Silencing your perfectionist tendencies
Do you remember the last party you hosted? Everything had to be perfect. Perfect. You spent hours on Pinterest looking up ideas for how to make cute food, hand make decorations, fun games, and carefully curated music. You then dedicated your entire life to cleaning every inch of the house.
Well you wanted to anyway. Life got in the way and you had a party, but it wasn't perfect. People still came, and laughed, and said it was fantastic, but it wasn't perfect.
If everything needing to be perfect is ruining your fun, here are our top tips for silencing your perfectionist tendencies so you can live again, imperfections and all.
You're already good enough
Most perfectionism is rooted in fear. You don't want to disappoint your coworkers, your family, or yourself. You feel anxious about criticism, so you try to be perfect so no one can pick at you. The truth is, you're probably already good enough, and let's be realistic—can anybody meet your standards?
Focus on personal bests
Another common mistake is to look at the very best person in a particular field, and compare everything you do to that person. You can't just cook a good dinner, it has to be something that would come out of a gourmet chef's kitchen—only it's everything, not just one field.
Instead of comparing yourself to Gordan Ramsey every time you pull out a spatula, try simply improving on your last dish. Athletes have this down by measuring their own times, and working towards shaving off seconds from that, rather than trying to break records belonging to other people.
You'll find yourself more encouraged, and you'll have more to look forward to as you measure your own success against the only competitor who matters—yourself.
Use your failure
Didn't meet expectations? Instead of feeling disappointed in yourself, turn that failure to your advantage by learning from it. Go over what went wrong, and think of ways to make things easier in the future.
By seeing mistakes as data to be analyzed, it can take some of the pain out of it, as well as helping you improve your form. Just remember not to become too obsessed with the data.
Relax
As a perfectionist, you always give your best effort. Remember that party we talked about earlier? Everyone had fun. It's not going to hurt anything if you also have fun as well. When you look back on it days and weeks from now, do you want to remember feeling frantic and stressed? Or laughing together with your friends about The Great Ballon Bridge Disaster.
I'm pretty sure you know which one it'll be.
Perfectionist tendencies are a problem, but they can be fixed. Just remember when you find yourself making a 6 page check list of all the things you need to do in order for everything to be perfect, throw it out the window. Your next big project is going to be fine just the way it is, and so will you.