Overcoming Perfectionism: Accepting the Imperfections

Anxiety & BurnoutIndividual CounsellingCouples Counselling

Sep 30

Written by Cassandra Curado

Whether it’s at work, school, or in your daily life, pushing yourself towards your own success takes dedication and motivation. Though these are strong qualities to have, these same qualities can easily be overtaken by the downfall of perfectionist thinking. Of course we all want what’s best for ourselves and want to achieve every goal and task before us. However, when you constantly give yourself excessively high standards to reach you can experience the stress, frustration and depression that comes with a perfectionist mindset. This blog post will outline what perfectionism is and how you can reframe your mindset while supporting yourself towards success in a healthier way.

Perfectionism: Wanting Excellence or Avoiding Failure?

Often when you hear someone describe a person as a perfectionist you think of them as being a highly detail-oriented person that always puts out their best work; they are motivated, persistent, and hardworking. I mean who wouldn’t want to be a perfectionist if it meant you could always strive for excellence in every aspect of your life? Though perfectionism is often disguised as the ultimate quality to have, it can come with many downfalls that interfere with your ability to complete tasks, while impacting your wellbeing, sense of self and relationships.

As I aimlessly scoured the internet searching for the PERFECT example to explain perfectionism and its effects, I came across the swan metaphor. Now I want you to envision a swan calmly floating on top of a pond. The water is perfectly still and crystal clear as the swan glides across the water without a care in the world. However, below the surface of the water and creating those graceful movements are their manic webbed feet constantly paddling. Much like a swan, perfectionists appear to others as people who seem to calmly reach excellence with nothing but control and grace. However, masked behind this excellence is the underlying anxiety and overwhelming fear of failure, such that anything less than absolute perfection is a catastrophe.

There are two sides to perfectionistic thinking, an adaptive side and a maladaptive side. Being a perfectionist can relate to strong adaptive qualities when combined with the understanding that imperfections are inevitable. Though perfectionism is seen as a positive quality to hold, in many ways it can be better understood as a maladaptive defense mechanism that can develop for different reasons, some of which include:

Early Childhood Experiences - high expectations from parents

Anxiety Coping Mechanism
Low Self-Esteem - fear of judgement from others
Need for Control
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

With perfectionist thinking there is a lot of pressure to be perfect in every aspect of your life as a way to avoid feeling shame and disappointment. With this underlying fear of failure, you may be self-critical and place pressure on yourself to always achieve perfection. However, you may also feel pressure from others to be perfect. For example, you may feel driven to look a certain way based on unrealistic beauty standards in the media. A more subtle form of perfectionism that you may not notice involves placing pressure on other people in your life to also be perfect. For example, you may be very critical and feel frustrated when your partner doesn’t clean the house the “right” way because it disrupts the bubble of perfection you’ve created.

Though you may feel safe and secure in your bubble of perfection, being stuck in this mindset can have negative effects on your wellbeing and relationships. There’s nothing wrong with wanting the best for yourself. However, when you rely solely on perfectionism and attach your self-worth to your achievements you create more problems for yourself as you’re driven by fear not true motivation.

Signs Your Perfectionism is Negatively Impacting Your Life

Black-and-White Thinking → Anything less than perfection = failure
Catastrophic Thinking → If I make a mistake in my presentation I will be so humiliated and my co-workers will see me as a fool.
Difficulty meeting your own standards
Feeling frustrated, depressed and/or anxious when trying to meet your own standards
Chronic procrastination and giving up on tasks to avoid failure
Overly cautious when completing tasks and excessive checking behaviours
Being defensive when receiving feedback
Avoid trying new things that could risk making a mistake