The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

by Katherine Morgan Schafler

You admit that you’d never be satisfied with an average life—you long to excel, and you know it. You acknowledge just how much you thrive by being pushed—you need a challenge or your boredom risks tipping over into a depressive episode.

Women receive an eternal fountain of directives every day about how to be less. How to weigh less, how to want less, how to be less emotional, how to say yes less, certainly how to be less of a perfectionist. This is a book about more. About how to get more of what you want by being more of who you are.

Perfectionists are intelligent people who understand that everything can’t work out perfectly all the time. What they sometimes have trouble with is understanding why they still feel so disappointed by imperfection in the face of that intellectual concession. What they sometimes wonder about is why they feel so compelled to endlessly strive. What they’re sometimes confused by is what they’re striving for in the first place. What they often question is why they can’t just enjoy relaxing “like a normal person.” What they want to know is who they are outside of what they accomplish.

Perfectionists are people who consistently notice the difference between an ideal and a reality, and who strive to maintain a high degree of personal accountability. This results in the perfectionist experiencing, more often than not, a compulsion to bridge the gulf between reality and an ideal themselves.

When left unchallenged, the perfectionist mindset hooks itself on the motive to perfect (as opposed to improve upon or accept) that which could be made better.

so enjoy the energy of the perfectionist. Always pushing limits, forever poking the bear, unafraid to travel to the depth of their anger or desire, eternally seeking a connection to something bigger, to more.

Acknowledging that you want more is an act of boldness, and every perfectionist (when they’re being honest, which people generally are in therapy) flaunts a bold streak I’m magnetically drawn towards.

Highly self-disciplined, classic perfectionists are adept at presenting in a uniform way, making it difficult to take their emotional temperature. Are they thrilled? Enraged? Having the best orgasm of their life? Who knows. They’re either stoic or smiling as if they’re about to have their picture taken. While it’s easy to interpret this engagement style as inauthentic or closed off, it’s anything but.

It’s not mere talent that rises to the top, it’s persistence. While change does always involve loss, not changing involves a much deeper loss.

Say, for example, that an intense perfectionist racks up $14,900 worth of sales commissions, just shy of their self-imposed $15,000 goal (which was likely an arbitrary marker in the first place) but still breaking a company record. They know they’re supposed to be somewhat pleased with the result and can objectively register the net positive, but they cannot access an emotional sense of excitement or redemptive pride in their achievement because they were short of their goal and the outcome is all that matters.

As intense perfectionists learn to identify and connect to the process over the outcome, they experience more joy, connection, and interpersonal fulfillment—all without giving up their high standards.

Mainstream discourse on perfectionism doesn’t include adaptive perfectionism. Instead, we decry and reduce the entire spectrum of perfectionism into its negative iteration. This means that the prevailing dialogue about perfectionism is not actually about perfectionism; it’s about maladaptive perfectionism.

Unlike perfectionists, some people can enjoy daydreaming about ideals without experiencing attendant pressure to work towards actualizing them. Feeling their potential press upon them from the inside out daily and acutely is not their experience, as it is for perfectionists. They don’t encounter a chronic restlessness to achieve, excel, and advance. They’re not haunted like you will be if you don’t give yourself the opportunity to grow into your best self.

Not everyone gets to experience that impulse you carry, pushing you to explore the bounds of possibility for yourself and the world around you. Perfectionists don’t allow themselves to be constrained by what’s “realistic”; that one mindset advantage alone is invaluable.

As a perfectionist, you have a lot of energy inside of you, more than you might know what to do with. But what if you figured out what to do with it? As long as you’re playing small, that energy rattles inside you and makes you ache. Stop cursing the ache and become curious about why it’s there. If you’re a perfectionist, you want more of something. What is it? Why do you want that? How do you imagine getting what you want will make you feel? Perfectionism invites a deep, unending exploration of who you are and what you most desire from this life.

Unlike a perfectionist in a maladaptive mindset, however, adaptive perfectionists understand that ideals are not meant to be achieved, they’re only meant to inspire. That’s how adaptive perfectionists get to spend their lives, inspired. Pulled towards something bigger than themselves, a grand task they can never finish, something worthy of a lifetime of striving.

I’m already driven to succeed. Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t. A lot of perfectionists think they’re driven by success when what they’re really driven by is the avoidance of failure—two very different animals. When you’re driven to achieve success, that’s called promotion-oriented motivation. When you’re driven to avoid failure, that’s called prevention-oriented motivation.

As you learn the skills to adapt inwardly, to your version of success based on your values, your striving takes on more excitement, more meaning, and—most significantly—more joy. Why? As research suggests, adaptive perfectionists play to win; they’re more likely to enjoy the process because their efforts are fueled by optimism and reward seeking. Maladaptive perfectionists, on the other hand, play to not lose; they’re more likely to experience stress and worry because their efforts are fueled by fear.[21]

when you learn to extract meaning from the process instead of the outcome, you can’t fail. It goes back to eudaemonic living—finding the meaning is the success.

Incidentally, do you know how much more often you win when you’re not intimidated by losing? As Thomas J. Watson said, “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”

When you know success is just a matter of trial and error, you don’t mind the trial and you don’t mind the error.

she was coordinating her life to a grid: what she was told to do on the horizontal axis, who she was expected to be on the vertical. Layer atop this grid the ever-pressing dictum for women to be, as writer Karen Kilbane puts it, “pathologically grateful,” and you get a silent, invisible, internalized sense of failure: What’s wrong with me? Anyone would be grateful for this. I can turn this around. I need to get it together. This is the way so many ambitious women spend their twenties, thirties, and beyond—building the “balanced life” they were told everyone wants, then not wanting it themselves.

Rupa finished her “be balanced” to-do list, then she waited. Nothing. The opposite of satisfied, she felt a crawling, muffled, scratchy anxiety. It’s always a sobering sight to behold—the quiet, anticlimactic, slow-drip shock of the “finally balanced woman.” Sitting on my couch too exhausted to do anything other than tell the truth, asking me (which is to say, asking herself) some version of the brutally rhetorical question Is this it?

What’s culturally incentivized is not being healthy for yourself, it’s seeming healthy for others.

ad nauseam;

Reinforcing the tempering of women’s expression of power is billed as “finding balance,” an instruction overwhelmingly directed towards women, not men.

In the same way the word bossy served to regulate authoritative, traditionally masculine behaviors in girls and women, the word perfectionist has quietly risen to regulate ambition and power.

You are allowed to want more and get it. Wanting more is healthy. Your desires are real and important, and they do not have to make sense to anyone other than you.

A woman who wants more is ungrateful, a man who wants more is a visionary.

Because balance doesn’t exist, you’re either operating under or over your energetic equilibrium. In other words, you’re in the realm of being either underwhelmed or overwhelmed. Perfectionists reliably choose to operate over their equilibriums.

We all feel tension at times. We notice the space between the ideal we envision and the reality plunked down in our laps. The noticing creates a tightening, which then seeks an outlet for release. Feeling the tightening and seeking release is an everyday experience for perfectionists. Perfectionists live with a tension inside them that never goes away. Like a light that makes a sound when it’s on, you get used to the hum. Tension doesn’t always feel good, but there’s value in it. Tension energizes and stirs awareness. Tension catalyzes action. Tension makes everything more interesting. What we do with the tensions we experience is what makes life such a colorful, redemptive, tragic, joyful, and surprising experience. Tension is the wild card.

Accepting that perfectionism is compulsive means accepting that, as a perfectionist, you will always be compelled to actively strive towards the ideal your perfectionist type represents. If Lena suppressed her compulsion to excel towards her specific ideal—if she set her speed to average and pushed cruise control, something inside of her would go dark in the same way that if an artist suppressed their compulsion to make art, something inside of them would go dark. No matter what the artist does, no matter how much they achieve in other areas of their life, they’ll feel like a loser until they make some art. This can’t be helped. It shouldn’t be helped. It can feel scary and limiting to accept the compulsive nature of perfectionism, to accept the compulsive nature of any strong natural impulse. We want to control the degree to which we are compelled to do anything. We want to feel free. You don’t achieve liberation through control; you achieve liberation through acceptance.

As much as she tried to find a way to let go of her impulse to strive—as hard as she tried to “relax” and embrace average without feeling like a loser, Lena couldn’t. You won’t be able to either. This is always the most provocative part of explaining perfectionism—saying that unless you’re striving to excel in some way, you’re going to feel like a loser. People don’t like to hear that. For one, it sounds like a judgment against average, which it’s not.

The trick is to figure out how to excel based on your values, not someone else’s values.

High strivers could retire young, say at fifty-five, sit on the beach all day, and soak in the pleasure of doing nothing, indefinitely, for years. While the beach scenario is the dream for millions of people, it would be an exile of sandy horror for perfectionists. An absolute nonstarter.

Even when perfectionists achieve deep satisfaction upon the completion of a goal, they always notice areas that could technically be improved upon.

Compulsivity in OCD can also reflect rigid rules applied for no logical reason: I can’t walk into a room without first tapping on the doorframe three times. Perfectionists may also engage in rigid behaviors, but the rigidity holds a connection to reality and logic: I can’t send an email until I read it three times over because it may have grammatical errors and I don’t want to seem incompetent.

Emotional perfectionism: I want to experience a perfect emotional state. Cognitive perfectionism: I want to understand perfectly. Behavioral perfectionism: I want to behave perfectly in my roles and perform perfectly in my tasks. Object perfectionism: I want this external thing—art, the surface of my desk, my face, the movie I’m directing, the presentation deck, the “About” page on my website, my child’s hair . . . to exist in a perfect state. Process perfectionism: I want this process (an airline flight, sobriety, going to church, giving a presentation, a marriage) to begin, continue, and end perfectly.

I wasn’t connected to my self-worth in that moment, though, which didn’t mean I felt totally worthless; it meant I was holding off on fully living my life—enjoying the present moment—until I earned it. I made my joy contingent upon my performance instead of my existence.

Control is limited and transactionally owned. If you’re a person in a position of control and you give someone else control, you have relinquished your control. Power, by contrast, is unlimited and can be shared. If you’re a person in a position of power and you empower someone else (you give someone else power), you haven’t lost any power.

Power is understanding the immutability of your worth. From that place, you’re not desperate for an outcome to unfold in a particular way, because you know you’re already worthy of whatever the outcome would grant you. You give yourself permission to feel joy, love, dignity, freedom, and connection now. You already won.

When you’re disconnected from your self-worth, you’re fixated on control. You may be experienced as demanding or needy to be around because you’re so attached to a specific outcome’s unfolding. You need something to happen in a certain way to feel relief. Whether you realize it or not, you are desperate.

Control encourages restriction; power encourages freedom. Control is petty; power is generous. Control micromanages; power inspires. Control manipulates; power influences. Control is myopic—you have to plan everything one precise move at a time. Power is visionary—it affords you the great luxury of taking leaps of faith. Power is the upgrade.

Your memories of perfect moments are memories of moments in which you were most present.

After a perfectionist reaches a goal, they always create a new goal, a bigger goal, because their true interest lies in chasing the ideal that the goal represents.

There’s an odd irreverence that accompanies being present. You don’t need anything to happen. You don’t need anyone to like you. You’re fully relieved of the small-mindedness of your thoughts, detached from the strain of trying to bend the future towards you and make everything happen now.

For a perfectionist in an adaptive mindset, presence is the main priority. Whatever you’re doing, thinking, or feeling, you seek to be present first. Some people describe this level of engagement with the present moment as being “in the zone.” Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it being “in flow.”

Being present can also be described more generally: freeing yourself, letting go, opening yourself up to possibilities, living without dictation from the past or instruction from the future, making room for spontaneity. What all these descriptions have in common is their emphasis on losing control.

a perfectionist in a maladaptive mindset, performance is the main priority. You must excel, even if you don’t care about what you’re doing, you don’t want to be doing it, you take no joy in doing it, or it actively hurts you to do it. Control is maximized because when you feel powerless, being controlling feels like the responsible thing to do.

We think perfectly understanding “why” can help us control our negative feelings about what occurred. Power is found in accepting and processing the undesirable feelings within you, not by erasing them.