10 Psychological Secrets For Managing Your Perfectionism

The need to be perfect all the time can be so compelling. After all, if you are perfect then you avoid all of the pain of recognizing that you are not in fact perfect.

But to remain perfect, you may go to extremes. You may spend money you don’t have. You may compromise your health and your friendships. You may actually jeopardize your overall well-being.

Perfection is not worth that.

Let me repeat: perfection is not worth compromising yourself.

In fact, being perfect means that you do not have the opportunity to learn, to improve, or to feel what it means to be truly vulnerable. You would never have the opportunity to sit in the discomfort of knowing you have a long ways to go and that you may never really arrive but that the journey will be worth it.

If you can identify with the desire to want to be perfect, do not worry as you are not alone. Many people are on their path to recovery from the pull towards perfectionism.

Here are a few strategies to managing your desire to be perfect.

Notice When You Are Working Towards Perfection

You cannot make any changes or adjustments if you are not aware of what you are doing. If you’re a lifelong perfectionist, change will not come overnight.

The first strategy for you will be to simply observe and be mindful of when you are attempting to be perfect at whatever it is you are doing.

Start by practising being present. Talk yourself through your tasks. What is your ultimate goal? How fair or realistic are the expectations you are setting for yourself? Is this aiding your overall wellness?

Asking yourself the above questions may be helpful in your attempt to stay present.

Explore Why You Feel The Need To Be Perfect

All behaviour is caused. We do not do things just to do them. We may be doing them subconsciously at times and it may be necessary to call our intentions to our consciousness.

Ask yourself why you desire perfectionism so much. Recall when you first began feeling this need. Was it in childhood? If so, what was going on around that time of your life? Is it possible that is leading your need for perfectionism now?

It could be there are reasons that you need to be perfect that you may not even be aware of.

If you become aware or learn more about yourself, work at healing those experiences that led you here. It may help you accept your humanness in its simple and imperfect form.

Identify How You Feel About Falling Short Or Failure

You may need to explore what failure means to you to truly understand your need to be perfect and thus challenge it.

If failure means you in fact are a failure, there are corrections that need to be made.

Failing means we have the opportunity to learn and improve. It does not mean that we, as humans, are failures.

Challenge Your Thoughts About Failure

Failing or falling short only affects our self-worth if we allow it to. When we hear ourselves saying that we are a failure because we have made a mistake, we must challenge that thought.

The first way to do so is to fact-check. Ask yourself what the facts are? Then ask yourself if the facts fit your feeling about the situation? Are you truly a failure or is this just a feeling that isn’t serving you well in this moment?

Remind yourself that the feeling isn’t serving you well. You could even ask it to leave and tell it that you won’t allow it space in your head.

Reframe Your Beliefs

Reframing your beliefs is a basic principle of cognitive restructuring. It allows you to identify a new perspective. This new perspective will be what leads your values and interactions.

You cannot ignore your true desire to be perfect but you can adopt a new perspective such as you value learning. If you value learning, perfectionism may begin to be of lesser importance to you.

Stop Defining What Perfect Is

Another helpful strategy in becoming a recovering perfectionist is to stop defining what perfect is.

Do not ask yourself what perfect would be. Allow yourself to stay present when you are completing a task so that you are enjoying the process and not focusing on the outcome so significantly.

When you notice yourself defining what perfect is you might develop a mantra for yourself such as “I am enjoying the journey to wherever it may lead. I am not focusing on the result but I am learning along the way”.

Practise Mindfulness

A simple mindfulness practice daily could help you with learning to be more present and less focused on future events. Try paced breathing, for example.

Get into a comfortable position where you are preferably seated with your feet flat on the ground. Take five deep breaths in through the nose and exhaling through your mouth. Count to five as you inhale and count to five as you exhale.

Another technique is four-square breathing. This involves exhaling all air out of the lungs and then inhaling for four seconds, holding the breath for four seconds, and exhaling for four seconds.

During each breathing activity, notice how your breath feels entering and leaving your body. Afterwards you may feel more present and intentional.

Set Multiple Goals

Perfectionists are goal-setters. They may feel an emotional hangover when an event they worked towards is done, especially if they didn’t perform to their perfect expectations.

Another strategy to help avoid the pain that “failing” may bring is to set multiple, tiered goals. What is your preferred goal? If you don’t meet it, what is your second goal? What is your third?

You are likely to meet one of those goals, and so you may feel better at the end because you did accomplish at least one thing you set out to do.

Challenge The All-Or-Nothing Thoughts

We can become easily sucked into this kind of black or white or all or nothing thinking. It tells us that unless we achieve it all then we have nothing. This simply isn’t true.

Notice when you begin to feel as though you accomplished nothing because you didn’t meet that number one goal.

Challenge it by reminding yourself you met the second, third, or even fourth goal. You met a goal! You don’t in fact have nothing gained from that experience.

This may take practice. All of the steps will but that is okay. It is a part of your journey.

Ultimately, Leave The Shame Behind You

Sometimes people feel shame or guilt about being a perfectionist, especially if it has a significant impact on their relationships or work.

Remind yourself to love and accept yourself as you are and as you come. You are working towards having a healthier relationship with your perfectionism and that is good.

You should not have shame about wanting to be perfect because that does not help you stay present nor make improvements or set boundaries for yourself.

A Personal Perspective

Perfectionism has certainly been a major issue for me over most of my working life, and there are a few downsides:

1. It’s rarely possible to achieve perfection, so you’re setting yourself up for frustration and failure before you even begin.
2. There is an opportunity cost – while you’re constantly tweaking your project to edge it closer to perfection, you’re robbing yourself of the time and energy to work on a new project.
3. It can delay the launch of your project, possibly leading to one of your competitors stealing a march on you.
4. It can drive people who are not perfectionists absolutely nuts, both at home and at work. You’ve probably already come across others whose work you find overly sloppy and can recall how that makes you feel – well, that’s quite likely how they feel about you trying to achieve perfection.
5. Sometimes perfectionism can actually be a mask to cover up your fear. You’re anxious about releasing something into the world (whether it’s a book, report, article, infographic, physical product, poem, service), so you persuade yourself that you “just need to add one more thing”, so that you can delay the possibility of people not liking what you have created.
6. It’s a major cause of procrastination, which comes with its own set of issues.

The key then, for me, is recognizing the point when good enough is good enough.

It’s easy to waste time on things that often really don’t matter, including:

• The font you choose to use
• Precise shades of colours
• Finding the perfect complementary image to accompany an article
• Pixel-perfect placement of elements on your web page

Of course, sometimes these things do matter, but you need to determine whether that’s the case with your particular project – and I suspect that in most situations, you’ll find they’re not as important as you feel they are.

In summary, you may end up worrying about things that your customers or audience never even notice.

And if you really can’t decide between a couple of possible option, then do some split-testing – it’s what it’s for.

A software developer I know creates software and gets it to the stage when he feels it performs its basic function. He then releases it to a limited number of beta testers (typically people within his circle that he knows) and uses them to do more rigorous testing as well as suggest features that he hadn’t thought about, or re-prioritize features he hadn’t deemed important enough for the initial release of the software.

This allows him to quickly fine-tune the new software so that major bugs are fixed and features that real users would need are included – but without spending time trying to add all of the bells and whistles he can think of.

Software developers are often prone to perfectionism, even striving to include features that nobody ever asked for – and the obvious cost of this is an increased project budget and a delayed implementation.

So for him, it’s a great strategy.

And as a website builder and software developer myself, it’s an approach I have used too on occasion – thanks to my being one of his beta testers in the past.

It can also be used, for example, by writers, who make use of a select group of readers who will review the pre-publication book – usually before it goes for formal copy editing and proofreading. Again, this helps the author get their book out there quickly without agonizing for months over minutiae.

Conclusion

Remember that you are uniquely you, with the desire to be perfect or not, and that you are changing and evolving just like everyone else.

Good luck on your journey to managing your perfectionism!

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. Dealing With Perfectionism
2. Mindfulness Course
3. Split Testing