Strive for progress not perfection, great advice or total BS?

Season #4 August 22, 2024

Is Progress not Perfection the goal, or is that BS? In this episode, we talk about the positive and negative of the progress not perfection mindset.

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Episode Transcript

8/18/24 Strive for progress not perfection, great advice or total BS?

Hook

Are you a perfectionist? How’s that working for you? Which is better, progress or perfection? Let’s talk about it, because I might have a take you’ve never heard before.

Subject intro

Hello my lovelies! Welcome to the Moving Toward Better Podcast. I’m your host, Karen Bemmes, and today we’re talking about striving for progress rather than perfection and whether that is great advice or total BS.
Before we dive in, I want to make clear that what I am about to share is based on experiences from my own life and what I learned along the way. Your situation may be different, and this is no substitute for medical or mental health intervention if your situation warrants it. This podcast is designed to help people understand themselves and others better based on their personalities. It is not intended to diagnose or treat any mental or physical condition. If you suspect you or a family member is at risk of physical or mental harm, please seek proper professional help immediately.
For those who are new to the podcast, when I talk about personalities, communication and relationships, I use the DISC personality model of behavior and refer to people as D or Driven, I or Inspired, S or Supportive, and C or Cautious. You can find links to take your own Personality Assessment in the Show Notes

Presentation of Problem/Challenge

So, progress versus perfection is a pretty big topic, and as with any big topic, there are a million ways we can look at it and argue about it if we’re so inclined. I am not inclined to argue about it, but these are the types of discussions I truly enjoy. In the realm of personality, only one of the DISC personalities always strives for perfection, and we will talk about them, not to disparage them, but to discuss how perfectionism affects them both positively and negatively. Until then, we’re going to talk about how all personality types can deal with progress and perfection in the healthiest ways possible, so let's dive in.

Exploration/Development

Starting with the Driven personality, you are a git ‘er done type. The faster you can check things off the list the better, and if you’re a high D, you will most definitely resonate with the phrase done is better than perfect, but because that is your attitude, sometimes you make big mistakes. If you’re in balance, you take responsibility for those mistakes, fix them and move on. If you’re out of balance, you will blame others and could even destroy relationships that are important to you, although you might not realize it at that moment. Then you might have to do something you truly dread, and that is apologize and say you were wrong. Ew!

Now, if you are someone with a Driven/Cautious blend, you’ve got a great combination going on to get things done and do them well at the same time, which is lovely, but I would caution you to remember that your task orientation gets things done but rarely considers how that affects others. The D/C blend loves to work and can work from dawn to dusk, but this is also the personality that can rise to the top of their profession and lose everyone they love in the process, and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

While the Driven personality can appear not to care to the more people oriented personality types, they love fiercely but sometimes struggle to show it. That is especially difficult for Driven women I work with who love their children so much but struggle with the nurturing part of parenting. Several driven women I know and have coached will do anything for their children except let them be clingy because they simply cannot handle it. One of my clients had a rule when their children were younger that after she or her husband put the kids to bed, she got 30 minutes of no one touching her because her social battery was completely worn out from dealing with children being close to her for the entire day.

Like many Driven women, she worried that she wasn’t a good mom because she didn’t love snuggling and cuddling, but the truth is that her husband did, so when they could lean into who they naturally were, they could stop worrying about being perfect parents or perfect anything for that matter and do things extraordinarily well, and I think that’s amazing.

For the I personality, you share the trait with the D personality that you like to check things off the list quickly. In fact, you are the personality that will do something not on the list, and you’ll add it to the list just so you can check it off. For you, perfection seems like some unattainable and frankly, completely unfun thing. You struggle with progress enough that focusing on perfection feels like a prison sentence. Oddly, though, you are often the person that appreciates and admires perfection the most because it feels so out of reach for you.

I know you don’t want to hear this, but you, more than any other personality type, need a perfectionist in your life, preferably one that is in balance, because they can catch the details that you miss. I know this because I’m one of you, and I rarely publish anything other than these podcasts that I don’t have someone else look over. Why? Because even with being an English major and a Communications major in college, I know I make mistakes that others will catch.

The reasons I don’t have anyone check my podcast are because I generally type up an outline and edit it twice, and then I sometimes change it while I’m recording. I know that sounds strange to people who don’t “wing it”, but it works for me, and I adore creating this podcast, most weeks anyway. The other thing that allows me to do the podcast by myself is that I have a very detailed checklist that I use every week, and even though I may have done something every week for months, without that checklist, I would invariably miss something, especially if I get interrupted moving through the process.

For those with an Inspired personality who are willing, it can be incredibly helpful to have someone detail oriented help you with creating a checklist for nearly everything you do, and it will save you a ton of time and eliminate so much frustration. My favorite way to create checklists is in Trello because I can access them easily from my phone or my desktop, although I do have a paper list that I use every day because it still gives me a little thrill to check things off with pen and paper. I understand this isn’t for everyone, but for many Inspired personalities, we need the physical list to remind us of what we want to do because even if we want to do it, without that reminder, we will forget, and while our system may not be perfect, it helps us to progress, and that is a triumph for nearly every I personality.

Moving to the Supportive personality, while perfection might not be your go to, if you’re helping someone else, you strive to do everything perfectly for them. If you’re in balance, you know that if it isn’t perfect, you’ve tried your best. If you’re out of balance and it’s less than perfect, you’ll beat yourself up over that.

One of the hallmarks of the Supportive personality is helping others. It brings you great joy and satisfaction to help others succeed in any and every way that you can and wanting to do that extraordinarily well is not a bad thing. Beating yourself up over it not being perfect is. This is especially difficult for those with the S/C blend because not only is helping others important to you, but doing it well or perfectly is often equally important to you, but depending on who you’re working for or with, what you do may be better than they hoped for. I’m talking about the Driven and Inspired personalities, and their appreciation can be very different. For the Driven personality, you’ve done something for them that they did not want to do themselves, therefore you’ve taken an unpleasant task off their hands. While they’re appreciative, they may not be effusive in their praise of your work or their gratitude because you’ve empowered them to move on, and they like to do that quickly. The Inspired personality, on the other hand, may be overly effusive in their praise and gratitude to the point that you’re embarrassed. The irony is that both probably appreciate you and your efforts but just have very different ways of showing you.

In your case, if you have very little perfectionism, it helps you to find someone who has a talent for details to help you progress, and if you have the C element in your personality, please be aware that as you help others, they may not appreciate you or your work in ways you would express your gratitude for the same effort.

Moving on to the Cautious personality, I am actually excited to talk about you in this progress versus perfection conversation because you, more than any other personality type, strive for perfection in all you do. If you are naturally more inclined to the Driven side, you’ll want things done exceedingly well but quickly so you can move onto the next project. If you are naturally inclined more toward the Supportive side, you’ll want things done well but not at the expense of other people. For those more Driven, the challenge will be not to take things away from everyone else because you feel like you have to do everything yourself to make sure it’s right, and for those more Supportive, the challenge will be to complete the task well without hurting anyone’s feelings. In the former, you cut off communication to do the task, and that can cause friction because people feel shut out. In the latter, you may not move forward on the task because you may actually need others to step up, and asking for help is not in your wheelhouse.

So what’s a Cautious personality to do? Honestly, it depends on what you’re doing. A typically Cautious personality will tell you that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. If that person is a doctor, surgeon, accountant, mechanic, or some other profession where your life or financial security can be at risk, I’m inclined to indulge perfection over progress. In the case of most office work, teaching, being a parent, cooking and some baking, you can leave perfection at the door. Instead, strive for excellence in your progress and maybe allow yourself to enjoy the process. I know many of you would argue with me about baking, but some of the happiest bakers I know are reformed perfectionists. They are people who use their misshapen cookies as testers for their immediate family. They are the ones that realized that as they teach their grandchildren how to bake because they couldn’t stand the mess or the messups when their kids were young, that it’s ok to make a mess while you’re learning, and most people will get better with practice.

They have softened the perfectionism of their past to let more joy into their lives. They still love perfection and strive for it whenever they can, but they’ve given up the idea that everything has to be perfect, and sometimes the greatest gift they can give themselves is letting progress be enough.

Climax/Key Moment

The point of all of this is that there are definitely times when perfection is the goal. We all want a heart surgeon to do things perfectly. I remember being perfectly fine with my eye surgeon not having the friendliest bedside manner as long as the work he did on my eyes was perfect. When my son was an infant in the NICU, while we definitely celebrated progress, I wanted his medical team to be perfect in the execution of their work to the point where one of his nurses had to insert an IV into my three week old son and asked me to leave. She explained that she was excellent at inserting IVs and was asked to do the more difficult ones in the NICU, but if she knew I was watching, she would definitely mess up. She asked me to walk away and come back 5 minutes later, which I did, and she had perfectly inserted the IV.

Conclusion/Summary

So, sometimes progress is much more important than perfection, and sometimes perfection keeps things from going completely wrong. Depending on your personality type, you know you naturally are inclined toward one or the other, and if you need to lean the other way than your natural inclination, I suggest you get help because it will alleviate so much stress, and you might find that things go better than you ever imagined.

Remember the podcasting checklist I talked about? That came from a coach who understood I need things broken up into bite sized pieces, and it became part of her standard coaching. How’s that for a win-win? The point is that progress and perfection have their place, and it’s up to us to understand and figure how when and where that is.

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