Are you a perfectionist?

Are you a perfectionist?

If you think so, then start applying perfectionism in the high performance way.

Perfect reviewing is not simply labelling anything less than 100% successful as a failure. Perfect commitment is not needing every fine detail in place before you’ll begin a performance, start a project or get a job done. Perfect self-communication is not simply pointing out to yourself all of the negative things that didn’t go as well as you’d like them to have. Perfect goal setting is not setting a goal that has to be 100% achieved with no room for underachievement (or over achievement for that matter!). Perfect self-confidence building is not undervaluing a result when you do have it and just stating, ‘well, it’s what I should have done anyway, so it’s nothing special’.

Perfectionism is normally only focused on specific, learned behaviours and attitudes, that don’t necessarily allow the perfectionists a fair chance of exploiting their desire to be as good as they possibly can be.

So, if you want to exploit your perfectionism, make sure you start with getting help with defining just what perfect actually means from a human performance perspective for all elements of performance and not just the outcome side of things. Perfectionism is a hugely powerful quality when exploited perfectly. Failing to exploit perfectionism perfectly is what you should really worry about being guilty of!