Perfectionism is probably the only self-limiting pattern of thinking and belief that is revered and desired.

Maybe it’s because of the word itself? Who knows?

Anyhow, Perfectionism is perceived as a desirable mindset that leads to perfect results, perfect achievements, perfect relationships, a perfect life. To perfection itself.

This cannot be further from the truth. 

Ask me!

I know first-hand. A self-limiting belief by any name is still a self-limiting belief. 

Perfectionism is the incarnations of stress. It’s the pressure we feel in order to be perceived as perfect by ourselves and by others. And of course, it’s a fool’s errand. Nobody is perfect.

And instead of being perfect, we are just exhausted and disappointed and disillusioned. 

Unmasked, perfectionism is simply the expression of feeling like we are not enough and that we just need some extra effort to eventually, be enough.  

The downside of course, is that concept of being enough and being worthy is so elaborate and elusive that it is simply impossible to achieve. 

The consequences of perfectionism are vast. Our mental well-being and our very sense of Self is at stake because perfectionism can bleed into every aspect of our lives, stripping us of ability to feel whole and connected to ourselves, the people around us and the experiences through which we live.  

Perfectionism keeps us on a treadmill of proving ourselves whilst we at the very same time become practiced at finding evidence to disprove ourselves, our worth and our contribution. 

Let’s look at some of the ways in which we do this and how if makes us candidates for burnout.

Perfectionism is internalised oppression

1. Trouble-shooting holes into Your Progress 

As a perfectionist you don’t want things to go wrong. It’s unbearable.

Not your hair and make-up, not your relationships, not your projects. You also assume that you’re sole alone in ensuring your perfect outcome. So, you become hyper-vigilant about all the things that could possibly go wrong. Not probably. Possibly.  

You are so tuned into what could go wrong, that you become practically incapable of seeing what could go right, even if it has already gone right. This fault-finding becomes your lens on the world.

More especially, it becomes your lens on yourself in the world. It becomes so germane to you that you can see and be convinced of trouble and problems a mile away, without needing any evidence of it.  But you can’t see the positive about yourself, and sometimes others, even if the evidence is stacked up a mile high right in front of you. This imbalance becomes the foundation of your reality, and you live in a state of anxiety, depression, burnout, and all manner of physical ailments. 

2. Being a Lone Wolf

I used to bristle with pride whenever someone referred to me as ‘radically independent’. I had thought of it as recognition of my ‘invincibility’. It was essential to me to know that I could do it all by myself, and being recognised for it. And oh my word! the recognition was the cream and the cherry on the cake.

Little did I understand how very teeny-tiny the cake was and would remain. The very radical independence I was acknowledged for drove a wedge between me and people who actually cared about me, and who really wanted to help and support me as I went about my various missions. 

Different dynamics played out simultaneously:

• I was presenting myself as having my ducks in a row, when in fact they were scattered and fleeing. I felt overwhelmed and the more overwhelmed and out of control I felt, the more something within me felt compelled to seize more control, and the way in which I did this was to take on more and pretend even more to be in control by working longer hours. It sounds crazy I know, but somehow it made perfect sense to my exhausted, brittle brain.
• Consequently, people who were willing to help didn’t know I needed help.
• People who offered help were quickly rebuffed by my over-compensating self, frightening off any further offers of help and support. 
• There were those who assumed I had capacity and added more to my plate.
• Yet others offered me more opportunities to ‘grow’ adding onto my bulging plate.
• I felt pressured to demonstrate my capability and capacity, for fear that the amazing opportunities to grow and take on more responsibility would come to a calamitous end. 
• My levels of resentment climbed and poured out of me in outbursts at home with my hubby and innocent little children, who were simply trying to make their way into my heart. 
• I lived in a state of mental and emotional exhaustion with physical pain and discomfort of all sorts being my constant companion. My sleep was inadequate and offered me very little rest.

Ultimately, I switched off and numbed out, feeling alone and abandoned in a world that wanted every pound of flesh I had to give, without giving any back. 

Perfectionists fervently believe that they have to do it all alone. Even when they understand that they cannot, they experience a compulsion to do it all by themselves. The have to do it all by themselves because they have to prove themselves, and because they can’t risk anyone else messing things up.

Asking for help is torture and it implies that they are inadequate somehow. For the perfectionist, this is not simply about capability or about capacity.

This is about their worth and this is about how they are perceived, and this is about feelings of shame for not being good enough. Asking for help is about not being perceived as strong, self-reliant, confident and capable. They adapt by becoming hyper-independent and as a result, they struggle far more than they should, and they accomplish far less than they can. 

3. Seeing Greener Grass Everywhere But Here

A perfectionist’s comparison machine is always set at super charge! Trying to be seen as the best, the perfectionist is trying feverishly to Be the best. Enter hyper-vigilance. To know where you are in the ranking, you have to keep careful track of how the competition is doing, and how you are measuring up. Its flipping exhausting! Especially given that the competition does not know its a competition!

Perfectionists are always checking what the other colleague did, what the other mom did, what the other partner did, and so on, in order to counter-respond with something better and more impressive. The one-upmanship is endless. Even if you actually are the best, you are unable to see that; so, you keep competing with the ghosts of perfectionistic delusion. 

4. Chasing Ghosts 

Growth is a beautiful thing. But that is not really the perfectionist’s game.  

Perfectionism has you looking for ways to improve your idea even before you’re halfway to landing the original one. 

And if they do land the original one, it is with dissatisfaction because it is not as great as it could have been. In fact, because the landed idea does not match up to the innovation in the perfectionist’s mind, the landed idea is mentally deleted, as if it was never achieved. All the focus is on what must still be accomplished. 

Raising the bar mid-way through everything is deflating to the perfectionist and everyone involved. There is a missed feeling of accomplishment and an overwhelming pressure to do more and more and more. 

Even when the perfectionist is congratulated for the job that is done, it is unbearable to them, and even a source of embarrassment and shame. 

The perfectionist is not alone in bearing this burden. It becomes the cross that everyone around them also has to bear. 

5. No Down Time  

Perfectionism is closely associated with workaholism. Even those that are not in formal employment. 

A perfectionist desperately wants a break but will take it reluctantly. It may seem sometimes that they are on a break, doing other activities, but this is not a real break.  This is an anxiety fuelled distraction. Inevitably, the perfectionist’s need for control gets the better of them and they ‘check-up’ on things. The more they discover that they are not needed in a situation, the more they will scratch around for evidence that they are indeed needed. Their ‘check-up’s tend to be longer than required and, in extreme circumstances, their downtime is completely abandoned. 

A perfectionism doesn’t see the value in self-care, and therefore they don’t create time for themselves and for the activities they like. Not having a break, though, from such an exhausting and demanding agenda is not sustainable. A healthy mind cannot exist without a respectful number of breaks, rest and pleasant activities. Our system will protest sooner or later, one way or another.

6: So many ideas too little time

The moment a perfectionist is confronted with the unknown, they feel out of control, and they seek distractions to soothe themselves. This results in the procrastination loop that is well travelled by every perfectionist to ever have walked the face of this beautiful earth.  When an idea matures, the challenges of making it come to fruition creates a level of stress within the perfectionist.  

As they struggle with a difficult, unfamiliar task or role, the perfectionist seeks out distractions to soothe themselves. To maintain the illusion of productivity, the distraction that presents itself, is very often a familiar task that isn’t really a priority, or it is a new and different idea, or an innovation to the one already being worked on. To escape the discomfort, the perfectionist throws themselves into the new activity, all the while, holding immense guilt inside them and feeling bad about not doing what they are supposed to. Once this pattern has played itself out a few times, the pervasive feeling that sets in is one of shame, and the perfectionist loses trust in themselves, and they lose belief in their ability to grow into their fullest potential. 

This is a very strange, mercurial place that many perfectionists find themselves in. Simultaneously the perfectionist believes in their potential and the impact that they are capable of. They can feel it in their bones that they are here to do something important. Something that matters. And at the same time they also feel that their efforts are futile, and their impact impotent. At the base of this inner conflict is the growing suspicion that whatever they try, they can’t trust themselves because their self-betrayal is inevitable. 

7. It’s all about the achievement

A perfectionist is strongly oriented towards achievements, accomplishments, results and visible growth. And what’s wrong with that? Well, on one hand this is what we all want. To grow and develop. On the other hand, a perfectionist cannot enjoy the space in between or towards the achievements. A manager working on a project will be only satisfied when she has the desired result and even if the team worked really well and there were several wins during the project.

The value of incremental progress is lost on her. Worse yet, as mentioned before, the ideal in her mind is a moving target that no one can catch up to.  

Not only is the opportunity to celebrate the achievement missed, but the goodwill and the opportunity to learn is squandered with it. 

A person who takes up painting will not be happy and relaxed while drawing and painting. Their orientation toward achievement robs them of their enjoyment of painting and drawing and leaves them critical of their progress. Painting a creation worthy of space in a prestigious gallery may still leave them questioning their skill and validity as an artist. Not enjoying the process and not rewarding ourselves for the things we learn and not only for the things we achieve can lead to burnout, as we will inevitably be disappointed with ourselves, especially with things going slowly or with things we can’t control. 

8. All Work and No Play

A perfectionist is, as we said above, task- and result-oriented. That means that many perfectionists present as workaholics. They work long hours, they talk only about work, they meet people only if they are related to work, they think about work even when they are with friends and family. In short, it’s all about work-work-work. Even their leisure activities are output oriented. 

Tired and out of balance, the perfectionist misses out on the opportunities available in everyday life to connect, build relationship, find inspiration, decompress, discover different interests and aspects of themselves, and to connect with the big picture of their lives and careers.  With an underdeveloped and underinvested personal life, the perfectionist’s relationship with their work is overinvested. They over-identify themselves with work, their skills and professional lives. Consequently, if things go wrong in their professional lives, the impact feels catastrophic.

Play has been man’s most useful preoccupation

9. No celebration

Perfectionists do not celebrate the victorious moments of their lives. Typically, they don’t even recognise those moments. If you ask them about their successes, they will say that they were happy but they didn’t “do anything special about it”. 

Compliments are awkward and uncomfortable to them, and they profess that their success is founded on some or the other luck or advantage. 

Instead, the perfectionist focuses only on what must still be done. Everything is serious. There is no time to play. There is no space to let their guard down and just be. There is only the next thing and the standards that have been missed!

Over-invested in their activities, under-resourced because they can’t accept help, dispirited because they do not count and celebrate incremental progress and unmotivated because fears course through them continually, the perfectionist is a strong candidate for burnout.  

10. Low self-confidence 

The perfectionist is in turmoil. He is stressed about how others see him and he is preoccupied with where is in comparison to others.  As if this is not enough, he ruminates over the worst possible scenarios, whilst perpetually raising his expectations of himself. 

He beats himself up all the time, and with little to no leverage from his personal life, he is exhausted. Not only can’t he give himself a pat on the back, he also can’t receive it from anyone else, regardless of how well earned it may be. 

Smarting from a sense of self-betrayal, he constantly doubts and questions his own worth. 

It’s really hard to imagine our perfectionist selves as confident and heroic and resilient when we see the abuse we carry with us.

What we can appreciate is that the perfectionist walks through life with a desperate yearning for acceptance.  

Perfectionism doesn’t lead to perfection. It leads to burnout. 

Self-Awareness is vital. The sooner we notice all these micro-behaviours and the negative thoughts that swirl around in our minds, the sooner we can take actions to stave off and hopefully, completely avoid burnout, anxiety, depression, and other symptoms such as sleeplessness, or headaches and tension, and a plethora of health problems associated with stress that accumulates over time.

Perfectionism is complex, and depending on the extent of your perfectionism, addressing it may require a range of strategies. Whatever you decide, self-compassion is essential.

Talking to others can help you identify the leverage points available to you to shift from perfectionism to flourishing.

Take Action now by taking advantage of my complimentary coaching session. It’s pitch-free and it’s priceless. Schedule you session here. This is a time and a space specially created for You. 

If you’re unsure how much perfectionism is playing out in your life, have a look at this quiz: How Much of a Perfectionist Are You?

If you’d like to unmask your Inner Perfectionist, join me in Unmasking Your Inner Perfectionist.