I consider myself a recovering people pleasing perfectionist. As I type this, I had to rewrite the word “perfectionist” four times because I misspelled it. That should tell you something. Maybe I’ve crossed over too far and am solidly out of perfectionism and into the mess of reality. I’m in my mid 40’s and my people pleasing perfectionism has been haunting me for a very, very long time.
I don’t remember anyone sitting me down, telling me how to be. It was more of a becoming. Nature or nurture? Likely both. As a young child, learning and school came easy to me and I wanted to do them well. I wanted to please my teachers, my parents and my grandparents. And it worked! The more I did and the more I did well, the more recognition and praise I received. By the time I was in high school I had a long track record of straight A’s, a pile of swimming medals, JROTC medals and ribbons, NHS, Honor Roll and all sorts of other achievements. This is usually the point in the story where I tell you that I was miserable inside but actually, I wasn’t! Everything was working out for me and the people around me were happy.
Everything went along swimmingly until some point after college when I realized that I had been living my life the way that I thought other people wanted me to and not how I wanted my life to look. I found myself in the wrong relationship, in the wrong career and very, very confused. How had I gotten to this point without even realizing it? I was a traveling IT consultant at the time. One morning I was sitting at the gate, waiting for my weekly flight to Cedar Rapids, IA and was wondering what this was all for. In my early 20’s I was having an existential crisis. Why was I doing this? What was this all for? I had a house that I barely ever spent any time in, a long distance relationship and no time for friends or family.
It took me a number of years and many more moments of panic after that one to find my calling, my partner and heal myself from the expectations and perfectionism that were controlling my life. In the larger arch of my life, I have recovered and yet, I still deal with those expectations I put upon myself every day. I’m still a work in progress.
It’s the same story, the same Perfectionism disease, that I hear from my clients all the time. People pleasing, doing the things you think everyone wants you to do out of fear of doing the wrong thing, never trying anything new because you won’t be able to do it perfectly.
I wish that we could take this word out of our colloquial dictionary. If we replaced perfectionism with good enough, imagine what the world would be like! Imagine how rich we would be in art, literature, technology, science - everything!
What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? (Aka - if you didn’t expect to be perfect?)
The irony of all of this is that the people who do succeed in creating incredible things are the ones who fail the most. They are the ones who are brave enough to have an idea, try it out, fail and try again and again. Through the process of failure they actually find perfection.
Wishing you bravery and many, many failures.
Desirée
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