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6 Lessons From a Recovering Perfectionist

Getting off the hamster wheel of constant striving.

Are you stressing yourself out by always chasing perfection?

In your looks, your work, your relationships, your finances, your parenting…? The list goes on.

You are sick and tired of constantly striving for — and falling short of — your own or others’ high expectations.

Even when you manage to achieve those expectations (after working your butt off), you feel good for 3 seconds, then you are back on the hamster wheel once again. There’s no sense of joy or pride in your achievements.

All this makes you feel like a serious addict. But you comfort yourself in the thought that at least it’s a healthy addiction. Besides, isn’t it what we are supposed to do in life, to achieve and to succeed?

So, despite your stress level going through the roof and a growing uneasiness about where your life is heading (or not heading), you hold onto perfectionism as a way to get — and stay — ahead in life. You simply don’t know any other way.

As a recovering perfectionist, I know first-hand the many challenges that perfectionists face. Coming from a family of insecure over-achievers, I wore perfectionism as a badge of honour for as long as I could remember. It worked for me… until it didn’t.

Instead of kicking ass and doing and achieving more (and more), the stress of it all got the better of me and I was paralysed with fear and self-doubt. I became the queen of procrastination, and it took me many more years to free myself from the binds of perfectionism.

Here I’m sharing with you my 6 hard-won lessons:

Perfectionism can be manifested in two ways: hyper-activity or paralysis. In other words, over-achieving or procrastination.

A perfectionist often engages in endless activities to keep improving, people pleasing, perfecting their work, relationships or life in general in order to live up to the unrealistic standards they have for themselves.

However, lurking in the shadow are their deep-seated fears of not being good enough or not having what it takes to succeed and they end up feeling paralysed, hence the saying, “Perfectionism is the mother of procrastination.”

In other words, they engage in a stress response of either fight or flight (and often swing between them).

We need to reject both outcomes because they do us more harm than good. Over-achieving is relentlessly stressful and can easily lead to burnout and depression, while procrastination destroys our dreams, and ultimately our happiness.

The most common myth about perfectionism is the confusion over excellence versus perfection. While striving for excellence, or high standards - is perfectly (no pun intended) fine as it drives us to do the best we could, perfection, on the other hand, doesn’t actually exist in real life.

Therefore, it’s hard to achieve those standards consistently (if ever!), so you beat yourself up constantly for your perceived mistakes and failures, and you experience a lot of shame and self-blame. Instead of blaming the impossible standards, you think the solution is to try harder next time.

In other words, perfectionism is less about achieving high standards and more about feeling nothing is ever good enough.

So, even when you do manage to achieve those standards, you don’t celebrate because for you it’s a given. Instead, you feel compelled to keep striving for more, better and faster.

Ultimately, you can’t win either way — you’re damned if you achieve, and damned if you don’t.

In addition to the shame and self-blame that you experience from constantly failing to achieve your perfect standards, perfectionism also creates fear and self-doubt as you are aware of how easy it is to fail. You hesitate to start, or to finish what you’ve already started.

Despite your outward confidence, inside you’ve become uncertain, indecisive, and you’re always second-guessing yourself.

This also creates a negative feedback loop because your failures — real or perceived — become evidence that you are not good enough. And since you don’t feel good enough, you are either compelled to over-achieve to prove to yourself wrong, or to give up trying altogether, and your failures once more deepen your belief that you are not good enough.

What should you do then? First, set yourself up for success. By that I simply mean making it easy for yourself to succeed. With perfectionism, we have unwittingly set ourselves up for failure. We’ve all heard of the idea, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

How do you make it easy for yourself to succeed? By lowering your impossible standards. Just because you’re no longer a perfectionist doesn’t mean you have to settle. You can still be great and even excellent. In other words, you optimise, not perfect, and you make the best of any given situation.

It’s also helpful at this point to examine where your standards come from. Are they intrinsic or extrinsic? It’d be a lot easier if your standards come from within, so you are pulled, not pushed, into achieving your goals.

One of the worst fears of a perfectionist is to be average. As mentioned before, giving up perfectionism doesn’t mean you have to settle. Aiming for greatness and excellence is still within your reach. Indeed, you can have — and achieve — the craziest dreams. How? By taking baby steps.

Baby steps allow you to overcome perfectionism and procrastination by lowering the bar temporarily so you can get started quickly and easily. After all, we all know that getting over the initial hump is often the hardest part.

And if you managed to get started and are stuck in the ‘messy middle’, baby steps allow you to get unstuck, avoid overwhelm and get to the finish line by simply following one baby step after another.

Last but not least, the worst part about being a perfectionist is the harshness with which we treat ourselves. We beat ourselves up for the smallest setbacks and we talk to ourselves worse than how we’d talk to an enemy!

“What’s wrong with you?”

“You are a worthless piece of shit and you don’t deserve to be here.”

“You are a fraud.”

The antidote? Self-love and acceptance. I wish I had learned about loving and accepting myself earlier, but I didn’t know there was another way.

What does that mean in practice? It means putting down the stick of shame and self-blame and speaking to yourself kindly and not abandoning yourself when things get tough — precisely when you need to be the kindest to yourself.

After all, we all make mistakes and fail from time to time. It’s worth remembering that mistakes and failures are part of our journey, and indeed our humanity. As Einstein famously said, “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

So, pay attention and notice when you are being harsh towards yourself in the moment. Cut yourself some slack and don’t worry that you’ll suddenly become self-indulgent if you do. This is not a concern for us perfectionists who are typically really hard on ourselves; instead, it gives us much-needed balance and grace.

“ I will hold myself to a standard of grace, not perfection.” — Anonymous

It’s time to get off the hamster wheel of constantly striving for a very alluring ideal that doesn’t actually exist! The impossible standards we set for ourselves lead us only to an unhealthy addiction to achievements or endless procrastination, destroying our happiness and dreams in the process.

By setting yourself up for success and taking one easy baby step after another — instead of following the doomed path of shame and self-blame (aka perfectionism) — you’ll not only get closer to your dreams each day, you’ll also find real contentment and build unshakable self-confidence along the way.

Also, by doing it from a place of self-love and acceptance, not fear and insecurity of being not ‘good enough’, you can take your mistakes and failures in stride instead of letting them paralyse you.

Best of all, you’ll still be kicking ass, but without all the stress and drama that used to plague you as a perfectionist.

Try one of the strategies to let go of the shackles of perfectionism. A future of true fulfilment and freedom awaits you.

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