Burning out over perfectionism

In today’s world, the pressures of “society” have us striving for perfection. We must be perfect at work, perfect at home, even perfect on vacation, for goodness’ sake!

If you are one of the lucky few, you won’t break on this impossible, never-ending quest for perfection; but the remaining two thirds of us will suffer from burnout at some point in our lives — or already have.

What is burnout?

Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and physical fatigue caused by continuous exposure to high levels of stress. Burnout can be debilitating and often requires a long road to recovery. Burnout should not be confused with exhaustion, which has a relatively quick recovery period.

To use a car analogy, exhaustion is like pulling into a gas station when your fuel gauge just hit empty. After you’ve refueled, you speed off (within the speed limit, of course 😉), a/c blasting, music blaring, and an open road of possibilities ahead.

On the other hand, if you’re burned out, your fuel gauge is anxiously flashing “EMPTY”, you haven’t had the a/c on since the tank was a quarter full, GPS isn’t picking up any gas stations for miles, you’re chugging along on fumes, traffic piling up behind you, horns blasting, and you’re fearing the moment the car can’t go any further — breakdown is imminent.

Typically, burnout is correlated with workplace stress, but you can burnout under many different circumstances across work and personal life. In fact, for example, trying to accomplish the perfect balance between work and life can cause burnout.

So where does perfectionism come into the equation?

Perfectionists are prone to burnout because we put endless amounts of pressure on ourselves to hit a goal that, by definition, is unattainable and we suffer from unnecessary amounts of disappointment because we have no way of measuring our success.

It is in our pursuit to be flawless that we become our own worst enemy. When we make “Perfect” the goal, we create an undefined finish line and we stop acknowledging our accomplishments, we start devaluing our greatness, and we almost kill ourselves to “have it all”.

Winston Churchill once said, “Perfection is the enemy of greatness.” We focus our attention on being perfect but forget to celebrate our awesomeness along the way.

By changing my perspective from ‘I must be perfect’ to ‘I will be great’ gave me so much freedom. It was hard work, and ‘Perfectionist Penelope’ (as I like to call her) raises her perfect little head every now and then, but there are a few key steps that have helped me focus less on being perfect and more on being great. I hope these tips will be helpful for you.

Three things you can do right now if you are burning out over perfectionism:

1. Re-write your goals.

· Set realistic goals (and even stretch goals can be realistic).

· Define success so you know what you’re aiming for and when you’ve achieved it.

· Break down your goals into smaller key results so you can celebrate the small successes along the way.

2. Ask for help.

· Check-in with HR, your employer hopefully has an Employee Assistance Program to help support you.

· Friends, family, therapists, and coaches can also help provide support. Let people know what you’re going through and help them understand what support you need.

3. Celebrate your greatness and find joy and satisfaction in imperfection!

· You are an awesome, passionate, and ambitious human being — take a moment to recognize some of your recent accomplishments.

· Take time to think about something you recently completed that was not perfect. What did it give you? Perhaps relief it got done. Perhaps surprise by all the compliments you received. Perhaps you shocked yourself that you were brave enough to submit something that wasn’t absolutely perfect (like this article 😜)

Now go out there and be awesome, you perfectly imperfect human being!