Do you get mad at yourself when you fall short of perfection? Striving for high quality work is admirable, but criticizing yourself for falling short of perfection is not good coping. Before you know it, you have taught yourself to be self-critical most of the time; that’s a recipe for poor coping because you will never be satisfied with your work, even when it’s good! Also, extreme self-criticism ignores the fact that striving for perfection is usually better than being sloppy and not giving a damn.
One theme we try and develop in this blog is that your negative emotions and tendencies that you really don’t care for, and that you treat like your enemy, can actually be channeled into working for you. The key is to think about them a little differently. Suppose you see yourself as too much of a perfectionist. You say, “I get so frustrated because I’m just not able to finish a job. I keep looking at parts of the job I’ve already completed, but I’m never satisfied. So, I’m constantly overanalyzing my work and never getting to the end.” Maybe you should talk with Zhao, an international student from China.
Zhao was a high-achieving perfectionist, but he seemed to know how to use those tendencies in a positive way. Some people want to deny or avoid facing such tendencies inside them. Their dilemma is: “I want to ignore my need to be perfect and move on to complete a task, but I can never quite pull it off.” The reason they can’t is because they’re trying to deny a part of themselves. Always remember: if there’s a trait you don’t like—such as perfectionism—it’s still a part of you, and whenever you work to deny a part of you, you’re heading down a dead-end street.
Zhao, however, had a different approach: “I must be perfect when I have an assignment. I know that, but use it to make me focus on the assignment. I outline the important parts of the assignment and make sure I do not overlook any of them. Every part gets my attention—in time. If I reach a block, I get information I need to remove the block no matter how long it takes. I must solve the block or I am not moving forward, and if I am not moving forward, I am not going to be perfect.”
It occurred to me that most students, when confronted with what Zhao called a block, would self-criticize—“Damn, I’m too much of a perfectionist. I’m not getting anywhere and getting all stressed out. I’m my worst enemy.”—and be likely to stop. Not Zhao. He reacts to frustration by channeling his perfectionism at the block, and not worrying about—at least for the time being—the larger assignment at hand. He understands that such a strategy will eventually resolve the block and put him back on track for the larger assignment. He seems to understand that allowing his perfectionism to stop him would compromise his perfectionism; he couldn’t achieve a “perfect” result if he mismanaged his drive to perfectionism; he couldn’t satisfy his perfection needs if he lets those needs stop his path to being perfect.
Zhao’s attitude about being a perfectionist seems to carry this coping lesson: However you go about it, the key is not to engage in self-critical comments about what a perfectionist you are, but to engage in positive forward-moving actions to resolve bumps in the road along the way. Sure, at some point you must force yourself to accept a finished product as the best you can manage, but shifting from “worrying about perfection” to “focusing on each part of the task,” might help. Let’s face it, though, not many of us have Zhao’s mental discipline. Is there another strategy more of us could use to deal with perfectionist tendencies? Next week we’ll take a look at Anita’s case to answer that question.
Psychology and Stress 