When an insight can help you find your purpose, you know you’re onto something. Even if the revelation seems obvious to your friends.

A few years ago, Aseanté Renee realized she was a perfectionist. This lightbulb moment felt earth shattering. Aseanté shared it with a close girlfriend, excited about how this self-awareness could spur life changes and progress. 

Her friend’s reply? No shit, Sherlock. 

“That's the mark of true friendship to me,” says Aseanté. “She had the patience with me to let me experience that on my own time.”

Why does perfectionism break us down? And why do we stay so attached to it? 

“We see results,” says Aseanté. “Oftentimes we think perfectionism is what gives us the accolades, it gives us the achievements. We think that perfectionism is the cheat code. And it's not–perfectionism is not a cheat code. It's a coping mechanism that people use when they don't feel safe and when they don't feel like they are enough.”

The Recovering Perfectionist

When her coping mechanism—long-practiced perfectionism—failed her, Aseanté went searching. 

Through her journey grappling with an ingrained perfectionism, Aseanté decided she had to go a level deeper to understand why she’d relied on perfectionism. She realized that it can help people feel that they have control over a situation. In the many situations where cannot is not possible, perfectionism can further exacerbate problems.

“Perfectionism shows up when you're a kid, because perfectionism is a response to trauma,” shares Aseanté. “You learn [it] either through actively engaging with other people or watching other people's stories and experiences.”

The Healer

Aseanté has experienced significant pain and loss. As she works through difficult moments, she finds strength and healing by staying in touch with how she feels. 

“I'm not shrinking my emotions,” she shares. “I think the whole idea of ‘stay strong and keep yourself together’ is why so many people are emotionally constipated, and no one has time for that. So I let [the emotions] flow pretty freely.”

Aseanté describes healing in the realest terms: “Healing is a car wreck. It's a car wreck in the rain, and you hit a tree and you get out of the car and you got one contact in and your shoes are broken, and you're like, alright. Now, what direction do I go in?”

Despite the pain, she sees beauty in incredibly hard moments, holding these two truths at once. Having compassion for oneself and holding space for emotions to come up can be healing in and of itself.

“For those of us that are into therapy and social work, I think we're trying to heal our own wounds by being something to people that we did not receive. I'll create a safe space for other people, so they never have to feel what I feel.”

The Perpetual New Kid

A proud Texan, Aseanté moved around a lot as a child.

“I was the perpetual new kid. I’d change schools every year, and sometimes twice in the same year,” she says. “I got really good at reading people, because that was a survival tactic. Most of the time in each school, I would be the only Black girl. I had to get really good from a survival perspective of identifying which groups were safe.”

This prompted an interest in people and an innate ability to understand different people and perspectives. “I got really curious about people's stories and their experiences, and I got really good at looking at people's mannerisms and body language, and picking up on the little things that they don't say.”

This interest in people—what makes them tick, what makes them unique—in some ways guided her to her career. 

The Coach

“My love of people naturally brought me to the type of career that I have now,” according to Aseanté. Her career is one way that she lives out her purpose, which is “to help people create lives.” 

Aseanté has her own transformative coaching firm called The Axon Group. An “axon” is a nerve that moves ideas into action, which is the focus of her practice. 

She supports clients across a range of topics from leadership and career to catalyzing change. This support takes on bespoke forms depending on individual client needs and goals, ranging from individual one-on-one coaching, to executive coaching, group work, to workshops and retreats.

Aseanté finds the coaching approach more useful than her previous focus in private therapy practice. She found that most of the time her clients wanted to talk about work and career. She came to realize that, not only do we spend an inordinate amount of time at work, but it’s the safest place for trauma to play out.

“Your work people become scapegoats for all your stuff,” says Aseanté. “Some of the time, the place where this stuff plays out is with Linda in accounting. Linda didn't even mean to do the thing that Linda did. But Linda said something in that meeting; then Linda gets triggered by her own stuff that's happening in her personal life, and she's coming back at you and everybody's traumas talking to each other.”

The Entrepreneur

Aseanté launched her own business because she did not feel fulfilled building toward someone else's mission or vision, especially when she had such a driving purpose. “I launched my business out of sheer frustration and exhaustion, because I knew I couldn't be the only one experiencing what I was experiencing.”

Her business presents an opportunity to craft a space where her clients don't feel the pressure of judgment. Eradicating judgment frees up room to strategize, process and truly figure out what steps her clients need to take to affect the change that they want to see.

The Black Woman

Aseanté’s experiences and perspective helps shape her role as a coach. That includes intergenerational trauma and the messages inherent in the unjust, racist societal structures that pervade the workplace. 

“My great, great, great - maybe one more great - Grandmother was not seen as a person. She was seen as a product. She was only as valuable as the labor that she produced. That's it. She wasn't seen as a woman. She was seen as something that needed to produce an output. And when you stop producing an output you were no longer valuable. You were no longer worthy.”

Aseanté continues: “That generational trauma has been passed down in the DNA of so many melanated women. That we are only as good as what we produce, we are only valuable for our labor, and when we are not producing, we are no longer necessary. We can be discarded without a second thought. And so this deep need to produce and create and prove that we are worthy, that we are valuable, that we are enough, shows up all over the place. Not just with executive women, not just with leadership women, just women in general.”

This idea has seeped into the narrative and shaped the messages people receive over and over again. “For me, it often shows up as a double standard: I'm not allowed to have emotions. if I have emotions, I'm an angry black woman. If I cry, then I'm being dramatic. My counterparts are able to experience certain emotions while I'm not able to show up authentically in those same ways.”

“I believe oftentimes melanated women are required to fix problems that we did not create. We become the last line of defense.”

This reality makes the perfectionism coping mechanism all the more alluring. To take matters into one’s own hands and strive for an unattainable version to reject the constant messaging of not being enough.

The Practitioner

Navigating the world today–where we seem to individually and collectively experience trauma –is not an easy task. In her coaching work, Aseanté offers tools to help her clients navigate their feelings during moments of heaviness in their own lives and the wider world.

Aseanté recommends giving yourself permission to pause from the moment you wake up. Fostering curiosity about yourself and your needs is another way to get in touch with yourself and create much needed space. Asking: What do I need right now? What do I need to release? When can I give this to myself?

Even something as simple as what you want–what you actually want–to have for dinner. “Not what's convenient. Not what's around the corner. Not what's in the refrigerator. Not what the kids can eat like. What do my taste buds want?” This can also manifest as one thing you can give yourself to tap into articulating your needs and preferences.

Aseanté also talks about the power of self-regulation. “The quickest way to reset your nervous system is breathwork. There's a reason why we unconsciously take deep breaths when we're feeling overwhelmed. Often it is your body's way of trying to reset.”

To approach this intentionally, Aseanté advises a body scan and breathwork. Finding the tight places in your body, locating tension, and taking note of your temperature can help you reconnect to your body and be present. The breathwork exercise revolves around taking long, slow deep breaths, holding and exhaling, which prompts a reset of your nervous system.

Aseanté also talks about releasing and calling in intentions. “‘What do I want to release?’ ‘What do I want to call in?’ Just one word.” She recommends breaking this exercise into manageable time periods for today, this month and this year.

Aseanté emphasizes taking that pause or that moment for yourself. Her final piece of advice: “Does this really matter in the big scheme of things? Do I have capacity for this engagement?

And if any of those answers are no, let it go.”