“The second you do not manage to give it your 100%, people will start to look at you differently” - My nephew Abinash (he is one of the people that inspired me to write this post)
Hi again,
I hope you all enjoyed my blog The truth about self love that I wrote last week. Those of you that haven’t read it yet, click on the title and you will find the post. This week I have decided to write about a topic so close to my heart, and that is perfectionism.
What is perfectionism? According to the dictionary, perfectionism is the refusal to accept a standard that is imperfect. Which gives rise to many questions, what is perfect? How can we be perfect? The truth is, we can never know how to be perfect and that is what makes perfectionism dangerous. We are trying to attain the unattainable while lacking wisdom, knowledge and experience. We all have limited abilities, thus we make mistakes. In fact, we have been making mistakes throughout our lives yet, we expect perfectionism from ourselves or others.
This myth of perfectionism creates this domino effect. We expect perfection from ourselves, we fall short of perfection, we experience disappointment, we selectively think about the mistakes we have made, we become hypercritical and then, we begin to doubt ourselves. Have you heard of the phrase “expectations leads to disappointments”? This phrase can be applied here. This is what makes perfectionism imperfect.
Some of you may believe that the higher we aim, the more we will achieve. I do agree to some extent. When you aim high, you work harder and produce more fruitful results. The issue with perfectionism however, is that we do not just aim high. As perfectionists, we have the tendency to reject the idea of failing while trying to achieve our desired results. We refuse to accept that there is no time limit to achieve that so called “perfect” result. As perfectionists, we become impatient and obsessed with the results, that we neglect the process that takes us there. We fail to realise that mistakes are inevitable and necessary and that it takes time to achieve our desired results. As perfectionists, we drown in stress while killing ourselves to reach this “perfect” goal. In the end, we become suffocated.
Here is the thing, we are humans, we have flaws, we make mistakes and those mistakes teach us valuable lessons. We only ever perfect a craft after failing repeatedly. Being imperfect and accepting it gives us strength so why are we still so obsessed with perfectionism?
The community you belong to massively contributes to who you are today. Children of immigrants are very familiar with this concept of perfection. As kids, we are always compared to our peers, heavily criticised and told to achieve perfect results. While this has led to many of us achieving great things in life, it also gave us crippling insecurities. When we reach our limits and fail to reach perfection 100% of the time, we start to feel incompetent. To make matters worse, when a “perfect child” fails to meet the “perfect criteria” for one second, their whole community forgets about all their achievements and only remembers their flaws. Which is funny because until then, they saw that “perfect child” as a celebrity or an angel that fell from heaven.
My cousin Sneha pointed out another reason as to why one may become a perfectionist. She believes that one becomes a perfectionist because they lack control in their personal lives. They try to make the most out of the one thing they believe that they can control and that is their performance. I found this point quite interesting let me know in the comments if this is what you have experienced growing up.
I believe that some may become perfectionists because they believe that achieving perfection is their only way to receive acknowledgment and acceptance. This may result from experiencing neglect as a child.
Either way, it is clear that our environment massively contributes to our current mindset. Therefore, to break out of this toxic cage of perfectionism, we need to fix our environment. We cannot undo our past but we can teach the future generations that it is ok to fail, it is normal to make mistakes and that it is all a learning curve.
Without mistakes and imperfections, we would not be unique and we cannot build character. Since we are not born with skills and knowledge, we need to make mistakes in order to understand how to carry out a task perfectly. Since we are humans with varying abilities, we would not always give our 100% everyday and it is ok, sometimes we need a break. If we spend the rest of our lives focusing on perfect results, we will not be able to enjoy the learning process.
We need to stop focusing on the results and start enjoying the process. That way we would be more open to learning new skills. Moreover, failure due to imperfections helps us build perseverance.
We need to remember that no matter how many times we fail we can always pick ourselves up again. Enjoying the process of learning and making mistakes would make life more interesting. You gain confidence when you learn how to undo a mistake or move on from it. So being imperfect is not the end of the world. I hope this article made you reflect on your perfectionist mindset.
That’s it for today, I gave you quite a bit to read. Please subscribe to make sure you do not miss any of my posts and also feel free to comment your thoughts about this topic. Until then, see you all next week.
Love,
Akshi