Suffering The Perfectionism Gene

Can personal development and self improvement be taken too far?

I always like getting my inspiration to write from something that’s happened to me – it feels more real that way – and a rather strange thing happened to me this week.  It was such a small thing, but my gym instructor commented about the fact that I always asked her questions after class.

Its so easy in these situations  to allow your limiting self beliefs to tell you that you’re being a pain – but I know better than allow this voice to take over so I took a step back and thought about it.  I’d  thought my behaviour was the same as everyone else – clearly not – we held different perspectives.  So I thought again.

And I’ve concluded that one of my positive traits, the one that is about attention to detail and getting things right is a little out of balance and I’ve turned a trait that is about getting things right into a perfectionism gene.  I was being driven my a strong desire to get my exercises perfectly right ALL the time – driven by my limiting self belief that despite working really hard to ‘perfect’ my technique for the last 6 years – I’m really not as good as everyone else.

There’s no right or wrong answer.  In fact in some circumstances this would be a perfect skill to take to a job interview, however exposing your gym instructor to it week after week might be taking it a bit far.  I am of course exaggerating a little (I hope) just to make the point.

So I believe sometimes we have to consider our habits, look at them from differing perspectives and question whether we take things too far.  This is just as important as considering the aspects we think of as weaknesses.

I’ve touched on this before in a previous blog post

So, what are your strengths? And do you ever take them to far? If so what impact does it have?

Related articles

• The Perfectionism Series (itsawonderfulimperfectlife.wordpress.com)
• Is Perfectionism Holding You Back? (fastcompany.com)