What are you wishing on your children?

Perfectionism is a form of control that lasts a lifetime. Parents who seek too much from their children leave them emotionally and mentally crippled. Adults who demand too much of themselves increase their stress, ruin their health, and destroy most of their relationships. Organizations that demand too much of their employees produce burnout, increased turnover and a corporate culture riddled with no-holds-barred competitiveness — and often dishonesty too.

The killer that lurks within perfectionism is that constant sense of criticism: the knowledge that whatever you do is never going to be quite good enough; the sense that every achievement will create an instant demand to do better. It is, in the words of Hara Estroff Marano, author of A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, in Psychology Today (“Pitfalls of Perfectionism”):

. . . an endless report card; it keeps people completely self-absorbed, engaged in perpetual self-evaluation—reaping relentless frustration and doomed to anxiety and depression.

Don’t confuse perfectionism with setting high standards, Marano warns. Most successful people set themselves challenging goals. What makes the difference that turns this into perfectionism is a constant fear of failure. Instead of accepting that they will make mistakes, perfectionists assume that any mistake, however trivial, will make them look stupid. Oddly enough, the perfectionist believes, eep within, that he or she is incompetent or unworthy. It’s their obsession with disproving this that drives them to achieve more and more.

In fact, most high achievers have some streak of perfectionism, if only the superstitious kind that dreads failure because it’s virtually unknown to them. Many have suffered some kind of past humiliation for messing something up that hurt enough to convince them never to risk that treatment again — even if the only way they can ensure that is by using deceit or dishonesty to conceal their mistakes. The trader who lost vast amounts of money for the French bank Société Generale wasn’t motivated by greed or personal profit. What drove him into foolish risks was his sense that others were looking down on him, because he hadn’t attended the top level university — the grand école — demanded to join the elite of French business.

Perfectionists aren’t born, they’re made and our society is making more than ever. That’s a bad mistake, since perfectionism is just about everything that is not required in our global business world: rigid, inflexible, hostile to innovation, lacking in creativity, self-defeating and liable to choke under pressure. It’s time we recognized the mistake we are making and turned to more civilized ways to assist excellence.

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