By HD Silversmith
As I do a final polish on the article I wrote last month before sending it out tomorrow in search of a home in a peer-reviewed journal, I'm fighting my old perfectionist tendencies -- this despite yesterday's positive feedback from a senior colleague.
Yup, those monkey voices that Anne Lamott writes about were chattering in my head. "It's not good enough ... I need to fix X, Y, and Z ... it can't go out the door until I've addressed Issue Q in more detail."
So I spent a few minutes trawling the internet for some encouragement, and fortunately, it wasn't difficult to find. Click on the link below for a good piece on perfectionism by James J Messina, Ph.,D., a licensed psychologist. The bit I've quoted beneath it speaks eloquently to perfectionism's high costs, and the article as a whole contains some useful ways of reframing one's own negative thoughts.
Overcoming Perfectionism | LIVESTRONG.COM.
Examples of the negative consequences of perfectionism include:
- Low self-esteem. Because a perfectionist never feels "good enough" about personal performance, feelings of being a "failure" or a "loser" with a lessening of self-confidence and self-esteem may result.
- Guilt. Because a perfectionist never feels good about the way responsibility has been handled in life (by himself or others) a sense of shame, self-recrimination and guilt may result.
- Pessimism. Since a perfectionist is convinced that it will be extremely difficult to achieve an ideal goal, he can easily become discouraged, fatalistic, disheartened and pessimistic about future efforts to reach a goal.
- Depression. Needing always to be perfect, yet recognizing that it is impossible to achieve such a goal, a perfectionist runs the risk of feeling depressed.
- Rigidity. Needing to have everything in one's life perfect or "just so" can lead a perfectionist to an extreme case of being inflexible, non-spontaneous and rigid.
- Obsessiveness. Being in need of an excessive amount of order, pattern or structure in life can lead a perfectionist to become nit-picky, finicky or obsessive in an effort to maintain a certain order.
- Compulsive behavior. Over-indulgence or the compulsive use of alcohol, drugs, gambling, food, shopping, sex, smoking, risk-taking or novelty, is often used to medicate a perfectionist who feels like a failure or loser for never being able to be "good enough" in life.
- Lack of motivation. Believing that the goal of change will never be able to be ideally or perfectly achieved can often give a perfectionist a lack of motivation to attempt change in the first place, or to persevere if change has already begun.
- Immobilization. Because a perfectionist is often burdened with an extreme fear of failure, the person can become immobilized. With no energy, effort or creative juices applied to rectify, improve or change the problem behavior in the person's life, he becomes stagnant.
- Lack of belief in self. Knowing that one will never be able to achieve an idyllic goal can lead a perfectionist to lose the belief that he will ever be able to improve his life significantly.
So, back to those thoughts I had this morning ("It's not good enough ... I need to fix X, Y, and Z ... it can't go out the door until I've addressed Issue Q in more detail").
You know what my response is now, after reading this piece on perfectionism? "Yes, it is; no, I don't; and yes, it can."
