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April 20 - April 30, 2025
Messy perfectionists take over the world when they learn how to channel their enthusiasm into single, intentional missions they can execute in dynamic ways.
Intense perfectionists want a perfect outcome. While some intense perfectionists focus on a grand vision, others’ vision can be pedestrian.
A classic perfectionist may share a similar goal, but the difference is that classic perfectionists understand that it’s not reasonable to impose their expectations on the people and environment around them.
A quality that often works to their advantage professionally and to their detriment personally, intense perfectionists don’t care about being liked.
People around intense perfectionists who haven’t yet learned how to manage their perfectionism are susceptible to becoming collateral emotional casualties.
Anger is a powerful, healthy, necessary, and motivating force. Dysfunction arises when you use your anger to hurt yourself or others, which intense perfectionists tend to do (consciously or not).
Intense perfectionists see nothing redemptive in the process, such as what they learned along the way. Unless they hit their goal, it was all for nothing.
Other people seem to be able to connect to joy and a sense of purpose regardless of the outcome in a way intense perfectionists can’t understand or relate to.
Meaning is what fills our experiences up. Without meaning, victories aren’t weighted; they can’t be felt and they’re hollow. There’s a ten-second victory lap and then it’s on to the next goal.
It’s true that some intense perfectionists do generate breakthroughs. What’s also true is that all kinds of different people generate breakthroughs; intense perfectionists don’t have a monopoly on being visionary leaders.
Intense perfectionists managing their perfectionism constructively become high-gravitas leaders who are intoxicating and inspiring to be around.
If you’re a messy perfectionist entrepreneur with a brilliant idea, the smart move would be to get some intense and classic perfectionists on your team ASAP, or you’ll never make it past naming the company (clearly the most fun part).
The medical-model language in particular (cure, treat, heal, affliction, etc.) cements in our psyche the association between perfectionism and disease.
As opposed to engaging in negative coping styles like ruminating or avoiding conflict, adaptive perfectionists take problem-focused and solution-oriented approaches to stress.[4]
This is perhaps because adaptive perfectionism has been shown to be a significant predictor of encountering “flow” states, moments of intense yet effortless engagement with a task or goal.[6]
Mainstream discourse on perfectionism doesn’t include adaptive perfectionism. Instead, we decry and reduce the entire spectrum of perfectionism into its negative iteration.
Perfectionism is experienced in a visceral way, as a deep and integral part of selfhood, as opposed to something external that you encounter.
When you try to get rid of your perfectionism, all you’re doing is hemorrhaging energy at the opportunity cost of attending to your wellness. Perfectionism is meant to be managed, not destroyed.
Ambition is not a universal trait. Some people are not interested in continually pushing themselves towards their highest potential or chasing an ideal.
Too much chaos would ensue if everyone tried to break all the limits at once.
Unlike perfectionists, some people can enjoy daydreaming about ideals without experiencing attendant pressure to work towards actualizing them.
Before we seek to understand, we seek to diagnose. Instead of saying, “Let’s figure out what’s happening here,” we say, “Let’s figure out what’s wrong with you.”
The larger culture is more focused on dysfunctional iterations of perfectionism because the mental health industry is built on an illness model; we’re more focused on dysfunctional iterations of every psychological experience.
Mitigating the risk factors and emphasizing the protective factors from an informed, emotionally aware place is what managing any aspect of your mental health looks like.
Kindly get that “I’m a recovering perfectionist” nonsense out of your head. There’s nothing about who you are that you need to recover from.
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.
You see that your drive isn’t there to hurt you, it’s there to usher you towards your potential. You shift from avoiding your drive to honoring it, which requires you to stop misdirecting your energy. Then you get to grow beyond your wildest dreams.
When we describe something as perfect, what we’re saying is that there’s nothing we could add to it to make it better. Nothing more is needed because you can’t add to something that’s already whole.
You don’t earn your wholeness; you’re born with it.
Limited perceptions don’t dictate reality. The moon is always full and whole, even when it hangs like a slither in the sky, even when you can’t find it in the sky.
Everything you achieve in this life is just the clapping after the song. You are the song.
Perfection is a paradox—you can never become perfect, and you already are perfect. A perfectionist in an adaptive mindset believes both those statements are true.
adaptive perfectionists understand that ideals are not meant to be achieved, they’re only meant to inspire.
Hedonic approaches to well-being seek to increase happiness and avoid pain, whereas eudaemonic approaches to well-being seek to increase meaningfulness.[17]
Eudaemonic lifestyles have been described in the research world as “the striving for perfection that represents the realization of one’s true potential.”[18]
Perfectionists are bored by hedonism. Perfectionists love working. Perfectionists love a challenge. Perfectionists want to contribute, create, and grow.
You’re adapting to the most authentic version of yourself. Adaptive perfectionists don’t acclimate to external environments or expectations; their adaptation is an internal process.
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.
External wins and losses don’t make or break you when you’re connected to your inherent self-worth.
People hold themselves back because they’re afraid to fail, but when you learn to extract meaning from the process instead of the outcome, you can’t fail.
Incidentally, do you know how much more often you win when you’re not intimidated by losing?
Embracing adaptive perfectionism involves a series of choices made repeatedly over time, the first of which is choosing to focus on a growth mindset.
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. Not only do you not mind working on the puzzle; you also extract enjoyment from working on the puzzle.
Your history of false starts is not evidence that your capacity to heal, grow, and thrive is static.
You don’t heal by changing who you are; you heal by learning how to be yourself in the world.
Holding space for possibility looks like taking a breath. A real breath. Get the air past your throat. Consider that a life in which you readily and often feel joy is possible for you.
Boldness, authenticity, an endless drive you don’t even have to try to cultivate, the confidence to fail, learn, and grow as you saturate your life with more and more meaning and improve yourself and the world around you—that’s perfectionism.
In case no one’s mentioned it before, when you build a life you want, it still feels hard a lot of the time. The difference is that the difficulty feels, to say the least, worth it.
There has been little to describe the psychological lives and ways of gifted women, talented women, creative women. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The stakes are higher when you say something out loud because the truth becomes clearer to you. We also don’t speak what we know out loud because while acknowledging the truth can be liberating, it’s almost always painful first.
