Do you have a little voice inside your head that says: ‘I can achieve more/do better if I spend more time on this?’ Or, when the boss says that they want a project completed by Thursday, do you set yourself a Wednesday deadline to show that you’re diligent and hard working?
As it turns out, a lot of high achievers do exactly that. There are many benefits to working in this way, of course – disorganised or less motivated colleagues may even look on with envy. But when the trait becomes overplayed, it becomes a negative attribute that reduces your productivity.
Look at early messages
A tendency towards over-diligence and perfectionism often has its roots in messages received early in life from family, school or community that have been internalised over the years.
Those messages were most likely useful at the time as they encouraged us to work hard at school or to prove ourselves in our early career. But if we let them run the show all of the time, they can become a stumbling block.
Striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high standards can cause you to spend too long on a task and result in unnecessary stress; it can take away your power to influence others because you may miss the bigger picture; or it can stop you thinking outside the box to freely innovate. Taken to their extreme, such standards can limit progression or even derail a career.
Tackle the pattern
It’s worth tackling patterns of perfectionism and over-diligence at the first sign, and certainly before they become too deep-rooted. To achieve a sustained change in behaviour, we benefit by addressing both the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ aspects of how we work.
The inner aspects include the range of beliefs that fuel our thinking and mindset. The outer aspects are our behaviour – the manifestation or consequence of our beliefs. Techniques and tips that address the outer behaviour but not our inner beliefs may result in changes that soon fade away.
The good news is that exploring our inner beliefs and mindset doesn’t require a session on the psychiatrist’s couch. Instead, it simply involves some reflection to consider where the messages about perfectionism may have come from. You should acknowledge and appreciate the benefits it has brought over the years – there is no need to let it become the enemy.
Striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high standards can cause you to spend too long on a task and result in unnecessary stress
The choice is yours
Then take a moment to note the times when this belief has not been helpful – when it has got in the way of you working at your best or from stepping up to a new opportunity. Realising that you have a choice about when to engage it is a key step – use it when it’s useful, and don’t when it’s not.
Once you accept that you have a choice, the next step is to find a way to put that choice into action. You might want to list those situations when the default to perfectionism takes over – are there are patterns or similarities in what prompts that way of working? This will give you clues about when to be ready the next time the perfectionism trigger is pulled.
If, for example, you notice that perfectionism takes over when you want to impress the boss, or when you want to minimise the number of errors in a piece of work, think of alternative ways to achieve those ends. Can you impress the boss more by another means – for example, coaching or developing a team member? Or can you reduce an error rate by working with a colleague and showing your collaboration skills?
Get out of the rut
When we let a limiting belief such as perfectionism take over, we can get stuck in a rut. But by standing back and looking for patterns and alternatives, it’s usually possible to identify other ways to reach our goal that are less costly on a personal level.
Here are some additional techniques and tips to help cement your new motivation:
- Nominate a buddy to be your conscience or guardian so that you have someone who can point out when you’re overdoing a piece of work.
- Always keep in mind the golden rule of 80/20 – that 20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results.
- The foolproof way to ensure that you are spending the ‘right’ amount of time on a project and not overdoing it at the expense of your productivity is to ask the stakeholder of your work at the outset what’s really important to them.
Ask them to prioritise whether it’s speed, or big-picture thinking, or detail that they want the most. And get ready to wave goodbye to the need to be perfect.
