“You’re such a perfectionist” was something I used to hear a lot growing up. The first time I heard it was when my third-grade teacher took away my eraser because I had rewritten something four times due to not liking how my handwriting looked.
Although the act of her taking something away from me made me feel like I had made an error, the word “perfectionist” made me feel a sense of pride. In my head, I wanted everything to be perfect, and there was nothing wrong with that.
Perfectionism exists amongst many of us. For some, it may be advantageous, but for others, it may limit their success.
When I was younger, this applied to arts and crafts I participated in, but it wasn’t until high school that I realized my perfectionism did more harm than help. During high school, I started to value the grades I received, and that was when I developed goals for the future I wanted to accomplish.
As a result, I found I was harder on myself when I hadn’t done too well on an assignment at school. I checked each question at least three times before moving to another question during an evaluation.
I found myself waiting until the last minute to submit assignments even when I had them done earlier because I wanted to keep adding to them to make them “perfect.” When I made plans for school clubs I wanted to join and jobs where I wanted to work, I never felt like I was good enough when things didn’t go my way.
It wasn’t until my final year of high school that I realized my perfectionism was affecting me negatively. I was drained after a point and my motivation was decreasing. That was when I knew I had to stop putting so much pressure on myself to be “perfect.”
Whenever I made a mistake, I told myself to move on instead of trying to fix it. If I didn’t like my handwriting while I was working on my notes, I would accept it instead of erasing and restarting. I felt that simple acts like this saved me a lot of time and energy.
Another way I do this is by approaching tasks solely with the goal of completion. This may sound confusing, but especially with school evaluations, I realized I was too hard on myself because I would make it my goal to achieve a certain grade.
Whenever I turned in an assignment, I was hesitant and doubtful of my work, which led me to take longer than expected. Once I started changing the goal to simply doing my best, I found that I took less time but achieved good grades, too.
However, this year being a first-year journalism student, I realized that it’s quite important to be a perfectionist with Canadian Press style rules and the simple importance of delivering accurate news.
It may seem like this has taken me right to the start, but I learned an important lesson from this: there are pros and cons to everything; it’s just important to learn balance!
Although it’s useful to utilize the qualities of a perfectionist during my role as a student journalist, there are other instances in my day-to-day life where I can accept my flaws. It’s important in some cases to aim for perfection, but there are also some cases where this is not important, like making a smoothie!