When I was young, I was a competitive and scholastic student. My goal was to get an A in every class, both in high school and college. I’d drop a class if it looked as though I wouldn’t get an A. Ultimately, my statistics grade took me down a notch and taught me there’s no such thing as perfection.

Thanks to a statistics class, I did not graduate with a 4.0 grade average. However, for years, I still pursued my quest for perfection, and by then, it had spilled into other areas of my life. I was the perfect hostess, impeccable dresser, superb cook, successful professional, excellent—well, you get the idea.

In pursuing perfection, I set high goals and beat myself up when I failed to meet the mark. The verbal attacks I’ve unleashed upon myself would be categorized as emotional abuse if a parent inflicted them!

Perfectionists can be counted on to get a job done and on time. They have an incredible work ethic and what it takes to perform, so they approach challenges with gusto. If left unchecked, however, perfectionists can produce toxic behavior and negative messages in their relentless pursuit of excellence.

Leaders and entrepreneurs strive to achieve excellence for many reasons. Perfection is seductive because it hints at the promised land; however, it’s more about the ideal than the real when leaders let it sabotage their business and life.

The good news is that with the right mindset, there are ways we can leverage our perfectionist tendencies to produce a healthy and balanced approach to business and life. Here’s how to be an awesome perfectionist:

1. Strive For Competency In One Or Two Areas

Never confuse perfection with competency. No one expects you to be perfect; they do expect you to be competent. When you lead from a place of competence, you lead from a place of strength.

If you’re a perfectionist, you drive yourself to excel but here is how you can be awesome instead of driven—choose a few areas in which you need to excel and hone your talents.

It’s hard for a perfectionist to be content with less than ideal because you’re unfamiliar with a term that others find quite acceptable—and it’s called good enough. As a perfectionist, you have an all-or-nothing approach to everything. To be an awesome perfectionist, you need to balance the pursuit of perfection in all things with the need to excel in the fewer, more important things.

How To Make It Work For You: Remember, you don’t need to be perfect in everything you do. Choose tasks worth the effort and put your perfectionist traits to work on them—and then go for it! Over time, those tasks may shift, so you’ll need to re-evaluate where you are in business and life on a regular basis.

2. Discover That Rest Is Not A Four-letter Word

Perfectionists seldom experience downtime and rest because they always seek to improve their situation. As a result, they often forfeit rest and view it as a four-letter word. By their very nature, perfectionists want each day to be productive because they don’t want to be seen as lazy. To them, lazy is another four-letter word.

When you allow yourself to take time off, you shed the stress you put on yourself to always perform. In a study by the Journal of Health Psychology, 450 participants were followed over 6.5 years. Consistent with their hypothesis, the findings demonstrated that the risk of death was significantly greater for high scorers in perfectionism.

How To Make It Work For You: Set aside time to play and explore. For many, self-care is a low priority. So are strong relationships because they require important time away from the relentless pursuit of perfection. To be an awesome perfectionist, use a time of rest to 1) revisit your values and 2) reflect on how you can nurture the relationships that are important to you. Most importantly—take the time to celebrate your successes!

3. Share Your Awesome Work Ethic With Others

In other words, delegate. This is hard for perfectionists because it means the end product may not turn out the way you want, but two things happen: First, the work will get done, and it won’t be the disaster you’ve anticipated. Second, you place yourself in a situation where you can share your work standard with others.

Your tendency to intervene will lessen over time, but it’s important not to hover over the other person and point out their mistakes.

How To Make It Work For You: To be an awesome perfectionist, let others observe how you excel at the critical aspects of your job but settle into a good enough attitude at the less important ones (you’ve implemented tip #1, right?). When you give others the opportunity to perform, it shows that you trust them and that you think they’re capable.

4. Change The Way You Talk To Yourself

The need for perfection is deeply embedded in a personality type that feels compelled to keep moving toward goals with high integrity. Some are trained to believe perfection will take them to high success. Still, others try to quiet a strong inner critic.

Our personalities develop in childhood, and it’s often productive to understand why and when we think the way we do.

How To Make It Work For You: You can be an awesome perfectionist if you understand the need behind your desire to excel. Ask yourself these questions:

• Is my need for perfection driven by my need for others to love me?
• Or do I perform so that others will see me as a success?
• Is it important that others see that I know the right way to do things?
• Do I want to beat others because I want to be a leader?
• Or because I’ve done the research and know how things need to work?

There is no right or wrong answer to these questions, but the answers can help you better understand your motives. Once you understand your motivation, you can choose how to respond to a situation rather than let your emotions react in ways that can sabotage you. The more self-knowledge you have, the more control you have over your behavior.

5. Take A Break From Social Media

Sage Journal recently conducted a large study on perfectionism and found that it has increased substantially over the past 25 years and affects both men and women equally.

Much of the blame is placed on social media posts that project unrealistic, perfect lives through glossy advertisements and unattainable standards of perfection. While men are also affected, social media is filled with unrealistic media images of young women that have negatively impacted their body image.

How To Make It Work For You: To be an awesome perfectionist, you need to let go of the fantasy. Slick advertising has been around for decades, but it’s become more pervasive and extreme. Perfectionists are smart, and they know what works for them, so take some time to rest (remember tip #2?) and jettison social media at regular intervals. It’s a great way to keep sane from the noise of the rest of the world.

© 2019 LaRae Quy. All rights reserved.

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