Perfectionism Prescription
On understanding and moving through perfectionism
In the last blog post here, I shared that I was shaking up patterns and chose to throw perfectionism out the window in order to move forward with starting an email community. How easy that makes it sound… Ha!
The mental shifts I made to get into forward momentum required much more of a process.
This post breaks down perfectionism, what it looks like, common causes, and how we can make sustainable changes to that pattern.
Perfectionism can masquerade as many different behaviors. Some of those behaviors even seem noble, and they are applauded in our workplaces. Here are some of the common manifestations:
Procrastination (This can take many forms, including active procrastination through prioritizing other important work, or, my personal favorite, researching or information gathering.)
Long hours and what is perceived as a strong work ethic
Criticism of others’ work, or secretly fixing others’ work after they hand it off to you
Late delivery on projects and tasks
Unwillingness to try new things that you might not be good at, or to keep doing things you aren’t yet good at
Inability to move forward without input or review from someone who will validate you, or at least give you nice suggestions for improvement
To be clear, perfectionism isn’t the only cause of the behaviors above. If we observe any of these behaviors in ourselves or others, though, it’s a cause worth considering. Perfectionism costs us deeply. Costs of perfectionism include unnecessary stress and anxiety, lower self-esteem, decreased mental and physical health, inaction, hampered creativity, missed learning opportunities, and ironically, lower productivity and performance despite expending a lot more energy.
So, how can we move through perfectionism?
The key is in uncovering the reason we’re trapped in perfectionism in the first place. Common root causes range from personal to systemic.
Fear
Insecurity
Trying to control the outcome
Not wanting to make the wrong choice
A fixed mindset, or a belief that there’s one right way to do things
Belief that your worth is reliant on your accomplishments
Being highly sensitive to criticism
Current or former managers or leaders who expected perfection and shamed errors or mistakes
Meritocracy
OK, so we have some ideas for what perfectionism looks like and where it might come from, but now what?
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as deploying a few productivity hacks and wiping our hands clean of it forever. I actually don’t know whether we can truly cure perfectionism. Rather, we can get better at noticing when it’s showing up, deepen our understanding of what’s underneath the surface, and then choose different thoughts and behaviors. It’s like a muscle that we can strengthen and flex more easily with practice.
So maybe we won’t banish perfectionism today, but we can look at the common causes above for some good clues for quieting the perfectionism tendency. Here are the top four angles I take with clients, moving from surface-level to deep identity work.
Assess what merits near-perfect and where that’s not needed. If you’re not yet ready to throw perfectionism out the window altogether, start to parse out where you want to apply it and where you don’t. For any given task or activity, ask yourself: “What is ‘good enough’ in this situation?” In some cases, that might be nearly perfect. In others, you may be able to mark it complete long before you might have otherwise.
Experiment. Be an anthropologist and get curious. Try being complete with one little thing before it’s totally “perfect”, observe, gather information, analyze what served your goals and what didn’t, and then take your next action based on what you’ve learned.
Develop your resilience skills around mistakes, feedback and criticism. When perfectionism is showing up to protect you from the pain of criticism, it’s possible to shift your mindset so that you can genuinely experience mistakes as learning opportunities and no longer let them feel like the end of your world. As for feedback and criticism, it might serve you to discern between that which is useful and the rest.
Start to separate your worth from your work. This is a big one. It’s like a fish not sensing the water it swims in. We are steeped in a culture that ties contribution, achievement, and productivity to value; but there is immense confidence and empowerment in believing you (and the people around you) are inherently worthy simple because you are.
The bottom line is that perfectionism isn’t really about doing really good work or being really good at something. It’s actually about feeling safe, and protecting ourselves from the pain of embarrassment, humiliation, shame, and fear of being ousted from a social group. Brené Brown articulates this so well in her writings. In Atlas of the Heart, she explains, “Perfectionism is not striving to be our best or working toward excellence. Healthy striving is internally driven. Perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but potentially all-consuming question: What will people think? ”
Because of this root cause, dormant perfectionism often comes right back to the surface during times of stress, change, or uncertainty right when we feel a need to seek safety. That’s totally normal! It’s not a failure to return to behaviors that have seemed to keep us safe in the past. We always have a choice, though, and it’s possible to look at stress, change, or uncertainty as a heavier weight with which we can exercise our anti-perfectionism muscles. I know I’m offered these choices all the time.
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Cover photo by Afif Kusuma on Unsplash