Here is a good blog by Penelope Trunk that gives food for thought. Please read my response. It is amazing how when we think something is really good, like being a perfectionist it can turn into something ugly and addictive if we let it. Excellence is great so long as there is room for the oops factor. It is when we become too attached to it being just right that it becomes like an unhealthy addiction.
BNET: Perfectionism is a Disease: Here’s how to beat it
by: Penelope Trunk
It’s amazing that people admit to being perfectionists. To me, it’s a disorder, not unlike obsessive-compulsive disorder. And like obsessive-compulsive disorder, perfectionism messes you up. It also messes up the people around you, because perfectionists lose perspective as they get more and more mired in details.
We can never achieve perfection — any of us. Yet so many people keep trying to reach this elusive goal and they drive themselves crazy in the process. So cut it out. Accept that it’s okay to do a mediocre job on a certain percentage of your work. If you need convincing, consider this: Perfectionism is a risk factor for depression. No kidding. Sydney Blatt, psychologist at Yale University, finds that perfectionists are more likely to kill themselves than regular, mediocre-performing people.
Here are three steps to take to avoid the perfectionism trap:
1. Allow yourself to be wrong in front of others.
Try having an opinion that is wrong. Tell a story that is stupid. Wear clothes that don’t match. Turn in a project that you can’t fully explain. People will not think you’re stupid. People will think you spent your time and energy doing something else — something that meant more to you.
We all have many competing demands. We do not presume to know other people’s demands. But we are all sure of one thing: Our work is often not the most important thing on our plate.
Also, you’ll notice that people are not particularly vested in you being right. They don’t care if you’re right or wrong in what you do or say. They just want you to get stuff done well enough that they can do what they need to do. And this is usually a far cry from perfection.
The other huge problem with perfectionism is that people stop learning when they’re constantly afraid of being wrong. We learn by making mistakes. The only way we understand ourselves is to test our limits. If we don’t want anyone to know we make mistakes, which is how perfectionists tend to behave, we are actually hiding our true selves.
2. Be a hard worker rather than a perfectionist.
You can be a hard-working person and cut corners. In fact, it’s often a requirement: Smart people cut corners. The art of being a star performer is knowing which corners to cut. Focus on your goals, and be honest with yourself about whether your goals require perfectionism along the way. A lot of times perfectionism is a way to avoid focusing on goals. Real goals, after all, almost always require a little bit of luck and assistance along the way — factors the perfectionists tend to dismiss.
3. Spend your energy making yourself likable.
Tiziana Casciaro reports in the Harvard Business Review that people are not all that interested in you being super-good at your job. They care if they like you. And, Casciaro found that if someone does not like you, he or she will decide you’re incompetent whether you are or not. Sad, yes, but the converse is true as well. You can do a poor job and no one will notice if they like you. And, newsflash: In many instances, this is good for business — teams do better work when everyone on the team likes everyone else. So don’t worry about doing a perfect job. Do a decent job, but leave yourself enough time to manage your relationships at work. Take lunch. Participate in office politics, because office politics is really about being nice — which, frankly, is more healthy and certainly more achievable than being perfect.
Sylvia Lafair’s Comment:
Anything taken to its extreme becomes toxic! Thus perfectionists often are also procrastinators because of their fear of making mistakes or not seen as brilliant and amazing.
In “Don’t Bring It to Work” there are 13 of the most common behavior patterns that we learned in our families as little kids that end up following us to work. Unless we tackle these to the ground and learn to transform them they will haunt us forever and ever after.
There are some good remedies to perfectionism in this article. I would also suggest that the game “connect the dots” would be helpful. The idea is to go back as far as you can to see the results of being a perfectionist and see how that got you “good reviews” in your family. No one was born a perfectionist, it happens when we get positive or negative reinforcement that keeps the patterned behavior going. Once you see the connections from the past it often is like untying a knot, as in “am not, cannot, should not, and not like me”. Once the “nots” are loosened it is easier to change the behavior in the present time.
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