Are you an obsessive perfectionist? - [ What to do to change? ]

Are you one of those who live with the obsession to try to be perfect?

Throughout my life, I have met several people who claim to be perfectionists.

They are those people who take care of even the smallest detail of everything, of those who strive to make everything come out perfectly, without errors. When they make a mistake they get in a bad mood, get stressed and the day is spoiled.

If a perfectionist occupies a managerial position in a company or is in some way boss in his work, he demands from his workers more than what they can give, he demands from them that they do everything perfectly and this brings in the workers a feeling of frustration, of guilt, and also stress if they do not achieve the perfection that the boss demands.

Perfectionism in the human being is an entelechy, it does not exist. To err is human and in this, we have to be very clear, nobody is perfect and nobody achieves perfection.

Do not be afraid to be wrong. You learn more from mistakes than from successes.

It could be that you do some perfect work at a certain moment, but that does not mean you are perfect. Perfection can not always be achieved and that is why perfectionists live almost always bitter, in a bad mood and this ends up causing them serious illnesses.

Of course, this does not mean in any way that we should not try to do our job as best as possible, taking care of even the smallest details but it is necessary to take into account that if we err, it is not our fault because, as we already know, to err is human.

If we see it in another way, to err is a learning opportunity that life and circumstances present to us.

Always erring brings us teaching, it is necessary to see the errors from the positive side and not from the side of the perfectionist because for him to err is something negative and it is not like that.

For the perfectionist, an error does not mean teaching but a reason to lose control and stress unnecessarily.

It has been shown to satiety that working under stress prevents higher performance at work. In my beginnings as an employee of a company, I was in charge of a group of workers to whom I required them to perform the work with neatness and perfection and on several occasions I myself was wrong in front of them.

What did I have to do to change my perfectionist attitude?

I had to admit that I am not perfect and that they were not perfect either and from that moment the work gave them more because they were not subject to my pressure to do the job perfectly.

In addition to this, their treatment of me changed, they behaved in a kinder way with me. The fact that I understood that we are human and therefore prone to make mistakes made me leave that perfectionist attitude and that also brought as a reward a much more favorable and pleasant work environment and also greatly improved my health and of my employees.

While we do not admit that as human beings we are, we can make mistakes, we will never change that perfectionist attitude. As long as we do not realize that mistakes are learning opportunities we will never find the positive side of mistakes and, of course, we will not be able to assimilate the teaching that mistakes leave us.

The perfectionist behavior of some people also has other negative traits and is that a perfectionist is also a self-insecure person with low self-esteem and often believe themselves inferior to others even if they do not manifest it.

A perfectionist is excessively self-critical and this is well known to me because before I was.

If human beings were perfect everything would be great, there would be no mistakes and the world would be fantastic a utopia. But unfortunately, we must admit that we are not and that therefore we fail and that we can not demand from ourselves a quality that we do not have and even less demand it from others.

Therefore, we admit that we do make mistakes but that mistakes are an invaluable source of education that we should take advantage of for our own good and that of others.

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