Perfectionism
Based on the title of this post, you might be surprised to see it get published. I mean, what are the odds that this is the perfect post? Slim to none, if I was to be honest about it.
I read a post over at Get Rich slowly, one of my favorite blogs, and it had to do with perfectionism and the all-or-nothing mindset. It explains perfectionist can be paralyzed with fear- fear of failure, fear of success, or something else entirely. It can lead to procrastination, self-deprecation, and even the inability to start something one might not do well. In this unhealthy form, it’s known as maladaptive perfection. Some of the comments on the entry point out that perfectionism is not always bad- in some cases it is quite good, such as the all-start athlete, the top chef’s in the world, and artists who become obsessed with their work. I am not one of those people, however, so I’ll focus on the more negative forms. Ironically, that’s how it affects me.
I’m a maladaptive perfectionist; it manifests itself in some random areas, as well as more obvious places.
At work, I do some things that are rather ho-hum and straight forward. These are easy enough to accomplish, and there isn’t really a whole lot of thought involved with some of them- well, new thought I should say. I still need to go over some decisions and pick which method works best for the given problem, but nothing like “this has never been done before… where do I start”? All of this is doable, and I do it pretty well.
On the other hand, my job no has a lot of areas where I venture into the unknown, and I have to get certain things done and working. These are where I have issues. When something is difficult to do, and I don’t know the right way to go about getting it done, often times I’ll freeze, and it’ll take me a long while to understand what I need to do, and sometimes I’ll put it off until I simply have to get it done. I at least have that going for me, my fear of being seen as a failure is even greater than my fear of failure.
But it’s not simply work that stresses me out- it can be almost comical the way it affects me.
If you’ve been in my apartment bedroom, you’ll notice the blue shitty paint job on the wall. This is one of those times where I thought I could paint, did it, and it ended up being kind of sloppy. I still have some left to do, but I simply can’t convince myself that I should do it, because it’s going to be terrible again. When i can’t even do something I know I should do, well we have a problem, don’t we?
Another example comes when I baked a cake for a friend a couple of weeks ago, and it didn’t come out as well as I’d hope. I still gave it to her, but I was extremely embarrassed. Again, the only reason I gave it to her was that I promised her one, and felt that failing on that was bigger than failing on the cake. Maybe that’s true, but I’m pretty sure i would have thrown that sucker out if it wasn’t for my promise. Hell, when people were about to eat it, I made fun of it before hand, telling people “it looks like shit, and probably doesn’t taste much better… you’ve been warned”.
The cake scenario above illustrates one of the more pathological issues- I deprecate my work and myself to excuse it’s lack of success. More often than not this is internal- the way i think about myself and feel about myself suffers from each and every failure, however small, to the point where I simply don’t want to try anything at which I might fail.
It’s fairly obvious to see where this can lead to other problems: self-esteem, anxiety, depression are all common- not that I suffer from all of these or anything, but some people do. I’m more of the self deprecating type as i’ve mentioned. But I procrastinate tasks when i’m not sure how to do them, and I’m also apt to downplay the importance of things i’m not too good at, or excusing my lack of ability by some other means.
A great quote from the wikipedia article explains, “perfectionism is often marked by low productivity as individuals lose time and energy on small irrelevant details of larger projects or mundane daily activities”. This is the scary part- my work is affected by these tendencies to the point where my productive effort is cyclical- sometimes i’m not very productive, other times (usually near deadlines) I’m very productive, and work more than I should, or is healthy- also marked by my inability to “shut off” from my tasks, although i’m not so sure this is a result of my perfectionism or, as I suspect, something else.
So, how do I get over this? It would be easy to imagine getting over this as a mountain, and part of me would see it as an entire task to accomplish. What I have read, though, is that you need to make small, manageable goals in order to over come these things. Make a goal step one of that mountain, then goal two 3 steps, and so on. Build it up- baby steps, if you will. I’m not sure if it’ll work, and I’m almost certain i’ve tried it before, but hey, a new year means a fresh start, maybe this will work.
If not, i’ll pretend like I never tried.