Perfectionist, a word that we have all heard. Let's start with defining what a perfectionist is. Being a perfectionist isn't having expert attention to detail. Perfectionism is what we do to protect ourselves from shame, from having people reject and abandon us. We do this so others don't speak negatively about us. It’s protection. It gives us the belief that if we are perfect and can do everything perfectly, there are no openings for other people to criticize us. If we are perfect, everyone will love us and we won't ever have to feel ashamed again. A few symptoms of perfectionism are people-pleasing, procrastination (we will get into the why), low self-esteem/confidence, fear of failure.
Procrastination is how we protect ourselves from fear and shame. We believe we work better under pressure, so we create the habit of leaving everything to the last minute. If we have an upcoming test, we don’t study until the night before. We believe we work better under pressure because we don’t have the option of procrastinating anymore since the deadline is coming up. Leaving studying until the last minute also gives us an excuse if we didn’t do too well on the test. If we didn’t do as well as we wanted, we could say it's because we crammed and didn’t have enough time.
We could study before the test several days in advance and do our best. Perfectionists procrastinate because they believe that sometimes, their best isn't good enough. If they did their best, they won’t have an excuse for the grade they received. They would feel ashamed because they did everything they could, but they didn’t do too well. They would get the feeling that they can’t do anything right, or that they aren’t smart enough.
Perfectionists are often told from a very young age that they are so smart, or they’re good at something. This creates the perfectionist mindset that we need to stay perfect as we get older. This limits our opportunities because we only do things we know we will excel at. Or, we procrastinate when it comes to new things, so we have an excuse as to why we didn't excel.
Procrastination presents itself in many ways. Many of us procrastinate when we need to study for an upcoming test. One person can procrastinate by watching TV, going out with friends, or doing chores that have been put off for weeks. Another way to procrastinate is with productive procrastination. An example of this is making our notes beautiful, even though we don’t learn the content in them. We spend so much time on the details and aesthetic of our notes that we don’t focus on the content and information. We could also do a reading, but not learn any information from it. This feels productive, but it is procrastination where there is no learning happening. The time spent on making notes pretty or doing unnecessary readings could have been used to do homework/ practice problems, taking practice tests, going through reviews for the exam.
We could always open ourselves up to the option of trying our best and putting in a 100% effort. But there is always the possible consequence of not getting being where we want. This would make perfectionists feel ashamed because they weren’t able to be perfect.
So we self-sabotage by procrastinating. Perfections are self-critical, we set insanely high standards for ourselves. We set it so high as a form of self-sabotage because we feel like it's all or nothing. We are unwilling to do our best and see what happens.
There is no correct way to stop procrastination. It changes according to everyone. One way to prevent procrastination is self-awareness. Learning why we (yourself) procrastinate would help us be aware of our personal reasons for procrastination. Once we know why we are procrastinating, the awareness can get us back on track. We need to regularly remind ourselves that almost every reason for procrastination is an excuse. We need to open ourselves up to the possibility of doing our best, but not getting the result we want. We need to understand where the procrastination is coming from, and what we are avoiding. This understanding is good because we can remind ourselves about the positive sides of what we are avoiding.
We self-sabotage because there is that slight possibility of not doing well enough. One way that we can deal with procrastination is by increasing our self-awareness and our willingness to fail. We need to grow our mindset from the perfectionist one.
We can split our major goal into smaller goals. If your goal is an A, then we can split that up. We can think about how much we need to study every day to get that A and study that much every day. You can use your goal and develop a plan. You need to focus on whether you put in the effort, not if there are results. You need to trust the process, even if there are no immediate results. When we don’t think about whether it is working, we can focus on the goal more, which provides even better results in the long run.
Perfectionists have the fixed mindset of needing to be perfect changing that mindset into a growth mindset will be very beneficial for them. They will try new things. Perfectionism is also a major cause of procrastination, because if we procrastinate, we have an excuse if we don't do well enough. Procrastination can be dealt with by increasing our self-awareness and making our goals into plans. Focusing on the effort instead of whether it is working will help us achieve our goal. If we focus on whether it is working, if we see it isn't, we get disheartened and give up. Perfectionism is a form of self-sabotage which can hold us back from opportunities, so sometimes, being a perfectionist isn’t always as good as it sounds.
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