When Perfectionism Blocks You

The first day I met him, Alfredo defined himself as a meticulous and detailed person, who liked everything to go well for him. He told me that he came to my office for psychological help because, in recent years, he had realized that his quest to achieve perfection was deeply affecting his work and personal life.

He was working as an architect in the studio of a friend of his father’s, but he wanted to become independent to create a sustainable architecture company. However, although he devoted all his free time to devising personal projects, he was original and creative, never going beyond the initial phase of the development of his company.

Alfredo felt blocked on all levels.

He wanted to present investors with such a perfect business plan that he could never be satisfied with the work he had done. The result was that, despite having designed a number of excellent homes, he was still stuck in the early stage of starting his business.

Where the unproductive perfectionism is born

Obviously, striving to give the best of ourselves and do quality work, in itself, is not harmful. However, many people confuse excellence with perfection, which ends up producing them, as happened to Alfredo, a blockage in their personal and work life. Being people have so internalized the obligation to do everything so perfect, that when developing their ideas or creating a family, they end up paralyzed, unable to carry out their projects.

Family patterns may be at the origin of this insane learning of perfection, but the educational system also has an enormous responsibility. Children are under great pressure, from the time they are very young, not to make mistakes. They are led to think, regardless of the process, that the final grade is the only thing that matters.

The school penalizes error and does not value learning. Children assimilate the idea that it is wrong to make mistakes and this leads, for many of them, to develop a tremendously harmful blockage in their lives.

The message that his unconscious records is “if I do nothing, I will not make a mistake, I will not fail and I will not be punished.”

Alfredo had suffered this double pressure, from the school and from his parents. Everywhere he was forced and demanded to be the best and get the best grades. He tried to try his best to please everyone, but at the same time, he felt awful. Alfredo told me that he had suffered several anxiety attacks at the institute and, later, at the University.

How to break this perfectionist thinking scheme

To help Alfredo from psychology, I proposed to look for a situation, in his past, in which he had to do something little by little, progressively and that would have served as a learning experience. At first, it was difficult for him to find a situation like this, but he remembered that, at one stage in his life, he worked in a bakery, owned by his family.

He was young and he explained that there he felt free to dare to create new types of cakes. He carried out some first tests that helped him to realize what ingredients needed to change and, little by little, after several somewhat insipid experiments, he managed to bake some cakes that everyone liked and ended up becoming the flagship of the family business.

Alfredo had always considered this experience as an unimportant parenthesis in his studies, but now we were analyzing it from another perspective. We take it as a progressive learning in which the error was not seen as something negative, but rather provided important data for the next test.

This new point of view was a revelation for Alfredo. Throughout the week following this session, he was meditating and writing down all the ideas that came to his mind and that helped him deprogram his pattern of perfection.

We collected all those ideas to draw these valuable conclusions:

• Lower expectations: Don’t pretend to make everything perfect.
• Go step by step: It is better to start moving, than to stay still, paralyzed.
• Draw conclusions for the next step: Each experience helps us to prepare and improve the next test. Each test we carry out involves learning for the next.
• There is no mistake: We have to reprogram the idea of ​​the error as something negative. If we make a mistake, but we can get a learning, it will have been useful.

After a few months, Alfredo launched his sustainable architecture studio with great success. Errors were no longer a blockage for him, but an opportunity to learn and evolve in his work.