Most of us want to do a good job of things, but what happens when “doing a good” job turns into wanting things to be perfect? Indiscriminate perfectionism can become a toxic habit that has the potential to affect you, your career, your business and everyone around you.
A couple of days ago a delegate approached me after I came off stage at a conference. He told me that what he had heard had triggered something in him that had held back his career for over 30 years. He was a self-confessed perfectionist – and he believed that he just might have cured himself.
Before I share what had released this guy from his self imposed prison, let’s look at the effects of perfectionism. First of all, you are never good enough to meet your own high standards. When you aim for perfection and don’t reach it, your monkey voice starts chattering away – and it never shuts up. It niggles you, chips away at your confidence and tells you that you could have done better. It tells you that people are going to question your competence. Your perfectionist monkey brain is wicked, and it doesn’t care about your long term outcomes. It lives in the now, and it leaves its indelible miserable monkey-mark on your confidence.
You can also find yourself spending too much time trying to make things perfect when great would have been more than good enough. That leads to inefficiency, over engineering things, fiddling at the margins and wasting huge amounts of time. If you get a reputation for being slow, it can be a label that’s hard to shake off.
But the most corrosive element of of all is the cumulative impact on your mental health. You start to think it’s you that’s the problem, not the task or output. You can end up avoiding things because you imagine you won’t produce a perfect outcome. That leads to missed opportunities. Fear of failure leads to a limited portfolio of trial and error. After all, perfectionists hate errors. Finally, you can easily end up getting really down about what you have done, because you have been forced to ship work you aren’t happy with. People who work around perfectionists suffer too. Their work is never good enough, and they often feel like their efforts aren’t appreciated because criticism and nitpicking always comes before praise.
All that because the perfectionist really cares! It’s ironic isn’t it…..
So what was the big revelation for the guy at the convention?
Well, I was talking about Mastery that day. That’s the process of becoming REALLY good at something. I was telling a story about my time as a dressage rider and the contraction of striving to master something highly technical where you had to be fully present in the moment. The two things were at odds. I knew what perfection looked like. I even knew what it felt like – for fleeting moments. But I eventually realised that it’s impossible to sustain that perfect moment because mastery involves balance – and balance is dynamic and constantly shifting. Getting my head around the process of aiming for perfection but never reaching it took me more than 20 years but was been transformational when I worked it out.
Total mastery is impossible and learning to become OK with that (without giving up the pursuit of ever greater mastery) is where the deepest satisfaction lies.
Instead, mastery is about perfect balance in the moment, which is by it’s very nature it’s unsustainable. It’s an alchemy of accumulated knowledge, a continuous push towards for perfection combined with a sense of contentment about knowing it’s impossible to reach. Whether it’s a perfect ski run, an idea whose time has come, or a project that needs to be shipped; mastery isn’t about perfection. It’s in that distinction, that the prisoner set himself free.
