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

by Katherine Morgan Schafler

Perfectionism makes an excellent servant and a terrible master; let’s also be honest about that. Can we just say it?

We both know that in the past, your perfectionism has tortured you in every arena of life: professionally, romantically, artistically, physically, spiritually. That’s because you didn’t understand it as a power and a gift, you didn’t respect it, you tried to deny it, and you reduced it to a proclivity for tidiness and punctuality, though real perfectionism has little to do with either. The more you pushed your perfectionism away, the harder it pushed back. You couldn’t get rid of your perfectionism if you tried (and try you did) because it’s a fundamental component of who you are.

Lucky for you, the deepest, most powerful parts of who you are never abandon you. Whatever you did to numb out or downplay or otherwise mute the powerful energy inside you that you didn’t know what to...

Your problem is not that you’re a perfectionist. Some of the most joyful, extraordinary, fulfilled people in the world are perfectionists. Your problem is that you’re not being your full self.

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.

Ultimately, this book will teach you how to make the single greatest trade you’ll ever make in your life, which is to exchange superficial control for real power.

Perfectionism does not have to be a struggle. You do not have to stop being a perfectionist to be healthy.

Here’s another question I’ve spent years exploring: What if your perfectionism exists to help you?

Some gifts feel like a burden until you understand how they can serve you. Let me show you how your perfectionism is a gift to you, and how you are a gift to the world.

A classic perfectionist writes the first sentence, hates it, tries her best to forget it ever existed, but is inevitably haunted by it for a minimum of eight years.

Psychology professor and researcher Dr. Joachim Stoeber is a leading expert on perfectionism, as well as the author of the book The Psychology of Perfectionism: Theory, Research, and Applications. In a groundbreaking review of perfectionism research,

Stoeber joined esteemed academic scholar and researcher Dr. Kathleen Otto to explore the ways in which adaptive perfectionists thrive.

The review was notable because Stoeber and Otto didn’t just compare adaptive perfectionists to maladaptive perfectionists, they also compared them to non-perfectionists. Among the three groups, adaptive perfectionists demonstrated the highest levels of self-esteem and cooperation, in addition to demonstrating lower levels of “procrastination, defen...

Additional tripartite research (where adaptive, maladaptive, and non-perfectionist groups are compared to one another) indicates that of the three groups, adaptive perfectionists report the highest levels of ...

In line with preceding studies, adaptive perfectionists are the least self-critical[9] and the most interested in working with others.[10] Because adaptive perfectionists demonstrate the lowest levels of both anxiety and depression among the three groups,[11] additional research was conducted to explore whether or not adaptive perfectionism can serve as a protective factor against anxiety and depressi...

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 ac...

Managing perfectionism by telling perfectionists to stop being perfectionists is like managing anger by telling people to “calm down.” Never in the history of the world has this approach worked, yet we continue to barrel through on this dum-dum quest to get perfectionists to fall in love with average.

Perfectionism is meant to be managed, not destroyed. (Perfectionism is also meant to be enjoyed, by the way, but we’ll get to that later.) To manage anything successfully, you need to be able to recognize it in its inception as well as in its most advanced iterations, and everything in between. To begin, we need a better understanding of what perfectionism is.

Where eradication fails, integration succeeds. Taking an integrative approach to perfectionism

You’ve been taught that being a perfectionist is who you are before you learn to be healthy. 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. That’s number one.

Number two is that you need to start appreciating what you have. Stop taking your perfectionism for granted. 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.

The more you learn to manage your perfectionism, however, the less you’re overwhelmed by it.

You begin to appreciate the drive inside you. 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. The school of perfectionism is a top-to-bottom gift.

Number three: you’re perfect. Yes, perfect. Not “perfectly imperfect,” not “good ...

It’s something between sad and strange, how defensive we become about...

We feel righteously entitled to our defensive posture, so much so that we immediately feel comfortable rejecting the categorization out loud

Meanwhile, we rarely defend ourselves out loud and in the moment (or even quietly, later) when someone needles us with a criticism or judgmental remark. We don’t feel instantaneously entitled to reject negative categorizations about ourselves because the bad stuff is easier to believe.

The word perfect comes from the Latin perficere, per (complete) and ficere (do). Something considered perfect is that which is completely done; it exists in a state of completion, wholeness, perfection. When we describe something as perfect, what we’re saying is that there’s nothing we could add to it to make it bet...

You’re not flawless—none of us are—but you are whole, you are complete, and you are perfect.

We so effortlessly acknowledge perfection in children, nature, our best friends—but we deny perfection in ourselves as grown women because what would happen if we didn’t need to add anything to ourselves? What would happen if we understood deeply that we’re not broken, we’re whole? That we’ve always been whole. That we don’t have to fix anything to be ready for life. That we can just show up, now.

The answer is not “We would become powerful.” We already are powerful. The an...

people who feel entitled to step into the internal power we already possess. What would the world look like if we felt as entitled to step into our ...

“That is perfect which has attained its purpose.” You’re perfect because your being alive in the world fulfills a purpose. You attain your purpose by existing, by being the one and only you. As Tolle puts it, “You are a presence in the world, and that is all you ever need to be.” On the day you were born, you were worthy of all the love, joy, freedom, connection, and dignity in the world simply because you were in it. All of that is still true. Everything you achieve in this life is just the clapping after the song. You are the song. — In a world where the desires and ambitions of women are pathologized as a matter of course, the messages in this book may sound radical—they’re not. The opposite of radical, these are basic starting points: you’re already whole. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not a tumbling barrel of weaknesses. You possess rich strengths, and you can use those strengths to lead your life in any direction you choose.

All perfectionists chase that which is unattainable, “unrealistic,” an ideal. 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.

To lead an inspired life yourself, you’re going to familiarize yourself with the perfectionistic impulses inside you, give yourself permission to embrace the energy of your perfectionism, and learn to work with it, not against it. The work is not about fixing anything,...

You’ve been connecting to your weaknesses and faults for long enough. You can tell me if it’s fair to say that you’ve gone beyond connecting, that you’ve centered your identity on those weaknesses. In either case, we’re...

Once you’re connected to your strengths, you’ll have the perspective required to integrate your perfectionistic tendencies into your life in a way that feels healthy for you. Healthy means safe; healthy means empowered; healthy means reflective ...

Well-being can be divided into two basic branches. Hedonic approaches to well-being seek to increase happiness and avoid pain, whereas eudaemonic approaches to well-being seek to increase meaningfulness.[17] Happiness and meaningful experiences are by no means mutually exclusive, but one does not beget the other. Perfectionists find hedonic approaches to wellness to be underwhelming and basic. That’s part of the reason that people complain that perfectionists don’t know how to have fun. It’s not that perfectionists don’t know how to have fun; it’s that perfectionists have strong eudaemonic orientations. Inviting new challenges and building meaning around the ways in which you conquer those challenges is what’s fun for perfectionists, not playing frisbee or whatever other people do.

Eudaemonic lifestyles have been described in the research world as “the striving for perfection that represents the realization of one’s true potential.”[18] Your strong eudaemonic orientation is an important feature of your perfectionism to keep in mind as we move forward. There’s no need to feel like you’re failing because you’re not happy all the time. The absence of cheerfulness is not a disorder.

Your goal is not to be constantly happy or revel day and night in the dopamine-coated candy of immediate gratification. If that were your goal, you’d be hedonically orie...

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.[19] In their article “Do You Play to Win—or to Not Lose?” esteemed psychologists Dr. Heidi Grant and Dr. E. Tory Higgins explain these two underlying motivations well: “The promotion-focused are engaged by inspirational role models, the prevention-focused by cautionary tales.”[20] 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 understand that you are the person who oversees defining what’s meaningful to you, you connect to the power of embracing success on your own terms. As you continue to succeed on your own terms, you build a confidence that’s all your own, one that external accolades have no say in. For adaptive perfectionists, “winning” through traditional markers of success is nice (sometimes it’s really nice), but that’s all it is. External wins and losses don’t make or break you when you’re connected to your inherent self-worth. Along those same lines, it turns out “failure” isn’t that big of a deal to adaptive perfectionists either.

It’s not that adaptive perfectionists are magically inoculated from feeling disappointment; it’s that their appreciation for what they learned and the thrill of trying itself eclipses the disappointment.

You can see then how boldness is a natural side effect of adaptive perfectionism—how could it not be? 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. 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...

Maladaptive perfectionists don’t chase success, they run from failure. Maladaptive perfectionists are driven to avoid failure because maladaptive pe...

As we’ll discuss more in chapter 4, shame avoidance is one of the most exhausting and futile emotional exercises a person can engage in. You can’t enjoy the process when you’re in a maladaptive space—for the same reason that you wouldn’t enjoy being in a car accident just because you weren’t critically injured. When your entire goal is to win for the purpose of avoidin...

This central shift from avoidance of failure to the pursuit of self-defined success is, in a word, freedom. In two wo...