Dealing with Perfectionism

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review, and Happy New Year. I’m Curt Nickisch.

High standards, attention to detail, self-control. These are qualities that lead to success in many fields, right? Well, they’re also aspects of perfectionism. If we’re being really honest, many of us take pride in our perfectionistic qualities. After all, they probably have helped us excel in school and in our jobs. Our guest today says perfectionism can work for some of us some of the time, but it can also cause a lot of mental and physical harm for us in the longer run. Ellen Hendriksen is a clinical psychologist at Boston University Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. Her new book is How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists. Her research, clinical, and personal experience will help us understand where perfectionism comes from and how it can affect our work and lives. She’ll also explain how we can shape these learned behaviors to find healthier and more sustainable ways to live and work. Ellen, thank you for joining me.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

CURT NICKISCH: I want to start by asking you what drew you to write an entire book about perfectionism? And did you also know that it would never be done by doing so?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Exactly. So there are two reasons I wrote the book, and one I have to admit is personal. I wrote this for me. If my previous book about social anxiety was the book I needed 20, 25 years ago as a college student or young adult, this is the book I need now.

CURT NICKISCH: You’re probably not the only one in this.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Probably not the only one, I’m guessing. The second reason, however, is because I think there is a bit of a silent epidemic of perfectionism that’s happening. Nobody comes into the Anxiety Specialty Center that I work at and says, “Ellen, I’m a perfectionist. I need everything to be perfect.” Instead, they come in and say, “I feel like I’m failing. I feel like I’m falling behind. I have so many things on my plate and I’m not doing any of them well,” and I think that’s because perfectionism is a little bit of a misnomer. It’s not really about striving for perfection, it’s about never feeling good enough.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, it’s not a clinical diagnosis, right?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Correct, it’s not. It’s not a diagnosis in and of itself, but it definitely can lie at the heart of a lot of diagnoses like social anxiety, OCD, eating disorders, some kinds of depression. So it’s a cross-cutting vector across many kinds of diagnoses.

CURT NICKISCH: You make it sound bad. It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot and you can’t say it critically of somebody, but you can also say it as a good thing.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Yeah, it’s every…

CURT NICKISCH: They’re a perfectionist, right? They do good work. What does it actually mean? Can you define it for us?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Sure, yeah. It’s everybody’s favorite weakness, right? In a job interview, what’s your biggest weakness? Oh, I’m such a perfectionist.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, yeah, right, right.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: So there are some researchers who would disagree with me but there are some who would absolutely agree with me that perfectionism can be good, and that’s when we strive for excellence. We do good work for the work’s sake, we have high standards, we care deeply, we work hard. So that is healthy perfectionism.

CURT NICKISCH: It’s the opposite in that sense of mailing it in.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Right, exactly. Exactly, and at the heart of perfectionism is a personality trait called conscientiousness, which is the tendency to be responsible, to be diligent, to work hard. I like to say it’s the world’s least sexy superpower, but it is, if you’re going to choose a personality trait, it’s the one to choose because the psychologist, Dr. Angela Duckworth, who’s better known for her work on grit, has a lovely paper showing that a conscientiousness is one of the biggest predictors for both objective and subjective success in life. Where it can tip over into unhealthy perfectionism or clinical perfectionism is when we start to do something called overevaluation. And now we’re getting into the work of doctors Roz Shafran, and Zafra Cooper, and Christopher Fairburn, when they were colleagues at Oxford University. Overevaluation is when we start to conflate our self-worth with our performance. So forgive my grammar, but it’s when “I did good” means “I am good.” And so there, we start to base our self-image or our self-esteem upon striving to meet personally demanding standards.

CURT NICKISCH: You used the word epidemic before, and in the book you say that perfectionism is on the rise. There’s some research from 2019, long-running research, confirming that. Help us understand what causes it and why it’s becoming more prevalent.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: For sure, yeah. So this is the study you mentioned is the work of doctors Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, and they indeed looked at 27 years of data and found that over those years, perfectionism is increasing. But to get a little more granular on that, there are three kinds of perfectionism. There’s “self-oriented perfectionism,” which is what you classically think of when you think of perfectionism. That’s when we’re hard on ourselves. Then there’s “other-oriented perfectionism,” which is when we’re hard on the people around us. So often people close to us like our spouse, our kids, our employees. And then there is “socially prescribed perfectionism,” and that’s when we expect others to be hard on us. So all three types are increasing, but that last one is the one that’s increasing like a rocket launch, and their inflection point over the years I thought was interesting was 2005, and that happens to be when Facebook was launched. All humans react to the situations we’re put in, and so when we’re put in a culture or a company or a family or other group that demands that we perform and achieve and consume to ever higher levels to be sufficient as a person, of course we’re going to respond with some perfectionism. That makes sense, and I think that’s what’s driving the rise.

CURT NICKISCH: Okay. Well, let’s talk about mistakes now, how perfectionists handle mistakes.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: I think a lot of things come bundled with that concept of overevaluation, and that is that we tend to focus on flaws and details. So we tend to zero in on the one frowning face in the crowd full of smiles. I know I notice the crumbs on the otherwise clean counter that no one else seems to notice. We also evaluate things as all or nothing, and so we will often set the bar for adequate at flawless. So if we make a mistake, we screw up, we struggle, we flip from all to nothing. Okay, you asked about mistakes. So there, that’s where the all or nothing evaluation comes in because again, if we set this bar for adequate at flawless, we are not allowed to make any mistakes, either in outcome or in process. So when I say process, I mean for example, we might expect ourselves to focus like a laser beam all day long, and when we take a break or get distracted, as of course we’re going to do because we’re human, we’ve broken our rule, we’ve made a mistake, and now we’ve shunted ourselves from all to nothing. So, what we can try to do there is to make some room for mistakes, and that’s very different than what I think the traditional advice against perfectionism says.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. What is the traditional advice?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Yeah, I feel like the advice, like, you have to lower your standards or stop when things are good enough, is a little bit misguided because either if we do have some overevaluation, if we see our performance as a referendum on our value, or it’s just very important to us, like our work or whatever we’re doing is in line with our values and very important to us, we’re not going to settle for subpar or mediocre outcomes.

CURT NICKISCH: Right, I don’t mind spending time on this. Yeah.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Exactly. So with the overevaluation there, if we’re told, stop when things are good enough, we’re not going to do that because that means that we are subpar or mediocre. And just like you alluded to, if it’s something we really care about, even if we’re not equating our self-esteem with it, we’re going to want to do a good job, it’s something that is important to us. So what we can do instead is to try to make some room for mistakes.

CURT NICKISCH: You made me think of a few things. One is this idea of know when something’s good enough, and I don’t know if you saw that documentary with… Is it just called Free Solo?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CURT NICKISCH: It’s with Alex Honnold.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Yes, yes.

CURT NICKISCH: And in it he talks about his mom and how she had these sayings when he was growing up and one of them was, “Good enough, isn’t.”

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Interesting.

CURT NICKISCH: And I totally got that.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Yeah, sure.

CURT NICKISCH: And you see how there’s no room for mistakes in what he’s doing or maybe in the process, but not when he actually does it. Right?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Yeah, yeah.

CURT NICKISCH: He’s climbing up the side of a…

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: For sure.

CURT NICKISCH: … steep cliff with no protection, and it’s life or death at that point. I don’t know, you see situations like that, and you certainly appreciate perfectionism.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Yeah, there’s some situations where there are no room for mistakes. There’s…

CURT NICKISCH: You don’t want the surgeon to be like all right, well…

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Good enough!

CURT NICKISCH: A mistake will be a teaching moment. Yeah, yeah…

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Right, exactly. You don’t want your pilot to make a mistake. So absolutely, there are definitely situations where there’s not room for mistakes. But I’ll tell you a story about a client we’ll call “Julie,” who is a pediatrician, and she’s been doing this for 25 years. By all accounts, she’s an excellent doctor. And one week she came into session and was just distraught because she had made a mistake. A little girl had come in with some abdominal pain and she had diagnosed it as constipation and sent her and the family home. Turned out to be appendicitis, and she ended up at the emergency room and was fine. But Julie was just beside herself and was saying things like, “Maybe I should retire early. I am a bad doctor.” She was absolutely not willing to have made that mistake. Now, I get that her standards are high, she wants to do right by her patients, absolutely understandable. And the flip from all or nothing by making one mistake from, “I’m a decent doctor” to, “I’m a bad doctor,” was really noticeable there. So what we did for her was try to help her keep her sense of herself as a good doctor, while making room for the inevitable mistakes that are going to happen over a 25-year career. So there, rather than” I’m a good doctor” or “I’m a bad doctor,” we try to make a sense of, “I’m a good doctor who sometimes has a misdiagnosis.” We can apply this to anything, like, “I’m a good student who sometimes fails a quiz.” “I’m a good presenter who sometimes bungles a presentation.” “I am smart with money and sometimes make a bad investment.” “I’m a good parent and sometimes yell at my kids.” So, what we’re doing there is trying to not lower our standards. Again, we want to keep our high standards, but to make some room for the inevitable mistakes and struggles and problems of life.

CURT NICKISCH: You also write that avoiding mistakes can hold you back in your career too.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: In order to learn something new or in order to learn a new skill, we’re going to make mistakes at the beginning. It’s unrealistic to expect ourselves to do everything perfectly with ease the first time. So if we really put a lot of energy into trying to avoid mistakes, that means that we’re going to avoid gaining new skills, trying new things, or we take only safe risks. So for example, if we’ve run a marathon and we want to challenge ourselves but we’re afraid of making mistakes, we challenge ourselves to run it five minutes faster. So we end up taking only safe risks rather than actual risks that could help us move forward.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, you might actually get better time by setting a goal that you don’t meet, than setting one that you can.

So let’s go back in time a little bit. You share two stories at the beginning of your book about two men who were both perfectionists in sort of similar creative work. They managed their perfectionism however very differently and achieved kind of different outcomes in their life and work, both still very successful. Could you take us through the stories of Walt Disney and Fred Rogers, and then help us understand how they managed their perfectionism differently and how that affected them?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Sure, yeah. This was really fun to research and write. So, both Walt Disney and Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers, they both were real titans of childhood, both created beloved entertainment, were quite perfectionistic but they, like you said, handled it in really different ways. So with Walt Disney, there was, you could very clearly see this overevaluation, that at the very beginning he was his movies. That if people liked it, that means they liked him. That means he was okay, he wasn’t a failure.

CURT NICKISCH: It’s definitely managerial in his case. Right? Because he…

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: For sure.

CURT NICKISCH: …from your book, I get the sense that he would’ve loved to have just created and drawn the whole movie himself, but he couldn’t. He needed to hire hundreds of illustrators and engineers and all sorts of people to create color palettes, and he spent a lot of time correcting and spending more and more money to make it turn out exactly as much as he could the way he wanted. In the end, he said he wished he could start all over and do it again because he sees some of the flaws in it. He didn’t though, to his credit, he did know that good enough was good enough at that point.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: I think if the bank and the audiences would’ve let him, he would have started over again, though…

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, right.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: …no, he put just an exhausting level of work and precision, sometimes that was a little bit misguided. Like he auditioned over 150 young women for the role of the voice of Snow White. His detail orientation was what we could call pathological. Ironically, then he would worry that all the corrections would suck the spontaneity from the film. So, he really evaluated things as all or nothing and couldn’t trust the people that he had so carefully handpicked to take their project and run with it.

CURT NICKISCH: You just got to learn to delegate, Walt.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Exactly, exactly.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, yeah, okay.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Whereas Fred Rogers, also high standards, had a real vision for children’s television. Also, lots of hard work, if it was for the kids, it had to be right. His management, however, was much more collaborative. He was much more focused on connecting with others, whether those were his colleagues, his guests, his fans, and there he certainly kept his high standards, but really lived the values that he was taught by his mentor, Dr. William Orr, of guided drift. And that meant, stay true to your principles and your values but be flexible within that. And he also turned out extraordinary work, but maintained the connections that he made along the way.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. What I found interesting were the examples of where things just didn’t go as planned on set, and he would roll with it and turn it into a teaching moment, rather than start it over and have it have to be perfect.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Yeah, exactly. There was one incident where he did his classic move of coming into the set and taking off his blazer and his dress shoes and putting on his cardigan and his sneakers.

CURT NICKISCH: Buttoning it up.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: He buttoned up his cardigan and realized that the buttons were one button off, and I’d say the…

CURT NICKISCH: We’ve all been there, Fred.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: We’ve all been there. Exactly, and so everybody on the crew expected him to say cut and to start over, but he just re-buttoned the sweater and said, “Mistakes happen and they can be corrected.” So rather than doubling down on control, like Walt Disney, he trusted his audience and his colleagues to roll with whatever happened.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. So let’s dig into these aspects of perfectionism, this sort of flexibility versus rigidity that you’re talking about. What is an inner rulebook and how do we know if our own rules are too rigid?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Okay. Uncertainty drives anxiety, rules reduce uncertainty. So, rules reduce anxiety. And those of us who are a little bit perfectionistic, myself included, again, I wrote this book for me, we orient to rules. We like to know what the rules are so we can follow them. And if we’re doing a little bit of overevaluation, that often can mean that if I am doing things correctly, that means I am correct. And this extends to situations where there are no rules and there we make up rules so we can follow those. And that’s not necessarily bad. Think of the last, say, big project you did. I’m sure you maybe came up with a calendar of how to chip away at this. Again, these are not necessarily bad things. In fact, having goals, having some structure can definitely lead to happiness and achieving those goals. It’s when the rules get rigid, arbitrary, or sort of mindless. If we’re doing sort of a generic idea of the right thing, rather than what is truly important or meaningful to us, that can kind of get us into trouble.

CURT NICKISCH: So, how would you recommend that we learn to edit those inner rulebooks, find a way to allow some kind of Fred Rogers style flexibility?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: So I think we know that a rule is functioning as a rule when it feels a little bit coercive, a little bit obligatory. So I had a client who illustrated this perfectly because she said she was taught through a combination of God and her mother to be generous, but that meant that she had to be generous. If somebody on the street asked her for a dollar, if a neighbor asked her to babysit, she had to do it. It was the very opposite of the spirit of generosity, so it was functioning as a rule. And what we can do there is try to shift over to values, and values has become sort of one of those buzzwords that’s hard to define…

CURT NICKISCH: Sure.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: … like mindfulness or self-care, but I think values are freely chosen. They’re never coercive or obligatory. They’re under your control, meaning they’re not contingent upon anyone else. So being respected or getting famous is not necessarily a value. Values are intrinsically meaningful, meaning you’d care about them even if no one ever knew. So it’s not performative at all. And also, they’re continuous, you’re never really done living a value. So like a pianist is never done practicing piano. A person of faith is never done practicing their religion. We are never done practicing our values.

And a value can be a concept like equality or hard work, it can be a thing like books, it can be activities like running or being outdoors. It can be relationships, like connecting with your kids or being a loving partner. So anything that is important, meaningful, purposeful to us, that is what we can run towards. And especially when it’s freely chosen, the quality of the experience starts to shift and it starts to feel less coercive, less obligatory, and more freely chosen.

CURT NICKISCH: Relationships are so important at work. And you talked about one aspect of perfectionism, which is where we are looking for it in other people. How can perfectionism affect the way we show up with colleagues and how deep our relationships at work are?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: I think other-oriented perfectionism where we’re hard on the people around us, which can include our employees or our team, can often manifest as micromanagement or redoing our colleagues’ work. And we may be thinking, “oh, I’m just trying to help,” but it comes off as, “this isn’t good enough” or “I don’t trust you.” And the effect that that has on the team then is, well, if it isn’t going to be good enough, why even try? Very demoralizing. And people who are having an other-oriented perfectionism moment are doubling down on some control, but the opposite of control isn’t having your team spiral out of control. The opposite of control is trust. It’s trusting your team to take what they need to do and run with it, it’s trusting them to do a good job.

CURT NICKISCH: So, what if you suspect that you’re managing a perfectionist? You see those qualities, maybe you recognize them because you’ve dealt with them yourself, but maybe you just see that they’re overevaluating, being too hard on themselves. What can you do to help them break that cycle?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Yeah, absolutely. So I think what we can do as managers or leaders is to model the type of work that we want to see. And so that might include being a little vulnerable and showing that you too make mistakes, but that they can be corrected. It might be setting limits on the hours in which you do email so it doesn’t bleed over into midnight. I think it’s important not to tell the employee to lower their standards or stop when things are good enough, but I think rather than taking something away, what we can encourage them to do is to add on some questioning. Is this really what I need to be spending my energy on? Is that fifth draft really doing something? Is rehearsing the presentation for the 15th time actually improving the presentation, or is it just reducing your anxiety? Something else we can do is when we’re evaluating their work, to really keep the focus on the work, as opposed to on them.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. We’ve covered some of the nuances of perfectionism. What does the research tell us about what happens to perfectionists in the long run?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: A lot of people will mellow as they age, but people with perfectionism tend to burn out. Life does not get easier for perfectionists, and that’s because if we set unrealistic standards, we’re not going to meet them a lot of the time. And as we rack up failures, which we can define as not meeting standards, again and again and again, we start to feel like failures. And so as people with perfectionism age, we can get less diligent, sort of more unstable, and are certainly prone to the disorders that I mentioned before like depression or OCD, eating disorders, social anxiety, etc.

CURT NICKISCH: Did this happen for you? I mean, were you ever at risk of not mellowing out?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Oh, for sure. I found a paper that I thought the title was just spot-on, it said, “Perfectionist at 20, Work-Life Problems at 40.” And I feel like a lot of people can probably relate to that. No, but I did go through sort of a personal burnout, and for me, it mostly manifested physically. I got diagnosed with a GI problem, I went through five rounds of physical therapy. When I work with clients who come into the clinic, sometimes that manifests relationally, like their marriage is in trouble or they haven’t talked to a lot of their friends for a long time. It can manifest at work that they spend a lot of time procrastinating, or otherwise avoiding trying to reach their unrealistically high standards, or being afraid to make mistakes, being overwhelmed at all that they’ve expected themselves to do. And so it can ironically manifest as not doing well at work when that is exactly what they want to do. Yeah, so a lot can backfire.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. What lessons do you take away from your own experience with that?

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Yeah. I think common advice for people who are really hard on themselves is to go easier on yourself or to have some self-compassion. I was taught as a therapist that self-compassion actualized was talking to yourself like a good friend. And so I think for people who struggle with perfectionism, sure, if talking to yourself like a good friend works for you, absolutely do that. But much easier than that I think, is self-compassion can also be actions. It can be letting yourself linger over your coffee in the morning. It can be letting yourself stand under the warm spray of the shower for a few minutes on a cold morning. But it can also be, not doing all the things that you expect of yourself. It can be actions, but it can also be inactions or letting yourself off the hook for some of the more personally demanding things that you expect of yourself. So it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, that we as people with perfectionism tend to default to gut renovations or total overhauls or new year, new you. But really, we just need some little tweaks. And being 5 percent less hard on ourselves,  ten percent kinder to ourselves, let ourselves make some room for those mistakes, but retain that positive view of ourselves. That can make all the difference. A little bit of self-compassion, a little bit of flexibility can go a really long way.

CURT NICKISCH: Ellen, this has been really wonderful.

ELLEN HENDRIKSEN: Thank you so much for having me.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Ellen Hendriksen. She’s a clinical psychologist at Boston University. Her new book is How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists. And if this episode is not enough for you, we have more — more than 1,000 episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at HBR.org/podcasts, or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thanks to our team: senior producers Mary Dooe and Anne Saini, associate producer Hannah Bates, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. Thank you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast, I’m Curt Nickisch.