One of the most pervasive problems with academic writers is perfectionism. It’s ubiquitous and manifests in so many unfortunate ways. There is a unique flavor to academic perfectionism, and it is exacerbated by the culture of colleges and universities (particularly for tenure-track faculty members).
Many perfectionists are painfully aware of their problem but many of the most unhappy perfectionists are reactive and resistant to the idea that they have perfectionist tendencies. They either think everyone else is flawed or that they couldn’t possibly be a perfectionist because their life isn’t yet … perfect.
If you are an academic perfectionist, it is costing you in ways you may not realize. Perfectionism has been shown to have a negative impact on scholarly productivity. A study found that perfectionist professors have lower research productivity, fewer first-authored publications, and fewer citations than their peers. While it’s bad enough that perfectionism can make us feel perpetually miserable and tortured, the single greatest reason to overcome your perfectionism may be that it isn’t helpful to your scholarly productivity.
Recognizing Perfectionism
The first step in overcoming this problem is to know if you are an academic perfectionist. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you highly conscious and hypercritical of mistakes (yours and those of others)?
- Do you aim to be the best in everything you do (even if it’s something that you’re not interested in)?
- Would you rather sacrifice your well-being (sleep, exercise, relationships) than let a manuscript, report, or class be less than you imagine it can be?
- Do you beat yourself up over the smallest things that go wrong in your writing, research, and teaching?
- Do you struggle to draft new text at early stages of the writing process because you just can’t stop editing every word as it comes out (each word on the page elicits your inner critic’s wrath)?
- Do you hold onto your drafts until you think they are perfect and only share manuscripts with others when they are in their most advanced stage?
- Do you experience defensiveness towards criticism when you do share your work with others and feel like the comments represent a personal attack?
- Are you so fixated on the end goal of publishing your paper, receiving a grant, and/or getting stellar teaching evaluations that if you don’t meet the goal, it doesn’t even matter what happened in the process?
- Do you feel extremely self-conscious in situations that might reveal to others that you are not perfect (job talks, conference presentations, lecturing in large courses, etc.)?
- When you get above-average teaching evaluations, do you fixate on the handful of students who gave you negative reviews to the exclusion of the overwhelmingly positive pattern?
- No matter how many papers you publish, students adore you, grants get funded, or awards you win, do you feel like it’s never quite enough?
It’s important to see what perfectionism looks like for academics because many times people think that perfectionism is really just a form of striving, being goal-oriented, having ambition, being driven and/or having high expectations for your career. All those things are great, but they are not perfectionism.
Perfectionism involves self-defeating thoughts and behaviors that are aimed at reaching an unrealistic goal (perfection). In other words, it’s fundamentally different to set high goals (“My teaching evaluations will be above-average this semester”) vs. unrealistically high goals (“100 percent of students will give me the highest rating”). There’s a difference between wanting something to be as good as it can be (“I’ve taken this manuscript as far as I can for now, so let me hand it over to someone else for feedback”) and the illusion that something could actually be perfect (“If I just work on this manuscript one more semester it will be perfect and then I can let someone else read it”). And there’s a difference between having a desire to do your work well (“I feel successful when I’ve done my best work”) and needing external validation to feel work is well-done (“I will allow myself to feel successful when I’ve won a MacArthur Genius Award”).
The difference is simple: high standards allow us to stretch and feel a sense of accomplishment when we meet them. When perfection is the goal and external validation is required to know we’ve met the goal, it leaves us constantly feeling frustrated and disappointed, even when we’re doing an extraordinary amount of high-quality work.
Overcoming Perfectionism
Overcoming perfectionism is not easy. The environment and system in which you are embedded trigger and exacerbate perfectionist tendencies. And the ugly truth is that academic perfectionism stems from a deep and profound insecurity that you aren’t good enough or smart enough, or don’t deserve to be in your position. And those feelings are going to require more than tips and tricks to evolve into something that is useful. In other words, if you truly want to overcome academic perfectionism, you will need to start working on the core of the problem (your insecurity about measuring up).
Here are three steps to help you permanently eradicate your perfectionism.
Clarify Your Vision
Perfectionists hold the flawed notion that everything they do must be done at the very highest standard (perfection). Because the root of perfectionism is insecurity, the force driving the unreachable goals is the desperate attempt to prove (to yourself and others) that you deserve to be a professor, to win tenure, to get promoted to full professor, etc. The hard truth is that proving yourself is toxic fuel. You will never get what you want, you’ll never feel fulfilled, and you will never be satisfied by your quest to prove your worth.
In case it’s not obvious, if your self-worth is dependent on the appraisal of others, you will constantly feel like you have to do SOMETHING to prove yourself. Instead, clarify what the fuel is that is driving you and then develop an internally generated vision of what it means to be successful. In other words, if you’re driven by proving yourself and your success is determined by external accomplishments, that’s a red flag. In contrast, consider what would happen when you answer the following questions:
- What do I want?
- What is my passion and purpose?
- What does it mean to be successful and what does success look like for me?
Early in our careers, most of us allow others to define what we should want and the terms of success for us so that we only get to feel a sense of accomplishment when we finish the Ph.D., get the right job, win tenure, or get promoted to full professor. This is reinforced by the fact that our colleagues tend to use these markers of success as a collective shortcut to determine our worth.
Creating your own vision of what you want, what you’re meant to leave as a legacy in this world, and what success looks like for you is a powerful act because it fundamentally reshapes your relationship to work.
The key to getting clear about it that most people miss is that you want to specify things that are within your control (e.g., produce high-quality scholarship and a tenurable research portfolio) rather than things that are controlled by other people (e.g., become a tenured professor at ________ University).
A vision that is within your control allows YOU to set the bar (instead of it being set for you), it allows YOU to meet the standards you set for yourself (instead of letting other people’s subjective evaluation become your sense of self worth), and it enables YOU to feel a deep sense of accomplishment because your vision is the articulation of success so moving towards it means you’re doing the work you truly desire and is meaningful for you.
Use Your Vision as a Filter
Perfectionists often believe that everything has to be done at the highest standard. But let’s be honest – in academic life there are many things where “done is good enough.” In fact, many perfectionists are doing work that doesn’t need to be done at all. The challenge is to develop a filter that can reliably and consistently help you to vary your standards in a conscious and intentional way by determining which activities need to be done at a high standard, which activities need to just get done, and which activities you can let go of entirely without any consequences.
When you’re clear about your vision, you can use it as a filter to vary your standards. This requires you to develop the mental habit of running your activities through your vision filter. For example, if you get requests to sit on dissertation committees, review journal submissions, or sit on various editorial and advisory boards, run each request through your filter and ask: Will this bring me closer to my vision?
The vast majority of the time, the answer is a quick and easy “no.” It’s also the case that a vision filter is a great tool for shaping daily activities.
Use Your Vision as the Measuring Stick
Intellectually comparing yourself to others tends to produce negative feelings. For perfectionists, this is especially the case because they often choose reference groups for comparison that aren’t appropriate and guarantee feelings of failure (i.e., the most successful person in your field, a peer who doesn’t have the childcare responsibilities you do, or someone at a different type of institution, which has significantly greater resources to support their work). No matter how dangerous you know comparison is, it’s very hard to avoid because you want to locate yourself on the continuum of progress, and the easiest way to do so is to compare yourself to others.
Having a clear vision enables you to stop comparing yourself to others to see if you measure up. Instead, you use your vision as your measuring stick. That shifts the inner conversation from “how do I stack up next to _________ [fill in inappropriate comparison person]?” to “how far have I moved toward living my vision?” It’s a seismic internal shift to move from a self-evaluation that is contingent upon comparing yourself to others, to an assessment of how close or far you are from the vision of your work that YOU desire.
Ultimately, overcoming perfectionism requires you to clarify your vision, use it as a filter for varying your standards, and shift your approach around self-worth from negative comparison to others to a personal assessment of your proximity to your vision. While incredibly difficult work, it’s the one thing that will move you from the misery of perfectionism to a truly empowered stance in the academy.