The first thing to know about perfectionism is that it affects us all to some degree or other. The second thing is that it’s not about high standards. It’s about insecurity and validation. Perfectionism grafts high standards and insecurity together.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Thomas Curran, a professor of psychology at London School of Economics. High standards don’t have to come with insecurity. We just need to understand how that vulnerability has inserted itself into our perfectionist impulses. “It’s a problematic relationship with ourselves, in which we demand too much or are overly self-critical, and it is also a problematic relationship with other people, in which we believe that those around us demand perfection,” he writes in The Perfection Trap.
He’s a perfectionist. He has studied it, observing how perfectionism is a trait we often celebrate. Leaders will credit their success to it while celebrities and life coaches tell us how to maximize perfection for personal gain. Stuck in a job interview to name a shortcoming, we brandish perfectionism as a wonderful weakness to have – “our favourite flaw,” he calls it.
But it’s not all that wonderful. At its core, he believes it stems from the belief that we’re not good enough or important enough to matter to other people or be loved by them. Indeed, he describes his book as “a souvenir of solace from one perfectionist to another.”
Perfectionism has many faces. Paul Hewitt, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, and Gordon Flett, a professor of psychology at York University, identified three in a celebrated 1991 research paper:
- Self-oriented: This is what we normally associate perfectionism with – the workaholic colleague or overzealous student. The researchers called it an “internal compulsion and sense of internal pressure to be perfect.” Prof. Curran says the most visible feature of self-oriented perfectionism is a hypercompetitive streak fused to a sense of never being good enough. He has mentored many high-achieving young people and sees a lot of self-loathing, even recasting successes as abject failures.
- Socially prescribed perfectionism: This comes from outside ourselves, the belief that others expect us to be perfect. There’s an illusion of constant judgment, which leaves us always having to live up to everyone else’s standards. Even benign statements are perceived as jabs. “Like self-oriented perfectionists, socially prescribed perfectionists live their lives trying to repair their imagined imperfections. However, in the latter’s case, the primary motive is to meet the expectations of other people with the express aim of gaining their acceptance, love and approval,” he writes.
- Other-oriented perfectionism: This is the belief that other people must be perfect – perfectionism turned, often with ire, at others, sometimes individuals and sometimes groups of people, such as all your (lesser) colleagues. “Other-oriented perfectionists set impossible standards for other people because they are compensating for their own imagined perfections – what [Sigmund] Freud called ‘projection,’” Prof. Curran writes.
Perfectionists work hard, he says, but it’s far too hard, and they can be extremely inefficient in where their effort it allocated, making them highly susceptible to exhaustion and burnout. And when the going gets tough, they tend to avoid the thing that needs doing, fearful of rejection or failure, until forced to act down the road.
To deal with perfection, you must accept yourself. You do good work. There are limits to the things you can control. “You are enough,” he declares.
That acceptance should be rooted in a crystal-clear consciousness of ourselves, our limitations and how the things we can’t control impact our innermost tensions. “Then, without even realizing it, without even consciously trying, you’ll find less and less need for perfectionism,” he says.
Quick hits
- Get comfortable with silence, advises author Mark Manson. That way you’ll only feel the need to speak when you have something important to say. Also: Get comfortable with boredom so you will only feel the need to do something when it is actually worth doing.
- Sales consultant Steve Keating says people who struggle with whether something is ethical or not are usually only trying to convince themselves that something that is clearly unethical is actually ethical. If you think there is even a slight possibility that something is unethical then it almost certainly is.
- Leadership guru Ken Blanchard is a big proponent of goal setting, but sometimes one of the best ways to get things done is to do nothing at all. Too much focus can narrow your thinking and your thoughts don’t extend beyond the obvious and unoriginal. The next time you’re feeling stuck, he recommends following the direction of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland: “Don’t just do something, stand there.”
- Entrepreneur Seth Godin says the best passwords are actually a series of simple words: blueredrobin is way easier to type and remember than b2#3R4, even though they have similar security.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.