Without necessarily being aware of it, we operate on inner mental representations of what the standard of quality in our work means: what competence entails, what it means to be good professionals. And it’s alright to have standards – these can work as a guide and as a regulatory measure. In fact, the more regulated a profession is in terms of (external) professional standards, the more the professionalization of people entering that field increases (i.e., better training, benefiting everyone).
The problem arises when these mental definitions or inner standards are not questioned in any way and become rigid. For example, I have met teachers who say: a dedicated teacher will be involved until exhaustion in his activity with the children – this is how they show them care and commitment. Or a top programmer will always have the ideal solutions at hand – that’s their job. A good product manager will be able to effortlessly understand the customer’s needs and easily translate them to the implementation technical team. A good psychotherapist will only have satisfied and mentally balanced clients.
Total involvement, universal answers, effortless understanding, unfailing success. What do you think about these milestones? Are they mastery markers or not?
The discussion can be very nuanced on many levels, but psychologically we are witnessing a toxic overlap between high competence/excellence and perfectionism. It’s tempting to think of perfectionism as a quality (or that desirable flaw in job interviews). Let’s not be fooled.
Perfectionism is binary (perfect success or failure, all or nothing) it puts pressure, it does not allow for mistakes, it is rigid, and it demoralizes us. Sometimes we think we’re motivated by our perfectionism, but in fact we’re being constrained and self-sabotaging (it’s like we’re running a race and someone behind us is yelling, “Don’t stop, it’s not good, it’s not good at all, you’re going to ruin everything!”). Many times, perfectionism is that mysterious element behind procrastination (if we don’t have the certainty of success, we naturally procrastinate) or inaction. Not by chance, I often see people in therapy who declare themselves to be perfectionists and who are tormented by feelings of imposture. Data shows that this trait is also associated with higher rates of depression, anxiety, burn-out and eating disorders.
What’s more, when we operate in a perfectionist mindset, we fail to enjoy the results of our work. We are too exhausted and preoccupied with the next “race” we must engage in. It is never enough.
High competence means you want to do your job as well as possible. Possible, not impossible. Striving for competence allows for growth and sees error as part of learning and progress. When we want to be highly competent, we can nuance things, we can better understand all the factors involved in the success of a process (it’s not all up to us!) and we can make better decisions. The goal of competence allows us to be flexible and gives us energy (to the same race above, it would say “Keep going, you’re getting better, keep going, you’ll do better!”). Excellence means real and flexible growth, it means the satisfaction of every intermediate result (this is because we understand that we are engaged in a process, that things evolve).
In the next edition of the newsletter, I will tell you about the most common “bedtime stories” that perfectionism tells us and give you some strategies to become more flexible in relation to the unrealistic standards in your mind.
