…but maybe you think like one.

Do you have big plans and ideas, yet fail to take action to get them done?

Perhaps you feel disappointed with what you’ve achieved in your life so far, even though you know that you’ve got all this potential locked inside

Are you getting to the point where you are losing faith that you can create the life you want for yourself and your family?

A perfectionist mindset could be the culprit here. 

For 38 years of my life I didn’t believe I was a perfectionist.  Sometimes I admitted that I did behave a bit like one, but most of the time I considered myself so far away from the high-achieving, controlled, smart and precise perfectionist stereotype that I knew I couldn’t be one.

Sometimes I wished I was a perfectionist, because then at least I’d get shit done.

But then I discovered rather cruelly, that not only was I a perfectionist, but that many perfectionists are not actually that great at getting shit done.

In reality perfectionists are very good at putting things off, dithering over decisions, and ditching projects at the first sign of failure.

I’ve spent the last 9 years learning about perfectionism from my own experience and those of my clients: what it is, how it affects us, especially as mothers, and what are the most common perfectionist strategies, thinking habits and patterns of behaviours.  

Take The Perfectionist Quiz now 

There are many signs that you have a perfectionist mindset. I have compiled a list of 30 – which you can measure yourself against in my free online quiz.  Here’s a summary of the Top 10 signs.

TOP 10 PERFECTIONIST BEHAVIOURS

• You set yourself extremely high, often unrealistic and unattainable rules, standards and goals.

• You are overly critical of yourself and talk to yourself harshly, in a way that you would never speak to anyone else.

• You are constantly worrying about what other people think of you (even while rationally knowing this is not healthy) so that you can judge your self-worth from what you assume they think of you.

• You are full of self-doubt. You stress over decisions and once they are made you second-guess yourself constantly and often change your mind, or don’t make any decisions at all.

• You are constantly living in the future: to ward off problems, to stay in control you micromanage the future in your head, always living 5, 10, 30 minutes, 2 hours, days, weeks, months ahead of yourself.

• You have an almost pathological inability to be kind to yourself, to allow yourself to be human. You believe there is no excuse for mistakes and so self-compassion and ‘letting yourself off the hook’ is a weakness.

• You focus on what went wrong, what you should have done differently and fail to appreciate what you do well. As a result you don’t appreciate or enjoy your life because you are constantly thinking about what you need to change.

• You don’t like chaos and uncertainty. You need to know what’s going to happen and can be a bit of a control-freak.

• You don’t trust life. Because you are self-sufficient and think everything is up to you, you don’t believe that things are going to be OK unless you are controlling, managing and perfecting them.

• You are exhausted. Hustling for self-worth is a hard way to live.

Can you relate to any of these?  If you can relate to a few of them, maybe it’s not just time to admit to being a perfectionist, but also that this mindset is not working.

Please comment below if you can relate to these perfectionist signs. What do you think? Do you agree?  I’d love to hear from you. 

If you do feel like do you have a perfectionist mindset and that it’s not serving you, come along to The Perfectionist Mother HQ for more information, support, coaching and strategies for change.