Nina’s Nuggets #1: The recovering perfectionist.

Hi, my name’s Nina and I’m a recovering perfectionist.?

Throughout my life, I’ve sought perfection. Shaped by a school system that taught me to strive for the perfect score and to avoid the negative slash of the dreaded red pen at all costs, I started to believe that anything other than 10/10 was not good enough, it was not “success”. I cried after a geography exam when I knew that I’d got just one answer wrong; I was disappointed if I didn’t secure the lead role in a play after an audition; I didn’t sleep for days before I got the confirmation email that I had been offered a place at Cambridge.

This mission to attain the perfect score - this ambition to be perfect -? also embedded itself within my working career. I craved the limelight in team meetings, I did everything to get a promotion - a title that told me “you are more perfect than you were”. My work always had to over-deliver against expectations.?

Perfectionism also manifested itself in an obsession with pleasing my managers, my leaders - looking good, getting it right, making them happy, ticking all the boxes of whichever talent framework the company chose to adopt.?

It took me over 13 working years to confront the truth. That this life-long companion of mine that I thought would bring me success and glory, was actually a spectre that had cast its shadow over my decisions, my interactions with my colleagues, my courage, my confidence and ultimately had extended its influence into all parts of my life.?

Because of my fascination with the perfect, I became a workaholic: when I wasn’t working, I was thinking about working and re-playing, re-editing, re-living work experiences, obsessing over what I could have done differently to have attained a more perfect outcome. Burn out was a very real threat lurking just around the corner. Doesn’t sound perfect does it?

This strive for perfection also translated into an almost abject feature of failure: failure was to be avoided at all costs. This meant I couldn’t ask for feedback - because what if there was criticism. What if it suggests, infers, indicates or even explicitly says that I’m not good enough; that I’m not perfect. And when I received feedback, I couldn’t process it. Even if there were 9 good things said, if the 10th was constructive criticism, it was that 10th that would stick with me for days, months, even years. Even healthy comments on improvement areas would consume me to the point of paralysis where I’d have to find escape in binge watching TV, binge drinking and all those other bad habits that seductively offer instant distraction.?

Perhaps it’s having children, perhaps it's our wonderful new era of workplace mindfulness infiltrating my echochamber, but I realised that the concept of perfection is, in itself, a lie. There is no perfect end state. The harder I worked, the overthinking, the people pleasing - it wasn’t making me perfect. It wasn’t making me more successful. It wasn’t making me happy.?

Inspired by Foucauldian post-modernists, I started to reflect on reality and I realized a hard but liberating truth: that my reality is my own construct. It is not - in fact - real, but informed by discourses and experiences from my life. And the realisation hit me: if there is no perfect score to life then I cannot fail to achieve it. I cannot fail. I can only learn, evolve, grow and change.?

With this knowledge, I have tried to approach this second part of my working life with new confidence and a new direction. Rather than do everything in my power to be perfect for others, I focus on being the best version of myself, for myself. This gives me the courage to actually play the game and not just observe it, to share my ideas, to create something new, to show up and challenge my leaders and my bosses.?

Today I look to deviate from the norm.?

Does doing this make me feel vulnerable? Yes. After all, it's often our inner voice that is our own worst critic and unlearning a lifelong habit takes repetition and commitment. But ultimately I’ve found that saying no, asking why, challenging the status quo and trying something out of the ordinary not only makes me feel more powerful, it makes me happier. And ironically it appears to be fuelling my career trajectory more than my people-pleasing past.?

Without the fear of failure - and with the knowledge and understanding that there is no “perfect” end state - I’ve been able to realize that success is embedded within the journey I’m on, not an outcome I will achieve. It’s a process that makes me a little bit more knowledgeable, a little bit more understanding, and that gives me more insight into myself - and my potential - every moment of every day. Do I sometimes fall back to old habits? Yes. Will I continue to try to unlearn and recover from my addiction to “perfectionism” and be more mindful of when a healthy desire to do my best is overwhelmed by obsessive perfectionism and insecurity. Yes.