A few months ago, I was having a conversation with a client I’d been seeing for a while, listening as she described feeling frustrated that she wasn’t following through with her intentions as well as she wanted to. “It sounds like you’re quite a perfectionist in the standards you set for yourself,” I offered. “Oh no!” she replied, “I don’t have the self-esteem to be a perfectionist.”
And there’s the rub of perfectionism; on the one hand, it has the illusion of being a self-esteeming thing to aim for – surely expecting ourselves to do things ‘perfectly’ implies some degree of faith in our abilities. Yet in practice perfectionism is anything but self-esteeming, for two reasons. First, perfect is by its nature essentially unachievable – when was the last time you did something “perfectly”? Second, it doesn’t allow much room for anything less than perfect; there is no ‘good enough’ or ‘nice try’ or even ‘almost perfect’. Falling short of perfect usually lands us solidly in “failure”.
Countless studies on the change process have found that making a change in our habits – establishing an exercise routine or making healthier food choices for example – is best achieved through small incremental steps (and perseverance in the face of setbacks). When it comes to changing their relationship with food, one of the things I encourage my clients to do is make a list of their good habits – for example, drinking lots of water, liking a variety of vegetables, being willing to try new things, having established meal times with their family, etc. I also have them list their less ‘good’ or change-worthy habits –eating in the car, skipping breakfast, eating too many sweets, etc., and ask them to rank the items on this list from the easiest to change to the hardest. Once they’ve ranked the items, we start with the first 1 or 2 “easiest” items and define what the change they would like to achieve in them might look like. For example, if ‘not bringing a lunch to work’ was the first item, a change might be “I will pack a lunch for work once this week”.
The change statement has to be stated in specific terms, and has to be realistic and achievable – no help from ‘perfect’ required. When it comes to developing a sense of self-efficacy, it’s much better to under-promise and over-deliver than the reverse. That is, feel proud of yourself for bringing a home-made lunch twice when you’d set your goal at once, rather than set the mark at five times in the week and feel discouraged and demoralized because you only accomplished it four times. It also seems to be important that this process takes place in the presence of another. There’s a difference between making a commitment to yourself – another Monday, another new start – and hearing yourself speak that commitment to someone who is present in witnessing that (and will ask you about it next week).
I ask clients to try walking through their change commitments for a couple of weeks, paying close attention to what they notice. Inevitably, clients find some changes easier to make than they thought, and encounter obstacles where they were (or weren’t) expecting them. I encourage clients to keep walking towards their goals as a direction, not a destination, keeping Voltaire’s words in mind: “The perfect is the enemy of the good”. It can also be the enemy of making sustainable desired changes in our lives.
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