In my previous post, I described five ways that perfectionism is harmful to your well-being. It decreases your productivity and makes you try to cover up your mistakes. You end up avoiding situations that might result in mistakes. Eventually, perfectionism can become a way of life, and you lose the emotional flexibility you need to deal with difficult thoughts, feelings, and situations.
There is nothing wrong with striving for excellence, but perfectionism makes you a slave to success. No matter how well a situation turns out, it is hard to embrace and enjoy the outcome because your mind finds some way that it is not perfect.
Here are some ways to face and move beyond perfectionism.
1. Take a break from social media.
Social media can be a way to share your life with others and connect with them. But it also sets up the temptation to compare yourself to others. Someone else’s life seems to be going so much better than yours. Others are more successful, have a better job, live in a better neighborhood. You begin to accumulate a list of all the things you should be doing differently in your life. This list of “shoulds” can negatively impact your mood and your sense of self.
So it might be helpful to spend time away from social media. Check in from time to time, but don’t spend a lot of time reading what others have posted and comparing yourself to them.
2. Enjoy activities that don’t expect perfection.
For example, you could spend time reading biographies. Every biography describes moments when a person experiences rejection, failure, and criticism. Sometimes, these challenges go on for years. And yet, the person is not only able to overcome these circumstances; they see how those moments shaped them into the person they are becoming. You can see how success comes not in spite of failures, but because of them.
Play games that give you the chance to experience pleasure, even excellence, without being perfect. For example, one of my favorite sports is baseball. If a person plays major league baseball for 20 years, and he makes an out 7 out of 10 times he comes to bat, guess what happens? He becomes a member of the hall of fame. His lifetime batting average will be .300, and any person with that kind of average is considered a star of the game.
Golf, learning to play a musical instrument, playing board games. Nobody does any of those perfectly. So embrace the joy these moments can bring.
3. Practice self-compassion.
Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer are two people who are helping us learn more about what self-compassion is and how we can express it. In their work, they identify three negative responses you have when things go wrong or when they aren’t perfect.
The first is self-criticism.
This involves feeling shame and guilt. You are hard on yourself because you have done something “wrong.” Or you are hard on yourself because there is “something wrong with you;” you have some deep flaw that keeps you from ever doing something perfectly.
The second is self-isolation.
This involves pulling away from the people around you, even the people who care for you and want to be there for you. You tell yourself that no one else would make a mistake like you have made, so being around others reinforces just how bad you are.
The third is self-absorption.
Your mind begins to weave together a narrative about the mistake you made and how bad you are that you made that mistake. This narrative can draw stories from the past about previous failures; it can make predictions about failures you will have in the future.
In her book, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, Kristin Neff says that self-compassion “entails three core components. First, it requires self-kindness, that we be gentle and understanding with ourselves rather than harshly critical and judgmental. Second, it requires recognition of our common humanity, feeling connected with others in the experience of life rather than feeling isolated and alienated by our suffering. Third, it requires mindfulness—that we hold our experience in balanced awareness, rather than ignoring our pain or exaggerating it.”
So, when you are experiencing self-criticism, you intentionally develop ways to practice self-kindness. When you are experiencing self-isolation, you intentionally develop ways to experience your common humanity, the awareness that all of us are not perfect. When you are experiencing self-absorption, you develop mindfulness practices that allow you to step out of the past and future and experience the wonder of the present moment.
If you would like to know more about how I work with people who struggle with the anxiety of perfectionism, please visit my anxiety treatment specialty page.