6 Reasons Perfectionists Struggle With Change

So you want to change but you’re finding it harder than climbing Mt. Everest.  Your discouragement is understandable.

There are plenty of reason for the difficulty in making change. I’ve been a psychotherapist for about 35 years now, and I’ve seen a lot of things that slow people down from becoming healthier perfectionists. But if we’re aware of the blocks, they’re less likely to get in our way. To try to make them more recognizable, I’ve narrowed them down to 6 main issues.

I’ll explain these in a moment, but first, just so that we’re on the same page, here are six of the things that I imagine my readers and listeners might want to change:

• Have less need for control, order, completion and resolution.

• Be less perfectionistic, angry and critical about themselves and others.

• Not be so rigid about things needing to be a certain way.

• Not think about what others think of them.

• Be less obsessive, worry less and procrastinate less.

• Be less hurried and urgent.

Assuming these types of changes appeal to you, let’s dig into what makes them hard to achieve.

1.    You Adopt Avoidance Goals Rather than Approach Goals

I set you up for failure with that list. Notice how the goals I tried to get you to agree to are all about being less rather than more. These goals are motivated by avoidance rather than approach. While avoidance motivation can sometimes be helpful, it usually doesn’t get you where you do want to go.

If you want to stop or limit some sort of behavior, you’ll need to replace it with something more meaningful.

Let’s try those goals again:

• Have more capacity to let go, be more accepting and appreciative of life as it is, especially when throngs of unresolved issues shout at you.

• Have more affection and compassion for your less perfectionist self, and for others who don’t get the glories of perfectionism.

• Be more flexible, receptive and open-minded.

• Follow your north star, even if others think it’s the wrong direction.

• Be more proactive and take more steps to live out your values.

• Be more patient and present, savoring the moment.

When our kids were very young and we started taking them hiking, it was much easier to get them up to the top of the mountain when there were fields of fresh blueberries just waiting to be picked and savored.

Ask any coach: You can’t win with just defense. You need offense too. You can’t score if you don’t shoot.

2.    Your Impatience Holds You Back.

Change takes time to occur, time to become visible, and perhaps more patience than you have yet to summon. Your thirst for change, paradoxically, makes it more difficult because you get impatient and, as we all know but fail to accept, haste makes waste. The impatience buys into all-or-nothing thinking.

For instance:

• You start meditating but give it up after two months when you don’t reach nirvana.

• You start therapy but quit after three months because you still have uncomfortable feelings.

• You start going to the gym but give it up because you don’t look as good as all those people on Instagram.

I know the feeling: “This is too slow. I have to do something drastically different. NOW!”

We both have to get over it. Neither the world nor our personal complexes will move at our urgent pace. Our speedy demon egos will need to accept life at life’s tempo.

Being impatient is not only unpleasant, it’s also unproductive and undermining.

As people with compulsive and perfectionistic traits, we are set up to fail in this regard. We despise inefficiency and we are quick to jump to the conclusion that a given approach to change is insufficient and inefficient.

To get down to the good stuff, rather than only digging superficially and changing strategies when things get tough, we need to dig one hole deep by staying with reliable strategies.

In preparation for this post  and episode I interviewed the Tortoise. That’s right. The Tortoise who out-raced the Hare. I asked him how he had done it. He told me that he studied The Compound Effect, the message of which is, in order to succeed at anything we need to recognize the importance of small, consistent, prudent behavioral choices.

Real progress builds on itself. Life hacks and quick fixes can’t do that. We reach our goal with every little step. Progress builds slowly at first, but more quickly, even exponentially, as time goes on.

For the Tortoise that meant one small step at a time, because all those steps, with few deviations, add up over time. And all that consistency paid off when he reached the finish line before the Hare.

He told me the classic example of The Compound Effect. If given a choice between getting one magic penny that doubles in value every day for 31 days, or getting 3 million dollars, what would you choose? Well, what fool would take a magic penny? But, if we did choose the magic penny, after 31 days we would have ten million dollars—due to The Compound Effect. Meanwhile, the impatient fool who took the $3 million has already spent it all on concert tickets, Rolex watches, and DoorDash.

The Tortoise’s magic penny was simply taking step after step.

We want it now, but we get less of it when we’re impatient. Before you give up and trash your latest self-improvement project, remember that the genome wasn’t built in a day. We need to stick with our program.

I’ve had lots of experience with this as a musician. We have to practice daily to make progress. And that includes a lot of repetition.  After a while it pays off and it’s a blast. Similarly, to change psychologically we need to practice daily in order to lay down new neural patterns to override the old ones. (I’ll make suggestions about how to do this at the end of this [episode] post.)

We also need to tolerate setbacks. If you expect your efforts and results to be consistent, and you chastise yourself when they’re not, you’re buying into the worst of your perfectionism and selling short your progress. Don’t go all-or-nothing.  Don’t make this another control project.

And get your ego out of it. This is not an inquisition into your goodness.

Progress is not always predictable, perceptible, or perfectible. And it’s certainly not always linear. You may feel that you keep revisiting the same issues over and over. Chances are though that you are re-visiting them at higher levels, as if you were ascending a spiral, rather than just going in circles.

Enlist your perfectionists, obsessive-compulsive determination in the service of patience and persistence. The Tortoise was obsessively and compulsively persistent. And he won the race.

3.    You Magnify Difficulties and Consequences

You may see change as more monumental than it really is. It’s the old mountain out of a molehill thing, with the caveat that it really is a hill. It’s just not a molehill. Still, it’s not a mountain and you magnify how steep it is.

Compulsives often imagine that tasks are more difficult and the consequences more dire than they really are. (I covered this more extensively in podcast episode 82.) We imagine too far into the future, and imagine it negatively and inaccurately. Especially the thinking-planning types among us. They try to foresee everything they have to do in order to prevent disasters before they happen. Nice idea, but it doesn’t work. It’s just another flavor of overcontrol.

How does this mountain-climbing perspective prevent change?

• You resist starting to climb the hill because it looks too steep.

• You exert more energy and don’t pace yourself. That’s not efficient.

• You’re more likely to give in to despair or burnout from over-working before you reach the top.

 

Remember the story of Chicken Little? The little-known, original version of the story illustrates what happens when we exaggerate the difficulty and consequences of change.

Chicken Little is in a bind because she has both a high school PTA meeting and a middle school Band Booster meeting on the same night. Missing either one predicts certain disaster to her. She tells her therapist about her predicament. Her therapist suggests she will feel much better if she doesn’t take so much responsibility.

To her, not taking so much responsibility would be climbing Mt. Everest. And because her defensive strategy of over-responsibility is threatened, when Chicken Little thinks about not attending both the PTA and Band Booster meetings this week, she believes the sky will fall.

I’m not mixing metaphors here. This is what happened when she imagined a tall mountain.

Anyway, convinced of the impending doom, she warns all her feathery friends and they hustle off to tell the King. But they don’t know where he is. Overhearing all this, Foxy Loxy agrees to take them to the King to tell him about the problem. Instead, he leads them to his den and has oodles of delicious chicken dinners for the next week: Chicken Tikka Masala, Chicken Shwarma, and Coq au Vin.

If you fall for the illusion that the problem is monumental and the sky is falling, you’re cooked.

It’s not a mountain and the sky is not falling.

One reason that we magnify the difficulty of change is that we buy into the lie of fixed mindset, thinking that human capacity (or avian capacity) for learning and growth are set entirely by genes. “If I can’t make  this change right away, that means I’m just not good at it and I’ll never get it.”

Instead, we need to work from growth mindset, the belief that with commitment, our capacities and talents can improve over time.

Notice that it never occurred to Chicken Little that she could learn to tolerate the discomfort of taking less responsibility.

Some of this comes from comparing.

You will want to give up if you think others are able to change more easily than you because they were more gifted all the way back to diaper days, and now their Instagram posts are beyond enviable. “How come Sam can just turn his brain off so easily? He just floats through life while I’m stuck in this swamp of obsessions. I’ll never be able to make that change.”

Don’t fall for it.

4.    You Set Unrealistic Goals for Change

In contrast to those who see things as unsurmountable, some make change difficult by aiming for Everest. For instance, if you think you’re going to be as calm as Mr. Rogers from the television show A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood after 3 sessions of psychotherapy, you should go to therapy to get that idea fixed.

This is actually a common unrealistic goal. Therapists often need to help patients relinquish the goal of not having bad feelings anymore. If that’s your expectation, you will be disappointed, and worse, you won’t know how to handle the disappointment. If you accept that the goal is to be able to exist alongside disturbing feelings without identifying with them (e.g. I am depressed, I am apoplectic, I am disappointed), you’ll be moving in the right direction and see more change.

Of course this is just one example of an unrealistic goal. There are many, and we have been warned by the great writers and thinkers of the world. Their characters sometimes set unrealistic goals and illustrate what happens:

 

There’s Don Quixote who tilted his lance at windmills with the goal of being a chivalrous knight. Nary a dragon did he slay.

There’s Icarus, whose father warned him not to fly too high but did anyway. He fell into the sea.

And of course there’s Captain Ahab who chased the great white whale Moby Dick until almost everyone on his ship drowned when the aquatic beast turned the ship over like it was a child’s paper boat. Ahab could have saved all of us the trouble of reading the 800 pages and saved lots of trees from being cut down to make those pages if he had accepted that he did not have to prove himself by conquering Moby Dick, his Everest.

We make problems when we make unrealistic goals. Let the bloody whale be.

OK, Gary. Enough with the literature review. How does this manifest in real life? Here are just some examples of unrealistic goals:

• Expecting to never feel annoyed by your partner, children or mother-in-law.

• Expecting to never react negatively to the misalignments, misanthropes, and misdeeds all around you.

• Expecting never to want to have things resolved.

• Expecting to finish the screen play in three weeks.

• Expecting never to worry about money again.

 

It’s ok to moderate your goals. People often change their goals once they get into therapy and start to develop awareness. Or once they start up the hill. And that’s fine.

 

5.    You’re Too Much in Your Head.

Change is not just the result of better thinking. It also takes emotional engagement, imagination and behaving the opposite of the way you usually behave. If you’re trying to change only by figuring things out, you’re disconnecting from your body and your feelings, and you wonder why they won’t listen to you. They can’t hear you when you’re that far away!

Yes, insight is important. But if you don’t slow down enough to talk about that insight with your gut, and feel the feelings that you’ve been avoiding much of your life, change will be slow in coming.

The core cause of obsessing is the effort to think your way out of a feeling. You may have noticed, it doesn’t work.

Many compulsives forgo feeling for control. But emotion is the lubricant of the brain, and without it, the damned thing rusts and freezes up.

Being frozen is a great metaphor for the unhealthy compulsive personality. There’s nothing wrong with the water itself. It’s just become too rigid.

Think of Elsa from the animated Disney film Frozen. When young, Elsa uses her inborn capacity to create ice and snow to amuse herself and her sister Anna. But over time she loses control of her capacity and freezes out everyone. She suppresses her feelings, fearing that they are too intense and will lead to shame. In effect, she freezes herself. For Elsa to change and adapt to her world, to connect, she had to learn how to let it go, allow herself to be herself, and to feel.

For those of you who don’t dig Disney, you might find Spock, from the television series Star Trek, more relatable. Half Vulcan and half human, Spock was often baffled by human emotion and the behavior it led to. In order to function with humans, and to find his own fulfillment, he had to learn the language of emotion. Otherwise, half of him was left out. He couldn’t merely figure it out intellectually, he had to experience feeling to change.

So, if you are perfectionistic, obsessive or compulsive, and you want to change, the challenge may be to allow yourself to have feelings such as insecurity, uncertainty, and fatigue from trying to be so perfect. These are the actions that allow us to change.

You can’t put your feelings in cold storage and expect to be flexible.

Being too much in your head may also mean that you isolate when you really need more support and structure in order to change. Social contact can get us out of our head and lead to emotional experience.

For some people friends and family are enough support. For others therapy is the ticket. But some people need the structure of a group. Many medical school students study together and that’s what gets them through. Many people are better able to maintain weight loss with the support of a group. Unfortunately, support groups for people with OCPD or perfectionism are rare. But you don’t have to have a perfect match to get the benefits.

The factors that seem to help are:

• Regular attendance

• Accountability

• Repetition over time

• Social norms that support persistence

People with OCP are reluctant to delegate, and this may seem like a form of delegation. But it’s also a path to change.

 

6.    You Cling to the Fringe Benefits of Being Obsessive-Compulsive

It will make it harder to change if you still get something out of your old ways. We call these secondary gains.

For instance, if you’re sick, the secondary gain is that you don’t have to do the dishes or the laundry or even act very nice. Cool. But it also makes it harder to start feeling better. Which is not to say I think you’re malingering, but that outside of your awareness there may be resistance to change because you would lose something sweet if you gave up the status quo.

Other secondary gains could be an identity as a virtuous person, a competent person, or a perfect person. Change requires modesty and giving up the King on the Mountain position.

And then there are the fringe benefits of identifying as a victim. Someone else has been bad to you, and therefore you are good. It’s simple logic. And flawed logic.

Frank has to decide what to do with his evening. He can choose to stay up all night to correct someone else’s errors on their team project, proving that he is the victim of someone else’s sloppiness. Then he could display his victimhood in the meeting tomorrow morning. Or he could not to take too much responsibility, and watch a few episodes of Friends. For him, the first option is sexier.

Few of us are not tempted by the siren call of the victim. If you’re upright and virtuous, you may choose to clean up the slop of all the muggels around you. (Muggles are the normals in the Harry Potter world who don’t get the magic of perfection, production and control.) If you choose to do this, you may may feel the warm bath of being the casualty of their laziness.

Another area of fringe benefits is the Comfort Zone of Risk Aversion. You’re not willing to take the chance of getting anything wrong, being shamed, or shaming yourself for not obsessing and compulsing so much you get it perfect. The risk you fear is getting a whoopin’ from your inner critic for letting go of control. That makes change very difficult.

Takeaways About How to Change

Because repetition is a technique that helps us to change, let’s summarize and reinforce what we’ve discussed:

1. Don’t just sit there and avoid what you don’t want.

• Go after what you do want and what has meaning for you.

2. Don’t give up and jump from one change strategy to another.

• To find the treasure dig one hole deep.

3. Don’t assume it’s impossibly difficult.

• Be open-minded and consider that this hill is probably not as steep as you thought.

4. Don’t choose unrealistic goals.

• Taking small steps consistently will get you very far.

5. Get out of your head.

• Get into your feelings: Don’t avoid negative feelings. Allow hopeful feelings to motivate you. And get help.

6. Don’t cling to secondary gains.

• Acknowledge what you get out of old ways and ask whether that makes it worth staying stuck in the status quo.

 

Here are 11 ways to apply these ideas. Choose 3 of these that address your specific goals to focus on each day:

• Spend 5 minutes less each day cleaning or organizing. Do something more fun instead.

• Work 20 minutes less each day.

• Rest 10 minutes each day.

• Find 3 opportunities each day to let go and be more flexible.

• Tolerate 1 unknown each day by not planning it out.

• Accept 1 imperfection in your work each day.

• Spend 1 dollar you don’t need to each day.

• Let someone else get away with 1 imperfection each day without correcting them.

• Find 3 opportunities to complement someone else each day.

• Make 1 decision each day not to try to please someone else with your perfect behavior.

• Take 20 seconds to review your list of 5 most important values each day.

Each of these may make you feel like you’re about to lose something. That’s a signal that change is coming. And that’s worth it.