Excellence and perfectionism

Last night, I announced to J. that I needed to revise my self-image a bit because I had a revelation that I wasn't actually a perfectionist. I've been calling myself a 'recovering perfectionist' for years, so this felt like a huge shift. Since I'm writing about it here, I'm evidently still doing some processing. It is processing that I think might be useful for other people, though, so there is more going on than just my own navel gazing.

It was all because of reading Brené Brown's recent book, Atlas of the Heart. Here is what I read:

"Shame is the birthplace of perfectionism. Perfectionism is not striving to be our best or working toward excellence. Healthy striving is internally driven. Perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but potentially all-consuming question: What will people think?

It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the biggest barriers to working toward mastery is perfectionism. In our leadership research, we've learned that achieving mastery required curiosity and viewing mistakes and failures as opportunities for learning. Perfectionism kills curiosity by telling us that we have to know everything or we risk looking 'less than.' Perfectionism tells us that our mistakes and failures are personal defects, so we either avoid trying new things or we barely recover every time we inevitably fall short." (p. 142)

Now, I'll fully embrace the notion that I am internally driven towards excellence with probably a heaping dose of competitiveness thrown in. (Interestingly, she doesn't deal with competitiveness. I would really be interested in what she would have to say about it.) As I read, I realized that the M.O. of perfectionism didn't fit me. I am extremely curious. I am perfectly content to say I don't know something. I am willing to try new things. I don't stop trying new things because of mistakes. (I don't like them, and I may set something aside for a few days while I stew about what went wrong, but they usually cause me to figure out a solution and keep trying.) Nothing of it fit. 

So why have I spent years working under the assumption that I was a perfectionist? 

I think there are two reasons. The first is that we do not tend to separate out an inner drive for excellence from perfectionism. While there is a big difference between needing to do something well and needing to do something perfectly, as a society we tend not to make that distinction. Thus, we end up turning something positive into a negative. And like most things, it probably says something about the giver of the label rather than the receiver. 

So hold this in the back of your mind as I tell you about an incident in one of the gifted classes I was in. This was a pull-out class in grade school, and there are several memories I have from that time that are vivid and not terribly positive. (I would eventually ask my mother to pull me from the class, which she did.) 

In this particular instance, I was working on some project, though I can't remember what. The teacher comes over and tells me how wonderful it is. Well, I remember not being terribly thrilled with it. It wasn't exactly as I had in mind and I also knew that I had not done my best work on it; I hadn't tried very hard. I vividly remember that I could have worked harder on it but didn't. I didn't feel down about myself because of it, it was more a statement of fact. I told the teacher that I didn't think it was all that great, though probably didn't elaborate on why I thought this. She then told me that I needed to not be so hard on myself and to not be a perfectionist. 

This little encounter did two things. First, I lost all respect for that teacher because it seemed too easy to fool her into thinking I had tried really hard but actually hadn't (even though fooling her wasn't my intent). Second, it planted that perfectionist seed in my brain. To want to excel was to be a perfectionist. The two ideas were conflated ever since. 

So I'm not going to call myself a recovering perfectionist anymore. Instead, I am going to embrace my desire to excell and do things well. This doing things well is a process... and it always has been. There is not specific goal that once I reach it I'll be done. Instead, I know there is always more to learn, more ways to improve. I have never actually desired to be perfect or do something perfectly because I have always known that it is an impossible goal. But it feels so freeing to give myself permission to have a desire to excel without it feeling like a pathology I need to either hide or get healed from.

[This also reminds me that there is another piece of that early gifted education experience that I've been meaning to write about, so I'll probably tackle that tomorrow.]