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

by Katherine Morgan Schafler

Can you really learn to use your perfectionism to get you far in life without allowing it to ruin your life? Can you really take pride and joy in what you’re doing even if you’re failing horribly at it, so much so that failing feels the same as winning? Yes, you can. Adaptive perfectionists do it every day.

Embracing adaptive perfectionism involves a series of choices made repeatedly over time, the first of which is choosing to focus on a growth mindset.

You’re probably familiar with Stanford psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck’s theory of “growth mindset” versus “fixed mindset.” Dweck’s idea is that people operate under one of two basic belief systems; they either believe they’re capable of growth and development (they have a growth mindset) or they believe their capacities are static (they have a fixed mindset).

Your history of false starts is not evidence that your capacity to heal, grow, and thrive is static. Your history of false starts is irrelevant—I don’t care about it, and neither should you. Allow your history of long and winding false starts to represent your abiding commitment to discover your authentic self.

To challenge a fixed mindset, understand that when you misidentify the problem, you misidentify the solution. You’ve been relying on a faulty solution: trying to be less of yourself, trying to control who you are. The solution is to be more of yourself, in a healthy way.

Choosing a growth mindset requires you to take a moment to hold space for possibility. 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. You can resist perfectionism or you can embrace it. When you stop resisting perfectionism, you’re practicing nonresistance. Engaging in nonresistance frees up energy. You are the person responsible for directing where your newly liberated energy goes next. If you direct your energy in curative and intentional ways, you can build a life that you want instead of a life that feels hard all the time. 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.

Rupa had made a rookie mistake, a mistake so common for women that it can unfortunately be considered a rite of passage into womanhood: trading the self-defined life for prescriptive balance. Rupa felt cheated out of the peaceful-yet-engaging, healthy, emotionally regulated lifestyle promised to her if she worked less, found a hobby, socialized more, ate well, and focused on “putting herself out there” romantically. It was a broken trade from the start; it always is.

Rupa was staring at her patchy, dark ceiling approximately four nights a week because 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.

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?

In stark contrast, I notice a bright, expansive quality whenever women describe the joys and benefits of getting older. Their description always goes something like this: “When you get to a certain age, you’ve learned to no longer care. You finally accept that you can’t please everyone, so you try to please yourself. You trust yourself to know what you need. You do your best to get to the most conscientious place possible, and from that pla...

I don’t know one balanced woman. I know a lot of women who are two extra days in a week away from feeling balanced, or one professional housecleaning service away from feeling balanced, or one generous extension on the deadline away from feeling balanced, or three entire days of their children in someone else’s loving and competent care away from feeling balanced. I know a lot of women who, like Rupa and like old versions of myself, structured a very balanced-looking life only to feel something between fidgety and haunted by the tap tap tapping. It’s easy to get hooked on the feeling that you’re really close to achieving balance, like a gambler at a blackjack table playing just one more time for the fifty-fourth time—but alas, the house always wins. Balance remains one step ahead, the ever-elusive prize of female modernity.

And yet, in my practice, women are constantly reporting their failure to achieve balance to me as if everyone but them has it figured out.

Our contemporary view of balance is based on the notion that your life could ever fit on a to-do list in the first place, and that once you finish the to-do list and match your problems to their adjacent solutions, you can expect to feel a satisfying click, like a seat belt snapping into place. If you haven’t experienced the clicking yet, it’s because you’re not balanced enough. You’re not doing it right. Being “balanced” has become synonymous with being “healthy.” If you’re not a balanced woman, you’re not a healthy woman.

Do you think it’s a coincidence that our culture embraces, celebrates, and syndicates female perfectionists when their perfectionism is expressed through improving and decorating the home, hosting social gatherings, and tidying up? The celebration serves as both reward and signal: this is how to behave.

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. As with all implicit messaging, we not only unconsciously hear it, we unconsciously internalize it.

The push for increased balance is not a response to the state of women’s health; it’s a response to the state of women’s power. Unfortunately, the implicit messaging works. Women scatter their energy on a wild goose chase to find balance while internalizing their perfectly healthy desire for more as a deficiency in gratitude.

If you’re not leading a balanced life right now, that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. You don’t have to “hit the gym” until you’re too tired to be mad or make longer lists in your gratitude journal until you stop wanting things. You can be angry and full of love. You can be grateful and want more. You do not need to balance any of this out.

Wanting more may feel subversive and “dirty” to women who are taught that their perfectionism (read: ambition) is bad and wrong, in the same way that being sexually aroused can feel subversive and “dirty” to women who are taught that their sexual desire is wrong. Wanting more is an affront to everything you’ve learned about how to be a grateful, healthy, and balanced woman. A woman who wants more is ungrateful, a man who wants more is a visionary. A woman who seeks power is “power hungry,” a man who seeks power is an “alpha male.” These narratives are boring and raggedy. Be done.

Do not allow your ambition to be pathologized. Refuse to apologize for or disguise your insatiable desire to excel. Reject entirely the notion that you need to be fixed. Reclaim your perfectionism now. If only for the briefest moment, allow yourself to consider a radical thought in a misogynist world: there’s nothing wrong with you.

Because balance doesn’t exist, you’re either operating under or over your energetic equilibrium.

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. Tensio...

Perfectionism draws on a prototypical tension—wanting what you can’t have. You want th...

if you don’t honor the drive in you to actively explore the ideal, you’re likely to experience an enduring sense of defeatism. (In other words, you’re gonna feel like a loser.)

I don’t mean “loser” in the socially comparative context, in relation to others, but in the sense of losing touch with one’s full self. Perfectionists “confess” in therapy that when they try to stop excelling, they feel muted. They feel like they’ve lost something; they feel like losers. The trick is not to figure out how to stop wanting to excel so much—for true perfectionists, that always backfires. The trick is to figure out how to excel based on your values, not someone else’s values.

All perfectionists have vocal inner critics. Adaptive perfectionists learn how to respond to their inner critics with compassion, thereby disabling negative self-talk from having power over them—but the tape still plays. Narcissists don’t have inner critics as much as they have inner superfans telling them they’re geniuses, they’re the best, and that the rules shouldn’t apply to people as special as they are. Narcissism involves a sense of grandiosity that perfectionism doesn’t.

Conversely, a perfectionist in an adaptive mindset sources their primary sense of validation from themselves, while a perfectionist in a maladaptive mindset doesn’t feel soothed by reassurance. For reasons we’re about to delve into, excessive admiration and reassurance in fact makes the maladaptive perfectionist feel more insecure.

Adaptive perfectionists find it to be an honor and a privilege to have discovered an endeavor worthy of endless pursuit. When your bottomless striving is value driven and executed in a healthy way, it’s a singular joy. The reward of doing work you know you can never finish is that you get to continue to do the work.

Compulsively striving towards an impossible ideal is the base of perfectionism. Why you strive and how you strive determines whether your perfectionism is healthy or not.

Adaptive perfectionists are connected to their self-worth. When you know you’re already whole and complete (i.e., perfect) as you are, you’re operating from a mindset of abundance. You already have what you need, and you feel secure. For adaptive perfectionists, striving towards an ideal is a celebratory expression of that security.

Maladaptive perfectionists do not feel whole or secure. They feel broken, and they operate from a mindset of deficit. Their striving is driven by the need to compensate, to fix what’s broken, and to try to offer substitutes for or try to hide what’s missing.

It’s impossible for you to ever show up empty-handed because you’re always bringing you.

It’s important to understand that detaching from your self-worth doesn’t feel like I’m a piece of trash, so let me desperately scramble to make up for that. Typically, the disconnection is experienced more subtly. It’s nuanced with a tinge of misguided optimism.

Being disconnected from your self-worth feels more like this: Okay, I’m almost there, I’m close, so I’ll be able to enjoy my life soon, as soon as I’m ‘done,’ as soon as I’m skinny, as soon as I make over X amount of dollars, as soon as I get the job, as soon as I get pregnant, as soon as I’m accepted into that school, or my children are accepted into that school, as soon as I make partner, as soon as I’m in a relationship, as soon as I can buy the person I love the present they want, I can feel good about myself as soon as I’ve earned it. When you’re disconnected from your self-worth, you think your ability to feel joy is won through goal attainment.

I wonder if I wrote this entire book just to write this next sentence: You don’t earn your way to joy. Joy is a birthright. So is love, freedom, dignity, and connection. As the inimitable James Baldwin said, “Your crown h...

Target Parking Lot Moments

As civilized people do, my friend Selena texted me to ask if she could call. I called her immediately. She was in a Target store parking lot, alone in her car. As you and I both know, that could mean anything. I braced myself.

Each type of perfectionist has their own way of expressing the dynamics inherent in maladaptive perfectionism, but regardless of context, the raw formula is the same: you get separated from your self-worth, and you think restoring your worth hinges on an external outcome. You start trying to compensate for something you don’t need to compensate for. You start trying to earn something that already belongs to you.

For classic perfectionists, it looks like refusing to acknowledge that no matter how much predictability, exterior beauty, and organization you create, some moments are uncertain in a way you can’t control.

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. The confidence of having already won liberates your potential. When your self-worth isn’t on the line, it becomes easier to take risks. You get more of what you want because you’re more willing to risk trying. 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. People can feel the attendant anxiety of a person who is desperate. If you want to be a leader in your field, in your family, in your community, in the world, you need to learn how to be powerful, not controlling. Nobody wants to work for or be around people who are controlling. 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. Relying on a strategy of superfici...

Think about the leaders you gravitate towards. Is their authority based on control or power? You can be an authority figure without having power (the boss that no one listens to or respects), or you can be a leader without having official authority (the one employee who influences the decision-making of the entire team). Power isn’t granted by titles. Anyone can be powerful.

Perfectionists are perfectionists because they love to court ideals. Goals are terminal; ideals are continual. 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.

Perfectionism reflects our natural desire to experience total alignment with our inner and outer worlds. It’s an attempt to merge the ideal (embracing what’s possible) with reality (embracing what is). The only way to fully bridge this gulf is to become present. When you’re present, you embrace both what is and what’s possible simultaneously. You’re achieving an ideal—the ideal state of awareness.

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. When you’re present, your life now is not dictated by that of your past; it’s dictated by possibility. You’re encased in your own wholeness and at the same time, you are utterly free. A misconception about being present is that presence equals happiness. We take deep breaths, fix our posture, then wait. We’re waiting to feel something. Shiny, clean, ready—happy. The way people in car commercials look like they feel. You can be present and feel tired. You can be present and feel heartbroken. You can be present and not feel ready. Presence guarantees freedom, not happiness.

When I listen to people describe perfect moments, they’re not describing the material; they’re describing feeling whole and connected. When I listen to people describe moments that “should’ve been perfect” but weren’t, they’re describing exterior, superficial perfection amidst an internal sense of feeling fragmented.

We find superficial perfection to be stilted and dull because it’s not imbued with presence; other people can copy it. You can perfectly paint by numbers without making a single mistake, but you’ll never create a masterpiece that way. Something will be missing; it’s your signature presence—that’s what makes it “completely done,” that’s what makes it perfect.

It’s not a coincidence that the people who rise and remain at the top of their fields are the ones who feel present doing what they’re doing. Those are the people whom we feel do their job “perfectly.” When Beyoncé steps onto a stage, she’s not entertaining us w...