Use Your Superpowers to Navigate the Perfectionist Paradox

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Susan, an executive coaching clients, was recently promoted to lead a bigger team. This talented, experienced professional was a self-proclaimed perfectionist. “I’m methodical and hyper-vigilant when it comes to quality,” Susan told me. “I ensure every communication or deliverable is evidence-informed and as perfect as possible before it goes out.”

Yet, despite the fact that Susan was so thorough and detail-oriented when it came to her job tasks, I noticed a major omission from her quality standards when it came to understanding and acknowledging her own strengths. This also reflected a pattern I’d seen among other high-achieving women clients.

After witnessing so many perfectionistic women reject a more holistic view of their own work performance or evaluations, I had an aha moment. While emphasizing their diligence and commitment to letting nothing slip beneath their radar, these women seemed unable to register the full perspective—based on the entire set of facts—when it came to their own abilities and achievements. I call this blind spot that some women have around their own impressive skillset the “perfectionist paradox.”

Here are three strategies to help you navigate the perfectionist paradox so you can leverage and learn from your experiences, to excel in your career:

1. Use Your Superpowers for Good

Like Susan, many of my clients claim to value evidence and rigor. These women talk about being “highly analytical,” “deeply rigorous,” “detail-oriented,” “thorough,” and “accurate.” Yet they fail to apply these same skills to fully understand themselves.

Selectively applying this rigor can result in missing valuable performance information about what is working in order to sustain, nurture, and leverage what is working. Failing to develop a complete and robust picture of our performance by only focusing on the negative leaves participants with an incomplete, negatively skewed perspective of their competence and expertise, which often limits learning and leads to strategies to work harder, not smarter.

Instead, use this commitment to excellence and accuracy to expand your analysis and learning to develop a complete rendering of your performance. Mine the bright spots in your performance feedback for what they can tell you, including what to sustain, alongside examining any perceived shortcomings.

By employing these skills that you systematically apply elsewhere in your career, you’ll gain a more complete picture of who you are. You’ll also receive important intelligence to help you decide what competencies you can leverage, not just what you need to improve, allowing you to work smarter, not harder.

2. Build Trust

Marsha came to me for leadership coaching after receiving her 360 review from her team. Not only did she only care about the developmental feedback, but she also dismissed the positive as inaccurate, saying, “The reviewers were just being nice. They have to say those things to be diplomatic; they aren’t true.”

This self-inflicted one-two punch comes up frequently. The first punch lands as a failure to validate positive feedback, accompanied by a second punch that calls into question its validity and legitimacy. In Marsha’s case, she had 30+ respondents participating in her anonymous review, so it’s statistically unlikely that all 30 were “just being nice.”

Part of developing your self-awareness is learning to acknowledge where you are at a given moment. For some, including Marsha, this began with her relationship to trust in her own perceptions of her abilities, not just what others think. Given that Marsha values analytical rigor, I had her prepare a spreadsheet to identify her accomplishments and skills demonstrated over the past year. We called on her analytical superpowers to create a complete and robust picture of what she’d achieved, complete with evidence.

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Next, we looked at Marsha’s diverse sample of 30 respondents, some of whom she didn’t know well and many of whom she knew to be as committed as herself to rigor. It was clear after drilling down in this area that she couldn’t realistically assume they were all being disingenuous.

Trust is an important component of building self-awareness. Marsha needed to learn to trust herself and her experiences as an important and viable source of data in assessing her performance. She also needed to trust herself to review the feedback and discern what to take forward based on where she wanted to go and grow.

3. Find a Fierce and Tender Ally

One reason women give for not wanting to acknowledge their strengths is the erroneous belief that they’ll become lazy—that drilling down on their deficiencies while ignoring compliments is the best way to work and improve. This is a good sign that their inner critic is in the room. An inner critic powers self-doubt and self-recrimination while pummeling self-confidence, which can mean failing to appreciate and build on what you’re currently doing well as a development strategy.

Learning to quiet your inner critic so you can access the full spectrum of your resourcefulness, including the positive, can be an effective development strategy.

• Recognize that you’re hearing from your inner critic and acknowledge its presence by saying to yourself something like: “My inner critic is really screaming when I listen to all this positive feedback” or “My inner critic really doesn’t care about all this airy-fairy praise—I just need to work on what I don’t do well.”
• Thank your inner critic for the information, but firmly let it know you’re in control of the situation.
• Confidently tell your inner critic that you’re planning to explore alternative viewpoints, including your strengths and accomplishments.

Years of self-compassion research indicate that extending compassion—which can be both fierce and tender—is a more effective motivation strategy than fear and threat tactics.

The perfectionist paradox leads to high-achieving women—who value analytical rigor—having a stunted sense of self-awareness when it comes to feedback about their own abilities and attributes. By being willing to hear the positive in performance reviews, gain self-awareness, and take the megaphone back from your inner critic, you can find opportunities to leverage and communicate your strengths, expand your influence, get things done, and advance in your career.