A martial arts student of mine tested for her new belt the other night.
She made some mistakes and blamed her perfectionism for it. She said she was “too much in her head” and the obsessing over the details messed up her flow and ability to perform.
What I told her is that perfectionism is as much a strength as it is a weakness—like most things in life. And it isn’t something that should be blamed, but something she should seek to better understand.
See perfectionism is really just a close attention to detail and a desire to get things right. This is an excellent virtue to have. Heck, without details, martial arts would stop being an art and would become arbitrary movement. And without a desire to get things right, what the heck are we even doing?
Where perfectionism goes wrong is when we expect ourselves to be perfect… and react to mistakes in destructive, unhealthy, or unproductive ways. What we have to understand is that to be human is to be imperfect—it is wired into our very nature.
And rather than blaming perfectionism for our mistakes… we should thank our perfectionism for making us care about the details… and use it as fuel to get back to our training in an even more deliberate, healthy, and productive way.
This is what she was missing.
See it wasn’t the perfectionism… it was the expectations and lack of practice. Get those two things right and suddenly perfectionism becomes the best thing to ever happened to you.
…I know it feels that way to me.