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Flashback to eight years ago—I was planning my wedding and every single detail had to be perfect. I spent hours obsessing over things like: should my dress be ivory or white? Should we have peonies for the centerpieces or tulips? In the end I realized that I had lost sight of the actual important parts of the day. I also spent the better part of a year stressed out about the planning process.
I have realized since then I needed to find ways to dial back my perfectionist tendencies. Here are some strategies I have used that have helped me and maybe they can help you too.
- Practice the concept of “good enough” vs. “perfect.” If I want to clean my house and I want it to be “good enough” I would vacuum the rugs, mop the floors and clean the bathrooms. If I wanted to clean my house until it was “perfect” I would move all of the furniture so I could clean underneath it, reach up to the highest shelf to dust it, clean the windows, etc. You get the picture. Most of the time it’s ok if I clean my house so that it is “good enough” otherwise I am spending oodles of time cleaning when I would rather be doing other things.
- Give yourself a limited time frame to get something done (and then be ok with the outcome). In my experience doing something “perfectly” means it takes about three times longer to do a task than it normally should. I wanted to make a cake for my son’s birthday and I knew I only had about an hour and a half during naptime to get it done. In my perfectionist fantasies I would have baked a cake from scratch, made homemade icing in his favorite color and somehow made it look like one of those masterpieces you see on Pinterest. Realistically I knew this was not going to happen so I made a cake from a box mix and used frosting from a can. My son loved it and that is all that matters.
- Jump in with both feet and course-correct as you go. Perfectionists are planners. They want tons of time to execute the perfect plan, which means they may delay starting a task for a long time. I found that if you do the opposite—just start—you can always make tweaks or even change the plan as you go along. For example, I decided to start my own business and launched it in four weeks. I made lots of mistakes along the way, but progressed much faster because I started rather than waited to draw up the perfect plan.
What about you? Are you a perfectionist? Have you found anything that helps keep your perfectionist tendencies in check?
By Alison Pidgeon, MA, LPC