Melissa Wood-Tepperberg Shares Simple Steps for How to Let Go of Perfectionism

The workout and wellness leader opened up about her own journey on Instagram.

Melissa Wood-TepperbergAlberto Tamargo/Getty Images

Workout and wellness leader Melissa Wood-Tepperberg is well known for her versatile and effective at-home workouts. But her practice, encompassed in her MWH platform, extends far beyond simple movement. In addition to coaching Pilates and yoga, the 40-year-old has her own podcast, Move With Heart, where she discusses all things physical and mental health while promoting total wellness, rather than just physical strength.

In Wood-Tepperberg’s most recent episode, she opened up about her personal journey with perfectionism and the practices that she has developed to work through it. For her, perfectionism “is something that always has stood in my way,” she said in the episode, often leading to procrastination when she was growing up and well into adulthood.

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It wasn’t until she started to address that reality head on that she began to overcome it and develop means of dealing with it. For the 2023 SI Swim rookie, it “really comes back to this radical transparency with self and being really raw about this need to always be so damn perfect.” Once she confronted her perfectionism, she found it much easier to begin the process of dismantling it. It allowed her to “lean into what made me me,” she said, and become a more “raw, unedited” version of herself.

In addition to radical transparency, the entrepreneur is a huge proponent of meditation and movement, but she encourages her listeners to find their own daily practice to help center themselves. Those practices will have the potential to become a “consistent rhythm in your life,” which bring you “back to that home base” in times of hardship, she said.

Another tool Wood-Tepperberg endorses is therapy. She consistently works with a cognitive behavioral therapist, which has given her the full freedom “to let it all out” and let go of the thoughts that she “tend[s] to get hung up on.”

But ultimately, it’s all about focusing “on the progress of improving,” and finding the practices that work best for you. According to the wellness guru, “That is the foundation that you have to come back to so that you don’t lose sight of why you’re here.”

Check out the New York native’s recent episode on any podcast platform and learn more about dismantling perfectionist behaviors.

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