"Perfectionism [doesn't] lead to results. It [leads] to peanut butter."

I'm in therapy.

Just about every week.

And I've been going steady almost four years.

I wondered for a long time what it would look like to "graduate" from therapy. I assumed everyone did, or tried to. Then again some don't, and that's okay. But me? I'd have to 'make it out' and demonstrate that I could 'overcome' what put me there in the first place.

When I put it that way it sounds like a prison sentence.

It's been a lifesaver in more ways than one, even after having to switch providers after moving and meeting one who needed therapy more than I did.

So what's the point? Point is I may not ever graduate; I may not ever reach a point where I don't need therapy. Because it provides something I cannot provide to myself and is difficult to get from family and friends--someone who can tell you the obvious objective and you pay attention to it.

It's that simple. And that difficult to make happen.

Which is why over the past week I've been reading The Gifts of Imperfection by Dr. Brené Brown . Published in 2010, the book is a mix of memoir and what she learned from research into what happens when we don't confront our self-imposed perceptions of worthiness. My therapist recommended the book after listening to me rail on for the umpteenth time about the compulsion to be "productive" as a means to prove my worth--to myself and others. At the same time, I'm normally convinced I don't deserve any sort of 'break' or 'rest' or 'relaxation.' Even less so good news or blessings or happiness. It's a vicious cycle that can only get worse if left unattended, considering how easy it is to always be 'busy' and when our professional culture rewards good work with more work that must be done better.

So the Peanut Butter...

I took some liberty with the headline--a quotation from Brown's lamenting her own obsession with perfectionism. She alludes to what impacts such continuous stress had on her; it didn't engender higher performance but unhealthy habits (like eating peanut butter by the spoonful randomly throughout the day). And I mean it when I say the only thing 'worse' is the chocolate frosting tucked deep in the pantry, undiscovered until you're shooting for über-perfect and falling way short and you're working from home...alone. Then you know not only what food you don't have in the house but whatever you do for a stress response will only contribute to your falling shorter of the final goal. Another vicious cycle.

Brown's line struck home for obvious reasons and evoked the contradiction many of us live and breathe working in a world that talks so much about "balance" and making time for contemplative "deep work" yet never manages to acknowledge the value of blocked-open time on a person's calendar to simply sit and think. If we're sitting at our desk not visibly moving or ?? working from home to focus on deep work or strategic thinking, we're not 'maximizing' our time for the company. In some cases (and with some bosses), we're at risk of stealing from the company. Because clearly it makes sense that if I'm actually busy all the time, I'll also have the mental capacity to think about the problems you've handed me to solve--the ones which demand well-reasoned, well thought-out solutions.

This same contradiction lives on in some of the infographics I see on this platform. I save some as reminders that what we say we believe is often not how we act, which is an indictment not of what we're doing but how we engage our own beliefs. Consider Exhibit A below (I've not tagged the person for what should be obvious reasons; I'm sure he's well-intentioned and doesn't mean his advice to be counterintuitive in the way I've taken it).

What struck me was the headline, "How to Set Priorities," followed immediately by a color scheme that evokes police caution tape and a mess of smaller charts-within-charts. The charts-in-a-chart would be no fewer than nine slides when arrayed in sequence, perhaps further broken into three mini-decks of three slides each. At each level of hierarchy the poster offers three ways to "set priorities." Some, if not all, of the methods are probably familiar to you. If you focus on one or two you might get somewhere with your own endless list of tasks. But why post all of them in one fell swoop? To me it smacked of max productivity--trying to do as much as possible in as little time (and space) as possible. The result is an assault on the senses that seems only to alarm the eyes at the same time the message is to calm a person's triage instinct. Seeing a chart like this makes me turn back to the jar for one more spoonful before I get on with whatever I was doing instead of procrastinating on LinkedIn.

What About Perfectionism?

I'm not going to pretend it's anyone's fault but my own. I won't even blame "Perfection is the Standard," the mantra played on repeat by our Minuteman operations leadership for years. The contributing factors are numerous and digging to a single root cause is virtually impossible; what remains is my attempt to identify the problem with some useful language and come up with a way to counteract the tendencies before they do irreparable damage to me or someone else.

I've been stuck being a "perfectionist" a long time. Don't mistake my recognition of that for arrogance; I've blown a lot in my day--I've gotten my own bosses yelled at by their bosses, missed deadlines and countless meetings, and somehow convinced a 100-person squadron that I had the power to control our commander like a marionette. Each of those was a chance to recover maturely or dwell in 'yet another' failure. I opted for the latter more often than not without overt external intervention; I can destroy my own self-worth and state of mind just fine on my own, thank you very much.

Then again, that I can recall each of these examples with ease--years after they happened--indicates that some part of me hangs onto them, as if to remind myself just how imperfect (read: terrible) I really am.

Elsewhere in her book, Brown talks about her family's love of music, singing, and dancing. In fact her husband and two kids will often sing and dance in the kitchen before or after dinner, a time without devices where each can demo some moves--no matter how embarrassing they might be. ?? Brown adores this time and argues for its sanctity even as none of the Browns are "dancers" nor trying to be. There's nothing quite like opening yourself up to judgment by dancing as a regular person; not only does it encourage useful vulnerability (as Brown articulates), it also allows you to truly enjoy several moments of the day precisely because you are doing something imperfectly. Maybe the connection seems a stretch you--perhaps it makes sense only to me, whose rhythm and voice require segregation to an empty vehicle during rush hour--but to me it speaks to the strange-but-institutionalized inverse relationship between that which we believe must be "perfect" and those things we "must get done" in our every day lives. There is no external force directing the Browns' evening dance parties, nor your belting Taylor Swift's Bad Blood at the top of your lungs stuck in the parking lot called I-95. So not only are we 'free' to do those things terribly but because we are freely doing them, we somehow can derive actual joy from them.

Work, of course, is a different story. So is family life, the Church, and other places in which people rely on us or expect things from us. Once those external forces manifest, the pressure skyrockets and we're in a mental state that cannot continue without setting rigid standards on the path to 'getting there.' Perhaps you have a job that forced it on you (see our missile mantra linked above) or perhaps you've found that 'holy grail' of the working world "doing what you love." Either way, it seems these are the places that exact perfectionist pressure on us. It certainly is for me--as a husband, father, church member, and secular professional. And because those four labels account for almost all of my waking hours, I'm in perfectionist mode for all of that time. And because of that, I remain convinced all day, every day that I deserve nothing more than the attendant suffering that comes with not being perfect.

Which is a never-ending truth. We will never be perfect; even if you don't believe in God or anything spiritual or supernatural, it should be obvious to you that humans are fundamentally busted up in different ways--each of us, individually, have virtues and vices; that we can use every day to get past the bad and be/do more of the good is a best-case scenario. But if you're predisposed to perfectionism and end up living in that mental hole a lot, that best-case quickly turns into another impossible task--because it feels like you never get any better because you're even terrible at the process of getting better part!

So what the ?? do I do with all that?

TO BE CONTINUED...