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How To Be Your Most Productive Self: Let Go Of Being Perfect
3 types of perfectionism
- Self-oriented: when people are highly critical of themselves.
- Other-oriented: when people are highly critical of others.
- Socially-prescribed: when people think others expect them to be perfect and then pressure themselves to be perfect in order to meet those expectations.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Perfectionism: The Pursuit Of Constant Excellence
There is a common trait among many high-achievers: Perfectionism. Celebrated geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci, Beethoven, Steve Jobs and even Kanye West share an obsessive ...
Perfectionism: The Good
The good aspects of being perfect are intrinsic motivation, extreme focus, ambitious goals, strong work ethic and high personal standards. They are also highly coachable.
Elite performers are often perfectionists as their activity requires error-free performance.
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Key Ideas
Do a weekly review to reflect on your progress
Try to identify things you avoided due to fear of failure and situations where your perfectionism wasn’t worth it or moments where you did well despite being uncertain.
You...
Get an outside perspective on your perfectionist tendencies
Talk honestly and openly to someone about your tendencies and how you’re working on getting better.
Ask them to tell you when you are being too fussy about something so you can think about it.
Interrupting the cycle of rumination
- 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.
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Key Ideas
Perfectionism and to-do lists
To-do lists can help perfectionists move past our paralysis. They may find making a list to be a reassuring guide to their day.
But there's also a risk: to-do lists can backfire i...
Break down projects
... into manageable tasks.
This way, you're armed with a set of concrete actions to take rather a vague cloud of high expectations.
Define the next action
... rather than all subsequent steps.
Focusing only on the next action gives you permission to work on something even if you don’t have it all figured out—which is crucial to completing tasks that in the past have left you paralyzed.