Stop Trying To Be Perfect

It’s time to stop pursuing perfection, says a new book. What we should do instead is embrace the concept of ‘ish’

- Erin Fisher

So often, the simple question of asking a friend or family member how they’re doing is met with the same response: busy.

Living on hyperdrive in an effort to keep everything together has become the new normal. But is it really worth it? Or are we just left feeling burnt out?

As a “reformed perfectionist”, Australian author Lynne Cazaly has been there. Her career experience as a board director and mentoring high-performing executives, as well as going through a few personal health scares, all contributed to a stark realization: life is simply far too short for perfection.

In her new book, Ish*, she explores the problems with our pursuit of perfection and the life-changing practice of good enough. She draws on the work of researchers Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, who define perfectionism as a combination of excessively high standards and overly critical self-evaluations.

In their study of more than 40 000 people from the late 1980s to 2016, Curran and Hill looked at the changes across three different dimensions of perfectionism.

The first is self-oriented perfectionism, characterized by unrealistic expectations of oneself, being highly self-critical and attaching irrational importance to being perfect.

The second is other-oriented perfectionism, where you evaluate others critically and hold them to unrealistic standards.

The third dimension, socially prescribed perfectionism, is where you believe you’re judged harshly in a social context and that you must display perfection for approval.

PERFECTION WASTES TIME

While all three dimensions increased over time, the rise of socially prescribed perfectionism was double that of the other two. “This is the one that’s the worry,” Cazaly says.