Understanding the perfectionist view;

An alternative view on perfectionism.

Communication in its essence is about mutual understanding and the ability to take on the other person’s point of view. More importantly, when you are dealing with other people’s problems, your help is only effective to the extend that you can identify with the person you’re trying to help.

Instead of projecting yourself in the other person’s situation, you should try to imagine how he or she experiences the problem, being them, not you. Otherwise, the solution you come up with is only useful to you (if you were in their situation), but are useless to them. You might end up in the situation where he or she feels misunderstood and you feel like your help isn’t appreciated. Although your intentions are good, the situation for both people just got worse, which can be very frustrating.

In this sense I was recently forced to think about perfectionism. I realized that the way perfectionists are portayed by society is quite different from the way they really experience it. This leads to a large disconnect between the two, and serves as a barrier for mutual understanding in both positive and negative situations. In what follows I will elaborate on this disconnect and how you can circumvent it to better understand perfectionist behaviour.

When most of us think about perfectionism we generally imagine people who painstakingly put in the extra effort to make sure that what they do is done perfectly. We think of people with extreme attention to detail who are not satisfied with average results. Names like Steve Jobs, Serena Williams and Lance Armstrong come to mind, individuals who reached the top of their field due to their strive for perfection. In sum perfectionists are portrayed as people who want to do things perfectly. But is this really how they experience their drive to do the things they do? Do they really want to strive for perfection? I think not.

Sure there are people who go through immense effort to do things perfectly. I think, however, it is important to stress that they actively want to strive for this perfection. In other words, they know that their efforts are of increasing diminishing returns and are far beyond what other people would do. Still, for various reasons, internal or external, such people want to deliver extraordinary results and acknowledge this to others and themselves. Most of us can identify with this type of behaviour because at some point we all have had a project where we wanted to do it perfectly, since it really mattered to us. This completely misses the point of perfectionism. This is where the disconnect happens.

The key difference with perfectionists is that they do not want to do things perfectly. In other words, they do not experience that they are putting in the extra effort to make it perfect. This seemingly small difference in fundamental experience has an enormous effect on the resulting behaviour. Let’s go through some detail to formulate perfectionism in a more tangible way.

Everyone of us has its own standards when it comes to various tasks in life. These tasks are very broad, to name a few: cleaning the house, preparing a presentation, cooking a meal, understanding a technical topic, responding to emails, … anything you can think of really. For each of these tasks we have a certain amount of effort, or a list of things to check off before we consider it done (in a neutral way, not good, not bad, just done). Let’s associate this level of effort with what I call the bar of completeness.

Using this terminology, we can formulate perfectionism in the traditional sense in a more concrete way. When you perform a task and you want the result to be extraordinary, you actively and knowingly go beyond your bar of completeness for that specific task. Because it matters to you, you want to put in the extra effort even though you know that if you would quit, you can still consider it good enough since you are above your bar of completeness. In short: to achieve perfection, you need to go well beyond your bar of completeness.

Now imagine that your bar of completeness for a specific task lies well beyond its average counterpart for other people. Imagine your bar for considering something done lies on par with someone else’s perfection bar. In this case, you don’t necessarily want the outcome to be perfect, you just want it to be considered done. It just happens to be way beyond what other people expect. The next graph should make this distinction clear.

A question you can ask others, or yourself, to get some kind of indication of perfectionism is why they put in the extra time and effort. The majority of people will more often than not answer that they want it to be perfect because it really matters to them. A perfectionist will answer that it is just a very difficult task, and it takes a lot to complete, or something along these lines.

So what does this picture explain about the behavior of perfectionists, and how can you mitigate miscommunication.

In general, if your bar of completeness is extremely high for some specific tasks, it tends to be higher than average for any other task as well. This is where difficulties and downsides of perfectionism start to expose themselves. The majority of people get to choose where they want to put their extra effort in, they get to choose for which task they go beyond their bar of completeness. Perfectionists cannot. Anything they have to do, they will have to put more effort and time into it than other people before they can consider it done. This also includes mundane tasks such as house cleaning, cooking food or answering emails. All of these chores take up a lot of effort and consequently, a perfectionist will feel short of time, most of the time. This adds tremendous amounts of stress to their life. As outsiders this looks very absurd, it looks as if the person wants to do these chores meticulously and with perfect results, taking away precious time from the things that do matter, draining him or her in the process.

If you fail to understand how perfectionists experience task completion, it will be very hard for you to communicate adequately with them about the stress they have due to lack of time. For example, you project yourself into their position and you suggest the following. These mundane tasks don’t have to be perfect, you don’t need to put in the effort to make them perfect. Just get these tasks done and focus your effort on what’s important. You think this is a valid solution, since it is what makes sense to you, in your experience. However, the person you’re trying to help doesn’t feel like he or she is doing things perfectly, they just get them done. Moreover, now they feel misunderstood and not helped at all.

You could also offer to take over some of the tasks, because you can do them in a much shorter amount of time, effectively saving the other person more time than you have to put in. But beware, you should realize that if you do this, that you will have to go beyond your own bar of completeness for that specific task. If not, the person you are trying to help doesn’t consider the task done, and concludes that next time, they’d better do it themselves. This results in you feeling underappreciated for trying to help. A better way would be to assist the person, instead of completely taking over the task. In this case you save them some time and know exactly how they want it to be done, and when they consider is finished.

In general a big contributor to the experienced stress due to lack of time is the absence of an intuitive feeling of how much time should be spend on specific trivial tasks. The majority of people have a good understanding when they are spending too much time on something they don’t consider crucial or important. If something is taking too long, they are quick to leave it as soon as it’s good enough. Perfectionists will start something and not leave it until they consider it done, which as we know now is at the same level where the majority of people considers it almost perfect. There is a solution to mitigate this open-endness in time spend on mundane tasks. Instead of commencing a specific task without any notion of how long it will take, consider first taking a moment to determine how much time you are willing to spend on something trivial such as this. Similarly, you could set aside specific time slots during the week where such tasks are done. This ensures better time management and avoids spending unforeseen hours on things that are just not worth it.

To end of I would like to reiterate that behavior is best understood by understanding the other person, being them, not you. This maxim applied to perfectionism gives us the understanding we need to better communicate with the people we want to help and learn from.