You’ve come to equate the meaning of success with “not-failure” or “un-failure.” You are either a failure or a not-failure. If that’s the meaning you assigned to the notion of success, it’s no wonder you never really feel successful. You’re only someone who once again didn’t fail. So, of course there’s never any reason to celebrate or allow yoursel

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.

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

Whereas an expectation is an unwarranted entitlement, a demand that reality comply with your vision of how it should be, a preference is just a wish.

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

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

You’ve put into this game far more than you’ve gotten out of it. It’s time to toy with the idea that perfection is not only attainable but inevitable, with the idea that you are always doing your best at any given point in time and that is enough. Enjoy!

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

perfectionism is mostly a result of learning, programming, and conditioning. I see it as an ingenious adaptation to a hypercritical, high-pressure, invalidating environment, a psychological self-defense strategy that unfortunately creates more problems than