Strategies to Support Perfectionism

Strategies to Support Perfectionism

If your client has anxiety related concerns it may be the case that they experience intense perfectionism. Some strategies to support perfectionism include:

  •  Encourage your client’s parents and teachers to focus on the process of their work, rather than the product. 
  • Try to refrain from allowing your client to engage in perfectionistic behaviour.
    • For example, if an assignment has already met requirements, they should be encouraged to hand it in as is. Allowing them to make continual changes will perpetuate their anxiety. 
  • Continue to help your client take pride in and learn from their mistakes. It is important for them to learn to approach challenging situations as an opportunity for growth, rather than a threat.
  • Encourage your client to partake in activities that do not require evaluation or perfection, such as identify activity.
    • They are encouraged to use the resiliency strategies they have developed in identify activity and apply them to their approach to school.

Tips For Clients Dealing with Perfectionism

Your client may benefit from talking to a counsellor about perfectionism and how it is affecting their daily functioning.The following tips can be given to your client for dealing with perfectionism:

  • Learning to fail: Ease up on yourself when trying something new especially if you have never done it before.  Not succeeding all the time is normal.
  • Learning to laugh: Start with safe things and funny people.  After you’ve practiced laughing at safe things, be brave and move on to the next stage: laughing at yourself.
  • Turning problems into opportunities: Study whatever aspect of perfectionism makes things hardest for you. 
    • Find out what doctors and researchers have discovered about its causes and effects.
    • Imagine that you are a counsellor with a perfectionist clients, devise a treatment plan and take your own advice.
  • Set Reasonable standards for yourself: You don’t always have to be the best and the brightest.  Enjoy the doing of something rather than the end product. 
    • Setting high standards for yourself prevent you from finding the middle range between first place and last place and prevents you from growing and learning.
  • Plan positive alternate paths: leave room for unplanned events; give yourself permission to make mistakes (some of the best ideas have come out of accidents); be flexible in considering alternate paths; give yourself time for alternate paths to emerge; pursue your interests.
  • Get to know the real you:  How do you define your self-concept?  Do you see yourself as someone who always finishes first?  Someone who does not fail?
  • Learning to reward yourself and savour success: you may need to practice being good to yourself.
  • Accepting praise from others and praising yourself: The next time someone offers you a compliment say “Thank you.” Not “Thank you, but…” 
    • Refusing to accept a compliment is like refusing to accept a gift, and that insults the giver.
  • Learn how to deal with criticism: Perfectionists often view criticism as a personal attack, responding to it defensively.
    • Concentrate on being more objective about the criticism, and about yourself.
    • If someone criticizes you for making a mistake, acknowledge the mistake and assert your right to make mistakes.
    • Once you no longer buy into the fallacy that humans must be perfect to be worthwhile, you won’t feel so angry or defensive when you make a mistake.
    • Criticism will then seem like a natural thing from which to learn, rather than something to be avoided at all costs.

Resources For Clients

Your client would benefit from reading about perfectionism in order to educate themselves about how it is impacting their life.

  • Books:
    • Don’t sweat the small stuff… and it’s all small stuff by Dr. Richard Carlson (New Work: Hyperion, 1997).
    • A Guide to Rational Living by Albert Ellis. Wilshire Book Co, 1998 (3rd revised edition).
    • How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life by Alan Lake. New York: New American Library, 1996.
    • I’ve Done So Well-Why Do I Feel So Bad? by Celia Halas & Roberta Matteson. New York, Ballantine, 1987 (reissue edition). (11/02)

For more information and targeted interventions for perfectionistic behavior, see this handout: Perfectionism Handout