Perfectionism: Your Friendly Enemy

Are you a bit of a perfectionist?

Many describe themselves this way. And although they know Perfectionism isn’t a good thing, there is a slight guilty pride in it. But if you knew the negative effects of Perfectionism, you’ll still want to rid it from your life.

Let’s just be clear about what perfectionism is. In Performance Psychology, Perfectionism is not a desire to be perfect. It is a belief that one should be perfect, a mindset that criticises you for not being perfect (when you should be) and a set of behaviour that avoids any situation where more failure might occur.

It results in actors becoming unwilling to take a risk because they are afraid to make mistakes. Perfectionism is a close bed fellow of our old friend the Fear of Failure and causes people to pick away at themselves negatively because they ‘should be good at this’.

Perfectionists believe that they really ‘just want to get things right’, but actually, they just really ‘don’t want to get things wrong’ – often because that might let other people down, make themselves look foolish, or confirm a secret suspicion they have about themselves.

When you are a perfectionist, you hold yourself to highly irrational expectations about the results you’ll achieve and criticise yourself heavily if you don’t achieve them – and possibly even give up.

Sadly, society still rewards perfectionists by giving approval to this behaviour and completely misunderstanding what causes perfectionism.

Here’s some quick and dirty solutions to confronting that friendly enemy.

PROBLEM: Perfectionist actors have a set of beliefs that make them believe that they shouldn’t make mistakes. A mistake is seen as a form of personal failure.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION:  Look at where the belief is coming from. What is the cause of belief that they shouldn’t make mistakes. Develop a healthier relationships to mistakes by looking at all mistakes non-judgmentally. When something goes wrong, instead of reacting emotionally, stop yourself and ask yourself what just happened.

PROBLEM: Perfectionists have high expectations about outcome or results.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION: Replace high expectations with achievable goals and high self confidence in your skills. When you trust your skills, you will have the confidence to tackle your goals without expectation of the outcome.

PROBLEM: Perfectionists gain confidence when things go right, confirming their perfectionist beliefs.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Ask yourself what confidence level you are currently at, ask yourself what you would have to do (DO = actions NOT expectations) to get to 10. Take those actions.

Perfectionism is a blight to actors and other creative artists, it crushes confidence and freezes faith.

In order to avoid its traps, to try tackle the beliefs beneath it, reduce your expectation and exchange it for goals and work on the actions you can take to improve your self confidence.