perfectionism

Your teammate at work gives two-hundred percent and at first glance, you feel an admirable degree of drive, and thoroughness. They rarely take holidays, sneak in extra hours and are first at work. A person with high standards can be coined with the term, perfectionist. It might be questioning to locate any problems here. In a troubled world, why complain about a devotion to perfectionism? The concern is not the love of perfection in and of itself. The origin is the feeling of never being good enough. It is rooted in memories of being disapproved of or neglected by those who should have warmed us in childhood, which leads to self-hatred.

We become perfectionist from a sense of being unworthy: a sense of uninteresting, a disappointment, a nuisance, flawed. The pressure on our psyche is so appealing that we prepare to do more or less anything to expunge it. We try to do twice as much as the next person to cleanse our apparently undeserving selves. We promise ourselves that the completion of the next project will bring in a sense of peace. Thus, we are not interested in doing work perfectly, we are trying to escape the feeling of being awful people. We want to feel acceptable.

We cannot gain this acceptance from our partners, friends and boss. Furthermore, we need to allow ourselves to imagine that we deserve to be accepted. There is no need to prove that we heave a right to exist. It’s admirable to want to work well, but it’s a symptom of early love deficit. We can welcome an ability to tolerate periods of laziness so we can speak more kindly to ourselves rather than accept ourselves as a prize or trophy.