MY DAILY WOW: why drive to perfection is doomed to fail – what makes sense instead

If you’ve ever been inflicted with the suffering of perfectionism, you’re hopefully aware of the suffering implied. The stress. The neglect of important people & things in your life, to make room for millimetric this & that that absolutely need to be fixed or else…

Enter Kintsugi – emphasizing imperfections and seeing mends as forms of life, leading to renewed value, second, third, fourth lives of things. Destruction seen as a normal part of the continuous cycle of life. Beautiful mending though!

So here’s my WOW: what if, instead of what is considered to be a gracious “don’t mention it!” or “no problem” – the finest approach in dealing with human fall-outs – we took the path of “what does this mean” and examine the newly accomplished reality as a valuable achievement, the creation of a new form of reality.

The enabler of this approach is the skillful repair needed. Mending pieces of what was into a new reality also takes time. But instead of interpreting that time and mending effort as a painful path to “back to [whatever]”, we can look at it as a natural, beautiful process of making meaningful choices destined to bring something new to life. Psychologists speak of it already as a healing mindset and process. My interpretation is that there should be not talk of healing. Just the talk of creation, from what is available, using high end skills.

Perfectionism is about hiding & shame. It’s inhuman. Thus, unsustainable.

Kintsugi is a conscious choice to embrace imperfection, and in chat choice resides the mighty creation, unbound to the past or to norms, but defined by best effort.

MY DAILY WOW: there is literally no limit to people’s hypocrisy – here’s my way to deal with this reality

This post was triggered by a very warm recommendation posted on LI, high praise for a DEI program done by a huge global company led by a beloved renowned leader. So I fell for it and read through it. It was beautiful. All the right words. Then I saw this:

I needed a good laugh at the beginning of the week, and they managed to provide a healthy dose of it with their hypocritical approach to an otherwise very sensitive topic. And examples go on and on an on…

Fascinating to me that people are so keen on claiming to have higher standards or more noble beliefs than is the case (hypocrisy defined, yes?) and invest a huge amount of time & energy into it rather than taking a walk in the park or striving to assimilate said standards/beliefs.

The disgust is warranted. Cognitive dissonance being triggered, we all react in various ways…but the point (and today’s WOW focus) is: how do I live with them? I can’t pretty well walk around puking whenever I sniff it, right? More importantly, if I want a bit of quality of life, I’d better cut the sensation from its roots: the thinking behind it.

What am I thinking that is triggering the disgust?

Well, some limiting beliefs stopping me from happily being in the vicinity of such people – and my mind-resets – are:

• They do it on purpose, to deceive, for their personal gain -> They are bought into the idea, to a certain extent and to the limit of their ego’s capability
• They want others to align to it while they stand out as exceptions (double standard) -> It’s a good idea, it’s just that they are not yet able to raise to its standard.
• They are so delusional that they don’t even see what they’re doing (saying one thing and doing the opposite) -> They might be in a blind spot, oblivious to the fact that they’re preaching the opposite of their actions

The new set of beliefs cannot trigger disgust anymore. It triggers compassion (my shade of kindness), which enables a completely different set of actions that stem from the single most enabling belief there is: “They’re just doing the best they can” which sets me on the self-compassionate path of “I’m just going to do the best I can”.

MY DAILY WOW: perfectionism is an auto-immune disease – how to help a colleague cure

Like many other socially-induced diseases, perfectionism is hurting individuals at the doubtful benefit of others. This says it all:

“Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit for the worst in ourselves; the part that tells us nothing we do will ever be good enough – that we should try harder.” –  Julia Cameron

The mindset is “I am what I do. If I don’t get it done perfectly, who am I?”. It’s an all-or-nothing game that ultimately takes a toll on people’s health, and on the road to that end, it cruelly diminishes the quality of life. As in all other such instances, nobody can “get” other people “cured”…but is there anything we can actually do to help the self-inflicted ones potentially step out of this sooner rather than the later?

Knowing that perfectionism is directly linked to external validation, interpreted as identity validation by the perfectionism-inflicted colleague, it stroke me today that every time we use “perfect”, “as expected from you” or any other external validation of identity we reinforce this sick behavior 😦

So how about going for a bit of WOW and reinforcing “best-effort” instead?

By asking the right things / setting realistic goals. By asking for experiments and pushing people towards “let’s see how that goes”. By giving short deadlines for getting bite-sized things done.

By readjusting the rules and completely letting go of fancy, corporate, useless areas of “excellence” that add little value to the business.

By constantly offering perspective, drawing perfectionists towards the big picture, and recognizing the best effort instead of the perfect end result. Until they can do it to themselves.