Poll results: Perfectionism

The results are in! None of you would admit to being total control freak perfectionists. I know they exist, but I guess none of them are reading my blog, which probably makes sense -- although 16% said they would like most things in their life to be perfect.

Two-thirds of you said that you like a few areas of your life to be perfect, such as work. WELL, GOOD LUCK WITH THAT. Ok, I'm kind of kidding. But I hope you are letting yourselves off the hook when you or your coworkers make mistakes, because it's bound to happen, and perfectionism at work can cause a lot of stress. Still, I do think it makes sense to try to do your best at work.

16% also said they didn't worry too much about being perfect. Slackers! (Again, just kidding.)

Thanks so much for taking the poll!

Perfectionism and its evil twin

I was thinking last night about the name of this blog, and how I bet a lot of people expect it to be about problems with perfectionism, or at least a blog by a perfectionist. I really did come up with the name because I had been calling Zoe dog OLOP, but it's true that perfectionism has bedeviled me ever since I was raised by a perfectionist.

Most people react with surprise when I say I have problems in this area: "Wait, you think *you're* a perfectionist??" That's because perfectionism walks hand in hand with its evil twin, fear of failure. And these two little monsters conspire to turn a certain subset of perfectionists into procrastinators.

My recent career change -- editing for a living -- was a definite move into a field that demands a person to be nitpicky about language and grammar. I am trying to get all the errors out of a document so that it can be perfect. Luckily, I'm pretty well-suited to this task -- and yet I still freeze up totally when confronted with a new project. It's a terrible vestigial feeling that I haven't been able to shake my entire life: "what if this time, I just can't do it? what if this is the project that shows me to be a complete fraud?"

I was thinking about this last night because I received a really great performance evaluation, which I'm not telling you in order to brag (ok, maybe just a little) but to show that I am good at my job and yet I still have these fears of failure. It's as if failure is lurking around every corner.

This isn't a post with a lot of answers. It's a topic I expect to explore more as time goes on. Usually, when procrastination rears its ugly head, I try to somehow muster the strength to just start the project, which in itself is the hardest part! Once I've started, I'm more than halfway there. More on this in later posts.