There are three kinds of perfectionism in the research, and the one almost nobody talks about is the one I think does the most quiet damage to people in visible roles.
Self-oriented perfectionism is the demand you place on yourself. Other-oriented is the demand you place on everybody else. And the third, socially prescribed perfectionism, is the belief that other people are placing demands on you. In the wording from my thesis, it is the perceived need to obtain and sustain standards which are believed to be expected and prescribed by others, and by our environments.
Read that again and notice the words doing the work. Perceived. Believed. Not agreed, not stated, not written down anywhere. Believed.
The standards nobody set
Here is what I mean practically.
Somebody says to me that they cannot be seen to be struggling. I ask who said that. Long pause. Nobody said it. It has never been said. There is no policy, no conversation, no moment they can point to. It is simply understood, in the way that a great many extremely powerful things are simply understood.
Or: I have to reply within the hour. Who decided the hour? Nobody. It was ninety minutes once, years ago, and then it crept.
Or, from people whose work is public in some way: I cannot have an off day. And when we look at it properly, the actual audience for that off day is somewhere between four people and nobody, and the standard is being enforced entirely from the inside by somebody imagining an outside.
What I found in my research was that socially prescribed perfectionism, along with self-oriented, was strongly related to psychological distress, and predicted both intolerance of uncertainty and fear of negative evaluation. It is not the softer version of the three. It is one of the two that hurts.
Why it is worse than the self-oriented kind in one specific way
I want to be careful here, because both are damaging and I am not running a competition.
But self-oriented perfectionism has one mercy in it, which is that you set the standard. It is yours. In principle you can look at it, argue with it, and in a good week move it.
Socially prescribed perfectionism has no such thing. The standard belongs to somebody else. Somebody unnamed, usually plural, and entirely unavailable for negotiation. You cannot go to them and ask whether the deck really needed to be that good, because there is no them. There is a composite figure your brain has assembled out of a teacher, a parent, an early boss and possibly a comment on the internet in 2019.
And you cannot meet a standard you cannot see. So you overshoot, permanently, because overshooting is the only way to be sure.
Why public life makes it so much worse
I have a particular interest in this, in people who live some part of their life in view. Not only the famous. Anyone whose work is watched: partners whose decisions are scrutinised, people who present, people who lead something, anyone with a title that makes other people careful around them.
Because for those people, the imagined audience stops being imaginary. There is a real one. Not as large or as attentive as it feels, but real.
And once there is a real audience, the belief about what is expected becomes almost impossible to test. You cannot ask two thousand people what they think of you. So the belief just sits there, uncorrected, being confirmed by the occasional bit of evidence and never disconfirmed by anything, because absence of criticism does not register. It never does.
What I see in those people specifically, and I wrote about this recently in the context of my other work, is that the ordinary human skills of tolerating discomfort and regulating your own state do not get much practice, because so much of the environment is arranged to keep you comfortable and on time. And then something goes wrong, in view, and the machinery for handling it was never built.
The only useful question I know
When somebody tells me what is expected of them, I ask the same thing, and I ask it plainly, and it is almost annoying how often it works.
Who decided that?
Not rhetorically. Actually. Name them. When did they say it. Was it said, or inferred. Are they still there. Were they even right at the time.
Most of the time somebody cannot answer, and the not being able to answer is the entire point. You have been complying, at real cost, with an instruction nobody remembers issuing.
Sometimes they can answer, and it turns out to be a person from about 1998 whose opinion they would not currently seek on anything else.
And occasionally, the standard is real and current and someone genuinely does expect it. Which is fine. That is a normal work problem and it has normal solutions, including a conversation.
At the end of the day, the difference between those three situations is enormous, and almost nobody makes the distinction, because the feeling is identical in all three.
Anyways. Have a think about the last standard you were absolutely certain you had to meet.
Who decided that?
Until next time, Stacy