The Perfectionist

Over the last few days I have been reflecting on the fact that I can have a tendency to be a perfectionist in quite a few areas. I try to get A's in all my classes. I hate doing anything half hearted. I'm just an "all out" kind of guy. Of course, in many areas I am far off from perfection and how I deal with those areas is actually kind of interesting. I can sometimes devalue that part of my life (it's not that big of a deal to keep your room clean) or pretend like it's impossible to get any better with that (acting like it's impossible for me to remember names any better). Now perfectionism is useful in driving us to perform well but it can become a problem when life becomes unbalanced or when we are crippled by the perfectionism in some way.

Now I had been thinking that I would like to be more helpful around the house. But the problem was I had only been thinking about it. I started to think about committing to a drastic change but something was holding me back. At first I didn't have a clue what was wrong. I wanted to be a nicer, more caring person but I didn't want to commit to it. The problem was, as a perfectionist, I was afraid that I was going to fail. If I committed to change then I would be raising the bar for my own standards of how I should act.

My perfectionism couldn't handle this. I could deal with being disappointed with my behavior from time to time. But raising the standard would likely mean that I would fail more, at least at first. So deep down I resisted the change because I was afraid to fail. Once someone pointed this out to me everything suddenly clicked. I realized that I couldn't accept that I am a work in progress. I should applaud myself for wanting to change and not be deterred by initial setbacks. I was glad because once this perfectionism was brought to the light, the truth suddenly made it seem silly.

Perhaps my case is not unique. Could there be ways in which you resist change simply because you fear failure? Maybe you tried before and failed. No matter how many times we fail, it is always important to try to live up to a greater standard. Sometimes we simply need to remind ourselves that our goals are worth the pain of a few setbacks.