If you’re a perfectionist you’ll know being so go’s hand in hand with killing of confidence. If you attempt to be perfect in all your endeavours, you become nervous, edgy, and dependant on outcomes and results. If things don’t go to plan, you can feel like a disappointment and a failure, thus your self confidence plummets.
The search for perfection is a confidence killer because it means you need to constantly plan ahead, instead of living in the moment and enjoying being in the here and now. The desire to have everything go perfectly, and everyone about you behave as you need them to, becomes an issue about control.
Staying in control, and making sure people around do as they should, while you work hard all the time to keep up your high standards, can lead to a breakdown in relationships and communication. The result once more, is that your confidence dies, as your search for perfection silently kills it.
People who suffer from the need for perfection are generally very hard on themselves. They demand much more from themselves than the average person, and expect more from their endeavours and relationships. Accepting failure, is that much harder for a perfectionist, as it delivers a massive blow to their confidence levels.
If the descriptions above sound like you, there are steps you can take to alter your way of thinking, so that perfectionism is no longer the killer of your confidence and self esteem.
As with all perfectionists, your need for everything to be just so, stems from control and fear. You may have begun to link a feeling of comfort, and safeness, with everything being perfect ,some time ago. The need for order and perfection has a direct link with your need to control everything in your life, because you don’t feel that the world is a safe place.
By attempting to run your own world, and influence all around you, you are blocking yourself from new experiences and feelings, which if felt and experienced, could lead you to greater confidence. The chances are that you are behaving this way, because letting go, and allowing the world to function without your control, is scary to you. When you are in control, you can be sure of a happy outcome, right?
Wrong! The outcome will sometimes be that everything go’s to plan, but your family life and other relationships will suffer because people around don’t like being controlled. When you act this way you block their personality and creativity from emerging. Eventually they will challenge you, and painful eruptions will develop, as they rebel and attempt to wriggle free from being under your thumb.
Once you understand the negative affect your search for perfection is having on your life and on those you, it will become recognisable to you that change is in order. Altering your behaviour is a choice. Your perfectionist attitude isn’t something set in stone. It didn’t come to you out of the blue either. It developed slowly in time, so that it could fulfil needs you had back then.
Now is the time to move away from the past, and to recognise that your behaviour once served a purpose, and was a form of personal protection for you. But now, it’s usefulness has passed, and if you want to save your relationships and sanity, you need to let go of the killer of your confidence.
