How to Manage Your Perfectionism

• Take note of when you’re ruminating and what triggers it until you can see your patterns and find ways to counteract them.
• Don't trust your first reaction when ruminating. Most of the time, it colors negatively your read of the situation.
• Seek a diversion to break the rumination cycle.
• Think positively: remembering your successes and times you tried new things helps you to not be avoidant of tasks you can’t do perfectly.

Perfectionists tend to keep tweaking their work endlessly. To counter that, you can create a checklist for each task.

With a checklist that reminds you to confirm what you’ve done, you needn’t endlessly slog. You’re following a process with discrete and measurable goals.

To manage your perfectionism you can “calibrate your standards” by showing your efforts to someone early in the process. You may discover it’s already “good enough. ”

Even if you need to continue to work on it, the feedback will help you improve. Also, keep in mind that your work often needn’t be the final word, it just has to contribute something useful.

Realizing when you are working for diminishing returns lets you be less perfect about some things, so you can concentrate on what’s important.

Achieving perfectionist ideals takes extra time and effort that doesn’t always translate into a bigger impact of your results.

Many perfectionistic tendencies are rooted in fear and are maintained even when they become counterproductive. Perfectionists worry that if they are less meticulous and conscientious, it will hurt their performance and standing.

Perfectionism can motivate you to perform at a high level and deliver top-quality work, but it can also increase anxiety and slow you down.