Recovering Perfectionist and Failing Forward
I am a recovering perfectionist.
I liked to think I had high standards, was fastidious, didn’t have the time and energy to put into something if I couldn’t make it just right. But in reality I was afraid of failing.
Failing meant failure, no matter how many times people said differently.
Failing meant scrutiny, judgment, and loss of creative control (because someone else would take over to make it right).
Failing meant net loss: a waste of time I didn’t have, money I didn’t have, and the loss of peoples trust in my ability to reliably do the thing.
This wasn’t just in my creative pursuits. Nope this fear of failure (aka perfectionism) showed up in parenting, housekeeping, religious expression, being a friend, a member of a community, school (when I was in school) and basically every aspect.
You might think this perfectionism made me really excel, like in school, but no, I wasn’t excelling, so the shame just built and built and the fear got deeper and deeper. That coupled with people pleasing, someone would say jump this high, and I’d raise the bar twice and then fold.
And yet, I am a deeply creative person.
So I’d do these binge/purge cycles. I’d pour every ounce of energy time and money I could into my current interest, get annoyed at how many times I was distracted from it, get frustrated that my skill didn’t match my vision, and then give the whole thing up.
Or I’d have my husband do the thing, and wait for my driving want to become his priority.
I thought I lacked perseverance, endurance, motivation and was just a class A procrastinator and perfectionist.
How did I break out of the cycle?
I’d like to report that something amazing, some epiphany, broke the cycle. And maybe working hard to fix my depression and anxiety, and find my identity was that epiphany, but really it was a slow steady process of climbing into healing step by micro step.
The more I made space for me to take up space, to recognize I’m doing my best even though it doesn’t look like a “best”, the more I saw the fear that kept me small. I stopped doing the things for perfect, and started doing them because they brought me joy.
Through the years I began to see the truth in the saying people always say about failure.
Failure isn’t final
Mistakes are part of the process
Do we give up on the baby learning to walk when it falls
But at the same time it all felt like platitudes. I still hated making the mistakes no matter how unavoidable they were. Still feeling in a way they were a personal failing. A setback I had to make a comeback from. Still a waste of time, a waste of money, a waste of material. I’d just gotten a bit more comfortable with it.
See to me a mistake, a failure was always a net loss.
My awesome and technical drawing of the impact I believed mistakes had on my growth.
If you stopped after a failing, you were in a deficit. A negation of growth. A negative on the invoice of life.
And then I took a Motorcycle class.
Motorcycles both excited and scared me. I’d go riding with my husband as “the backpack” or riding behind him. When I got really depressed and axious motorcycle rides lost a lot of the fun. For a while I’d wondered if I had my own bike it would be fun again, but… I wasn’t about to put that in motion.
Then Hubs bought me a motorcycle class for my birthday this year, and took care of the little so I could go the two full days.
The class had a classroom portion and a practical portion. The class is very much like drivers ed, except when you do the practical portion, you are on your own bike, with 12 other people on bikes, and the instructors stand a safe distance away watching and advising.
It starts slow. Feel the clutch begin to engage and begin to pull the bike forward, disengage the clutch and rock the bike back. Once we were all well and comfortable we started walking with the bike slowly stepping the bikes a distance, do a big sweeping turn around and slowly walk back. I began tense, excited, terrified. But perfection was going to make sure I did exactly as instructed.
I did well. I also had fun. I asked questions when everyone was quiet. I talked to myself to make sure I remembered the sequence, and when the instructors said relax, I worked on relaxing. It was an interesting mix of try it and be ok with failing, but also be perfect and DON’T fail.
I was asked to lead out the class in a formation. I did it. Then I was asked again. And again. We had a curves formation, separated into groups of six, and I was placed with the guys who’d ridden before, but wanted a refresher even though it was my first time. And the second time around I was asked to lead out again, and right before we started the formation the instructor told the guys behind to watch what I’m doing. the perfectionist in me was CHEERING!
Then came the practical exam. I was asked to lead the class in the graded formations. Even though the first few formations I was tense, I did it. But the last one—the last formations were curves and I BOSSED curves…until I didn’t and I swung way too wide of the marked lines, finished the formation with a beet red face.
The instructor told me afterwards “I wanted you to lead for two reasons. One, you are a great example for the people behind you. If you had watched others do it first, you would have done it perfectly, because you can do it perfectly. But I also wanted to you to see that you could fail and finish and that you’d be ok. You passed, even with messing up like you did. You still passed.”
That public failing, that realization that I didn’t get mocked, didn’t let anyone down, didn’t die (didn’t even die a social death) has changed my trajectory on failings.
Failings, mistakes don’t create a net loss, but actually a catapultion into higher gains.
The awesome and technical graph showing how mistakes actually have a positive impact on my growth.
We learn more from failings and mistakes than we do from successes.
If I do a thing once and succeed immediately I’ve learned one iteration of how to do the thing.
If I do a thing and mess it up, I learn how:
not to do the thing,
how to fix the thing,
how to make corrections to avoid the mistake the next time.
But what if you do a thing wrong, notice it’s wrong, stop and never learn how to fix it or do it right? Well you learned how to not do a thing. The same amount of growth that you had by doing it correctly the first time.
The trick comes because we are sometimes more propelled in motivation by successes, and can lose motivation by failures. And that I’m realizing has more to do with the fears tied with failing, than anything else.
For so much of my life I thought failing was steps backward, always a negative. Now I’m seeing that failing is always a forward motion, maybe a step, maybe a leap, but failing is forward.
