Why trying to be perfect is ruining your life

How many of us exhaust ourselves daily in the pursuit of perfection? We agonise over the tiniest details, wasting endless hours redoing things over and over “because it’s not perfect”.

What is perfect?

Can we name one single (manmade) thing that is 100% perfect?

We cannot.

Yet we kill ourselves to achieve perfection, usually with little reward. The things we spend the most time on are often just glanced over by the people we are trying to impress. Nothing more than a cursory nod and a ‘thank you for the report’ or ‘that’s nice’ type of response. This makes us angry and confused because our hard work has gone unnoticed and unacknowledged.

Almost no one escapes this trap, white collar workers in corporates, business owners, home owners, land owners, vehicle owners, parents, children, husbands, wives, siblings….

When you strive for perfection, you are ultimately setting yourself up for failure.

True perfection is unattainable.

Your goal should be progress, not perfection.

Trying to be perfect leads to misery and anxiety and never being satisfied with your efforts.

Do we ever even stop to ask ourselves why we are this way? If we did, we’d find a few home truths that are hard to face. Yet this is the work we must do to bring balance back to our lives.

If you dig deeper into this, you will find  that trying to be perfect comes from a deep sense of insecurity and an innate sense that we are not good enough. It’s not your fault! You probably had parents, teachers, authority figures be overly critical of us, seldom praising us; or conditionally praising us, pushing us to deliver more and more in the futile quest to gain recognition and love by doing more. So in our little child brains, we get scared and figure it must be our fault, that if only we tried harder, they would love us for who we are. But that didn’t happen did it?

And so we continued this strategy into our adult lives. Here is where we learned that focusing on perfection by demanding it of yourself or others, you get to hide that vulnerable place it came from. We use it as a shield to protect us from the inadequacy we feel, the judgement we felt during the original wound. We will do anything not to feel that pain, so we project out. We (wrongly) assume that if we are perfect, we won’t be rejected. A pain worse than death! Because being rejected means you are not good enough and your deepest fears become realised.

We become overly critical, turning a spotlight onto the smallest of flaws in others. We do this to ourselves too, but not always as publicly as we point the spotlight on others of course. We justify all the work we are doing to make ourselves feel valuable and loved. We become control freaks and then live by the approach that “if you want something done right, just do it yourself”.

We reject society as useless and think that you are the only one that knows what they are doing. We lament the uselessness of the world with our friends, complaining endlessly how bad something is; when you know you are just as guilty. You have let the ball drop in many aspects in your life, you just don’t want to admit it. Far easier to blame the rest of the world for the state it is in. We let our egos rule and judge everything and everyone long as we don’t have to turn the spotlight onto ourselves.

We work long hours into our private time to make sure people know what good little workers we are. We tell people how tired we are because we have so much work to do. We sacrifice time with our loved ones, we stall our businesses, we one-up our co-workers, we criticize everyone around us. We miss out on so much of life.  We spend all day being someone we are not – all in the pursuit of perfection to stamp out the pain of actual cause. All the while not realising how fruitless the exercise is because perfection is so subjective. What you deem perfect is not what I deem perfect.

Aren’t you exhausted from this yet? Do you really want to live the rest of your life like this?

So what do you do?

Start by accepting you are human.

We are flawed, every single one of us. We make mistakes. It’s what makes us human.

It is okay to make a mistake! It’s okay to have setbacks!

Read that again.

It’s time to be kind to yourself and others about this. We need to stop judging people and ourselves and start looking at the situation with new eyes. We need to understand that as cliché as it is, everyone truly is fighting a battle you are not aware of. That people have come from different circumstances and perspectives to you. If they are not perfect in your eyes, you are the problem, not them. Turn the spotlight to yourself.

Dig deep and search for the original wound. Heal that wound. If you don’t know how, learn. You can start with a powerful Hawaiian healing called Hoponopono. You repeat the phrase : I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you. So when you think you have identified the person or situation that started this trait in you, you can let them go with love and forgiveness by repeating I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you until you feel better. If the wounds are too deep and you need more help, ask for it. Seek counselling if you must. And right now, your perfectionist mind is probably telling you that it is failure to ask for help.

It is not.

It is the bravest, smartest thing you can do.

Let it go. Ask yourself if this is going to matter in 5 years. If you must choose between tweaking a PowerPoint presentation for the millionth time, versus letting it go and spending time with your family – which do you think is going to matter more 5 years from now? Take a big step back and look at the bigger picture here.

Learn and accept that doing your best is good enough.

Do better than you did before. Your only measure of success should be your own progress on something.

And if you truly screw up, own up, apologise, get up, fix it and do better next time.

Nature is perfect. We humans are not.

And that’s okay. I love you anyway.