(LinkedIn jingle)
- Do any of these situations sound familiar?
When working on a project,
your focus is on the product, not the process.
You believe effort and attention are not enough.
Results must always be productive,
and most importantly, successful.
When things go wrong or you do not achieve
at a certain level, you feel that you have failed.
You're afraid that you won't be able to live up
to your own expectations.
You believe that if you continually achieve
and look good doing it,
that that will make you successful and happy.
However, when you do achieve success,
the satisfaction from it is temporary and fleeting.
You try to beat others to the punch
by being your own harshest critic.
You are very conscious of situations
that would give others the perception
that you are not perfect,
and you feel secretly judgemental
of people who fall short of perfection.
These are some of the hallmarks
and manifestations of perfectionism,
the constant striving for unreachable perfection.
And if you haven't connected the dots already,
imposter syndrome often triggers perfectionism.
When we feel lacking in some way,
we drive ourselves to be perfect
and we hold ourselves to ridiculously high standards
that we would never hold for others.
This can cause us to expend energy and effort
towards the wrong pursuits, working in fits and spurts,
pushing ourselves to exhaustion
and running ourselves into the ground.
Perfectionism stands in the way of creativity
because of the rigid thinking behind it.
Creativity calls for flexibility, curiosity, exploration,
and learning from so-called mistakes and failures.
When we have an idea of how it's supposed to be
in our heads, but can't ever achieve it,
how can we grow creatively?
Our goal then is to release clinging
to trying to be perfect in order to make room
for a more creative mindset to take hold.
This creative dose is called excellence versus perfection.
It's important to realize and understand
that perfection does not equal excellence.
That's right.
Perfection and excellence are two totally different things.
What's the difference?
Striving for excellence means that you are
in active pursuit of experiences
that you learn from and enjoy,
and then cultivating skills, confidence,
and eventually mastery from them.
Striving for perfection, on the other hand,
typically results in negative feelings
from not attaining a certain level of achievement,
and then being overly critical
of your performance and perceived mistakes.
There's a great quote by Aristotle,
which says, 'We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.'
To work on building excellence
and prevailing over perfectionism,
give yourself permission to practice
at whatever you're doing.
By practicing, you start to build the habit
of the activity that will eventually lead to excellence.
As you strive for expanding your own creativity,
skills and knowledge, keep reminding yourself
that the goal is excellence, not perfection,
and then enjoy the growth process.
(inspiring music)