Why are we so afraid to be imperfect?
The damaging impact of perfectionist thinking…
I often ask my clients before they’ve read the perfectionist description in The Thrive Programme, whether they think they are a perfectionist or not. Most of the time, they assure me that they are not. After all, they say, they aren’t always neat and tidy, they don’t throw a hissy fit if something is out of place, and they aren’t very organised. Almost always, they change their minds once they get further through the programme and realise that this isn’t perfectionism at all, just as I did all those years ago when I was a client. Even now it is something that (as I realised rather unexpectedly at our Thrive Programme Coaches bootcamp) I sometimes have to work on in my everyday thinking!
In fact, it is easier than you might think to miss the presence of perfectionism in our own lives and attitudes entirely, even when we DO know what it is, like the question in our online Thrive Programme TQ Assessment about whether you ‘hold others to your own very high standards’. I have never once answered that question with a yes, because I honestly didn’t think I was ever judgemental of others (and never really saw it as perfectionism either). I realised recently that this wasn’t actually accurate at all - I simply hadn’t seen myself doing it. So I want to examine this particular thinking style in a bit more detail, show the widespread impact it can have on our own well-being, and explore how maintaining it can leave us feeling stressed, lacking in self esteem, and even a bit vulnerable amongst our peers too…
So, what actually IS perfectionism?
I remember Rob Kelly telling me in one of our sessions five years ago that if an employee knew what true perfectionism actually was, they would never put it on their CV, and that if an employer knew, they would never hire anyone who said at an interview that they were one, because it isn’t the seemingly positive quality that many people believe it is. And yet I remember many an interview where I proudly said that my ‘workplace weakness’ was being a perfectionist (mostly because I thought it was one of those ‘weakness but also a strength’ answers - clever, huh?!), and interviewers always reacted positively to it, as some kind of backwards demonstration of a supercharged work ethic. Don't get me wrong, work ethic is great. As is being tidy or organised. It’s just not ‘perfectionism’…!
In a nutshell, a perfectionist is somebody who feels unable to tolerate anything less than perfection in themselves, their own lives and their achievements. It’s not simply a person who works hard and achieves things - even though that is often the case for a perfectionist as they do work incredibly hard, mostly to try and actually BE the perfect person they want the world to see them as. It’s deeper and more damaging than just working hard to get things right, because perfectionism is actually someone who just doesn’t cope with getting things wrong/making mistakes, not knowing something, making a human error, even just saying or doing something out of line that they think a ‘normal’ person would never do (and then judging themselves harshly for it).
These things are of course all part of being human, but as I often point out to my clients, a perfectionist doesn’t want to have to DO the lesson in order to LEARN the lesson, so they react badly to each and every mis-step of theirs as a ‘sign’ or even ‘proof’ that they are inadequate, useless or failing, rather than a lesson for them to learn and grow from. Essentially, they set themselves very high – almost unrealistically high – goals and expectations, and over react with disappointment, even outright dejection, when they don’t then meet them. In the mind of a perfectionist, they just can’t get ANYTHING right!!
What’s the bigger picture with perfectionism?
As you can imagine, it goes hand in hand with pretty low self esteem and social confidence, because in order to FEEL like they are never doing well enough at something (or everything, as a perfectionist thinker will often – incorrectly - believe) they have to spend a lot of time comparing themselves to everybody else, and then a lot of time criticising and berating themselves for in their eyes not then measuring up against those people. They’re harder on themselves than probably anybody else, because not being as good as they would like to be is seen in their eyes as SUCH an awful thing.
Think about it… they may be working two jobs, studying for an extra qualification, keeping a tidy house, AND ferrying their kids to loads of after school clubs and hobbies, but be frustrated that they can’t home-cook healthy dinners every night of the week or that they can’t make yoga classes 4 times a week like the other mums and get rid of their ‘baby belly’ as quick as the celeb in the magazine (who probably spends THOUSANDS each year on personal trainers and diet plans, and may even have a nanny to help!). In other words, they set huge personal expectations, don’t meet them, then react to that with abject failure and misery. It’s not proportionate or realistic, and it’s certainly not helpful, but it’s the constant merry-go-round a perfectionist can find themselves in, working harder and harder to avoid that feeling of failure they create when they aren’t as good as they feel the need to be. (Sounding familiar yet…?! Don’t worry, your perfectionism might be so habitual that you don’t even think this is perfectionism, you still think it’s perfectly healthy ‘drive’!).
If you think about it, this ‘I have to get everything perfect otherwise I’m a failure’ attitude is conditional love in its most basic form – a highly inconsistent form of love and kindness where we are ‘allowed’ or ‘permitted’ to be nice to ourselves ONLY when we meet ALL of our own high standards, targets and aspirations. Of course, the more outcome-driven, error-averse and self-critical we are of ourselves, the more we can start to unintentionally project these hugely unrealistic expectations and high standards onto others as well, and before we know it we are treating them with the same conditional love and positive regard we react to ourselves with too! So we are FUMING at our boss for pulling us up on a mistake when ‘he’s done far worse’ and now think he’s a USELESS boss, a relationship is OVER because our partner can’t even stack the dishwasher ‘correctly’, and we’re filing for parental emancipation because Mum made was mistake and got it wrong which of you won the wooden spoon race as a child! You see where I’m going with this…
No surprise either that it has a pretty close working relationship with a few other pesky unhelpful thinking styles too, particularly black and white thinking (an either/or, yes/no, good/bad, pass/fail attitude to everything, with no grey in the middle) and catastrophising (blowing any tiny mistakes, difficulties or imperfections wildly out of proportion with reality), which just add extra fuel to that perfectionist fire. With all those thinking styles going on, a perfectionist spends most of their life under-processing and underplaying all the good things they do each and every day, and over-processing and exaggerating the things they don’t do or aren’t achieving. It’s a hugely unbalanced WAY of looking at and evaluating ourselves, which means it builds a hugely unbalanced VIEW of ourselves too. The problem is, it might be an unbalanced, unrealistic, even completely distorted view to other people, but the perfectionist really, TRULY believes it…
Why exactly am I writing about this?
Well, because quite honestly it’s been on my brain ever since our Thrive Programme Coaches bootcamp! I came away wondering why on earth – despite smashing many, many big challenges on bootcamp – I focused almost all of my attention (when looking back at it the next day) on the one sole challenge that I chose not to do, or on the one time that I snapped at someone, or at the bad mood I created for all of half an hour on the last day when I was tired. Why, I thought, was I not focusing instead on all the challenges I DID push myself to achieve, on the fact that I apologised to the person I snapped at and apart from that was nice to everybody the whole weekend, and that I actually got myself out of my bad mood faster than I probably ever have done by using my thriving skills?! You see, the more I imagined I needed to be some extra-special, challenge-smashing, perfect, superhuman, thriving role-model on this bootcamp, the more I set myself up to utterly over-react to any tiny (perceived or actual) imperfection and failure, and very quickly lose perspective. Once I realised that, it started to dawn on me that it was all about perfectionist thinking, and I hadn’t even known I was doing it!
This is how damaging perfectionism in its most organic sense can be, because it meant that because I felt bootcamp hadn’t gone 100% perfectly, it became so much easier to believe that I had failed at it instead, that I wasn’t ‘as thriving’ or ‘as good’ as everyone else there, or wasn’t achieving enough, with my perfectionist glasses firmly on. The minute I realised they were there, and took them off and allowed myself the breathing space to be a normal, imperfect human being like everybody else on the planet, I regained all my perspective and realised just how well I’d actually, in reality, done. Like taking off a pair of dark sunglasses, suddenly everything because sunnier and brighter again.
People with a phobia of sickness/vomit - emetophobes - are particularly renowned for this thinking style (takes one to know one!), and tend to have more blips going through the programme than other clients, precisely because of how harshly they view - and therefore treat - themselves in the face of any and every perceived failure. They’re never working ‘as hard’ as they should be to beat their phobia, they’re never doing ‘ALL’ the exercises correctly all at once, they’re never over it ‘enough’, or ‘as much’ as they perceive other ex-clients are. For an emetophobe, despite now having a pretty normal life again, where they are happy and relaxed and able to do all the things they wanted to again without the phobia limiting their life choices anymore, if they only felt 99% over their phobia they’d FEEL like they’d failed or ‘the programme didn’t work’ for them. And even if they’d been thriving for 5 years, if they maintained perfectionist thinking then one tiny, brief blip is enough for them to convince themselves they’ve failed and are back to square one! Many are hesitant to even ever say they’re ‘cured’ for fear of looking stupid or ‘wrong’ if they do then have a blip. This is classic perfectionism - anything less than a total cure is seen as a total disaster! (Well done if you’ve spotted the black and white and catastrophic thinking here too ;) ).
So how do we start to tackle perfectionism?
Well, the first step is to notice it!! Whether you’ve been thriving for 10 days or 10 years, there’s no shame in noticing every now and again that you need to do a little tweaking in your thinking! After all, it would just be perfectionist to think that once you’re thriving you’re either ‘perfect’ and never need to do any more self-development or learn any new self-insights ever again, or that you’re a failure, wouldn’t it 😉 The next step is to challenge it head on. Ask yourself why you feel such a need to be perfect all the time, and why you think mistakes are so bad! We all make them, even if some people choose not to SHOW you their imperfections or mistakes… It’s how we learn and grow, after all, even if the process itself can feel a little uncomfortable. Reminding ourselves that others aren’t perfect either (even if they might SEEM that way) is hugely important too.
Which leads me into my final point. Putting in the effort to consciously over-ride that natural perfectionist tendency to try and hide difficulties, weak spots, errors and imperfections, because of being afraid to expose yourself as anything LESS than perfect. To be human requires us to be vulnerable sometimes, and that means unconditionally loving, embracing and showing ourselves to the world completely as we are, even when we make mistakes, even when we aren’t achieving what we want to be, even when we did something we regret or are embarrassed about (I wonder just how many people can’t bring themselves to even apologise when they’re wrong, just from pride, not wanting to ‘be in the wrong’ and a fear of looking imperfect).
Beating perfectionism is about getting a more realistic, calm, loving view of ourselves and what we can be, and feeling comfortable showing ourselves just as we are, imperfections included! Nobody is perfect, even if they claim to be (the concept is completely subjective anyway) so the best way to tackle perfectionism is to stop trying to achieve ‘perfect’ (which doesn’t exist), and start working on just achieving the best version of YOU instead.