I once met a guy who had a proper perfectionist streak about him at work.
I mean things like:
*** His thinking was all or nothing. Everything was either perfect or not good enough (and 99%
of the time it wasn’t good enough – even a tiny typo would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory)
*** His overly high standards meant he’d always take twice or thrice as long on a piece of work than his colleagues. A 5 minute email became a 30 minute masterclass in nitpicking and making mountains out of molehills
*** As everything needed to be perfect, he was often on edge, stressed, anxious and exhausted
*** He found it almost impossible to relax. Instead of enjoying the moment, he was always thinking about what he could’ve done differently in
the past or what would happen in the future. Like if he was out for lunch, he’d be dwelling on tomorrow’s meetings or an email he’d sent earlier that day
*** He’d always be putting himself down and telling himself he should’ve done better (ironically, sometimes putting himself down was a reason to put himself down more – “I shouldn’t be having thoughts
like this…” etc)
*** He tried lots of ways to “cure” his perfectionism (meditating, using funky time management techniques, reframing mistakes as chances to learn & grow) but nothing worked
I could go on, but you get
the idea.
Luckily there is a cure for perfectionism like this.
How do I know?
Because that guy was me.
It was only when I saw my perfectionist ways for what they really were – a bunch of ideas I’d picked up over the years to help me feel more secure – that the cure started to emerge.
Before anyone honks their horn, I’m not saying my perfectionist ways have vanished like a box of free donuts in the office. Just last week I spent almost an hour tinkering around with one of my daily emails, adding some commas & full stops and tweaking a few words here & there.
That’s perfectionism 101. So
clearly I’m still an imperfectionist in training.
But I’m past the novice stage.
More an intermediate imperfectionist perhaps.
And what I’ve found now is that shaking off my perfectionist problems isn’t the tricky part. The tricky part is managing the perfectionist ways of the hoi polloi instead.
e.g. replies from well-wishers to my daily emails telling me I’ve switching tense halfway through a
sentence.
This isn’t something I’ve ever had to deal with. No-one could outdo me when it came to perfectionism, so it never came up. And now it has, it’s a rather odd and eye-opening experience.
Anyway, I’m not
pointing the finger at anyone.
As I said, this was me too. Perfectionism is a condition I know all too well.
As for the cure?
I already hinted at it earlier in this email.
It’s got nothing to do with the usual generalisations of setting boundaries, practising self-compassion, prioritising more effectively, embracing mistakes, journaling or trotting out Pareto’s shopworn 80/20 rule.
If you’d like to get into it 1 on 1 and start your own imperfectionist training:
https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com
That’s all for today.
- Tom