How I Became Friends With My Inner Perfectionist

May 25

His name is Vincent.

Picture a tall, slender man dressed in a midnight blue striped suit and a cylinder hat. White gloves cover his long thin fingers. He carries a cane crowned with a rowing tiger head. I can see my own reflection in his black polished shoes. Not a single hair is out of place. He is suffocatingly perfect, and he never seizes to remind me about that.

We have NOTHING in common, except for the fact that we share my head.

Such a neighbour can drive anyone crazy, and he did so for quite a while until I found my secret recipe.

Being a perfectionist was as normal to me as breathing.

I didn’t think about it as an issue. I used to proud myself on having high standards and doing my best to uphold them. I was a person who strived for perfection. What’s wrong with that?!

It wasn’t until I realised how paralysed I felt by the pursuit of unattainable results when I started to look for ways to evict Vincent for good. It turned out to be way harder than I expected as if he was a tree rooted deeply into my brain.

I was stuck with him whether I liked it or not. I tried to ignore him, plead with him, and finally to negotiate. Was he actually trying to ruin me? No, his goal was to drive me towards success. However, his overly critical approach did exactly the opposite.

I knew there has to be a solution, but there was nothing in sight just a whole sea of questions reaching as far as an eye can see. Even my psychologist admitted that there was no cure for perfectionism. She promised that it can be dilated down but never truly got rid of.

Needless to say, it wasn’t the answer I hoped for. No magic pill solution here. I had to keep looking, but where?

The first part of my answer came from my meditation practice. One of the main reasons I meditate is to prevent my anxiety from taking over my life. Andy from Headspace taught me that I couldn’t get rid of anxiety. Again not the answer I hoped for. He emphasised how it was a part of me. The more I’ll fight with it, the more frustrated I’ll get, but it won’t bring me any closer to an anxiety-free life. Instead, Andy prompted me to accept anxiety as one of my states of being. The same is true for perfectionism.

Step 1:
Accept your inner perfectionist
Accept that it is, was, and will be a part of you.

The second step came from a faraway land of Japan. I was reading a book on Ikigai when one idea caught my eye. The author described how the Japanese were focused on continuous improvement, making things a bit better today than they did yesterday. It got me thinking. If you set yourself to constantly improve, then you know that you’re doing things imperfectly. This thought made me fidget in my armchair and shiver. So uncomfortable it is. Perfection leaves no room for improvement. Ideal is the end of the road. So to be able to grow, you have to do things as well as you can at that moment and accept them as imperfect and in need of further improvement.

Step 2:
Embrace imperfect
You can’t improve the ideal. So constant growth requires imperfection.

The third secret ingredient of this recipe comes from another book, but this time on habits. In Atomic Habits, James Clear writes:

“... you don’t need to be perfect. In any election, there are going to be votes for both sides. You don’t need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority.”

– James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

This idea didn’t impress me at first, but my brain kept mulling it over. And in a few days, it hit me:

If I am at my best most of the time, then it’s a win.

You don’t have to polish every single sentence to perfection to write an engaging post. You don’t have to make every single picture perfect to have an attractive Instagram feed. As long as the majority of your work is of high quality, some misses won’t matter.