What is Perfect?

In an earlier blog, I talked about a corporate client who realized that by spending so much time on drafting the “perfect” email, she was giving up time to spend on the activities that give her the most joy as well as the bigger payback, i.e., mentoring and coaching employees.  It takes courage to overcome perfectionist tendencies because it requires admitting that you are human—and to be human is to be imperfect.  Acknowledge that you’ve made mistakes all along the way in life and possibly the biggest mistake of all is being driven to be a perfectionist.

Here are some tools to combat perfectionism (from What Happy Women Know by Dan Baker Ph.D.).

• Kaizen – The  Perfectionism Antidote: Kaizen is the Japanese word for continual improvement through small incremental steps.  Use yourself as a standard and whatever it is that you’re working on, strive to make it better by a fraction of an inch.

• The Pareto Principle: This principle hypothesizes that 20% of our efforts deliver as much as 80% of our results—meaning that the remaining 80% of effort delivers only 20% of results.  Consider this:  If 20% is enough to deliver a reasonably acceptable job—maybe not perfect but certainly well above adequate—then the remaining 80% of the time spent seeking perfection is wasted on a very small gain.

Be aware of the difference between setting high personal standards and perfectionism.  Setting high standards involves establishing reasonable goals in pursuit of success, while perfectionism involves setting impossibly high goals and is motivated by fear of failure.

What might change if you told yourself that you will never fail, i.e., that you’re constantly learning from experiments you try in your own personal “journey to joy”?

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” –Henry Ford

P.S.  We teach what we need to learn.   Having Maximizer as my #1 strength means that excellence is my only standard.   I struggle with the concept that something has to be only a little bit better.  On my own personal “journey to joy”, I’m letting go of perfectionism and learning to embrace the concept of being the best I can be and letting go of other people’s judgments.  That’s about them, not me (even the good stuff!).  As long as I always do my best, that’s all I can do.  When things don’t turn out the way I had hoped, I just focus on what I will do differently the next time.  Life is a journey!