Motivation

Perfectionism

By  | 

The irony about perfectionism is that ostensibly the motive behind the attitude is to do something as well as possible but worrying about doing it perfectly will make you fall short of the mark, both in terms of while you’re doing it and in terms of your ultimate development.

This is because taking risks and making mistakes are vital elements of growth, you’ve got to reach beyond yourself and your current capabilities if you want to get better. Reaching beyond yourself means sometimes falling flat on your face. Making mistakes and falling flat on your face are exactly what is anathema to the perfectionistic attitude. Any signs of failure, of coming up short, are grounds for recrimination and self-doubt. If it’s not perfect it’s not good enough, so you’re going to put checks on the very risk taking behaviors that will help you improve.

In terms of the zone of proximal development, the best way to improve at anything is to ride that edge between the difficulty of what you’re doing and your current level of ability. You want your tasks to be challenging but doable, which means succeeding sometimes but also failing sometimes. The perfectionistic attitude necessarily holds you back from that edge, keeping you within your comfort zone where you can cultivate the appearance of doing it perfectly because it’s not that hard for you. Really it’s only perfect at a lower level of development, not close to what you could eventually be capable of if you were riding your edge and pushing yourself to get better.

When we dig a little deeper, we see that perfectionism as an attitude actually holds you back from expertise, from approaching that perfection you are concerned about. From a motivational point of view, you should worry about doing the very best you can at a level that is challenging for you, not doing it perfectly at a level that is not.

Related posts:

  1. Equating Being Perfect With Being Loved If you are a perfectionist, a psychoanalytic reason why is that you may have come to equate being perfect with being loved in your family of origin, and of course in order to be perfect you had to do everything perfectly. This situation is difficult because instead of congratulating yourself on your many successes you […]...
  2. Embrace Mistakes Most of us are aversive towards making mistakes, and the reason why is obvious enough. Mistakes we made in the past were met with aversive consequences like punishment, shame, guilt, and other unpleasant stimuli. We quickly learned how to avoid these negative reinforcers, which was of course by not making any mistakes. We can blame […]...
  3. Getting Better Means Seeming Worse Imagine two burgeoning snow skiers with comparable abilities. The difference between them is that the first takes a lot of risks and really pushes himself where the second mainly plays it safe and stays within his comfort zone. To most observers on the mountain, it will probably seem like the second skier is better. But […]...
  4. Depression Is Arrested Development From our existential point of view depression is the unconscious response to having abandoned the process of human development, it’s the psyche’s way of rebelling in the face of life choices that aren’t furthering growth and self-actualization. But you don’t have to agree with our analysis that depression is the result of arrested development in […]...
  5. The Problem With Perfectionism The main practical reason perfectionists have a hard time giving up their perfectionism is that, despite the joylessness, guilt, self-recrimination, anxiety, depression, and other painful thoughts and feelings that follow them around over the course of their lives these people do tend to produce at a high level. In fact it’s exactly those painful thoughts […]...
  6. Psychology Of Perfectionism Perfectionism is usually rationalized on the grounds that there’s nothing wrong with striving for excellence, that to do the very best you can is a very good thing, something to be praised not judged. Perfectionists might tell themselves the proof is in the pudding, that the quality of their work is superior to many of […]...
  7. Anorexia and Perfectionism Perfectionism is a common character trait for a person who is anorexic. This means that you set very difficult or even impossible to achieve goals for yourself in pretty much every aspect of your life and feel deflated and down on yourself when you fail to achieve them. We are talking about such diverse areas […]...
  8. Narrative Therapy For Perfectionism Perfectionism is difficult to treat because while most people are poignantly aware that the attitude causes them undue suffering and distress they’re also secretly proud of their life orientation and deeply afraid that if they were to let go of the compulsion to do everything perfectly their performance would suffer and their lives would fall […]...
  9. Relax Your Inflexible Standards If you want to be a lot happier in the short-term and have more success in the long-term relax your inflexible standards. The faulty thinking pattern we are talking about here is seeing the world in terms of words like ‘should’, ‘must’, ‘ought to’ and ‘have to’. When you think this way you invariably end […]...
  10. Keep Going People usually begin pursuing a new interest with high hopes and aspirations. You are not going to find too many people starting out who believe from the get go that they are going to quit. But this is exactly what happens all the time, and many spend their entire lives bouncing from one new interest […]...
  11. Redefining Success Deciding not to pursue worthwhile endeavors that require a lot of time and work is, for most of us, not a question of laziness but rather due to an unconscious defense mechanism meant to protect our psyches from painful existential anxiety cued off by the threat of failure. For many of us failure as a […]...
  12. Feeling Faint On The Yoga Mat This article is for all the peeps out there who practice yoga. We haven’t written an article on the topic for some time now, though we do have a good sized archive on yoga philosophy taken through the lens of Western psychology if you want to check it out. Today’s topic is for when you’re […]...
  13. Embrace Falls If you spend a season at the ski mountain you’ll notice that a lot of beginner and intermediate skiers judge their days by how many times they fall. If they didn’t fall at all it was a ‘great’ day. If they only fell a little it was a ‘good’ day. If they fell a lot […]...
  14. Know When To Push Forward Know When To Pull Back Mental health professionals have a much different attitude towards productivity than the general population because they’re on the front lines, they see what stress does to people and just how common burnout is. In our culture it’s almost blasphemous to say you should take it easy, to focus on self-care rather than pushing through it. […]...
  15. Be Patient With Identity Development There is usually an intermediary stage during the process of identity development that can be pretty annoying for those around the person developing, largely due to the fact that these people don’t see the changes as intermediary but as fixed differences, differences that compare unfavorably to the old identity to which they had grown accustomed. […]...
  16. Rationalization Versus Denial Rationalization is the preferred strategy to continue with maladaptive thought and behavior patterns in the face of mounting evidence that these patterns are leading to negative consequences in interpersonal relationships, work, and life. Of course denial is usually central too. And in a sense rationalization is denial. The difference is that denial flat out says […]...
  17. Losing Interest Does Not Necessarily Mean You Are Depressed One of the criteria for Major Depressive Disorder in the DSM V is markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all or almost all activities most of the day nearly every day for at least two weeks. Most people don’t need to be clinical psychologists to realize something might be wrong when suddenly they’re no longer […]...
  18. The Need To Be Understood Most of us are desperate to be understood, to have that sense of isolation shattered by finding people in our lives who really get us on an intimate level. The unconscious fear that seems to always be lurking in the background is that if we aren’t understood it will be as if we never existed. […]...
  19. Praise Versus Encouragement We tend to lump praise and encouragement together under the rubric of ‘awesome positive reinforcements’. They share the qualities of making the subject feel really good, and when used in proper doses they make a desired behavior more likely to occur in the future. I started thinking about what makes them different, and the conclusion […]...
  20. Dominant Culture Many people who identify themselves as Caucasian say they don’t really have any culture. They do of course, but they are just not consciously aware of what it is. This is one of the scourges of being born into what professionals in the field of social justice call dominant culture. People from dominant culture don’t […]...
Related Items