Seriously it’s no compliment.
First things first, let’s get to know the definition of perfection and what perfectionism really means.
Perfectionism definition: Perfectionism, in psychology, is a broad personality style characterized by a person’s concern with striving for flawlessness and perfection and is accompanied by critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others’ evaluations.
(Source WIKIPEDIA)
In simpler terms: Feeling incompetent and crappy even when you don’t have to, delusional, miserable, always feeling like it’s never enough and can be better, basically the antonym of high achievers.
Trust me. Been there. Done that.
And you honestly don’t want to be in that spot.
It crushes your self-esteem
Perfectionism crushes your self-esteem and makes you feel unworthy. You feel like a failure because you made mistakes you were bound to make.
It’s impossible to always be perfect. You are bound to fail at some points in life.
And if you are going to base your self-worth based on how perfect you are then I am sorry you can never live life to your full potential. Perfectionism distorts our reality and makes us pursue something that doesn’t exist.
‘Perfection’
It leaves you tired and exhausted
Because we are running after something that doesn’t exist, it leaves us exhausted and tired. It feels as if whatever we do and try to achieve is never enough.
Almost perfect doesn’t exist. We need total perfection. This turns into a vicious cycle and ultimately exhausts us.
The same things happens to me when I start something new. I am so into approaching that thing in the most ‘perfect’ way that the same work starts feeling like a curse to me and I eventually leave it for a few days to recover.
I always try to be someone I am not just to appear perfect to myself and everyone around me that I lose touch with reality. (i am really working on it now)
It turns you into a procrastinator
The people in this era are more procrastinators than ever.
I can safely say that anxiety and perfectionism go hand in hand.
This era of social media and all the capitalism around us makes us feel so imperfect and unworthy. Not to mention, the past we were brought up in as well as the behavior of our parents, peers, friends, partners influence us more than we think.
Whatever the reason may be, as grown individuals it’s upon us to realize that being a perfectionist is truly no compliment anymore when all it does is turns you into a procrastinator and makes you feel incompetent.
The thought of failure makes us immobile and paralyzes us with fear. We’d rather do nothing at all than make mistakes and make a ‘fool’ of ourselves.
You know, all talk no show.
Kills your confidence
Need I say more?
If you are suffering from perfectionism, you can relate to this on a spiritual level. Even the most basic of tasks sometimes seem overwhelming because “what if I screw up?”.
Especially so, if there are so many people in attendance.
And from all that nervousness you do indeed screw up and end up beating yourself up over it.
Because of course, you can never tolerate imperfection.
Not to mention, perfectionism makes us develop an unhealthy relationship with our physical appearance.
We are just never satisfied.
You won’t achieve anything worthwhile
As I just stated, whatever you do just isn’t enough. You see people starting something later than you and succeeding at it while you haven’t gotten past your launch phase. The idea of perfectionism makes you look at the finer details you didn’t need to.
You feel frustrated and incompetent.
Even if you do achieve something, you won’t feel absolute happiness as you keep thinking about how many ways it could’ve been better.
You keep getting sucked in this cycle and never truly enjoy the fruit of your success.
It makes your life colorless
Perfectionism takes colors out of your life and makes your life seem dull and grey, even when it’s not. You keep criticizing yourself over the pettiest of issues. You think it’s normal to feel this way and this is just how life is supposed to be.
Nope, that is not how it’s supposed to be. (Fight me!)
You fail to enjoy this blessing called life and the present moment and only either live in your past or your future. This isn’t how you’re supposed to lead your life.
You start to feel tired doing the same thing over and over again only to do it again.
You remember to do everything except live.
It makes you anxious and fearful
I can safely say that anxiety and perfectionism go hand in hand. You feel insecure or fearful about something and want to make it look ‘perfect’.
In pursuit of this, you feel desperate because so much time has passed by and you still far from where you thought you ought to be.
You then start to fear if you will be left behind. This again makes you more desperate and you in turn out of desperation make more mistakes that you could’ve easily avoided.
In the end, perfectionism is not a very cool trait to have as people make it out to be. It’s more of mental disease than anything.
Mistakes are what make us human (not deliberate of course). And it’s through those mistakes do we learn and take the step in the right direction.
But we get deprived of such lessons only because the fear of failure overpowers our will to actually do something worthwhile. And feel happy in it.
Even if we do achieve something, what’s the use if it doesn’t make us happy?
We do what we do, so that we could be happy and live our life to its full potential.
Isn’t it?
