Balance perfection with pragmatism

Everyone thinks and sees things differently and measures performance differently. What's perfect to one may not be perfect to another. It all depends on how one defines perfection.

It's great and imperative to have high standards for yourself and for others up to a point. Competition keeps intensifying for everyone and you need to set high standards and achieve them.

But in the long run, can perfectionism be a losing strategy? You know about the stress, anxiety and possibly depression that it causes and the strain it can put on working relationships.

Impossible

So a balance between perfectionism and pragmatism is key to achieve realistic results. You cannot be happy if you cannot accept the world or your life as it is. You will constantly try to make everything perfect, which is impossible. Happiness depends on acceptance and joy in the present, with how things are today.

In organisations people in various professional relationships need to help each other grow the business that offers satisfaction to all. If the leader is a perfectionist he will demand perfection from his followers. Perfectionists create stress on themselves and on their subordinates and are very demanding. Relationships need to have a give and take principle embedded and acceptance of one another's faults within allowable limits is a big part of that.

Aim high

In real life, given the dynamism of the world, perfectionism can cause you to have a 'feeling of defeat' and hurt all sorts of relationships you have. Perfectionism will prevent you from taking satisfaction from anything you achieve. A perfectionist believes that nothing he or she does is good enough because only perfection is acceptable.

Perfection doesn't exist in the real world. If you have perfectionist expectations of yourself then you constantly feel dissatisfied or 'a failure' even when others think you did a great job. You may find that your perfectionist expectations of others turn you into a control freak and that you constantly feel let down and disappointed by them.

Perfectionism, as a personality trait, is a big predictor of clinical depression. The 'if it's not absolutely perfect then it's a disaster' approach to life is also known as 'black and white' thinking. With black or white thinking there are no shades of grey. Everything is completely this or completely that. Does that sound familiar?

Life is grey

Life is composed of shades of grey. If you expect perfection all the time then you will always be disappointed. Because everything could have been done better in retrospect. "Usain Bolt, the fastest man on earth ever, could have been a fraction of a second quicker". Such is the thinking of a perfectionist.

The trick is to know when to be 'all or nothing' and when to 'relax and see' the shades of grey so you can 'give credit' to yourself and others for the effort and the attempt.

You can have drive, determination and ambition without tyrannising yourself and possibly others with the 'absolutist' tendency of perfectionism.

Alternatively aim for perfection, give out your best and be happy with what you achieve at the end. Be determined to keep on improving the delivery. If you don't aim high you will fail anyway. The choice is yours but it's imperative to aim high.