Shifting From Perfectionism to Values-Driven Living

Key Quotes

"perfectionism can be helpful it's when we strive for excellence we do good work for the work's sake we set high standards we care deeply you know please please keep doing that in fact the healthy heart of perfectionism is a personality trait called conscientiousness and that's the big five yeah yes exactly yes and it is when we tend to be responsible and diligent i like to say it's the least sexy superpower but it is definitely the one to choose for a good life for both objective and subjective success whatever that means to you in life conscientiousness is the personality trait to choose okay however where it tips over into unhelpful perfectionism is when we get into two things and this is the work of drs roz shafran zafira cooper and christopher fairburn from when they were colleagues at oxford university and they say the two pillars of unhelpful perfectionism are self criticism and that's something that's probably familiar to a lot of us but in perfectionistic self criticism that it gets particularly harsh and personalistic so perfectionistic self criticism could look like over name calling so i was working with someone today a client who definitely does this calls himself an effing piece of ass or it could be like oh i'm such an idiot or like i'm so stupid it could be uh rhetorical questions like why can't i do this or what is wrong with me or it could simply be sort of an underlying rumbling current of dissatisfaction with our lives with like disillusionment with ourselves so self criticism is one pillar but the second one is something that i think might be new to a lot of people and that is something called over evaluation and that is when we start to conflate our worth with our performance so in other words it's a mindset that says we have to perform as superbly as possible to be sufficient as a person so you know forgive my grammar but it's when i did good equals i am good now we can over evaluate almost anything so classic examples might be like a striver student who needs to get all a's like that's who they are and that when they get a b or god forbid a c you know that's not just a bad grade to them that means something about them or we might over evaluate our social behavior perfectionism is the heart of social anxiety and so we might rise and fall based on our social interactions and like did i say something stupid or did i tell a joke that went off poorly we could over evaluate our quarterly evaluation a musician or an athlete might define themselves by how well they performed in their last show or their last game it's anything where our performance is a referendum on our character so it's the self criticism based on that really evaluating us as human beings our value as a human being based on how we perform in this one particular domain or project or whatever it is you know insert whatever it is that's relevant to you yes absolutely yes so again it could be anything we truly value and how we define ourselves and what happens is that we set the bar for adequate at flawless and that means that whenever we struggle or we make a mistake or we come up short because we're human human that really flips us from from all to nothing there's a there's a huge gulf uh in which we can criticize ourselves for not reaching that bar of flawlessness right"

Dr. Ellen Hendriksen explains that perfectionism can be beneficial when it involves striving for excellence and setting high standards, a trait linked to conscientiousness. However, she identifies two key components of unhelpful perfectionism: harsh self-criticism and over-evaluation, where personal worth becomes conflated with performance. This distinction is crucial for understanding how a drive for high achievement can become detrimental.

"i think that's because perfectionism as a word or a term is a little bit of a misnomer it's not about striving for perfection it's really about never feeling good enough and a lot of my clients are very accomplished very impressive and i like to say that we really look like we're hitting it out of the park but we feel like we're striking out and i think therefore the prevalence data whatever it may be is probably much lower than it actually is there is prevalence data for kids and there one third of kids have some kind of clearly maladaptive perfectionism where they're over evaluating their character and their performance and criticizing themselves harshly because of it yeah and and that would actually make a lot of sense to me because probably i would imagine that a lot of this comes out in the form of academic striving so that's the age right there right because all of a sudden they're put into a system where they're in a group of people and they're all being rated and judged and and graded and scored on a regular basis and striving towards a particular outcome and then they get a report on a regular basis saying how close or far that they've come with that so i would imagine there's sort of like a feedback mechanism and a system to support that perfectionism in a way that just either fall away or just morphs into all sorts of other weird things once you certainly step out of that structure into you know like adulthood does that make sense oh yeah absolutely yeah and i think for kids i think grades 100 absolutely but i think it can also be very prevalent with athletics i think it can be prevalent in terms of like musical performance i think it can be you know again our social performance like are we cool and charismatic or are we awkward and weird it could be how we appear like whether we think we're attractive or not some people will over evaluate their reflection in the mirror the number on the scale and so it really can be anything"

Dr. Hendriksen clarifies that the term "perfectionism" is often a misnomer, as it's less about achieving perfection and more about a persistent feeling of inadequacy. She notes that many accomplished individuals, despite outward success, feel like failures. Dr. Hendriksen also highlights that this maladaptive perfectionism is prevalent in children, often manifesting through academic or athletic performance, and can extend to various aspects of life, including social interactions and self-perception.

"so i think imperfection is having sort of a cultural moment which i love and completely agree with but i do think that the advice around it is a little bit misguided so because a common piece of advice i know i've been told this i wonder if you've been told this is to stop when things are good enough or to lower you got to lower your standards ellen but good enough doesn't resonate when it's something from which we you know derive our value you know it's something if we if we're using that to measure ourselves of course we're not going to settle for subpar or mediocre performance because that means that we are subpar or mediocre so again it's not the problem is not the high standards necessarily it's the overvaluation i think that is the thing that we can try to tackle rather than telling people oh you just gotta you just gotta stop when things are good enough yeah"

Dr. Hendriksen challenges the common advice to "just stop when things are good enough" or to "lower your standards." She argues that this advice is misguided because for individuals who derive their self-worth from their performance