The Perfectionist Tendency and Trap

today I've been thinking a lot about perfectionism which is something that I've struggled with myself quite a bit my entire life and I sort of they can't say that I have entirely mastered or even fully understood what's going on within my own perfectionism those tendencies I started thinking about it today in part because I'm beginning another semester with with students and I have them do these these self evaluations at the beginning where among other things I have them I ask them about their own their own tendencies and what they think might might interfere with them doing well in in my classes and there tend to be about four main things semester after semester that I see students bringing up you know and they're not all about perfection as a model some of them have some connections they they talk about time management skills big big problem it was always a big problem for me as well writing abilities let's talk about procrastination which which is connected with time management but is somewhat a bit different and then the I would say a good third of my students maybe even half of them depending on the class bring up being perfectionist and this sometimes ties together with procrastination and with with other other issues as well so I want to talk about this and I'm shooting this video in part for my my students but I think that this is useful to think about outside of just a strictly academic context because it's a perennial problem that over and over again in people's lives you know academic lives personal lives our political engagements many other things I mean it holds us back in many ways from things so I want to talk about the perfectionism in general what does it mean to be a perfectionist well you know if we want to answer that we should think about well what does a perfectionist look like and if you're a perfectionist you can you know look in the mirror but it's not quite so easy because one of the things that you notice about this this tendency is it leads to or it both leads to and it comes out of a lack of self-knowledge that comes not from any sort of deficit necessarily than the person but from not paying attention to what's going on because you're so focused on other things instead it's sort of like doing sleight of hand with yourself all the time and fooling yourself where you're both in the magician and the the audience and so you're taken in by by yourself illusion um how can you identify a perfectionist you know that may be another way of thinking about it so you know what would you do in order to answer that question well you could look at what do perfectionist actually do but that's not that helpful because what a perfectionist does is very much the same as what other people are doing including other high-performing people so it's not simply a question of what one does it's more a question of how one does it the mode in which one one does things how much they do it so it's the way in which things are done and it's the degree or the amount that's different than just the sheer you know facticity of something being those are external things you can look at having to do with actions if you're looking at yourself you're looking at other people and you know we can't you know see another person's soul in its entirety or their mind or their personality as an entire whole but if you can't do that with your own either but we are we do have some degree of access to each other's psyches you know that's what it means they have an interpersonal life with with other human beings to have what we call intersubjectivity in phenomenology fancy word for saying well we inhabit a common world in which we can actually peer into things to some degree what would we talk about in that case we could say well how does a perfectionist feel what do what does that look like or what what can you sense coming from them and then you know you can sense it at least in myself not just through self-reflection you know seeing how I feel about things but I can tell sometimes through email interactions with a student that they have these perfectionist tendencies and in which direction they're going now you can you can sense the anxiety or the need for things to be very very clear and the path to be charted out so that they can they can plow ahead and can get it all done you can also ask about motives you know with a perfectionist what is what is their actual motive them and you can say well you know to do something to the highest degree to make it perfect to be perfect in every way but then you know we have to clarify that and and I think it's worth thinking about what we mean by that so another thing that we can look at we've got these two dimensions of what does a perfectionist do you know what's their motive behavior what is their effect or their motive like you know their interior disposition what don't they do that's another important question they ask yourself what what separates a perfectionist from a non perfectionist it's not just what they do it's also what they don't do and or what they don't have or what they don't exhibit and and one of the things that goes along with that I think is again I'm drawing from my own experience and experience of many others that I've interacted with a kind of lack of contentment not necessarily an inability but certainly a failure to appreciate what it is that one has actually attained you know you look at perfectionists and they often get quite a bit done but they're not they're not thrilled about what they they got done and they they tend to focus on the the lack or the small failures or the the negativity of what they've gotten done rather than the positive achievement that they actually did something rather than than nothing you know oftentimes a perfectionist focuses too much on things that turn out to be irrelevant so that keeps them from actually being able to focus on things that are more relevant and that's a kind of foundation or lack as well yeah I would say that another thing that's really lacking in perfectionists and again I have to admit that this this affects me as well thankfully less that it used to is what's often missing is a sense of proportion and I don't mean just a sense of proportion about you know individual things or instances or projects or things like that I don't mean that the person lacks a sense of proportion totally so that they can't get anything right I mean that once they get involved with something that they value and which they think other people value they tend to lose a sense about how important things actually are in relation to each other so you know for example I'll give you an example I just finished turning in grades for two classes of ethics students from this last semester and I inevitably get some some students emailing me who already have an A in the class and they're concerned because they didn't get the full points on this thing or that thing or this thing and now why does that show lack of proportion well if what they're really concerned about is scores it's not going to make any difference if they get you know an extra 10 points here an extra 10 points there they've already got the eight for the class there are no eight losses at Marist so you know thank God for that cuz otherwise if people like grade grubbing for every little tiny little a little bit that they can get and they poor no no what do we mean by lack of proportion yeah does that mean that that ten points doesn't matter at all no it's ten points but it's not going to make any difference and here's the key thing they're throwing away time energy even to a certain extent goodwill can can be lost in the process as well by insisting I I need to have an answer about this and you know I myself in the past I have to admit that I would look at that and I'd get you know indignant about it no I just kind of feel sorry for the person who gets gets into that that sort of trap of perfectionism where it doesn't make any difference it would be sort of like washing a table and you know there's there's still like one little speck on but nobody's ever gonna eat on that table again and the tables already been cleared you don't need to do it any further than that you know another thing to ask if as long as we're raising these big questions about perfectionism if we want to fully understand it so we've got you know what is the typical action what is the typical effect or desire or emotion or motivation what tends to be missing you can add to that who are they trying to please and the perfectionist often doesn't really have a good handle on this again you know speaking from experience in the process you can ask them who are you trying to please and they'll be able to point to some sort of you know standard or a person who's evaluating them or perhaps themselves but it's not really thought through very well and as soon as you start peeling it away you find out that maybe they're trying to please somebody else maybe it's kind of a morphus maybe they have no idea who they're trying to please there's just this sort of tyranny of standards self imposing itself upon them who are they trying to impress who are they trying to satisfy that's really worth thinking about and this isn't the sort of thing that you can answer right off the bat this is if you are a perfectionist this is the sort of thing that you kind of have to mull over and you have to think about from situation a situation you know understanding these sorts of things is not just a matter of having one moment to the Epiphany where everything comes into view it's really and this is you know this is kind of typical of the problem of the perfectionist the perfectionist would love for there to be something like that where everything clicks but that's not the way it really works that's not the way moral progress actually takes place for the most part for most people what happens is you get a little bit of a insight here and you you know you keep working at it and expanding it you get a little bit over here and keep working at and expand it and then maybe you bring those together and then you get a little bit more here and you just start changing some of your habits and pay close attention to what you think and how you you treat yourself and how you you know you make some resolutions about what you're gonna do next time and you fail in half of those and then you just you know evaluate why you failed in those and and then you know actually start congratulating yourself for the ones where you didn't and gradually you start you start making some progress well you know figuring out these questions like who are you really trying to impress or pleased or satisfied if you're a perfectionist is kind of like that you know the other thing that you can ask that's really important is what are what are the results of being a perfectionist and this is where well this is really the the handle by which you might actually get a grip on it and decide you want to investigate it or even change it the perfectionist does not actually bring about what it is that they they aim in it doesn't really work out the way that they they want to even when everything turns out to be quite good what are the results well they they sort of miss invest time and energy enthusiasm effort and that means that they got to take it away from somewhere else you know you only get 24 hours in a day so if you're spending an extra two hours on some sort of project that really didn't bear you know that you've got to take those two hours from somewhere else if you only have so much energy you know you can boost it a little bit by drinking yourself some coffee but that that's a you know there's a diminishing return on that that's not gonna carry it through all the time what are some other results well you know perfectionism it's not just what what you end up doing or what you end up leaving out it's also the dissatisfaction that you end up feeling yourself many of my students who are perfectionist talk in terms of anxiety being anxious about without say grades for example or about doing well in the class some of them you know even are concerned about how I view them you know they Turnitin assignment late and they don't want me to think of them as the kind of person who turns in an assignment late and I'll write them I'll say you know I I understand life is complicated sometimes things fall through the cracks you know we forget things that's why I set things up so you can still turn in your assignments late you know and generally I actually you know give them if not full credit pretty close to it because I want them to actually do that the work that's involved and they're less focused quite often on why I want them to do the work which is the big picture that's the no student learning right and they're more focused on I gotta get this done I gotta get this done oh god I hope I do you I didn't screw it up and I did it the right way and and you know dr. Sandler doesn't think the Atome for turning it in late and I'll never let this happen again and they get you know you wound up into this sort of thing for me you know I I I have something like that when it comes to time I don't like being late for anything and I feel bad you know sometimes when I'm late to say grade students stuff I try to get that turn around as quickly as possible so that students have their their work right away and I actually you know I feel bad when I what I don't but I've at least gotten to the point where I recognize hey it's gonna happen from time to time for me the perfectionism tends to exhibit itself more in the kind of work and research and writing and course development that I do I try to make my courses to be the best they can possibly be for for the students so I'm constantly adding new resources and developing handouts and shooting videos you know like for instance this talking about perfectionism and the question is you know for you how much time are you gonna put into this and and how good does it have to be does it you know with videos for example do I need to have like an intro thing with some music you know do I need to annotate everything so that you know somebody could follow each each idea out you know with with written stuff as well as you know me talking you know at a certain point if you want to get out of being a perfectionist you have to train yourself to say that's good enough and that's really scary for a perfectionist because one of the reasons why somebody is a perfectionist is because they are not very good at identifying what actually is good enough and a part of that has to do with you know this question of who are you actually trying to please if you've if you've had to try to please people for whom nothing was ever good enough or you know I've known people for example who when they did well that it was sort of a neutral response and then anything less than that got a muted badly response if that's the case you're gonna very difficult time figuring out what actually is good enough particularly again determinate circumstances you're going to look actually for some sort of standard for what's good enough rather than developing the prudence that's required within you to be able to say yeah in this circumstance this counts as good enough in this circumstance this counts as good luck and they're not always exactly the same um so we've covered a lot of ground I want to say a few other things one is that perfect is a relative term and there's one exception to this and that's if you have a certain kind of ontology or metaphysics which actually thinks that there is a perfect being out there or something like degrees of being where there's some some sort of thing at the apex and that is not us human beings if you actually have a metaphysics like that somebody like that would be say for example Plato or Saint handsome or st. Thomas Aquinas people who believed in you know if not the god of Judaism Christianity and all these monotheistic religions the form of the good or something like that some sort of ontological principle of perfection that would be the apex and that we would suddenly participate in there we're talking very metaphysical stuff we're not talking about the everyday phenomenal world that we move in and experience and in which we act like perfectionist so let's think about other meanings of perfect where it is relative so you know one one sense of the word perfect is when you see a tiss by some sort of standards so I I give an exam and it's got say multiple-choice questions and fill in the blank questions and so I'm sure to answer questions some essent questions and the exam is worth 100 points and if you answer everything completely correctly you have a perfect score now that scores a proxy it doesn't necessarily mean you have perfect knowledge right you know they score that's perfect in relation to the set of standards that's been provided you and we can do this for artificial things you know you can talk about I don't know I mean can you talk about say the perfect size for a book I don't know there there there probably isn't one it's going to depend on a lot of a lot of circumstances you know is this book the perfect size is this book the perfect size this book is you know a pocket book so you know it fit into certain pockets but but not all of them yeah and you know you gotta ask yourself who sets these these standards and how important are these standards a lot of times people get so caught up in I need some standards I need something that I can measure up to I gotta I gotta figure out what my you know what I have to do in this case and they don't ask themselves well what's the actual point here is it to find you know the standards get on the Dean's List how do you get on the Dean's List you got to get a certain grade point average well you know does that really that important it's not actually I know people who obsessed over it after then I I did to some degree I was interested in somewhat bigger things as well like graduating you know somewhat laude when I was an undergraduate or you know when I took my preliminary examinations I remember how humiliating it was that on my Master's examination I got a low pass and part over some kind of you know BS things you know some of some criticisms probably were off base and then how you know great I felt when I got high passes on three out of four of my my preliminary examinations at the Masters level but you know when it comes down to it does that really mean anything not much not in the long run I mean these are not great predictors of how you're gonna do in the future you can get an a on one of my ethics exams and then you know you've managed to remember all that stuff for the tests then you forget it the next day and it doesn't make any impact on your life or you can be the kind of person that actually gets a 75 but you you retain the stuff because you actually cared about it and you thought about it and you made it part of your new existence and the person who's actually successful is not the one who got the hundredth the person who's successful is the one who carried it forward so you know simply satisfying standards having perfect scores is because it's not really perfection in a real sense are there any other senses that that are more meaningful you can say no let you know not lacking it not having any sort of blemish not lacking any sort of thing that it want to have like you know is this a perfect pen well it's not perfect anymore because you know it's not completely full so I guess it was perfect when it was first created and I guess if we looked at some of these things we'd find you know pits and blemishes and stuff like that that's not a particularly useful way of understanding perfection either I know that that's one that we use you know you can talk about someone having a perfect body get close enough to anybody it turns out not to be perfect I mean that hgtv has been great for show I guess that it's not only all these people who were TV worthy before turn out to have all these you know facial blemishes that we didn't realize they and are there any other meanings that could be useful well you know you can say best in relation to certain things so you have the highest score up until this point you're perfect and the perfectionist might be aiming at that just surpassing everybody else I know that tended to be the kind of perfectionism that I really had a problem with in the in the past and I guess still probably have some problem with in certain respects in the present you know if you're involving yourself in a lot of comparison to others sometimes that takes away from actually focusing on what you yourself are doing I would like to say that if we want to get away from perfectionism we need a different conception of perfection and I would say that if you want to find where that that better conception of it lies it's actually in ancient and medieval philosophy it's not lacking any blemish or anything like that it's tied to an understanding of something as being perfect when it's the way it ought to be when it's fulfilling its purpose when it's realizing it's potential and that's you know that's a matter of degrees and something can be in a certain sense perfect without being entirely developed being completely at its end you know if you think about a plant for example it's a corn you know everyone sees an acorn and an oak and I'm kind of tired of that example take corn because I'm from corn growing areas so I know a lot Kord you put it in the furrows and it pops up and it's shooting up and you know you don't you don't expect it to be 8 feet tall immediately right I mean knee high by the fourth of July is healed the old saying all the new stuff shoots up a lot quicker than that because you know it's a palm genetically modified but if it's knee high by the fourth of July you're on good track that's sort of a measure that we used in the Midwest for the corn it's got to shoot up and it's got to produce these tassels and then it's got to produce ears and the ears have to have at least a certain you know size of kernels and then we call it then it's perfect it's it's done what it ought to do it's the same way with with you for so many things you don't have to find some sort of somebody else given an artificial standard that tells you okay here's where you have to be this is exactly what you have to be see whether the things that you're doing are actually working our to adopt a more pragmatic conception of perfection one though that's in line with ancient and medieval thought which saw us as being part of a cosmos in which each thing and its own way of developing and you know Thomas Aquinas for example said the nature of a thing you only get to see the nature of a thing fully when it's been fully developed so and he gives examples like a horse my horses aren't that that tough to figure out but a human being is so much more complicated let alone a house or a family a family can be thought of as something that undergoes development people try to have these perfect families and you know sometimes they're just hellish because they misunderstand perfection and and perfectionism is really a misunderstanding of the nature of perfection so the last thing I want to talk about a few paradoxes of perfectionism and again things that I know through bitter experience and had to work my own way through and I can do another video talking about some of some of the specifics of that some other time here's one paradox perfectionism is an adaptation to one's environment to one's history to one's you know the conditions that one lives in that's actually maladaptive so it's an adaptation to producible it's a change oneself into something that that is you know producing producing producing attaining certain things but is actually maladaptive because you're missing out on things and you're cutting yourself short from from some satisfaction for yourself most perfectionists are not happy people here's another paradox it involves so much energy and attention that it keeps the person from noticing all the other things that are going on and from reflecting on them so you know perfection for a human being would involve growth perfectionism actually stifles growth because it produces a sort of building in this kind of way but it keeps you from actually expanding and growing because it keeps you from paying attention to the larger the universe and the matrix of of other human beings that you're caught up with it keeps you from actually knowing yourself and that way that sort of hinders your own growth another paradox is that it prevents a person who has it from developing the prudence that's actually needed to determine what counts as good enough and what would actually count as genuinely perfect prudence is not something that you're born with it's something that you have to develop and cultivate over time you know it doesn't happen in everybody sometimes it takes bitter experience in humiliation and screwing up and then you know reflecting on that and trying to get your life on track I know I've got a lot of cases like that for myself where it's that's through sorrow and suffering that that I wound up learning some things that I had you know other people were telling me but I wasn't paying attention sometimes it's through having you know good people that you actually learn from and malla yourself after and listen to it and who genuinely care for you and who can't help you to understand what what actually counts is good enough which direction we should be going and that that scores by themselves are really not that important they're not the thing that you can you can nourish yourself with so anyway prudence that's something that that the perfectionist unfortunately lacks and yet they think that they're there one of the most prudent people in the world quite often the most prudent thing is if you're a perfectionist is to actually realize that you're a perfectionist and then start working on getting away from that the last thing and this is probably the most important thing this is the reason why perfectionism is a failing strategy for dealing with life for dealing with the kind of things that you you have to do in life anything that's valuable in the world in life in yourself is complicated because reality is complicated and when things are complicated that means that you can see them from multiple angles from multiple sides and what counts is perfect from one vantage point you change the vantage point a little bit and now you can see the blemishes and the imperfections involved the last thing I'm going to say about about perfectionism really ties everything else in together and it's it's something that's really important to keep in mind it has to do with the nature of reality and the things that we find valuable so I mean here's the bottom line anything that that is actually worthwhile valuable out in the world in your relations with other people in yourself and the things that you produce anything along those lines is always going to be complex and it's usually going to be more complex than then you're taking in at any given point and it's always going to be more complex than any particular measure of it that you're engaging it so you might think of it this way everything has multiple size you know for instance this pen you can see it from from different angles right and you can see it multiple ways it looks very different in this way when you want to go right with it then when you do this just a simple thing you've already changed the perspective on it you've changed the nature of it and break off this piece right here and now it won't cling to my pocket that changes the perspective as well in a coffee mug as if it's full of coffee that's good the coffee is not hot necessarily well then that's not so good so anything that you look at anything that you're going to evaluate and try to make perfect as soon as you change your perspective the imperfections show up and what that should make you think about is the fact that the goal is not to try to maximize perfection because you can never do it you can never no matter if you even you just pick one single thing one single aspect about yourself you can't take that and make that from every single perspective one might look at it into something absolutely perfect in parkus what if you put it next to something else or what if you put it in the context of your whole life and you say well I invested them you know half my life into this this one thing that's a failed life most likely unless that was some really really important thing and if it was you probably didn't make it perfect yourself you're probably collaborating with other people it's probably still isn't perfect anyway so you know the thing that you want to do is is start thinking less in terms of you might say artificially imposed and unthought about just assume standards of perfection let's start actually thinking about what what do I mean when I say I want things to be perfect when I want myself to be perfect what is my conception of a perfection do I have the right conception of perfection because it's see that's one of the paradoxes of perfectionism perfectionism gets perfection wrong and is thereby imperfect that's where I'll leave off a lot of reflections on this but something really important something that I've you know had to struggle with a lot myself and I you know anybody that this helps out there in thinking about these things I'm glad if it helps you if not you know may be a wasted you know twenty minutes of your time but unless you're a perfectionist maybe that's not such a bad thing

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 9,149

Rating: 4.9750781 out of 5

Keywords: perfectionism, perfect, perfectionist, personal, talk, chat, Philosophy, Sadler, Students, Learning, Education, time management, good enough, self-help, perspective, practical reasoning, good life, happy, happy life, standards, College

Id: WCB_e1pjbhc

Length: 35min 26sec (2126 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 20 2012