You might call it discipline. You might think that your high standards are a sign of excellence. But what if they’re not?
What if the real reason you can’t stop improving, fixing, overthinking… Isn’t because you want to do your best—but because you’re terrified of what it means if you didn’t?
Perfectionism is not a pursuit of greatness. It’s a self-sabotaging behaviour. It’s a mask worn by shame.
Signs of perfectionism:
- You are looking for the perfectly right thing: the perfectly right project, strategy, article to write, morning routine, time management system;
- You overthink and examine the potential impacts of even small decisions
- You’re always trying to get it right—yet somehow never succeeding;
- You’re never good enough;
- You are afraid of failure and you find even small mistakes catastrophic;
- You’re fixing and improving yourself;
- You have a very loud inner critic, and you tend to be harsh and unforgiving with yourself;
- You have very high standards for yourself. You are judgemental and put off by people whose actions fall short of your expectations and criteria. You are upset with their low standards and slack ways of doing things, and you find what appears as their mediocrity or shallowness very off-putting;
- You find being wrong and admitting fault difficult;
Perfectionism is not the problem—it’s the coping strategy for the problem
Perfectionism is a crutch. And the reason we need the crutch of perfectionism is because at the deepest level we believe that we’re not good enough, that something’s wrong with us.
John Bradshaw called it toxic shame. It’s the voice that says: You’re not just not good enough or imperfect—you are fundamentally flawed.
And so to protect ourselves from the illusion of our wrongness, we put on a mask. We build a False Self in order to escape from our Authentic Self.
The False Self, Bradshaw proposed, is constantly trying to be either more than human or less than human. A perfectionist, or a slob. The hero or the scapegoat.
Of course. When we believe a lie, we are trying to either prove it or disprove it.
When I first read this, it resonated deeply. I looked back at my life and saw my own patterns of less-than-humanness and more-than-humanness. High standards, inability to feel at peace with myself, doing it all on my own, feeling guilty for taking time off, being very harsh on myself.
The root cause of perfectionism is the belief that something’s wrong with you
The more than human individuals are the anxious high-achievers of society: always perfect, immaculate, striving toward the next big milestone. The lie that something’s wrong with them is driving them to do anything and everything to disprove it, by being and getting everything right.
The less than human individuals are the so-called losers or dropouts of society. They are at the other extreme of the perfectionism spectrum—bankrupt, derelict, bums, good-for-nothing. The lie that something’s wrong with them is their driver, too, but in contrast to the “more than human” high-achievers who are disproving the lie, the “less than human” dropouts are proving the lie.
The upshot is: perfectionists and dropouts alike are both driven by a lie. The lie that they’re somehow fundamentally flawed.
And it is this lie that gives rise to their thoughts and feelings that drive the coping strategies of perfectionism, procrastination and other forms of self-sabotaging and self-abandoning behaviours.
The way through is not in fixing perfectionism, but in healing the lie that creates the perfectionist on the first place.
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This is what I teach inside my free two-day masterclass: Freedom From Self-Doubt and Overwhelm. If you want to learn how to break free from self-doubt, overwhelm, and bring the spark back into your life, reserve your spot: www.pavlina.me/inner-freedom