At its root, perfectionism isn’t really about a deep love of being meticulous. It’s about fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of disappointing others. Fear of failure. Fear of success.
Michael Law
Is perfectionism a highly desirable trait that ensures high standards and reliability —or a psychological handicap indicative of dithering, delay, and delusions? Is it a healthy drive or self-destructive?
We all know that perfectionists value and foster excellence and strive to meet important goals.
Adrian Furnham, professor of psychology at Norwegian Business School, explains that there is a dark side of it: perfectionism is seen as a cause and correlate of serious psychopathology. At worst, perfectionists believe they should be perfect—no hesitations, deviations, or inconsistencies. They are super-sensitive to imperfection, failing, and weakness.
Psychologists see perfectionism almost always as a handicap. They see perfectionists as vulnerable to distress, often haunted by a chronic sense of failure, indecisiveness, procrastination and shame. Perfectionists are rigid.
The clinical opinion on perfectionism is that it can and does involve setting excessively high personal standards. It can also mean imposing one’s standards on others and having equally high (often quite unrealistic) expectations of them.
According to Adrian Furnham, perfectionism comes from our closest family members: our parents, sisters or brother and grandparents. They may have been critical and demanding. Perfectionists in adulthood live with their parents’ voice, and their standards.
So what are the main issues with perfectionism? Psychologist identify several of these:
1. Concern over mistakes, which reflects negative reactions to mistakes; a tendency to interpret mistakes as equivalent to failure.
2. Personal standards, which reflect the setting of very high standards and the importance placed on these high standards for self-evaluation.
3. Doubting of actions, which reflects the extent to which people doubt their ability to accomplish tasks.
Adrian Furnham explains that perfectionist are driven by a fear of failure; a fear of making mistakes; and a fear of disapproval. They can easily self-destruct in a vicious cycle of their own making:
Set unreachable goals → fail to reach them → become depressed and lethargic → have less energy and a deep sense of failure → get lower self-esteem and high self-blame.
Do you recognize yourself using the above formula?
There is nothing wrong with setting high standards, but they need to be reachable with effort. It’s all about being OK; human not super-human; among the best, if not THE best.
Do you consider yourself a healthy perfectionist or maybe it is making your life harder?
Below you will find some questions for self-test, could any of the below apply to you?
1. You give up before starting.
2. You avoid delegating because you think others won’t meet your standards.
3. You want to be good at stuff straight away.
4. It bugs you when other people won’t do something your way.
5. You say no to opportunities if you’re not 100 percent confident you’ll perform well.
6. You get defensive if anyone criticizes you even slightly.
Does any of the above apply to you?
Remember last time something went not as you expected, not according to your plan? Maybe someone from your friends or your beloved ones did not meet your ¨standards¨? What was the outcome? Maybe this time it was not the person but your high expectations that disappointed you?
What can be done?
First thing is to realize in which areas of your life you put too much pressure on you, so at this point you don’t have any positive results because you strive for excellence, all or nothing. What are these areas? Work? Your love life?
Another important thing is to cultivate self-love, remind yourself that you don’t need to be perfect in order to be valued, in order to inspire others and to be loved.
And probably, give more attention to those whom you care about, giving more and expecting less.
The tricky thing about perfectionism is that we stop accepting making mistakes ourselves and hardly tolerate when others do them. It almost always leads to frustration, distance in any relationship since we are not ready to have less than we expected.
What if we could accept ourselves the way we are and set reachable goals? Perhaps it is good to remind ourselves that we do not need to be perfect in order to leave happily? Maybe it’s time to surround ourselves with people who are not afraid of our imperfections and do not expect us to be the best?
Let’s allow ourselves to learn from our mistakes, let’s allow ourselves and others to be imperfect!
With love,
Jelena
become your inspiration 
Alexandra V. Tomorskaya commented (on LinkedIn):
Licensed Paralegal, Co-owner at APRIORI Legal Services Professional Corporation, Attorney-at-Law…
(There are people out there who still consider Beethoven’s symphonies a little bit too, you know, loud.) At some point, you really just have to finish your work and release it as is—if only so that you can go on to make other things with a glad and determined heart. Which is the entire point. Or should be.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Yes, sometimes the results are ridiculous and disastrous, but sometimes, strangely enough, it works—a man who seems not ready for the task, not good enough for the task, somehow grows immediately into his potential through the wild leap of faith itself. I only wish more women would risk these same kinds of wild leaps. But I’ve watched too many women do the opposite. I’ve watched far too many brilliant and gifted female creators say, “I am 99.8 percent qualified for this task, but until I master that last smidgen of ability, I will hold myself back, just to be on the safe side.” Now, I cannot imagine where women ever got the idea that they must be perfect in order to be loved or successful. (Ha ha ha! Just kidding! I can totally imagine: We got it from every single message society has ever sent us! Thanks, all of human history!) But we women must break this habit in ourselves—and we are the only ones who can break it. We must understand that the drive for perfectionism is a corrosive waste of time, because nothing is ever beyond criticism. No matter how many hours you spend attempting to render something flawless, somebody will always be able to find fault with it.
“Perfectionism is a particularly evil lure for women, who, I believe, hold themselves to an even higher standard of performance than do men. There are many reasons why women’s voices and visions are not more widely represented today in creative fields. Some of that exclusion is due to regular old misogyny, but it’s also true that—all too often—women are the ones holding themselves back from participating in the first place. Holding back their ideas, holding back their contributions, holding back their leadership and their talents. Too many women still seem to believe that they are not allowed to put themselves forward at all, until both they and their work are perfect and beyond criticism. Meanwhile, putting forth work that is far from perfect rarely stops men from participating in the global cultural conversation. Just sayin’. And I don’t say this as a criticism of men, by the way. I like that feature in men—their absurd overconfidence, the way they will casually decide, “Well, I’m 41 percent qualified for this task, so give me the job!”
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Daniel Schulster commented (on LinkedIn):
ADP Streamline Implementation Coordinator at ADP
I never thought of it as a handicap but I agree with that because you can’t let perfection get in the way of life and living.
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Giovanni Garay commented (on LinkedIn):
Manager Operations │Transformational and Strategic Leader │Performance, Change, Project Management
When someone tells me that they are a perfectionist, I like to ask them what does it mean to them to be a perfectionist. What I have learned is that the perception/understanding varies from one person to the next. There is nothing wrong to strive to do the best we can do or to continually work on to become a better version of ourselves. Perfection is in my opinion an ideal. a construct of one’s mind…it may be unattainable.
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Timoor Mischoutchenko commented (on LinkedIn):
ADP Streamline Implementation Coordinator – Multi National Accounts
Interesting subject to talk about for sure . Thanks for sharing your thought on that
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