Notes From A Recovering Perfectionist

The tricky thing about perfectionism is that it’s my one toxic trait that consistently gets positive feedback. When I’m drawing: “Oh, you spent 90 minutes hand-drawing a circle without a compass until it was perfect?! How admirable. What focus.” When I’m at work: “I don’t know how you can spend four hours writing one line of copy. I mean, that’s commitment.” False. I mean, yes, there’s focus involved in my perfectionism. And commitment. But also a lot of pressure (learned, societal, my own), and negative self-talk, and distraction, and wasted time. It feels like I’m sitting in a lush, dappled landscape, and I’m hyperfocusing on the bark when there’s not only a tree, but a whole forest out there.

Attention To Detail

For me, the slope toward perfectionism gets an extra layer of “slip” when I’m at work. As a digital communications strategist, the work I do innately requires attention to detail. At Percussion Strategic, we work with advocacy organizations to help create websites, run digital ads, and develop and execute digital media campaigns. As you can imagine, there’s…a lot…of detail there.

I often feel like I’m walking on a balance beam called “attention to detail,” without trying to fall off into the fire of perfectionism. Luckily, we’ve got systems set up to help our team improve our balance and stay on the beam.

There are certain moments where I can feel the heat, and I start to sweat. For example, when it comes to setting up a complex LinkedIn ad campaign. My colleague and I have a QA list that’s two pages long to make sure everything is set correctly and double-checked. We go through all the steps of campaign set up – Dates. Targets. Budget. Geo. Creative. UTMs. (You get the idea.) Then we hand it off. Dates, check. Targets, check. Budget, check. Geo, check. Creative, check. Check. Check. Check. Then we launch, our due diligence done. I’m still on the balance beam.

But then, some nights, I can’t help but keep those unhelpful thoughts out. “What if I didn’t upload that 16:9 creative for LD5? But Katie Hewitt QA-ed it. But what if we missed it? Let me check it again. This is important, communities are relying on this campaign’s results. Yeah, I’ll check again. Just to be safe.” And I fall from the balance beam of “attention to detail,” and into the fire of perfectionism. Again.

Perfectionism Is A Bully

Perfectionism makes me feel like if I’ve made a minor (often unrecognizable to anyone but myself) mistake, I’ve completely and utterly failed. It’s like a highlighter for things that I do that are out of sync with societal norms – the lines aren’t absolutely straight, the grammar isn’t perfect according to the MLA, the drawing of a cat doesn’t look like a photo of a cat. And instead of using it as an opportunity to push back against norms – and the very concept of norms – I fall into the fire pit of perfectionism.

When perfectionism takes hold, it feels like my own brain is ripped from my control, and has its self-bully dial turned to “maximum.” A venomous energy in me grabs control of my pen – or my cursor – or my keyboard – and sets me into a vicious cycle of repetition.

I try to please the goddesses of sameness, and achieve the (completely biased and random version of) “perfection” that I have in my mind. It’s a never ending, unproductive cycle.

Growing Among The Flames

What’s the solution, then? Must I permanently walk on a piece of metaphorical gym equipment, flames of “what if” lapping at my feet? Nope. Nope, nope, nope. I need to unlearn. And I am working on it. I’m challenging the white supremacist culture of perfectionism¹ and reminding myself that trying new things – and making mistakes – can be rad. Like, really, really rad.

Mistakes teach us in ways that nothing else can. As a wise sage recently wrote to me in an Instagram comment, “we can make friends with failure.” The word failure is a scary one. It’s rife with judgment and shame and even worse…blame. But those are unhelpful distractions. It’s also about experimentation and growth and learning. Thinking back, it’s hard to think of an important lesson I’ve learned without failure. So here are some steps I try to follow when I feel myself losing balance and slipping into the fire:

1. Make friends with failure. It’s going to be around as long as I am. So why not make the process something that provides for me, rather than something that takes from me? I’m trying to replace the cycle of perfectionism with a better one: have an idea, try something, learn from what goes right and wrong, hone, and repeat.
   
2. Identify the why. Ask myself: “Why am I going into this perfectionism cycle?” Is it internalized academic pressure left over from my days as a student? Is it coming from the work I’m doing, or what the client is asking of me? Is it actually helping me get to where I need/want to go? Digging into the “why” is a helpful way for me to step out of the perfectionist mindset and stay focused on where I’m going.
   
3. Remember that I want something better than what this is creating. The most powerful tool in my belt for fighting perfectionism is to remind myself that it’s not even something I want. In fact, it’s holding me back from creating what I really want: Something bigger and more magical than what the stiff notion of perfection has to offer. I’m an artist who uses writing and art to push back on the concepts of boxes and categories and labels. I love things that are “off” or “weird” or just…genuine. And I’m not unique in this – much of the creative that spurs people to take action online is genuine, first-person content that speaks more to the messy orb of the heart and less to the graph paper of the brain. But it’s hard. I’ve been trained to be a perfectionist for well over 30 years. It feels more like my friend than failure. But it’s not a healthy friendship, and it’s time to go our separate ways.
   
4. Just stop. This is a big one for me. For fans of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, it’s also the skill known as “opposite action.” I look the opponent straight in the eye (in our case, perfectionism), and do the opposite of what my gut is telling me. I want to re-edit this blog post for the 44th time, for example. Instead, I close the document, or even my laptop screen, and move on to something else. Often when I come back, the perfectionism fire has quelled itself, and I’m happy with what I’ve created, just as it is.
   
5. Build systems and trust. There are certain moments when I reliably feel the heat of perfectionism. That’s when I find it most important to create systems to help ensure we have all our necessary details correct, without focusing on the fact that I’ll (inevitably) make mistakes. QA sheets for ad launches, templates for social media toolkits, systems for tracking UTMs.

Just like in work, the mistakes I’ve made in life have been my most faithful teachers. They’ve taught me to seek a sort of “open curiosity” toward things. To experiment, to give new things a shot (even if I have no clue where to start), and learn from things that go awry. Learning from failure has taught me more than any volume of theory. And daily, it’s helping me unlearn perfectionism. I can stop looking down when I’m on the balance beam, and wonder more about what I can do with my time up on it.