The Truth About Perfectionism
At practices for my old NBL1 team, part of our warm up would be to play a sport other than basketball to help get our bodies ready, while also having a bit of fun.
One particular warm up has always stuck with me. It was a made-up game with a tennis ball, where you could only pass and throw to your teammates with your non-dominant hand. Now I like to think that because I was a professional elite athlete, I should be pretty good at most sports, right? Wrong. Turns out basketballs and tennis balls are significantly different. I could not catch the ball with my left hand. I just couldn’t do it, and every time I dropped the ball, my teammates would laugh, and I got frustrated. I was failing, and what should have been a fun game with my friends turned into a battle with myself to control the rage burning inside me.
‘I’m a perfectionist, I like to do things the right way and I like to be good at everything.’ That’s what I told an assistant coach who noticed how frustrated I was getting.
What I actually meant was ‘I don’t like to fail and look bad, especially in front of people.’
To make matters worse, I was then ashamed of my reaction and my inability to have fun and enjoy a light-hearted game.
This wasn’t the only way that perfectionism was showing up at this point in my career. After any game or practice, I was insanely good at finding all the things I didn’t do well, all the mistakes I made, and all the times I didn’t meet my own expectations.
Essentially I was looking for all the ways I wasn’t perfect and this became the proof I needed to convince myself that I had no right to play basketball.
I would feel horrible. I would feel ashamed and I would feel angry, and these emotions often followed me into every other area of my life for days after a game.
But still, I was honestly proud of my perfectionism, along with, I think, a pretty big percentage of athletes. I thought it was what made me a successful athlete. I thought that aiming for perfection and feeling these negative emotions when I didn’t reach it was exactly what I needed to be motivated to get better and better until I was perfect and had reached the next goal.
What I didn’t understand was that perfectionism was not the healthy or sustainable motivator I thought it was. It did not allow me to learn and grow as a player, it was entirely self-destructive, and it was causing me harm in both my performance and my wellbeing.
Perfectionism is a common trait among athletes, with studies finding that athletes tend to have higher levels of perfectionism than non-athletes.
Unfortunately, we buy into it without realising that it is a double-edged sword, with the negative effects far outweighing the positive.
On one hand, perfectionism can provide us with the drive to push ourselves as we hunt for our next achievement.
It’s no secret that becoming a professional athlete requires an intense dedication and focus on mastering the many, many skills that your sport involves. If you want to get better, every little detail of your performance must be analysed and worked on tirelessly in order to fine tune your skills and develop them continuously. Striving for perfection can feel like the necessary motivation to achieve this.
But playing the perfectionism game is risky and dangerous.
It is far too easy to fall into the trap of believing that doing everything perfectly is the key to success, and that anything less than perfection is failure.
The obvious problem here is that perfection is a lie. It does not exist. We will never have the perfect game and we will always make mistakes. Perfection is not real.
Now I know I’m not blowing anyone’s minds with these statements. Yet we seem to lose sight of the fact that seeking perfection is seeking something that is literally impossible for us to ever achieve.
When we operate in this mindset, we set unrealistic and unattainable standards for ourselves, and we become overly self-critical when we don’t meet those standards. This only makes us feel shame, guilt and anger at our inabilities. Fuelled by these negative emotions, we convince ourselves we have to do more, work harder, grind more, until we are perfect.
In my case, sure, I was motivated to get better. But being fuelled by these negative emotions was exhausting and honestly miserable. Furthermore, it wasn’t even working. I was not producing the results I was so desperately chasing and my performance and wellbeing were suffering deeply in this viscous cycle.
Not only does aiming for the unattainable standard of perfection set us up for self-destruction, but it also creates a stepping stone to tying our self-worth to our performance. Now I am exactly what I accomplish on the playing field and how well I accomplish it. Now how I feel about myself is determined by whether the ball goes through the net or not, a connection that does not ever make sense and only ever harms us.
All of a sudden we find that we’ve created a breeding ground for our negative emotions to rule our entire experience, and we find ourselves deeply unhappy not only with the sport we once loved, but with who we are as a person.
There is one final piece of the perfectionism puzzle that I want shine a light on, and it is the most important of them all. I may get closer to blowing your minds with this one… Perfectionism is not simply a fool’s errand of chasing something that doesn’t exist. At its heart, perfectionism is actually a defensive mechanism put in place out of fear.
Often, the true motivation behind someone seeking perfection is not to simply master their skills, but to save themselves from the risk of judgement from others.
Perfectionism is a shield we hide behind.
We fear failure and making mistakes and what we think they mean about us as a person. We are afraid of how people will judge and criticize our actions and abilities.
So, we think that if we can just do everything perfectly, then we will minimise the risk of being judged by others, therefore avoiding the pain of shame. The game now becomes about hustling to gain the approval and acceptance of others through our actions.
And by living behind a shield built out of fear such as this, we start to avoid taking actions we see as too risky, thereby stunting our development and growth as a person and a player.
And so, perfectionism does not actually promote healthy growth or self-improvement like we so often believe it does. Instead, it shackles us to the opinions of others, holds us back from becoming our best, and stops us from experiencing the freedom and joy that comes with chasing our true passions in life.
So how exactly do we move past perfectionism, especially as an athlete? I dive into this in the next blog in the Perfectionism and Performance series, and it will be out next week.
But before it’s released, I need to ask something of you.
I need you to believe that there is another way to be motivated to improve and become your best.
Being a perfectionist and seeking perfection may have served you in some way to get to where you are today. It certainly helped me in my career. But I want you to understand that we do not have to keep hurting ourselves by expecting impossible standards and beating ourselves up when we don’t reach them.
There is another way.
We can let go of the idea that we need to be perfect in order to be successful. We can step out from behind the armour put in place to protect us from the opinions and judgements of others. And we can stop relying on using negative emotions as fuel.
We can do all of this and still find the motivation to work hard to achieve our dreams, we can allow ourselves to truly learn and grow, and we can enjoy the journey a heck of a lot more along the way.
If you’ve made it this far, then you’re already one step closer.
In the meantime, Brene Brown provides fantastic insights into perfectionism in her book ‘Daring Greatly’, which I thoroughly recommend you read if you’re a human.
See you next week!
