Unwinding perfect...personally and professionally

P.E.R.F.E.C.T. That seven letter word that can be both tantalizing and paralyzing. Surprisingly (and confusingly), often at the same time.

I would guess that many people who have worked with me would say I am a perfectionist with extremely high expectations in the work environment. Not necessarily a bad thing, but as I reflect on how I handled instances when imperfect marketing material or content accidentally went out, I know I could have been better.

And it wasn’t just marketing materials or presentations that I wanted to make sure were perfect. I liked to have my hand in just about everything. Again, not a bad thing, especially when you are co-leading an organization. However, it becomes a bad thing when that level of involvement stymies productivity and creates a bottleneck to output. One mentor told me, “Not everything has to be done the Christine-way.” Meaning, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and that the Christine-way wasn’t the only way to get an acceptable outcome.

Delving into my inner self the past several years, and the forces that drove my perfectionism, was, well...alarming, heartbreaking, eye-opening, rewarding, and a whole host of other adjectives. I came to learn that perfectionism stems from a need to control outcomes, most likely rooted in childhood patterning formation, and that control stems from fear. In my case, my fear came from chaos in my childhood where I learned that controlling outcomes by presenting perfect, no matter what the situation was, would result in less chaos and a feeling that felt safer to me.

Letting go of control and the idea of “perfect” have been hard for me, both in business and in life. I started by understanding the driving fear behind my actions anytime I found myself trying to control an outcome. To do this, I would ask myself, “And what would be the result if that happened?” And then to that answer, I would ask, “And then what would be the result?” And then again, “And then what?”?

As I did this exercise, I usually ended up down the path of understanding that even if this potential fear came true, the result was never as devastating as what my subconscious and ego had tried to create with the fear in the first place. By doing this, I began to allow myself space to let go of any attachment to the outcome, and began to realize that the result would be okay regardless. When the fear subsided, the control subsided. And imperfectly perfect became enough. In fact, it was freeing.

Obviously, in a work environment, a leader or manager cannot just stop overseeing projects and employee output. But they can be open to alternative paths and outcomes, sometimes which may be better than originally anticipated. For me, letting go of the idea of “perfect” and being okay with the creativity that ensued, allowed me to free up precious mental bandwidth. By understanding the fears behind the incessant need to show perfect, I was able to begin to heal core childhood wounds that have been both personally and professionally transformative.