How to be an awesome perfectionist

When I was young, I was a competitive and scholastic student. My goal was to get an A in every class, both in high school and college. I’d drop a class if it looked as though I wouldn’t get an A. In the end, it was my statistics grade that took me down a notch and taught me there’s no such thing as perfection.

Thanks to statistics, I did not graduate with a 4.0-grade average. However, for years I still pursued my quest for perfection, only by then, it had spilled into other areas of my life. The perfect hostess, impeccable dresser, superb cook, successful professional, excellent—well, you get the idea.

In the continual pursuit of perfection, I set high goals and beat myself up when I failed to meet the mark. The verbal attacks I’ve unleashed upon myself would be categorized as emotional abuse if they were inflicted by a parent!

Perfectionists can be counted on to get a job done and on time. They have an incredible work ethic and have what it takes to perform so they approach challenges with gusto. If left unchecked, however, a perfectionist can produce toxic behavior and negative messages in their relentless pursuit of excellence.

Leaders and entrepreneurs strive to achieve excellence for many reasons. Perfection is seductive because it hints at the promised land; however, it’s more about the ideal than the real when leaders let it sabotage their business and life.

The good news is that with the right mindset, there are ways we can leverage our perfectionist tendencies to produce a healthy and balanced approach to business and life. Here’s how to be an awesome perfectionist:

Never confuse confuse perfection with competency. No one expects you to be perfect; they do expect you to be competent. When you lead from a place of competence, you lead from a place of strength. If you’re a perfectionist, you drive yourself to excel but here is how you can be awesome instead of driven—choose a few areas in which you need to excel and hone your talents there.

It’s hard for a perfectionist to be content with less than ideal because you’re unfamiliar with a term that others find quite acceptable—and it’s called good enough. As a perfectionist, you have an all-or-nothing approach to everything. To be an awesome perfectionist, you need to balance the pursuit of perfect in all things with the need to excel in the fewer, more important things.

Remember you don’t need to be perfect in everything you do in life. Choose tasks that are worth the effort and put your perfectionist traits to work on them—and then go for it! Over time those tasks may shift so you’ll need to re-evaluate where you are in business and life on a regular basis.

Downtime and rest are seldom experienced by perfectionists because they always seek to improve their situation. As a result, they often forfeit rest and view it as a four letter word. By their very nature, perfectionists want each day to be productive because they don’t want to be seen as lazy. To them, lazy is another four letter word.

When you allow yourself to take time off, you shed the stress that you put on yourself to always perform. In a study by the Journal of Health Psychology, 450 participants were followed over a period of 6.5 years. Consistent with their hypothesis, the findings demonstrated that risk of death was significantly greater for high scorers in perfectionism.

Set aside time to play and explore. For many, self-care is a low priority. So are strong relationships because they require important time away from the relentless pursuit of perfection. To be an awesome perfectionist, use a time of rest to 1) revisit your values and 2) reflect on how you can nurture the relationships that are important to you. Most important—take the time to celebrate your successes!

theladders