WHY BEING A PERFECTIONIST ISN'T SO PERFECT - 10 SIGNS YOU ARE A PERFECTIONIST

This is part1 of a two part series on perfectionism:

Part 1: 10 signs you are a perfectionist
Part 2:  The downsides of perfectionism and how to overcome it 

Do you consider yourself a perfectionist? Or are you usually labeled as one? Do you often feel the need to perfect every single thing you do even at the cost of your well-being?  While having high standards is considered as a good thing by most people, a tendency to set standards that are so high, such that they cannot be met or can only be met with great difficulties, which is the case with most perfectionists isn't that perfect.

Perfectionism as described by [Wikipedia] is a personality trait characterized by a person striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high standards, accompanied by overly critical self evaluations and concerns regarding others' evaluations.

They refuse to accept any standard that is short of perfect and in most cases believe anything that is short of perfection is horrible.  Well if you are wondering whether you are a perfectionist or not? Here are some signs of perfectionists:

1. Spend too much time on something:  You will often spend so much time right down to the last minute to perfect something.  It won't matter to you even if it means sacrificing your sleep, well-being, your personal time, just so as you can achieve to your highest level.

2. Set excessively high standards:  You often set very high standard for whatever you set your mind to do, which may sometime seem humanly impossible, but that doesn't stop you from making them.   

3. You have a specific way of doing things, which in most cases is very detailed for the "regular" people to understand and if it falls short of how you expect it to be, you consider it unacceptable.

4. You don't accept mistakes and perceive them as a failure:  While making mistakes is most often considered inevitable and isn't considered a failure but rather a chance to learn and improve yourself, as a perfectionist, there's no room for mistakes in your world.  Making a mistake to you means that you are a horrible person and a failure for disappointing others.

5. You'd rather give up on something if the outcome won't be as you have envisioned:  You already have clear and set standards for whatever you want to achieve but if you get the slightest feeling you may fail to reach the set standard, you'd rather give up the try.  After all what is the point of trying if you can't get the desired results?

6. You stop at nothing, until your reach the end goal:  It doesn't matter to you if you achieve 70%, 80%, 98%..As long as you haven't hit the 100% mark you will stop at  nothing.

7. You are extremely hard on yourself and sometime get depressed when you don't achieve your goals:  You will beat yourself up ceaselessly if something falls short of your expectations no matter how small it is.  You constantly keep wondering what could have gone wrong or what you could have done wrong.

8. You keep procrastinating waiting for that "perfect" moment or the "right" time to do something: Most often than not you you will put off something for that "perfect" moment or when the time is "right" for you, since you do not want to jeopardize you work by starting when you're not well prepared.  However, that "perfect moment" sometimes seems to overly take too long or never seems to come.

9. You always get the need to do more:  Whatever you do and achieve, there always seems to be something bigger to aim for.  Sometimes it feels like you are never content with what you have achieved.

10. You are often critical:  You have a sharp eye for details and thus you are often inclined to finding faults and mistakes even when others don't see them.

Do you fall in any of these categories?  Is any of these familiar to you?  Personally there are several categories I fall in.  Especially spending copious amount of time in a task, excessive checking, like going through over and over a task just to ensure it's perfectly done. Often love doing things for myself, afraid of the fact that if I leave it to someone else they may not do it as I can do it or as I would want it done.  

I sometimes find myself putting off things waiting for that "perfect time" to do them,  which in most cases overly takes too long.  Always aiming higher and setting high standard goals for myself.

However the good news is, if you relate to any of this, it doesn't mean it's all that bad since according to psychology there are two types of perfectionists:

• Adaptive perfectionists, work on developing their skills and their standards are always rising.  They approach work with optimism and a desire to improve.  This is clearly a healthy type of perfectionism.
• Mal-adaptive perfectionists, on the other hand are never satisfied with what they achieve. They dismiss anything that doesn't seem perfect to them and they may experience fear of failure, doubt, unhappiness or any other painful emotion.

So what type of perfectionist are you?  Catch me on part two of this series on the downsides of perfectionism (mostly Mal-adaptive) and how to overcome perfectionism.