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Learn how the inner perfectionist works, what its effects on your life are, and how you can enjoy the talents it has without being controlled by it.

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The perfectionist is the part of us that tries to do everything just right. It has high standards and is serious about making us meet them.

Signs that you have a perfectionist as a primary self are that your stress levels are high, you feel anxiety about the quality of your work or activity, it’s difficult to get things completed, you check and re-check work, and you may feel frustrated, both with yourself and with others, especially those who aren’t as perfectionistic as you.

It often plays a large role when a person is suffering with anxiety.

But isn’t it good — even necessary — that we can do things perfectly? Especially things like life-saving surgeries, air traffic control, building sky scrapers?

Is it possible to achieve high standards without your inner perfectionist in charge?

Yes! It is.

Because consider this: there are many people who have a strong inner perfectionist who are unable to complete — or sometimes even begin — a project because they are crippled by their perfectionism.

An example is someone looking for the right fabric to recover an old sofa and nothing they see is quite right and so the sofa-recovering project never begins.

Or someone writing a book they never complete because they’re unhappy with it and they keep re-writing and tweaking it.

And there are others who can’t achieve the standards they desire because their obsession blinds them to different perspectives on how to achieve a particular standard or what even constitutes a high standard.

It’s when we’re able to divorce our inner perfectionist and see it for the obsessive part of ourselves it is, in need of our reassurance and care (and who works in tandem with our inner pusher and inner critic), that we can move forward in our endeavours and achieve the standards we have consciously chosen.

How to Use Your Inner Perfectionist Consciously

If you suffer from perfectionism, a good counterbalance to it is the stereotypically Australian ‘she’ll be right mate’ self who accepts inferior outcomes (sorry my fellow Aussies, but our housing standards are evidence this is more than a silly stereotype), or a self who is comfortable with ‘enoughness’, or a self who can simply be.

How to do this:

1. Practice inviting in opposite energies in order to gain some separation from your perfectionist, or do a Voice Dialogue session, or work on the awareness level of consciousness so you can ‘see’ more objectively how it operates in you.

2. Query your perfectionist about what its underlying anxiety is. Interview it about what it fears will happen if it’s not in charge — write down the answers that come to you so you’ll remember them.

3. Practice a type of exposure therapy where you intentionally leave a mistake in a document or email where there would be no terrible consequence for the mistake, or in how you’ve cooked a meal or cleaned your house — basically in whatever area you tend to be perfectionistic in.

The ability to do things extremely well and precisely is important in many aspects of our lives, but the best way to use your inner perfectionist is to be aware of it and then make choices in how you use that energy.

A great way to connect with the wonderful array of selves within you, and to harness their perspectives, gifts and energy, is to read my ebook Which Self Are You?