If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word. Margaret Atwood

Ever spent too long on a Powerpoint presentation, quit a project or found yourself going over an essay for the tenth time? Perfectionism creeps into every facet of our lives. We want to be perfect at work, we’re obsessed with our appearance, we want stellar achievements, and the followers to go with it. We even imagine our perfect partner: that ideal being who meets all our needs.

I used to wonder what was wrong with ‘perfection.’ In a world full of average, surely people producing great work can only be a good thing? But the problem is not what perfectionists produce – its where the need for perfection comes from. Our desire for perfectionism is not because we are looking for perfection.

It emerges from the feeling that we’ll never be good enough.

For some of us, that creeping sense of being unworthy springs from childhood. Desperate to raise highly accomplished children, parents can be overcritical, triggering guilt when the child falls short. Others, despite plenty of early encouragement, still lack confidence in themselves, and in how people see them. Henry Nouwen admits, “A little criticism makes me angry, a little rejection makes me depressed. I feel like a very small boat on the ocean, completely at the mercy of the waves.”

We will do almost anything to calm this storm. We work long days, we fawn to those in authority, we re-do completed tasks ad infinitum. We tell ourselves it is this task which, once perfected, will finally bring a sense of completion for our bruised psyches. We hope these labours will bring a lasting feeling of accomplishment. And so, we fall into the Sisyphian trap, condemned to roll our rock up the mountain, only to watch it roll back down each time. Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, said that we have an eternity of repetitive tasks ahead of us.

This is the perfectionist trap: a desperate desire for perfection yet no real sense of what it will take to achieve it. And no understanding of how to break the cycle – when to accept being good enough. I used to think some people were perfectionists, and others not. Now I think we all have perfectionist tendencies. For some, it kicks in when the pressure’s on, for others it chronically addicts them to doing more and more. And it doesn’t only affect us – it can place impossible expectations on our colleagues. It can even suffocate the children we teach.

‘If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well,’ were the words my Dad often said, when I was about to short-circuit a chore. What he meant was: don’t rush, do one thing at a time, find satisfaction from doing things well. He was training me in how people would expect a job to be done. This is what psychologists call ‘constructive perfectionism,’ where we learn from our mistakes and, over time, develop self-discipline.

Brené Brown defines the other side of perfectionism:
‘if I look perfect, live perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimise the painful feelings of shame, judgment and blame.’
It’s not fulfilling, but is where we want to show that all is well with the world. Psychologists call this kind of high-stakes, goal-setting behaviour ‘destructive perfectionism’, and it probably lies behind many of today’s mental health problems. To combat this, Brene Brown recommends an honest vulnerability which celebrates our gifts of imperfection while Kristin Neff recommends the approach of self-compassion.

When it comes to starting new tasks, we tell ourselves we will begin when conditions are more ‘perfect’, or we’ll apply for the job when a better role comes along. People are sometimes stuck in their career because they wait, procrastinating for that perfect possibility. Looking for a flawless way out of their predicament, they find that that new opportunity has too many shortcomings, too many ‘not-quites.’

So here are 5 techniques I use to help me keep perfectionism at bay:

1/ Remember ‘perfection’ is not ‘excellence’
Perfection and excellence are not the same thing. We follow perfection imagining how something will appear to others, we strive for excellence for its own ends. I used to think that perfectionism was a virtue, associated with producing quality work, but I’ve since realised that excellence (becoming really accomplished in your chosen domain) involves learning that it is not all about the perfect finished product, essay, speech or presentation.

In fact, I think that what you are looking for is almost the opposite of this mentality. Having the confidence to submit a work-in-progress, and then take on feedback (early enough to make a difference to the final piece), will mean that our work can be perfected through the help of others. When we kill the instinctive fear we have of feedback, then we can move on from saying to ourselves ‘I’m not showing this because I’d rather nobody told me what was wrong.’

“Don’t go expecting Plato’s republic, be satisfied with even the smallest progress.” Marcus Aurelius

2/ Know what motivates you
– When you try to stay in school later than everyone else, you are more motivated by what others might think when you leave early.
– When you want to stay late to get a piece of work completed when its quiet, you are more motivated by focusing on the task, not what others think.
– When you go over your slides for the tenth time, finding yourself going over the same ground, you are more motivated by wanting to seem impregnable to the audience.
– When you tell yourself you are not allowed to use more than four slides, you are more motivated by getting the message across, more simply, and keeping it real.

3/ Use the vocabulary of ‘good enough’
– Good enough is the intersection between my rate of improvement and the time I’m spending on it. Between how good my powerpoint is getting and how much I am missing my partner, or hearing my children’s requests to play. Somewhere between those two, there has to be a sweet spot.
– Good enough is when we make a distinction between the ‘critical’ and the ‘extra’. Of course, my work will never be good enough, so it helps to define what, at an early stage, is going to be good enough. Make this your barometer for when to stop. If I’d known this in my twenties, I’d have saved so much time.
– Good enough means calling my work ‘first draft’, and then sticking that on top of my presentation, like an alibi. A passport to escape the imposter feeling. The words first draft gives me permission to slip away from my desk earlier than I would otherwise. Because then I’ll have the confidence to say, when I present, ‘don’t worry, it’s only my first draft’.
– Good enough is recognising that our daily work is not an interview-to-impress. We don’t have to be better than everyone else, all of the time. That’s not only annoying, it kills any sense that we’re a team.  

When I write, my writing (always on paper first) is full of crossings out. Some of what I write I hurl instantly at the bin, some I put to one side to scour for titbits later. And every so often I find, several pages in, a sentence which might have a fraction of what I’m looking for. While it’s frustrating that it took all that time to get there, I also know I couldn’t have written that sentence on page 5, had I not made my messy way through the jungle of pages 1-4. In fact, my imperfect early pages are a necessary part of the process of producing that sentence on page 5. My perfectionist self wants to wait until it is perfect, but my real self knows that the bad stuff is part of the journey. You can’t have one without the other.

In the podcast The Poet Laureate Has Gone To His Shed, Simon Armitage interviews JK Rowling, saying that writing longhand into notebooks is important: “It’s good to build up an archaeology of your work that you can look back on it – even if it is just about seeing your mistakes and where you went wrong. Deleting everything just leads to the idea that everything was perfected right from the beginning.”

If you insist on perfect, you’ll produce no work at all.  Calling your work first draft – or even ‘zero draft’ (the one before your first), helps you creep past your inner editor. This way you have created something to perfect, rather than trying to create perfection from scratch.

4/ Learn the art of disappointing
When I first began writing, it was important to know what others thought. Praise encouraged me to write more, whereas criticism cut my output. But it wasn’t long before I began to realise that what some people enjoyed, others found dull. And because this had little to do with its quality, I knew I couldn’t let people’s feeling control my writing. I had created my very own prison of perception, and this insight was like being released.

Instead of those people who matter, we chase many who don’t. We somehow imagine everybody has a right to shape what we make, so we care far too much about the opinions of others. Realising that this attention does not determine our worthiness, releases from us the pressure of people’s expectations. And when we are afraid of disappointing, we cannot produce our best work.

In the problem with being perfect, Mel Robbins describes the fear of disappointing people. We think that once we produce something perfect, no one will criticise us. We think that what we want is perfection, because people will somehow the wonderful, productive person we are. But this is perfectionism at its most protective – trying to defend us from all criticism.

Letting go of perfection means moving past the fear of what the observer is thinking, and back into the joy of the work. If we could just stop posting something that looks like perfection, and share instead the messy truth, we might release some of the pressure to be perfect. Living an imperfect life takes some courage.

5/ Share the load (delegate more
When we are stuck in a perfectionist mindset, we often say we can’t delegate because ‘we need things to be done properly’. Start by challenging your beliefs. List the things that you believe must be perfectly done. Next to each item write down why you believe that this activity must be perfect. Are you resisting delegating to a colleague because you don’t trust their ability? How might you overcome this? For example, you might feel easier about this by separating tasks into low stakes and high stakes and begin by delegating just one low stakes task per week. Then track how this goes – not just the task, but your ability to step back and not micromanage your colleague.

We aren’t actually interested in perfect work, believes writer and philosopher Alain de Botton. And because the problem doesn’t begin with producing great work, work won’t provide the solution. We want to feel accepted, but not by our bosses, so neither the perfect pitch nor the slick seminar will provide peace. Only when we acknowledge that we are worthy – because of our qualities and our relationships (the things that make us ‘us’ in other words), then we’ll be good enough for ourselves.