Topics for Coaching: Perfectionism

Understanding Perfectionism

One of the downsides of someone being a perfectionist is that they often don’t finish things or even start things because they want them to be perfect.

It’s a useful topic of conversation in the coaching room and something, we’ve found, that’s very relevant for doctors. The medical world would seem to be a space where getting things right is often a matter of life and death. You’re probably not going to make it through medical school if you don’t have a bit of a perfectionist trait.

Perfectionism is often seen as a positive trait, or if not entirely positive, thought of as a bit of a badge of honour. It’s one of those things that if you’re asked at an interview, ‘what are your weaknesses?’ You might say, ‘oh, well, I’m a bit of a perfectionist’, thinking that actually that’s a strength and it shows you in a good light.

Perfectionism and completing a task so that things are perfect can lead to high performance and a standard of excellence. But the pursuit of perfection might be a phenomenon that derails some people and can make them deeply unhappy. If it’s not possible for things to be perfect and you have a perfectionism streak, then that’s going to make you pretty miserable, hence, it may be something that is brought to the coaching space.

In this article we will explore:

• What perfectionism is,
• Why it can be harmful,
• How we might shift our mindset or our coachees mindset towards embracing progress as an idea rather than perfectionism

What is it Perfectionism?

Looking at it through a transactional analysis, or psychodynamic lens, perfectionism is one of five different drivers that are seen as common defence mechanisms. People tend to have them in order to overcome messaging or injunctions that have taken on as children. They will have received the messages from significant others around them (parents, older brothers and sisters, teachers perhaps) that perhaps results in them having some of these strong drivers.

The drivers are:

• be perfect,
• be strong,
• try hard,
• please others
• and hurry up.

So the ‘be perfect’ driver is obviously the one that relates to perfectionism.

We did talk about the ‘please others’ driver in episode 17 of our podcast on people pleasing.

In the world of transactional analysis, the drivers are like mini scripts that we run to make ourselves feel as though we’re doing okay in our own lives that we’re keeping ourselves safe, and that we are then worthy of love and belonging. For example:

“Life’s okay if I’m perfect”

Each of the drivers is kind of an antidote to different messages we might have received or taken upon ourselves. We find these as coping mechanisms to help us be okay and to feel that we’re worthy of love and belonging. We’re all going to have some of these drivers to some extent, but if we overplay them, then that can be problematic and a bit obsessive.

Most perfectionists are raised being praised for achievement and performance, so they get good grades, they have good manners, immaculate appearance, maybe sports prowess, that sort of thing. And they get praised for all of that. And if they take that message on for themselves of, ‘that’s how I have to be in order to be worthy of love and belonging’, then that high achievement is their ‘go-to’ in order to get that sense for themselves.

“I am what I accomplish and how well I accomplish it. And the only way that I’m worthy of love and belonging is to be perfect.”

That is going to serve them to some extent because they’re going to do well in school and in their exams. They may have the kind of parents that, when you get 99%, they say, “what happened to the other 1%?”

This doesn’t mean every child of a parent that says this will become a perfectionist, but some might. In the short term they’re going to excel. They’re going to do well in exams, they’re going to do well in school, in university, in medical school, they’re going to get a good job. And so the perfectionism gets rewarded all the way along, and reinforced over again. Effectively they are conditioned to be perfectionists.

It becomes a problem if your sense of being worthy of love and belonging depends on things being perfect. It can mean that at times you think, ‘I am not worthy of love and belonging because things aren’t perfect.’

So perfectionism is the belief that anything less than perfect is unacceptable.

It often involves setting unrealistic standards both for ourselves and for other people. So while the striving for excellence can be healthy, perfectionism takes it to an extreme where we actually fear making mistakes or not measuring up, because in our unconscious, that means that we’re not worthy of love and belonging.

It’s not just going to affect your work, it’s also going to affect your personal life, whether it’s the way you look, the way you raise your kids, how your relationships appear to others. It’s that internal voice that whispers in the background telling you that good enough isn’t enough.

Perfectionism isn’t about striving to be our best or working towards excellence is because striving is actually a healthy internal driver. Perfectionism is still an internal driver, but it’s externally driven by that potentially all-consuming thought that ‘if I’m not perfect, then I’m not worthy of the love and belonging of others’.

One of the biggest barriers to working towards excellence is perfectionism. Because actually achieving excellence requires curiosity and viewing mistakes and failures as opportunities for learning. It’s that growth mindset isn’t it. Whereas perfectionism kills the curiosity by telling us that we have to know everything or we risk looking ‘less than’, and that we have to get it right, otherwise people are going to judge us.

That pursuit of excellence and perfectionism will often be conflated into one thing by many people.

If you are producing excellent work, people might well think you have a perfectionism script running, which might not be the case. You might be very comfortable with making mistakes, but do produce excellent work nonetheless. Going back to that growth mindset, it’s the journey towards making things of good quality without feeling like it has to be perfect.

The downsides of perfectionism

If we accept that perfectionism means tying our sense of being worthy of love and belonging to things being perfect, what are the knock on effects?

• It can certainly lead to a fear of failure. So even the smallest mistakes can feel like monumental failure.
• It can lead to procrastination and avoidance, because we don’t want to start something that’s not going to be perfect.
• If you’ve got the perfectionism streaks, everything’s got to ‘be perfect’. If you’ve got people pleasing scripts, so you take on other people’s work to keep them happy. So you volunteer to take on too much, and then you’ve got to do it perfectly. And then if you combine that with the ‘be strong’ script: so you can’t have time off sick because you’ve got to be strong, then that’s the perfect recipe for burnout.
• That’s not to say everyone that has perfectionist perfectionism as a script is going to have those other drivers, but I think it’s probably the key thing that’s going to tip you over the edge. That’s going to take atoll on your mental and physical health.
• Increased self-criticism: you are going to be your own worst critic. You’re going to notice the flaws. Even if other people are celebrating your success, you’re going to pick up on the things that you got wrong.
• That internal dialogue is going to erode your self-esteem again, making you feel like you’re not good enough.
• It’s going to strain relationships because quite often perfectionists expect everyone else to be perfect, too. And they will judge other people for not being perfect.
• It will affect how you interact with others and might lead to you feeling like you’re being excluded.
• It might actually lead to you being excluded because you have unrealistic demands of other people. So that sense of rejection might well come in, which again leads to feelings of shame.

You’re probably going to fail at meeting your own expectations, and perceive yourself as constantly falling short in other people’s eyes, when actually that’s not probably true, because they’re probably quite happy for you to make mistakes, but you’re going to perceive that they’re judging you.

Perfectionism can be quite self-destructive and it’s really hard as a friend for those around perfectionists too. And it all comes back to that wanting approval. But it’s almost an impossible approval to achieve because it most likely goes back to childhood, we’re seeking the approval of our parents and other people can’t give us that, so we’ve got to do the work ourselves.

How is perfectionism likely to show up in the coaching room?

Let’s be honest, people are going to tell you! They will likely wear it as of badge of honour.

They won’t say, ‘I’ve got to be perfect driver’. They will say, ‘I’m a bit of a perfectionist’. It could be a throwaway comment, not necessarily the thing they come to coaching with. And they might not see it as the reason that they’re unhappy with the way things are, but they are likely to own it as a behaviour, or a way of being.

If you hear that, ask them questions like: “Tell me about that.” or  “How is that working for you?” And it might be that then other things come out.

Also, if they’re heading towards burnout, perfectionism is definitely going to be part of the mix.

And if it does show up, how do we work with that in the coaching room?

Be Curious:

Ask questions about what’s going on for them when that perfectionism shows up, what it feels like, what emotions come with it, what behaviours come with it, what it means to them when things aren’t perfect?

Look For Signs and Strategies

Notice if there’s a link between, a drop in self-esteem when things aren’t going perfectly. What strategies they have for dealing with those times. Perfectionists take quite a hit in those moments, and they will have developed strategies for dealing with them, whether they’re useful or not.

How do we support them?

One of the ways we can support them is by exploring what it would be like for them to give themselves permission for things to be good enough and how that would look if they allowed it to happen.

A symptom of perfectionism is often that things are never quite done, or not completed on time because you’re still trying to make it perfect. So it might be about giving themselves permission for things to be good enough, or to finish things on time.

But recognise that people in a coaching session saying that they’re going to give themselves permission for things to be ‘good enough’ might not play out in real life. They might revert to old ways of being because these are deeply embedded drivers that have been there for years. Awareness is the start of the journey and then they can start to look at strategies for what to do when that happens.

If they know that they get to that point when things aren’t perfect and they feel rubbish about themselves, what can they do about that? So it could be:

• Journalling
• Have a coaching session
• Talk to a friend about it,

Whatever strategy they adopt, it’s important for them to recognise that how they have always handled it in the past, is not how they have to deal with it now. That they could view it in a different way.

It’s all very well saying, ‘I just have to think about it differently’, or ‘I just have to get on and do it’, but that’s not always enough. There has to be an action, a reminder, or a trigger; something that stops you going down that route because you’re so used to going down that route.

Working with them on focusing on progress rather than perfection. Just continuous improvement and growth. We’re all a work in progress. We’re never a finished article. Just recognising that and getting them to think about one thing they did well today rather than what went wrong.

Self-compassion is really important for perfectionists. They tend to be very hard on themselves. Recognising this about themselves can be helpful and to then practise some self-compassion that might help build their resilience.

Also, reframing their fears around it, so that if they have a sense of ‘I failed, people are going to judge me’ they can start to think about it differently. Asking questions like, ‘and if they judge you, what then’, or ‘What happens next?’. And perhaps event, ‘what’s the worst thing that will possibly be an outcome of this?’.

Learning to set boundaries is something that is useful for people with a perfectionism streak too so that they don’t overwork.

Practical tips to start overcoming perfectionism:

• Setting some time limits for tasks can be really useful. Not working until it’s perfect, but working for the time that you’ve allotted to it. And when that time’s up, you move on to something else.
• Practising some self-reflection, some self-compassion, maybe do some journaling, focusing on what went well, and really embedding that as a habit, a discipline to focus on what you’ve done well, but not perfectly.
• Challenging the thoughts when they arise. Understanding that it is connected to that sense of being worthy of love and belonging, and recognising that you are worthy of love and belonging without things being perfect. That kind of expression of, you know you are enough.

Both our Doctors’ Transformational Coaching Diploma  and our Transformational Coaching Diploma for Lifestyle Medicine cover aspects of coaching that will help to explore these topics with coaching clients. Take a look and get in touch if you have any questions about either.