Success = Happiness, Right?

(6/10) This story forms the sixth part of a 10-part article series, exploring the messy intersection between pursuing happiness and how perfectionism holds us back. Subscribe to The Hard Truth to be notified of the next release.

When we try to be impossibly perfect, it affects our lives in every department – personally, professionally, and most importantly, how happy we can truly feel with ourselves. We might be constantly doubting ourselves, criticising ourselves up for mistakes, continuously telling ourselves a narrative that we are not worthy, that we are not good enough, and this usually based on fraught stories we’ve told ourselves about the idea of what success means.

Engaging into maladaptive perfectionism has many repercussions, which can show up in our physical and mental health, but what I find at the heart of perfectionism, where these narratives of I am not good enough, is that individuals are robbed of the many positive emotions that would normally come with achieving a goal – pride, joy, contentment, satisfaction – and instead they are replaced with sadness, frustration, anger, disappointment.

We spend our days focusing on what could have gone better – we hear ourselves “It was great but…”, “It went well, however this could have been different…”.

I still have memories of events that I’ve done, where I’ve received messages about how well I did, but if I knew I made a mistake somewhere, I didn’t focus on those messages, I focused on the mistake, I focused on the moment I stumbled, the moment I didn't execute as well as I could have. I can still feel my stomach physically turn when it comes back into my memory bank.

I remember, at one specific talk, I was speaking with a 200-strong audience about mental health and, mid-way through the talk, I said "And if you forget everything I say I today...remember this..." and my mind went completely blank. I completely forgot what I was going to say. I stared at the big display of my slide, in silence. The whole room waiting. Someone might have thought I was just trying to build suspense. I didn't remember it, owned up it, and moved on with the rest of the talk. After that talk, do I remember all the people who came up to me afterwards and told me what an amazing talk it was? No. Do I remember the one person who said Did you remember that thing you forget????...I may have forgotten what I was meant to say, but I never forgot that comment.

What this means is that I would always be on alert, always watching out, protecting myself from mistakes in the future, spending less and less time in the present.

As perfectionists, we spend a lot of our time and energy looking at yesterday about what could I have been better, looking at tomorrow asking what could go wrong, and if we are lucky enough to take a moment to look at where we are now, we focus on where we think we should be, instead of where we are.

I’ve spent most my life looking ahead, looking at the next step, repeating this sentence I’ll be happy when…

Little knowing that all this time, if I spend so much time looking at what might come that could make me happy, I’ve forgotten to look around me right now and see what yesterday’s Camille wanted.

I learned through my life that...Perfect = Success = Happiness, right?

If I want to be happy, I should work harder for the goals I think I should achieve at this point in my life. This is what our brains logically tell us. When we are successful, we can buy nice things, live more comfortably, and, in turn, we would assume that success means more freedom for ourselves to do the things we live.

Recently I was inspired in this thinking as I listened to a short video of a conversation between Brene Brown and Tim Ferriss who were talking about self-awareness, but in that process, they begun by sharing of how many people they know who are considered by others highly successful, but they knew how miserable they were behind the scenes.

We've been mis-sold the story of what happiness entails, and what we need to be happy.

We make the assumption that once you’re “successful”, that happiness will follow, but what if this is where we’ve gotten it all wrong? What if it was the other way around?

When someone says I don’t feel happy, we have this tendency to list out of the things that the person has, that we are essentially telling the person to be grateful for the things they have. You have a nice place to live, you have a great job, you can afford what you need. And, yes, the focus usually on things. Now, don’t get me wrong, these are things to be grateful for, no doubt, but do they automatically equal subsequent happiness?

This is where a lot of us start to say things like “I’ll be happy when…”. Our happiness becomes reliant on achieving or reaching the next goal, which is a usually a goal provided by what society tells us is important, resulting in many of us reaching achievements without the deep feeling of joy that should come with it.

As a perfectionism, I am a chronic ‘should’ girl. I should do this, I should do that, I hear myself say often. Using the word ‘should’ is almost always sure sign that what you are doing is defined by someone else’s goal that you’ve adopted yourself. And, sometimes, we do have goals that would make us happy, and we use the word should, however I tend to find that instead of should, I replace it with ‘I really want to…’ and that’s how I know whose defined my goal – me, not someone else or a societal pressure – not something else that tells me I should be doing it.

It takes a lot of courage to pause, listen to what your heart tells you to be true, even if it doesn't make sense to someone else.

Subscribe to the series to learn more about maladaptive perfectionism in the next article and strategies to overcome it.

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