And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

Podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols and this episode is titled Perfectionism.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

This week I'm following up a little bit on the obsessive-compulsive personality disorder episode from last week

because it prompted a little bit

of interest in the subject of perfectionism. That was a patron only episode, by the way. So if you

want to go and have a listen to that one, you know where that is by now. I waffle on about

Patreon enough. So there's been quite a lot of research over the years actually to draw from, and I thought it

would be a popular topic for you, because on the surface, perfectionism sounds like a good

thing. Wanting to do a good job, not settling for less than the best, it sounds like that

would make quite a good employee, doesn't it? The thing is, a perfectionist might do a good job, but with most careers it means they're actually quite unproductive.

Because it's a bit like seasoning your food.

A little bit of perfectionism, a chili flake sprinkle of it stirred throughout your job.

That can be a good thing, but a whole tablespoon stirred into everything you do is going to absolutely paralyze you. Instead, what we want

is a healthy kind of perfectionist attitude called positive striving, which is to have high standards, but setting realistic

standards, so that you can feel as if you've actually achieved something and you can be satisfied

with what you've done with a that's good enough attitude.

But as we move up on the scale of perfectionism, we've got people whose entire self-worth is based upon achieving unrealistically high standards.

No good comes from that.

Now, it's often said that there are three types of perfectionism.

Self-oriented perfectionism, other-oriented perfectionism and socially prescribed perfectionism. Let's take a peek, shall we? So, self-oriented perfectionism comes with a lot of guilt and self-criticism because people with it set the bar themselves and they set it too high to be attainable.

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