Perfectionism may be destructive, but it could be rooted in a personal strength.

Commonly, the term perfectionism is presented as an admirable trait, associated with the idea of performing to one’s potential wherever possible. In practice however, perfectionism causes people to act generally irrational and inefficient.

Perfectionism has been linked to negative academic achievement1, anxiety2 and has been shown to undermine performance3.

The best way to overcome perfectionism is to redirect the emotions that cause it. In order to do this, one should understand the ways in which perfectionism is preventing one from achieving one’s goal.

In order to highlight the irrationalism of perfectionism one should view the situation from a bird’s eye view and consider the whole picture, rather than the small step the perfectionist is focusing on.

🔍 What do Perfectionists do?

Let’s paint a picture; you want to cook a soup. You only have some of the ingredients at home, so decide to cook it the next day when you have the last ingredient.

The next day comes, and you remember you wanted to practice how to cut onions and decide to do so with specialist videos to guide you.

After some time, you start to get hungry and eat a ready meal instead, pushing the soup preparation to the next day.

The next day comes, and you start chopping them up just as planned. You remember some advantage of chopping the vegetables very small and proceed to do so.

After some time, you start to get hungry and decide to store the chopped ingredients until tomorrow and eat a ready meal today instead. The next day comes, and you finish the soup.

Three days ago, when you first decided to cook the soup, you told your neighbor Jack about it. He also wanted to make the soup and also only had some of the ingredients.

He cooked the soup anyway although it didn’t turn out as good as it would have done with all the ingredients.

After tasting the soup, he thought of a variation recipe to make it taste better, which he prepares the next day. The day after Jack prepared that same soup in half the time he did yesterday.

Unlike you, Jack successfully prepared a soup each of the three days, came up with a better variation and improved his speed in preparing it.

This is a classic example of how perfectionism plays out. A perfectionist will repeat these tendencies in various areas of their life.

For one, a worker might push the writing of a report to a time when they have ‘had more sleep’ or ‘have read more’, which are things which might actually be ever so slightly helpful, and they therefore use it to justify their behavior to themselves.

They then spend a long period of time thinking about the wording and font. After making small careful steps of progress divided by justified procrastination periods, the worker might even have one ‘fantastic’ paragraph, but as the deadline nears, the worker is forced to reword something they saw on the internet and submit a sloppy report.

In summary the perfectionist will often end up eating a ‘ready meal’ or submitting a ‘sloppy report’ although they had opportunity to create something in line with their interests.

The classic pitfalls of a perfectionist can be placed into three categories:

  1. ➡️ Not Starting
  2. ➡️ Pointless Activities
  3. ➡️ Opportunity cost

🚫 Not Starting

Often, perfectionism goes hand in hand with procrastination tendencies. The perfectionist will many times avoid facing the task at hand.

Often, they have procrastinating periods interrupted by brief continuation of the task, which prove too subconsciously painful to continue and is swiftly ended with a justified postponing of progress.

They may also practice indirect procrastination by finding a related but unnecessary activity instead.

🌀 Pointless Activities

Often, they find a way around facing the emotion of doing the task but also following the want to complete the task by focusing on a menial not important but related task instead.

They may spend considerable time on a related task that might technically be slightly helpful to the main task but is in actuality a way of avoiding doing the main work and thereby facing their underlying emotional turmoil.

⏳ Opportunity cost

In the whole, the perfectionist’s greatest pitfall is their irrational use of time. The greatest cost their tendencies has is the avoided opportunities they have to make efficient progress.

By refusing to accept one of a series of steps to be complete, they waste time and postpone progress.

This is usually just the tip of the iceberg of an internal emotional struggle they are facing which even they are usually not fully aware of.

🔦 Why Perfectionists do It

Often perfectionism has emotional roots that most are not fully aware of. Sapadin & Maguire (1997)4 argue that perfectionism procrastination is motivated by the subconscious fear that the result’s of one’s performance may not be as good as one expects of oneself.

They argue that when the perfectionist uses different methods to postpone task completion, they do so to postpone the possible frightening experience of not meeting their own expectations.

Often these ‘slightly helpful’ activities used to postpone task completion may seem especially delicious to a perfectionist because they are an excuse to postpone the completing of the task.

By this way they avoid facing the painful fear subconsciously associated with testing their’s performance.

Consciously however, they might hold the narrative that they are holding of doing the task or moving on to the next step for a rational reason, rather than to avoid facing the emotions associated with completing the task.

The fear might not necessarily be that they don’t have the ability to compete the task to meet their expectations, but rather that they aren’t able to apply themselves as they could.

The underlying fear the perfectionist grapples with may not necessarily be the fear of not having the skills or talent required but the fear of not being disciplined enough to use their abilities as they would like to.

Afterall, the original expectations may have arisen from a belief in their own abilities. The perfectionist may actually be afraid of not being in control of themself to the extend necessary to complete the respective task to the standard they expect.

🏁 Steps to Overcome Perfectionism

For the perfectionist to overcome their tendencies, the goal is to become aware of their own patterns & their emotional causes, learn a rational replacing attitude and put it into practice with force factors.

It can be useful to understand that having these tendencies may be a heightened occurrence of an obstacle that most people face to some degree.

Perfectionism might have arisen from a personal strength, such as having the courage of setting high goals for oneself and accepting responsibility for one’s own influence.

Dealing with perfectionism’s counterproductive tendencies will not devalue this strength. Overcoming perfectionism can be broadly categorized into these general steps:

  1. ➡️ Recognize Patterns
  2. ➡️ Shift Attitude
  3. ➡️ Make it Easy: Use Force Factors

💡 Recognize Patterns

In order to overcome perfectionism, the perfectionist should be aware that they have these tendencies. They should identify areas where they are displaying perfectionistic behavior and realize how these have been counterproductive to their interests.

They should think back to a time when perfectionism has inhibited efficient progress for a task they wanted to complete.

Realizing how they may have practiced procrastination using ‘slightly helpful’ related activities that they excessively focused on or made excuses to postpone progress.

They should attempt to envision how they might have gone about the task completion process efficiently and thereby demonstrate to themselves the impact of this emotional turmoil.

👁️‍🗨️ Shift Attitude

The perfectionist’s attitude should be adjusted.

Rather than approaching tasks as final tests of one’s skill, compete them efficiently. Instead of attempting to maximize every aspect of the task, approach the task as a draft to be learned from. The main aim of completing the tasks should be to do it efficiently in order to review the result and get better at completing it.

Practice applauding yourself when choosing to resist the temptation to ‘perfect’ a trivial detail.

One helpful thing to consider is that it is a lot easier to turn a bad thing into a great thing than to create a great thing from scratch.

🤝 Make it Easy: Use Force Factors

After adopting this new attitude, it may still take some practice to learn new behavior patterns. In order to make this as easy as possible, use force factors.

While still trying to reprogram tendencies, they should avoid putting themselves into situations where they rely on willpower entirely. One of the best force factors is accountability to someone else.

This could be any other person, a friend, a librarian, a spouse, a parent, a stranger from social media, etc.

Let them in on your past struggles and make an agreement with them where you regularly inform them of your intended progress, and they check on you at agreed times.

Simple this may seem, accountability to another person outside yourself significantly increases the likelihood that ‘things will get done’.

The in-depth approach for overcoming perfectionism and its procrastinating tendencies is broken down here: Overcome Perfectionism Procrastination With Psychology

References

  1. (Karner-Huţuleac, 2014) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042814046278 Jump back up to sentence in which this source was referenced: ↩︎

  2. (Koivula et al., 2002) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886901000927 Jump back up to sentence in which this source was referenced: ↩︎

  3. (Flett & Hewitt, 2005) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00326.x Jump back up to sentence in which this source was referenced: ↩︎

  4. Sapadin & Maguire (1997) https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/It_s_about_Time.html?id=SksCAAAACAAJ Jump back up to sentence in which this source was referenced: ↩︎