Managing Perfectionism
RefLection
What drives your perfectionism? Do you enjoy meeting a high standard and relish your achievement and are you pleased with yourself when you accomplish something?
How are you a perfectionist? Is it mainly work/performance based, is it related to personal achievement?
How accurate is your thinking? Do you see positives in your performance or focus only on the negatives? Do you discount your own achievements – ‘anyone could have done it?’
Avoidance and procrastination. Do you get things done or are you holding back as you don’t feel good enough?
Perfection is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can motivate you to perform at a high level and deliver top-quality work. On the other hand, it can cause you unnecessary anxiety and slow you down.
if you’re a perfectionist, I’m right here with you. I’ve been working on managing perfectionist tendencies for a while. I had started becoming more and more obsessed with details, I had reached a point where extreme perfectionism has become a burden. It had made me slow, insecure of my own work and afraid to move forward.
The fallacy
Perfection is like the horizon line. You move one step forward, and it moves as well. Unattainable. There are constant ways to polish and refine something. The process never ends.
how we manage perfection?
‘Good’ is good enough
If you have impossibly high standards, use your reasoning skills to recognise that it is highly unlikely that you will live up to them. Furthermore, you are likely to fall into that ‘woulda, shoulda, coulda’ dynamic where you end up ‘shoulding’ all over yourself – focusing on what you ‘could have and should have’ done better.
Instead, invite ‘good enough’ into your repertoire and reassure yourself that things don’t always have to be perfect.
Managing Your inner CRITICAL voice
We all know this voice in our head that constantly criticizes, belittles, and judges us. This voice has many names: inner critic, the superego, judge.
Critical self-talk can make you feel bad, as well as negatively affect your performance. Be aware and label those inner thoughts. “My inner critic suggests I am not good enough.” That way, we can create distance between the thought and us, and observe the thought more objectively.
Remember that we’re all just doing the best we can.
Big picture
It’s easy to get lost in the detail about trivial things that don’t matter so much, in the huge scheme of things. So, take a helicopter view, and see the big picture to prioritise the greater purpose and what matters most. Don’t waste time on getting absolutely every tiny thing perfect.
Big-picture thinkers broaden their outlook by striving to learn from every experience. They don't rest on their successes, they learn from them.
Celebrate every progress, viCtory and failure
Celebrate everything you have done, including your progress, victories, mistakes and failures. That’s right — your mistakes and failures as well. This means if you’ve “only” made a 1% progress in your task, celebrate that. If you run into a roadblock, celebrate the discovery of this bling spot you didn’t know of before.
If you made some bad mistakes, acknowledge them, and then fix them accordingly. Be grateful for this experience to learn and improve. Needless to say, celebrate all your victories and give yourself a HUGE pat on the back for a job well done.
The interesting thing is that you may find that doing so doesn’t necessarily make you any lax with your work and life. If anything, it encourages you to strive for better. It acknowledges your strengths and abilities, and helps you harness them better. It also makes life a lot more fun, joyful, and enjoyable. Because as opposed to a constant focus on lack, you now acknowledge what you do have.
Takeaway
Perfectionism requires hard work and helps to develop judgment. The right amount of perfectionism makes you better because you constantly question and challenge yourself to improve.
But if you cross the line and become obsessed with perfectionism, you stop producing and you may end up consuming time and not finishing anything. By focusing on production rather than perfection, you will likely yield better results in the end.
Perfectionism must be understood as a direction, not a destination.