The exclamation marks in the title will start making sense to you as you read along. We use the phrase ‘I’m a perfectionist’ so often that I’m sure you will steer clear of it forever after what you’ll read in the following sentences 🙂 First of all, let me just tell you that ‘Perfectionism’ is not all that great. Then again, the perception of ‘perfectionism’ in Turkey is completely based on crying out “I beat the odds and I won!”. The notion is coded in our brains at a young age that what is difficult must be valuable; and what is easy must be insignificant. The greatest fear that underlies perfectionism is fear of failure. The more we believe that we are going to fail, the more we become a perfectionist; and this sense of fear is surely followed by a desire to be liked + appreciated + approved, to receive a pat on the back. I’m sorry to tell you all of this is simply a matter of ‘ego’. We are only human, of course we have egos; but if we are conscious of our own ‘ego’ when that time comes, we can be able to take control of our own belief system and of this energy. And this, believe me, is so much fun to do.
Let’s take me as an example; I’ve been wanting to start a blog somehow; write some articles and share them with other people. The old me, I’m sure, would say; “Just wait, because it has to be the best. It has to be !perfect! in the way that no one has ever done or thought of doing it before”. You know what? If I had trapped my thoughts inside that frame of mind and kept having that attitude I wouldn’t ever be able to lay one finger on the keyboard, let alone start a blog, with that fear of failure in my mind. Do I have the perfect blog right now? Of course not. Because we all know that there is and always will be something better, more impressive and more qualified. For that reason, I’m sorry to tell you that perfectionism ain’t worth nothing. Let me put it this way; you wouldn’t ever want someone else to take credit for what you have done, would you? But I thought you enjoyed yourself while doing it? Then it shouldn’t really matter that you did it and someone else just came and took the credit, right? I know that this example has been a little too extreme, but the point that I’m trying to make is that !perfectionism! is nothing to be proud of, though I’m sure it must be very important for ‘perfectionists’ to be appreciated; to have people’s approval and have their name proudly come up in a meeting when they have accomplished something. What I mean is, the deal in our case is not really perfectionism but that our egos compel us to hide ourselves behind what we would like to call perfectionism.
PS: Let’s not confuse ‘perfectionism’ in this case with ‘negligence’.
With Love,
Zeynep İrem Çağlar
International Certified Life Coach
Asro-Shera