Release painstaking perfectionism and shift to healthy striving in caregiving
Learn how to choose excellence over perfectionism to serve your loved one from a place of greater authenticity, compassion, and wholeness.
“Perfectionism rarely begets perfection, or satisfaction — only disappointment.”
If you identify as a perfectionist, you tend to “know” how a situation or person, including you, is supposed to be. You work harder than most to help everyone achieve that ideal. Then you watch with dismay as those situations and people, including you, invariably fall short of the mark.
When burdened with perfectionism in your caregiving journey, your critical eye and seemingly irresistible compulsion to fix or improve “just one more thing” won’t let you rest—even when you feel wrung out. “Later!” you tell yourself, but later seldom becomes now. So, a sense of burden, resentment, irritation, and exhaustion becomes your new normal.
It can be all too easy to cling to perfectionism. Even when your perfectionism is damaging your body and relationships, rendering you chronically irritable and even paralyzing your decision-making—you cling to it as if refining just this one thing will somehow make everything better.
By now, you’ve likely come to realize that perfecting doesn’t make things more perfect. The perfectionist in you keeps moving the goalpost back and your striving toward these unattainable ideals continues unabated. It’s time to get off the hamster wheel of correcting and perfecting, not only for your sake but for the sake of your loved one.
In this article, you will learn how to release perfectionism and adopt a “healthy striving for excellence” model, a more effective standard for wholeheartedly serving your loved one.
99 percent of the journey of releasing perfectionism is admitting to yourself why part of you is attached to it.
Let’s face it. We might not like the effects of perfectionism on our already weary hearts, minds, and bodies. But, too often, we feel quite attached to our perfectionism. We furrow our brows or shrug our shoulders as we continue tidying up the room, editing the spreadsheet and straightening up yet another thing. We tell our friends and family that we don’t know how to let perfectionism go. However, we often fail to admit just how attached we are to being a “perfectionist” – which is why we won’t stop.
The first step in overcoming perfectionism is sincerely wanting to do it in the first place and connecting with the parts of ourselves that feel protected by our perfectionism and don’t want to let it go.
Here are a few common reasons why certain parts of you might hold onto perfectionism even as other parts of you are crying out, “Enough already!”
As you take a look at the list below, keep the following in mind:
Do you resonate with any of these? If so, which ones?
What other reasons might you have for holding onto perfectionism?
You may want to journal and/or share your reflections in the Steadii community or with your Steadii advocate.
→ Pride: Maybe you have a bit of egoic pride attached to being more hardworking, careful, self-sacrificing, or responsible than seemingly everyone else. If this feels even a bit like what is going on for you, consider whether you are choosing your ego (and sense of superiority) over your self-love and self-care.
→ Fear of criticism: Perhaps you have never fully dealt with your fear of criticism, whether it’s a fear of being criticized by actual people or by people whose voices you previously internalized. Those who fear criticism sometimes try to adopt standards higher than those around them to avoid the pain and shame of ever experiencing another's disapproval or judgment.
Are you willing to practice approving yourself while accepting that some people will always find something to criticize about you and that you will work yourself to death trying to earn their approval?
→ Fear of failure: “Perfectionism is not as much the desire for excellence, as it is the fear of failure couched in procrastination.” (Dan Milleg)
Related to the fear of criticism is the fear of failure. You fear failing your loved one. You fear failing yourself. You fear failing everyone! However, it’s important to remember that perfectionism doesn’t make you fail less. Perfectionism is about adopting such high standards that you end up experiencing failure nearly every day—an experience that can be so demoralizing as it zaps your energy and enthusiasm for caregiving.
→ Fear of being out of control: Perhaps your perfectionism is about trying to maintain a sense (however illusory) of being in control. You are trying to fix the outer world to regain a sense of being okay inside of you.
If this is the case, it is essential to recognize that people with a perfectionistic mindset actually experience significant feelings of powerlessness—especially caregivers. Striving to be perfect can make you feel more out of control in the long term, leading to a spiral of powerlessness.
After accepting that you’ve done all you can to the best of your ability in the caregiving context, shift your focus to what you can control—however small, in a different area of your life.
Again, these are just a few examples of how we often use perfectionism to protect a vulnerable part of ourselves. As vulnerability researcher and author Brené Brown observes, however, it doesn’t work. She writes: “Perfectionism is a twenty-ton shield we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it’s the thing that’s really preventing us from taking flight.”
We think that without perfectionism, we’ll be worse caregivers: lazy, irresponsible, and unloving. More likely, the opposite will happen. Though it can seem like perfectionism improves our caregiving, perfectionism often has the opposite effect.
When we are perfectionistic, we tend only to attempt things we know we can do because we fear making mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable when we’re facing a situation that is constantly and often quickly changing.
Also, attempting to do just one task “perfectly” can result in missing the bigger picture and neglecting other equally important tasks. As licensed clinical social worker Meredith Gordon Resnick L.C.S.W. says: “False belief: If doing it well is good, doing it perfectly is better.”
Finally and quite significantly, perfectionism divides us and our loved ones. In our article, One essential consideration in meaningful caregiving, we highlight the very subtle but important distinctions between “helping,” “fixing,” and “serving.”
Ultimately, an attitude of fixing can imply that our loved one is broken, and helping can too often create a distance between people and deprive those we love of their dignity. However, we cannot serve at a distance. As Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., teaches: “We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected.”
Perfectionism keeps us fixing and helping at a distance. By releasing it, we move into our vulnerability and humanity—and thus serve our loved one(s) in a way that more deeply respects and honors their autonomy and dignity.
Practice embracing “excellence” instead of perfectionism.
Releasing perfectionism doesn’t mean simply dropping any or all of your high standards. According to Brené Brown and other researchers, it is important to differentiate between the healthy pursuit of excellence and the perfectionism that leaves us people-pleasing and struggling with self-doubt and fear of not being good enough.
As you set down the shield of your painstaking perfectionistic tendencies, here are helpful tips for embracing healthy striving:
→ Set more realistic vs. unachievable goals.
Perfectionism is setting unachievable high standards, which cause you to feel defeated and weighed down instead of energized and motivated.
Healthy striving is setting high but realistic goals for yourself that support you in moving in the right direction because achievement feels possible.
→ Striving for excellence means being willing to learn from your mistakes.
Perfectionism contorts itself to avoid making even a single mistake. This can involve over-doing, over-researching, and over-preparing or procrastinating on specific tasks because of the fear of doing something poorly or making the wrong choice.
Healthy striving is about having a “growth mindset” when making mistakes. Honor that you did the best you could with the resources you had at the time and learn from the mistakes to improve. It is about valuing progress over perfection.
Relatedly, healthy striving is about taking feedback seriously and constructively but not personally. There is a difference between “I made a mistake” and “I am a failure.” The first is about what you did, and the second is about who you are. When you say, “I’m a failure,” you make your mistakes mean something about you. Then, you do anything to avoid making the mistake. You don’t take the risk or try a new activity.
→ Focus your attention internally vs. externally.
“Perfectionism is other-focused: ‘What will they think?’” Healthy striving is self-focused: ‘How can I improve?”
Perfectionism is externally motivated. You’re attempting to manage others’ perceptions and reactions. Not only is this impossible, it is a pathway to burnout.
Healthy striving is self-focused; it’s about working towards a goal based on your values and wants. Healthy striving also involves intentionally celebrating each of the small triumphs along the way.
In healthy striving, you let yourself feel the beauty of precious moments you helped make happen rather than seeing what you might have done wrong or neglected to do. It could be as simple as getting your loved one to an appointment on time, devotedly helping your loved one get dressed, or figuring out the maze of health insurance.
Alternatively, maybe you haven’t figured out the insurance quite yet, but you kept your head about you when you would have blown up in the past. Give yourself credit for getting up this morning and trying at all. Chances are that right now, you know a lot more about caregiving than you did even a few months ago. You have a few routines and tasks down that, not long ago, were entirely new for you. Don’t discount any of this. Appreciate yourself for each effort, however seemingly small. They all add up. They all matter.
An article by the University of Texas Counseling and Mental Health Center sets forth a handy bulleted summary to aid you in quickly distinguishing between perfectionism and healthy striving. You can also save this entire article to your favorites, take a screenshot of this page to take with you on the go, or put this list on your refrigerator to help you remember.
Perfectionism
Setting standards beyond reach and reason
Never being satisfied by anything less than perfection
Becoming depressed when faced with failure or disappointment
Being preoccupied with fears of failure and disapproval
Seeing mistakes as evidence of unworthiness
Becoming overly defensive when criticized
Healthy striving
Setting high standards but within reach
Enjoying the process as well as the outcome
Bouncing back quickly from failure or disappointment
Keeping normal anxiety and fear of failure within bounds
Seeing mistakes as opportunities for growth and learning
Reacting positively to helpful criticism
In sum, choosing healthy striving over the shield of perfectionism will make you a more excellent and effective caregiver.
Ahh. What a relief this must be, right? Letting go of perfectionism won’t make you a worse caregiver; in many respects, it’ll make you a better—more resilient, enthusiastic, fulfilled, and connected—caregiver!
It is crucial to recognize that your perfectionism hurts your caregiving more than you might have even realized. It is not only a path to bitterness and burnout, it can be crippling and create a barrier or shield that prevents authentic connection with your loved one.
By honoring the reasons part of you stays invested in the shield of perfectionism, you can set that shield down. In its place, you don’t relinquish all your high standards – only the ridiculously unattainable ones. In their place, you set more authentic, achievable standards for caregiving based on your values rather than others’ opinions. You also give yourself permission to be your authority and cheerleader as you show up with more enthusiasm and excellence for your loved one from the softer, more open-hearted stance of healthy striving toward excellence.
Nhien Vuong, J.D., M. Div. is an international Enneagram presenter and the founder of Evolving Enneagram, a community-centered organization whose mission is to transform human ecosystems around the globe using a contemplative approach to the Enneagram. A former Stanford-trained attorney and ordained interspiritual Unity minister, Nhien marries a wealth of insight with deep compassion to support our conscious evolution.