image by christin▲

Recently, I experienced a personal victory. I finished a semester of graduate school completely, and made the previously tight grip of perfectionism on my life a little weaker. While I haven’t found out my grades yet, I am happy, and amazed that I finished this while also working part-time, keeping up with a consistent exercise schedule (that I slightly modified) and writing occasionally for this site.

I know that there’s a lot of you out there that choose to be super busy and super psyched about life, and so this may not seem like such a big deal. But for me it was, in comparison to what I would usually do and the way I usually would respond to the pressure of completing projects within a time frame.

My need to be perfect and make anything I did perfect showed up very strong while I was in college.  It took me so long to complete my papers and I wound up taking several incompletes that took years to finish. In the past, I let laziness, fear, and wanting to make things perfect do me in. I would put off doing my work because I didn’t want to do it right away, and thought I could put it off, thinking I’ll have time later, and it won’t take too long.  But all my projects always did take longer than I planned for partly because I had waited so long to do them.

I found writing term papers to be nearly impossible—I wanted to do a superb job and include every bit of fascinating detail. I thought that details were king. Sometimes I saw the broader links in what I was writing.  What I sought was a feeling of wholeness; I wanted to develop an idea through my own unique style of writing, to develop a thought completely. Coupled with wanting to do a superb job was the critical internal nag putting me down, saying that whatever I was doing was never good enough, or wasn’t quite right. Consequently, I left and went back to school several times, and I took ten years to complete my degree.

What I have learned is that projects take longer with each day you put them off. They use up unnecessary thinking time, and this thinking is repetitive because it’s the same thought “I have to do… I have to do…” I was talking to a high school physics teacher recently about perfectionism.  He said that if you put off expressing an idea because it’s not perfect, then the idea keeps cycling around and round in you and it never changes.  In fact, he said no idea is perfect and will ever be perfect, but when we express them, then they can be worked with. Once expressed, ideas have the freedom to change and we keep developing them for the rest of our lives. This was a misunderstanding I had. I thought I was required to have perfect ideas in order to even express them in the first place. 

It’s interesting that education has changed since I was an undergrad. Now, I usually receive a rubric for each required project in graduate school. In most ways, this has made my own personal writing easier in that I can meet the requirements and then add my own perspective on top. As a teacher it’s showing me what clear instruction looks like: there are specific things to learn, find and do, rather than hey, if I like your work, you’ll get a good grade. 

What is perfectionism? I often look up words I think I already know because it helps me maintain some objectivity. Left to my own mind, I make up some pretty negative and wacky meanings. Most words have multiple meanings which I find adds depth to how they can be used in writing and speech. According to the American Heritage College Dictionary, perfectionism is a propensity for being displeased with anything that is not perfect or does not meet extremely high standards. It also can mean a belief in certain religions that moral or spiritual perfection can and must be achieved before the soul has passed into the afterlife.

Bingo! For me, needing to be perfect shows up exactly like the former meaning. Not only has this meant that I don’t find my own ideas good enough to express, but I’m also critical of others’ ideas too. Not very much can get done in a mental atmosphere as controlling as this. The latter meaning points to humanity’s desire for goodness. We want to achieve a high degree of perfection in so many areas before we die, or at least we want to get to a higher place that where we start out from at birth. I want this too, and agree with this meaning, but I realize that I misunderstood how to get there.

I thought that my ideas had to be perfect from the get go, rather than expressing what is there and through getting them out choosing the best ideas or refining the ones I want to work on. I’m still figuring all this out, so it may sound nebulous. Over these past five months, I often reminded myself of the ideas from two people whose examples “against” perfectionism were particularly vivid to me: my brother and a friend, Campbell Dalglish.

Back in January, while I was doing life coaching homework I spoke to the ten closest people in my life whose perspective I trust and value. During a conversation with my brother, we talked about perfectionism. He said that in his work, there’s really no place for it. He works as an engineer designing cars. The development of each new model is on a time frame. Any new research and design modifications must be worked into the design for a new model within the given time frame. He said that you could have a spectacular idea for a new design, but if it’s after the deadline, it cannot be used because that would mean that the rest of the production schedule for that car would be pushed back and that means loss of money for the company. So for every alteration, no matter how fabulous, there is a cost. This is part of the reason why there are new models each year… Part of it is that car buyers want the latest model for looks, but if the priorities of a car manufacturer are maximum efficiency and safety, then yearly adjustments are good.

When I interviewed Campbell and Catherine at their amazing sustainably built home in Long Island, Campbell thoroughly explained the details of how the house was built.  He said that while the house is going up, sometimes as a homeowner, you want to change planned features, like, “Let’s move the window 6 inches to the right.”  But this means that a construction worker will have to move stuff around. And extra labor means money. So even if you have this fantastic vision of how a window will look set slightly right, is your vision worth the extra money and time? These examples served to concretize the consequences of perfectionism in my life. Every time I put off addressing what needs to be addressed quickly, I lost out on in terms of money, self-confidence, my own integrity and others’ trust.

Now, so many things have shifted for me. I have noticed that whenever I take a step towards a project right away, my thinking about it usually develops. I begin thinking about other things that are related or I get focused and hone in on how I can more clearly develop the idea I want to express. 

Now, my challenge with projects is in determining how much time is required to get something completed, and what level of completion will others and myself be satisfied with, and what projects do I want to take on? Over these past five months, my goal was to finish things, not make them perfect. Being content with getting things done is new for me. I have felt excited and even elated with a few things I’ve finished but for most of the things, accomplishing tasks has meant just crossing things off a list, with no accompanying feeling of satisfaction. After all, my feelings aren’t the most important thing to consider.

When I commit to completing projects I am committing to other people, or to a system, or a structure that is in place.  Their expectations of me and trust in me are important to maintain and uphold.  Learning to be part of a team is a big lesson that I am learning. I wonder how I will learn how to develop confidence expressing my ideas, developing them within a defined time-frame and sharing them with others in public.  This is the next phase of my work on dismantling perfectionism in my life and on adopting a philosophy of ongoing development and acceptance of myself and others.