How to Get Rid of Perfectionism

Here below you can find some recommendations that will help you deal with your perfectionism.

• 1. Be Responsible for Your Inner Voice

  To overcome your perfectionism, you need to gain control upon your inner critic first of all. That voice in your head, reminding you about your being not good enough.

  That is a voice that makes you feel like a secondclass person every time you make a mistake, a voice that exhausts your self-respect and self-esteem level. As a result, you get filled with a fear of failure and criticism: that is why perfectionism exactly comes to the stage.

  Perfectionism is a try to avoid failure, criticism and mistakes. But there is no any progress in a goal achievement.

  To take responsibility for your inner voice, you need to be conscious about thoughts living in your head first. Thoughts and words cause numerous emotional worries. They become basis for beliefs that put limits for you.

• 2. Create Fitting Expectations and Standards

  Personal expectations and standards that you put for yourself, are substantial for your decisions and behavior.

  Perfectionism appears once your standards are too high. That is why you need to know how to set up more realistic ones first. They will give you more freedom and flexibility in order to move forward.

  People usually set up too high standards when they want to get other people’s approval. Yes, there is to be a high plank if you want to get more money and reach success, but if your self-esteem suffers and the level of stress gets higher, then something is really wrong.

  So, the first thing to do is to put goals based on your personal expectations and standards. Additionally, make sure these goals are realistic. They have to create a motivation, not a stress or tension.

  Setting up strict deadlines for tasks and projects can be valuable, too, because deadlines make you go on moving from one goal or project to another without getting too deep into details.

• 3. Analyze Your Expenses and Profits

  If you see yourself being busy with a task for too long while working on it, then ask yourself next self-analysis questions:

  • How does this behavior help me?
  • Does this behavior hurt me?
  • Can it potentially hurt others?
  • What are short-term consequences for me if not to complete this task?
  • What are long-term consequences?

  This is how you can get certain information about things you do. People usually do not do that: they do not doubt their behavior and go on acting as usual, satisfying their perfectionism.

  So, find some time to estimate yourself, your behavior and its influence onto your life objectively.

• 4. Check Your Reality

  Unrealistic expectations “feed” perfectionism. Distinguish them from realistic ones.

  Enlist your unrealistic expectations on a paper. Look them through on purpose in order to remind yourself about behavioral and thinking patterns you have. For instance:

  • To complete a book during one month;
  • To work on four jobs;
  • To run every morning even if there are problems with a hip.

  Realistic ones look like:

  • To devote two hours to a book daily;
  • To learn how to get the wanted income and improve skills;
  • Skip the run if a hip hurts, but devote time to curing it.

  When you write down your unrealistic expectations and replace them with realistic ones, you find out that it is not obligatory to suffer at all. The point is to learn how to think wider and to process all possibilities.

• 5. Learn to Show Your Weakness

  This strategy stands against the philosophy of most perfectionists. But there is a guarantee of getting amazing results if they only try.

  In especially difficult life periods, when perfectionism poisons your life, you can:

  • Cry;
  • Spend a day without thinking about studies, job or different standards at all.
  • Allow you not completing the job and feeling normal.

  Of course, that is useful only if to use it rarely. Just let yourself have short breaks. You need to charge your life batteries, make correct conclusions and get back to work.

• 6. Focus on what is Important

  

  Finally, when it comes to avoiding perfectionism traps, it is important to concentrate on most important things.

  Remember about Pareto principle: 80% of efforts bring 20% of results while the other 20% of efforts bring 80% of results. That is what has to guide you if you want to overcome perfectionism. It will deny all wishes to be busy with details if the project’s main body is not finished yet.

  Another key: concentrate on the overall progress, not on precise separate results. The more progress you get, the more new things you study. New things lead you towards new progress, and so on.