Are You a Perfectionist?

(View this post on Personal Excellence)

This is part 1 of a series on why being a perfectionist isn't so perfect and how to deal with it.

Note from Celes: Hey everyone! For the upcoming period (months), I'll be updating and refreshing the past classics at PE, as part of improving the quality of content on PE and to give you guys the best I’ve to offer. Many of these articles were written years ago when I started PE, so it’s time to revisit and tidy up some of them.

I was actually doing this last year for the life purpose series but stopped halfway, and I realized the problem was because every new post would sent out everyone on the PE newsletter — whether or not it was relevant for them. It made me uncomfortable in doing so as I would hesitant republishing a post unless it was relevant for everyone, and hence held back from updating many of my classics.

As such, from now on, I’ll only be sending email updates about posts/series that I feel has a general appeal (like this one), while sending a digest every few weeks with all new/updated articles. Sign up for the newsletter to get the digest. This will allow me to put out new posts more often, while not worrying about flooding you guys with emails. This is experimental so there may be some changes as I test it out.

Are you a perfectionist? Do you often seek to achieve a perfect standard in your work? Do you feel a need to perfect every single thing you do, even at the expense of your own health and well-being?
A perfectionist is a person who refuses to accept any standard short of perfection. In psychology, perfectionism is a personality trait characterized by "a person's striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high performance standards, accompanied by overly critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others' evaluations." [Wiki] To a perfectionist, anything that's less perfect is unacceptable.

Are You a Perfectionist?

To help you identify your level of perfectionism, I've come up with 11 signs of a perfectionist:

1. There is no room for mistakes in your world. Whenever you see an error, you'd be the first to jump on it and correct it. While others can live with mistakes and issues, you make it your duty to fix them, pronto.
2. You have an all-or-nothing approach. You have a clear standard you want to achieve. When you feel that you can't achieved said standard, you would rather stop than try. After all, what's the point of trying if you can't achieve your target?
3. It's all about the end goal. Doesn't matter whether you've achieved 80% or 90% of something -- as long as you haven't achieved 100% of your goal, to you, that means you haven't achieved it at all. And you won't stop until you do.
4. You become depressed when you don't achieve your goals. It's common for you to mull over outcomes that don't turn out as envisioned. You constantly wonder if things could have turned out differently, even if for one tiny bit. It's easy for you to sink into a state of depression (different from clinical depression, though this can happen as well) if you did not achieve something you set out to do.
5. Success is never enough. Whatever you do, there's always a greater height to aim for. Even when you achieve X, you'll want to achieve 2X. Even when you achieve 2X, you'll aim for 5X. More importantly, it seems like you're never happy with what you have. You always feel like you need to do more, to get more, just to keep up and be happy.
6. You procrastinate so as to do something at the "right" moment. You are constantly waiting for the "right" moment to work on your goals. You only want to start when you are "ready," so as to deliver your best quality of work. However, this state of "readiness" sometimes seems to take very long. Sometimes, it never seems to come.
7. You have extremely high standards. Whatever you set your mind to do, you will have high targets. Sometimes, these targets seem humanly impossible, though that doesn't stop you from setting them. Some people would say you're being unrealistic, but you know better.
8. You constantly spot mistakes when others don't see any. While this can simply mean that you're highly conscious and detail-oriented (both of which are characteristics of a perfectionist as well), perfectionists often spot mistakes, issues, from a mile away. Sometimes these mistakes are real. Sometimes they seem imagined.
9. You are extremely hard on yourself. Whenever something goes wrong, you become really hard on yourself. It doesn't matter if this error was due to your fault or just one small thing -- you'd beat yourself up and feel extremely bad about it for a long, long while.
10. You have a very specific manner in which things should be done. Many times, people don't get your methods because it can be too specific and detailed for them to understand. As long as something is out of place or doesn't conform to your approach, it'll not be acceptable. Because of that, many people find it hard to work with you; for you, you often find it very hard to find people who can achieve your standards.
11. You often spend copious amount of time, right down to the last moment, to perfect something. It's not uncommon for you to sacrifice your sleep and well-being on your work, just so you can bring it to the highest level. To you, this is all part of achieving your end goal.

Can you relate with any of the traits above? Out of the 11 traits above, how many apply to you? Which ones?
(I have created a manifesto of this article that you can get here: [Manifesto] 11 Signs That You Are a Perfectionist)

My Experience with Perfectionism

I used to be quite a neurotic perfectionist when I was younger. There was a time when all 11 traits would fit me to a tee.
I'd say that my perfectionism took root from when I was a child and started to manifest in my late teens.
As a child, I was always an earnest and committed kid. My parents taught me to always do my best in whatever I do, and be an honest and upright person. They never imposed any expectations on me, in terms of my grades, school, or anything like that. In retrospect, I really appreciate that as it gave me the space to grow into my own.
When it came to school though, it was a totally different matter. I came from a primary school with extremely strict rules on what we could or couldn't do, what we could or couldn't say. The school prided itself on being an elite institution. Looking back now as an adult, it's questionable how these "rules" contributed in helping us become better human beings. For example:

• We were not allowed to speak during recess, in between classes, or when walking to class. The only time we could speak was during class, when authorized by the teacher. Hence, the whole school was usually deadly silent, including during recesses (when kids were eating and should supposedly be allowed to "relax"). As one of the teacher often said, we should be so quiet that we could "hear a pin drop."
• We could only wear watches of plain colors white, black, grey, or blue. No digital watches were allowed, and neither were watches with any "pattern" or "design." The watches must be plain with only one color.
• For girls, we could only wear plain hairbands of one color: either white, black, grey, or blue. As long as you had some fringe, you had to pull it up with a hairband; no hair should be out of place, and the part where the hair was pulled up should be "flat" against our head. For girls with longer hair, as long as your hair was shoulder-length or longer, you needed to tie it up into a very neat pony tail, with no strand out of place. The pony tail must not be tied too high up your head. All hair must always be neatly tucked behind our ears and behind our back, with no dangling strand. If any of this was violated, we would get into trouble.
• In the few times we were allowed to speak, we were only allowed to speak English, even though everyone was bilingual and learned 2 languages in school. Only during our language classes were we allowed to speak our ethnic language.
• When writing, we were not allowed to write over the lines on the paper or into empty paper margins. We were also not allowed to use correction tape. Any wrong text should be neatly cancelled out by drawing a line across it with a ruler (not free hand).
• We were to sit up straight and stand tall at all times.
• We were expected to greet and bow to teachers at all time.
• We were not allowed to run along corridors or anywhere in school except during PE classes.
• Other general school rules applied, like coming to school on time, finishing and handing in all homework on time, not dyeing your hair, not using makeup or nail polish, not being rowdy or "misbehaving" when wearing the school uniform outside school grounds, and so on.

Perhaps the biggest problem wasn't the rules themselves, but the punishment that would ensue when they got broken. As little kids aged between 6 and 12 who barely knew who we were and were still trying to find ourselves, we would be immediately shamed and rebuked when we "violated" any rules, including being lambasted by the discipline master, being made to pull our ears and stand in front of the school during recess time, being caned on our palm, and getting caned on the bum in front of the whole school during morning assembly (I believe this was for guys only) if the offence was very serious. I had seen peers get slapped before too.
The teachers were basically the Gods in the school, and if we were to violate any rule that they set, we would have to face their wrath.
Along with these strict rules, came staunch rules for our studies. For example, if we made a grammar mistake that had been covered in class before, we would be heavily rebuked and told to slap ourselves in class. We were expected to remember everything we had been taught, and never to make any mistake if it was something we had already learned. At that time I didn't think much about the treatment we received, but looking back now, we were never really treated like kids or human beings. Rather, we were treated more like empty shells with no rights, no worth, and no identity, where it felt like the teachers could do anything they deemed fit, and there was nothing we could do about it.
So as a little girl, I learned to operate at a very high level of precision and accuracy. I would follow every strict rule that was laid out, so as to avoid punishment and being flagged out as a "bad" person. I learned to operate within the confines of every situation I was placed in and not to tread on anything that could result in me getting scolded and subsequently, shamed.

Yet, I wouldn't say I was a perfectionist at this point. While I believed in working hard and doing well in my work, I wasn't hung up over not making any mistakes or reaching a certain level of standard (of grades), though I did do well in school. I was more afraid of doing anything that would result in negative shaming from not matching the teachers' idiosyncratic preferences and mood; many times it seemed like they would be deliberately looking for things to shame as an example to others, as opposed to there really having an issue that needed fixing.

It was only later on in my late teens when I became a neurotic perfectionist, as you will learn in part 2.

This is part 1 of a series on why being a perfectionist isn't so perfect and how to deal with it.

Lots of Love,
Celes