Taking your business to great heights. You've managed this through hard work, setting the bar high and .... But behind this shining success story lies a challenge: letting go of control. The tendency to want to control every detail, driven by the pursuit of perfection. This perfectionism can be both a blessing and a curse. It often helps us persevere and improve ourselves, and at the same time it can get in our way.
Today we speak to Liesbet Boone. Co-founder of Conundrum, leadership coach. She did research at the University of Ghent on perfectionism. Wrote the book "Not perfect, yet satisfied. In which she developed a model to move perfectionism towards optimism. Coping better with perfectionism does not mean that you have to lower the bar. It does mean that you can make more conscious choices and perform with more satisfaction.
The study
Before Liesbet wrote the book, she did research on perfectionism. "It was two studies that we had given a different design that brought surprising results. One of those studies was a diary study so how is your perfectionism? There we had asked students to measure perfectionism levels every day. What we saw from that is that perfectionism effectively varies not only between individuals, but also varies within individuals. We saw that perfectionism was higher some days than others."
What is perfectionism
According to Liesbet, a distinction is often made between adoptive and maladoptive perfectionism. Adoptive perfectionism is setting high standards and that is often said to be positive. Maladoptive perfectionism is more self-criticism and having worries and doubts and that's quite negative.
"We also saw in the research, and that was also one of those surprising results, that when people set high standards that often self-criticism was also triggered or people also experienced negative outcomes with that. That was the starting point for the model we developed. We're not looking at how high that bar is, but we're mainly asking the question: why do people set the bar so high? And to a large extent, that's where the answer lies."
Links
More about Liesbet Boone
See her book here
More about the Working Professor
Do you have questions or input? Please contact Wendy van Ierschot at wendy@viepeople.com.
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