What Type of Perfectionist Are You?

High-Performance Executive Newsletter: You're here because you have already achieved some outer success and reached your current executive leadership position. But growth doesn't have to stop here. There is a thrill and satisfaction in challenging yourself, stretching and seeing how much you can achieve. Have an impact and make a contribution.

The talents, skills and tools that have got you to this point will not necessarily take you further. Or the approaches you've used to achieve this success may have been expensive in terms of time, energy, stress and effect on your relationships. You need new or upgraded power tools to make sure you can sustain or advance your position more easily.

The High-Performance Executive Newsletter introduces these tools, so that you can level up. It draws on many areas of solid research into high-performance in business, including neuroscience, psychology, physiology, trauma therapy and flow-state study.

The three essential areas for high performance are neuro-regulation (to get and stay calm), clear the negative self-talk and the beliefs that create them (including imposter syndrome), and create new success habits.

This week we're looking at perfectionism.

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What Type of Perfectionist Are You?

There are five different kinds of perfectionism, and the distinctions may surprise you.

But first, a bigger question is whether perfectionism is a good thing or not.

Some people feel quite proud of being a perfectionist and see it as a reason for their success.

But what if we compare perfectionism to high standards?

High standards are a goal to work towards and ideally meet. They are reaching for the best while remaining reasonable about what is possible. Missing a high-standards goal is frustrating, sure, but it does not make you feel bad about yourself.

By contrast, perfectionism has a whiff of the impossible about it. Many perfectionists acknowledge that truly perfect is impossible, but laugh when they say they still try for it.

The biggest difference is that perfectionism creates internal stress when those perfect standards are not met.

You are not only frustrated to miss the goal but also add emotional reactions of self-criticism, blame and feeling not good enough. Indeed perfectionism is a common symptom of imposter syndrome, which is feeling like you’re not quite good enough despite your evident success.

The problem with perfectionism is the significant internal stress it creates. This stress is distracting, so you lose focus, and exhausting.

Ironically, this stress lowers your ability to perform at your best, and makes you more likely to make a mistake and miss the mark. That is, your perfectionism can be holding you back!

It’s definitely worth exploring further.

The Types of Perfectionism

Let’s look at the five types of perfectionists.

1.?????? Visual perfectionists: what most people think of as perfectionists, people who need everything to look ‘just right.’ It applies to clothes, hair, cars, houses etc. And at work, it is visual perfectionism in presentations and reports, images, fonts, graphics etc. You spend a lot of time and energy getting things to look perfect.

2.?????? Rules perfectionists: people who follow the rules to the letter themselves and want others to do so too. You feel that there is a right way to do most things, and feel stressed when things are done 'wrong.'

3.?????? Knowledge perfectionists: those who expect themselves to have the right answer for everything. You feel the need to be an expert regardless of the situation, and can overwork to make sure you can answer any question.

4.?????? Results perfectionists: people who need to be the best, get the best results and win. You feel anything less than absolute success is a failure.

5.?????? No-mistakes perfectionists: These think that any written report, presentation, calculation, or demonstration must have zero errors. This can also apply to social interactions, diet and fitness programmes, and verbal communication. Mistakes in any or all of these areas make you criticise and berate yourself.

Do you recognise yourself in any of these? Or more than one?

The common link is how any missteps in these areas feel.

Is it genuinely high standards or do you need to get things perfect in that area?

The drive to do any of these perfectly is the clue that this is perfectionism.

Going Deeper

If you’re now asking why you need to get things perfect, you’re on the right track.

Perfectionists unconsciously assume that your failure of right action/result is a failure of yourself. That is, mistakes and imperfections are somehow a criticism of yourself and your worth.

This is called a belief in your ‘conditional worth’, which is endemic in our society. If you’re a perfectionist, then you see your worth as a human vary according to how you perform.

While it is untrue, conditional worth is an unconsciously held belief - which means that most people don’t even see it.

Stress Connection

The need for perfection is a source of stress.

However, perfectionism is also a coping mechanism when you are stressed.

That is, when you’re stressed, you unconsciously think that getting things just right will make you feel better. You hope being perfect will make the stress go away.

Unfortunately, it gets locked into a vicious cycle, continually escalating stress levels instead of calming things down.

So what can you do?

You can either manage the perfectionism or eliminate it.

Managing perfectionism means focusing on the stress response. The calmer you feel, the less you will feel the need to get things perfect. The short-term solution is to focus on getting yourself as calm as possible.

Eliminating perfectionism means tackling the root cause of it – that pesky belief in your conditional worth. As vague as it sounds, this can be done in a precise, highly scientific way, for example, the Inner Success programme mentioned below. This breaks the cycle by solving the real problem.

Seeing perfectionism as an ineffective coping mechanism for stress changes it’s meaning. Whichever type of perfectionism you use, it is not your personality.

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What I've loved this week:

How Chess is a Lesson for Business

This webinar by Stefan Kindermann and Sebastian Kuhnert blew my socks off this week. From the title, I expected it to be about strategy and thinking many moves ahead. I was curious, and always enjoy exploring novel perspectives. But I was delightfully surprised.

In chess, there are so many (many) combinations of movements that it cannot be calculated, unless you’re a supercomputer. We humans need to rely on intuition, which is subconscious assessment.

In both business and chess, the effective use of intuition is to use it to select an option/move. Then use rational thinking and calculation to check the validity of that move. Finally, circle back with intuition to evaluate it again before deciding.

Building intuition involves integrating your previous experience with empathy. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes and imagine their logical and emotional reaction to it. Now that’s a brilliant move!

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An action step you can do this week…

Spotting Your Reactions

If you find yourself driving for perfection, take a quick step back and look at your triggers. What in this situation is especially stressful? What potential threats are you concerned about?

When you tune in to the stress and your triggers for perfectionism, you see that the problem you need to manage is your stress, and the solution should become clearer too.

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We'll cover more on perfectionism in future issues.

Do subscribe and share!

I'm Dr Tara Halliday, specialist Imposter Syndrome Coach and best-selling author of Unmasking and Outsmart Imposter Syndrome.

I created the premium Inner Success for Execs programme - the fastest and best solution to imposter syndrome.

Check out the Inner Success for Execs programme for fast 'up levelling' of your internal leadership tools.

https://www.completesuccess.co.uk

Think you may have imposter syndrome? Take this free quiz to find out:

https://www.completesuccess.co.uk/quiz

Want to fast-track and have a chat about your inner success, book a quick 15-minute call here:

https://completesuccess.kartra.com/calendar/sUz3jn51MxZa

Have an excellent, refreshing and recharging weekend!

Tara

P.S. Thank you for reading to the end of the newsletter, I appreciate your interest and attention!

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