When it’s something I’m doing, perfectionism is just what’s called “doing a great job.” When someone else is doing it, it’s called perfectionism.

It’s not the wanting to do great work that’s the problem in perfectionism—it’s that people who suffer from it are extremely rigid about what good work looks like, and how it should be accomplished. The rigidity is the problem, not the desire to do great work.

Perfectionism is the intersection between excessively—usually unrealistically—high standards and rigid adherence to those standards.

The problem is the rigidity around those standards. The rigidity means it’s all or nothing, so we hyperfocus on achieving our impossible goals, only to burn out, neglect other responsibilities, avoid our goals altogether, or constantly feel miserable even when we’re objectively doing well.

rules + rigidity = perfectionism

The antidote to perfectionism is not getting rid of your rules—it’s understanding what they’re designed to help you achieve, noticing situations where they’re helpful versus hurting, and being flexible enough to follow them when they’re helpful and disregard them when they’re not.

In the behavioral psychology community there are two kinds of rule following: tracking and pliance. Tracking means you’ve found a rule, and it’s been reinforced by positive outcomes when you’ve followed it in the past. Pliance means you’re following a rule because you think you’re expected to by other people.

The problem is, once we’ve found a rule that’s been reinforced, either by good outcomes or by social pressure, we hold to it so tightly that we often become blind to places where it doesn’t work. Psychologists call this rule-governed behavior.

what we want is to look at when the rule is actually working and when it isn’t. This is what we call contingency-shaped behavior.

Letting your experience teach you is a much more effective way to run your life than the rigid rule-following common to perfectionism. And if you want to start doing that, what you first need to do is understand what you want.

Values are directions you want your life to go in, and qualities of the journey you want to go on. These directions and ways of being can become guideposts for you when you’re faced with challenging circumstances and you’re caught in the grip of perfectionism.

especially in the psychological arena, the problem with goals is that they have an end date. Once you accomplish them you often end up feeling lost and rudderless.

Finding your values helps to find the things that are most intrinsically motivating to you, and framing them as values helps to keep them available to you at all times.

study participants are much more likely to approach a difficult or painful circumstance if doing so relates directly to a personal value.

all of the perfectionistic thoughts and ideas that are driving you mad can actually be a gift. They point the way to what’s most important to you.

be careful to separate out rules that you’re following because you think you “should”—i.e. because they help you conform to socially expected standards of behavior—rather than rules you’re following because you intrinsically want the results of following them.

awareness is powerful because once you can do it consistently it gives you the freedom to develop a new skill: the ability to get some space from the thoughts and feelings you’re experiencing. This is what psychologists call defusion.

Once you’ve defused from your thoughts sufficiently, and you have the freedom to choose how to behave, the next step is to remember what you want: to return to your values.

Following your values creates variability in behavior. And variability in behavior is good. It allows you to learn new things.