Perfect Perfectionism — Is perfectionism harmful or something to strive for?
“I don’t want to disappoint people who entrusted me with this project. I need to get this right.”
“I don’t trust others to do it to my standards.”
“I am not perfect for this new position that I always wanted.”
“I just want to get things done perfectly.”
These thoughts are constantly terrorizing my clients would they be doctors, IT specialists, financial managers, or athletes, would they be students or executives.
Paralyzed to move forward fearing failure, losing sleep, and sanity with overwhelming stress to accomplish everything perfectly.
You cannot tell high-performers your goals are too high, you should work less, you expect from yourself and others too much.
You cannot become a high performer without being driven by wanting to do things exceptionally well.
Some high-performers pride themselves on being a perfectionist and some find it as a detrimental trait that they cannot escape, and some don’t know what to think about it.
Complexities of the perfectionism
Perfectionism is broadly defined as a tendency to set unrealistically high standards of performance, striving for flawlessness, and characterized by biased and overcritical evaluations of the self and others (Hewitt & Flett, 1991).
Not only my clients but also researchers are divided if perfectionism is beneficial or it needs to be considered as a serious psychological illness that causes eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, psychosomatic syndromes, anxiety disorders, depression, suicidal thoughts…
The divisiveness of perfectionism stems due to its multidimensional and multifaceted characteristics. There are two major dimensions of how perfectionism is categorized: personal standards perfectionism (PSP) and evaluative concerns perfectionism (ECP).
What perfectionistic tendencies tell us?
The intricacies of perfectionism are shown in the 2×2 model by Gaudreau and Thompson. The graph analyzes the high and low tendencies for standards and fear of failure.
Adaptive and mixed perfectionists have more motivation to increase their performance than non-perfectionists. However, non-perfectionists outperform perfectionists that are highly concerned about mistakes.
Some researchers prefer adaptive perfectionism and some showed the power of mixed perfectionism in learning from mistakes faster, it ensured faster growth and higher-level development.
“Our findings are in line with the hypothesis that perfectionists with high concerns but low standards avoid performance monitoring to avoid the worry-inducing nature of detecting personal failure and the anticipation of poor evaluation by others. However, the stronger goal-oriented performance motivation of perfectionists with high concerns and high standards may have led to less avoidance of error processing and more intense involvement with the imperfect behavior, which is essential for improving future performance.”
(Barke, A., Bode, S., Dechent, P., Schmidt-Samoa, C., Van Heer, C. & Stahl, J., 2017)
When perfectionism is good?
Seeking flawlessness and the unattainable standard only works for those who are feeding on that stress as energy to push themselves forward.
The key is to keep monitoring ourselves and be aware of how we think, feel and act when we set super high goals for ourselves.
Do we get excited about them or become super worried about the possible failures?
When perfectionism is dangerous?
- Obsessing over mistakes. Seeing our mistakes and improving upon them is a very important step towards perfection. However, by overfocusing on errors our confidence ceases and we start looking for excuses to avoid performance at all costs which debilitate us to move forward. The fear of failure can suck us into the rabbit hole of serious psychological illnesses mentioned before as eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, anxiety disorders, depression, suicidal thoughts.
- Self-worth being attached to perfectionism. The biggest danger lies in the persistent negative self‐evaluation and feelings of conditional self‐acceptance.
- The concern with the opinions of others. Trying to be seen as perfect by others and being afraid of their judgment.
What to do to make perfectionism perfect?
Perfectionists are always playing with fire. Managing not to get burn requires high precision self-awareness and mastery of self-regulating techniques:
- Define in more concrete terms what perfectionism means to you. Your self-worth should not be determined by strive towards perfection. Leave room for surprises, unknown possibilities to capitalize on. What is perfect to you might not be perfect for others and maybe your perfect is not so perfect?
- Set the optimal and controllable steps towards perfection. Every goal should be accompanied by the learning objective for you to achieve.
- List your strengths and how they can be applied in the sought performance. Use this list especially when your confidence level is dropping.
- Give yourself time to learn. Track how much time does your body needs to learn a new behavior. Recognize what learning experience it has to have to adopt a new behavior. According to this data manage your expectations from yourself.
- Keep asking yourself where is your focus on the goals or mistakes? Preferable to have more focus on the goals and a little bit on the mistakes. List what mistakes and how many you would allow yourself to make in this learning journey.
- Track the intensity levels of judgment from yourself and others. Know what is your optimal stress level for performance and have a list of techniques that work for you to regulate it.
- Check in with yourself what is your fatigue level. When we are tired our precision to evaluate things objectively reduces. Mixed perfectionists need to focus on their recovery strategies to be able to handle the high intensities of the performance experiences.
- Then getting stuck with details to achieve perfection — broaden the perspective by for example reminding yourself of the bigger purpose for your strive.
- Create a support team for yourself.
- Ask yourself often if you are having fun?!
Mistakes are part of our growth, to fear them is to fear the growth. Perfectionism hurts the most who perceive making mistakes as being a mistake. We are perfectly imperfect humans whom we do not need to fix but we always can improve who we are and what we do.
“Artisan, who rendered the realm of perfect, eternal Ideas into its imperfect copy, the world we experience. Here, the concept of the world as a work of art is explicit.” — Frank Wilczek
You are welcome to take a test to see what perfectionistic tendencies you might have with Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (FMPS).
Resources
- Barke, A., Bode, S., Dechent, P., Schmidt-Samoa, C., Van Heer, C. & Stahl, J. (2017). To err is (perfectly) human: behavioural and neural correlates of error processing and perfectionism. SOCIAL COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE, 12 (10), pp.1647–1657. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx082.
- Weinberg, Robert S.; Gould, Daniel S.. Foundations of Sport and Exercise Psychology (2018). Human Kinetics, Inc.
- Ruggeri, A. (2018) The dangerous downsides of perfectionism. BBC
- Robert W. Hill, Timothy J. Huelsman, R. Michael Furr, Jason Kibler, Barbara B. Vicente & Christopher Kennedy (2004) A New Measure of Perfectionism: The Perfectionism Inventory, Journal of Personality Assessment
- Benson, E. (2003) The many faces of perfectionism
- Swider, B., Harari, D., Breidenthal, A., Steed, L. (2018) The Pros and Cons of Perfectionism, According to Research, HBR
- Curran, T., Hill, A. (2018) Perfectionism Is Increasing, and That’s Not Good News, HBR
- Harari, D., Swider, B. W., Steed, L. B., & Breidenthal, A. P. (2018). Is perfect good? A meta-analysis of perfectionism in the workplace. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(10), 1121–1144. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000324
- Ocampo, ACG, Wang, L, Kiazad, K, Restubog, SLD, Ashkanasy, NM. The relentless pursuit of perfectionism: A review of perfectionism in the workplace and an agenda for future research. J Organ Behav. 2020; 41: 144– 168. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2400
- Stoeber, J., Damian, L. E., & Madigan, D. J. (2018). Perfectionism: A motivational perspective. In J. Stoeber (Ed.), The psychology of perfectionism: Theory, research, applications (p. 19–43). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
- Stoeber, J., Hutchfield, J., & Wood, K. V. (2008). Perfectionism, self-efficacy, and aspiration level: Differential effects of perfectionistic striving and self-criticism after success and failure. Personality and Individual Differences, 45(4), 323–327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2008.04.021
- Stoeber, J. (2012). Perfectionism and performance. In S. M. Murphy (Ed.), Oxford library of psychology. The Oxford handbook of sport and performance psychology (p. 294–306). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731763.013.0015
Inga Stasiulionyte, Olympian, Master Performance Coach, and sports industry consultant, shares the high-performance insights and case studies of the challenges that her clients face.
