The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life - Tal Ben-Shahar (2009)

Part III. MEDITATIONS

Chapter 8. First Meditation: Real Change

It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.

—James Gordon

An experiment conducted by Ellen Langer and her student Loralyn Thompson helped me understand why the shift from perfectionism to optimalism has been so difficult for me and for others.¹ Participants in the study were given a list of undesirable traits, such as rigid, gullible, and grim, and were then asked which of these traits they had tried to change in themselves and whether or not they had succeeded. Later, they were asked to evaluate the importance of traits such as consistency, trust, and seriousness. What participants were unaware of was that the traits on the second list are often seen as the positive equivalents of the traits on the first list. Consistency may be perceived as the positive version of rigidity, being trusting may be seen as the positive side of gullibility.

What Langer found was that those who valued a certain positive trait had difficulty changing its negative counterpart—those who valued consistency, for example, had difficulty becoming less rigid because deep down, subconsciously, they feared it would mean becoming less consistent.

Along similar lines, people do not give up excessive feelings of guilt because they do not want to lose their sensitivity; they continue to worry out of proportion to the situations they are dealing with, because they fear that not worrying will mean not being responsible. Then there are those who remain faultfinders because they believe that being a benefit finder implies being detached from reality. As Langer writes, “The reason some people have a hard time changing their behavior, no matter how hard they seem to try, is that they really value that behavior under a different name.”

Can you think of any traits or behaviors that you have tried to change and haven’t been able to? Are there positive counterparts to those traits that you value and do not want to lose?

One of the reasons perfectionism is difficult to overcome is because we associate it with certain positive traits. Many people in job interviews mention perfectionism when they are asked to name a personal weakness. They usually equate perfectionism with making sure things are done and done well and paying attention to details. Their “admission” of perfectionism is a roundabout way of revealing a strength, of saying, “I am detail oriented, methodical, hard working, and you can trust me.”

Why was it so difficult for me to change my perfectionism, even though I knew that it was making me unhappy? Because although I saw perfectionism as problematic, I also associated it with being meticulous and driven. And because I didn’t want to be sloppy and lazy, I chose—or my subconscious chose for me—to remain a Perfectionist, despite the price I knew I was paying.

To be able to change, we need a nuanced understanding of what exactly it is that we want to get rid of and what we want to keep. Researcher Dina Nir writes about the importance of unbundling, the process of taking a particular quality and separating it into “two or more distinct and explicitly defined sub-aspects.”² There are a number of characteristics that are bundled within perfectionism, and to bring about change we have to unbundle them—to understand which we want to keep and which we don’t.

To apply the unbundling process to the trait of perfectionism, we can start by asking some or all of the questions that Nir suggests: What does perfectionism mean to me? What do I gain from being a Perfectionist? What aspects of perfectionism am I proud of? What price do I pay for being a Perfectionist? What price do others pay for my perfectionism? Which aspects of perfectionism do I want to keep? Which elements of perfectionism do I want to get rid of?

In my own case, while I want to rid myself of my fear of failure and my rejection of painful emotions (which psychologists associate with negative, maladaptive perfectionism), I want to keep my drive and ambition (which I associate with optimalism). Once I define those areas where I want to change and those where I do not, I am likely to be less conflicted and consequently more ready to change. After we unbundle the traits, we can decide whether or not we want to change and, if we do, what exactly it is that we want to change. Essentially, what Langer’s study suggests—whether we apply it to perfectionism, rigidity, faultfinding, or any other trait or behavior—is a shift from the Perfectionist’s all-or-nothing approach to a more nuanced, realistic analysis.

EXERCISE

Unbundling Perfectionism