Are you someone who is seen as a high achiever?
Do other people think you have it all together?
Do people go to you when they need help with a task because they view you as an expert?

These all sound like they can be positive qualities and can be helpful in our modern world that values productivity, expertise, self motivation and standing out from the crowd. However, depending on your mindset, being a “high achiever” or “driven” can quickly shift from being a positive quality into the more negative realm of perfectionism. Perfectionism is a habit of thinking and behaving where nothing feels good enough and you never feel at ease.

Unfortunately, the idea of perfection is a myth that many people get swept up into. The irony is that the harder you strive for perfection the more likely you are to feel disappointed. Every aspect of our world can be improved if we inspect it under a microscope and look for its flaws. Everything can be tweaked, altered, streamlined. Not only do perfectionists see all the flaws in the world around them, but they are also acutely aware of their own flaws. It makes it hard to ever truly enjoy an experience or be proud of something they’ve done, because they’re always looking for ways it could be better.

If you’re a perfectionist reading this you might be thinking: I know all this stuff already! This is my reality, tell me something that I can do about it. What if I were to tell you that the key to breaking the curse of perfectionism is to strive to be average? If you’re a perfectionist, striving to be average might sound pretty scary. If you try to be average you might worry that you won’t get to where you want to go in life, that your life will be boring or unfulfilling. But, for perfectionists striving to be average actually turns out to be pretty good. If you go for average you save yourself all the mental stress and strain of obsessing about how you could have improved on one slight detail. You allow yourself to be flawed and human, and then you’re also more forgiving to the world around you. I’m not saying that you would in fact be “average”. This is the trick to this whole concept.

Being “average” is also another cognitive distortion, because there is no all powerful being behind the scenes judging everything we do and measuring it in comparison to the things all other humans do (at least in a non-religious sense). The concept is that if someone with very high standards for themselves and others strives for a more average performance, on more things, they’ll actually begin enjoying themselves more and get themselves out of the very limited path that they have created for themselves in the world, that’s making them miserable.

A key trap that many perfectionists fall into is deciding not to do things they might actually enjoy, because they worry that it won’t be perfect. So, a perfectionist might not risk engaging in an activity like going to a casual drawing class because they worry they won’t be able to produce a perfect drawing. They might actually enjoy the process of drawing, find it relaxing and maybe even talk to some people in the class once they’re engaged, but instead they choose to avoid the experience entirely for fear of failure.

My recommendation is if you struggle with perfectionism to give yourself permission to do more things at an average level of effort. You might be surprised by the above average results!