Perfectionism: the fear that stops you starting

People sometimes describe themselves to me as a perfectionist with a faint note of pride, and then describe a working life in which almost nothing gets started on time. The two are connected, and not in the way the pride suggests. Perfectionism very often stops the work from existing.

High standards versus perfectionism

High standards are about the finished thing: you want it to be good, you work until it is, and then you stop. High standards get work finished.

Perfectionism is about the verdict. If it is not excellent, it is worthless, and worthless reflects on you. Under that rule, a first draft, which is by definition not excellent, is evidence of failure, produced by you, with your name on it. No wonder you cannot bring yourself to write it. Perfectionism stops work from starting, because starting means producing the bad version first, and the bad version is intolerable.

You do not have to give up your standards to fix this. What we aim at is the difference between the two: standards that get work finished, and the rule that prevents it from beginning.

The feeling at the moment of starting

Watch what happens when you open the document. The feeling arrives, before a word is written. Something like dread, or a tightening, or a sudden need to check something else. That feeling is the perfectionism doing its work: forecasting the verdict on a thing that does not yet exist, and finding it wanting. Closing the tab removes the feeling, immediately, and the relief trains the habit.

Procrastination is a feeling being avoided, and for perfectionists the feeling is the anticipated judgement of the imperfect draft.

Starting badly on purpose

The most direct experiment in the CBT work is also the one perfectionists find hardest to hear. Start badly, on purpose. Write a deliberately poor first paragraph. Produce a version you would be embarrassed by. The point is to test the belief, "a bad draft is unbearable and says something about me", which has never been tested because you have never let a bad draft exist. Testing it means letting one exist and finding out what actually happens.

What actually happens, almost always, is that the bad draft is fixable, that fixing it is far easier than producing a perfect one from nothing, and that the world did not end. That is information the perfectionism has been preventing you from gathering.

Deciding what good enough looks like

The second experiment is to decide, in advance, what done, as opposed to excellent, means for this task. What would be sufficient for this to be finished and sent? Perfectionism never answers that question, which is why perfectionist work is never finished, only abandoned or endlessly revised. Naming a finishing line before you start gives you somewhere to stop, and somewhere to stop makes it possible to start.

The aftermath

There is a part of the perfectionist cycle that gets less attention: what happens after a wasted day. The self-punishment. Lazy, useless, everyone else manages. It feels like motivation, and it reliably makes the next day worse, because it adds the fear of another failure to the fear of the task. Learning to close a bad day without a verdict attached is one of the more effective interventions here, and one of the least obvious. You are removing the extra weight that makes tomorrow harder.

What the work looks like

We start by looking at the actual tasks you avoid and what they have in common, because the pattern usually reveals the rule. This is often shorter work than other things I treat, typically 8 to 12 weekly sessions, and between sessions you will be trying things rather than planning to try them, on real tasks from your own week. The experiments are small on purpose; the aim is information, not a heroic week.

If the blank page has been unbearable for a long time, there is more on how I work with procrastination, and on the perfectionism that usually sits underneath it.