AKA the most common way we hold ourselves back.
I recently had a mini-session where my client was telling me that she needed an entire day to complete one of the tasks on her action plan. When I challenged her to constrain herself and do it in half the time, we discovered that her reasoning for this conclusion was it would take an entire day to “do it right” and to make sure that it was “perfect.”
We do this all the time. We convince ourselves that we must complete something to perfection before we can move on to the next step.
We can’t ask for a raise until we are able to conduct our work with perfection. We aren’t going to offer to speak at a conference until we have a full mastery of the underlying material. We don’t want to take that expert deposition until we have done simpler depositions perfectly.
We carry around this faulty belief that there is no sense in doing something unless you can do it flawlessly.
Can you imagine where we would be if everyone followed that logic?! If everyone was afraid to massively fail on the way to success?
Consider Thomas Edison and his endeavors to create artificial light: “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
The real motivation behind this perfectionism is the avoidance of failure.
If we believe we can’t act until we can do it perfectly, then we don’t have to do anything until we know we can do it without failure. We don’t have to face any criticism of our imperfections until we have a foolproof plan to avoid criticism. We can spend our entire lives building up to those perfect skills and never getting there: we never take any risks so we never fail.
“Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”
Confucius
Perfectionism is a way to stay stuck. To convince yourself that your efforts are noble. You simply want to do it right and you can’t move forward until you do that. It seems valid. It seems reasonable. But this is simply fear masquerading in a more “honorable” outfit. The fear of failure, dressed as perfectionism.
Perfectionism is for scared people.
The truth is that you don’t want to face any criticism.
It’s easier to tell yourself you are only going to do it if you can “do it right” than it is to be honest with yourself and admit that you don’t want to experience failure or criticism. Most people avoid criticism because they have a practiced habit of endorsing the criticism. They agree with the criticism and interpret the feedback to mean that they are a failure.
When you allow criticism to mean that you can’t do it, of course you are going to try and avoid criticism!
Enter the myth of perfectionism to distract you from what’s really going on.
Don’t jump teams and join your critics by default. Don’t let failures mean anything about you. Don’t let the words of critics hold you back. Criticism from others has more to do with the other person than with you!
You can decide to receive criticism however you want. Consider allowing it to mean that you are learning and always improving (because you are a human and “to err is HUMAN”).
If you committed to doing everything 80% and moving on, how different would your life be? How much more could you accomplish?
People may criticize your B+ work. People may NOT criticize your B+ work. You won’t know until you stop trying to manufacture A+ work before putting anything out there. You can always go back and make something better but you won’t know what is “better” until you start trying and learning.
Besides, just because you conclude something is perfect, doesn’t mean no one will criticize it. Spinning on things until they are perfect, does not “save” you from criticism.
That is a lie you are telling yourself to keep you safe. To keep you stuck.
Don’t convince yourself that perfect is something to strive for. It’s all subjective.
Don’t allow the myth of perfection to keep you stuck.
Success only comes from trying and failing repeatedly. Not from sitting on the sidelines theorizing about how to best do something.
Strive for continuous improvement, instead of perfection. ― Kim Collins
Get out there are start failing. You can’t learn how to handle critics if you never do anything noteworthy.
Think your perfectionism is serving you? Let’s see what’s really going on. What are you afraid of?
Photo by George Becker from Pexels
