The perfectionist hates to think of themselves as average. The very idea of being an average person in an average world is offensive to the perfectionist. The thought of being ordinary makes the perfectionist nervous. Their idea of perfection is an outward one, related to doing, not being. They rob themselves of real happiness by their enslavement to achieving, and they can never achieve enough. People, including family, never make the mark in the perfectionist’s eye. One perfectionist’s thirteen-year-old son complained his dad was home too much.
Perfectionist behavior is often learned in childhood when the love received from parents is conditional. A client of mine shared how he could not remember a time in his life when he felt he had been a truly good boy in his mother’s eyes or that he had met her approval. Even when he graduated from college summa cum laude, his mother was unimpressed. He explained to her that summa cum laude was Latin and meant with greatest honor, the highest academic distinction, and the comment his mother made was, “I never heard it in church.”
As a successful businessman, my client struggled for years with perfectionist attitudes. Without knowing it, he had taken on himself the attitude and voice of his fault-finding mother, who died without ever telling him she was proud of him or that she loved him.
I become emotional at such cruelties parents inflict on their children due to their own selfish, pained lives. My client needed to silence the critical, unloving voice in order to see his way to freedom. His mother had been a church-going woman, and this is what confused my client and kept him at a distance from God. I suggested he attend a men’s Christian retreat, and reluctantly he went. He was deeply moved by the experience of being with men who encouraged one another in their faith walk, and when he came back, he was ready to begin my class in Quiet Prayer as a way to be still before God and learn more of His compassion and loving-kindness.
Perfectionism is sometimes an alternative way of saying “obsessive-compulsive.” The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) describes the obsessive-compulsive personality as being excessively rigid, over-inhibited, over-conscientious, over-dutiful, and unable to relax easily.
A certain degree of obsessiveness is helpful to have when you need to be hardworking and conscientious. If you must meet a goal or a deadline, a healthy amount of obsessiveness is beneficial. The industrious, organized, and efficient person knows it’s important to be dedicated to doing a good job. But if that person behaves over-conscientiously and over-dutifully, burnout is imminent.
The time in your life when it is not neurotic to be obsessive-compulsive is when you’re a student. Medical students, seminary students, and other graduate students would not get through the demands of school without being committed to their work to a degree that is over and beyond the call of everyday living. When you’re hard-pressed to accomplish a task, when you have a deadline at hand, when you are working on a project requiring more work than an ordinary job, and when you find that you must work many more hours a day than usual, you are not necessarily behaving neurotically. Nor should you accept labels such as “workaholic.” There are some times in life when you must work harder and longer than people who don’t have the same job or exam or deadline that’s on your plate. A problem develops when such behavior becomes a life pattern and when you find no satisfaction in your achievements because they only remind you of what’s left to achieve.
When you’re dedicated to being perfect, you can never be content with what you do. You’re constantly critical of yourself and always striving to do better. The pursuit of success doesn’t translate into happiness. When success and happiness mean being perfect, problems intensify when a very imperfect world always gets in the way.
What are the things people say as they lie dying? Do they say, “I wish I had impressed my mom”? Probably not, because they said that enough during their life. Do they breathe their last regretting they didn’t turn off the porch light or win a Nobel Peace Prize? Bronnie Ware, an Australian songwriter and palliative caregiver, took notes on what her patients said at the end of their lives for her book titled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Here are two of her entries:
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
“I wish I had let myself be happier.”1
Traits of the Perfectionist
The perfectionist finds it difficult to maintain friendships because they see people as having too many problems and faults. Nobody is quite perfect enough. And to complicate things, the perfectionist doesn’t believe they are perfect enough to be somebody’s friend. One of the items on any happiness scale is “connection,” or a gratifying social life. Without this, the perfectionist turns inward and begins to gnaw on their fragile ego like an animal chomps on a wound, which serves to alienate them more.
The perfectionist thinks that happiness is an illusion because the concept of perfection is not compatible with reality. If you look at everything around you, you’ll see that most things could probably be improved upon. The room you’re in now could probably be decorated better, the car outside could probably use a paint job or at least a wash, the trees in the park probably need some pruning, the building next door may very well need renovating, your shoes may need shining, your nails may need polishing, your hair may need a trim, the work you did yesterday could have been better, the pizza could have been cheesier, the coffee hotter, the sermon shorter—you get the point.
Another kind of perfectionist is the one who takes no chances in life out of fear of making a mistake. This person will never function in extremes or excesses and will choose the middle of the road, where there’s the least amount of conflict. A woman I will call Shirley fits this description.
Shirley works hard all year at her job as a bookkeeper in a large corporate real estate business, but when vacation time comes, she doesn’t travel somewhere exciting. She stays home and cleans the garage. Last year she rearranged all her bookshelves and cleaned closets. She doesn’t hang art on the walls of her house because she doesn’t want to make holes in the walls. She hasn’t changed her hairstyle since she was in high school twenty years ago, and she doesn’t have pets because they’re too much responsibility.
Shirley’s perfectionism has turned her inside herself. She’s so afraid of doing something wrong, making a mistake, or failing that she never tries anything new. Her house, though pristine, lacks personality and flair. Her lifestyle is stilted and pinched. As long as the threat of things not going well lurks in the shadows of her mind, she will never rest in her soul.
Perhaps you’re the kind of perfectionist who buries their emotions by working doggedly. If so, you may be using work as an unconscious compensation for your insecurities. Perfectionism may be a means to fulfill your strong needs for approval. You may spend most of your life working at a frantic pace to make a lot of money or to attain power or prestige in order to prove yourself worthy of something, but what you’re actually doing is trying to prove yourself to yourself. You want to prove to yourself that you aren’t the loser-wimp-nobody you suspect you are underneath it all.
I like what a friend of mine did to combat his painful self-demands to succeed, go further, push for more, be spotless and perfect in all he does. When he began jogging, he couldn’t run more than two or three hundred yards in the hilly region where he lived without gasping and quitting. Most runners are taught to increase their distance and speed every day, but my friend wanted jogging to be enjoyable, so he decided to run a little less two days a week. He laughs when he talks about it because doing less was like swallowing rocks. “I’m the guy who does more, not less!” He was determined to enjoy jogging and not make it a grueling and frustrating experience. By doing less two days a week, he removed the pressure he usually put on himself and still accomplished his goal. “Running became enjoyable,” he said, “more than I imagined it could be.” Over a period of weeks, by daily practice, he built up to the point where he could run seven miles over steep terrain at a fairly rapid pace without his familiar emotional and physical stress. His basic principle, to try to accomplish less two days a week, changed his life.
The Driving Force of Perfectionism
What are the rewards for your dedication to doing everything to perfection? What rewards has perfectionism brought you so far?
| Rewards I Think I Get for Being Perfect | Proof That Being Perfect Isn’t All That Rewarding |
| I fulfill God’s expectations of me. | I can never fulfill people’s expectations, especially God’s. Since I can’t be perfect, I’m constantly unhappy. |
| I fulfill the Scripture passage, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might” (Eccles. 9:10). | My drive to be perfect makes me competitive, critical, and unloving. I judge other people’s performance against what I believe is perfect. I am never happy, even when I do a good job. |
| I make my parents proud. | I never feel my parents are truly proud, so why am I constantly trying to win their approval? It is God’s approval I need, not any person’s. |
| I feel satisfaction in a job well done. | Exhaustion, not satisfaction, is more like it. Besides, I never feel I did a job well enough, no matter how exhausted I am. |
| People give me respect when I achieve things they admire. | I’m so afraid of making mistakes that I really don’t trust the respect people give me. I crave admiration, but when I get it, I don’t really believe it’s sincere because I’m not perfect. |
As the above chart shows, fear always lurks behind the drive to be perfect. Fear will cause you to become a raving obsessive-compulsive person. As you drop your drive to be perfect, you’ll have to confront the fear that motivates you. Are criticisms, failure, and disapproval offensive and frightening to you? Does it upset you to think of facing those things? If you insist that everything you do must be just right, you may be motivated by the terror of being criticized or of something bad happening.
Here are behaviors familiar to the perfectionist and how to handle them when they occur. If you don’t think you’re a perfectionist, consider the following exercise anyway.
The fear of doing something wrong or of being found at fault can be overwhelming. It’s time to eliminate that fear!
A New View of Life
One of my goals as we work through this book together is to show you that no matter what level of life you’re at, no matter what point you’re at in your career or family life, your happiness depends on how you see yourself and what you tell yourself. Let me suggest that you make a decision to give up your perfectionism right now, at least on a trial basis.
Hanging on to perfectionism and the misbelief that making mistakes is the end of the world will lead you to procrastinate, quit, run away, or do nothing. This is a formula for depression. Being fixated on perfection can steal your happiness in a number of ways, as with a couple I know who won’t have friends over anymore. They don’t feel their house is nice enough. Not perfect enough. Since positive socialization is important to a happy life, this couple quarantined themselves inside their house where nothing was perfect enough to share with others.
We’re always facing new challenges and experiencing new problems to solve. Believe in the power of the Holy Spirit in you. You have a power in you much greater than you think. Happiness is not possible without growth, and growth starts with looking at and challenging the way you view your life and the world around you. The strengths and stresses of your life are the result of what you have programmed into your belief system. Your views about yourself, about God, about your world, and about what makes life worth living are the forces behind who you are and what you do.
Take notes in your happiness journal as you examine the way you view the events of your life. You can change the amount of stress you suffer by changing your perception of your life and of what makes you valuable.
Before going to the next chapter, let’s pause for another five-minute Quiet Prayer exercise. This is a time to practice quieting your mind and emotions, breathe deeply, and allow yourself to be still. Here there are no words, and you simply quiet yourself and focus on being in the presence of God. You’re sitting still with Him saying nothing, asking nothing, with no expectations or desires but just to sit with Him. That’s why it’s called Quiet Prayer. It’s an amazing experience, one I hope you will adapt as a daily practice, because happiness is found in inner peace. Are you ready?
Find a quiet place with no distractions and set a timer. Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and allow yourself to rest into your body. Allow yourself time to feel a sense of God’s peace in you. God is in the process of making changes in you and bringing you to a higher place of faith. He’s with you now. You’re in His presence, quiet and still and beautiful.
When the timer sounds, open your eyes, make any notes about your experience in your happiness journal, take another deep breath, and go on to the next chapter.