルヒム・オブ・ザ・タイガーマザー）
  • Yale law school（イェール法科大学院）
  • PBS（公共放送サービス）
  • Steve Jobs（スティーブ・ジョブズ）
  • Freud（フロイト）
  • Thomas Curran（トーマス・カラン）
  • The Perfection Trap, Embracing the Power of Good Enough（パーフェクション・トラップ、エンブレーシング・ザ・パワー・オブ・グッド・イナフ＝完璧主義の罠、十分な力を抱きしめる）
  • Hidden Brain（隠された脳）

【英単語】

  • perfectionist（完璧主義者）
  • procedure（手順）
  • conscientious（誠実な）
  • meticulous（細心の注意を払う）
  • diligent（勤勉な）
  • outburst（爆発）
  • psychological hardship（心理的苦労）
  • self-castigation（自己批判）
  • self-compassion（自己慈悲）
  • self-loathing（自己嫌悪）

【英語フレーズ】

  • Slam one’s own face with his racket（ラケットで自分の顔を打つ）
  • have incredibly harsh criticism（非常に厳しい批判を持つ）
  • Engage in self-castigation（自己責任を問う）
  • lack of self-compassion（自己同情の欠如）
  • strong sense of self-loathing（強い自己嫌悪）
  • project high expectations outward（高い期待を外に投影する）
  • live up to high expectations（高い期待に応える）
  • accept and appreciate success（成功を認め、感謝する）
  • feel under microscope（顕微鏡の下にいるように感じる）
  • relentless expectation for perfection（完璧への無情な期待）

★ここまでの文章の一部の表現の解説記事はこちら★
ポッドキャストで英語学習：Escaping Perfectionism (Hidden Brain) 4/6 - さんだーさんだ！（ブログ版）




"But the reason why I'm here is because I was very, very fortunate to come through at a time where people like me were supported to go to university, where I just so happened to meet the right professor at the right time, it took me to the right university. But without those remarkable moments of luck, I wouldn't be here. The second thing to say is that I look, I guess on the surface, like a very successful individual, and in many ways, I suppose I am. But I can't afford to live in the city that I work in, I don't have a house, I've had to put off things like having a family and relationships. I've lived in countless different homes. I can't set root in communities, or build a long and lasting friendship group because my life has just been essentially one long period of flux.

[39:30]
So, yes, it looks like success, but it doesn't feel like success. And when I look and reflect on this journey and how difficult it's been, and the sacrifices I've had to make, I sometimes question whether I might've been better off back in my working class community with a job that gives me some sense of purpose with a family and a house and a community. Maybe I would be happier. Is it possible that for some people, perfectionism might be something they say, yes, it's a curse, yes, it's psychologically unhealthy, but yes, also, I'm glad I chose this life. I don't know if Steve Jobs was or wasn't a perfectionist, but if he was, you know, I suspect that if he was around, he would tell us, you know, I got to start a $3 trillion company, and yes I drove myself and everyone around me nuts,

[40:31]
but that's what I did, and it was worth it. Would that be okay for him to say it was worth it, or do we get to diagnose them from the outside? No, I don't think we get to speak for Steve Jobs at all. If somebody carries perfectionism around with them and they're really successful and they, yes, they go through all of the things that I've experienced and for them it's worth it, who am I to tell them that it isn't the case? All I can say from what I understand about the work that I've done and my own experiences is that perfectionism carries a really heavy cost. and that actually there's plenty of evidence that we can be just as successful, if not more successful, and not carrying around the emotional baggage that we carry around with perfectionism. One of the people who might fit that bill is the writer Margaret Atwood. She's written nearly the equivalent of a book a year over six decades. When asked how she does it, she says, I'm not a perfectionist. That's one clue.

[41:32]
So, it's possible you can be very productive and get a lot of things done, and not be a perfectionist. In fact, it might even be easier to get a lot of things done when you're not a perfectionist. And you'd be a lot more happy. I think Margaret Atwood is a great example of someone who can combine a desire, a joy, a real sense of purpose and vocation in what she does, i.e. writing, and being able to do that in a way that doesn't carry with it this kind of constant self-worrying self-doubt about it being perfect or exceptional. And really, perfectionism is the thief of creativity in many ways. It stops us from putting things out there when they're not quite right because we worry about how that's going to be received. And I can tell you that firsthand from having written a book. You know, my editor I think was ready to frost to meet at the end of the process because I was still tinkering it to writing right to the end. And it was so intensely difficult to get this one out. And Atwood has almost the opposite perspective.

[42:36]
There seems to be a joy and an embrace of the process in her writing. And that really comes through in her pages, and it really comes through in her self-analysis of how she writes and why she writes and the motivations behind it. So I think she's a really good example, actually, of how you can be incredibly successful. You can contribute so much to the world and not be a perfectionist. We're talking about perfectionism mostly in a work context in this conversation, and that is perhaps where perfectionism mostly manifests itself. But it can also show up in the domestic sphere. There's a phrase you like, the good enough mother. Tell me the story of Donald Winnicott. Donald Winnicott was an English pediatrician and he wrote extensively on parenting in the 1950s. His idea of the good enough mother was something that was a bombshell, I suppose,

[43:36]
to mothers of the day, who were holding themselves up to really impossible standards that were being placed on them in terms of the way they parent and the way they raise their children. The idea of the good enough mother wasn't simply that perfect mothering or perfect parenting is not possible, of course, it's not possible. But it was also it's not even desirable for the mother themselves, but also for the child, because the child needs to learn about setback difficulties, things not going quite to plan and they need to know how to handle and deal with the frustrations and disappointments of those moments because the world is gonna present those things to us all the time. I think those were the key lessons that Winnicott really wanted to instil in mothers. The good enough mother can help to raise children that are well adjusted and happy and have a sense of purpose for life. You say there are steps that we can take as individuals to reduce the harmful effects of perfectionism,

[44:39]
and one of the things that you have mentioned to me, Thomas, is that perfectionists tend to engage in a lot of rigid and unrealistic thinking. You know, they tell themselves, I must perform flawlessly, and if I don't perform flawlessly, everything around me is going to fall apart. You have a writing technique that you use for yourself and that you recommend to others, that pushes back against this kind of thinking. What do you do? Yeah, so perfectionism indeed involves those really intrusive patterns of thinking. I must do this, I have to do that. Why can't you be this, why can't you do that? And I think the most important thing to do when those feelings are starting to make themselves known to you is to write them down, think about them, reflect on them and ask yourself, maybe on a scale of 1 to 10, how realistic is this, how achievable is this? And importantly, do I actually need to do this right now? If I don't, what would happen? And again, often the consequences when we

[45:42]
actually sit down and reflect are not as catastrophic as your perfectionism would have you think that they might be. You know so often Thomas, perfectionism is about seeing our work and our accomplishments as extensions of ourselves. But of course we don't have to do this. Instead of making ourselves the focus, we can make our work the focus. Now you had a role model close to home who exemplified this idea of the work being its own reward. Tell me about your grandfather. My late grandfather was a master craftsman. And I used to watch him for hours as he would fashion everyday things, like banisters, chairs, window frames, in his workshop. And they were immaculate. From the vantage point of a child, they just seem magical. How on earth were you able to create these wonderful pieces of furniture? And of course, his meticulousness, his diligence, his conscientiousness, his high standards

[46:43]
were unquestionably the traits of somebody who worked really hard and wanted to do things well, but they weren't the traits of a perfectionist. And when I reflected on his way of striving versus mine, it became evident to me really that the big difference was that when he had created the things that he created in his workshop. He just took them to where they were going to live and left them there. He didn't loiter for validation. He didn't need that five-star review. And as far as he was concerned, they just needed to exist way more than he needed to be loved or recognized or appreciated. And that is the thing about high standards, I think. They really don't have to come with insecurity. Only perfectionism grasps the two together. And that's why perfection isn't about perfecting things or tasks, it's about perfecting our imperfect selves and going through life trying to conceal every lash, blemish and shortcoming from those around us.

[47:45]
So, whenever I'm back home, I visit the places where my grandfather's carpentry is still installed because all those banisters and stairs and window frames that he brought into the world are really evidence of a man who had a vocation way bigger than himself. And, of course, none of those things bear his name but they are used and enjoyed by hundreds of people every single day."

★ここまでの要約・日本語訳★

  • The speaker discusses the struggles of their success, admitting their inability to afford living in the city and lacking a sense of community, despite outside perceptions of success.

「成功しているように見える私について話すスピーカーは、都市生活を続けることができず、コミュニティに所属する感覚がないという困難を認めています。」

  • They query whether being true perfectionists, like Steve Jobs, contribute to overall happiness and success, arguing that perfectionism often carries a heavy emotional cost.

「彼らは、スティーブ・ジョブズのような真の完全主義者であることが全体的な幸福と成功に貢献するのか疑問を呈し、完全主義はしばしば重い精神的負担をもたらすと主張しています。」

  • The speaker points out that successful people can still achieve great things without being perfectionists, using Margaret Atwood, a prolific author who admits she isn't a perfectionist, as an example.

「スピーカーは成功した人々は完全主義者でなくても偉大なことを成し遂げることができ、完全主義者でないことを認めた多作な作家マーガレット・アトウッドを例に挙げて指摘しています。」

  • Perfectionism doesn't only affect professional life, but also personal spheres, as shown by Donald Winnicott's theory of the 'good enough mother' which revolves around accepting imperfections.

「完全主義はプロフェッショナルな生活だけでなく、個人の領域にも影響し、ドナルド・ウィニコットの「十分良い母」の理論が示すように、不完全さを受け入れることを中心に回っています。」

  • The speaker concludes by honoring their grandfather, a master craftsman who didn't seek validation but took satisfaction in his work, suggesting that perfectionism doesn't have to be conflated with having high standards.

「スピーカーは確認を求めず、自分の仕事で満足感を得ていた彼の祖父、職人の達人を称えて話を結んでおり、完全主義は必ずしも高い基準と同一視される必要はないことを示唆しています。」

★ここまでの特徴的な固有名詞・英単語・英語表現★

【固有名詞】

【英単語】

  • fortunate（幸運な）
  • professor（教授）
  • university（大学）
  • remarkable（注目すべき）
  • sacrifice（犠牲）
  • perfectionism（完全主義）
  • vocation（職業）
  • creativity（創造性）
  • pediatrician（小児科医）
  • setback（つまずき）
  • adjusted（適応した）
  • harmful（有害な）
  • rigid（剛直な）
  • flawlessly（完全に）
  • intrusive（邪魔する）
  • craftsman（職人）
  • workshop（作業場）
  • conscientiousness（誠実さ）

【英語フレーズ】

  • come through（通り抜ける）
  • put off（延期する）
  • set root in（根を下ろす）
  • look and reflect（見て考える）
  • was worth it（それだけの価値があった）
  • carry around with（連れまわす）
  • be a perfectionist（完全主義者である）
  • putting things out there（物事を公にする）
  • raise children（子供を育てる）
  • unrealistic thinking（現実離れした思考）
  • write them down（それらを書き留める）
  • take as individuals（個人として受け取る）
  • reduce the harmful effects of（〜の有害な影響を軽減する）

★ここまでの文章の一部の表現の解説記事はこちら★
ポッドキャストで英語学習：Escaping Perfectionism (Hidden Brain) 5/6 - さんだーさんだ！（ブログ版）



"And I think just knowing that gave him an incredible sense of pride and accomplishment. And that's a wonderful way to live, one in which I'm hoping in myself that I can also find that. Thomas Curran is a psychologist at the London School of Economics. He's the author of The Perfection Trap, embracing the power of good enough. Thomas, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me. If you have follow-up questions about perfectionism for Thomas Curran that you would be willing to share with a Hidden Brain audience, please send a voice memo to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, perfectionism. That address again is ideas at Hiddenbrain.org. Please include your name and where you are from. 60 seconds is plenty. Hiddenbrain is produced by Hiddenbrain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Poehler, Kristin Wong, Laura Querel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our Executive Producer. I'm Hiddenbrain's Executive Editor.

[48:47]

For today's Unsung Hero, we bring you a story from our sister show, My Unsung Hero. It comes from Julia Minson. When Julia was in graduate school, her mother was diagnosed with Advanced Stage Lung Cancer. Julia dove into the research on the disease and discovered there was a new experimental drug that had a small chance of helping her Mom.

[49:48]

So she brought it up with her mother's physician, Dr. Charlotte Jacobs. She was skeptical, but Julia had done her research, so she pushed back. She said, 'You know here I am, I'm like a 26 year old grad student in psychology arguing with you, one of the top oncologists in the world about a treatment plan. And she says, no, it's incredibly risky, you know, she could bleed out, she could be paralyzed for what remains of her life, I could lose my license, I could go to prison, like absolutely not?' And so we go back and forth for a while and she says, no. And I leave the office disappointed. And then we came back two weeks later or whatever the next appointment was. And she said, I took your idea to the Tumor Board. And I said, what's the Tumor Board? And she said, it's a gathering we have once a month of all the top oncologists in Northern California where each of us gets to present one case and I discussed your idea and they pretty much unanimously agreed that it was a nonstarter for all the reasons that I already explained to you.

[50:51]

But you know, I really thought it was worth discussing and thoroughly thinking through. And I'm sorry that we can't do it. And it turned out she was right. Just weeks later, my mother passed from the lung cancer. And I still remember that conversation 17 years later as the time where I felt most heard perhaps in my life. And I have never seen her since when my mother passed away and, you know, never got to explain that my entire research program right now is about receptiveness to opposing views. And I think part of the reason that story's particularly precious to me is because I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that making somebody feel heard doesn't require changing your mind.

[51:52]

And to me, that is like a very stark example where, you know, she did not change her mind, but I still felt heard. Julia Minson of Lexington, Massachusetts, is a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and was recently a guest on our episode Relationships 2.0, How to Keep Conflict from Spiraling. If you liked today's episode on perfectionism, please consider sharing it with one or two people in your life who could benefit from it. You know who they are. I'm Shankar Vedantam, see you soon."

★ここまでの要約・日本語訳★

  • The speaker shares thoughts on pride and accomplishment, expressing a wish to find personal fulfillment similar to what an unidentified individual seemed to find. （話者は誇りと達成感についての思考を共有し、同定されていない個人が見つけたと思われる個人的な充足を自分自身でも見つけられるようにという願いを表明しています。）
  • Thomas Curran, a psychologist at the London School of Economics and author of The Perfection Trap, was a guest on the program.（ロンドン経済学研究センターの心理学者であり、「The Perfection Trap」の著者であるトーマス・カランが番組のゲストでした。）
  • Audience members are invited to send in voice memos with follow-up questions on perfectionism for Thomas Curran.（視聴者は、トーマス・カランに対する完璧主義についてのフォローアップの問い合わせを、音声メモとして送ることが求められています。）
  • The episode shares a story from Julia Minson, a graduate student whose mother was diagnosed with Advanced Stage Lung Cancer. An experimental drug that had a small chance of helping her Mom was turned down by Julia's mother's physician, Dr. Charlotte Jacobs, due to potential risks.（このエピソードでは、母親が骨肺癌と診断された大学院生のジュリア・ミンソンの話を共有しています。彼女の母親を助ける可能性がわずかにある新薬は、潜在的なリスクのためにジュリアの母親の主治医であるシャーロット・ジェイコブス医師によって却下されました。）
  • Julia later recognized the significance of feeling heard, even without seeing a change in Dr. Jacobs' decision about the drug. This realization influenced her research program that focuses on receptiveness to opposing views. (ジュリアは後に、ジェイコブス医師の薬についての決定が変わらないにもかかわらず、自分の意見が聞かれていると感じることの重要性を認識しました。この認識は、彼女の反対意見に対する受容性に焦点を当てた研究プログラムに影響を及ぼしました。)

★ここまでの特徴的な固有名詞・英単語・英語表現★

【固有名詞】

  • Thomas Curran（トーマス・カラン）
  • London School of Economics（ロンドン・スクール・オブ・エコノミクス）
  • The Perfection Trap（パーフェクション・トラップ）
  • Hidden Brain（ヒドゥン・ブレイン）
  • My Unsung Hero（マイ・アンサング・ヒーロー）
  • Julia Minson（ジュリア・ミンソン）
  • Advanced Stage Lung Cancer（進行期肺がん）
  • Dr. Charlotte Jacobs（ドクター・シャーロット・ジェイコブス）
  • Tumor Board（トゥーモア・ボード）
  • Northern California（北カリフォルニア）
  • Lexington, Massachusetts（レキシントン、マサチューセッツ）
  • Harvard Kennedy School of Government（ハーバード・ケネディ政府学校）
  • Relationships 2.0（レレーションシップス2.0）
  • Shankar Vedantam（シャンカル・ヴェダンタム）

【英単語】

  • accomplishment（達成感）
  • psychologist（心理学者）
  • perfectionism（完璧主義）
  • experimental（実験的な）
  • oncologists（腫瘍学者）
  • nonstarter（見込みのない）
  • receptiveness（受け入れられやすさ）

【英語フレーズ】

  • embracing the power of good enough（十分なものの力を受け入れる）
  • follow-up questions（追加の質問）
  • send a voice memo（音声メモを送る）
  • include your name and where you are from（あなたの名前と出身地を含める）
  • arguing with you（あなたと議論する）
  • present one case（一つのケースを提示する）
  • unanimously agreed（全会一致で合意した）
  • use the subject line（件名を使う）
  • opposing views（対立する見解）
  • trying to convince people（人々を納得させようとしている）

★ここまでの文章の一部の表現の解説記事はこちら★
ポッドキャストで英語学習：Escaping Perfectionism (Hidden Brain) 6/6 - さんだーさんだ！（ブログ版）