Why being perfect is the barrier to everything

“What is it about fear that we find so crippling?” A wise colleague mused to me today as I fretted about whether a presentation I was writing was any good and whether I’d provoke discussion / show enough knowledge / provide an interesting and insightful session.

And that’s the ridiculous thing about fear.

I don’t mean the fear of jumping out of an aeroplane with only a thin piece of silk canopy between you and certain death.

I mean the everyday crippling fear that is so invidious we don’t even notice that this is the emotion driving us on or holding us back.

It’s particularly prevalent in girls. I notice it all the time in the women I see around me — myself included — my mid-life friends, the young graduate, even in my four year old daughter who announced this week that her drawing skills weren’t very good.

And I think it’s driven by the ‘be perfect’ gene. We fear criticism, not being right, not doing everything possible within our reach to produce a superhuman level of performance on everything at all times. We do everything we can to avoid conflict, being challenged about our point of view (in case we’re wrong) or simply not good enough.

And what’s it in service of? Avoiding that uncomfortable feeling that we may have failed in some way. That we haven’t lived up to our impossibly high standards that we are convinced everyone else around us must share and measure us against.

And what if we are found wanting? Then what? Will the sky fall in? Will our careers end and never restart?

Probably not.

Probably everyone will think (if they have even noticed) that we did a pretty good job. Maybe even a great job.

And yet we’ve just spent all that emotional energy twisting our insides into gut wrenching paroxisms of stress about whether we can do something or if the thing we are doing is really good enough.

What a waste of energy, brain power and creativity that we could have spent in the moment with someone, doing something more meaningful or fun or silly or thoughtful or a thousand other things that have just passed us by because all our attention was focused on soothing the fear inside of us and trying to pre-empt the scenarios created by and playing out in our brains. None of which are actually real.

So what really matters is here, now, in front of us.

Not the wild throes of our imagination about how we might fail, might get it wrong, might not do our absolute best performance.

I always love John C Parkin’s philosophy about fear. He goes for the direct approach and encourages everyone to say f*ck it to fear. Because in that split second when we do finally say “F*CK IT!”, that’s when we let go of the fear that’s been nagging us and holding us back and we do it anyway. Usually with a deep sense of liberation.

And often, in my experience, that’s when it all works out perfectly.