Diffusing Perfectionism

Do you have exceedingly high expectations of yourself? High levels of self-doubt? Are your high standards of yourself causing you to burnout? These are many symptoms’ people experience when facing perfectionism. Perfectionism can have strong links with anxiety, as it often comes from a strong desire to be enough, thus people continuously do more to try to feel enough. The only concern there is that to feel like enough it is more about being than about doing, giving yourself permission to exist. This doesn’t mean you stop taking action and moving forward, it means that you use taking action as a tool for continuous self-growth not to establish your worth or value. Below are 3 keys to begin diffusing perfectionism:

1. Nurture your relationship with your body. This is easier said than done. However vitally important as perfectionists often reside in their mind overanalyzing, ruminating, and self-criticizing, thus important to find a mind-body balance where they engage in positives ways with the body, for more on this click here. 
2. Befriend the perfectionist part of you to understand it more. Connecting to parts of ourselves with curiousity and compassion can help us gain insight of awareness of when it tends to show up, and possible clues as to its roots and origins.
3. Develop kinder self-talk. Why this is important is because it is like an antidote to the self-critical energy of perfectionism, and finding ways to “tip the scale” to be more balanced by engaging in kind self-dialogue can help you to develop a different relationship to yourself and the perfectionism.

References:
Shafir, H. (2022). Perfectionism: Signs, causes and ways to overcome.       https://www.choosingtherapy.com/perfectionism/