Perfectionism may be fueling your procrastination

Isabella West, Arts Editor | 

Have you ever found yourself procrastinating even though you’re racing a deadline? Well, Joanne Foster, author of Procrastination and Perfectionism: Connections, Understandings, and Control, challenges procrastinators to stop with the beat-down mentality because the fix may be in understanding your feelings about being perfect. Arts Editor, Isabella West, caught up with Joanne Foster, award-winning author, and gifted education and child development specialist to discuss this topic. 

Isabella: Why did you find it important to bring awareness to the truth about the link between perfectionism and procrastination?

Joanne: There’s a link in the sense that people who like things ‘just so,’ may put things off if they feel they can’t get it perfect. There is definitely that link. The sense that you know, “if I can’t do it, absolutely 100 per cent correctly, then, I’m not going to bother doing it at all, it’s not worth trying.” There may be this fear that “people have expectations of me to be able to do it that way.” There’s this whole reasoning that could happen in terms of someone who is very focused on perfectionism and yet is afraid to fail. There’s also a fear of success that if a person does something really well, the expectation, the bar will rise. So there’s that aspect to the fear of failure and the fear of success.

Isabella: What exactly drew you into studying perfectionism and procrastination?

Joanne: As an educator, I find that it’s a universal issue, procrastination is a universal issue. I think it’s misunderstood, I think it’s more common than people realize and I think that a lot of people tend to think of it as just people being lazy or making excuses. Similarly, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the causality of whether or not perfectionism causes procrastination, or whether procrastination and perfectionism are even related at all. 

Isabella: What advice would you give people who really struggle to let go of perfectionism?

Joanne: I think they have to understand that perfectionism is elusive. It’s not something that’s automatic, it’s something you really don’t even need to strive for. Because flaws are okay, you can be “flawsome.” You can still be awesome, even though you have certain things that you don’t do as well as others. We all have areas of strength and we all have areas of weakness, that’s what makes us who we are. I think you have to think of the positives. A lot of what a person accomplishes has to do with their attitude. If you are too deeply focused on that idea that everything has to be just so or that it has to be perceived as just so, I think you get too hung up on that and you lose sight of the journey. Focusing too much on a perfect outcome can be stifling. Look at [Thomas] Edison. Edison had thousands, I think it was a thousand tries before he actually discovered a light bulb that went on properly. It’s not to say that what he did to get there didn’t have value. You can’t always be focused on perfection, you have to take pleasure in the small successes that you experience along the way. You can make a mistake on purpose, it won’t kill you.

Isabella: For those who struggle with perfectionism and procrastination, are there any tips or tricks that you would advise them to try to overcome it?

Joanne: Re-evaluate your expectations, differentiate between success and perfectionism, there’s a difference. Become more aware of others, think about people you admire who are not perfect and what it is about them that you think is wonderful, why do you admire them? Why is perfection so necessary when there are so many people who have accomplished so many things and they’re not perfect by any means? Learning to commit to something and then relax, step back from it for a while, take a break, and then go back to it. Understanding that on certain days, you may not feel like doing certain things, and that’s okay, step back from it, find another day, another time. Then maybe you can re-evaluate something that may be causing you to feel too challenged. Also, one step at a time, don’t necessarily look at the whole big picture of something, because that may be really hard to achieve. But rather, take a look at small segments and chunk them so that you do one little chunk at a time and build up to the other thing. Another good thing to know is to start with what you know. It always helps to start with what you know and then build from there because it will give you a sense of pride and a sense of familiarity with what it is you have to do. And that makes it a little bit easier to progress and to move forward.