Present Perfect: A Mindfulness Approach to Letting Go of Perfectionism and the Need for Control

Instead of saying, “I don’t care; you decide,” I recommend that you decide. Make a choice when the actual choice doesn’t matter to you. Practice making a choice when it doesn’t matter so that you can make a choice when it does.

this shadow is a metaphor of your programming, a representation of your past. As a perfectionist, you are constantly projecting your vision of what should be onto what is. Your perfectionistic software, like your shadow when the sun’s at your back, is leading rather than following you. All of us have the experience of not wanting to say something a

Many perfectionists are pushed into therapy by family and friends to address the problems of anger and hypercriticism and to work on their control tendencies and their insistence on being right.

Habitual behavior is a functional shortcut that spares us the trouble of thinking and the hassle of a conscious choice. As a perfectionist, you are a master habit builder. This skill is part of your efficiency, part of what helps you excel.

In being self-driven, you are driven by a self that you didn’t actually program.

perfectionism, as the central feature of OCPD, is also characterized by such traits as excessive concern with details, an extreme devotion to work and productivity (at the expense of leisure), excessive conscientiousness, scrupulousness, thriftiness, inflexibility and rigidity in the issues of morality and ethics, reluctance to delegate tasks, and

a mistake is either a mismatch of expectations or an accident. That’s all!

Preaching perfectionism for its own sake is akin to idealistic hazing designed to override the fundamentals of human motivation and to override free will.

trying to attach your well-being to what once was creates attachment, a holding-on to what must inevitably change and fade away. Attachment isn’t only a loss of contentment, it’s also a loss of independence. By making your well-being dependent on the perfect circumstance, you lose the sovereignty of your well-being. Your inner life becomes dependen

as a perfectionist, you define perfection as a theoretical best. That’s exactly why you are never satisfied with reality as it is. The real world—the one and only world that there is at any given point in time—always pales in comparison with a better world that you can imagine. In any