As a recovering perfectionist, it took me a long time to learn the most important lesson: perfectionism belongs in your rear-view mirror. You’re going to make mistakes anyway, because you’re human. Perfectionism doesn’t stop that. It just raises the stakes on the consequences – mostly internal ones – while doing almost nothing for your actual performance. You just feel worse afterward.

I’m not alone in this. Research shows perfectionism is rising (Curran & Hill, 2017), especially among young people, and the leading theories mostly point a finger at parents – helicopter parents (Segrin et al., 2020), intrusive parents (Hong et al., 2016). Progress, I suppose, over the Freudians, who just blamed the mother.

Parents can’t win this one. But let’s be honest, the way my grandmother was: “You can blame your parents for most things until you’re 40. After that, you only have yourself to blame.” Most of my family blamed her for plenty, because she was a strong woman in an era that didn’t easily forgive that. I’d like to set the record a little straighter here, in her honor.

Back to perfectionism itself. We tell ourselves the trait pushes us to work harder and get things right, and that’s a good thing. That’s called relentlessness. We tell ourselves that if we want something done right, we have to do it ourselves. That’s called micromanaging.  And, most damningly, we tell ourselves we’re never quite good enough to accomplish what we want to accomplish.  In the long run, that’s called despair.

All of that makes us harder to live with — tougher on ourselves, tougher on everyone around us, and less forgiving of the results. None of it actually helps. It just makes the race harder to run. Let’s agree to stop.

Perfectionism is especially dangerous for leaders and keynote speakers, because the fear of making a visible mistake is perfectionism’s cruelest form. There’s something about standing in front of a thousand pairs of eyes that turns an ordinary brain lapse into a catastrophe.

Here’s the trick I’ve learned for those moments: don’t carry the error alone. Hand it to the audience. Say, “I just lost my train of thought — does anyone remember what I was talking about?” It’s remarkable to watch a room come to a speaker’s rescue. They want you to succeed as much as you do.  And you can relax, knowing that you don’t have to know everything.

A few weeks ago, I took a short vacation and made a conscious decision to leave my perfectionism at home. I resolved not to get defensive, to own my mistakes, and to laugh instead of grimace.

How’d I do? Not perfectly — which, fittingly, was the point. Before the vacation had even started, construction at Logan Airport sent me circling the terminal a couple of times before I found my way into my usual parking spot. We still made it in plenty of time, and everyone in the car relaxed into the trip faster than they would have otherwise.  I discovered that the new, relaxed ‘me’ was more fun to be around.  Here’s to my new motto:  imperfectionism forever!